During the campaign between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, Brown said the best way to end congressional gridlock was to send more senators like him to Washington, people willing to cross party lines when they vote. But now it’s Senator-elect Warren who’s talking about ending gridlock. In a blog post for the Huffington Post, Warren […]
Election 2012
Posted inPolitics, The Download
Could Deval Patrick tip the scales at Justice?
The Boston-Washington axis is all atwitter about the Obama administration’s second-term round of musical cabinet chairs. Will it be John Kerry at State or Defense, or Deval Patrick at Justice? Or both? Or neither? The requisite denials from the White House and the Corner Office have revved up the chattering classes. The Boston Herald’s Joe […]
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If Kerry bolts, do Dems have a replacement?
Massachusetts political watchers have had their eyes on John Kerry’s Senate seat for nearly a decade now. At first, the seat was going to open up when Kerry cruised past George W. Bush and into the White House in 2004. After that fell through, there was speculation that Kerry would fill a cabinet post in […]
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Warren the rookie
Like a rookie stepping up to the plate for the first time in the big leagues, Elizabeth Warren looked cautious and tentative in her first meeting with the State House press corps as the senator-elect from Massachusetts. She met with Gov. Deval Patrick for an hour at the State House and then the two of […]
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What’s the story with Obama?
Barack Obama supporters are praying daily (many of them probably hourly) at the altar of Nate Silver. The creator of the poll-dissecting blog FiveThirtyEight, who was signed on by the New York Times after making a splash in the 2008 election, calms their frazzled nerves. He explains why deadlocked national tracking polls mean less than […]
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Question 2 triggers a battle over life, death, and dignity
Early on, it appeared that Massachusetts would become the third state to legalize so-called physician-assisted suicide, with polls showing voters favoring the end-of-life ballot question by a more than 2-to-1 margin. But as the weeks to the election have dwindled down to days and opponents have begun flooding the airwaves with stark ads, it’s become […]
Posted inEnvironment, Politics, The Download
FEMA: How do you like me now?
If Katrina was the nadir for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, then Sandy is its brightest moment since New Orleans. Up and down the hurricane-battered Northeast corridor, local, state, and federal first responders have received praise for their efforts. But foremost among the cheerleaders is Chris Christie, the irrepressible Republican governor of New Jersey, who […]
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Romney’s Etch A Sketch for the home stretch
It was way back in March, about a million Twitter news cycles ago, that Mitt Romney’s man behind the curtain, Eric Fehrnstrom, announced what nearly anyone who has followed Romney’s career could have known: That after securing the Republican nomination based on an awkwardly worded self-appraisal as a “severely conservative” governor of Massachusetts, Romney would […]
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Scott Brown’s partisan problem
The second most bipartisan member of the Senate has a Republican problem. And his potential GOP colleagues are not helping him any. If there’s anyone in Massachusetts who has not heard Sen. Scott Brown touting his aisle-crossing voting record, it’s either a child just learning to talk or someone recently returned from a stint in […]
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Jill Stein and friends fight the good fight
Quick: Who is the only presidential candidate to be arrested this year? Answer: Lexington’s Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, was arrested at the Hofstra University town hall presidential debate last week for disorderly conduct during a protest over her exclusion from the forum featuring Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Stein and the […]