Justin Katz
In response to tonight’s post from the minivan in the Tiverton High School parking lot, the usual suspects will declare that I’m writing to script. My sympathizers will respond as if what I say is just common knowledge. But I have to admit that I was a little surprised at the comportment of the audience…
After years of bringing my garbage to the town dump in Portsmouth, I actually rather enjoyed not having to go farther than the end of my driveway when I moved to Tiverton. The glow wore off the experience of deceptively free trash collection when my one non-construction-grade barrel was demolished during pickup. Being a believer…
The movement of the Tiverton School Committee meeting from the library to the auditorium at least seems merited tonight. In that sense, I’m not alone. Inasmuch as I’ve no evidence that I’m the only plain ol’ interested citizen in the audience, I may prove to be alone in another, perhaps more important sense. Perhaps it…
Montalbano’s public statement gives the impression that he thinks $12,000 is a reasonable fine for a minor paperwork error: I am pleased to have reached a resolution of this matter that is fair and just. The finding of the Ethics Commission in this case – that I failed to complete my paperwork – accurately reflects…
… becomes probably the last person in Rhode Island to admit the obvious: Resolving months of legal back and forth, state Senate President Joseph Montalbano today settled the ethics case against him for a $12,000 civil penalty. … Montalbano was accused of engaging in a conflict of interest by voting to put a casino proposal…
The following segment of Rhode Island Association of School Principals Executive Director John Golden’s op-ed in yesterday’s Providence Journal struck me as noteworthy — taken in context of his declaration that public education ought to be left to educators — and his appearance on Dan Yorke’s show today deepened the concerns that the passage originally…
During a perusal of Instapundit, I came across two (seemingly) unrelated items. The first reports that British skulls appear to have grown 20% above the eyes since the times of the plague: The two principal differences discovered were that our ancestors had more prominent features, but their cranial vault — the distance measured from the…
Periodically, one comes across coincidences that are so appropriately rife with subtext that only a heavy-handed author would layer them in a fictional story. Putting aside the RI-welfare-state practice in question, there’s an example of reality’s too-obvious plot line in Elizabeth Gudrais’s Projo piece, “R.I. is ripe for welfare abuse, critics say“: Last spring during…
An old joke down in Washington (as I’ve heard) is that inhabitants have a peculiar method of reading books: index first. Of course, “Washington” is a metonym for American politics, and the index-first urge is a natural one for anybody who may find his own name (or that of another person or an organization about…