Justin Katz
Somebody asked me, the other night, what I would do about the housing affordability problem, and to be honest, I didn’t have much of an answer. I guess I’m not at the point, yet, of having comprehensive understanding of or prescriptions for every important issue, and housing is still one of those for which I’ve…
I’m not sure what its significance is, but a Warwick Daily Times story, by Matt Bower, on the Yorke/Avedisian kerfuffle places the story largely in the context of blogs and their commenters: Matt Jerzyk, administrator of the generally liberal RIFuture blog, www.rifuture.org, said he wrote a post the next day expressing his outrage that the…
Give me a break. I realize that progressives don’t want to lose one of their weapons for public assassination, but must we continue pretending that anybody on either side of the aisle actually thinks being gay, of itself, is political poison — especially in Rhode Island? (Not so ironically, one suspects that those politicians who…
With the release of Cape Wind, a book co-authored by the Projo’s Robert Whitcomb, about rich and influential people, ostensibly with socially appropriate environmental consciousnesses, and their fight to kill an environmentally friendly energy project involving water-based windmills, the example on the grounds of the Portsmouth Abbey that I pass twice a day caught my…
… 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…