Liberalism

“What life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution”

By Marc Comtois | May 28, 2008 |

Rebecca Walker (h/t Freeman Hunt), daughter of feminist Alice Walker, has a sad tale to tell. I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying. As the…

Tell Us What You Really Think, Pat

By Carroll Andrew Morse | April 17, 2008 |

I’d be interested to hearing a fuller explanation of exactly what it is that NEA Assistant Executive Director Pat Crowley likes about this video that he’s posted at RI Future under the heading of “Oh if only the world worked like this” He seems to be suggesting that he’d prefer a world with much less…

NEA to Projo: We Own the Monopoly on Calling People Fascists

By Carroll Andrew Morse | April 2, 2008 |

In Tuesday’s Projo, columnist Edward Achorn wrote…Though Rhode Islanders are independent-minded enough to vote for people from both parties for governor, the public-employee unions and welfare industry now control large voting blocks, and have the money and storm troopers to swing legislative elections fairly reliably to their hand-picked candidates.Robert Walsh, Executive Director of the National…

Off the Island

By Justin Katz | April 2, 2008 |

John Derbyshire’s “March Diary” has much with which Rhode Islanders might sympathize, and that makes one wonder whether forswearing the “island” in our name mightn’t be a step in the right direction. The following is from a reader’s letter: I see you’ve got the “New York Funk”. I was born and raised in NYC, and…

Environmentalists Mugged by Reality

By Justin Katz | February 9, 2008 |

This article would have been noteworthy based simply on pure irony: The rush to grow biofuel crops — widely embraced as part of the solution to global warming — is actually increasing greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing them, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Science. One analysis found that clearing forests…

Well, Maybe if the Doctor’s Office Was in the Mall….

By Marc Comtois | February 1, 2008 |

I gotta say, even I was surprised to learn that somehow RIPTA depended on Medicaid money to keep running. A federal clampdown on the state’s Medicaid program will cost as many as 18,000 needy Rhode Islanders their free bus passes and will force the state to make up for millions of dollars in lost transit…

Liberal Fascism

By Carroll Andrew Morse | January 28, 2008 |

Jonah Goldberg’s controversial new book, Liberal Fascism isn’t beyond-the-pale as his most strident critics would have you believe. First, as Goldberg has repeatedly pointed out, he is not the person who invented the term Liberal Fascism. That distinction belongs to the influential early 20th century public intellectual H.G. Wells. Beyond the provenance of the term,…

From Each According to Neediness, to Each According to Leverage

By Justin Katz | December 19, 2007 |

Froma Harrop makes an interesting observation: PAYING BLOGGERS is “not our financial model,” The Huffington Post’s co-founder, Ken Lerer, told USAToday. What a profitable business that must be. The Huffington Post is a popular liberal blog site named for Arianna Huffington, a pundit and power broker in the celebrity-industrial complex. Huffington is also very smart.…

Re: Kate Brewster (And the Price of Self Delusion)

By Justin Katz | October 25, 2007 |

With little doubt that the observation and conclusions will be misconstrued, I find myself comparing Kate Brewster’s Poverty Institute and Planned Parenthood. When people construct their lives such that they profit from — survive by — the evil outcomes of their faulty solutions, accuracy of analysis is apt to be subordinate to a priori prescriptions…

A Haunting Biopsis

By Justin Katz | October 15, 2007 |

Even a week after I read the related piece, this biopsis (if I may coin a term for “biographic synopsis”) lingers on the mind: Guevara, a physician with no formal military training, was also something else, critics say: prolific executioner, dogmatic totalitarian and co-designer of the Cuban police state and indoctrination apparatus. The version in…