Rhode Island Politics
Original post of the stances (or lack thereof) of RI’s General Officers on e-verify. One of the many interesting details that Justin reported from the Operation Clean Government event this morning is a switch by General Treasurer Frank Caprio on the matter of e-verify. Treasurer Caprio has gone from Rorschach test (neutral) to supportive. Pass…
Deliberately skirting the content of the news story, I’d like to note that I think RI-GOP Chairman Gio Cicione hit precisely the correct note regarding the drunk driving Democrat legislator: “I have trouble getting myself outraged about this,” state Republican Party chairman Giovanni Cicione said. “The guy should be a little more open about the…
One of the things I admire about Michael Morse over at Rescuing Providence is that he calls them as he sees them. From one of his reports posts of a couple of weeks ago. She’s twenty-four and homeless, and has been for four years. She has kids back in Ohio, had to leave them there…
Just checking in from Operation Clean Government’s event at the Quonset Club. A little shy of 200 people are here, many of them familiar faces, but not all. My initial thought is that there are a number of people from different segments of local activism. Local Tiverton folks, RISC folks, politicians, activists, and so on.…
I remain reluctant to relinquish the innocence that leads to my being surprised that such people as Pat Crowley exist outside of Charles Dickens novels and the bureaucracies of totalitarian madhouse societies. Last April, I informed readers of the Providence Journal opinion pages that, “according to tax returns filed in 2005 and 2006 (based on…
Our state is in dire financial trouble based on structural deficits, is on the wrong end of just about every state-by-state comparative list, and is losing its “productive class” by the thousands every year, but the matter of concern for a special legislative commission is, in the words of its Co-chairman Sen. James Doyle (D.,…
As damaging as his arrest for drunken driving may be to the reputation of RI Deputy Majority Leader Rep. Raymond Sullivan (D., Coventry), more damning, still, is the slate of legislation on which Mr. Sullivan has placed his name. If Rhode Islanders take the opportunity of his appearance in the news to review his latest…
Put your wonk hat on. Economists Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein write: While the theory of public choice can be broadly applied, it is the ideas of “special interests” and “rational ignorance” that are useful in understanding last week’s tea parties. Here’s an example of public choice at work. Let’s say teachers could benefit by…
For his latest RI Policy Reporter column, Tom Sgouros has moderated his vitriol and, in one way of reading it, attempted to explain what he meant by his statement that tea party goers are “afraid if they do learn about [the issues they claim to speak about], they will lose the purity of their opinions.”…
We’ve been remarking on the seemingly unconscionable inability of our General Assembly to close the indoor prostitution loophole (here, here, here) for a while now. The ProJo has editorialized about it and offered a fine investigative piece about it. As I wrote in 2007, “Rep. Joanne M. Giannini…has done yeoman’s work in presenting a comprehensive…