RI Progress Report: Who Still Supports Carcieri?

Former Gov. Don Carcieri seems to have lost all his political allies because of his historic blunder in giving his friend and political ally curt Schilling $75 million to make a video game in Rhode Island. It will be interesting to see if Brendan Doherty and Mitt Romney – the two candidates Carcieri is really pushing for this cycle – remain loyal to him…

The issue with Rhode Island’s instantly-infamously loan guarantee program is not that the public sector is helping the private sector, it’s that former Carcieri and former EDC chief Keith Stokes made a monumentally awful decision to give one company a huge sum of taxpayer money, not even to mention that it was a video game company run by an ex-baseball player.

Even ask House Minority Leader Brian Newberry, a fiscal conservative who told the Projo, he eventually voted for the loan program because he assumed the addition $75 million would be spread out around the free market. “Nobody anticipated the EDC would give away the store to one company,” he told the Projo. “Who does that?”

Scott MacKay of RIPR has a great op-ed today on how Gov. Chafee has to again clean up a mess left by Carcieri.

Massachusetts has better funded public schools than Rhode Island, they beat us to the casino punch and knew better than us to avoid financing Schilling’s pipe dream … here’s another way our neighbor to the northeast is serving its citizenry better.

File this one under education inequality in the Ocean State: At high schools in Woonsocket, Central Falls and Pawtucket students sometimes have to share textbooks because there aren’t enough to go around, while in East Greenwich the school committee is considering getting every high school student an iPad.

Did you know the Southside Community Land Trust operates about 40 community gardens on vacant lots all over the city? How cool is that!

Good for Congressman David Cicilline for taking issue with some of the often-oversimplified opinions of Projo columnist Ed Achorn … we keep wondering how Achorn will manage to blame the 38 Studios debacle on Stephen Iannazzi and public sector unions (just wait, it’ll probably happen!).

Congrats to Maureen Martin, who GoLocal Prov honors as a “Power Player” this week.