Rhode Island Politics
The Cranston Herald has published a (shall we say) strongly worded letter by resident Suzanne Downing noting (as I did a few months ago) that Republican state representative Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung is not voting as one would expect a Republican to do: As a resident of District 15 in Cranston I was happy to support Barbara Ann…
I’m working my way through the HBO television series, The Wire, and just finished season two. It doesn’t give much away to explain that the plot revolves around a dock-worker-union head’s quest to use revenue from smuggling to pay off city politicians so that they’ll include a dredging project in their budget. It’s purely a transactional…
One way of looking at Governor Dan McKee’s decision to hold off on implementing his predecessor’s plans for the state-run Zambarano psychiatric hospital is as a battle of union interests. Raimondo’s plan to spend $65 million (initial asking price) for a new facility would have made construction unions happy, whereas McKee’s move serves the service…
In case you missed it, this past week presented an excellent opportunity to watch RI Dems and Repubs handle election results. > At the State House, Democrats discovered that [gasp] a committee had done its job and actually voted on whether to send a bill to the House Floor, resulting in an 8-0 vote in…
UPDATE @ 4:30 PM: Kathy Gregg at the ProJo tweeted out: Hear that right? Did Speaker [F]ox just publicly remove J Patrick O’Neill from house judiciary after last nights ethics bill coup. Yes. Thus does O’Neill become the object lesson for what happens when you move to vote a bill out of committee without Speakah…
The campaign flyer at the center of this allegedly campaign law violation, and its dissemination at the last minute of the 2012 campaign, was such a nasty maneuver that part of me cheered when I heard that it has resulted in an arrest. (Jim Archer, candidate for the General Assembly, was the target of the…
The headline of Governor Chafee’s OpEd in today’s Providence Journal summarizes his premise: Gay marriage key to flourishing R.I. economy But is it? Several analyses have placed Rhode Island at or near the bottom for business-unfriendliness. What criteria did they use to rank the states? Helpfully, in their December, 2012 report [PDF] “A Review of…
Most Americans probably know very little about Rhode Island beyond the fact that it is at the wrong end of an awful lot of national economic and civic rankings. Residents of the state who’ve sought some explanation for its willful decline inevitably come across the concept of “Rhode-apathy.” Under the thralls of what force would…
Ten years ago occurred the horrific and completely avoidable fire at the Station Night Club in West Warwick. Far from being held accountable, the person most responsible for the one hundred deaths and two hundred injuries, West Warwick Fire Inspector Dennis LaRocque, was actively shielded by then Attorney General Patrick Lynch for what can only…
In response to my e-mailed inquiry, the following was received from Dave Kane, the father of the youngest victim of the Station Night Club fire. I promised myself that after the release of the Station fire land to the victims and their families, I would stop writing press releases and go quietly into the night.…