Blue v. Red
With over 250 comments, it’d take quite a bit of catching up, and the horrible policy of letting readers delete a comment when enough of them flag it as “inappropriate” makes the conversation difficult to follow, because comments (including Gordon’s) suddenly disappear, but the response thread to this story on the Tiverton-LittleCompton Patch is a…
Back in 2007, I argued against non-partisan elections in Tiverton. Those who disagreed took a very community-oriented view: ARGUING AGAINST asking Tiverton voters whether they’d like to return to partisan elections after one cycle of nonpartisanism, Charter Review Commission member Frank “Richard” Joslin made two points that have the ring of Rhode Islandry: First, that…
An op-ed in the New York Post, by Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK) points to a couple of topics worth discussion: One insidious force keeping unemployment high is regulatory uncertainty: Companies that could hire (or re-hire), don’t — because they’re worried about what new restrictions will be coming down from Washington. Congress bears much of…
The opposition went to the immigration law enforcement rally, last Friday, dressed humorously to distract from their underlying intent, which is to prevent the public from hearing or understanding an argument with which they disagree: Suddenly, demonstrators in polyester clown suits filed through security and entered the State House rotunda, carrying signs that said, “Clown…
I’ve been meaning to note Bob Kerr’s continued function as the elder statesman who says what the younger folks must strive to keep to themselves at the Providence Journal. Here’s the crux of his Wednesday column: You might remember protest. It’s an honored American tradition. It’s how this whole thing got started. People speak out…
Timothy Sandefur’s edifying review of the shift in legal thought on the Supreme Court during the era of President Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive revolution points, among other things, to the way in which political groupings do not draw straight lines across history, such that a conservative or progressive today would have agreed with their supposed forerunners:…
Just in time for election season, I’ve finally managed to read Travis Rowley’s The Rhode Island Republican. For good reason, the largest portion of the forty-page pamphlet addresses unions, specifically public-sector unions, primarily in context of the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”: In 1966, two Columbia University political scientists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, penned an…
There may be more to the story, but it appears that University of Illinois Adjunct Associate Professor of Religious Studies Kenneth Howell has lost his job for the offense of teaching Catholic thought as if it might be worth considering as something more than a curious human error. Kenneth Howell was told after the spring…
Somehow the headline “Voicing their views” feels a bit discordant over an article that includes this detail: Speakers from the New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage seemed startled as they were encircled by counter-protesters who yelled, sang and waved the rainbow flag associated with the gay-pride movement. Then, as some 170 protesters — most wearing…
Having chided Mark Patinkin for his colum lampooning Republicans (poorly), I think it only fair to note that he’s offered an attempt at some fair-play turnabout. It would be fascinating, I think, for a literature class to devote some discussion time to the differences in sentence structure and related attributes as a means of discerning…