Blue Mass Group

Ladies and gentlemen … GOP front-runner Herman Cain! No, no, don’t thank me, please just send cash. My other favorite treatment of that song, of course, is this:

Dear BMG, Being a Member of Congress is a balancing act between your work at home and your work in Washington.  But I believe our office’s results over the past ten months indicate that my primary focus has consistently been on the residents on Massachusetts’ 10th Congressional District. This week I will continue that balancing act by hosting a “Women’s Week”, with several of the events scheduled open to the public.  Included in the “Women’s Week” will be three “Breakfast with Bill” and two White Ribbon Campaign Events.  The “Breakfast with Bill” is a program designed for me to meet with constituents in a convenient, casual setting. The White Ribbon Campaign, which I am an ambassador of, is the largest effort in the world of men and women working together to end violence against women. By wearing the White Ribbon and by taking the pledge we are promising to “never commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women, sexual assault, and domestic violence.” Attached to this post are flyers for both the White Ribbon and the “Breakfast with Bill” events.  I hope that you will be able to join me. Best,                 Bill Keating Member of Congress                     

I mean … I have nothing to add. This is a guy who just voted to filibuster the President’s jobs bill — not just voted against, but refused to allow it to come up for a vote. Brown assails ‘disgusting’ political climate: Brown said the nation is in the throes of a financial emergency, yet hobbled by political obstructionism that he called “disgusting.” “The thing that’s frustrating to me is that there’s no Democrat bill that’s going to pass, folks. There’s no Republican bill either,” he said. “Let’s stop playing games.” Senator … you are the political climate. You are the dysfunction. You are playing games — it won’t pass because you won’t vote for it — or even allow it to come up for a vote. You just proved it yourself — in fact, you ran on creating a roadblock to the President’s agenda. Give. Me. A. Break.

After playing around with some open-source redistricting tools and thinking about the gnarly issues that arose therefrom, I reached some conclusions that surprised me. For instance, geographical compactness doesn’t matter much, unless you are taking it away.

  The MetroWest Daily News Circulation: 24,357 Sunday By Susan Eaton and Jamie Gass/Guest columnists  Susan Eaton is research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School and Jamie Gass is director of the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank.  Posted Oct 16, 2011 @ 12:15 AM Massachusetts’ 2010 education reform law is titled, “An Act Relative to the Achievement Gap.” If closing race- and poverty-based achievement gaps is indeed a priority, a recent report suggests the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) should be one of the programs to get additional resources. Founded in 1966 by African-American parents and white suburban educators, METCO is one of only eight voluntary inter-district school desegregation programs in the nation. It sends more than 3,000 students from Boston and Springfield to schools in 37 suburban districts. More than three-quarters of the students are African-American or Latino. Half come from low-income families and one-quarter have special needs. “METCO Merits More: The History and Status of METCO,” published by Pioneer Institute and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, shows that between 2006 and 2010 METCO students [...]

MAP MAKING: Now that there’s a brief reprieve from gambling while the conference gets going, we can all focus on something that practically guarantees zero winners: redistricting! (Herald) Let the complaining begin. ONE’S A PUPPET, ONE’S A CARTOON: The L.A. Times breaks down the differences between Guy Smiley and Yosemite Sam. OUR WAY: The PoliProfs offer an interesting take on presidential nominations. 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 alerts.

Hey John Henry, will the next curse be the Lucchino curse? Scientists, mathematicians, and God Himself have come to the same conclusion: The Red Sox will not win another World Series as long as Larry Lucchino is on the payroll. Allow me to remind to you that New Englanders have that Calvinistic faith of what goes around comes around. You know, too much bad karma causes bad things. I loved your sports radio one man raid and especially liked when you declared  the Globe reporter confirmed the Terry Francona drug addict story did not come from ownership. Did you know it was hogwash when you said it? Unfortunately the lame-o sports hosts did not ask where it came from. They were afraid you would have mentioned their rival. Can you imagine that? I bet Larry led you to believe the reporter cleared you. Definitely sounds like a Larry Lucchino production to me. Lie to the boss if you have to. Shit, lie to everybody. Specious lies work just as well as good ones in the sports world. Look, Larry Lucchino is just not a good guy. His modus operandi includes destroying a person’s reputation to solve whatever the problem de [...]

COMRADES: I’ll be on the Emily Rooney show @12pm today. Feed me pithy, seductive talking points that will slither into the ears of an unsuspecting public, hastening our once-great society to the slippery slope of eco-femino-vegi-islamo-socialo-fascism. Update: Link to today’s show below:  

The violent disruption of the peaceful “Occupy” protest in Rome by infiltrators who can only be described as thugs illustrates the movement’s weakness:  there are no firewalls in place to contain bad behavior. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/15/rome-protests-black-bloc-militants-turn-occupy-protests-violent.html It is distressing that protests in sympathy with Occupy Wall Street occurred worldwide on Saturday, yet the coverage is focused on the violence in Rome. I’m distinctly a sympathizer with Occupy Boston but have withdrawn because of a bad experience I had as a legal volunteer. That was an isolated instance that cannot be generalized. But it threw into relief for me the contingent character of the community, good will, and inclusion most people have experienced in Dewey Square. The valence of the positive energy could easily be turned by a minority willing to resort to bullying to impose their agenda on a gathering whose structurelessness gives them an open invitation. If there are Nixonian types among the enemies of the protests, what’s to stop them from sending in disruptors in disguise to sow dissension or worse? Hoover’s FBI did that to the anti-war and gay liberation movements two generations ago. I complained about my treatement as a volunteer responding to an appeal over the Twitter [...]

Well I’m finally back here at work after another recent series of personal adventures; in the middle of all the fun I’ve been finding time to get down to my local “Occupy” event, and for those of you who have not been keeping up I thought we’d take a moment today to compare a bit of Fox-driven perception to the reality I’ve been seeing. What I’ve been told to expect, at least in certain quarters of the public space, are dirty filthy hippies with no jobs or ambitions hoping to destroy America while having deviant public couplings fueled by the free distribution of dangerous psychotropic drugs. Sadly, I’ve found that there’s not really much truth in that description, even as tiny bits of it do ring true; but with a manifesto in hand and a few conversations under my belt we’ll see what we can do to create a picture that will surprise a lot of the 99% who already support Occupy Wall Street, even if they don’t know it yet. Individuals or individual states may call themselves what they please: but the world, and especially the world of enemies, is not to be held in awe by the whistling [...]