Justin Katz
This video by Evan Coyne Maloney succinctly presents a critical part of the small-government, free-market perspective on one of Rhode Island’s most intractable difficulties: The machine by which teachers’ unions turn public dollars into union-organization profits and political patronage is clear and unambiguous. One could argue that the process is for the better, for one…
Today’s short takes address misleading labeling at the DNC, misleading fact-checking, fading national competitiveness, and the September 10 mentality.
A good example of the questionable utility of political debates arose during the Congressional district 1 primary debate on WPRO, last night. Only the most plugged in voters will have any inkling of what statements are true and which are spun to falsehood — let alone the context in which the facts were playing. Trying to…
Today’s quick(ish) hits touch on: Partisanship as evidenced by Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, and Nick Gillespie. The libertarian-conservative divide and this year’s election. Ed Fitzpatrick’s one-way love of fact checking. The dependency nation as an existential threat. Read all about it on the Ocean State Current…
In a Providence Journal Political Scene article about his speech to the Democrat National Convention, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee had this to say about his experience in office: Now I’m in a governor’s chair, trying to get the economy going, and it’s not, click, turn a switch. This is hard work and it takes time…
Readers shouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’m largely in agreement with Peter Ferrara’s “Obama’s Accelerating Downward Spiral for America,” but he happens to voice one bit of center-right common wisdom with which I have growing disagreement: There is no secret or magic as to how to turn around these declining incomes. Increased investment in business…
Against Incentivizing Cooperative Strategic Workarounds with Comprehensive Market-Driven Measurables
At the risk of repeating myself, I have to opine that one of Rhode Island’s core economic challenges is the frequency of sentences like this: To position Rhode Island to compete successfully for jobs and investments, a new public/private economic-development partnership should be designed to implement an integrated economic-development strategy that focuses on business retention…
Back when the Episcopal/Anglican Church was finding itself fraught with international internal turmoil over the appointment of an openly and actively homosexual bishop in New Hampshire, Catholic writer and blogger Mark Shea predicted, as an aphorism, that the organization would gradually turn toward the promotion of homosexuality. I always considered that a plausible, but not…
Politicos and policy wonks have been parsing every major speech offered at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, each with his or her own lens. (The exception is MSNBC, which apparently declined to parse several speeches by ethnic minorities.) Some have commented on the gender-war content of Ann Romney’s statements; some have focused on…