Justin Katz
It’s certainly a laudable act to seek to return $762 dollars found on the ground by an ATM. Few, indeed, would fault a man for predicting the rightful owner to be unlocatable and pocketing the money. Even fewer, I’d say, would find it blameworthy to keep the money if the authorities wouldn’t hand over even…
It’s taken a while for me to get to it, but it’s still worth noting a surprisingly high-profile, front-page, Sunday Journal article by Jennifer Jordan: About 40 girls under the age of 15 become pregnant each year in Rhode Island. The number of girls ages 10 to 14 who become pregnant is substantially lower than…
From time to time, we’ll discuss among ourselves a theory that certain shifts in states’ political character are the results of liberals’ fleeing from regions that they’ve ruined to regions in which conservative policies have (ahem) done precisely what one would expect them to do. As Froma Harrop recently discovered, New Hampshire is exhibit A:…
Seemingly because of Bobby Oliveira’s attempts to talk some sense into the NEA’s Pat Crowley (I know!), the Tiverton teachers’ union moved its planned picket from the hospital at which School Committee Chairwoman Denise DeMedeiros works to the superintendent’s office. Maybe next time, we on the other side shouldn’t forecast our outrage so explicitly. So…
Lee Drutman has an excellent idea for an additional (or substitutive) practice for evaluating presidential candidates: How about, just for once, instead of a short-answer debate, we let our candidates take a long-essay test where we get to see the quality of their actual decision-making? The format could work like this: The candidates show up,…
This sort of thing shouldn’t be anywhere near the chopping block: Investors in six start-ups are getting a lucrative reward for betting on local entrepreneurs, part of a new and costly state effort to grow local companies. Last night, the state Economic Development Corporation approved the first applications for the Innovation Tax Credit. The companies…
Newport Superior Court Judge Vincent Ragosta has rebuffed the Tiverton School Committee’s attempt to “block the teachers’ union from picketing on Monday [this afternoon] at the workplace of the committee chairwoman, St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River.” Anybody considering elected office in Tiverton with the intention of upholding citizens’ interests against the unions — or…
Speaking of the solutions that politicians dubiously “favor,” I note that Rhode Island’s blue-blooded, old-money Senator Sheldon Whitehouse would support climate-related legislation even if the “average American household” suffers in both the short and long terms: Landmark legislation to combat global warming will also be a long-term boon to the U.S. economy, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse…
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…
