Matt also has a bit on Governor Carcieri being talked up as a VP possibility for Mitt Romney:
The WaPo's Chris Cillizza has a good run-through of the possible VPs for each candidate. Look who he has listed for Mitt Romney:
* Don Carcieri: The Rhode Island governor doesn't get much publicity, but he has been elected and reelected in a VERY blue state and, before getting involved in politics, was a successful businessman. Sound like someone else you know?
Meanwhile, Anchor Rising's Justin today publishes another op-ed in the ProJo, taking folks, including my Newsmakers' colleague, to task:
Steve Aveson likened the decrease of public assistance for undocumented children to a “harsh carrot and stick”; “we deprive children of this support” so that their parents will “get the idea . . . and they’ll go away from Rhode Island.” But even a compassionate welcome can be worn out, and in truth, it only makes sense to devote scarce financial resources to their education and non-emergency health care if our invitation is for them to stay.
But the state’s primary moral obligation is to those who are not strangers, to provide an environment in which they can thrive of their own initiative. Thwarted by vested interests at the voting booth, many Rhode Islanders have been attempting, via moving van, to communicate to those Democrats in the Senate that the budgetary policy statement is unjust. It is on their backs, and at the cost of their aspirations, that Rhode Island’s powerful have been solving their deficit of maturity and failed comprehension of consequences.
As someone with a long-running (and unpaid) connection to the show, I think Justin oversteps in prescribing an advocacy role to Aveson, who like myself and other panelists, uses various rhetorical devices (the ever-popular devil's advocate, for example) in the interest of posing questions and stimulating discussion.