Whether or not the reporters and editors intended it to be so, yesterday’s “Political Scene” in the Providence Journal is a “well, duh” message for Rhode Island voters.

Story one is about the continuing possibility of a legislative investigation of the 38 Studios mess, in which the legislature created law allowing the quasi-public Economic Development Corporation (EDC) to blow $75 million on a speculative video game company run by a baseball player.

Story two is a list of hundreds of thousands of dollars that various financial and legal companies collected in fees for processing the 38 Studios transactions.

Story three is about the hiring of the son of master RI insider Richard Licht for a $118,000 “director of policy” position with the EDC, which is now called the R.I. Commerce Corporation.

And story four is about the annual deficit that Governor Gina Raimondo will have to address as she puts together her budget for fiscal year 2017, despite which she is maintaining plans to use government spending to “attract[] entrepreneurs and [make] investments in industries that play to Rhode Island’s strengths.”  (That is, either taxes, fees, and/or debt will have to increase or the government will have to cut some other item that might actually be more important to a greater number of Rhode Islanders.)

The insider class that runs Rhode Island government has been playing the rest of us for suckers for a long, long time, but it’s now becoming so bleedingly obvious that only deliberate blindness can possibly explain the continuation of Rhode Islanders’ voting habits.