Download Safari
Download Chrome
Download Firefox
Download IE 10+
The 2015 Competitiveness Report Card was the fourth that the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has released. For this edition, in addition to researching new data sources and compiling all of the updated data, Justin added an interactive functionality to the back-end spreadsheet allowing a report card to be generated for any state in comparison with any five other states.
One study says RhodeWorks would pay for itself
Another one says there ain’t no projects on the shelf
Nobody’s sure just what the DOT does
But we need truck tolls now… just because
You pay 17 tolls, and what do you get
A phony quasi-public half-a-billion in debt
St. Gina don’t you call me ’cause Mapquest’s sure
I’d cut my trip on Route 84
There’s more than one way to pay off a road
By cutting your spending or by the truckload
A private partner could mitigate risk
But when the speaker hears that, he says “tsk, tsk, tsk”
You pay 17 tolls, and what do you get
A phony quasi-public half-a-billion in debt
St. Gina don’t you call me ’cause Mapquest’s sure
I’d cut my trip on Route 84
A revenue bond would make investors sing
They get paid interest like it’s not a sure thing
But if something goes wrong, Wall Street ain’t stuck with the bill
If the truckers don’t pay it, then the taxpayers will
They pay 17 tolls, and what do you get
A phony quasi-public half-a-billion in debt
St. Gina don’t you call me ’cause Mapquest’s sure
I’d cut my trip on Route 84
The upside’s ten years of union work
But the governor knows that unions shirk
It’s a political rule, don’t be afraid of the crash
If the airbag’s filled with campaign cash
You pay 17 tolls, and what do you get
A phony quasi-public half-a-billion in debt
St. Gina don’t you call me ’cause Mapquest’s sure
I’d cut my trip on Route 84
Pale people got white privilege
Pale people got white privilege
Pale people got white privilege
These days
They say we can’t see it
But they know it’s there
We got to talk about it
Just to show we care
If you got pink cheeks
Around a slender little nose
You get a silver spoon
It’s just the way it goes
Well, I don’t want no white privilege
Don’t want no white privilege
Don’t want no white privilege
‘Round here
“White privilege” is just a phrase to signify
That you’re superior
To other whites who think they’ve had to strive
But that’s just more proof
Pale people got no grievance
Pale people got no grievance
Pale people got no grievance
That counts
Could be disabled
Mom and dad might be drunks
And all the gatekeepers
Treat you like a leaky skunk
You mighta grown up poor
Your face is ugly as sin
All a’ that ain’t nothin’
To the color of your skin
It don’t matter what
You think you’ve overcome
Don’cha take credit
For the things you’ve done
‘Cause I don’t want no white privilege
Don’t want no white privilege
Don’t want no white privilege
‘Round here
When I used to serve as a lector during Sunday Mass in Fall River, Mass., that reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was like pulling the short straw. You know the one: “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.”
As a recently married young man at the beginning of the third millennium after the birth of Christ, reading Paul’s instructions for husbands and wives took a great deal of care. I had to read the scripture reverently, of course, but with no hint in my voice that I offered the reading as a reminder for wayward modern women. My imagination may merely be filling in the gaps of silence, but to this day, I seem to hear guffaws from the congregation as the words echo in the church.
A basic rule of literary analysis is that every document is a text, every text has an author, and every author has his or her own set of beliefs, biases, limitations, and interests. This principle applies whether the text is Melville’s Moby Dick, Smith’sThe Wealth of Nations, Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Freud’sCivilization and Its Discontents, or the Rhode Island State Police’s Assessment of the Cranston Rhode Island Police Department 2014-2015.
Father John Kiley’s “Quiet Corner” column in the June 25 issue of Rhode Island Catholic helped me bring together a few thoughts that have been drifting in and out of my mind lately.
As somebody who works to develop and research public policy for a living — proposals like eliminating the sales tax and implementing school choice programs that bring private school within reach for all families — I’ve found my observations of the younger generation, the “Millennials,” discouraging.
After the 0.9% budget petition that Justin submitted for Tiverton’s 2016 fiscal year won with a substantial majority, the School Committee canceled plans to introduce all-day kindergarten to the school district for the first time because the budget reduced its requested increase. Justin worked with one local affected father to persuade the School Committee to change its vote, which it did after two months of public debate. The effort involved research showing the feasibility of the program and suggesting places in the budget in which the money could be found, as well as messaging to the public and grassroots organizing.
The 2015 Portsmouth Institute conference, on “Understanding the Francis Papacy,” was the sixth that Justin has covered, with multimedia recordings and written commentary. Browse through the tabs at right for video to access Justin’s commentary.
Starting off this year’s conference at the Portsmouth Institute, on “Understanding the Francis Papacy,” Anna Bonta Moreland spoke on Friday morning. As an Argentinian, herself, and a professor at Villanova University, Moreland’s purpose was to give some biographical background and cultural context for Pope Francis.
The second session at this year’s Portsmouth Institute conference, with the weekend-long subject of Pope Francis, took up the topic of interreligious dialogue and Pope Francis’s role therein. A bit of irony snuck in around the edges of the conversation (which more resembled a series of individual speeches): An initial impression of Francis’s popularity — in the United States, anyway — would seem to have much to do with the political application of his theological views. Yet the speakers on the panel held him up as a lesson to religious groups that have sometimes gotten caught up in their blending of politics and religion.
Ross Douthat divided his talk at the 2015 Portsmouth Institute conference into two segments. With the topic of “More Catholic than the Pope?: The New Catholic Civil War,” Douthat looked first at three areas of skepticism about the pope in the United States and then broadened his view globally. Given his particular insights, the current of larger concern may actually have flowed below the surface his rhetorical structure.
On day one of the 2015 Portsmouth Institute conference, on “Understanding the Francis Papacy,” the critical question that began to assert itself between the lines, so to speak, was whether the pope has correctly assessed the world as it is currently poised and, therefore, his role in it.
Picking up the second day of the 2015 Portsmouth Institute summer conference, on Pope Francis, John Carr began the Saturday session with an hour of humor and insight (full video below). If Friday’s speakers — knowingly or incidentally — wove a certain trepidation that American Catholics might have about the new pope through the subtext of their talks, Carr unhesitatingly called on us to carry the message that the pope will bring to our country.
Father Dwight Longenecker brought with him, to the 2015 Portsmouth Institute conference, the novelty of being a married Roman Catholic priest. He was among the Anglicans who converted to Catholicism and received a special dispensation from Pope John Paul II to remain priests while married. For an audience of Catholics, that biographical point was probably the most catchy of his talk. His most resonant point, however, was that a conversion won by tricks, gimmicks, or pressure is “a false conversion.”
During his homily at Mass, this morning, the priest — an affable senior who technically retired from service but still helps out around the parish — mentioned the pope’s recent dip in favorability according to a public opinion poll. He attributed that outcome to the fact that Pope Francis is insisting that we tend to the poor. There are ways to interpret the priest’s explanation in a way that would be plausible, if not outright true, but it seems at the least to be incomplete. Kicking off the afternoon of the second day of this year’s Portsmouth Institute conference, First Things editor R.R. Reno put Francis in a historical context, specifically the context of Vatican diplomacy. He titled the talk, “The Diplomacy of Bold Words and Striking Gestures.”
Father Roger Landry’s session was not so much a talk or a presentation as an instance of preaching. Watching the video, his intellectual points certainly come through, but the experience of watching him the first time was more personal. The first person to obtain a microphone during the question and answer period captured some of the sense, with his effusive praise.
A teacher of literature by profession, Kenneth Colston spent most of his Portsmouth Institute lecture tracing the significance of Franciscans (and the saint from whom they took their name) in literature. He mainly left conclusions, therefore, to the listener. In a sense, he describes an undercurrent of contradiction. Franciscans in literature are “non-conformist, yet traditional.” They are “cunning, mild, and orthodox.”
An exchange of economic ideas closing out the second night of the 2015 Portsmouth Institute conference, on Pope Francis, gave a real contrast of thinking. Taking up the side of economic progressivism was essayist and Brown PhD student Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig; taking up the more-free-market side was Cliff Hobbins, a teacher of history and economics at the Portsmouth Abbey school.
In the libretto for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar — which hit the global scene, controversially, as the ’60s stumbled into the ’70s — a song titled “Superstar” comes right before the crucifixion. With the insinuation of a modern perspective, the voice of Judas criticizes Jesus.
Providence Journal Commentary
State government makes Rhode Islanders’ lives less fulfilling
Rhode Island is stealing our opportunity to fulfill our potential and be self-sufficient. We’re becoming increasingly dependent on subsidies from government, jobs remain scarce, and the state’s latest programs are designed to make things worse.
Here’s one indicator of increasing dependency: From January 2007 to January 2010, the state added over 60,000 residents to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; “food stamps”). Over the next three years, nearly 50,000 more joined, bringing the total to nearly 181,000.
Continue reading in the Providence Journal.