The specialists in ad hominem fallacies on the Rhode Island Left are joining their peers nationally in behaving as if the sorts of things I’ve been writing out of conviction for over a decade must now be considered suspect because I’ve found a way not to have to write them for free.  As I’ve written before, they don’t start from the investigation of things I write that would otherwise be inexplicable; they begin with the assumption that I’m evil and request that I disprove my lack of integrity by sacrificing the people who support me, offering them up to progressives’ predictable subversive attacks.

One progressive group in the state has actively campaigned behind the scenes in an effort to prevent the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity from working with anybody on the Left on explicitly balanced projects designed to better inform Rhode Islanders of both sides.  Clearly, balanced debate is a sly tactic of the conservative conspiracy.

I mention this all to illustrate why questions of funding are on my mind, making it catch my attention that the R.I. Foundation is having banner years for revenue, recently, despite the state’s stagnant economy.  In the same article, it caught my attention that the Foundation gave $75,000 to the left-wing Economic Progress Institute (formerly the Poverty Institute).

Turning to the vendor payment module on RIOpenGov.org, I see Rhode Island taxpayers gave the R.I. Foundation $300,000 in 2013, through the Dept. of Business Regulation.  We also gave $15,000 to the Economic Progress Institute as a grant through the Dept. of Human Services.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to avoid the conclusion that Rhode Island’s ruling class is little more than a scheme by which insiders take money from everybody else, pretending to have our best interests in mind, and then shuffle it around among themselves.  I say this completely independently of the policies for which they advocate, which almost universally fall of their own merits, no matter where the money comes from.