Justin Katz
Brown student Sara Sunshine’s article on the local region of the blogosphere is a worthy offering — much better than I’d feared, having been forewarned of Crowley’s involvement. What better comment on the quirky, intangible power of blogging could there be than Ms. Sunshine’s inclusion of a quotation from the post in which I mentioned…
Perhaps the most ear-catching thing that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Stephen Alves (D, West Warwick) said to Dan Yorke yesterday afternoon was that we, the taxpayers of Rhode Island, “don’t pay [legislators] enough money to sit there and spend all hours of the night up there” — as if being a state legislator is a…
I know there’s no direct connection, but I couldn’t help but think of those complaints about the cost of the Iraq war to the state when I read this bit of rare positive news: A California aerospace company is scouting locations in Rhode Island in order to open a facility to build armored boats by…
PROEM: We’d like to encourage this sort of conversation, so commenters will have a very short leash for ad hominem with this post. Matt Jerzyk’s response to my post about the rich giving their money to we in the working class strikes me as so tangential as to raise a wholly separate topic, and as…
Falling through cracks has always been a specialty of mine. Wrong time. Wrong place. Not quite a fit. Too much of this for that. Too much there for here. Exceptions to the rule move to the back (or the front) of the room, please. Not that I’ve minded, particularly. It becomes sort of definitional, and…
This is a point worth making over and over again: [Iraqis] were willing to help us, but they are not a stupid people. They know that if they commit to the American side and the Americans abandon them as we did in 1991, it means death for them and their families. They know this, and…
Over on Kmareka, David Jaffe suggests that, thanks to those awful ultra-rich, working-class Americans have every reason to be bitter. Joins in commenter Miami Mama: If those ultra-rich would spend just a fraction of their wealth to help the poor and middle-class instead of selfishly splurging on themselves, it would be a much better world.…
Every couple of years, it seems, a student from Brown will contact me for comment in an article about blogging for the Brown Daily Herald. It’s traditionally been a unifying topic: although we’ve got different emphases, we Rhode Island bloggers will all agree about the value and opportunities that the medium offers, not the least…
In response to my recent column on Rhode Island’s economy and taxes, I’ve received email asking whether it’s merely the economy to blame — nothing unique to Rhode Island. Well, let’s see: Rhode Island was one of only five states nationally and the District of Columbia to post a higher unemployment rate in February than…