Amberpaw has a great diary on the MBTA’s budget crisis situation right now, and the stark choice we are faced with as a Commonwealth today: Do we want to be a part of the 21st Century, or have a transportation system that may as well belong in the days of the horse and buggy? No doubt, the budget situation at the MBTA is dire, but as she makes clear in her diary, the reason isn’t because of riders or even employees or anything like that. It’s because the MBTA was saddled with about $2 billion in Big Dig Debt, debt that’s drowning the agency today. The deficit the MBTA is faced with this year is $161 million and lots of people have been questioning where that money’s going to come from. The solution of most politicians on Beacon Hill and the MBTA big whigs they put into power is the easy one: Screw the riders. They want a combination of massive rate hikes and draconian service cuts to be the solution, the likes of which would drive many people away from the MBTA, literally. The combination of hikes and cuts could very well kill the MBTA as we know it, [...]
Ron Paul Says Maine Still in Play
Gotta love the GOP Primary season. You couldn’t make this stuff up: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-presidential-primary/210153-ron-paul-not-conceding-maine Ron Paul not conceding Maine vote But in Washington County, where Paul had expected to perform well, the caucus was postponed until Feb. 18 due to an expected snowstorm. Washington County Republican Chairman Chris Gardner told the AP he had no idea when the caucuses were postponed that his county would no longer count toward the grand total. “This is an outrage,” John Tate, Paul’s campaign manager, said in an email to supporters. “But our campaign is in this race to win, and will stay in it to the very end.” Perhaps another Iowa situation in the making: Paul’s campaign has accused the local GOP of postponing the caucuses to prevent the results from being reported on Saturday, arguing that “just the votes of Washington County would have been enough to put us over the top.” The campaign is also dismissing the notion that weather was a reasonable excuse for the caucuses to be put off. “This is Maine we’re talking about,” Tate said. “The Girl Scouts had an event today in Washington County that wasn’t cancelled!”
Towards a Unified Theory of Romney-ness
Read together, David Brooks and Dan Kennedy help us get to the heart of Mitt Romney’s limitations as a presidential candidate. Brooks delivers the mother of all counter-factuals: [Romney] needs to show how his outer pronouncements flow directly from his inner core. For his part, Kennedy imagines how Romney might make a virtue of his lack of orientation: If there’s still an authentic Romney underneath all the phony exteriors he’s tried on and discarded, then it is probably someone without a real political orientation — a pragmatic problem-solver, too liberal for Republicans (outside of Massachusetts), too conservative for Democrats, too bloodless and unappealing to be able to turn those qualities into a virtue, the way Ross Perot briefly did a dozen years two decades ago. The problem for Romney is two-fold, contrary to Brooks’ fondest wishes and as Kennedy recognizes, Romney has no inner core*. There is probably some psychological explanation for his success as a professional manager and his still startling propensity and capacity to say whatever he thinks necessary. But, the unavoidable truth: on the salient issues of the day, Romney has embraced both sides. And, contra Kennedy, there is no market for a presidential candidate with no orientation. None of [...]
