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Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos’s attempt to tar competitor Gabe Amos for — get this — having ties to Home Depot is fascinating: He wants voters to focus on his work as a public servant and to ignore the fact that he was a registered lobbyist for Home Depot despite the company’s ties to the far-right…
Decreasing political participation is unhealthy, limiting voters’ choices, tilting incentives toward corruption, and separating We the People from the exercise of government authority, and campaign regulation reform would be a good place to start looking for a fix.
Whether well-intentioned or conspiratorial, prescribing political activism as a form of therapy will inevitably create a destructive cycle.
Spin from Attorney General Peter Neronha, which local media picked up mostly without skepticism or even context, shows Rhode Islanders are defenseless against the activists’ storyline.
Update: The RI BOE voted 5-2 today to review all of the signatures on Sabina Matos’ nomination papers. Ms. Matos is on the Democrat primary ballot for the RI CD1 special election and ballots have already been mailed out to military and out-of-country voters. It is unclear if the outcome of the BOE’s review would…
Do we have a test case, for bringing this session’s Supreme Court’s ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County to Rhode Island? In Tyler v. Hennepin County, in a refreshingly short 9-0 opinion, the Court ruled that when local governments seize property over unpaid taxes, they are only entitled to keep what was owed. So after…
Last week came the good news (for our electric bills) that Rhode Island Energy, formerly National Grid, had declined the Revolution Wind 2 offshore wind proposal. A week prior, John Kerry, President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, departed from China without accomplishing his mission; namely, to … use climate co-operation to redefine their [US…
Keep an eye out for weeds that have purple-spotted stems and white, umbrella-like flowers: Poison hemlock has made its way to all 50 states, including Rhode Island, except for Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, and Mississippi, so it’s something we’ll all likely deal with at some time or another. Commonly found in yards and fields, on the…
For all the talk about equity and living wages in the Ocean State, we hear surprisingly little about the lack of opportunity and earnings growth for working people. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial understandably focuses on larger states, but Rhode Island makes an appearance, nonetheless: Earnings nationwide rose 5.4% on average between the first…
Homelessness may be the most striking issue on the table in the degree to which proposed solutions conspicuously ignore causes. The attitude of the advocates and journalists seems to be that homelessness falls like an original cause on a metro area and can only be addressed through direct government reduction. That’s a careless approach; an…