Political Thought
You’d think it’d be a bigger deal locally that the Ocean State (Cranston, specifically) is at the center of a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision that police violated a resident’s Fourth Amendment rights by seizing his guns without a warrant. Here’s the ruling on this obvious case. Credit has to go to the ACLU for…
The local media was all atwitter, last week, over the expectation that Air Force One was going to land at Rhode Island’s T.F. Green Airport. “Rhode Island is becoming a hot spot for White House dignitaries” proclaimed Ted Nesi on WPRI. But despite the various tweets of “I just heard the plane!,” Joe Biden was…
DePetro caught up with Mack on the streets of Providence while covering the recent spate of shootings there, and it’s a must-watch five minutes. DePetro was respectful, but really pressed Mack on her beliefs about what’s going on in Providence and the effects of her own public statements. In a nutshell, to Tiara Mack, violence…
Everything about the COVID response and vaccination pressure has been wrong, but that doesn’t mean being vaccinated isn’t the least risky option, including for those who feel the urgency to stop the erosions of our rights.
For a moment of cross-ideological sympathy, I was ecstatic to see progressive journalist Steve Ahlquist publish an essay with the title, “How does the public hold unelected boards, councils, commissions and departments accountable?,” a couple months ago on Uprise RI: From a political point of view, these unelected boards are a great insulator from the…
The common wisdom, of course, is that fake news is a byproduct of freedom, but it doesn’t work out that way, according to a Heritage study by Anthony Kim. Our findings reiterate the importance of economic freedom as the fundamental need for enhancing public trust. Pre-existing economic freedom perceptions are the building blocks for stability…
Several of the topics on Mike Stenhouse’s In the Dugout show, yesterday, had that theme, whether it was state GOP Chair Sue Cienki talking about Governor Dan McKee’s insult to the opposition party, talk about a Worldwide Freedom Rally in RI, or arrests of COVID-lockdown-resisting Christians in Canada.
Although Jonathan Swan appears to have positioned a recent essay on Axios with a view toward explaining away President Trump’s electoral gains among Latino voters as a “counterintuitive” political benefit-to-him of the coronavirus, I think the real lesson is quite different. Swan argues that by “shifting Trump’s rhetoric from immigration to fears around the economic impact…
Ethan Yang, in a post for the American Institute for Economic Research, asks, “Why Have the Courts Been Deferential to Lockdowns?” Yang addresses legal principles and tests, such as “rational basis” and “the narrowly tailored standard” and writes: Hollow phrases such as “the common good,” “the public interest,” and “reasonable” give enormous discretion to judges…
Each instance is a small thing, and especially in a small state, one wants to limit one’s time spent lurking around social media like a sort of contrarian anthropologist. (Of course, most insiders aren’t on there purely for fun and distraction, but are working angles, too.) Still this subtle dynamic may be one of the…
