Justin Katz
I know it’s de rigueur to advocate for those who require additional help in school in an effort to bring them as near to the average line as conceivably possible, but something just seems wrong (in certain lights, immoral) about opposing this change, as described in the Rhode Island Catholic, in a state with as…
Although it’s not online, a letter of mine encouraging my fellow residents of Tiverton to ask the Charter Review Commission to reopen the question of partisan elections is in the current issue of The Sakonnet Times: To the editor: At the latest Charter Review Commission meeting, member Frank Marshall made a successful motion to strike…
In a relatively short op-ed, Republican state office holders Nicholas Gorham (Coventry) and Laurence Ehrhardt (North Kingstown) make it clear to anybody who reads the paper how dire is the need to vote a large segment of our current slate of legislators right out of office: On Oct. 10, the Tax Foundation ranked Rhode Island…
We’re rightly wary when credit card companies target college kids. (I’m still smarting from the puncture that I received in the bull’s-eye.) So why is the New York Times treating it as some kind of a rights story that pharmaceutical companies are no longer targeting young women with discounted birth control? The change is due…
Perhaps it oughtn’t be the case — me being a family-oriented traditionalist and all — but I’m not a devotee of Thanksgiving. It might be my workaholism. It might be my lack of interest in football. And I’m not a big fan of turkey. (In part because tryptophanic considerations trigger a workaholic aversion.) It’s always…
I suppose the truth of the following depends on the measure by which one gauges “control”: “There is no plan to subcontract people out of these jobs. It hasn’t been studied. It’s just kind of like shooting from the hip to justify those cuts,” said Richard Ferruccio, president of the prison guards’ union. “It’s not…
A comment from the “stunned” Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva Weed in yesterday’s Projo article raises a couple of beguiling questions: As a tradeoff for the new work requirements and time limits the state adopted in 1996, she said, Rhode Island made subsidized health care and childcare available so, she told the luncheon audience, talk…
And to think — as the cost of driving my work van, carting around the tools and materials of a jobsite carpenter, resumes its upswing — Froma Harrop had the solution all along: Take oil. It’s not Bush’s fault that fast-growing China and India have fired up the global demand for oil, thus boosting its…
The following aspect of the Rhode Island Department of Education’s approach to dealing with dramatically tightening budgets is wrong-headed for two reasons: The $1.16-billion budget proposal also doubles fees for teacher certifications and permits, from $100 for a five-year professional certification to $200, for example, in an effort to generate about $400,000 in revenue. The…
I can’t help but think that New York Times movie reviewer Stephen Holden misses the significance of Bella by, well, by the distance between life and death: It is not hard to see why “Bella,” a saccharine trifle directed by Alejandro Monteverde, won the People’s Choice Award at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. This…