Justin Katz
Dan Yorke’s been on this for a couple of days, so most of you have heard the same clips from the ICE as Gestapo “press conference” at St. Theresa’s church that I have. Shameless. Despicable. The gut-punch is the suicide of David De La Roca, but the heart-tug pictures are all of the children of…
The cost — to the company — of Bank of America’s fees was all of my business. The final straw came when I found out the hard way that, when the bank automatically transferred funds from savings to checking to cover checks, it took the fee from the checking account, thus increasing the odds of…
Tiverton Superintendent Bill Rearick just handed out a budget packet. Here’s a key page: Obviously, the teachers’ increase is TBA and estimated. (Amy Mullen got up and asked how they can be considered if there’s no contract.) The bottom line is that, “as of January 8, 2008, the School Department is $149,011 over the spending…
I’m not going to lie to you; solely in consideration of entertainment, I miss seeing Pat Crowley at the Tiverton School Committee meetings. He gives off the aura of a TV villain, and drama requires such characters. But for the school system, for the town, and even for the teachers, the quiet, respectful atmosphere of…
Would it be hoping to much to believe that more noises like this might bring advances for the RIGOP in the next election? House Republicans have promised to boycott all legislative grants in the coming year and have threatened to sue the General Assembly leadership to stop the disbursement of the modest checks to local…
There could hardly be a better symbol for the errors — becoming ever more detrimental to the people of Rhode Island — in mindset of the General Assembly than Senator Dan Issa’s perennial bill to tax expensive clothing: At some point, though, he said, “expensive clothing goes beyond being about filling a basic human need…
Thomas Schmeling passes on a bit of information of which we’d all do well to take note: In December, I attended a meeting of the RI Board of Regents for Primary and Secondary Education. Parent/citizens were invited to comment on the question of how the teachers’ contracts affect public education. It was not a large…
Andrew notes that marrying the future mother of his child would have put Mynor Montufar on the path to citizenship. The various considerations that go into figuring out why that was a road not taken highlight the fact that, while not all decisions follow rational thought processes, incentive structures still apply broadly. As Andrew describes…
And the people who keep digging. That’s what my latest Providence Journal piece is about. As I said the other day: We’re in a race to move the state toward change before the four groups I describe in the op-ed manage to force too many others beyond its borders.
Although I’m not in a position to provide links right now, I wanted to mention something that I just heard on WPRO: The unwed, nineteen-year-old father of Rhode Island’s first-born baby of 2008 was just taken in under suspicion of being an illegal alien. Apparently, a housemate of the young couple was found dead (perhaps…