Justin Katz
Glenn is right that this isn’t exactly surprising news, but it’s worth remembering from time to time throughout the egregiously extended campaign season: Just like so many reports before it, a joint survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy — hardly a…
My emailbox is aflood with announcements of the General Assembly’s overrides of Governor Carcieri’s latest vetos. Not a single press release contains the phrase “failed to override.” Some highlights of the GA’s actions-by-override: Created another voice for established players to govern healthcare in Rhode Island — a Health Care Planning and Accountability Advisory Council —…
Putting aside his petty complaints that Dan Yorke and Lori Drew interrupted him on the radio (but noting that I heard him interrupting Ms. Drew moments before chastising her for doing the same), this aspect of John McNally’s thoughts on his appearance on Dan Yorke’s show relates to a question that I’ve had since first…
The truth — unfortunate or fortunate — is that I read much more explicit, more sexually descriptive texts for school work than Will Clarke’s “How to Kill a Boy That No One Liked” (PDF sample courtesy of Dan Yorke), including, for example, books by Stephen King in which not a few young fellas likely knew…
The economics of changing insurance rates based on demonstration of a healthy lifestyle are simply to understand. Still, do we really wish to make it the responsibility of employers to enforce those lifestyles? [State Health Insurance Commissioner Christopher F.] Koller explained that HEALTHpact was created, at the direction of Governor Carcieri and the General Assembly,…
Not being a connoisseur of biographies, I’m finding G. Wayne Miller’s series on Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence Thomas Tobin more interesting than I expected. One result has been a new resolve to pay closer attention, and perhaps submit writing, to the diocesan newspaper, Rhode Island Catholic. That being the case, I’m not sure what…
I see that the Tiverton Charter Review Commission, formed to take a closer look at the town’s practice of financial town meetings and propose changes on the November 2008 ballot, has also taken up a possible change that I pondered last month: Another suggestion would have the town return to partisan elections. According to that…
These are curious statistics to compare: To put the roughly one-third who believe in ghosts and UFOs in perspective, it’s about the same as, in recent AP-Ipsos polls, the 36 percent who said they are baseball fans; the 37 percent who said the U.S. made the right decision to invade Iraq; and the 31 percent…
It’s been clear that the sort of thought that the Providence Journal editorial board criticizes has been permeating university faculty halls for decades: The Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence has been making use of a handbook called “dismantling racism 2006” put together by a consultancy called Dismantling Racism Works. Here’s a passage: “Racism =…
Perhaps owing to a natural affinity for arguments that put the United States in a stumbling-behemoth light, retired ABC leftist, Bristol photographer, and occasional Providence Journal op-ed contributor Jerry Landay makes some points with which I agree: … Breakdown, [social scientist Leopold Kohr] stated [in the 1950s], is the product of social organs that implode…