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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Bizarro principles



By Linda Felaco

There he goes again. Apparently, Mike “Voice of the CCA” Chambers was out of town most of September and is now playing catch-up with his blogging on “Regressive Charlestown,” posting four new Chamberpots™ in rapid succession.

Normally, I don’t try to unpack Chambers’s each and every distortion, because (a) I trust that readers live in the real Charlestown and not Bizarro Charlestown, and (b) who has the time or the energy. And frankly, if I were to tumble all the way down the rabbit hole of the Chambers mind, I fear I might not be able to find my way back to reality. 

But sometimes Chambers manages to pack so many falsehoods into a single post that it demands to be deconstructed.

Chambers starts off his most recent Chamberpot,[1] “A Calm Voice of Reason,” with a real whopper about the composition of the current Town Council. Now, here in reality-based Charlestown, as we all know, the council is controlled by two members of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, President Tom “Boss” Gentz and Vice President “Deputy Dan” Slattery, and their ally, the nominally “independent” Lisa DiBello, who generally votes with Gentz and Slattery because she’s suing the other two members of the council, namely Marge Frank and Greg Avedisian. 

Frank and Avedisian, in reality-based Charlestown, are former CCA-endorsed councilors who have since been disavowed by the CCA. Marge Frank is not affiliated with any political party, and Greg Avedisian is in fact a Republican and ran as one last time around.

But in Chambers’s Bizarro Charlestown, the current Town Council is somehow a tie between the CCA and the Democrats. He claims the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee “supports 2 councilors” the same as the CCA does.

Huh?

Now, I suppose I could be charitable and assume that Mikey is just confused because here on Progressive Charlestown we’ve found more to praise than to criticize about Marge and Greg, in sharp contrast to the rest of their colleagues. That’s not the same as “owning” them. Indeed, we have never hesitated to zap Marge and Greg when we’ve disagreed with them, such as Marge’s vote to prevent Tim Quillen from speaking on the CDTC’s behalf and Greg’s advocacy of Y-Gate. Though we’ve also praised Lisa DiBello for standing against Y-Gate and Dan Slattery for being scrupulous about his Y-Gate recusals.

In fact, I will go a step further and go on record as saying that despite my disagreements with Slattery’s stances on most issues, I do respect his restraint in not piling on along with Gentz and DiBello in denouncing Progressive Charlestown in open session of the Town Council. If anything, Slattery had more reason to do so than Gentz did.

Hint to Mike: This is called being fair. Balanced, even. Unlike Mike and the CCA, we don’t find fault with everything our opponents do just because they’re our opponents. Hell, the day the CCA does something I agree with, I will write about it—just as soon as the shock wears off.

Why Chambers wants to pretend his team doesn’t control the council is anyone’s guess. He even finds fault with our math skills for pointing out the obvious, that by hook or by crook, the CCA has managed to ramrod most things through that they’ve wanted and block most things that they haven’t.

Yes, we with our faulty math skills were the ones who called out the CCA when they tried to tell us that by paying double the assessed value for the Y-gate property, not to acquire the property itself but for a superfluous “easement” that the state was already paying for, we’d somehow be getting it for “50 cents on the dollar.” So much for the CCA being “good in math” as Mike claims they are.

Chambers then makes a series of claims about things Democrats have supposedly said that are completely unrecognizable, so I can’t even point you toward the reality-based version, unfortunately.

Except for this:

“A member of the CDTC stated that not all people can have solar panels on their houses or garages. Is that because a rich person used up the available grant money on his own house and then crowed about it? Or is it that the sun shines on the rich and the poor are left in the shadows?”

It’s true that Tom and Suzanne Ferrio were able to take advantage of a grant opportunity to put solar panels on their house, something they’d wanted to do when they were building it and had in fact designed the layout to be able to take maximum advantage of the available sunlight for solar panels.

But that’s where the reality in Chambers’s statement ends.

The fact is, the Ferrios did not “use up the available grant money”; the grant was about to expire when they were awarded it, as Tom explained in the very first story in his “Solar Power for Tom” series. Once the deadline passed, the grants were not renewed because Washington Republicans want the fossil fuel industry to get all the financial incentives rather than the renewable energy sector. And RI legislators don’t want to be caught doing much of anything to add to spending or taxes.

I tried to take advantage of the grant opportunity myself, so I know for a fact there was still money available even after the Ferrios were approved. Unfortunately, our roofline goes the wrong direction, we would have had to cut down trees to get enough sunlight, and our electric bills were not that high to begin with, so it simply wouldn’t have been cost-effective. But had the numbers come out differently, I was eligible to get the same deal the Ferrios got, which, by the way, paid for only a certain percentage of each project, not the whole thing.

Get your facts straight, Mike. If Chambers can be so wrong on simple factual matters that are easily checked, what does that say about his statements on more complex topics? A simple phone call to Alteris could have cleared up any confusion Mike might have had about whether the grant got “used up” or expired; the phone number was even given in Tom’s story. But Mike clearly is not interested in facts; he’s only interested in smearing his political opponents.
The sun does indeed shine on rich and poor alike, Mike.
But not everyone's roof slants in the right direction for
solar power to be cost-effective.

Mike goes on to conclude:

“[T]his is the reason we should choose councilors who possess a calm voice of reason. They have to ask the hard questions to keep harebrained schemes from draining the town’s budget surplus.”

Funny, I don’t remember the CCA councilors asking any “hard questions” about the Y-gate scheme, which would have drained the town’s budget surplus. Seems to me all the hard questions were asked by us here at Progressive Charlestown and by the various citizens who spoke out at the relevant council meetings.

Nor did the CCA councilors, with their Chambers-endorsed math skills, ever offer Charlestown voters the cost-benefit analysis that they promised all proposals would get when they ran for office. Y-gate was the “harebrained scheme” those CCA councilors with their “calm voice of reason” should have been protecting us from—but instead, they were the ones foisting it on us.

We here on Progressive Charlestown opposed Y-gate from the get-go—and the two councilors whom Chambers claims are somehow closet Democrats actually voted for it. But logic clearly is not Mike’s strong suit.

[1] As always, Chamberpots are CCA-approved, fact-checked, and of course civil. Note to the CCA Steering Committee: Bring back Peyton Storm! She had much better writing skills.
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