Justin Katz
… or does it seem as if things are starting to roll, just a bit: Denouncing as “outrageous” the 145.99-percent markup the state has been paying a private company to staff the traffic-monitoring center across the street from the State House, Governor Carcieri yesterday initiated an inquiry into “all state contracts that involve the retention…
I agree with the Providence Journal that it is “perverse” for the CEO of a health insurance company to make one-and-a-half times the entire payroll of a 2,000-employee hospital. Considering how often Republicans and conservatives are saddled with the ideological blame for these supposed excesses of the free market, that admission may surprise some readers.…
Given some recent upgrades in my technology, I thought I’d make a practice of taking pictures as I wander about the state and uploading them, with commentary as appropriate — all at the speed of blog! So herewith, Sheldon Whitehouse’s understated summer cottage, which I put in (my own) political context back before the election:…
With the news of Russia’s slow slide back toward totalitarianism and Rocco DiPippo’s observations about life in Iraq prior to the troop surge, I find myself baffled by those who seek not just power, but oppressive power. Writes Rocco: Before the troop surge began, my friend Nabil’s brother-in-law, a resident of Jordan, was shot in…
It’s somewhat surprising how little segue is deemed necessary, in America’s letters to the editor sections, to bash the president or the pope. On the death of Kurt Vonnegut, Ivan Wolfson from Riverside explained: Vonnegut’s novels explored, often with humor, the inexhaustible ability of humans, as individuals, governments and corporations, through their greed, thoughtlessness, stupidity…
In response to Marc’s post on the DJs’ being fired from Roger Williams’s WQRI, program director Mike Martelli has left the following comment (which I’ve also read his expressing in an email that reached me through a series of forwards): As the Program Director of WQRI it is my responsibility to determine what content is…
It’s a tricky business responding to the personal anecdotes that opinionists sometimes use in their columns. The reader was not there, for one thing, and it isn’t always evident what emotions the memory revives, for another. But the stories are offered, ostensibly for the purpose of illustrating an important point relevant to current events, and…
Peggy Noonan gets it exactly right in her recent musing about modern media’s effect on children: For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, “You don’t like it? Change the channel.” But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place…
It’s worth noting, as an addendum to Andrew’s post, that the two metrics aren’t merely correlative. A substantial portion of the tax revenue goes toward those sorts of programs that attract poor people to the state (see, e.g., here, here, and here). In other words, the option is more likely to be “all of the…
The Providence Journal’s editorial on the Supreme Court’s partial-birth abortion ruling isn’t quite as deceptive/deluded as Mary Ann Sorrentino’s, but at the very least, it’s misleading (emphasis added): The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision upholding the right of the federal government to impose a ban on a certain form of rarely performed second-trimester abortion is…