MGM Resorts International Chairman and CEO James J. Murren was the house controlling the game in his speech Thursday to the Boston College CEO's Club. As with all CEO's Club luncheons, the event invitation promised remarks plus opportunities for questions and answers, but Murren went on for so long that there was no time for …
Continue reading MGM Resorts chief shows the house is in control
Presidents have their social secretaries to tell them when to applaud during a White House concert. The rest of us, President Obama says, are on our own. But some of today's rigid rules need rethinking. Last Saturday night at the Boston Symphony, Peter Serkin performed brilliantly as soloist playing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2. The first movement …
Fifty years ago today, the woman was not yet a journalist. She was barely 24, a Wellesley College graduate, living in a thoroughly domestic life in a garden apartment in Norwood, getting used to days and weeks totally different from what she might have experienced were she born a generation later. She was surrounded by other, …
The talking heads are calling this year's snafus in the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act Obama's Katrina, likening it to the FEMA debacle in responding to the deadly 2005 hurricane that wasted Louisiana. I think the handling of the ACA roll-out is worse. Katrina is a code word for an epic bureaucratic screw-up, a failed response to …
Continue reading If ACA is a turkey, then Obama’s a lame duck
Still-a-state rep Marty Walsh appeared yesterday on Channel Five's On the Record. The candidate who, in debates and interviews, was unprepossessing at best, often awkward with rhetoric trending banal, is looking more and more mayoral. His presentation was comfortable, and he came across as focused and transparent even while skillfully avoiding being pinned down on specifics (as in, what …
He’s affable, charming and seems to be getting things done. Setti Warren is running for second term as mayor of Newton. He is on a mission, he says, of building a sustainable, livable community, a model city for the 21st century. In the preliminary, he beat challenger Ted Hess-Mahan by a more than three-to-one margin, …
Continue reading Setti Warren pursuing vision as Newton mayor
I can't remember ever being happier to be wrong! There will be tons of words written about the first Red Sox win in Fenway in 95 years. None will be enough, nor will mine adequately express our collective joy. As CNN's John Berman, a Red Sox fan, said this morning outside Fenway: worst to first, …
When my husband and I visited the Terezin [also known as Theresienstadt] concentration camp outside of Prague in 1990, we could only begin to imagine the horrors the Nazis visited upon the political prisoners and Jews housed there. The barracks where human beings were packed in, disease rampant, prisoners starved, worked to death or killed, hundreds of thousands kept for months or …
Continue reading Terezin Music Foundation touches core of humanity
Don’t believe the hype: Ted Cruz and Tea Partiers weren’t big losers. Most other people were. The recent partial shut-down and near default of the US government led by rogue deficit hawks cost American taxpayers at least $24 billion (according to Standard & Poor's), paid furloughed workers not to work, cut economic growth and, as …
Continue reading Washington artful dodgers postpone responsibility
Boston mayoral candidates Marty Walsh and John Connolly met in their first debate Tuesday and discussed issues to a draw. No surprise. There's little that separates them on matters of policy. Rep. Walsh did what he had to in proving himself engaged and comfortable on education. Councillor Connolly, who has claimed ownership of that issue, …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 