On Politics

After years of building his political credentials, West Warwick native Paul Tencher is at the center of one of the nation’s closest, hardest-fought US Senate races — the Indiana fight between Democrat Joe Donnelly and Republican Richard Mourdock.

Providence lawyer David Vogel, the independent candidate in the First Congressional District, has mostly gained attention for attracting 8 percent of the vote in a recent Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poll.

So there is yet another tome out dissecting Rhode Island’s economic woes. RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay talks about what the big Rhode Island Public Expenditure report didn’t say.

The General Assembly has long been populated with public employees — police officers, firefighters, and teachers — so the Hatch Act complaint described by state Representative Jon Brien has no small significance.

Larry Berman, the spokesman for House Speaker Gordon Fox, says the House leadership believes Stephen Casey is on solid ground in rebutting Brien’s complaint.

Woonsocket firefighter Stephen Casey, who beat state Representative Jon Brien in the September 11 primary, says he thinks Brien’s charge of a Hatch Act violation is all wet.

Outgoing state Representative Jon Brien, who lost his seat in the September 11 primary to Woonsocket firefighter Stephen Casey, charged today that Casey was ineligible to run to a federal Hatch Act violation. Brien says the violation is based on how Casey is employed by a department that receives federal funding.

The state Republican Party is unhappy that a group with a self-described mission of supporting “pro-jobs” legislative candidates is backing at least two Democratic professionals over Republican small businessmen.

The New Leaders Project emerged in 2010 with the goal of promoting a more “pro-growth” General Assembly. Yet RI GOP chairman Mark Zaccaria finds fault with two of the group’s current endorsements:

Brown University’s Taubman Center is out with a new Providence-based survey. Some highlights:

– Mayor Angel Taveras has a 60 percent approval rating in the survey of 425 registered voters, up 10 points from last year, according to Brown. (MoE is just under five percentage points.)

– President Obama’s approval rating in Providence is 68 percent.

The conventional wisdom holds that the September 11 primary was, at best, a status quo election for supporters of same-sex marriage. Legislative candidates who back the issue fared far better in the House, after all, than the real battlefield of the Senate. And Senate Judiciary Chairman Michael McCaffrey fended off a challenge by Laura Pisaturo, a gay woman, in one of the primary’s most high-profile legislative races.

John Simmons (left), executive director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC), formally presented this morning a 136-page report on remaking Rhode Island’s approach to economic development.