Rhode Island Politics
… the friend being Don Carcieri. In fact, the friendship between the Governor and the General Treasurer was the impetus for one of the rare instances in which the Governor deliberately opened himself up to criticism from his own party: it was an open secret that during the last election, Governor Carcieri favored Frank Caprio…
Somehow, this strikes me as a preview of the “benefits” of regionalization in Rhode Island: Just hours after he closed the Douglas Avenue fire station, Mayor Charles A. Lombardi ran into a legal stumbling block from the firefighters union Wednesday afternoon and he agreed to temporarily reopen the station. … Firefighters want [Providence County Superior…
…but he’s not ready to tell us what it is yet, reports Ray Henry of the Associated Press…[Gordon Fox], D-Providence, said he had proposals for reviving the economy but was not ready to discuss them. “For me to sit here today and say we’re going to do X, Y and Z, I think, is premature,”…
Meeting with East Greenwich town officials, Sen. Leonidas Raptakis (D, Coventry, East Greenwich, Warwick, West Warwick) spoke against state mandates: “We have so many archaic statutes, contracts and mandates, unless we start deleting these mandates or give cities and towns latitude, we’re going to start this revolving circle again, and it’s going to get worse,”…
Anybody who missed my appearance on WRNI’s Political Roundtable on Friday can find the audio here. There were two points that I didn’t manage to work into the extremely rapid format: In response to Scott MacKay’s suggestion that the Roman Catholic Church would find its pews empty were it to be as intransigent on every…
The Rhode Island Way is taking insidious form in some of the public boards and commissions that are meant to help the residents of Rhode Island keep an eye on their government, and the Board of Election’s attack on the Moderate Party gives a clear warning. I’ve reshuffled the paragraphs at the ellipsis to follow…
I know that the Rhode Island Board of Elections is famous for its procedural creativity, but even so, am I the only one who thinks that the offer made to the Moderate Party of pay us a big fine and the Attorney General doesn’t have to get your case is something less than above-board? From…
Here’s the Budget Office document showing the always-too-optimistic early revenue estimate for the state of Rhode Island: PDF. As you’ve likely read, the deficit is projected to be $219.8 million. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that number come in hundreds of millions of dollars too low. The reality is that Rhode Island has to…
While we’re talking political platforms, it’s worth noting that candidate Dan O’Connor has put himself forward as a candidate for whom those currently represented by John Loughlin (R., Little Compton, Portsmouth, Tiverton) should not vote. His letter to the editor of The Sakonnet Times isn’t online, but it’s adequate to summarize that O’Connor lists the…
Further campaign finance evidence proves pretty decisively that the Moderate Party’s main misstep was to fall into one of the many traps that Rhode Island’s political establishment has laid for those who might consider challenging their reign by methods that they haven’t rigged. From page 30 of the Campaign Finance Manual (PDF) provided by the…