Blue v. Red
Glenn Reynolds highlights an article in the New York Post that hits some familiar notes: For more than 15 years, New York state has led the country in domestic outmigration: For every American who comes here, roughly two depart for other states. This outmigration slowed briefly following the onset of the Great Recession. But a…
An interesting tidbit from over the weekend is that college professors appear to grade differently based on political affiliation: We study grading outcomes associated with professors in an elite university in the United States who were identified — using voter registration records from the county where the university is located — as either Republicans or…
Longtime readers know that I’ve never been much of a Froma Harrop fan. People who know her assure me that she’s reasonable, but she starts from (what one might call) the flawed premises of the ruling class. Still, when she focused on Rhode Island, at least she articulated a distinct perspective on matters of local…
With over 250 comments, it’d take quite a bit of catching up, and the horrible policy of letting readers delete a comment when enough of them flag it as “inappropriate” makes the conversation difficult to follow, because comments (including Gordon’s) suddenly disappear, but the response thread to this story on the Tiverton-LittleCompton Patch is a…
Back in 2007, I argued against non-partisan elections in Tiverton. Those who disagreed took a very community-oriented view: ARGUING AGAINST asking Tiverton voters whether they’d like to return to partisan elections after one cycle of nonpartisanism, Charter Review Commission member Frank “Richard” Joslin made two points that have the ring of Rhode Islandry: First, that…
An op-ed in the New York Post, by Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK) points to a couple of topics worth discussion: One insidious force keeping unemployment high is regulatory uncertainty: Companies that could hire (or re-hire), don’t — because they’re worried about what new restrictions will be coming down from Washington. Congress bears much of…
The opposition went to the immigration law enforcement rally, last Friday, dressed humorously to distract from their underlying intent, which is to prevent the public from hearing or understanding an argument with which they disagree: Suddenly, demonstrators in polyester clown suits filed through security and entered the State House rotunda, carrying signs that said, “Clown…
I’ve been meaning to note Bob Kerr’s continued function as the elder statesman who says what the younger folks must strive to keep to themselves at the Providence Journal. Here’s the crux of his Wednesday column: You might remember protest. It’s an honored American tradition. It’s how this whole thing got started. People speak out…
Timothy Sandefur’s edifying review of the shift in legal thought on the Supreme Court during the era of President Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive revolution points, among other things, to the way in which political groupings do not draw straight lines across history, such that a conservative or progressive today would have agreed with their supposed forerunners:…
Just in time for election season, I’ve finally managed to read Travis Rowley’s The Rhode Island Republican. For good reason, the largest portion of the forty-page pamphlet addresses unions, specifically public-sector unions, primarily in context of the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”: In 1966, two Columbia University political scientists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, penned an…
