Blue Mass Group

Ever wonder how the legislature can “get away with” making almost all its decisions behind closed doors, public excluded, no record made or published – check this out: Section 18Definitions applicable to Secs. 18 to 25 “Public body”, a multiple-member board, commission, committee or subcommittee within the executive or legislative branch or within any county, district, city, region or town, however created, elected, appointed or otherwise constituted, established to serve a public purpose; provided, however, that the governing board of a local housing, redevelopment or other similar authority shall be deemed a local public body; provided, further, that the governing board or body of any other authority established by the general court to serve a public purpose in the commonwealth or any part thereof shall be deemed a state public body; provided, further, that “public body” shall not include the general court or the committees or recess commissions thereof, bodies of the judicial branch or bodies appointed by a constitutional officer solely for the purpose of advising a constitutional officer and shall not include the board of bank incorporation or the policyholders protective board; and provided further, that a subcommittee shall include any multiple-member body created to advise or make [...]

a) The Sample/Specimen Ballot posted outside the polling place for voters. Why is the Elections Division http://mass.gov/sec of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts so difficult to get the Sample/Specimen ballot poster from by email before voting?… in case local elections commissions haven’t made the Sample/Specimen Ballot poster available by email or online, on the web. b) Printer of Ballots Could the Printer of Ballots email the Sample/Specimen Ballot poster on request for any voters interested in seeing the Sample/Specimen Ballot poster before going to vote? It’s 2012, it shouldn’t be necessary to make a trip to see a Sample/Specimen Ballot poster that could be make available by email or online, on the web in advance of the day for voting Printer of Ballots http://www.bradford-bigelow.com Peter Anton tel 978 904-3100 x113 email panton at bradford-bigelow.com c) Website. Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Could the Massachusetts Division of Elections provide easier to navigate website information? See also League of Women Voters http://www.lwvma.org MassVote http://massvote.org A better Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a better administrative organization for the Secretary’s Election Division http://sampleballots.blogspot.com

You have probably all heard them.  Scott Brown has money to blow and so he spends it on the relatively inexpensive radio ads that make him sound like a regular guy.  I mean the truck to pull his daughter’s horse and the $600 barn coat just like the one my mother owns already scream “wow just like me!”  However, the radio ads praising the patriots and the Red Sox are what really bring Brown close to our hearts. With opening day at Fenway Park only hours away, Scott Brown thought he’d take another swing at it and hit another one with one of these ads.  Oh, but instead he fouled it off…oh, wait, wait, it’s an OUT! Caught by (among others)…the Boston Herald? Brown’s latest radio ad praises the decision to keep Fenway Park as the home of the Red Sox ahead of the stadium’s centennial.  We’ll hand this off to the Boston Globe for more: As a state legislator, he pressed for a bill to have the Sox move to Foxborough, the town adjacent to his own town of Wrentham. Brown even asked Patriots owner Robert Kraft to consider using property around his football stadium to build a new [...]

George Will points out in the Washington Post that : with both alcohol and illicit drugs, about 20 percent of users consume 80 percent of the products. “Reducing consumption by the 80 percent of casual users will not substantially reduce the northward flow of drugs or the southward flow of money,” The “war on drugs” is a failed policy. It is making the prision industry rich. California is paying $50,000 per year per inmate and only $9,000 per year per student.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/should-the-us-legalize-hard-drugs/2012/04/11/gIQAX95QBT_story.html

I grew up in a town where change was not on the agenda so it was not surprising that when 2008 came around, the presidential election caused quite a heated debate. I was two months too young to vote that November, but I was so empowered by Obama and his message that I made the decision to get involved. On Election Day, my friends and I stood outside our high school equipped with homemade signs encouraging people to vote. All day long, we were able to talk to teachers and students about our thoughts and hopes for the newly elected president. The rest of the night, I was electrified by the notion that my few hours of contribution had possibly helped elect our next president. This feeling of being so connected to the political process inspired me to work on various other campaigns and instilled in me the importance of people becoming involved. Now, as a political intern at Democracy for America, my experiences are coming full circle. There is something about working with people across the country who come alive over a shared issue that inspires me in the same way that I was that November night in 2008. [...]

[Cross-posted from the ProgressMass blog.  Like ProgressMass on Facebook and follow on Twitter.] Our Republican junior Senator, Scott Brown, has a very simple decision before him: raise taxes on lower-income Americans and give the wealthiest Americans even more tax cuts (the Romney Plan), or increase tax fairness and make sure that millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share (the Buffett Rule). As a reminder, this is the impact of the Romney Plan: Mitt Romney’s new tax plan strongly favors the wealthiest Americans, offering earners in the top 20 percent an average tax cut of more than $16,000 while raising taxes on the bottom 20 percent of earners, according to an analysis from a non-partisan Washington think tank. The analysis out Thursday from the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution think tanks, finds that under Romney’s plan the bottom 20 percent would see their average federal tax rate increase $149, or 1.3 percent. The top 20 percent, meanwhile, would see an average tax cut of $16,134 — a 5.4 percent reduction in their tax rate. The top one percent of earners would see their average tax rate fall by nearly $150,000 per year, [...]