Rhode Island's Future is a Rhode Island blog dubbed the "state's most popular political blog" by the Phoenix Newspaper. [1]
Rhode Island, officially the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area, the seventh least populous, and the second most densely populated. Rhode Island is bordered by Connecticut to the west, Massachusetts to the north and east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the south via Rhode Island Sound and Block Island Sound. It also shares a small maritime border with New York. Providence is the state capital and most populous city in Rhode Island.
A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The blog was started in March 2005 [2] by political activist Matthew Jerzyk, a long-time community and union organizer with SEIU and Jobs with Justice. Contributing to this was the first Green Party elected official in Rhode Island's history (who later became a Democrat), State Representative David Segal. [3]
Jobs With Justice (JWJ) is a union rights organization in the United States. It was founded in 1987 and is made up of individuals and affiliated organizations. As of 2005, Jobs with Justice coalitions existed in over 40 cities in 29 states in all regions of the country. In 2012 Jobs With Justice announced a merger with American Rights at Work, another U.S. union advocate organization.
The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its rival, the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party.
David Adam Segal is an American politician, activist, and writer who was a Democratic member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives, representing District 2 from 2007 until January 2011. Prior to that, he served as Minority Leader of the Providence City Council from 2003 until 2007, elected at the age of 22 as the first and only member of the Green Party ever elected in Rhode Island. Segal was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the state's 1st congressional district on 14 September 2010. He serves as the executive director of the online organizing group Demand Progress. The organization helped lead the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act and related bills, co-led efforts to institute net neutrality regulations, and has been at the forefront of various other policy and activism efforts. Segal is a co-editor of a book about the organizing that led to the defeat of SOPA, published by O/R Books, called Hacking Politics.
Rhode Island's Future played a key role in the 2006 Senate race [4] between Sheldon Whitehouse and Lincoln Chafee by exposing a scandal involving a Chafee staffer [5] sending controversial emails from a government computer [6] just one week before the election. Jerzyk, the blog's editor, also played a central role in a prominent controversy at Roger Williams University School of Law involving the chairman of the university's board of trustees use of the "N-word" and the subsequent removal of his name from the law school. [7]
Sheldon Whitehouse is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States Senator from Rhode Island since 2007. He is a member of the Democratic Party and previously served as a United States Attorney from 1993 to 1998 and as the Attorney General of Rhode Island from 1999 to 2003.
Lincoln Davenport Chafee is an American politician from the state of Rhode Island. He was mayor of Warwick from 1993 to 1999, a United States Senator from 1999 to 2007, and the 74th Governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015. He was a member of the Democratic Party from 2013-2019; in June 2019, The Boston Globe reported that he had become a registered Libertarian, having previously been a Republican until 2007 and an independent and then a Democrat in the interim.
Roger Williams University School of Law is the law school of Roger Williams University, a private university in Bristol, Rhode Island. It is the only law school in the Rhode Island. It was the first graduate degree program established by the university, then Roger Williams College, in 1993. The School of Law has been accredited by the American Bar Association since 1997 and has been a member of the Association of American Law Schools since 2006.
Edited by Bob Plain, the site features as contributors: [8]
- Steve Ahlquist
- Samuel G. Howard
- Tom Sgouros
- Andrew Stewart
- Brian Hull
- Samuel Bell
- Dave Fisher
- Frymaster
- Peter Nightingale
- Elisha Aldrich
- Bruce Reilly
- transportprovidence
- Mark Binder
- Russ Conway
Steve Ahlquist is an American comic book writer, author, and humanist from Rhode Island.
