Current Affairs
The Download: Seeking middle ground on public workers
Gov. Deval Patrick is struggling with how to rein in municipal health care costs. Those costs are eating up city and town budgets, and most voters think public sector union […]
The Download: Killer bees, space aliens, and the invasion of the bankrupt states
The national news media has finally discovered that most states are bleeding a lot of red ink. Washington has so far rebuffed calls for bailouts. But California state treasurer Bill […]
The Download: Term limits
Massachusetts voters narrowly approved a term limits law in 1994, but two years later it was overturned by the Supreme Judicial Court because of the way it was crafted. Governing […]
The Download: The Speakah speaks
House Speaker Robert DeLeo really, really wants to show he’s not tone deaf. Really. After laying low in the wake of the devastating Ware report on patronage in the Probation […]
The Download: Wind resistance
Cape Wind dominates the debate on wind energy, but the push for onshore wind is a study in contrasts. A Cape Cod Times report explains how wind projects proposed for Dennis, Eastham, Harwich, Orleans Wellfleet, West Barnstable, and Truro have gone by the […]
The Download: Whose Constitution?
It couldn’t be termed a constitutional crisis but the decision by the new Republican-controlled House to read the Constitution into the Congressional Record was as much hysterical as historical. In […]
The Download: Patrick’s new politics
Kevin Cullen, in a column in today’s Boston Globe, shines a light on how Gov. Deval Patrick is insisting on political loyalty as he assembles his leadership team for a […]
The Download: Mass inequality
Massachusetts is leading the way into a new Guilded Age. The Bay State has one of the largest income gaps between the rich and the poor in the country. The […]
The Download: Senator Zelig
Another week, another round of head-scratching and hand-wringing over just who Scott Brown (Wrentham resident, truck owner, and current occupant of the People’s Seat in the US Senate) really is. […]
The Download: Michelle Rhee, Inc.
Michelle Rhee has certainly landed on her feet. Rhee stepped down as chancellor of the Washington, DC, public school system in October after the mayor who hired her was tossed […]
The Download: There will be blood
Few, save the most minimalist proponents of small government, think there’s much left to cut in the state budget without inflicting pain, so it’s now a matter of whose priorities […]
The Download: Mitt’s op-ed machine
While Sarah Palin goes the reality show route to boost her popularity and reduce her negatives, Mitt Romney takes a more conventional path to building presidential gravitas: holding forth on […]
The Download: Setting up a schoolyard brawl
There was tough talk aplenty in Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. And it was all built on a strange paradox. Menino isn’t asking […]