Side of the Rhode: Who’s Hot and Who’s Not? - September 9, 2022

HOT

Local Endorsements

As the state’s only locally owned statewide news organization, GoLocal believes that it is important to offer voters in-depth analyses of the candidates -- from a community-based perspective.

A GoLocal endorsement is that of the ownership of our publication and is completely separate from our news reporting function.

This year, in our first time offering endorsements, we took the extraordinary step of not accepting any political advertising during the primary campaign cycle.

This is a significant financial sacrifice, but we believe that it was important for maintaining the credibility and rigor of our endorsements.

Here's who GoLocal has endorsed in the primaries to date:

Mayor of Providence - Gonzalo Cuervo - READ HERE

General Treasurer - Stefan Pryor - READ HERE

Secretary of State - Stephanie Beauté - READ HERE

Lt. Governor - Coming Saturday

Governor - Coming Sunday

HOT

More Cooley 

Providence College announced Tuesday that Men's Basketball Head Coach Ed Cooley has agreed to a multi-year contract extension.

Cooley, who earned Naismith Coach of the Year honors, guided the Friars to a 27-6 mark in 2022. 

"Providence is my home and Providence is where I want to be," said Cooley. "Not many coaches are able to live the dream of coaching in their hometown and I feel blessed every day that I have this opportunity. I have had the good fortune of working for great administrators and coaching some of the best players in the country."

HOT

Advocacy for the Voiceless

The George Wiley Center, the longest-running statewide anti-poverty group in Rhode Island, organized a community “speak out” this week at its headquarters in Pawtucket.

 “In the past year, the PPL corporation bought out the Rhode Island branch of National Grid and is now branding itself as 'Rhode Island Energy.' They are proposing a rate increase of nearly 50% while, on the other side of the Atlantic, even the conservatives in the Tory party are talking about a freeze on utility rate increases for the next 18 months,” said the Wiley Center in a statement.

"The time to speak out is now. We won’t accept these enormous rate increases. We reject these proposed rate hikes that will cause widespread utility terminations to thousands of struggling families in Rhode Island, right before winter sets in," said Camilo Viveiros, executive director of the George Wiley Center.

HOT

Shark Researchers

Two Rhode Islanders -- wildlife cinematographers Joe Romeiro and his wife, URI marine biologist and Ph.D. student Lauren Romeiro -- have captured rare video footage and still photographs of rare porbeagle sharks, also known as the "phantom" shark, swimming off the coast of Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts. 

Porbeagle Sharks typically reach 8.2 feet in length and a weight of about 300 pounds and North Atlantic sharks grow larger than Southern Hemisphere sharks.

Named for its ‘porpoise’ shape and for its ‘beagle’-like hunting prowess, this little-known deep-water predator is often mistaken for its close relatives, the Great White and Mako sharks.

“There are very few photos or film footage of free-swimming porbeagle sharks anywhere in the world,” states Joe Romeiro. “We were out at night on our research vessel to capture what few have ever witnessed, hoping for just one porbeagle but then we saw five interacting with each other. It was the motherload!”

See footage HERE. 

HOT

Da da da da...

In 2014, Tucker Halpern led the Brown University men's basketball team to a home upset of Providence College.

That year, Brown outscored PC 9-1 in the final 1:58 to stun the Friars 69-68.

Then a junior, Halpern, who missed all of the previous season with an illness, popped a three-pointer from the left corner with :07 seconds remaining to provide the margin of victory. He finished with 26 points.

After the game, PC Coach Ed Cooley said, "I'm sick to my stomach over this loss."

Providence College stopped playing Brown University; Halpern may have been a big part of the decision.

SOFI TUKKER

Now, Halpern and Sophie Hawley-Weld, who met at Brown, have the hot music video featured in ESPN’s coverage of the U.S. Open.

The duo is called SOFI TUKKER, and in 2018, they were a Grammy nominee. 

Now, the question may be, what's next?

Da da da da...

NOT

Never Responsible Nellie

Last week, at least 55 voters who showed up to participate in the 2022 election process may be disenfranchised — their votes will not count due to a series of failures — and the finger pointing between the Board of Elections, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea is in full bloom.

Gorbea, the state’s chief election officer, is the first to tell anyone about her accomplishments of modernizing Rhode Island's election process.

Gorbea’s campaign for governor website hypes, “She has modernized Rhode Island’s elections infrastructure, increased cybersecurity measures, and brought both online and automated voter registration to the state.”

Last Friday, Gorbea issued the following statement after the failure became public — two days after she learned of the error:

That is why I am outraged that the state’s voting machine vendor, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), had a programming error that resulted in incorrect candidates being displayed on the Spanish language ExpressVote machine screens in four Rhode Island communities. I am equally appalled that the Board of Elections failed to identify these errors during its statutorily mandated logic and accuracy testing process.

Although I have no legal power over the Rhode Island Board of Elections, I have called for them to conduct a thorough, independent audit of this issue. The Rhode Island Board of Elections needs to explain to the public why this error was not found earlier, what has been done to remedy the situation, and show Rhode Island voters what it has done to certify that this mistake will not happen again.

Rhode Island voters should be very concerned about the competency of those running Rhode Island’s elections. This is not the time for election officials in Rhode Island to fail.

It plays into the hands of the conspiracists who try to claim that losing campaigns are the victims of election fraud.

This is not a case of fraud, but incompetence.

READ MORE

NOT

Newspapers - Put a Fork in Them

According to multiple reports:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will discontinue its daily print edition and go to a weekend print edition, but it will continue its digital news operation seven days a week, according to interviews with a half dozen people close to the newspaper.

The time frame to implement the discontinuation of the daily print edition has not yet been decided, but sources say it likely would happen sometime in 2023 — most likely within a year from now.

NOT

RI Turnout

Political pontificators and pundits are predicting abysmal turnout for Tuesday's highly competitive primary races on the Democratic side.

Maybe never before have so many important offices in Rhode Island been up for grabs so late.

In 2014 and 2018, the Democratic primary turnout was about 130,000.

Some are predicting the vote count this year may be less than 100,000. 

Never before has your vote meant more.

Vote.