Whitcomb: The Great Northwest; Power Push; Gubernatorial Specifics Wanted; Snowy Politics
Robert Whitcomb: Columnist
Whitcomb: The Great Northwest; Power Push; Gubernatorial Specifics Wanted; Snowy Politics
“And that is in truth what I never quite say:
Those trashed slopes are home to the foxglove
An ancient restorer of the heart’s beat, my love.’’
From “Valentine’s’’, by Sasha Dugdale (born 1974), British poet and playwright
“We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.’’
-- Ida Tarbell (1857-1944), American investigative journalist
“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. ‘’
-- Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), American writer and filmmaker.
“It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.’’
-- Cory Doctorow (born 1971), Canadian-British blogger, journalist and science-fiction writer
You’ll be saddened to know that none of this column was written by AI, but READ HERE:
I just got back from Western Oregon. Spectacular region! Dormant snow-capped volcano Mt. Hood, mossy and fern-thick temperate rain forests, huge trees and mild, moist weather. Lots of beasts you don’t see in New England, such as elk wandering along the sides of the roads in the state’s capacious parks.
Its big city, Portland, is laid back and sort of mellow post-Hippie in some ways. With Vermont or even the broader New England, it has a kind of communitarian sensibility. But then, western Oregon and Washington State were mostly settled (I’m mostly referring to white people here) from the Northeast. The eastern part of those states, much of which is high desert, has tended to draw right-wingers from the Plains states and the Southwest. Oregon’s health-care system is one of the best in the nation, and most people don’t seem to mind the taxes to pay for it. And there are some very good school systems.
In parts of Portland, there are the mixed aromas of ground coffee and marijuana. Coffee shops and head shops seemed to be everywhere as I strolled residential neighborhoods with flowers blooming and grass green because of the prevailing mild wind from the Pacific. It’s further north than Portland, Maine, for which it’s named.
The Trump regime, of course, has physically attacked Portland and some other cities at least partly for their mild leftism. It has portrayed cities such as Portland as cesspools of illegal immigrants (especially the darker-skinned ones, whom Trump especially hates) and crime. It got a plug for this assault in the state’s brief experiment with hard-drug decriminalization, which increased the number of addled, criminal and/or homeless people appearing in a small section of the city’s downtown. Tolerance out of control! The experiment has since been reversed. I was struck, as my daughter drove me around, at how quiet and safe it seemed, except in the small section where protestors confront mask-wearing ICE agents and get tear-gassed from time to time.
Reminder: Antifa is not an organization.
When I asked folks whether they feared the great earthquake that is bound to shake Oregon and Washington one scary day, they mostly just murmured “whatever….” But we know one couple who fled the city and moved to New Bedford, of all places, after reading “The Really Big One,’’ a July 2015 New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz on the risk of a magnitude 8.0–9.2 earthquake and tsunami in the Northwest.
My Providence/Portland flights, which, because of America’s tedious and trip-lengthening hub-and-spoke airline system, often require travelers to fly far south and then north, included the usual quiet weirdness you experience on an airliner. (Crying babies excepted. Give them brandy to shut them up?) During the entire stretch from God-awful Atlanta to Portland, a middle-aged man sitting next to me fanned himself with alarming energy with a magazine, claiming that the cabin was too hot, and yet he seemed to be working up a sweat with the fanning.
Maybe I got my bad cold from him. Planes are petri dishes!
On the way south from Portland to Atlanta, whence I would go north to Providence, I found myself sitting next to a large and friendly dog, I think that it was one of those Labradoodles that breeders cooked up a few decades ago. “No dander’’? This “comfort animal’’ was so calm that I thought that maybe it had been drugged, but the lady whose pet it was said the animal was always like that.
Strange, but then so is sitting in a metal cylinder 35,000 feet above the ground.
xxx
Speaking of immigration, think of how much less of a problem we’d have if the Fed’s long-existing “E-Verify” system, aimed at stopping businesses from employing illegal aliens, had been much more rigorously enforced than it has been.
All employers -- even Republicans! -- who hire illegal immigrants, knowingly or not, should be prosecuted, but few are now. The joys of cheap labor…. All employers should be compelled to get and maintain proof of citizenship or legal residency from all job applicants.
Further, the U.S. immigration-vetting complex is grossly understaffed, making it very difficult for immigrants to get necessary papers for orderly entry into America and gums up deportations for those who should be kicked out. So inefficient is our system that many files about individuals’ cases are lost.
And COVID had a big impact on illegal immigration, as this study from the University of Pennsylvania shows. Immigration was the key issue in bringing Trump back to power. The pandemic’s effects will linger for many years.
Two powerful new signs of Trumpian fascism have appeared recently. One is its use of AI to create fake photos that make its foes look unpleasant and otherwise distort the truth. That’s what you’d expect from leaders and their lackeys who come to power on lies and are determined to expand their power and grifting through ever more brazen untruths. Perhaps the most blatant recent example is the White House’s posting of an AI-altered photo of Minnesota civil-rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong sobbing and looking crazed after federal agents, at the order of U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi arrested her for demonstrating at a church.
In fact, Levy Armstrong remained outwardly very calm.
The regime says it will continue to pump out these “memes.’’
Orwell would have been impressed.
The other sign is MAGA’s plan to try to seize control of elections, at least for federal offices, with the aim of making MAGA/GOP control of the federal government permanent. But the states by law are supposed to be in charge of elections, not the Feds. Of course, Trump’s long-disproven lie that the 2020 election was stolen is a rhetorical basis for this fascist power play. Rhode Island systems expert and right-of-center civic reformer Ken Block, hired by the 2020 Trump campaign to try to find anti-Trump voting fraud, found instead that the election that put Joe Biden in the Oval Office was fair. Read Block’s book Disproven.
More Details, Please
The next Rhode Island governor will very likely be one of two Democrats -- current Gov. Dan McKee or former CVS executive Helena Foulkes. A Republican candidate, probably Aaron Guckian, would seem to have little chance because of toxicity from Trump, who’s very unpopular in the Ocean State, and for good reason.
Foulkes has battered McKee about the Washington Bridge fiasco and McKee has slammed Foulkes over her role during the national opiate-addiction scandal involving CVS pharmacies. I mostly blame prescribing physicians myself. Peter Alviti’s exit as state transportation director comes too late to help McKee deal much better with the political disaster of the bridge. It’s all blood under the bridge.
Fine. But let’s hope that they get much more specific about how they’d make the state better. One good way is to describe other states’ programs and policies that might work well here. Speaking of which, I wonder if Rhode Island should undertake/expand more programs on a two-state basis with Massachusetts for, among other things, economies of scale. After all, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has long operated in Rhode Island. It seems to me that in compact and densely populated southern New England more regionalization is in order.
Snow Scandals
“Even 40 days after the winter solstice, it appeared that the ice and snow clogging many streets in the Washington area in sheets, clumps and curbside Everests would be dislodged only by the ministrations of heavy machinery.’’
--- Martin Weil, longtime Washington Post reporter, on the effects of a snowstorm last month. He was laid off last week.
In all four of the Northeast cities I’ve lived in, big snowstorms leave in their wake angry complaints about badly plowed streets, often with immediate, if not usually long-term, political repercussions. People mostly blame the mayor, especially if he or she is out of town when the storm hits. But while showing video of a mayor sitting in the cab of a truck with a plow as the snow comes down at two inches an hour might be a good visual meant to show that someone is in charge, it doesn’t do much to remove the snow.
I’m fatalistic about such storms. There’s no way that every street will be plowed well in a dense place like, say, Providence, with its narrow, and in some neighborhoods, curvy streets. Then there are such obstacles as cars left parked along streets despite well-announced parking bans. Weather forecasts can still be remarkably inaccurate. And sometimes there aren’t enough private companies available to plow. Hiring more municipal workers to be available to deal with rather rare big storms would be expensive, and might require tax increases that voters would angrily denounce.
Residents get particularly angry when a snowplow operator, to make a street more passable, blocks driveways, but that’s often unavoidable.
Thank God there wasn’t much wind in the big Jan. 25-26 storm to create big drifts.
xxx
I’d guess that the financially troubled Roger Williams Medical Center, in Providence, and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, in North Providence, ultimately end up as housing, whatever the current deals to try to keep them in health care.