Justin Katz
Seemingly to change the topic after the NEA’s many missteps in Tiverton (including the widely distributed image of his own middle finger to the townspeople), NEA Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley adds insult to injury by attempting to sell Sakonnet Times readers a portrait of deception. His letter in yesterday’s edition ends with a statement…
What’s dismaying is that which the Providence Journal editorial writer elides in his or her advocacy for same-sex marriage: The ruling essentially locks homosexual couples into marriage in Rhode Island unless one or both members of the marriage move back to Massachusetts and institute divorce proceedings there. That is not equal justice under the law.…
Froma Harrop makes an interesting observation: PAYING BLOGGERS is “not our financial model,” The Huffington Post’s co-founder, Ken Lerer, told USAToday. What a profitable business that must be. The Huffington Post is a popular liberal blog site named for Arianna Huffington, a pundit and power broker in the celebrity-industrial complex. Huffington is also very smart.…
I’ve been finding something frustrating with local Christian leaders, of late. Consider part of the Gospel reading from this past Sunday’s Catholic Mass readings: Jesus said to them in reply, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead…
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…