Blue Mass Group

A few provisions of the Governor’s budget deserve a closer examination given the amount of taxpayer money that is being spent.

Medicaid (MassHealth)

The Administration is feeling the heat with the increase in Medicaid (MassHealth) spending. Without a doubt something needs to be done-as spending now accounts for almost 40% of the overall budget. That’s less money for schools, for cops, and for roads.

I, among others, think the Administration is being too optimistic on how much they can save by tweaking things on the edges. Will they really get almost $10 billion from rebidding Medicaid contracts?

Eisenhower would have been a Bernie Sanders independent, and would have been called a socialist by the likes of Howie Carr, The Tea Party,Glen Beck and the rest.  

I was first lead to the Blue Mass group by the posts about Nstar’s green program. I have been on that since I moved to Boston in 2009. Nstar has just given notice that the premium paid by their green customers is to increase by 340%. They site increase in the cost of electricity as the reason. Does anyone know why the increase must be borne by the green customers (only?)?

It has been a couple of years since we first started writing about Egypt; at that time we did a series of stories that described how the country’s Constitution is designed to ensure that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) remains the ruling party, how corruption and torture and rape are part of the justice system, how there’s a looming Presidential succession crisis, and how we better pay attention, because one day all of this was going to blow up into a national emergency, with the potential for disastrous consequences that ripple all the way from Turkey to Morocco to Pakistan.

And now…that day has arrived.

After protests that led to a change of government (sort of) in Tunisia, rioting is spreading across Egypt, quickly, the ISI (Egypt’s internal security police) is out grabbing citizens and doing what they do (we’ll talk more about that later), and the question of Presidential succession, which many people thought was headed in one direction, may now be headed off to a place that outside observers might not have previously considered.

Lucky for you, I have some reach inside Egypt, and we’re going to get a peek inside the story that you might not have seen otherwise.