Here’s a dirty little secret about Rhode Island’s state budget: it’s actually a pretty stable document.

The news media has a bias toward conflict – stability makes lousy copy – and so coverage of this week’s House Finance budget played up its differences from what Gov. Lincoln Chafee proposed back in January. No corporate tax change! $15 million less in local aid! 6,500 off RIte Care!

Each of those policy choices absolutely matter, especially to those who are directly affected by them. And when you’re talking about spending more than $8 billion over 12 months in a place with 1 million people, even relatively small changes can add up to many millions of dollars. The budget is definitely important.

Still, the year-to-year changes in the budget often aren’t as significant as the headlines imply, because much of the spending is effectively on autopilot. This year’s budget will probably be $8,101,600,000; next year’s will probably be $8,216,800,000. That’s $115 million more – a lot of money! – but still only a 1% difference:

Just some perspective to keep in mind. After the jump I’ve posted the House Fiscal Office’s summary table.

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Robert Decherd

The Providence Journal’s parent company, A.H. Belo, announced Wednesday that Robert Decherd will retire as its chairman, president and CEO on Sept. 11 and be succeeded by Jim Moroney, the Dallas Morning News’ longtime publisher and CEO.

Decherd, 62, will move to a new role as vice chairman of the board – and he’ll be richly compensated for doing so, according to a filing late Wednesday with the SEC.

Decherd will be paid $300,000 a year in 2014, 2015 and 2016 to serve as vice chairman of A.H. Belo’s board of directors, the company disclosed. Although Decherd will stop being CEO in September, he’ll still get his full $600,000 annual salary for 2013 and will be eligible for a full year’s bonus. Decherd earned $1.9 million in 2012.

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Perhaps you are an average Rhode Island citizen. Perhaps you want to look through the full text of the budget House Finance approved last night on a 12-0 vote. So you go find the bill – H5127A. (The A stands for “Sub A,” or the first substitute – aka amended – version of the original bill.)

Alas, all you see is a list of budget articles but not the actual text. Crestfallen, you log off and decide it’s just not worth it to be an active citizen. Instead, you go look at cat videos on BuzzFeed.

Charlie Hunt and Katherine Gregg to the rescue!

Hunt, director of public affairs at the Mayforth Group lobbying firm, and Gregg, State House bureau chief of The Providence Journal, have mastered the strange digital customs of Smith Hill, and they shared with me two ways to read the text of the budget articles – that is, the actual taxing-and-spending legislative language.

Hunt’s method: go to the 2013 House Bill Text page and scroll down to H5127A – you’ll find all 26 budget articles posted as separate PDFs underneath the main PDF, which is just a table of contents. Gregg’s method: go to the House calendar for June 25, the day the budget will be debated next week, and you’ll find links there to all 26 budget article PDFs. Ah, the sweet smell of open government.

Well done, Charlie and Kathy!

Update: Page 4 of the budget’s Article 8 authorizes the hitherto secret “Department of Fluinan Services” to enter into a lease (line 9). It also refers to the “Department of Labor anti Training” (line 6), which may shed some new light on why Rhode Island’s economy is struggling.

• Related: Chafee loses on local aid, corporate tax in House budget (June 18)

Don’t look now, but Pawtucket may be getting its own train station before too much longer.

It’s been six years since a 2007 feasibility study on the MBTA stop was published, and now The Valley Breeze’s Ethan Shorey reports growing momentum locally:

An environmental review and preliminary engineering have now been conducted by officials from the Department of Transportation, who have narrowed the possibilities for a future train station to a pair of Pawtucket sites:

* One is the P & W Railroad yard on the Goff Avenue side of the existing railroad tracks between the site of the former Union Wadding Mill and the Mineral Spring Cemetery.

* And the other, just over the tracks, is between Barton Street, Dexter Street, Weeden Street and the existing tracks, encompassing some commercial buildings diagonally across from the Lynch Arena.

[ ... ]

Construction of the project likely wouldn’t get started until at least 2017, if at all, according to [Stephen Devine, chief of Intermodal Planning for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation].

Read the rest here. There’s also a website with details about the proposal: vhb.com/pawtucketcommuterrail.

East Side Monthly’s Steve Triedman has a great story in the latest edition about an apparent boom in retail on the East Side of Providence – a nice antidote to the endless drumbeat of bad news about the capital city’s economy.

A sample of Triedman’s most interesting nuggets:

There are over 400 stores, restaurants and coffee shops to choose from, with more on the way. Retail occupancy on the East Side is well above the national rate of 93%. …

An unnamed national retailer is close to inking a deal on the recently vacated Gabrielle store in Wayland Square. …

On North Main Street, a major fitness chain is opening a 40,000 SF facility in the old Sears building, which has been partially occupied or vacant for 15 years. The old Ethan Allen store has been demolished and the rumor mill has narrowed the new tenant down to either a CVS, auto parts store or a bank. The Shaw’s Plaza, below North Main Street, which makes up the majority of the vacant retail space on the East Side, has been sold to Ocean State Job Lot, which is a major draw and will likely change the complexion of the plaza.

Read the rest here. There’s also a sidebar about why some buildings are still vacant. It’s particularly good to hear something may finally be happening at the old Sears store, which closed back in 1993 and is a sad spectacle of decay on busy North Main Street.

Slate’s Matt Yglesias frequently writes that we are witnessing “the end of retail” in America, but the situation on the East Side suggests we may be seeing the end – or at least the decline – of big-box stores; maybe the right smaller establishments located in dense urban environments can still thrive.

• Related: Study: Providence commercial tax rates highest in the US (May 10)

(photo: ArtinRuins)

Welcome to another edition of my weekend column – as always, send your takes, tips and trial balloons to tnesi@wpri.com. For quick hits all week long, follow me on Twitter: @tednesi.

1. You probably haven’t heard much about what may be Rhode Island’s biggest policy undertaking this year: the local rollout of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. In a basement office, a small staff of true believers and outside consultants led by Christine Ferguson are working around the clock to set up the state’s new health insurance exchange – the marketplace where individuals and small businesses can buy coverage under the law – in time for enrollment to start Oct. 1. The exchange’s insurance costs should be finalized before mid-July, with announcements about its brand name and new call center, plus a big marketing push, to follow. (Policymakers also need to figure out how to fund the exchange’s operating costs locally once federal money runs out in 2015.) The Chafee administration is focusing more on business users than some states; unlike the federal government, Rhode Island’s exchange will let workers whose employers use the new Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) buy any insurance plan they want with their premium money. Ferguson is envisioning more than an Expedia for insurance – she wants the exchange to drive changes in how health care gets delivered in Rhode Island, with an eye on reducing costs and improving quality. The stakes are high: health care costs are strangling small businesses in Rhode Island, as elsewhere, yet health care also has been one of the only sectors of the state’s economy adding jobs.

2. Here’s something that may surprise you: Rhode Island’s economy grew faster than the New England average last year, expanding 1.4% to $43.8 billion, after barely treading water in 2011. The only state in the region that performed better was Massachusetts (up 2.2%), while the one often held up as a model for Rhode Island to emulate – New Hampshire – managed to grow just 0.5%. (Connecticut’s economy actually shrank.) Some of the outperformance, then, is the soft bigotry of low expectations for growth in New England: Rhode Island’s 1.4% expansion only placed 34th nationally. Also interesting is which three sectors were responsible for much of Rhode Island’s 2012 growth: real estate, finance and wholesale trade. Notably – and perhaps ominously – the biggest drag on the state economy was actually health care and social assistance, which had been growing steadily in recent years. Rhode Island’s real GDP was $41,678 per capita last year, just below the national average.

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Patrick Kennedy is out of Congress, but he’s not out of the spotlight.

The former Rhode Island congressman will be the top interview on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” tonight at 10 p.m., likely talking about One Mind for Research, the nonprofit he cofounded to push for more research into brain science.

Kennedy isn’t the first Rhode Island politician to appear on Maher’s show: Lincoln Chafee was a guest on the program in October 2006 and again in October 2009, shortly before he kicked off his run for governor. (He got paid less than $1,000 for the ’09 spot.)

• Related: Bill Maher backs Taveras (and Chafee) on paring back pensions (July 16)

Well, they don’t call Rhode Island “Clinton Country” for nothing.

Ted Widmer, the former Bill Clinton speechwriter who ran Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library from 2006 to 2012, will reportedly serve as the ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming memoir, according to a Showbiz411 story published Thursday.

The revelation isn’t a big surprise. Brown announced Sept. 12 – the day after the Benghazi attack, as it happens - that Widmer would become a senior adviser to Clinton, who was then finishing up as secretary of state. He is continuing at Brown as a special assistant to President Christina Paxson, too.

Clinton has a deal with Simon & Schuster for the new book, due out in June 2014, and was expected to pocket an advance of as much as $14 million. Bill Clinton also got some help from Widmer in writing his own memoir.

Widmer’s ties to Rhode Island are longstanding; his father, Eric Widmer, was on the Brown faculty and served as dean of students for a time. The younger Widmer has also quietly aided Lincoln Chafee on some of the governor’s key speeches.

(photo: Brown University)

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne has a column today about the debate over surveillance, and one of the voices in the piece is that of U.S. Sen. Jack Reed (who also expressed concerns to WPRI last week):

That we’re now more inclined to question the national security state should not surprise anyone. “In the period immediately after the attacks of 9/11, the American people were willing to give the government broad power to keep them safe,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), one of Congress’s most thoughtful voices on national security, said in an interview. “Now, more than a decade later, it’s entirely appropriate that Americans are asking about the balance between security and privacy.”

Reed believes that we still need extensive surveillance programs. But he was also in the minority last December in supporting an earlier version of the Merkley proposal on the FISA court decisions. He also favored another amendment, proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), that would have required the director of national intelligence to submit a report to Congress and the public on the impact of the revised FISA law on the privacy of U.S. citizens.

This is a rare issue that divides Reed and his junior colleague, Sheldon Whitehouse.

Reed voted yes but Whitehouse voted no on the two measures from December that Dionne references – the Merkley amendment to disclose legal justification for surveillance and the Wyden amendment to require a privacy report. As I wrote in Saturday’s column, Whitehouse’s views may relate to his past service on the Intelligence Committee, his time in law enforcement and his general trust in the federal government.

• Related: Sen. Whitehouse defends Obama on surveillance programs (June 7)

One of the goals of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act was to extend health coverage to uninsured Americans without disrupting the current system of employer-based insurance and safety-net programs. That means Rhode Island will have a patchwork of health coverage provisions starting on Jan. 1, 2014, when the law’s major policies take effect – and what you use will depend on how much you make annually.

Obamacare will largely use two programs – Medicaid, the long-established state-federal health program for the poor, and the new Health Benefits Exchanges, which I wrote about Monday – to offer subsidized coverage to most Americans who make less than 400% of the federal poverty level (FPL). This chart from a recent RIPEC study offers the clearest breakdown of who’ll qualify for what coverage in Rhode Island on Jan. 1:

(“HBE” stands for the Rhode Island Health Benefits Exchange, which is being created by Obamacare and will offer subsidies for insurance to roughly 83,000 people. “CHIP” is the federal-state Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers uninsured children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid.)

Of course, nobody gets paid in FPL percentages – they get paid in dollars. To help you match the chart’s top row with actual wages, here’s the 2013 federal poverty level standards, also from RIPEC:

• Related: Study: Obamacare to subsidize insurance for 83,000 in RI (June 10)

Gov. Lincoln Chafee loves infrastructure – but he’s not ready to support Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’s ambitious request for $39 million in federal money to build a streetcar line in the city.

“The streetcar project is a promising concept but not ready to go,” Chafee spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger told WPRI.com on Tuesday.

Taveras has asked for $39 million from the federal government to fund a $114-million streetcar system in the capital. The grant would come from the competitive Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program, which has $474 million to hand out nationwide this year – meaning Providence is seeking about 8% of the national pot.

Chafee, however, wants a different Rhode Island proposal to win TIGER money this year: the state’s request for $10 million to build new bypass roads around the Apponaug Business District in Warwick, where Chafee was mayor from 1993 to 1999. Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian is also chairman of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, which is supposed to manage Providence’s proposed streetcar system.

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Dan McGowan broke the news Monday that Providence Mayor Angel Taveras has asked the federal government for a $39 million TIGER grant to help fund construction of Providence’s long-discussed streetcar system, which would link College Hill and the hospital districts starting in 2017.

Streetcar geeks – like Greater City Providence’s Jef Nickerson – will want to dig into the city’s entire federal application (PDF). For the rest of you, here are some highlights from the Taveras administration proposal.

Let’s start with the most basic question you probably have. Where would the streetcars go? How often would they run? This map has a good basic overview:

Much more after the jump.

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Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence Thomas Tobin received some unpleasant correspondence in response to his comments about same-sex marriage being legalized in Rhode Island.

In a speech Saturday to the annual Portsmouth Institute conference, Tobin said he “received a letter from an angry individual who began, as harsh critics so often do, by establishing his Catholic credentials.”

The prelate quoted the writer as telling him: “Bishop Tobin, based on your pastoral letter and a review of your previous comments on this subject, I have concluded that you are evil, reprehensible, homophobic, and bigoted, and that you should be ashamed of yourself in general and in particular as a so-called Christian.”

Tobin said he also received an email that called him a “fat, old, conservative bigot.” His reply? “I am not fat.”

Tobin’s address, “Evangelization in a Secular Age,” reflected on the modern era’s challenges for Christians. He cited a Barna Group survey declaring Providence the fourth-most post-Christian city in America.

“Is it the failure of the leaders of the Church to adequately preach and teach?” Tobin asked in response. “Is [it] the failure of rank-and-file Christians to give compelling witness in their daily lives? Is it the secular agenda promoted by the leaders of our government? Is it the atmosphere created by the left-leaning media and the erudite academic communities of our area? Is it a combination of all these things? Probably.”

• Related: Tobin: Think ‘very carefully’ before going to gay weddings (May 2)

Welcome to another edition of my weekend column – as always, send your takes, tips and trial balloons to tnesi@wpri.com. For quick hits all week long, follow me on Twitter: @tednesi.

1. Warwick Rep. Frank Ferri offered a short-term solution to the 38 Studios bond-payment controversy at Thursday’s Finance Committee hearing: “Maybe we should pay this year’s payment,” he suggested, “and then do our due diligence to come up with a clearer answer.” That sounds sensible. It’s important to remember that lawmakers aren’t being asked to pay the whole $90 million this year; Governor Chafee’s request for this year is only for $2.5 million, which is just 0.03% of next year’s budget – and far less than the $12.5 million that will be required annually starting in 2014. Making the initial payment preserves Rhode Island’s options on the remaining $87.5 million; skipping it will put the state in effective default, with all the consequences that could follow. If lawmakers are upset about the situation, they should amend this year’s payment and require Chafee, Treasurer Raimondo, Speaker Fox and Senate President Paiva Weed to commission a formal study of the consequences of default, as suggested by MMA’s Matt Fabian. (In fact, why wasn’t that done months ago?) In this age of bailouts and austerity, it’s understandable that lawmakers don’t want to pay bondholders money to which they aren’t even legally entitled – but if the direct and indirect costs of default top $90 million, they shouldn’t cut off Rhode Island’s nose to spite its face.

2. Staff changes are coming to Congressman Cicilline’s office as he settles into his second term. Word from the Beltway is that Scott Fay, who’s been Cicilline’s chief of staff since the former Providence mayor went to Washington, is preparing to leave Capitol Hill. Fay has spent more than a decade working in Congress for Cicilline, California’s John Garamendi and the late Ted Kennedy. The pair are scouting for a new chief of staff to be put in place before Fay’s departure.

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The Tax Foundation put together a set of maps showing how much of their total revenue state and local governments get from different kinds of taxes, using Census data from the 2009-10 fiscal year.

One big takeaway: Rhode Island gets a significantly smaller share of its revenue from income taxes (19%) than Massachusetts (30%) or Connecticut (27%). They rank fifth- and ninth-highest for income-tax share, while Rhode Island ranks 33rd. Here’s a map showing the comparison:

At the same time, Rhode Island is more reliant on property taxes (46%, or 4th-most nationally) than Connecticut (42%/9th) or Massachusetts (39%/15th), though all the New England states are in the top 15:

• Related: Making the case for property taxes across the pond (Sept. 26, 2011)

LaSalle Bakery and Joe Marzilli’s Old Canteen are two favorite places for Providence residents to get a bite to eat – though the food might be cheaper if the eateries paid property taxes in Cranston, Warwick or Smithfield.

With the Providence City Council giving its final OK on Monday to Mayor Angel Taveras’s proposal to freeze the commercial-property tax rate at the highest level in any major American city, a recent report the council commissioned offers some examples of how Providence’s high taxes impact familiar local businesses.

The 41-page report by the nine-member Commission on Revenue Sustainability and Effectiveness took a look at how Providence’s commercial tax rate – which will stay at $36.75 per $1,000 of assessed value in 2013-14 – compares with those of its surrounding towns. Take a look:

At the high end, One Citizens Plaza pays Providence $1.38 million annually, $238,204 more than it would in Cranston and $782,778 more than it would in Smithfield. At the low end, LaSalle Bakery pays Providence $14,005 a year, $2,423 more than it would in Cranston and $7,965 more than it would in Smithfield.

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Uh oh, Rhode Island.

R.I. House Finance Committee Chairman Helio Melo has a unique definition of “neutral.”

In a news advisory issued Tuesday, House leadership announced Melo’s panel will hear a presentation Thursday afternoon from Matt Fabian, managing director of Municipal Market Advisors, about whether taxpayers should repay the 38 Studios bonds. “The presentation is intended to provide insight that a neutral, expert third party can bring to the topic,” the statement said.

But Fabian – the only witness the committee is scheduled to hear from – isn’t necessarily neutral.

Last July, Fabian predicted doom for Rhode Island if taxpayers fail to pay the 38 Studios bondholders, who include USAA and Transamerica. “The market would treat it as tantamount to defaulting,” Fabian told Stateline. Rhode Island, he warned, “would be ostracized.”

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Longtime East Greenwich Town Manager William Sequino Jr. has been tapped as the new executive director of the quasi-public R.I. Clean Water Finance Agency, WPRI.com has confirmed.

Sequino will succeed Anthony Simeone, who is retiring after 19 years in the agency’s top job, on July 8. Sequino, 64, has been town manager in East Greenwich, one of Rhode Island’s wealthiest and most stable communities, since 1988.

The Clean Water Finance Agency has a relatively low profile, but it plays a key role in financing the maintenance of Rhode Island’s water system by providing subsidized and low-interest loans to local governments, which they use to fund infrastructure projects.

RICWFA’s total assets have grown from $102 million to more than $1.3 billion under Simeone, and it has a AAA credit rating. “The success of the Clean Water Finance Agency over the years has been due in large part to the leadership and hard work of Tony Simeone,” Governor Chafee said in a statement.

The agency was in the spotlight in March when House Speaker Gordon Fox and Treasurer Gina Raimondo unveiled a proposal to create a new Municipal Road and Bridge Revolving Loan Fund there to help communities borrow for repairs. Both said they wanted to capitalize on the agency’s strength under Simeone; the House Finance Committee hasn’t voted on the bill yet.

Sequino, who is also serving as chair of the Woonsocket Budget Commission, was picked by the agency’s five-member board of directors: Chairman James Hagerty, a senior banker at Washington Trust; Bank Rhode Island VP Scott Lajoie; attorney Joshua Celeste; Lisa Ferrara; and Josh Brumberger, a senior aide to Treasurer Gina Raimondo who represents her on the board.

• Related: What is the Rhode Island Clean Water Finance Agency? (March 21)

By John Marion

In 2007, the journal Sleep published an article suggesting a lack of sleep can cloud a person’s moral judgment. This result is something to consider as we approach the end of the General Assembly’s annual session.

Rhode Island lawmakers often conduct their final business in the early hours of the morning, just before they break for the remainder of the year. We can only speculate what effect these late-night sessions have on the judgment of legislators. We do know that the usual process in the final days of the legislative session – including the late nights when the $8-billion state budget is passed, as well as the final late-night session – is a recipe for mischief and mistakes.

Here are some numbers to consider.

Rhode Island lawmakers have been meeting three days a week since the General Assembly session began on Jan. 1. By Memorial Day weekend, they had introduced 2,126 bills and resolutions and sent 136 of them to Gov. Lincoln Chafee for his signature.

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If you didn’t hear, Ted turned 29 on Friday and spent most of the week attempting to lock down a disability pension. So I hijacked his desk, took his car for a spin and tried not to get chocolate all over his stuff. He’ll be back next week, but for now, welcome to another edition of the Saturday Morning Post – and feel free to send your takes, tips and trial balloons to dmcgowan@wpri.com or tnesi@wpri.com. For quick hits all week long, follow both of us on Twitter: @danmcgowan & @tednesi.

1. Spin artists from every likely gubernatorial candidate’s camp were out in full force this week following Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s decision to join the Democratic Party, but here’s one thing they all seem to have in common: they all believe their horse will perform well in Providence, the city that made all the difference for Myrth York when she eked out a Democratic primary victory over Sheldon Whitehouse in 2002. York won that race by 926 votes thanks in large part to her 2,379-vote win in the capital city. For Mayor Angel Taveras, supporters can point to his convincing victory in the 2010 Democratic primary and a 2012 Brown University poll that showed 60% of Providence voters believed he was doing an excellent or good job as evidence that he’ll perform well in his home city. Then again, Chafee’s decisive victory in Providence – he won with 50% of the vote – was one of the key reasons he held off Republican John Robitaille in 2010 and he has continuously gone to bat for the city since taking office (just wait until his campaign commercials feature Taveras praising his commitment to Providence). But don’t count out Gina Raimondo either. The treasurer has a strong base on the East Side and was the second-highest vote-getter – less than 1,000 behind Taveras – in the city in the 2010 general election. (By the way, don’t miss Ted’s smart analysis on Chafee’s big switch and what it means for the 2014 race.)

2. Campaign finance fun: We know Raimondo is lapping the field when it comes to fundraising; she has $1.7 million compared with the mayor’s $561,000 and Chafee’s $358,000. But guess know how many people have cut $1,000 checks to at least two of the three likely primary opponents in 2014 since they all took office in 2011? The answer: 84. The list of donors that have hit the trifecta and written $1,000 checks to all three is much shorter: 11. (Note: that does not include donors who have made several smaller donations that add up to $1,000.) Something tells me things will be getting quite awkward at the Hope Club come this time next year. (more…)

By Paula Hodges

Rhode Island is considered one of the most “blue” states in the country, ranking eighth most Democratic in Gallup’s 2013 State of the States report, and the Democratic supermajorities in the General Assembly would seem to indicate progressivism. Yet in stark contrast to this progressive marker, women comprise only 27% of General Assembly members. This critical lack of gender parity in positions of power and elected office – along with decades-old state laws and recent fights over healthcare reform – point to a more disturbing picture.

Alarmingly, when it comes to reproductive justice Rhode Island is comparable to conservative Midwest states such as Missouri, Arkansas or Oklahoma. Advocates in the Ocean State find ourselves similarly forced to defend annually against bills that would politicize abortion and make the procedure more difficult to access. Although 2013 will go down as a landmark year when Rhode Island became the 10th state to pass marriage equality, 20 years after that struggle began – and 40 years after Roe v. Wade – the cloud of religious-refusal clauses and discrimination recently overcome by marriage-equality advocates still threatens to rain down on women’s reproductive health.

Everything is not as it seems

Rhode Island merits a D+ grade from NARAL, with the most stringent abortion laws in all of New England. Conservative New Hampshire outpaces us with a C+, while Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut all receive A grades.

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By Carroll Andrew Morse

The question of whether to arm campus police officers at Rhode Island’s public colleges and universities, though seemingly a minor chapter in the overall debate about firearms in America, offers unique insight into why issues surrounding guns are so contentious. To quote Dan Kahan, Donald Braman and John Gastil – a trio of professors involved with Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project who have studied how gun matters are contested in public – the debate is intense because the issues at stake are as broad as “preferred ways of organizing, perceiving and justifying social relations.”

The view of Kahan and his colleagues has its roots in cultural anthropology (*), specifically in work started in the latter half of the twentieth century by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas. Douglas sought to identify common principles that could be applied to the analysis of any human society, “primitive” or “modern.” Amongst the concepts she found to be fundamental were that all societies relied on symbols and taboos for communicating intangible ideas to one another, implying that the study of ideas could not be fully separated from the study of their symbolic representations; and that humans everywhere focused on “on moral and political weaknesses they expect will escalate the damage” from dangers they faced, as much as they focused on dangers themselves, causing public debates about potential threats to “link some real danger to some disapproved behavior.”

Real dangers and disapproved behaviors, and moral and political weaknesses are certainly all factors in the debate over arming campus police officers – which is another way of saying that what guns symbolize in this debate is as important as guns themselves.

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It’s nearly official: Lincoln Chafee will be a Democratic candidate for governor in 2014.

Chafee spokesman Christian Varieka told WPRI.com the governor will make his announcement at 10:30 a.m. Thursday at Warwick City Hall. (Yes, Varieka made the call on personal time.) The news – first broken hundreds of miles south of Rhode Island by Politico and The Washington Post – struck the state’s political class like a thunderbolt Wednesday, despite the fact that Chafee has long indicated he was open to the possibility and amid rising speculation the move was coming.

Ideologically speaking, the switch makes perfect sense: Chafee is more aligned with the national Democratic Party than many of its nominal officeholders in Rhode Island. Think about it: this is a governor elected with the support of the state’s teachers’ unions on a platform of raising taxes to fund social services who just signed a law legalizing same-sex marriage in the nation’s most Catholic state.

Politically, Chafee has been a Democrat in all but name for a long time now – in 2012 he not only co-chaired President Obama’s re-election campaign and spoke at the Democratic National Convention, he even endorsed Sheldon Whitehouse’s bid for the very U.S. Senate seat he took from Chafee in 2006.

Clearly, Chafee and his savvy chief of staff, former Patrick Kennedy aide George Zainyeh, decided the approval-challenged governor’s best bet for a second term was in the Democratic Party. (Indeed, Chafee’s 2011 decision to replace the more Republican-friendly Pat Rogers with Zainyeh now seems telling.) But what’s the path? And are they right? Here are a few initial thoughts.

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By Lou Mazzucchelli

Ask people what leaps into their minds when you say “Rhode Island” and you get lots of different answers, depending on the geographic distance between the responder and our state. As a recently returned native, my answer is this: “Nora Desmond from ‘Sunset Boulevard.’”

Rhode Island is still attractive given her age, but almost completely delusional.

My conclusion stems from looking around the State when I returned four years ago after a 12-year absence. For instance, I fully expected to see Quonset thriving as a deep-water port. I hoped that the modest technology roots I had planted with Cadre Technologies might have sprouted into a small but functional technology business ecosystem. I was optimistic that downtown Providence would have attracted the broad array of small service businesses needed to thrive together with a growing residential population.

Instead, I found people still squabbling over using a deep-water port for its highest and best use, a mostly dysfunctional startup ecosystem, and a downtown area that was in the process of completely hollowing itself out. What were people thinking?

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