Justin Katz

Re: Rhode Island’s Retrograde Fiscal Culture

By Justin Katz | November 30, 2005 | Comments Off on Re: Rhode Island’s Retrograde Fiscal Culture

Andrew puts his post about Rhode Island’s fiscal position relative to its neighbors in the “Rhode Island Economy” category, but the issue is at least as political and cultural as it is economic. Over years of patchwork research, I’ve found that Rhode Island always tops Massachusetts in all the wrong ways. It takes bad or…

The Prick of Liberal Conceit

By Justin Katz | November 25, 2005 | Comments Off on The Prick of Liberal Conceit

The Providence Journal’s Bob Kerr slipped a curious few paragraphs in the midst of a 600-word piece of derision: Brown students are not enjoying their unintended celebrity. But then they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory on the social front lately. For a while now, neighbors of the university have been complaining that student parties…

Re: War Is Peace

By Justin Katz | November 20, 2005 | Comments Off on Re: War Is Peace

This sentence in Andrew’s previous post captures something that has been eating away at my confidence that September 11, 2001, seared a new clarity into the thinking of the American people: … toothless is not how our enemies see us today; toothless is how they saw us leading up to September 11. A series of…

Chafee as Weather Vane for the Conservative Rebellion

By Justin Katz | November 11, 2005 |

Something in a Corner post by Larry Kudlow might help to tie local Rhode Island concerns to the broader political landscape: Why Republicans don’t say more about the tax-cut related economic expansion is beyond me. And whether Tuesday’s disappointing election results provide a wake up call for the GOP remains to be seen. But they…

Frog-Marching Liberal Democracy Around the Globe… Successfully?

By Justin Katz | November 2, 2005 | Comments Off on Frog-Marching Liberal Democracy Around the Globe… Successfully?

Rod Dreher’s latest addition to the conservative-ire-at-Bush line of commentaries has made an appearance on Anchor Rising, so I thought I’d mention that I’ve contemplated part of it further in a post over on Dust in the Light: Dreher, it seemed to me, began to drift not long after he made the leap from displaced…

Fashioning a New Elite, a Truer Sky

By Justin Katz | October 29, 2005 |

Blogs are a marker of a new elite. More accurately, they represent one area in which the ways society works around elite structures must be reconceived. That’s the central theme with which I approached the annual professional development seminar of the Legislative Information and Communications Staff Section (LINCS) of the National Conference of State Legislatures…

Pacing Around a Disturbing Theme

By Justin Katz | October 25, 2005 | Comments Off on Pacing Around a Disturbing Theme

My latest FactIs column, “The Premises of the Culture of Death,” ponders a theme upon which I can’t quite land my finger. Something about things not meaning what they mean in pulsing cultural conversation that lacks substance. This, by the way, is my final FactIs column. I’m very grateful to the folks who produce the…

Offering the “Conservative Opinion” on the Evening News

By Justin Katz | October 18, 2005 |

This announcement comes after the fact, but I wanted to mention that Andrew was interviewed for the 6:00 news on WJAR NBC 10 regarding the latest anti-Laffey attack ad. The report was replete with a screen shot of this very page, and stands as evidence that Anchor Rising is beginning to have exactly the effect…

On Being “Well Informed”

By Justin Katz | October 12, 2005 | Comments Off on On Being “Well Informed”

My latest column, “Speaking Past an Oppressive Template,” remarks on the difficulty — in motivation and in practice — of being “well informed,” and the accompanying difficulty of communicating.

A Familiar Plot

By Justin Katz | September 30, 2005 |

Somehow this bit of biography of the man who recently performed a “75-minute one-act, written by Howard Zinn, [that] engaged the audience by shedding light on the theories of philosopher Karl Marx” at the University of Rhode Island is almost too predictable to notice: Jones is a high school teacher in New York and is…