Blue v. Red
Every couple of years, it seems, a student from Brown will contact me for comment in an article about blogging for the Brown Daily Herald. It’s traditionally been a unifying topic: although we’ve got different emphases, we Rhode Island bloggers will all agree about the value and opportunities that the medium offers, not the least…
I have to admit that I’ve been unfair to National Education Association Rhode Island Assistant Director Patrick Crowley. From time to time I’ve wondered whether I’ve played some small role in reducing his undeserved credibility, but now I see that my efforts toward that goal are hardly measurable in comparison to his own. I’m sure…
But let’s not lose sight of a principle that looms pretty large in conservative philosophy: that social pressure is often the appropriate means of guiding individuals toward behavior that is healthy for society. This concept puts conservatives at the obvious political disadvantage of giving liberals cover to declare that they judge nothing but judgement and…
Providence Journal photographer Kathy Borchers (and her editor) lobbed a softball out there to accompany Steve Peoples’s predictable coverage of the other night’s State House events (PDF), and Matt Jerzyk hammered it into the ground: In one corner we have MEN IN SUITS who are longtime advocates for lowering taxes on the richest millionaires and…
Perchance I wasn’t alone among readers of Saturday’s Projo opinion pages in recalling Mac’s piece on NRO back in 2004: In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane’s 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned…
One can hear, in the expected quarters, the admonition that Eliot Spitzer’s $80,000 whoring habit is a private matter. I wonder how many who’d make that argument also see David Richardson’s travails in Providence — where he recently requested proof of the citizenship status of an Hispanic customer to his store — as private. I…
The bout of grousing that Eliot Spitzer’s solicitous troubles inspired from John Derbyshire sounds all too familiar. Here are the final paragraphs, which hit the page like a fist on the desk: All the TV talking heads are telling me, with their sternest let-him-who-is-without-sin faces on, that it would be wrong, wrong to poke fun…
Come an idle Saturday night (“idle” being a very relative adjective in my case), our referral logs led me to a September post by URI professor Michael Vocino, in which Professor V. voices some misconceptions about Anchor Rising, specifically, and conservatives in general. The minor one, first: If you go to the spokespeople for the…
The point’s a little bit of a tangent from poverty advocates’ request for more workers to make food stamps easier to claim and disperse (which always raises questions about the responsibility of the government to promote its handouts), but this closing quotation illuminates one of the indistinct areas in which liberals and conservatives move toward…
There go those fascist terrorists again: Three seven-figure dream homes went up in flames early yesterday in a Seattle suburb, apparently set by eco-terrorists who left a sign mocking the builders’ claims that the 4,000-plus-square-foot houses were environmentally friendly. The sign – a sheet marked with spray paint – bore the initials ELF, for Earth…
