Blue v. Red

Knotting Some Public/Private Threads

By Justin Katz | March 13, 2008 |

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 Northeast Conservative Gripe

By Justin Katz | March 12, 2008 |

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…

Correcting a Misconception About We Right Wingahs

By Justin Katz | March 9, 2008 |

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…

Facing Reality on RI Poverty

By Justin Katz | March 9, 2008 |

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…

Terrorism on the Political Spectrum

By Justin Katz | March 5, 2008 |

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…

Ward: “Whether Walsh likes it or not, the party is coming to an end.”

By Marc Comtois | February 1, 2008 |

Both Justin and I mentioned NEA President Bob Walsh’s rather intemperate anti-business comments last week: “We are never going to compete with folks, with employers who are so ridiculous they do not provide retirement security plans for their employees….If they don’t, they are terrible people and they shouldn’t be allowed to exist and that’s always…

The Business of Business Is… Healthcare?

By Justin Katz | January 26, 2008 |

As disappointing as it is that Ian Donnis would write approvingly of something spat onto the public square by the NEA’s Patrick Crowley, it’s more disappointing that he seems to agree: Pat Crowley has a strong post up at RI’s Future, pointing to a state report to indicate how Rhode Island taxpayers are paying more…

Not a One on the Island

By Justin Katz | January 13, 2008 |

I managed to restrain myself and hold on to a Christmas gift card to Barnes & Noble until Wednesday in order to put it toward the purchase of Jonah Goldberg’s new book. (As readers know, I was otherwise occupied on Tuesday evening, which is when the book was officially released.) Liberal Fascism was nowhere to…

Imbalanced, On Balance

By Justin Katz | January 10, 2008 |

Alex Merchant got a picture and story in the Providence Journal for convincing the faculty at St. George’s School in Middletown — of whom “most… consider themselves liberal” — to let him and other members of the Young Liberals organization skip class to drive up to New Hampshire and volunteer with the Obama campaign. Wouldn’t…

Conservatives Develop Liberals’ Havens

By Justin Katz | December 18, 2007 |

From time to time, we’ll discuss among ourselves a theory that certain shifts in states’ political character are the results of liberals’ fleeing from regions that they’ve ruined to regions in which conservative policies have (ahem) done precisely what one would expect them to do. As Froma Harrop recently discovered, New Hampshire is exhibit A:…