Weekend Review

A typical weekend on Anchor Rising — and just about all such Web sites, as far as I can tell — brings a 25% drop in daily visitors compared with a weekday. Herewith a summary of our Saturday and Sunday posts for readers who believe their weekends better spent doing otherwise than obsessively reloading our site. (Can you imagine?)

I began the weekend pondering the implications of males' natural behavior for a society definitionally concerned with targeting behavior toward civilization's ends. It took fewer intellectual steps than one might think to transition to a look at the upshot of federal and state trends in energy legislation that will increase costs for everybody across the country, with Rhode Island (as ever) striving to impose an additional premium on its residents.

In like vein, I later noted that market and medical realities will not bend for government care and wondered aloud how a gang with police power will respond to them. Marc pointed out that one strategy (at least for Democrats) might be to give labor unions special treatment. On education, some resident comments at a West Warwick town meeting prompted the question of whether it mightn't save money just to send all of our children to private school.

Focusing more directly on governance qua governance, I directed readers to the Wall Street Journal's argument that progressive policies hurt and opined that nepotism doesn't help. Monique offered Speaker of the RI House Bill Murphy the suggestion that less government might be more, when it comes to the General Assembly. I posed the hypothetical of whether Murphy's expressed objective of allowing legislators to "cool off" was more likely a hope that others would look away. Monique might quip that legislators desire, thereby, to sweep the non-cancellation of local mandates under this year's rug.

Mark Steyn inspired a post on celebrity culture and politics, for which I subsequently presented a piece of evidence in the form of a columnist's pining for dates like the Obamas go on.

Monique also posted a cartoon on Iran by the ever insightful Charlie Hall.