Essay
Some lively back and forth with regard to the impact of ObamaCare on Medicare. Republicans have pointed out that ObamaCare cuts $700+ billion from Medicare. Democrats and the Obama campaign have responded variously by denying this assertion and/or saying that this amount would be found by cracking down on waste, fraud and abuse and from…
The straight-ticket, straight-party or master lever (just a line in Rhode Island) is an anachronism from long ago and its time has more than come to be eliminated. Each year, a bill is submitted to the Assembly to eliminate it, but you can probably guess what happens to the bill. Yep, held for further study.…
Admittedly, I’ve been griping about PolitiFact from the sidelines almost since it entered the field. For many of the uses that the reporters put it toward, the notion of entirely objective facts is as absurd as the notion of entirely objective reporters. The simplistic (albeit marketable) Truth-o-Meter emphasizes the point; something’s being arguable is not…
Pollster Scott Rasmussen explains how common poll questions offered by Beltway “professionals” make no sense to average Americans: In Washington, it’s a given that more government spending is needed to help the economy. Most Americans hold the opposite view. So when you ask whether cutting spending or helping the economy is more important, the question…
I’ve been meaning to update the data that I collected for the first three months of 2012, based on single-family home sales data available through William Raveis Real Estate. Upon re-reviewing the information, it seemed to me that the three-month window is sure to be erratic on a running basis. Simply as a matter of…
GoLocalProv’s Dan McGowan has the surprising news that organized labor Political Action Committees have led the way in political spending this year: The majority of the Laborer’s Political League’s spending has gone to the organization’s voluntary fund in Washington D.C., but the PAC has made $1,000 max-out contributions to Senate Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio, Senate…
Some quick background. The East Bay Energy Consortium (“EBEC”) consists of nine towns on the East Bay of Rhode Island which had banded together with the following goals. … to develop a regional wind energy system that will produce a sufficient quantity of electricity equivalent to the total municipal load of all nine members. We…
Violence in movies is not the problem. Violent stories are as old as fiction. Likewise, the realism of cinema and video games may be new, but in prior eras people didn’t need the visual aids. The livestock bled when slaughtered; the forest road was menacing in a way that needed no symphonic score. The problem…
It’s not that often where I can find an article on CNN.com that has much relevance to Rhode Island, but this one caught my eye. It just shows what a little ingenuity and work can do when you actually have a thriving economy. Out in North Dakota where the unemployment rate currently sits at 3%…
The unemployment rate for Rhode Island fell by one tenth of a percent to 10.8%, but total employment dropped by 80 people. That’s not even a “mixed picture,” though. The only reason the unemployment rate moved in a seemingly positive direction is that 471 more Rhode Islanders just gave up looking for work. So if…