Justin Katz
For the curious, I took a few obsessive-compulsive moments last night to compile the public school SAT data for all states. Rhode Island ranks 47th for every test except writing and 47th for total score. It’s interesting to note that states’ public school scores do not appear to correlate with private school scores, inasmuch as…
Well, it may not be at quite the level of signing one’s own death warrant as the Declaration of Independence, but the recent shenanigans of the government of Tiverton have spurred local action in the form of Tiverton Citizens for Change (TCC), a non-partisan political action committee. The town charter amendment that will appear on…
Granted, I don’t have his business experience, but sometimes news reports give the impression that Governor Carcieri doesn’t have a feel for the push-and-shove momentum with which one must grapple when bringing painful, but necessary, change: “We’re going to do our best efforts to negotiate and discuss this in good faith and get a resolution,”…
Karl Stephens, of Barrington, recalls what many seem to have forgotten: In its Aug. 19 editorial about Iraq’s $79 billion budget surplus from oil revenue (“America the sucker”), The Journal fails to mention the most important aspect of that oil-revenue story. Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, oil money was used by Iraq to sponsor terrorism, build…
Whatever the party, I can’t believe that anybody is interested — much less enjoys — these speeches. Everything promised. Posture. Posing. Some standby lines and historical references. Black-and-white arguments and vague solutions. One characteristic that I notice again and again with Barack Obama is his method of adding that flavor of bipartisan “change” to the…
Congratulations to the National Education Association’s Pat Crowley for managing to push his story about Governor Carcieri’s Florida condos onto (astonishingly) the front page of the Providence Journal, which used it as a contextual gotcha against the backdrop of the union healthcare story. (Gee, I didn’t realize that the governor is rich!) Normally, I wouldn’t…
Jeff Jacoby offers an interesting tidbit in today’s Globe: … it’s a quantifiable phenomenon. Scholars call it the “congressional effect” – markets tend to get nervous when Congress is in session, and generally perform better when it isn’t. As economists Michael Ferguson and H. Douglas Witte have shown, the impact this tendency can have is…
Yesterday brought a couple of opposing must-read columns from the right. First, John Derbyshire: So I won’t be watching either of the party conventions. Both parties’ choices of nominee are appalling to me. I contemplate the next four years with dread. I don’t want either of these men in charge of the federal government, neither…
I’m sure there are examples on the Right, as well, and taking my own biases into consideration, I wouldn’t be confident declaring an imbalance. But it does seem as if the Left has a habit of assuming the soundness of its solutions and seeing any evidence of the initial problem as explicit proof for its…
A comment from Tom W, last week, raises an interesting question (emphasis added): Of course “Linc” is now being widely (hailed) in the MSM regarding involvement with “Republicans for Obama.” Gotta love the irony, since McCain came here to campaign for Chafee to try to save his RINO bacon. This is what happens when the…
