In Depth
Tom Coyne of RIPolicyanalysis.org wrote on Saturday that politics in Rhode Island will change, it is merely the pace and manner in which this change occurs that is in question. He offered that either the voters will decide to bring about, via the ballot box, a more equitable political system or will the state go…
In Sunday’s ProJo, M. Charles Bakst, erstwhile stakeholder of the political commentariat of Rhode Island, took Sen. Lincoln Chafee to task for his waffling on both supporting fellow Republican President Bush and staying a Republican at all. His flirtation with bolting the party — and, more especially, his decision not to vote for George W.…
The President and his conservative coalition, as a matter of principle, do not like activist judges, i.e. judges who use their power to go beyond just interpreting the law. Here is uber-conservative and Bush supporter Phyllis Schlafly on the subject… “Finally, we have a president who comes right out and targets ‘activist judges’ as the…
Rhode Island just passed a separation-of-powers referendum on the state level. But do we have it at the Federal level? Separation-of-powers means that a legislative branch of government makes the laws, a judicial branch of government interprets the laws, and an executive branch of government enforces the laws. At the moment, Jim Taricani is being…
Providence Journal media writer Andy Smith has an update on the Jim Taricani situation in Sunday’s paper. For those unfamiliar with the events, here is the background. Jim Taricani is a political reporter for the local NBC affiliate, WJAR-10. In 2001, about two months before the (former) Mayor of Providence was indicted on federal corruption…
While we’re in the midst of our first weekend content lull, it seems as good a time as any to republish a vlog post of mine from January 2003 (mostly so it’ll be in the archives here). In the surrounding weeks, I made a few short blog-like videos, but the time it took to make…
Commenting to a post by Marc, Rich from East Greenwich offers several specific questions that he might ask if mediating teacher contract disputes there. Among the considerations that he proposes is a comparison of teachers compensation with the median for the town. Although not addressing East Greenwich, Marc and I worked through some of these…
Arianna Huffington has an article on her blog nominally analyzing how Kerry’s reluctance to talk about foreign policy contributed to his defeat, yet in her detailed tactical description how foreign policy came to be muted, she doesn’t tell us what she thinks that the Kerry campaign should have been saying. She attributes the avoidance of…
Pre–election day, Marc and I had a short cross-blog exchange that touched on the state ballot’s spending referenda. Marc did his homework and argued on behalf of some of the spending measures, including the URI biotech center. For my part, noting that I considered mine little more than a protest vote, I declared: “not a…
