Justin Katz
Charles Bakst has been peddling his curmudgeonly wares ’round these parts for much longer than I have, but at the risk of later being proven wrong, it seems to me that he’s either not very observant or is in on the game: The governor expressed the fear that legislators will backtrack on tax changes in…
Today’s surprising factoid comes from Mark Steyn, after a few paragraphs on the voluntary depopulation movement: Lest you think the above are “extremists,” consider how deeply invested the “mainstream” is in a total fiction. At the recent climate jamboree in Bali, the Reverend Al Gore told the assembled faithful: “My own country the United States…
To provide some perspective on yesterday’s stark warning of calamity, it’s worth mentioning that I made it home to Tiverton from Newport in not much more time than usual — about an hour, with three short stops (coffee, money, and newspaper). In other words, Will Ricci’s nine-hour trip from East Providence to South Kingstown and…
An editorial in yesterday’s Newport Daily News makes an excellent point with reference to recent departures of town administrators: … the lack of information about why the (Middletown and Tiverton) administrators are departing — whether because of poor performance, personality conflicts or political pressure — is frustrating, as is the fact that neither agreement has…
I just saw a report on channel 10 that there are still — at 9:00 p.m. — children on buses from schools that let out at 12:30 or 1:00. People abandoning their cars because of traffic generated during a modestly heavy snow storm? This state is embarrassing. Heads ought to roll in government offices tomorrow…
This is a plea to the teachers of Tiverton: Please step back for a moment and consider the depths to which your union is bringing you: Tiverton teachers plan to picket the workplace of School Committee Chairwoman Denise deMedeiros on Monday afternoon and have notified the president of St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, Mass.,…
Andrew and I are at the Ocean State Policy Research Institute dinner with Grover Norquist at the Cuban Revolution in Providence, and as you can see, the atmosphere is full of thematic incongruities: ADDENDUM: All throughout dinner, something in Fidel’s eyes distracted me. As everybody filtered out of the room, I walked over for a…
The school committee is looking for a temporary classroom because a school that’s being phased out as new construction completes after this year is substandard. The idea is, as soon as possible, to spread the children out in (and out of) a building that is too small to accommodate them, for health and noise reasons.…
Not a group to let some rain disrupt their protest, the teachers stood at their seats in the auditorium before tonight’s Tiverton School Committee meeting: My habitual area for sitting is occupied, so I thought it best to hide in back. (That, and I’m afraid that Pat Crowley might be in the audience and offend…
Lee Drutman’s musing against the scourge of lobbyists is telling in the solution that he fails to consider: The challenge then is two-fold. One is to figure out ways to make public service more of a career in itself and less of the stepping-stone it is increasingly becoming. This may mean such things as better…
