Blue Mass Group

Convincing win against a very fine team. Do they really have no chance against the LA Kobies? Definitely another level of play. UPDATE (By Bob) Charley beat me to the post, so I’ll just add this picture and say that was an AWESOME run back from that deficit to victory. Globe leads the way on sports coverage as always. Celtics are 8-2 against LA in NBA Finals to date, but we haven’t won a title for quite a while. First two games are in Boston. GO CELTICS! I also just wanted to send some major props to the Pistons and their fans. That is one awesome basketball team, and they really played all out. Very poor officiating, if you ask me. It seemed like the officials made bad calls, recognized it, and then tried to even things up by calling absurd fouls on the other team. Crazy.

There was an interesting AP story today by Glen Johnson.  He makes the case that the Governor’s slow and steady approach, with a focus on long-term solutions and change, is producing results and laying the groundwork for long-term success. Glen writes in part: “Eighteen months later, Patrick appears driven more by the broader picture and the long term, a philosophy that has girded his maturing administration and may pay dividends if and when he decides to run for re-election in 2010. The state’s first Democratic governor in 16 years has done a lot of spade work since taking office and believes the fruits are becoming apparent with time…Patrick also is poised for some other big-ticket wins: approval for a $1 billion Life Sciences Initiative, a Clean Energy bill, a $27 billion state budget he helped define and legislation to close corporate tax loopholes.” For me, the Governor’s approach is very familiar.  During the campaign, he focused on building the grassroots, traveling across the state meeting with voters, and developing an extensive library of detailed issue papers that were posted on the website.  While we were criticized by some for not focusing on the traditional campaign techniques (ie – raising money), [...]

One of the biggest claims that Senator Obama has is that he’s bringing a new kind of politics to the arena.  It’s about bringing hope and change to the people; it’s about inclusivity and embracing diversity.  

Except…  

Did anyone else read Ellen Goodman in the Globe today? She announced that she “finds herself channeling” Senator Obama for a “long overdue and eagerly anticipated conversation – on gender.” Overall, I didn’t find the column that persuasive; if anything, I thought it was yet another indicator that the media is completely in the tank with him.  I mean, really – what’s next? Does the media want this guy so badly that they’re willing to write and speak for him, and claim he was being channeled?   I have been active in the party for 30 years and I have never, ever seen the like of it.    

UPDATE: NH gets a clue (and probably lots of calls & emails) and has rescinded it’s request to the California Supreme Court.  Guess AG Kelly Ayotte finally read her own state law and realized that NH already downgrades incoming s-s marriages to civil unions.  Duh!  What a dolt!

Attorneys General from 10 anti-equality states have just petitioned the CA court to withhold access by gay citizens to the civil right to marry until after the November election.  What is the political stripe of these august functionaries?  Republican.  Yes, that’s right.  All 10 are republicans.  Ten powerful state-level members of the “state rights” party are petitioning one state to do what some other states want it to do.  Is there no shame in this party?

Their whiny plea, after the flip.

There’s Something Going On Here, I’m Tellin’ You. From Boston.com A 19-year-old Sudbury man who is an intern with the Red Sox is being praised today for comforting a woman who was trapped in the twisted wreckage of a trolley during Wednesday’s crash on the Green Line in Newton. He has his grubby little hands in everything. I bet he got the kid on the phone and ordered him back on the train to help. It’s a great story and the kid really was heroic. Good Job. (Now lets watch the Sox exploit a good thing).

Or is it a ploy for money.  I received this message yesterday (May 29th) at 10:00pm from the Center For Small Government, the group that wants to end income tax in Massachusetts.  Based upon the late message, I imagine they mean today. Dear Friend, Unless we raise $14,000 today to pay our petitioners, we will have to shut down our END the Income Tax petition drive. The signatures are flooding in. The donations are trickling. We are nearly broke. With your help, we’ve raised $15,633 this month. Toward the $47,000 in final petitioning costs we need by our June 9th turn-in deadline. Our bank balance is $1,834. We have collected, received, and paid for 8,013 signatures out of the 20,000 required. 40% done! Our petitioners have another 7,000 signatures in the pipeline. They’ll be turned in this weekend. By this Sunday, we’ll have over 15,000 signatures in hand. 75% done! By this Sunday, we’ll be only 8 days from the last 5,000 signatures. Only 8 days until daylight. On the ballot for our Initiative to END the Income Tax. Paid Petitioning is a cash and carry business. Petitioners don’t give credit. They don’t have time payment plans. They hold onto [...]

Robert DeLeo wrote a letter to the editor at the Herald defending the house budget and the Herald’s uneven focus on earmarks, it was a response this Casey Ross article.  DeLeo noted that the house budget is actually less than 1/2 percent of the budget and less than the previous year. earmarks make up only 0.43 percent of allocated funds in the House budget – less than last year. While he does make it seem that a small amount of funding in the budget goes towards earmarks, DeLeo loses me when he talks about earmarks being a good thing. The House budget contains earmarks because earmarks are local aid – and the House cares about local aid. State reps are closer to their districts than anyone else in state government, and no one knows what their districts need better than they do. When I think of earmarks I think of pork, a representative getting something for his district.  Yes, if you have to define it, it is technically local aid.  But the whole notion of hey, it’s just local aid is kind of absurd.  What an earmark does is remove the decision making process of the state to allocate dollars [...]

From Daniel Kutzman: Earlier today, John McCain released 1,200 pages of his medical records. Or, as his doctor calls it, Chapter One.” –Conan O’Brien “It was quite a weekend, politically. Yesterday, an estimated 75,000 people attended a Barack Obama rally on the banks of the the Willamette River. … And if you believe the media, listen to this. After the rally, Barack Obama fed them all with just five loaves of bread and two fish. Amazing!” –Jay Leno McCain’s “buttocks are unremarkable except for some very light tan freckling” –John McCain’s oncologist, Dr. Suzanne Connolly of the Mayo Clinic. Hat tip to The Daily Show. Have a great weekend. GO CELTICS!

I’ve been a bit behind the times of late, and missed this extraordinary call Sunday by Fox News analyst Liz Trotta for the assassination of Barack Obama:

You can find a comprehensive write-up of the event here on Wikipedia. The take at DailyKos is here, and there are over 11,000 comments on YouTube. Trotta has apologized.

Here are some of the interesting aspects, I think, of this story. First, Trotta remains on the Fox payroll. More evidence for what any sensible person already knows: Fox is a GOP propaganda outlet, not a news channel. Second, it’s easier to propose the assassination of an African-American running for President than a woman or a white man: this is the third national Obama-assassination comment in as many weeks (first Huckabee, then Clinton in her “RFK” comment, now Fox); I haven’t seen any comparably deadly high-profile suggestions about any of the other Presidential candidates.

What do you think?