By Jim Baron

WITH FRIENDS LIKE… — Governor Carcieri should buy a dog.

You remember that President Harry Truman is said to have said, “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” Well that seems to be the situation the governor is in at the Statehouse these days.
I’m sure Carcieri expects to get whacked around by the Democrats and the unions and the school teachers and the poverty advocates anytime he does something important, like release an annual budget. But last week it was the House Republicans coming after Carcieri first, fast and furious.
The initial refusal of a single Republican representative to hold his nose and perform the simple task of introducing the budget bill perhaps permanently crippled the already lame duck governor politically. It was like the budget the governor proposed had cooties — everyone was afraid to get close enough to touch it.
The Senate Republicans were, as always, quietly irrelevant. Maybe the four of them were off playing bridge someplace. None of them could introduce a bill in the House, but at least one could have stepped forward and publicly stood by the governor, rather than allow him to suffer his pitiful political (and perhaps even personal) humiliation completely alone.
Did the Republicans consider their ideological purity in opposition to a cigarette tax hike, which is actually in the 2009 revised budget and is offset in 2010 with decreases in the corporate income tax and estate taxes, worth stripping the last shreds of political dignity from a governor of their own party, who is already freefalling in the polls? Even when the caucus decided — too little, too late — to introduce the budget as a group, they made it clear that they were holding their nose by sponsoring the bill “by request.”
The tiny House GOP caucus already bullied Carcieri into making a fool of himself a few weeks ago when they pressured him into threatening to veto the cigarette tax hike and other revenue generating measures that he himself had proposed, and which he then had to propose all over again in the new supplemental budget. Yes, he had to bring the very same tax and fee increases back again, except now they will bring in less revenue because of the time that was lost. 
So the only things House Minority Leader Robert Watson’s crazy lese majeste accomplished were to isolate the governor and leave him with absolutely no budget bargaining power — and to open the door for smart-aleck columnists to make snarky cracks about the governor buying a dog.
So no matter what, the Carcieri budget is now a dead letter. I felt the futility when writing the first story about the budget the night Carcieri introduced it. I at first was trying to cram in as many facts and details as I could, but then I stopped and asked myself what the point of that was. Once you have a quote from House Finance Committee Chairman Steven Costantino that, “I see major revisions to the budget when it arrives,” well then, the details of the governor’s budget seem a lot less consequential, don’t they? Let’s see what the revisions are going to be before we start worrying about who is going to get what and what the effects of the budget will be on taxes, the state economy, cities and towns, schools, pensions and all the rest of it.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK — A caller to Dan Yorke’s radio show last week said, “Don Carcieri is the least effective governor this state has had since Lincoln Almond.” Agree with the guy or not, it’s a heck of a line.

DR. FRANKENSTEIN, CALL YOUR OFFICE — It’s scary how captive we have become to our own technology. When the General Assembly’s Web site crashed last week, it really shoved a stick into the spokes of Rhode Island government’s bicycle. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives cancelled its floor calendar and committee session. The Senate pulled the plug on its committees, too. It also wiped out the calendar except for the confirmation of Craig Stenning as director of MHRH. It went through with the confirmation because some of Stenning’s family came in from out of state to see him installed in the job.
The idea of having bills and calendars printed on paper Tuesday seemed so quaint, it was like seeing a school history class on a field trip. 
The Web site was back up for folks inside the building by the time sessions started Wednesday, but folks outside the Statehouse could not log on until after both chambers adjourned.
At least in the House, some legislators, particularly committee chairmen whose agendas are starting to back up, were miffed at the move, but holding off business when the public doesn’t have a fair shot at knowing what bills are going to be heard where and when has to be applauded as a GOOD THING when it happens. The House and Senate leaders got one right this time. Let’s hope this spirit of transparency and open government obtains throughout the legislative session, particularly the last week or so.

IT’S OFFICIAL — We can finally put to bed the debate about whether or not Twin River should be called a casino. Wayne Newton sang there the other night. It’s a casino. Case closed. Danke Schoen.

WHAT’S IN A NAME? — I understand symbolism as much as the next fellow, but I still can’t get my head around amending the Rhode Island Constitution to change the very name of the state because some people misunderstand the meaning of a word. The word “plantations” in the name “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” has absolutely nothing to do with, as satirist Tom Lehrer put it, “whuppin’ slaves and choppin’ cotton.” It simply identified the mainland farming area at the time when “Rhode Island” was meant to signify Aquidneck Island. The term “plantations” did assume a bad odor back in the antebellum South, and that’s why activists want to get rid of it now. But instead of declaring one more word off-limits, why not use this as a teachable moment, so future generations will not be similarly confused? Rhode Island doesn’t have clean hands on the issue of slavery; it was neck deep in the buying and selling of human beings and many prominent Rhode Islanders made their fortunes that way. Teachers can make the state’s official name a topic of classroom discussions and kids can do reports on it. Maybe it would be better for minorities for this issue to stay alive; if they won and got the Providence Plantations eliminated, it would just go away and people’s knowledge of the real history would dim.
My sense is that minorities, who — the new commander in chief notwithstanding — still largely get the dirty end of the stick in society, see this as one way to win at least a symbolic victory over The Man.
One way or another, this perennially proposed amendment isn’t going to see the ballot this year, either, for no other reason than the cost of changing everything that says “and Providence Plantations” on it (and no, that wouldn’t be the only reason).
But it would be interesting to see what would happen if it did come to a vote. If everybody who came to the polls cast a vote on it, my hunch is that it would fail, by a pretty big margin. But since it would be one of the referenda on the back of the ballot, and it doesn’t on its face look like it spends tax dollars, a lot of people might ignore it and a dedicated and energized minority could put it over the top.  But like I say, we’ll probably never know.