Under the Government’s Wing
Periodically, one comes across coincidences that are so appropriately rife with subtext that only a heavy-handed author would layer them in a fictional story. Putting aside the RI-welfare-state practice in question, there’s an example of reality’s too-obvious plot line in Elizabeth Gudrais’s Projo piece, “R.I. is ripe for welfare abuse, critics say“: Last spring during…
My heartless campaign to explain to Rhode Island that there are alternative, more comprehensively beneficial ways of helping families than maintaining our state’s structural deficit and driving out businesses and our most promising citizens continues in today’s Providence Journal.
My Projo piece from last Friday is now up. I mention it for those who haven’t read it, for those who wish to read it in Projo html, for those who’d like to help me create the illusion that I can drive readership, for those who have the time and inclination to play “find the…
PROEM: First published in the August 17 edition of the Providence Journal. It’s a suspicious thing for a legislature’s press release to use the word “unscrupulous.” “Unscrupulous” is a word for activists and marketers. When a representative body uses it to describe some of its constituents — in this case, building contractors — one suspects…
Although programming problems (as I’ve been given to understand) have kept it in print-only limbo, I’ve got an op-ed in today’s Providence Journal about the ways in which, under the headline of protecting the “consumer” from “unscrupulous” free agents (including construction contractors), government generally (and the General Assembly in particular) creates a regulatory regime that…
These two items aren’t directly related, but reading them in close proximity to each other, I discerned some dots that could be connected. First is RI Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva Weed’s defense of the General Assembly’s failure to reform our state’s fire code: Following enactment of the new code in 2003, the Senate has…
I can’t imagine what I would do — or, more to the point, demand — if my little square of land turned out to be contaminated. My family would probably be moving into somebody’s basement while we tried to figure out how to either save the property or extricate ourselves from ownership of it. Folks…
By DWC, I mean “driving while conversing.” In New Jersey, you see, talking on a non-hands-free cell phone while driving an automobile is a ticketable offense. Apparently, South Kingstown Senator V. Susan Sosnowski thinks that’s a swell idea: Citing the many dangers associated with talking on a cell phone while driving, Senator V. Susan Sosnowski…
