What is Deval Patrick is thinking these days? Other than his campaigning for President Obama, of course. At issue are the Governor's support of loosening a ban on gifts to doctors from pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers and his move to veto legislative reforms of the use of welfare debit cards. Big pharma has long plied …
Category: Politics
Tierney v. Tisei: Time to focus on the issues
Last Tuesday, Congressman John Tierney did what he should have done many months ago. He held a press conference and faced questions about what he knew and when he knew it regarding his brother-in-laws' illegal activities. For Tierney, there were no new revelations. Too bad he waited until he was backed against a wall by the two …
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Hatred trumps culture with Algerian novelist’s trip to Jerusalem
As Syria goes deeper into civil war (and may draw in Turkey) and Egypt's first civilian president, Mohamed Morsi, calls for the release of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plotter, "blind sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman, here's a small story that could be even more dispiriting when thinking about the future of the region. Well-known Algerian author Boualem Sansel was …
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Health care – the end of the beginning and the beginning of hard work
Thanks to CNN and Fox, Thursday's SCOTUS announcement was an emotional roller coaster. Like the Dewey-beats-Truman headlines, they both were so eager to be first that they were wrong. Shame on them. This time, print media at least made a stab at reading the Supreme Court decision before pronouncing the individual mandate dead. And, of course, it wasn't. …
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Big money mocks one person, one vote
That whoosh you hear is the sound of money, gobs of it, flying from wellheeled donors to political candidates and "independent" committees on behalf of candidates. The roar is increasingly deafening especially when the money is coming from corporations and superPAC's (and, to a lesser extent, labor unions. Corporations, Mitt Romney explains to us, are …
Obama’s executive order: the Dream Act lives on
Mitt Romney says that President Obama's recent move not to deport illegal immigrants brought here as children was motivated by politics. Now there's a surprise! That's a little bit like Captain Renault in Casablanca saying "I'm shocked, shocked to find that there is gambling is going on in here." Of course it was political, shrewdly political. And it …
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The debate about debates: enough already
It's the next phase of silly season. U.S. Senate candidates Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren are to-ing and fro-ing about how often they'll debate one another and in what settings. So far, she has agreed to four televised debates and he, to two televised debates and two radio debates. Included among those she has agreed is one …
The Greek election matters to us
Forget Romney and Obama for now. The greatest immediate impact on the U.S. economy, beyond the control of either nominee, could be what happens Sunday in the Greek run-off election. On that day, millions of Greek voters will choose from among a group of flawed and untrustworthy leaders a party (or coalition of parties) to lead …
Niki Tsongas builds bipartisanship, one small step at a time
Three-term 5th district Congresswoman Niki Tsongas marches to a slightly different drummer than her colleague Mike Capuano, the subject of yesterday's blog posting. Her rhythm is not a march exactly, more a step-by-step piecing together of small scale bipartisan initiatives in an environment in which bipartisanship is an unnatural act. Tsongas knows that, as one individual, she …
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Cong. Mike Capuano, a liberal and proud of it
Mike Capuano is not apologetic about his belief in government. He doesn't try to cast himself as a progressive or any other adjective that cloaks his unabashed liberalism as anything other than what it is- an admiration for what government, however flawed, can do to help people. He deplores the mire in which Congressional lawmaking …
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Marjorie Arons-Barron 