Quick Read
The Rhode Island General Assembly is calling its page for information about ideas and proposals related to its federal COVID handout the “American Rescue Plan Act State Fiscal Recovery Fund Recommendation Portal.” The Associated Press article about the portal maintains that framing: Rhode Island’s legislature has created a website to post the proposals it’s receiving…
Sometimes watching public policy is like a society-wide 4D puzzle, with the fourth dimension being (of course) time. I remember in 2013 when I had to explain to folks behind the scenes why legislation to create a new type of corporation — the public benefit corporation — belonged on the RI Center for Freedom &…
The featured image for this post is the power outage map for National Grid at 7:00 a.m. Power is out across the entire state. It doesn’t have to be this way. Wires could be put underground, except that our government squanders as much money as it can so as to charge us additionally for basic…
I read somewhere not long ago that the thing with alcohol isn’t so much that it lowers inhibitions as that it narrows one’s focus. Having fun in the moment, touching base with your high school friend at 4:00 in the morning, anger at that guy looking at you funny across the bar… these things become…
Understandably, the president and CEO of the New England Cable and Telecommunications Association, Tim Wilkerson, is striving to get out ahead of rumors that the state government might give government-run Internet a try. Not only do such projects have a track record of failure, but also: Rhode Island already is one of the best states in…
The news is national that Rhode Island has become the first state to greenlight sites where users have heavy drugs can go to take them: Rhode Island plans to create supervised spaces for users to inject illegal drugs, in a big test of the idea that reducing harm to drug users is more effective than…
The perspective of a parent produces a different reaction to URI’s Media Education Lab study of “media literacy” in Rhode Island schools than the perspective of a policy theorist, although they can come together for a conclusion. An interview with lead researcher Rene Hobbs by Alexa Gagosz in The Boston Globe gives a good overview, but…
Alex Cannon is the Republican candidate in the race for the open Rhode Island Senate seat representing the East Side of Providence, but progressive journalist Steve Ahlquist conducted a lengthy, interesting, and fair interview with him on Uprise RI. Cannon, who hails from Las Vegas, Nevada, and arrived in Rhode Island in 2017, describes himself as…
Locally, the Rhode Island opposition (such as it is) is grappling with the shifting ground of our rights. Presumably, for example, parents have a right to send their children to schools that do not provide pornographic material to them and to demand a reversal via school committee meetings when that reasonable expectation is not met. …
Pfizer is claiming a diluted version of its COVID-19 vaccine is more than 90% effective among small children, but the numbers in its study implicitly raise the question of whether it’s necessary: A Pfizer study tracked 2,268 kids in that age group who got two shots three weeks apart of either a placebo or the…