Quick Read
The timing could be better, with Rhode Islanders having no opportunity to change direction via the ballot box for two years, but we really need to learn the lesson of overcrowding in our emergency rooms. Namely, among all the various causes, the most significant is socialized medicine: “We are seeing long visit waits at the…
Judge Joseph Terence Houlihan yesterday acquitted then-police officer Jeann Lugo of simple assault at the June 24 melee at the State House, finding that Lugo was trying to break free from Rourke who was restraining him from entering the “melee” that occurred at the rally. Kudos to Judge Houlihan for issuing this wise and thoughtful…
In the long days since most Congressional districts in the United States managed to provide sufficient vote counts for victors to be named, Republicans have only needed approximately one-quarter of all remaining districts to claim a majority. Thus far, the Democrats have beaten the odds, and the GOP is still eight seats away, which is…
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which Rhode Island has ill-advisedly joined, requires that, whenever enough states have joined to control the Electoral College outcome for the President of the United States, all participating states must give their Electoral College votes to whichever candidate won the most individual votes nationally, no matter what their own…
Here’s a noteworthy WPRI headline: “‘Speechless:’ 7-year-old child brings gun to Boston school.” Must be all those Republicans who control the city! Out of curiosity, I went in search of information about how strict Massachusetts’s gun-control laws are and found myself reminded of that old Weezer song about unraveling a sweater: “If you want to…
Many in Rhode Island are too steeped in the mainstream narrative to even consider such a thing, but Joe Biden is, in his way, nastier, more divisive, and more destructive of our civic norms than what Democrats claim of President Trump. In fairness to Biden, however, his is just an exaggerated and less competently executed…
Why are Rhode Island parents so lackadaisical about the poor value they’re getting from the state’s government schools? As Dan McGowan reports, SAT scores are down from where they were before the pandemic, and they were already low compared with those of neighboring states: Math (minimum score of 530 out of 800): 25.3 percent English…
A recently released book by Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy, Superabundance, explores the amazing fact that the prosperity and the availability of scarce resources is proving only to increase as the population grows. Their most fundamental argument is that people have value. Every child added to the world increases the wealth of all of us. The authors…
Clearing out the links I’ve put aside, I came across a tweet that Bill Bartholomew sent out with a clip of himself on A Lively Experiment in early September, and he makes a point that’s still worth considering, related to stories around that time that schools were accommodating students who’d declared themselves to identify as cats:…
If you’re thigh deep in the muck of Rhode Island politics, as I am, you may find something about the local society inexplicable. The game is so locked up, in Rhode Island, that it isn’t clear whether anything can shake the stranglehold of insiders and special interests. Consider two recent stories. On the National Education…