Justin Katz
I didn’t realize that it was so hard to find models and/or fireman and policeman hats: The sculptor who made the 9/11 memorial that became the center of attention after Mayor Charles Lombardi buffed out the likenesses of two former public safety officials from the granite surface spoke out yesterday, saying that while he understands…
In what sort of environment could anyone possibly find it acceptable to place the faces of two local (and living!) officials on a monument to others who died heroically in a distant city? A decision by Mayor Charles Lombardi to remove the likenesses of two of the town’s former public safety officials from the town’s…
A note from Patrick Murray expressing dissatisfaction with my post about the first two parts of John Mulligan’s Providence Journal series about him led me to take another look at what I’d written. My title was certainly too strong; the use of the word “sinister” was too suggestive of conscious action. My knee-jerk reaction was…
The pressure that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s three-casino proposal puts on Rhode Island raises in the imagination a map of the United States with a cluster of red dots representing six casinos squeezed into the tiny area covered by Southern New England. Is that the reality to which we all wish to awake when the…
The case of the contaminated soil a Tiverton neighborhood just down the hill from me is beginning to exemplify everything that is wrong with our current mix of government ubiquity and the cultural knee-jerk reaction to litigate: Fiscal woes notwithstanding, the DEM went into the red in the fiscal year that ended in June to…
The New York Times smells self interest in industries’ recent support for federal regulations. A variety of factors are in play, but one quoted source for the story voices the overall gut reaction of public advocates: “I am worried about industry lobbyists bearing gifts,” said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest…
Julia Steiny’s column yesterday on Rhode Island’s poor treatment of its school principals is worth a read: In Massachusetts, principals can hire new faculty and make many of their own decisions. The Massachusetts 1993 Education Reform Act shifted much authority to the principals, with the understanding that they would delegate and share that authority with…
The last item slipped onto the Sunday Providence Journal’s front page above the fold is the most inexplicable. Taken from the Washington Post, about atheists in England, the relevance of the article’s placement seems mainly to be that it allows the Projo to burnish its image among Rhode Island fellow travelers who accuse the paper…
Mark Steyn solves the problem of our lack of general consensus about what to shout at speakers who deserve remonstration: This year I marked the anniversary of September 11th by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn’t exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio…