In Depth
Here’s an interesting find from URI economics professor Leonard Lardaro: As our unemployment rate fell from 5.8 percent to 4.5 percent, resident employment, the number of Rhode Islanders who were working, rose by only 423! The decline in our labor force, 7,146, was almost identical to the drop in the number of unemployed, 7,569, which…
A caller to Rick Adams’s show (listen here) just suggested to Don that Anchor Rising publish background information — voting records, fund contributors, family employment, union sympathy, and so on — for each of Rhode Island’s legislators. That’s a fantastic idea, and we should certainly give some thought to ways in which to get it…
In the course of yet another article about bias in our univerisities, William Pilger (a pseudonym), a conservative tenured professor in a southern university, managed to both display the value of a humanities education and the reluctance (and reason) that students show for engaging in any type of classroom discussion that may touch on current…
Consider these quotes about the recently concluded election: “Election results reflect a decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry…Ignorance and blood lust have a long tradition…especially in red states…They know no boundaries or rules. [Bush and Cheney] are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant.” Jane Smiley “I am…
While leading the way to the Christmas tree that my family had tagged a month before, I was amused by the searching look from the young man with the saw when he alluded to some volunteer work that he’d recently done with Rock the Vote and I said nothing. The other day, a solicitor for…
The Los Angeles Times, is “folding its daily national edition”. Will the next tier of papers down the news chain (in scope, not quality, necessarily) take a cue from this? As a news consumer, I would have increased interest in the Projo if it devoted less space to reprinting wire-service stories — which I can…
Just in case anybody’s interested, I thought it worth mentioning, over here, that I’ve decided to serialize a second edition of my novel, A Whispering Through the Branches, on my personal blog, Dust in the Light. I’ve written a partial explanation of my decision in an “Author’s Note for Blog Serialization.” Beginning (appropriately) with the…
For us separation-of-powers enthusiasts, there is an important distinction between the Plame-Wilson case and the Taricani case. In the Plame-Wilson affair, journalists are being asked to tell what they know about the violation of an actual law. It is illegal — according to a law passed by Congress, signed by the President — to leak…
