Rhode Island Politics
… to improve the state. This is what WPRO’s Dan Yorke asked Justin, his in-studio guest for a second hour. Justin responded that, for him, the elimination [Edit: Will corrects me under comments] of unions public unions would have top priority. I would point out that unions public unions are one of many special interests…
Driving home from the RISC meeting on Saturday, my MP3 player happened upon Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” propaganda song, which is essentially an audio collage of famous and semi-famous people singing and reciting along with a Barack Obama speech. It occurred to me that the content is sufficiently vague that, if one strips away external…
Dan Yorke had former State Rep Nick Gorham (R-Westconnaug) on to discuss the General Assembly’s 2010 “Rub-and-tugs”. Like those last year and the year before, the list is long….The dollars spent are about half of that spent in 2008 (around $19 million versus $8.6 million), but just about the same as last year ($9.1 million).…
Major congrats to the Moderate Party and their signature fiends … er, petitioners for the 30,000 signature that they have collected in jig time. Now, unnecessary confusion is being created as to where those signatures must be turned in. A little incident arose out of last year’s election that Republicans remember with a wince and…
Your representative and senator need to be replaced if… They didn’t vote to eliminate unaffordable mandates to help cities and towns. They approved a budget without knowing the costs They voted to keep their free healthcare or just pay a “token” co-pay while everyone else pays 20%+ if they even have health insurance They voted…
Today, we get the advocacy profile — a standard newspaper fare by which readers are made unequivocally aware of the “objective” reporter’s opinion: Inside the Liberty Elm Diner Thursday, the lemonade was cold and the bacon was hot. But the mood hung heavy with a sense of foreboding. Customers who devoured BLTs and pancakes wondered…
This was the basic outline of former Providence’s mayor Joseph Paolino’s strong municipal consolidation proposal, published in a Projo op-ed in May…In the interest of efficiency, economy and equity, Rhode Island should unify its 39 cities and towns into six county governments with full municipal powers. There would be a Mayor of Kent County, Newport…
Here’s a curious mid-summer press release: Fewer and fewer workers are approaching retirement age with a comfortable amount of savings, either through traditional defined benefit pension plans or other savings accounts. Some 49 percent of Rhode Island employers do not offer retirement benefits to their full-time workers (which mirrors national figures) and only 19 percent…
For the file of quotations that nobody noticed, but that ought to open eyes: “Legislators know what the issue is, they just lack the political will to do it,” says Stephen M. Robinson, a Providence lawyer who has been retained by the school committees in Pawtucket and Woonsocket to work on a school formula lawsuit.…
Add ballot inaccessibility to the list of Rhode Island’s dubious distinctions. With its requirement that a new party collect signatures from 5% of registered voters, Rhode Island is in a four way tie for dead last in this category. [Insert the well known list of Rhode Island’s problems directly attributable to poor managment.] But with…