Could this be the guy who bought the YMCA camp?

Newport Man Generates Energy and Anger

By TIM FAULKNER/ecoRI.org News staff

The four wind turbines on the roof of his Newport home
supply electricity for everything but his clothes dryer
and kitchen stove. (Tim Faulkner/ecoRI News photos)

NEWPORT — Sometimes you gotta say, “Screw you,” to make things happen. 

That’s what city resident John McNulty seems to be doing to get local rules established for residential wind turbines.

McNulty, a gifted do-it-yourselfer and admitted “thorn in the ass” to those who disapprove of his abundance of re-purposed outdoor furnishings — piles of masonry stones, assorted boats and a roof that looks like a makeshift weather station — didn’t wait around for government to tell him how to generate his own electricity.

2nd Annual Waterman Eco-Challenge Promotes Safety

“We had our hands full, but the conditions added to the energy of the day.” ~ Brian Guadagno, Senior Ocean Lifeguard Captain

By Tracey C. O'Neill  for Progressive Charlestown

2012 Waterman Eco-Challenge Prone Paddleboarders
(photo by Tracey C. O'Neill)

Ocean and sun safety awareness were on the agenda as the 2^nd Annual Waterman Eco-Challenge kicked off on Narragansett Town Beach on Saturday.

An Eco-friendly 3-mile paddle, The Challenge, organized by Narragansett Parks & Recreation and Narragansett Surf Rescue, was sponsored by WaveJet and Raw Elements, eco-friendly water, surf and sun-safe businesses with local ties.  The start, just before noon was held despite conditions more conducive to a traditional surf contest.  

“Leave the people out of it”

Boss Gentz names names.

… Unless, of course, you’re CCA and you’re screaming for someone to be fired.

By Linda Felaco

At the July 9 Town Council meeting, Town Council President Tom Gentz (CCA) called for a boycott* of Progressive Charlestown, denouncing our lack of “civility” and our impolite habit of “naming names.” Gentz repeatedly demanded that we “leave the people out of it.”

Which sounds reasonable in principle, but there’s just a few problems with that.

First, just how would Gentz have us report on town government without naming names of who’s doing what when, where, and how? Should we assign numbers to the councilors like in the old Dating Game and refer to them as Councilor #1, Councilor #2, Councilor #3, and so on? I suppose town employees who have unique job titles could be referred to by title rather than by name, but it’d be kinda hard to report on what goes on at Town Council or Planning Commission meetings without “naming names.”

Perhaps Gentz would like us to use a “master lever” in Charlestown so we could “leave names out of it” when voting.

Reasons to Hate Obama

All perfectly logical

By Tim Eagan


Click here for the whole cartoon.

The 'Freedom' to Refuse Health Insurance

Raise your hand if you don't want any health insurance.

By Mitchell Zimmerman

As the writer Anatole France once said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."

The right to refuse to have health insurance — something Republican leaders tout as a fundamental freedom — is a lot like the "right" to sleep under bridges. No one wants to exercise it.

GOP leaders are framing the requirement that every American get health insurance as the gravest assault on our liberty since the British burned the White House in 1814. But even the most hard-core teapartistas tend to freely choose the very insurance coverage whose imposition they decry as socialist tyranny. Few conservatives insist on paying their own medical expenses because they're rugged individualists.

Keep the bugs out!

Keep the Bugs Out: Buy and Burn Local Wood

Asian Long-horned beetle

By ecoRI.org News staff


Tree-eating, non-native insects can be transported in firewood, with the potential to cause damage costing millions of dollars in clean-up, eradication and replanting efforts, according to the state Department of Environmental Management (DEM).

In fact, the issue of invasive species is one of the U.S. Forest Service’s top four threats. The financial impact from invasive species infestations in the United States has been estimated at $138 billion annually in total economic damages and associated control costs.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Episode 3 – Avoiding Car Sickness

By Robert Yarnall

Read the rest of the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot series:
Episode 1 – Getting Ready To Fish
Episode 2 – Watchaug Bites
Episode 3 – Avoiding Car Sickness
Episode 4 – Bait & Switch (Not!)
Episode 5 – Still Baiting, Still Switching…
Episode 6 – Mother Gooser & Friends
Episode 7 – Under the Radar with L-T
Episode 8 – Steering Committee Syndrome Unleashed, The Prelude
Episode 9 – Steering Committee Syndrome Unleashed, The Kiss
Episode 10 – Snagged on the Epilog Epic-Log

The convenient truth about hauling a bass boat out of Watchaug Pond is that it’s basically clean when winched onto the trailer. No salty brine to topcoat the gunwales or yuck up the seats. Just drag the fish stalker up the ramp and beat a path to Route 1.

The AAA-endorsed triptik says to simply follow Prosser Trail toward the sea, but every once in a while some genius trades in his GPS for an IPA and winds up rampaging through the Sachem Passage neighborhood, where he  unwittingly brushes up against the second largest fluke ever caught in Charlestown, officially recorded as Assessor’s Map 17, Lot 186.

Village folklorists know this place as Whalerock.

Council finishes its July meeting with a 25 minute silly session

Council disdains MOU as well as open, transparent and professional governance

By Will Collette

It was not Tom Gentz's finest half hour

With no Y-Gate Scandal matters on the agenda, the Town Council met and bumbled through 25 minutes of business left over from their July 9 session.

Playing to a largely empty chamber, the meeting began with comments from Councilor Gregg Avedisian that the meeting agenda was incorrectly constructed. It was set up as if it was a regular Council meeting, rather than a continuation of the earlier July 9 meeting. Avedisian noted that using standard agenda boilerplate was inappropriate.

Town Solicitor Peter Ruggiero agreed, noting that the Council should have the Town Clerk list only those items necessary to complete the Council’s business for the month.

The Tax Former Movement

What's he hiding?

By Ted Rall




See the rest of the cartoon here.

300,000 – but who’s counting?

Despite Gentz boycott call, Progressive Charlestown readership grows

By Will Collette

Says she's never read Progressive Charlestown but knows enough to
denounce it from the Council dais (giving us a 40% bump in readership)

It’s been hard not to pay attention to our readership figures – like any editor or writer, I want to know that people are actually reading our stuff, so, yes, I look at our numbers at least once a day.

When Tom Ferrio and I started Progressive Charlestown, we thought that there might be a few dozen people who would click on the website, mainly out of curiosity, to read our personal take on Charlestown life, culture and politics.

At the end of February 2011, our first full month of operation, our articles were read a total of 1150 times[1], an average of just over three dozen a day.

Year of the Gaffe

We've got four more months of this.

By Peter Hart

Maybe you think the presidential election will come down to the issues. That would mean looking at how Barack Obama and Mitt Romney differ on important matters — or, in many cases, how they don't. Or perhaps the election might be all about money, and the shadowy Super PACs that will bombard us with TV advertising.

But often the campaign dwells on something else: gaffes.

What's a "gaffe"? One of those unscripted or "off-message" comments that, according to big-media pundits, are deeply revealing.

Planning Commission – THEY’RE BACK!

After short hiatus, Platner and her Planning Police come back on July 25 to long agenda

She's back!

By Will Collette

NOTE: given tonight's very light Town Council agenda, your Progressive Charlestown team will cover it later. The Wednesday Planning Commission meeting has a lot more juicy stuff in it.

On Wednesday, July 25, Charlestown’s premiere legislative and regulatory body[i], the Planning Commission returns to duty. They usually formally meet twice a month, but they cancelled their July 5 meeting and have not met since June 27.

They have a full dozen agenda items listed on Clerkbase, although many of them might simply be “placeholders” – slots reserved just in case Planning Commissar Ruth Platner wants to discuss items without overtly violating the Open Meetings Act.

We can be pretty certain that where there are documents linked to an agenda item, that item will actually be discussed at the July 25 meeting.

Let’s take a look.

Life begins at incorporation

Corporate Pro-Lifers

By Matt Bors


For the whole cartoon, click here.

Death comes for the humpback

By Linda Felaco

UPDATE, JULY 24: The Westerly Sun has reported that aquarium staff weren't able to find a place to perform the necropsy and the body was too badly decomposed already for them to be able to get much information from it—chunks of the carcass were falling off—so in the end they hauled her farther out to sea and sank her. So we'll never know how she died.
 
This morning, the Westerly Sun reported that a dead humpback whale had washed ashore at Lord's Point in Stonington. My husband and I grabbed the camera and headed down Route 1 to see if we could get a look at it before the good folks from Mystic Aquarium could haul it away. In one of life's odd coincidences, just as we were driving along the Charlestown moraine, WRIU was airing a program on … wait for it … the Charlestown moraine.

Hurricane insurance sticker shock will lessen

New Legislation goes into effect in January

Hurricane shutters battened down, waiting for Irene

By Will Collette

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, coastal residents have been paying much higher homeowner insurance premiums, if they can get conventional homeowners’ insurance at all, to cover insurers’ losses from Katrina and for future risk.

In 2006, after Katrina, Cathy and I received a notice from our long-time home insurance carrier. We were told that, despite having never filed a claim, we were going to be cancelled. And if we wanted to prevent that from happening, we had to install what we discovered were very expensive, hurricane-proof window and door guards.