Marc Comtois
From CBS News: CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra. Government doesn’t do a good job of picking winners. Even if–or…
It’s true: the City of Warwick charges the School Department to get multiple building permits for work being done in school buildings that the City itself owns. From today’s Warwick Beacon: School Committee Chair Beth Furtado said, for example, if there were six projects being conducted on one building, instead of getting one permit for…
Back when TLC actually put on programs that reflected their actual name (The Learning Channel) instead of just reality crap, there once was a show called Connections, hosted by a balding English dude with glasses named James Burke. I loved that show. In it, Burke would link seemingly unrelated items through history. (Like getting from…
Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum. In some order, they are the three front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination (it looks to me like Perry, Gingrich & Huntsman are just playing out the string or playing spoiler at this point). Here are a few “mixed bag” snippets about each as we set the stage for…
Here are a few historical items I’ve come across that piqued my interest (but not enough to devote a whole post). In the wake of “tree gate” and all the Roger Williams talk, wouldn’t you know a new book is out about him? Read an excerpt, an interview with the author and a review. This…
I haven’t committed strongly to any of the GOP presidential hopefuls, mainly because they’re all different flavors of meh. But one of them is going to win and run against Obama. It’s up to the GOP to figure out who has the “best chance” of beating the President. The one thing that has annoyed me…
The big education news this morning is that Rhode Island has won another Race to the Top grant, this time for early childhood education. Details will come later in the day, but it is another step in closing the so-called achievement gap between poor, disadvantaged students and those who, I suppose, are considered advantaged (middle-income,…
It’s been winding down for months now and today it became official: the War in Iraq is officially over. The Washington Post, perhaps, summarized it most accurately: The American war in Iraq came to an unspectacular end Thursday at a simple ceremony held on the edge of Baghdad’s international airport, not far from the highway…
Question: does the money spent on redistricting get counted as campaign contributions for Rep. David Cicilline? The ProJo reports that Rep. Jim Langevin (among others) isn’t happy about this: Rep. Jim Langevin is accusing fellow Democrat David Cicilline of trying to use congressional redistricting to aid his re-election. A redistricting plan unveiled Monday night would…