Essay
According to a news release from the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training (DLT), there are actually 800 fewer people employed in Rhode Island than previously thought. But that’s a good thing… because even more people gave up looking for work than we thought. Recovery! Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
Numbers between $17M and $25M are being reported as the cost of the sequester to Rhode Island state government spending. However, if a few state departments did nothing more than stay within their original FY2013 budgets, and the funding tentatively intended for their overruns could be intelligently redirected, the impact would only be about half…
A bill (H5068) requiring cities and towns to post an armed guard at every school in Rhode Island was posted Tuesday for a House Municipal Government hearing today. Here’s the complete text: The school committees of various cities, towns, and school districts, shall appoint a guard to each school building within their jurisdiction. The guard…
Most Americans probably know very little about Rhode Island beyond the fact that it is at the wrong end of an awful lot of national economic and civic rankings. Residents of the state who’ve sought some explanation for its willful decline inevitably come across the concept of “Rhode-apathy.” Under the thralls of what force would…
Justin liveblogs from Brookings Institution VP Bruce Katz event with the RI Foundation.
An article not about what it’s about; sequester demagoguery; softening kids for “effort shock”; and the rise of grassroots fascism. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
10. S0330: Independent voters would not need to become a member of a political party, to vote in that party’s primary. (S Judiciary; Thu, Feb 28) 9. H5389: Spencer Dickinson’s proposal for a binding arbitration process for teacher contracts. In the Dickinson process, only the school committee could choose to go to binding arbitration, but…
Local Impact: Coventry, Foster, Johnston, Middletown, North Kingstown, Woonsocket 2 Anyone know the background on this one? H5322: Prohibits unauthorized use of the emblem of the Attorney General of the state of Rhode Island. 21. S0341: A potpourri of changes to criminal law, including the decriminalization of a first offense for shoplifting or driving without…
My previous post referenced the circularly structured political spectrum that Justin proposed a few weeks ago. Samuel G. Howard criticized Justin’s mapping in a post at Rhode Island’s Future, one objection being that choosing individual emphasis versus community emphasis as a defining axis leads to problems that are intractable…I suspect it would be difficult for…
Last weekend, a small number of people turned out at Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, in some combination of protest and memorial for former LAPD officer Chris Dorner, who killed four people in Southern California, before killing himself during a standoff with law enforcement. Meanwhile, in the virtual world, a Facebook tribute describing Dorner as…