Blue Mass Group

Early this morning, in a raid reminiscent of the New Bedford ICE Raid back in March, ICE agents staged a raid in New Haven, CT.

I think it illustrates the importance of us working together regionally.

More information below the fold.

UPDATE (by David): Bill Richardson has released a statement harshly criticizing ICE’s conduct in this raid, and discussing the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

Newsweek gave Fareed Zakaria front-page treatment to a very sensible and long-overdue essay on what’s degrading America’s greatness: Fear. And he takes our drooling fear-monger of an ex-Governor to the woodshed: The presidential campaign could have provided the opportunity for a national discussion of the new world we live in. So far, on the Republican side, it has turned into an exercise in chest-thumping. Whipping up hysteria requires magnifying the foe. The enemy is vast, global and relentless. Giuliani casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. Mitt Romney goes further, banding together all the supposed bad guys. “This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood,” he recently declared. But Iran is a Shiite power and actually helped the United States topple the Qaeda-backed Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Qaeda-affiliated radical Sunnis are currently slaughtering Shiites in Iraq, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are responding by executing and displacing Iraq’s Sunnis. We are repeating one of the central errors of the early cold war — putting together all our potential adversaries rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked one another, a fact that [...]

Massachusetts needs private bus services for commuters. It’s green, it grows jobs, and it improves traffic flows. Let private companies to decide the routes, schedules, and costs. Google has created a great system for it own employee’s in the bay area. There is no reason a similar service could not be created for various buildings and areas around Boston.

Just unbelievable: The chief executives of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler met with Senate lawmakers today, less than a week before Democrats plan a vote on a sprawling energy bill, and asserted that the bill?s proposed increase in mileage requirements would be impossible to meet and would gravely damage the industry. The bill would raise the average mileage requirement for passenger cars to 35 miles per gallon by 2020, up from the current 27.5 miles per gallon, and it would include light trucks and sport-utility vehicles in that requirement. But key House and Senate Democrats are pushing a softer standard, and they appear to have a good chance of getting what they want. Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, both of Michigan, are drafting a bill that would raise mileage requirements but give car companies opportunities to escape the requirements if they appeared to be too difficult to meet. In the House, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker, is on a collision course with a fellow Democrat, Representative John Dingell of Michigan, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, who has proposed a bill that also includes numerous escape hatches for car companies ? ?off-ramps,? as supporters call them. [...]

Many years more-than-I-care-to-think-about ago, I was a college student at Oberlin College who spent a semester taking classes and doing an internship in Philadelphia.  I and a bunch of fellow students rented a place in South Philadelphia that I guess was a traditional student rental.  South Philadelphia was/is? a heavily Italian American section of Philadelphia that was similar to Southie in its political organization and involvement.  Anyway, within a few days of moving in, there was a knock on our door and I opened it to see this guy standing there.  He quickly handed me a business card, introduced himself as the local Democratic Party precinct captain, welcomed us to the neighborhood, and invited us to get in touch if we ever needed anything.  How cool was that?  Since then, I’ve always thought how cool it would be if progressives could build that kind of a grassroots party organization.  So now, I want to be that guy!  In Boston.  Is that possible?

Doubts enter the picture when I start to consider how much Patrick knows about education (based on his ideas, not much) and how many stock issues, the generic issues involved in serious policy debate, he simply ignores. To argue for a new policy, the would-be policy maker should prove the inadequacies of the status quo, propose an acceptable plan for fixing things, and demonstrate that the plan actually works. An example? There’s been enough news to suggest a problem with the number of people we’re graduating with two-year degrees. But the plan to make community college free begs the question of whether this plan will address this need. Is it money that prevents people from graduating from Holyoke Community College? My suspicion is that for many students, cultural and personal, not financial reasons, cause them not to matriculate.

Lengthening the school day is a solution in search of a problem. It’s the baby of former gubernatorial candidate Chris Gabrieli, and it’s unsupported by research. A longer school day may be the solution to the problems of some of our children, but it is by no means all. Although some parents would like to see two hours of free child care after school, I’ve been witnessing a maternal backlash against the lack of leisure time children have today. My children have 15 minutes of recess a day. Older children plays sports and work after school. There may be a good argument for an extended day, but it has yet to be made empirically.

Regardless of political party, there’s little chance anyone will give serious reconsideration to the concept of standards and “accountability.” See my earlier post quoting Michael Apple for an idea of the theoretical issues involved in the standards movement. If the Governor really wanted to make a splash in education, he could convene a panel on the issue of standards and accountability and hear the opposition to them.

Greetings my liberal Democratic friends.  I’m probably one of the few Republicans to have taken time out of his Sunday evening to watch the Dem presidential debate – and I did so with a handful of Dem friends!  I then, of course, watched the GOP debate on Tues night.  My verdict – while I saw no presidential timber on the stage on Sunday, I saw alot on Tuesday!

And, BTW, if Speaker Pelosi doesn’t get her act together soon, the “Do-Nothing” Democratic 110th Congress will quickly be a bad memory as the GOP not only wins the presidency but retakes the Congress (especially if the Surge works and Iraq looks much better at the end of this year)!

As many of you have probably realized, there is an annoying technical glitch on BMG (and other soapblox sites) at the moment.  When you copy and paste text from another source (such as an online newspaper article, or a document prepared in a word processor) in the course of writing a post, several special characters render incorrectly: they show up as a question mark (“?”), rather than what they were supposed to be.  The powers that be are working on it. In the meantime, it is possible to avoid this problem, which is particularly acute with respect to single and double quotation marks.  When you paste your text into the “new post” box, check the quotation marks to see whether they go straight up and down, or whether they are “smart quotation marks” (i.e., they point left and right depending on whether they begin or end the quotation).  At present, the “smart quotes” are not rendering properly, so you should go through the document and change them all to ordinary up-and-down single and double quotes.  Same thing with em- and en-dashes — replace them with a single or double hyphen.  UPDATE: You can also use a two-step cut and paste: [...]

Charley and I chatted yesterday for about half an hour with our junior Senator about war, wind, the web, marriage, and Alberto the Insult Comic Attorney General. Kerry rose to a passionate pitch on Iraq and the environment, but was unfortunately elusive when it came to specifics about Cape Wind, marriage, the impeachment of Gonzales, and the possible acquisition of The Wall Street Journal by Fox News. The call was arranged by new Online Communications Director Brian Young (thanks, Brian!). “There is a pent up demand for almost every thing that matters in politics,” Kerry began. He ticked off his four main priorities: end the war in Iraq (he voted No on the most recent appropriations bill, to his enormous credit, and promised another fight in a few weeks on its successor); make America more fair (he cited the increasing disparity of wealth and the cost of tuition); health care; and environmental issues (he cited climate change, depleted fisheries, and water pollution). So far, so good, but let’s see what happened when the rubber hit the road. Cape Wind. “I’m a huge advocate of wind power. I have supported incentives for it. I will be fighting personally for larger incentives,” [...]

Today, on the anniversary of D-Day and standing before a memorial to local soldiers, Jim Ogonowski revealed his strategy for Iraq and the Global War on Terror.

The Ogonowski plan focuses on three parts: (1) making America’s safety our top priority; (2) achieving victory in Iraq; and (3) creating stability in the Middle East.

Jim is asking supporters to sign a petition supporting his plan which is can be found on his web site, www.jimogonowski.com.

Ogonowski criticized the President’s choice to invade Iraq. “Although I think it was wrong to invade Iraq, it does not change my determination to win the war in Iraq,” Ogonowski said.  “‘Immediate withdrawal’ makes for a good sound bite, but it is cowardly and short-sighted.  Those that propose it have no real plan for America’s security and have underestimated the American people’s desire for real solutions.  I will never waiver in keeping America safe and strong.”