Blue v. Red
The Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights’ panel discussion on the event of Milton Friedman’s hundredth birthday offset “liberaltarian” Brown professor John Tomasi with June Speakman, a Roger Williams professor more inclined to agree with the prefix of the coinage. The panel would have benefited from the inclusion of an unabridged conservative who agreed with…
President Obama’s teleprompter style has been the subject of substantial (often mocking) critical commentary, and with some justification, as this nearly parodic 2010 video from a Virginia classroom proves: Given recent political events, one can sympathize with the desire of public officials to avoid extemporaneous speech. In a world in which one’s every public utterance…
I tried this earlier over Twitter but the 140 character limit doesn’t really lend itself to good debate. Mr. Plain over at RIFuture tweeted about Libby Kimzey’s article on the need for more diversity at the State House. Ms. Kimzey has announced that she is running for a seat in the General Assembly this year.…
Walter Russell Mead of the American Interest has a long (but very readable) essay on the future of the American social and political systems. He is discussing the nation as a whole, but anyone who follows the news in Rhode Island with any regularity will recognize that we are on the leading edge of nearly…
It’s a substantially different issue from the banalization of Christmas trees, in a number of ways, but I think there’s something of the same mentality as emerged from Morgan Hill, CA, here summarized by Glenn Garvin: … When a federal judge in San Francisco ruled earlier this month that school administrators in a California town…
In a post illustrating why he’s risen so quickly to the status of “must read” and why it’s so crucial to have intellectually curious people making their full-time livings investigating state-level politics and government, Ted Nesi responds to my incredulity at everybody’s willingness to accept the pension reform narrative. This is the most important paragraph…
In his Sunday Providence Journal column, Ed Fitzpatrick reviews the passage of pension reform, and I have to say that he contributes to my surreal feeling of different realities based on different narratives: Keep in mind that this isn’t Texas: This happened in Rhode Island, a deep-blue state where unions are considered a legendary force…
After a decade of blogging, the hunt for mainstream media bias gives me about the same thrill as finding three-leaf clovers. Even so, the Providence Journal’s front page declaration in its Sunday edition took me back a bit: “The voice of the masses”? Since Sunday, multiple polls have emerged suggesting that it just ain’t so.…
I never really paid much attention previously to people’s opinions of Froma Harrop and her columns. That is in part because I’ve seen her criticized from both sides of the political spectrum, so how bad can she really be? Well, her column on Wednesday in the Providence Journal sure seemed to make her biases evident.…
I have a friend who is a Pittsburg Pirates fan and I’m constantly shaking my head at the lack of effort that franchise makes to become a championship contender. The reason for this is the Pirates play in the National League Central division, which with its six teams is actually one of the weakest in…
