Political Thought
What are Governor Lincoln Chafee’s three Ts of economic development, again? Is it talent, technocrats, and tolerance? Or is it technology, tolerance, and twee ideological fashion? It can be so difficult to keep these gimmicky strategies straight. This particular strategy is also turning out to be difficult to make work. In fact, it may just…
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…
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…
In The Disenfranchisement of Rural America, James Huffman writes: The county by county map of the 2012 presidential election clearly portrays the irony and unfairness of a nation of predominantly red communities governed by a blue, urban, national majority. President Obama won 52 percent of the states and 51.4 percent of the popular vote, but…
It started with an email exchange among the contributors to Anchor Rising. Somebody suggested that moderates are essentially liberals who “believe in economics.” That got my mind (when hungering for procrastination) to filling out the rest of a political spectrum, and it turned into the circle illustrated below. As you can see, there are eight…
Perspective from on high; the empathetic view from my soap box; cover-up as economic development; what happens when that which can’t go on forever doesn’t. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
We’ve talked about the problems inherent in “big government” around here for, well, ever. More government means more taxes (ie; “revenue”), more regulations and more of government trying to pick winners and losers. Rhode Island is a perfect example. Despite the myriad problems in our state, our politicians don’t like dealing with the root causes.…
This week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is an apt one for thinking on a grand scale — of the where-we’ve-been-and-where-we-must-go variety. Essays in that vein fill the tabs on my open browser window, and as is often the case, most of them come from the center-right’s great aggregator and one-line editorialist Glenn Reynolds.…
Here is what is at stake in the lawsuit to void Rhode Island’s 2011 pension reform law, Rhode Island Public Employee’s Coalition et al. vs Chafee et al., being litigated in Judge Sarah Taft-Carter’s courtroom today. The state’s public employee unions are asserting a right to veto legislation that impacts their direct economic interests, i.e.…
