Ripple
Mark Steyn’s daily pre-election column is vintage Steyn today. But in Botswana everyone voted on Wednesday, the last up-country results came in on Thursday, the ruling party conceded and the new guy was sworn in on Friday. That’s a normal election in a normal country. Meanwhile, back in the greatest country in the history of…
I’ve fallen way behind, so this tweet from Ken Block is a couple months old, but its content is (unfortunately) timeless in Rhode Island: The picture being painted for me by over ten current and former DOT employees is a toxically managed organization where who you know is far more important than how you do…
I realized this when watching Democrats’ repeated proclamations about jobs numbers during the Obama years only to see those numbers quietly revised the following month, almost always with the revision making touted jobs disappear, rather than quiet corrections representing improvements. Now, it seems crime data has the same partisan infection. All year, we’ve been hearing…
The news cycle flows by so quickly, lately, that political actors and activists are learning it’s sometimes best to just keep your head down and let the controversy of the day join the rest of the noise tomorrow. Nonetheless, I think there’s something worth noting in the now-passed story about Russia funding some conservative commentators.…
I find it ominous that one of my children’s dentist just cancelled an appointment for tomorrow due to short staffing. RI’s medical infrastructure feels a bit like we could get the equivalent of an emergency Washington Bridge closure at any time. Or maybe we’ve been getting them, but the people who run the state are…
Last night, I read a business case about a handful of billionaires who’ve been trying to make lab-grown meat a viable consumer product, and I wondered something tangential. Imagine if a handful of billionaires decided they needed to have a pliable big-government progressive in the White House. They might flood her accounts with hundreds of…
It’s a passing thought, of course, but Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee’s mild lament that a State House celebration of a basketball trophy is happening during school hours bugs me. Somehow, it emphasizes the point that our government officials see the well-being of children — of all regular Rhode Islanders, for that matter — as…
Something more like a cookbook or plantation. I’ve heard complaints that conservatives have “no plan for you” — or “no vision for what the town should be” — repeatedly over the years, and I think it’s the most disturbing complaint progressives make. Chris Rufo articulates my view: Where do I see the town, state, or…
The reason it’s terrifying isn’t only that unrealized gains are purely hypothetical. The proposal (and defenses of it) show that for many taxation has become purely a money-finding scheme requiring the scantiest of rationale. By their nature, unrealized capital gains do not actually exist; they are hypothetical. While striving to come up with some sort…
With the caveat that we have to infer what he’s trying to suggest, I think we can conclude Attorney General Peter Neronha is implying Rhode Island isn’t keeping up on electric vehicle charging ports: Well, yeah. Rhode Island is a small state, geographically, meaning people are never very far from home, and in any event,…