The Democratic Primary Where the Candidates Agree on Constraining Democracy

September 8, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

The Democratic gubernatorial primary is where there is substantial agreement that the scope of democratic and representative decision-making needs to be narrowed (ironic, isn’t it?), so that special interests will encounter less interference with their ability to extract resources from the people. All three candidates with a chance of winning tomorrow seem comfortable with a government that gives more governing power to private interest groups at the expense elected public bodies, and even the people themselves.

The candidates are willing to ignore prohibitions on burdening the taxpayers with debt without their direct consent, and to ignore direct language that places retiree benefits outside of the collective bargaining process, because special interests do not approve of these laws. This kind of “leadership” is moving our system in a direction where certain privileged special interests are assumed to sit above the government, with a right to exercise powers that are above the law, that the government of the people never consented to, and cannot change.

Sen. Conley’s Work for State Government in Ethical Gray Area

September 5, 2014/by Justin Katz

An advisory opinion from the state Ethics Commission leaves Senator Conley’s contract work for the state in an ethical gray area that ought to be resolved.

GOP Gubernatorial Primary: After the Campaign, Allan Fung is the Clear Conservative Choice

September 5, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

Neither Allan Fung nor Ken Block would claim to be an idealized conservative. The difference between them is this: where Allan Fung doesn’t have fully-conservative positions or has moved to more conservative positions over his political career, he tends towards telling us what the substance of his positions is now (e.g. finding a real limit to the pro-choice position at late-term abortion; having evolved on gun-control), while Ken Block tends towards telling us that a number of issues of importance to conservatives aren’t important enough to merit attention right now (put the “social issues” aside until the economy is fixed; won’t move the needle one iota either way on gun control, etc.).

The area where Ken Block has most directly tried to define his plan, if not himself, as conservative is in the area of making government more efficient. No one doubts that Block is sincere about this, or that he is probably capable of administering government better than it is being administrated now. But, by itself, wanting government to be efficient doesn’t define a conservative position. Gina Raimondo and Angel Taveras sincerely want government to be more efficient too.

The problem is that trying to be “conservative” on fiscal issues, while declaring neutrality on many others, cedes the setting of government goals to liberals. Actively disengaging from other conservative priorities in the name of a total focus on economic efficiency, helps advance (intentionally or not) the liberal, Democratic one-way-ratchet-towards-more-and-bigger-government ideology of governance, because the balance point between a liberalism that believes in expanding government and a “conservatism” that restricts itself to getting government to be more cost-effective at whatever it’s doing is a government that constantly expands, just not at the full-speed-ahead rate that liberals would like.

Conservative voters want Republican leadership willing to support conservative solutions from the outset. And, to bring a legitimate issue up one more time, as their positions on Obamacare showed, Allan Fung is the candidate in this race that is comfortable immediately considering conservative positions on substantive issues, while with Ken Block it seems that liberal solutions have to be tried first and not work as well as promised, before he’s ready to start thinking about whether it’s time to start thinking more conservatively.

Interview with Steve Frias, on the Work of the Constitutional Convention Preparatory Commission

September 3, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

The excerpt I would pick to introduce my interview with Steve Frias, about the work the preparatory commission for a constitutional convention has done, would be this one…

Steve Frias: There will be an argument that there are reforms that people want in this state that are not happening, because the General Assembly refuses to give them serious consideration, for instance, the line-item veto. Rhode Island is one of the few states not to have it. On Ethics Commission jurisdiction, the Supreme Court made their decision in 2009, I believe, and five years later, while there have been votes on it in one chamber or another, it hasn’t been adopted yet….

This is a way for the people to amend the Constitution, and get things into it, that the General Assembly has shown by its behavior in recent years that it is just not willing to do.

However, when I asked Commissioner Frias directly what the most important thing he thought people could get out of the commission’s report was, his answer was…

SF: That the 1973 Convention was really cheap.

(In 1973, the convention cost about $20K, to be exact)

The entire interview, including a view on what a complete cost-benefit analysis of a constitutional convention should involve, is available below the fold.

GOP Gubernatorial Primary: A Final Word on Ken Block’s Vote for Obama

September 3, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

When choosing a President based on the very legitimate criteria of his influence over the Supreme Court, had Ken Block considered what it might mean for basic issues of religious freedom, the right to bear arms, and economic rights?

Republicans want a leader who is going to do more than work around the strange ideas that liberals have, after they’ve been implemented in government. His good work on the master lever notwithstanding, the votes for Obama are a strong suggestion that Ken Block isn’t that type of leader.

Vacation and Presidencies

August 23, 2014/by Justin Katz

Judging from Amity Shlaes’s book, Coolidge, presidents of the early Twentieth Century vacationed by means of a Summer White House. To be sure, technology then wasn’t as it is now, so a mobile base of operations was an elaborate undertaking that would lend itself to such thinking.

Much of the trip wasn’t a vacation so much as working in a different place, and even the leisure activities were meant to serve a diplomatic function. In South Dakota, for example, President Coolidge’s visit was meant, on his part, as a means of understanding the people of the region (and their similarities) and, on the part of South Dakotans, as a means of showing off their state to the president and to the country.

Consequently, when the Associated Press comes to the defense of President Obama at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, saying that “President Obama has spent less time away from the White House” than his predecessors, one gets the sense that the point is being missed. The news media of Coolidge’s day reported how many fish he caught and speculated about his displeasure when his wife got lost in a stroll through the woods. That is, “how is the president faring in an unfamiliar region of our country?”

In Matthew Continetti’s telling, it’s as if Obama has inverted everything. The fact that he’s away from the White House is mainly immaterial, because President Obama seems to be disengaged and living it up no matter where he is:

For this president, the distinction between “time off” and “time on” is meaningless. For this president, every day is a vacation. And has been for some time. He is like Cosmo Kramer of Seinfeld. “His whole life is a fantasy camp,” George Costanza says of his friend. “People should plunk down $2,000 to live like him for a week.” Imagine what they would pay to live like Obama.

In her AP article, Darlene Superville notes that President Bush had spent more “partial or complete days” at his ranch in Crawford, plus 26 at the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. That may have lacked the diplomatic investment of a South Dakota excursion, but it still gives more the sense of a second White House than yet another circuit of golf, beach, dining out, and concerts on the Vineyard.

10 News Conference Wingmen, Episode 40 (Public Funding of Art)

August 22, 2014/by Justin Katz

Justin and Bob Plain discuss the morality and economics of funding art through the government.

When the Future Can Pay for Your Business Model

August 19, 2014/by Justin Katz

The federal government’s deus ex machina act with HealthSource RI is as good an example as any of how government shouldn’t (but inevitably will) behave. There was a little bit less than the preferred 100% certainty that the state would allocate money for its experiment in health broker entreneurialism during the last session of the state General Assembly, and the administration of big brother Obama swooped in with the cash to keep the Web site going for another year.

It wasn’t supposed to do so, under the written word of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), and the state wasn’t supposed to accept it, under the written word of Governor Lincoln Chafee’s executive order creating the health benefits exchange. But what’s the rule of law and twenty-something million dollars compared with giving government agents the opportunity to experiment with a new business model?

If the U.S. Congress and the governor have to say one thing in order to get their big-government policies implemented and then ignore the specifics when they become inconvenient, and if more imaginary money has to be pushed to the resulting agencies, that’s just the price of trying to solve all of our problems via the political system.

The combined activities of Americas local, state, and federal governments now cost more per American household than the median American household brings home in income. The federal debt is now higher than the national GDP. In Rhode Island, the state government is suffering the consequences of its need to fill budget gap with one-time fixes and a ratcheting squeeze on residents, who are choosing to leave.

Last week, I checked in with HealthSource RI. After the open enrollment period ended in March, the agency had 27,961 enrolled individuals, with 21,097 having paid. By the end of April, 25,767 had paid. As of August 2, HealthSource counted 26,686 enrollees and 25,892 people paid up.

The federal government, in other words, gave nearly $1,000 per enrollee just for the exchange’s operating costs. That doesn’t include the subsidies that 85-90% of the enrollees are receiving.

It takes a little bit of education and imagination to see the consequences of this behavior. All that money comes from somewhere, and by the looks of the recent trends, it isn’t the much-vilified One Percent. Not being able to trust that the deal that politicians make actually means what they say it means when they first say it has consequences, too.

It may be the perfect crime, though. As the machine works its destruction, those whom it kills and those from whom it steals can’t easily see who’s to blame.

Don’t Abort a Constitutional Convention Over Scare Tactics

August 18, 2014/by Justin Katz

Government insiders want to do to the constitutional convention what they do to any opposition that comes their way — kill it before it can be born.

Judicial Objectivity When Politics Is a Job

August 14, 2014/by Justin Katz

Honestly, I’m torn about this one, although it brings me back around to the same place as much political news:

A federal magistrate judge has granted the city’s bid to delay Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’ questioning under oath in a lawsuit involving changes to the retirement system until after the upcoming primary election for candidates for governor.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Lincoln D. Almond late Tuesday granted the city’s emergency motion for a protective order to postpone Taveras’ deposition in the city’s lawsuit against its former actuarial firm, Buck Consultants LLC, until after the Sept. 9 primary. Almond found, without further explanation, that the city had shown good cause to delay Taveras’ questioning and to limit it to three hours.

On its surface, this looks like further evidence supporting the common wisdom that, if you’ve got a lawsuit involving political insiders in Rhode Island, you’re best off getting it in a federal court. On the other hand, if the mayor weren’t the mayor, but something else, and was requesting a brief delay of judicial proceedings to the other side of a major work project on which his career hinged, that would seem reasonable in a case with no major urgency.

Of course, the mayor is the mayor, and it’s difficult not to conclude that he’s worried about the ways in which his testimony (and the opposition lawyers’ spin of it, amplified by other candidates for the office he’s seeking). In that regard, it’s a question of transparency. After all, his administration brought the lawsuit.

And if it’s a matter of the time preparation for the deposition will require, we shouldn’t accept the notion that government must stop operating because people in office are bucking for a promotion.

At the end of the analysis, put this one on the stack of arguments against fostering a government environment in which politics is a career. If public office were in fact — as politicians like to claim — a question of service, then the argument for delaying the deposition pretty much evaporates.

A Constitutional Convention in Rhode Island; Citizen Democracy in Action

August 12, 2014/by Mike Stenhouse

A constitutional convention could help bring an end to a state government of the special interests, by the special interests, and for the special interests.

Reevaluating the Wisdom of a Constitutional Convention

August 8, 2014/by Justin Katz

I don’t know if I’ve written about it anywhere, but privately, I’ve expressed wariness of a constitutional convention. It has seemed to me that opening up the constitution at a time when the power of opposition voices has managed to fade beyond what seemed an impossible whisper is to risk a final roll. Partly by virtue of working on the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s initial analysis of the convention, and partly owing to the growing vehemence with which people are advising each other to leave the state, I’m starting to reevaluate.

As the conclusion of the Center’s analysis says:

Although it often depends whether or not they have the advantage in a given circumstance, activists on both the left and the right see the risk of direct democracy as a general principle on which to base government. However, for some issues, and at some points in history, letting the people make final decisions is appropriate, the best available option, or even absolutely necessary.

The Ocean State is at such a point in history, with many Rhode Islanders feeling that the solutions are as obvious as the problems are intractable. A constitutional convention would present an opportunity to settle some of the relevant questions.

Maybe a constitutional convention could motivate the people who understand the direction in which the state needs to head before there are just too few of us left in the state to make a difference. Maybe working around the normal, corrupted, rigged electoral system will prove that there are more of us than insiders in government and the media would have us believe.

And maybe if all of that is so much misplaced optimism, it’d be better to let the inevitable happen sooner than later. It would be clarifying, anyway, for Rhode Islanders currently agonizing over decisions about what to do with their lives and where to live.

The People Are Leaving. Be Angry.

August 4, 2014/by Justin Katz

News that productive people seeking to build a life are leaving Rhode Island is not new, but Rhode Islanders have to start being angry about it.

Government Funding of Activism

August 2, 2014/by Justin Katz

This story is worth reading as a small outcropping of a massive subterranean network:

Are tax dollars being channeled through the Environmental Protection Agency to Democratic activists working in the nonprofit sector?

A comprehensive new report released Wednesday by the Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee makes clear that the answer to that question is yes. The report is entitled “The chain of environmental command.”

It would be reasonable to expect that this sort of thing goes on throughout government. For another example, I’ve noted before how the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been funneling money to PolicyLink, a group whose previous work involved plotting to shift the United States to an economic system to the Left of European socialism. That money stream flows not just directly from the feds, but also via grants given to lower-tier governments (including for the RhodeMap RI initiative).

Throw in the actual activism of government agencies (such as the IRS targeting of conservatives) and the taxpayer money that flows through labor unions back into activists’ and Democrats’ coffers. It’s just another indication that government in the United States no longer serves the people as its primary mission in any meaningful sense.

Wait, what? (Freedom of Religion)

August 2, 2014/by Justin Katz

Religious Americans need to start paying attention to the intolerance that’s sneaking in with the progressive ideology that now defines liberalism and is almost entirely directing the policies supported by the Democrat Party. Consider:

A lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) asserted that the Internal Revenue Service ignored complaints about churches’ violating their tax-exempt status by routinely promoting political issues, legislation and candidates from the pulpit.

The FFRF has temporarily withdrawn its suit in return for the IRS’s agreement to monitor sermons and homilies for proscribed speech that the foundation believes includes things like condemnation of gay marriage and criticism of ObamaCare for its contraceptive mandate.

In the perverted definition of “separation of church and state” currently being promoted as tolerance, churches are forbidden from trying to protect themselves from encroachment by the state, or else they’ll be discriminated against in such things as eligibility for tax exemptions, licensing (e.g., for adoption services), and awards of contracts (for such things as humanitarian activities). On the other side, “separation” is said to allow (even to require) the government to dictate employee benefits and enforce redefined social mores for religious groups.

The saddest part is that religious people, and especially religious organizations, have brought this on themselves by going along with the ideology that insists that government’s fingers belong in everybody’s business as the ultimate supporter and hub of charitable activity.

10 News Conference Wingmen, Episode 38 (Funding Transportation)

August 1, 2014/by Justin Katz

Justin and Bob Plain talk transportation infrastructure funding.

Many Threads Together in D.C. Schools

July 30, 2014/by Justin Katz

It’s not often that so many threads of topics about which one has been writing come together in a single story as in James Richardson’s USA Today essay about government schools in Washington, D.C., trying to salvage their client base:

Here, where traditional public school enrollment has dipped by 30,000 students in just the last 18 years, administrators believe the key to stemming the exodus of public school refugees lies in diverting precious resources from improving instruction to marketing.

To augment the hard sell being made door-to-door by principals, the school system even retained the pricey data miners who twice won the White House for President Barack Obama.

As noted in this space, recently, Rhode Island schools are starting to worry about competing with alternatives like charters and private schools, and our local and state governments are taking steps to change the competitive environment. The experience of St. Jude Home Care at least hints at the risk of government’s abusing its hydra heads to give itself an advantage. Meanwhile, D.C.’s use of Obama’s team for manipulating the public with intricate data and big money raises the same questions about whether it’s appropriate for government to be operating this way.

In plain terms, the government is taking money from taxpayers to pay for expensive tools for manipulating the public in order to make up for the competitive disadvantage that comes with prioritizing labor unions (whose mission is ultimately progressive activism).

When Government Is the Biggest Client, the Biggest Competitor, and the Regulator

July 30, 2014/by Justin Katz

I don’t have any additional information about what’s going on with this story, but it’s one worth watching:

The doors were locked on Monday at St. Jude Home Care as the provider of home health-care services reeled from having its privilege to bill Medicare and Medicaid terminated as a result of federal and state investigations.

But owner Priscilla Pascale invited a reporter inside to say why she believes the government actions are unjustified and nothing more than “trumped-up charges” that are the result of a “vendetta.”

Pascale doesn’t say whom it is that has a vendetta against her, but she does claim that surveillance tapes make it obvious that the inspectors came in with the goal of finding something they could use to “take us out.”

St. Jude Home Care is “one of the largest providers of home health-care in the state,” which makes it one of the largest competitors to the state’s Dept. of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals. That means it’s one of the largest competitors to the government labor union whose members dominate lists of the most lucrative state jobs, making many times their official salaries.

Supporters of the Rhode Island status quo or big government generally are sure to claim I’m peddling a conspiracy story, because it’s critical to their ideologies that government agencies can be trusted to be intimately involved with our businesses and our lives. (Hello, IRS.) Still, when government becomes a provider of services for which it is also a dominant payer in industries that it also regulates, it’s far from unreasonable to think agencies might act in their own self interest in ways that would be obviously wrong to those who aren’t part of the cult of government.

Rule of Law as Guarantor of Freedom

July 29, 2014/by Justin Katz

The other day, I noted Dinesh D’Souza’s suggestion that freedom is a mechanism to guarantee justice. Admittedly, the text of the post drifted a bit from the intention for which I crafted the title. The bottom-line point that might have gotten lost was that a free nation, in which the government’s role is constrained, limits the opportunity of the government to manipulate the public. (It also limits the incentive, since gaining control of government doesn’t gain one as much.) It’s furthermore incompatible with a free nation for the government to be spying on its people or for the chief executive’s campaign to be setting up secretive organizations to manipulate the electorate.

Kevin Williamson brings in a consideration that is interwoven with the topic. Writing about the Supreme Court’s Halbig decision, “that the law says what the law says” when it comes to ObamaCare subsidies, Williamson goes on:

The Hammurabic Code, along with its presumptive predecessors, represented something radical and new in human history. With the law written down — with the law fixed — a man who had committed no transgression no longer had reason to tremble before princes and potentates. If the driver of oxen had been paid his statutory wage, if a man’s contractual obligations had been satisfied, and if his life was unsullied by violations of the law, handily carved upon slabs of igneous rock for all to see and ingest, then that man was, within the limits of his law, free. …

… We write laws down in order that citizens may know what is permissible under the generally promulgated rules of the polity. The writing down of laws was the first step on the road from subject to citizen, and to reverse that is to do violence to more than grammatical propriety …

As I noted imperfectly the other day, freedom from tyranny is a guarantor of justice, and we cannot have freedom if the tyrant is able to change the rules and laws on a whim. If the ground might dissolve beneath you once you’ve stepped off the tyrant’s path, you aren’t actually free to step from the path. In other words, the rule of law is a guarantor of freedom and a prerequisite if freedom is to guarantee justice.

That’s why Americans must insist on the rules, and that the language of the law means what it says. Rhode Island is an excellent example of the insider-dominated wasteland to which a failure to do so inevitably leads, and even we in the Ocean State have much farther to fall.

Freedom as Guarantor of Justice

July 26, 2014/by Justin Katz

The story of the Obama administration, and its path toward tyranny, becomes clearer with each scandal (whether or not the media reports it objectively).

The Missing Question on Transportation Funding

July 15, 2014/by Justin Katz

Channel 10 has a report up on the sorry state of Rhode Island’s roads and bridges and the absence of funds to address the problem. Here’s the missing question that really needs to start being asked: Where is all the money going?

From 2003 to 2013, Rhode Island’s budget increased from $5.4 billion to $7.7 billion. That’s a 42% increase, or 3.56% per year compounding. Over that same period, the gross state product (GSP) went up 32% (2.79% compounded per year), and inflation was 27% (2.39% per year). (From 2005 to projected 2015, by the way, the state budget increase is 46%, or 3.88% compounded annually.)

With the government’s budget growing so much more quickly than either the state’s economy or inflation, where is all the money going?

According to WJAR’s Susie Steimie:

President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to put $300 billion toward road repairs. The president warns if we don’t put money toward infrastructure repairs the economy will suffer.

We must stop letting politicians off so easily. $300 billion doesn’t materialize out of nowhere. From where does Obama plan to take that money, and why won’t that hurt the economy?

Unless we move past the superficial analysis of noting problems and insisting that the solution is money, we’re like children being governed by the Coachman on Pleasure Island.

Rhode Island Fix a Philosophical Shift; Contra Renn, Part 2 of 6

July 11, 2014/by Justin Katz

Skepticism about Aaron Renn’s suggestions for Rhode Island. Part 2: shedding pounds by changing location or voting differently.

Government, Academics, and Journalists… RI’s Lead Weight

July 9, 2014/by Justin Katz

A Providence Journal article extolling the virtues of lead-paint regulations fails to acknowledge a downside or provide context for the harm it seeks to alleviate.

Mark Zaccaria on Issues Facing the US Senate

July 8, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

After his campaign announcement, Republican Senatorial candidate Mark Zaccaria answered questions posed by Anchor Rising on the subjects of:

The guiding principle and vision of American foreign policy.
Where to go on Obamacare, from where we now are.
The institutional way to deal with executive overreach.
The gulf between the elites and the people, on illegal immigration.

Read more

Mark Zaccaria Announces for Senate

July 8, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

Mark Zaccaria: “[Y]our taxes, your food and your housing costs are all up as a result of what the Federal Government has done, and Jack Reed has voted yes for every single one of those increases, certainly during the last couple of terms. I contend that Rhode Islanders are ready to vote no, and it’s about high time.

But they have to have a choice to be able to do that, to be able to vote for better monetary policy, or smaller government that costs less, so that it takes less money out of your pockets. You have to have that alternative on the ballot. I hope to be the face of that message to the hard-working, tax-paying men and women of Rhode Island during this campaign.

There is another way, folks. We can do that. And I will be making that point, to anyone who will listen to me, every day between now and the fourth of November…you don’t have to vote for the guy you voted for last time. In fact, it might be better if you voted for somebody new.”

Hobby Lobby and the Lack of Church-State Separation

July 3, 2014/by Justin Katz

With progressives across the country in a delusional tizzy over the implications of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the federal government (through administrative action) can’t force a company to provide abortifacients (i.e., drugs that kill early-stage human beings in the womb), Jennifer Roback Morse takes a step back and looks at the context in the United States’ current practice of “separation of church and state” (italics in original):

Only after the program was over, did the pattern become fully clear to me: the caller (and the State) will allow the Church to be independent of the State, but only for things they think don’t matter.

We the State, allow you the Church, to have jurisdiction over who gets to receive Communion and Christian burial. That is because we consider those things unimportant.

But we the State, intend to have full authority over everything we consider important, like property settlements and child custody. And, as a matter of fact, if there is anything else we come to believe is important, we will take jurisdiction over that too.

And so here we are, with a relatively favorable ruling from the Supreme Court on the Hobby Lobby case. The Supreme Court has restrained the Administration from imposing upon the Mennonite Hahn family, owners of Conestoga Wood, or the Evangelical Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, in as catastrophic way as they might have. But the State has certainly not given up its authority over religious institutions and religious people, when they deem the subject matter sufficiently important.

We don’t have separation of church and state, in the United States. We have a thumb on the scale on behalf of statists and the non-religious, who often look to the government as a moral arbiter. The government is their mechanism for avoiding the necessity of persuading their neighbors to a different position, which can be hard work. (One suspects the anti-religion statists think it’s impossible work, inasmuch as they see religious people as constitutionally irrational.)

It’s all legerdemain. As with progressives’ selective adulation of science, they present their opponents’ morality as derived from subjective, superstitious sources, while their morality derives from simple truths about the universe.

To the extent that they succeed in their use of the government toward (what they see as) moral ends, it’s nothing other than an establishment of religion.

Speaker Mattiello at the Rhode Island Taxpayers Summer Meeting, Part 2 (38 Studios)

July 1, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

A retro-liveblog formatted transcript of remarks made by Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives Nicholas Mattiello, at this Saturday’s summer meeting of the Rhode Island Taxpayers organization, on the subject of the aftermath of 38 Studios; including why the Speaker favors paying the bonds, why he opposes using his subpoenas in a House investigation, and what the public should expect at the end.

Speaker Mattiello at the Rhode Island Taxpayers Summer Meeting, Part 1

June 30, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

A retro-liveblog of remarks made by Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives Nicholas Mattiello, at this Saturday’s summer meeting of the Rhode Island Taxpayers organization. The areas the Speaker touches on include education, the gas-tax, reducing regulations in RI, and some general ideas about what governing means and how it should be done.

State GOP Endorsement Convention Results

June 27, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

Endorsed for Governor: Allan Fung (over Ken Block 120-46).
Endorsed for Lieutenant Governor: Catherine Taylor (over Kara Russo 134-31)
Endorsed for Attorney General: Dawson Hodgson.
Endorsed for Secretary of State: John Carlevale.
Endorsed for United States Senate: Mark Zaccaria (over Kara Russo 151-14).
Endorsed for Congressional District 1: Cormick Lynch (over Stan Tran 54-21).
Endorsed for Congressional District 2: Rhue Reis.

Brief excerpts from each endorsed candidate’s acceptance remarks are below the fold.

Open Thread: Buddy’s Back

June 25, 2014/by Patrick Laverty

Just an open thread for the commenters. Buddy’s back and there are about a dozen declared candidates for Governor, including one from the Moderate Party (not Ken Block) and one from the Compassion Party. Have at it.

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