Justin Katz
Sitting around a pub’s chest-high table with new acquaintances, a blue-state conservative will look for signs of ideological sympathy. In New England, should the Boston Globe arise in conversation, the canny conservative need only drop one name, before sipping his beer to disguise the true import: Jeff Jacoby. The Globe‘s bio gives an inkling as…
What can one do but marvel that Providence Journal page B.01 columnist Bob Kerr would commit this to print: It’s a day to be silly. We’re not just inaugurating a president; we’re inaugurating a whole new way of life in which the entire country becomes its own reality show. People watch us from other places,…
“Lukewarm” support for the FMA is just fine, Mr. President. See my piece today on NRO for details.
A 230-word piece in the Providence Journal nicely captures the good that disputatious writers like Edward Achorn and (to a much lesser extent… for now) us here at Anchor Rising can do: [RI House Speaker William] Murphy had said he would seek an advisory opinion from the state Supreme Court, but said today that he…
Matthew Jerzyk of Providence has a particularly restrictive view of the appropriate content of public monuments: We have hundreds of places in our city for monuments of the Ten Commandments; they are called churches. Our public spaces, however, should be reserved to memorialize our common faith in government. For example, if any city official wants…
William Harris of Barrington proves that I’m not alone in seeing a bit of nitpicking in the ethics charges against Governor Carcieri: A more cynical analysis might conclude that it is an example of a state body hounding the governor to accomplish partisan objectives. While I support the goals of ethics reform, I believe it…
This story appeared almost two weeks ago, but I wanted to do a little research and give the matter some thought: The School Committee requested clarification from the courts after Cheryl McCullough, who worked as a health teacher and guidance counselor at Tiverton High School for 27 years, applied for health insurance for Joyce Boivin,…
Dan Yorke railed against this possibility on Wednesday: Under pressure from law-enforcement officials who want to use the roadblocks again, Governor Carcieri is deciding whether to ask the state Supreme Court to reconsider a 1989 decision that sobriety checkpoints violate the state Constitution. If Carcieri goes along with Attorney General Patrick Lynch, who wants him…
The latest salvo in the long-running local discussion of the relationship between social workers and socialism comes from Richard Hill of Narragansett: Schools of social work offer little to no education on how to run a business. Thus, some social workers have no concept of how to succeed without getting a check from the government.…
Questions of schadenfreude’s sinfulness aside, I have to thank Northeast Dilemma for pointing on New England Republican to an uplifting column by Katha Pollitt. I daresay that, with this paragraph, Pollitt opens wide the thickets that hide the secret path to a sunnier political perspective: Sometimes I think America is becoming another place, unrecognizable. David…