Rhode Frog: Chafee Vs. Cool Moose

Have you seen the ad urging you to call Chafee about voting for gay marriage in RI? I have issues with this.
For this post I'm going to side-step my personal feelings about gay marriage (see the Marriage Equality RI widget on the side), and focus on the facts.
This ad was paid for by the conservative National Organization for Marriage Rhode Island chapter. Anytime a biased group has something to gain, facts and statistics will be distorting to suit their needs.
First, the implication that new governor Lincoln Chafee earned less votes than the Cool Moose Party, therefore not the true choice of the majority of voters. A party does not become an elected official, but they were referring to the multi-year votes earned by CPM candidate for lieutenant governor, Robert J. Healey. Misleading statements irritate me. Moving on.
The NOMRI believes that unless RI citizens vote on the issue of gay marriage, they are being silenced. Not so. The majority of RI voters chose Chafee, who openly supported it during his campaign, and made clear his intentions to allow it. So, we voted for him, we voted on the issue.
Next, the poll numbers used in the ad. I really hate polls. I hate it even more when the results are used incorrectly and/or ignore the conflicting results of an equally valid/relevant poll. NOMRI will have us believe that out of the 1 million+ people living in RI, the majority want to vote for or against gay marriage on a ballot. Their majority? 401. Meanwhile, there's an Associated Press poll out there showing that more Rhode Islanders are for gay marriage (43%) than against (32%). A ProJo article also points out that more than 13,000 signed pro-gay-marriage postcards were brought to the statehouse last month.
This state has one of the highest unemployement rates in the country. Our school system is... lacking. There are more homeless men, women, children, elderly, veterans, and mentally ill people than our shelters can hold. I can't speak for my fellow citizens, but I don't want our elected officials wasting their time preventing two grown, consenting, commited adults, of any gender, from marrying.

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Chafee Vs. Cool Moose

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