Political Thought

A water drop and ripples

Be great if we talked more about young’ns voting.

By Justin Katz | March 12, 2024 |

Letting 17-year-olds vote in primaries if they’ll be eligible to vote in the associated general elections is certainly reasonable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note a pair of conspicuous questions along the way. Firstly, why do Democrats seem always to want to expand voting toward the most manipulable constituencies? Secondly (and perhaps relatedly), why…

A water drop and ripples

Here’s a quick lesson younger Americans should learn.

By Justin Katz | February 15, 2024 |

A truism about government used to be heard periodically:  A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.  That saying’s a bit dark, though, and makes its point in an extreme way that younger Americans who’ve been raised with an implicit trust of big government…

A visual representative of bureaucracy blocks access to a highway

Johnston’s unreachable neighborhood illustrates the problem with insider-ocracy.

By Justin Katz | January 28, 2024 |

Johnston’s challenge gaining access to a neighborhood during emergencies exposes several problems of RI’s way of doing things.

A dense conformist neighborhood on the water

A word on housing.

By Justin Katz | January 24, 2024 |

Amidst all the other happenings in Rhode Islanders’ lives, it’s worth a moment to consider that we’ve reached the point that the General Assembly is delving into such levels of micromanagement as housing setbacks and in-law apartments in local zoning.  That’s a sign that we’re doing things wrong. In the mania of the day (or…

Toy General Lee car drives up a book open to be a ramp

The Confederate Flag and Irony

By Justin Katz | January 17, 2024 |

Reactionary responses to Nikki Haley’s comments about the Confederate flag show the irony of progressive ideology.

An unkempt and overrun baseball stadium

The system we inherited doesn’t persist of its own accord.

By Justin Katz | January 10, 2024 |

News that the Rhode Island Republican Party is struggling to hit the qualification requirements to place any presidential candidates on the primary ballot points to a deep problem in our state’s political landscape.  This is true even if we put to the side (for now) rumors that some large number of signatures were inexplicably invalidated.…

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Here’s the scary thought, Rhode Island.

By Justin Katz | December 13, 2023 |

Nobody on your political bench can do much better than what you’re seeing now. Democracy has produced the government you actually wanted for so long that the bill is coming due.  I wrote about the “Four Horsemen of Rhode Island’s Apocalypse” 15 years ago, and the situation’s only gotten worse as people not in the…

A pig with Communist branding smiles in the mud

Refuse to wrestle in the progressive mud.

By Justin Katz | December 12, 2023 |

Progressives set rhetorical trap after trap in a cynical bid for division and mutual disrespect. Adding barbs and traps from non-progressives is not the solution; truth and an insistence on a broader sense of community is.

Dogs debating in town hall

People just don’t want to find ways to live together, do they? (We should try objective government.)

By Justin Katz | December 8, 2023 |

Silly and local as it is, this is one of those stories that makes me despair for the future: A few years ago, some folks petitioned for Tiverton to give some land next to the library to a group that wanted to put together a dog park. People using it are supposed to park across…

A dragon cradles three journalists

Yes, the Cicilline-run Rhode Island Foundation “investing” in journalism should be controversial.

By Justin Katz | December 5, 2023 |

It’s strange to note, but Providence Journal political reporter Kathy Gregg got some heat from others in the local media (specifically from the Boston Globe) for writing this: The political flap erupted a week after Cicilline – a leader in the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump – told the Boston Globe and more recently a…