Justin Katz
Governor Carcieri’s executive order is already proving to be a success: Rhode Island’s decision to order State Police and other state agencies to help enforce federal immigration law is jarring border cities in Massachusetts, where illegal immigrants say they are now afraid to enter the Ocean State. If they’re that reluctant to cross a state…
Commenter JP has it right: The Providence Phoenix profile of the Providence diocese’s immigration point-woman Stella Carrera is yet another litmus test on the issue. Consider one of several stories from her clients: One of the faces Carrera knows is that of Carla Rodriguez (not her real name), a 42-year-old Guatemalan native who has been…
I’d been meaning to note financial planner George Wright’s thoughts on demographic trends in Rhode Island: Financial advisers are seeing a noticeable increase in affluent retirees moving out of the state, especially to Florida, which has no state income, inheritance or personal-property taxes, and is about three hours away on Southwest Airlines. Here’s a plan:…
I have to admit that I’ve been unfair to National Education Association Rhode Island Assistant Director Patrick Crowley. From time to time I’ve wondered whether I’ve played some small role in reducing his undeserved credibility, but now I see that my efforts toward that goal are hardly measurable in comparison to his own. I’m sure…
As it happens, I thought of Ian Donnis as I flipped through a Providence Journal 1968 retrospective to which he directs his readers. I seem to recall a certain progressive journalist’s responding with incredulity to my reference a few years ago to what I thought to be generally acknowledged romanticization of the late-’60s counterculture, including…
Unlike Matt Jerzyk, Tom Sgouros’s difficulty in assessing the different interests at the Handy/Moura hearing wasn’t that he emphasized their irrelevant differences, but that he bound them together with reductive equivalence: Before the hearing, there was a rally in the rotunda protesting cuts to Head Start, the early-childhood education program. “Great,” you say, “yet another…
Doesn’t it often seem that modern society proceeds according the following order of operations? On emotional grounds, declare a change obviously beneficial and of minimal cost, with objections dismissed as outdated or inherently bigoted. Implement change. Ignore evidence that the naysayers were correct. Let things proceed to crisis level. Restate the original objections under the…
So how much of the Brave New World will be purely a matter of semantics? The man who stunned the world when he announced he was pregnant gave an intimate insight into his personal life in a revealing television interview with Oprah. Thomas Beatie stripped off for the cameras and bared his baby bump and…
Yes, there are most definitely arguments to be made for the practices, and truth be told, I’ve grown to be bring a mountain of skepticism to media accounts of income related to high-level government positions, but every now and then — especially in the current political and economic climate — it’s difficult not to suspect…
So the makers of Absolut vodka are advertising in Mexico with the statement that, “In an Absolut World,” the Southwestern United States would be the territory of our neighbors to the south. One might call it immanentizing the endgame. Well, my choice of vodkas just became easier by the subtraction of one. (More on Gateway…
