Justin Katz
Taking a soft tack in defining “fairness” when it comes to teacher compensation, Julia Steiny references a series of reports put out by Education Week: The researchers averaged the earnings of all 16 occupations and used that number to draw a “parity line” across the center of the chart. Against that line they graphed each…
I would hope that we could all agree that the events that Bob Kerr describes are a travesty in their own right, although certainly accentuated by the fact that their victim is a veteran: Barone is a neighbor and friend and has testified in court on [Paul] Kelly’s behalf. He remembers when Pocahontas Cooley, Kelly’s…
Ken Block, founder of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island, is taking his cause to court: The Rhode Island ACLU has today filed a federal lawsuit against Rhode Island elections officials on behalf of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island (MPRI), challenging the State’s restrictive ballot access laws. The lawsuit, filed by RI ACLU volunteer…
There’s some risk of “gotcha” opposition to the current president and his hordes of true believers, including in the media. Considering that the Katrina catastrophe still holds an important place in the self-persuasive arsenals of the anti-Bush crowd, Steve Gill is right to note a conspicuous difference in treatment: Last week a massive ice storm…
Ray Hodges’ ruminations on the morality of same-sex marriage are reasonable and presented with an even temper. Just so must be the tone of any dialogue on controversial matters. Unfortunately, his argument is a wholly erroneous construct, collapsing under the weight of misapprehensions, categorical non sequiturs, and an a priori conclusion. The flaws emerge right…
Word on the street is that the RI Senate Judiciary Committee has indefinitely postponed its hearing on marriage issues. On a related note, a source in a position to know informs me that the reason even informed citizens can be surprised by such events is that the General Assembly exempts itself from open meeting laws.…
Conservatives sometimes lament that, unlike liberals, they lack for countries to which to move — or at least to threaten to move — when they lose elections. Judging purely from its president’s attitude, it looks like the Czech Republic might be headed in the right direction: When it comes to the climate, “there are competing…
Disappointingly, URI economics professor Len Lardaro sums up the zeitgeist of the times: “These may not be stimulus funds in the strict sense,” Lardaro said, but they convey the sense that government is attacking the crisis head on. Bryant’s Edinaldo Tebaldi displays another symptom of the intellectual virus currently infecting economics academia: To Tebaldi, the…
It’s curious — at a time when lefties and unions are more than happy to accept far reaching justifications for weaving their wish lists into an ostensible stimulus package at the federal level — to hear them arguing for a close delineation of “budget repair” in the state: Union leaders are accusing the Carcieri administration…
On Friday evening, Portsmouth Fire Chief Jeff Lynch sent an email to a baker’s dozen (or so) of state legislators explaining why not a single one of the governor’s budgetary suggestions related to public-sector labor ought to be accepted. The entire letter is printed in the extended entry, below. It would be folly to state…
