Blue Mass Group

All –   The town crank has proposed the following motion for my town meeting. Is this legal?  I get that the town budget can be approved or rejected, but can they eliminate funding for everything except the contract?   I move to eliminate all proposed funding in Article 18 for the sub total line on page 52 under the heading EDUCATION, Line item, School Budget and subtotal in amount of $36,847,861 or _________________________, as it presently contains  initial funding for  a “Proposed Contract” entitled “AGREEMENT between the NORTH ANDOVER SCHOOL COMMITTEE and the NORTH ANDOVER TEACHERS UNION 2011 – 2014, made and entered into as of September 1, 2011 for the period September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2014,  and by doing so, have North Andover’s 2011 Annual Town Meeting refuse to give required legislative approval BY PROVIDING INITIAL FUNDING for Proposed Contract and prevent its provisions and any other labor contracts contained in the amount therein from becoming effective and binding on the Town of North Andover. MOTION TO PUT IN NEW LINE ITEM ENTITLED “TOWN MEETING’S N A PUBLIC SCHOOLS”. I move to create a new line item in Article 18 entitled TOWN MEETING’S, N A PUBLIC SCHOOLS in the amount [...]

It’s revealing, and a tad sobering, to realize just how extreme the Republican party has become in quite a short period of time.  Bruce Bartlett, according to his bio, “held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.” So, we’re not talking some kind of left-winger here.  He brings some much-needed sanity to the ongoing discussion about taxes: The table below shows total taxes, including state and local government taxes, as a share of G.D.P. in 2008, the latest year for which there is complete data. The table makes clear that the United States has very low taxes by international standards. … [A] substantial portion of the higher tax burden that Europeans pay is really illusory. They are really just paying their health insurance premiums through their taxes rather than through lower wages, as we do…. There may be reasons why it is better not to subsidize every family with children and not provide government health insurance for every citizen. But the idea that Europeans are enslaved by high taxes, as most American conservatives believe, is just nonsense. Try telling that to the increasingly pathetic Tim [...]

This is absolutely not what I want to hear. And yet it’s what we hear all the time: ScienceDaily (June 6, 2011) — The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study by Stanford University scientists. The results will be published later this month in the journal Climatic Change. In the study, the Stanford team concluded that many tropical regions in Africa, Asia and South America could see “the permanent emergence of unprecedented summer heat” in the next two decades. Middle latitudes of Europe, China and North America — including the United States — are likely to undergo extreme summer temperature shifts within 60 years, the researchers found. Apropos of my earlier post on whether individual events can be traced to global warming: Though no single extreme weather event can be linked to global warming, scientists say that as the planet warms, we should expect more extremes, such as heat waves. Diffenbaugh and Stanford research assistant Martin Scherer wondered whether one extreme pattern — heat waves — would become more [...]

Last week’s deadly tornado in Springfield is the latest in a nationwide string of bizarre weather events. And we’ve had some resistance from the usual folks about linking individual bizarre weather events to global warming. I get it. There is merit to that resistance. And it is difficult to ascribe any single weather event to global warming – although that may be changing: Using the extreme value approach, Hegerl and others have confirmed that the number of extremely hot nights around the world has been increasing over the past few decades. And when they’ve looked to computer models to see if the same sort of thing might have happened in an emissions-free world, they don’t see it. It seems, says Hegerl, that the increased frequency of heat waves may well have been caused by human behavior. “It is really interesting because for years we’ve just laid back and said, ‘You can’t say anything about a single climate event,’” says Hegerl. “But now people are showing you can say something about the probability of that kind of event occurring.” But the current consensus seem to be this: Day to day weather patterns are just too complicated to link directly to general [...]

NYT: Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts has decided the state will not participate in a fingerprint-sharing program that is central to the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement strategy, dealing a new political blow to a program that has met rising resistance nationwide. … In a June 3 letter, the Massachusetts secretary of public safety and security, Mary Elizabeth Heffernan, said Mr. Patrick had concluded that he should not sign any agreement to join the program because it was not accomplishing its goal of deporting immigrants who were convicted of serious crimes. Ms. Heffernan also wrote that state law enforcement officials feared that the program was “overly broad and may deter the reporting of criminal activity.” … In Massachusetts, Mr. Patrick said last December that he was inclined to join the program, in part because he believed the state had no choice. In a half-dozen sometimes stormy public meetings across the state, immigrant organizations spoke out against the program, saying it was sweeping up illegal immigrant workers who had not committed crimes and had family members who were in the United States legally. To me, the primary issue here is money. This is an expensive unfunded mandate, because it requires Massachusetts to pay [...]

It has been said that taking Zoloft during pregnancy can cause harmful effects to the fetus, and worst can pose harmful side effects. The zoloft and pregnancy has been the topic of dispute that leads to several lawsuits against zoloft. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Zoloft is classified as a pregnancy Category C drug. When the doctor decides that the pregnant patient needs to take Zoloft, an anti-depressant drug, the physician should weigh the benefits versus risks and that measure that the benefits must always outweigh the risks. As for the patients, when your doctor might overlook your condition and advised you to take zoloft, you should immediately tell your physician that you are pregnant or suspect to be pregnant. Although Zoloft’s side effects generally affects the fetus in the third trimester of pregnancy, prevention is always better than a pound of cure.

IMMIGRATION: Gov. Patrick says no to Secure Communities (AP) and defends his choice (Herald). Some call the decision a victory, some call it a public safety threat (Herald). Some use recklessly hyperbolic rhetoric. TORNADOES: An emergency sup budget is on the way to help out communities hit by last week’s tornadoes. (MassLive) And the cleanup continues. LAWRENCE: Campaign finance investigators issue subpoenas to Lawrence area establishments associated with Mayor William Lantigua. Uh-oh. (Globe) CASINOS: Speaker DeLeo’s looking at July for passage of Gambling Bill 3.0. (Republican) Read the rest of the MASSterList, including the Mitt Monitor, today’s legislative headlines, transportation news, new health care headlines, today’s Best of the Blogs and more by signing up for daily email at MASSterList.com

    Austin Goolsbee is resigning to return to the University of Chicago, following Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and a few others of the president’s high level economic advisors prior to the completion of his first-term.  The Republican playbook calls for the continued prayers of conservatives nationwide for President Obama to appoint another moderate, Clintoninte, triangulation type economic policy advisor that will continue to swerve first in the Congressional game of chicken, while at the same time following the framing debate that Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson and the other deficit hawks have used the corporate media, to brainwash Jon and Jane Doe. The smartest move President Obama could make with this current resignation would be to appoint Robert Reich to the post, he is a holdover from the Clinton White House, you know balanced budget, paying down the debt, and Big-Government is over. Yet he really is a progressive, he understands how to handle unemployment, and help wage growth occur at levels other than that of CEO’s and CFO’s.  And more to the point with his media and communications savvy he can help shift the debate being held in this country back to where it belongs.  On jobs, [...]

I really have no problem with the concept behind the city council’s proposal in this matter, or the moral value behind the public policy issue at stake.  Many people are not paying their sewer bill despite using the service just as much as the families that are paying their bills, the issue with the current proposal to my understanding though is that the city council would like to shut off the city’s water service to delinquent consumers. Some of these families are not paying their sewer bill due to the fact that they would prefer to purchase drugs, booze, prostitutes or scratch tickets they just simply cannot afford the monthly bill.  If the choice is between rent, water, electricity, rent or the sewer bill obviously they should not pay the sewer bill, this is not a case of immorality or laziness or the abuse of other tax-payers or rate-payers in the city of Holyoke, these families are just that broke and should not lose their water service because they cannot afford to flush the toilet.  In the case of families and households with incomes and debt ratio’s that allow them to afford paying the current monthly sewer rates then by [...]