Tagged: scott mackay

After the Rhode Island court scandals of the 1990s, the state changed the way judges are chosen. RIPR political analyst explains why lawyers with Statehouse connections keep getting appointed to the bench despite the reforms.

Common Cause of Rhode Island, the good government group, the Rhode Island Bar Association and a past president of the NAACP skewered Gov. Lincoln Chafee recently when he elevated former Senate President Joe Montalbano to a coveted judgeship on the state superior court bench.

The Atlantic Hockey blog mentions that the University of Rhode Island is being considered by league brass to replace the University of Connecticut, which is moving its Division 1 hockey team into the Hockey East.

The Atlantic Hockey Conference is known as a stepping stone conference for colleges moving up to Division 1. Quinnipiac, for example, started in Atlantic Hockey and is now a national power that plays in the ECAC conference along with such Ivy League schools as Brown and Yale, which won the national championship a few weeks back over Quinnipiac, Yale’s New Haven neighbor.

The Dynamo House, the century-old onetime Narragansett Electric power station, now sits as a forlorn reminder of what once thrived along Providence’s downtown waterfront.  And as Rhode Island Public Radio political analyst Scott MacKay notes, it now stands as a guard to the old Jewelry District that state and city officials are trying to rebrand as a Knowledge District.

Richard Walton was an unforgettable presence for decades in our cozy state. An activist, he was in the forefront of so many campaigns for social justice and peace during his 84 years on this earth that even his friends couldn’t do a full accounting. A graduate of Brown in the 1950s, at a time when most of his WASP classmates went into banking, law or joined the CIA, Richard took the path less traveled. He became a reporter for the Providence Journal, then worked in New York newspapering during the Golden Age of print journalism.

Rhode Island hasn’t had enough to celebrate lately. RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay brings us an anniversary all Rhode Islanders can take pride in next month.

Three hundred and fifty years ago, Rhode Island struck a blow that would reverberate around the globe when England granted the colony a charter that for the first time in the modern world put in place a government that granted absolute religious freedom to its people.