Marc Comtois
This past Friday, Justin wrote a piece for The Current about Rhode Island’s business-unfriendliness (worst in the nation). Not that causation=correlation or anything, ahem, but he ended the piece with this bit: The page for Rhode Island also presents data and rankings based on the U.S. Census. Notably, the state had the second worst debt…
As Bob Plain reports: Writing on behalf of the 80,000 members of the AFL-CIO, union leaders George Nee and Maureen Martin sent a letter to every member of the legislature asking that ALEC memberships not be funded with taxpayer money. “If the views and priorities of ALEC align with your personal beliefs, then by all…
Despite attempts to quell rumors to the contrary, we’ve learned that President Obama is indeed in Afghanistan and will hold a live press conference from there. The purpose of the trip is to sign a new treaty with the Afghan government. The countries have been negotiating a strategic agreement that would outline the basis for…
In a recent column, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, authors of the new book It’s Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, state that the Republicans are to blame for congressional gridlock. As I tweeted earlier,…
So, to no one’s surprise, in the lightly attended primary, Mitt won RI and 4 other Northeastern states and has all but technically locked up the GOP Presidential nomination with Newt ready to throw in the towel (the book tour must be over). Ron Paul marches on and I find I’m in agreement with Politico…
It may have been noticed that I’ve been MIA for about a month. So, for those wondering, I learned on St. Patrick’s Day that when an eyeball (my left one, in this case) collides with a soccer ball traveling 80+ mph, the soccer ball will win. Thankfully, there was no damage to my retinal nerve,…
Governor Chafee’s municipal reform and relief plan (link to a PDF) contains many items that have long been considered in the “good idea” category by those of us around here (as Matt Allen posted on Facebook, “I think the blind squirrel found a nut!”). As Ted Nesi writes, a lot of it was promoted by…
Last month I expressed my approval of progress being made to further develop the port of Davisville and Quonset Point. However, I also explained my philosophical opposition to paying for port improvements, ie; dredging, via a bond instead of from the general revenue. However, I subsequently learned that I was mistaken when I thought the…
While looking at Civil Rights data for my previous post, I noticed that they included a category labeled “% FTE of Teachers Absent > 10 days of the School Year”. I then started looking at some of the numbers. To ensure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, I went to their…