Blue Mass Group

Suffolk University/WHDH News7 Poll is out:

Head-to-head in our exclusive 7News/Suffolk University Poll it’s Scott Brown 48%, Elizabeth Warren 47%…with just 5% undecided.

In February, Brown was up 49 to 40; so he’s flat, and she’s growing.

Suffolk does not have the poll posted yet.

UPDATE [by David]: Suffolk now has details of the poll posted at this link.

Also, check out some great stuff in The Hill’s writeup:

“This has been like a fender-bender on the side of the road,” said Joe Malone, the former state treasurer and a major GOP player in Massachusetts. “They’re slowing down to look, but it’s not changing where they’re heading.” …

“You’re always surprised by something, but that overall ballot test number — it really did change,” said David Paleologos, the head of polling at Suffolk University. “What we can conclude is people do not believe it is a significant story.” …

“Unless he’s got something else that reinforces the seed he’s planted, that indicates a pattern, he’s going to have to move on,” said Malone. “Pretty soon the media will bail. If this is a yawner to the voters, let’s move on to something else.”

You go, Joe.

Nice catch at HuffPost, Scott Brown sent a letter last week to JPMorgan which he wanted to sound like he was expressing concern. The problem is that the letter didn’t really say anything.

Scott Brown’s, ahem, concerns:

In that letter, Brown calls for only one thing: a clawback on the compensation of “the responsible parties in your company.” The problem is that Dimon already said that was likely to happen.

How tough and independent — telling a bank to do what it already said it would do!

What’s more, the Dodd-Frank Act makes clawbacks mandatory in some cases. So what does Brown do? He tells Dimon that clawbacks are mandatory in some cases. What a maverick.

Just in case anyone at JPMorgan thought he was in any way serious, Brown made sure further down in the letter that *wink* *wink* *nod* *nod* that he’s still Wall Street’s favorite Senator:

Lest his pointless letter seem too threatening to his scores of friends on Wall Street, Brown slips in some language that they would understand: “While regulations are necessary, it is also very important that when unprecedented mistakes do occur, banks will use the internal policies that they have set up to promote employee accountability.”

Translation: When Wall Street screws up on an unprecedented scale and engages in risky behavior that undermines confidence in the market, they should treat it as an internal matter. No need for the government to get involved — just move along, folks.

This, incidentally, is the same message as the one being spread by extreme conservatives like Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Of course, it was the lack of government involvement that allowed the financial crisis to happen in the first place.

I’m sure Scott Brown doesn’t want anyone to remember his role in Dodd-Frank was to water down regulations on risky trading which was at the center of the 2008 banking crisis. Taxpayer backed JPMorgan’s now 3 billion dollar loss to some is a test scenario to see if the rule should be strengthened.

Sounds like Scott Brown is singing a different tune, keep the money comin’:

image via Kos

I’ve earned it!

——– Forwarded message ———-
Sent-From: Braga, Ann Hess
Date: Wed, May 23, 2012 at 9:27 AM
Subject: .sgstn stenograph stenonote record of the last public meeting of Boston City Council.
To: “City Archivist John McColgan”

Good morning –
Attached please find the stenographic file of the last Council meeting.

Ann
Have a great day!

Say, is there some kind of uniform legal understanding of the ownership and rights to us contributors content on various blogs, such as BMG and HuffingtonPost and Boston.com? (Not including the ownership of stuff we post links to, like that truly awesome Rick James video I just embedded, which you should watch five times in a row to appreciate Rick James’s acting and singing and overall amazingness) but stuffff like this, truly ungrammitacal stuff, like Rick James himself coming home intoxicated. My understanding is that BMG can publish everything all their users contribute (“can tribute”) but that they don’t own our contributions, I can go make this same post on RMG or incorporate it into a book I’m writing and BMG can’t object. Is that about right?

Great read from a MarketWatch columnist on the spending spree that wasn’t.

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

Read the whole thing.  Also noteworthy: the second- and third-lowest rates of spending growth in the last 30 years belong to President Clinton’s first and second terms, respectively.  Remarkable.

h/t Dana Chandler, Jr.

In years past, as a member of the Commonwealth’s Executive Branch, I worked with the Governor’s Office of Administration and Finance while it created more than a dozen state budgets. It is a complex process. If you are not familiar with it, here is the shortest, thumbnail explanation I can offer:

After months of work, the Governor’s Budget is submitted to the House of Representatives as House 1—supposedly the first bill of the session—in January of every year. After receiving House 1, the House Ways and Means Committee (HW&M) begins work on its budget which is usually released in early April.

To influence the HW&M Budget, one works with the HW&M analysts and perhaps with members of the HW&M Committee. When the HW&M budget is released, advocates work with individual representatives, the Speaker and the HW & M Chair to seek sponsors for “floor amendments,” to restore, add or change funding in their final budget. Once the full House votes to accept the budget, a House Budget is created and sent to the Senate Ways and Means Committee (S W&M).

The SW&M begins work on its budget and advocates begin their work to influence the Senate W&M analysts, the Senate President and Senate W&M Chair. After presentation of the SW&M Budget to the full Senate, a process similar to that in the House takes place where advocates seek individual senators to sponsor important “floor amendments” and eventually a Senate Budget is produced.

Because the House and Senate budgets are not identical, a conference committee with membership from the House and the Senate is convened to reconcile differences. Budget items in agreement stand as they are. Items that differ are negotiated until an agreed upon Conference Budget is created.

The Conference Budget is then returned to both the House and Senate for approval and when agreement is reached, that budget is submitted to the Governor who will either approve it or make line item changes before signing it to give the Commonwealth a new State Budget (hopefully by July 1^st when the state fiscal year begins).

Is your mind reeling yet?

As I said, I lived and worked through this process over a dozen years. I was in the gallery at 3:45 AM one April morning in 1993 when I realized they were debating the program I was trying to create. Supporting legislators began beckoning me to meet them outside the chamber on the 3^rd floor of the State House saying that W&M Chair, Thomas Finneran, had not received the study supporting showing the need for the program. Of course, he had but there wasn’t time for argument. The door to my office building across the street was locked with my keys inside since I’d been at the State House for nearly 18 hours BUT I found another representative with a copy of the report in his office and placed it into the Chair’s hands after 15 minutes of shear panic. By 8 AM, our efforts to create that program failed and I returned to my office for a days work. We didn’t succeed that year (we did the next) but I DID learn indelible lessons about the complex in’s and out’s of the state budget process.

As a matter-of-fact, the process is so complex that I developed a flow chart to use as a teaching tool for many of the non-profit program I funded. Unlike large, for-profit corporations, non-profits often can’t afford pricey lobbyists and, thus, are left to fend for themselves in the complex world of the state budget. I tried to teach them how to navigate the system to give them a fighting chance.

As reported in the Radio Boston pod cast http://radioboston.wbur.org/2012/04/26/budget-transparency//player, an independent, nation-wide analysis of state budget processes, The State Integrity Investigation (http://www.stateintegrity.org/) gave Massachusetts a failing grade—placing us 47^th of the 50 states. How shameful. Even with our existing “Sunshine Laws” which has been helping to bring government processes into the light, our budget process came in at the bottom of the Nation .

One of the deficits noted by researchers was the ineffectiveness of the Ways and Means Committees. My opponent states that he is privileged to serve on the House Ways and Means Committee. Although he, as I will be, is only one person, my challenge to him is, What have you done to fight the system and improve it to shed light on the state budget process?

I will tell you what I will do:  I pledge to try everything I can think of to make change. I have already, at this writing, reached out to House Speaker Pro Tempore, Representative Patricia Haddad, Representative Ruth Balzer (featured in the podcast) and Representative Richard Kocut Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight to ask what I might do to effect change once elected. I want to be on their radar screens.

Seeing wrong and doing nothing is neither morally acceptable nor my style. I want to fight for Bridgewater and Raynham on equal footing with all other cities and towns. I don’t want backdoor deals and dead-of-night, unprocessed, radical changes to our state budget. I promise to push for change.

Marilee Kenney Hunt

www.huntforstaterep.com

More evidence that Obama is the most gifted politician of our generation. Here he neatly transitions the entire Romney campaign, using their own claims, into an effort for the 1%, with him representing the remaining 99% of the electorate.

“I think it’s important to recognize that this issue is not a, quote, distraction. This is part of the debate that we’re going to be having in this election campaign about how do we create an economy where everybody from top to bottom, folks on Wall Street and folks on Main Street, have a shot at success, and if they’re working hard and they’re acting responsibly, that they’re able to live out the American dream. Now, I think my view of private equity is that it is – it is set up to maximize profits and that’s a healthy part of the free market. That’s – that’s part of the role of a lot of business people. That’s not unique to private equity, and as I think my representatives have said repeatedly, and I will say today, I think there are folks who do good work in that area, and there are times where they identify the capacity for the economy to create new jobs or new industries. But understand that their priority is to maximize profits. And that’s not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers.

“And the reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience. He’s not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying,’ I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it,’ and this is his business.

“And when you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who get laid off and how are we paying them for their retraining? Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses. Your job as president is to think about how we set up an equitable tax system so that everybody’s paying their fair share that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow. And so, if your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about. It doesn’t – it doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but ten years from now and twenty years from now.

“And so, to repeat, this is not a distraction. This is what this campaign’s going to be about, is: what is a strategy for us to move this country forward, in a way where everybody can succeed? And that means I’ve got to think about those workers in that video just as much as I’m thinking about folks who have been much more successful.”

As promised, here’s a thumbnail of my epic post on the proposed new billboard regulations and how Massachusetts will soon go from having among the strongest billboard regulations in the country to among the worst.    Enjoy!

1.   We’re Losing the Current Electronic Billboard Ban.   After conducting a pilot program on the safety of electronic billboards with Clear Channel, the Office of Outdoor Advertising is proposing its first set of (seriously lacking) regulations for electronic billboards. However, per the federal agreement between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Federal Highway Administration adopted pursuant to Mass. Gen. Laws Ch. 93D, Section 7, electronic billboards are currently prohibited in Massachusetts “except those giving public service information such as time, date, temperature, weather or similar information”. Before the OOA can adopt these new regulations they have to get the legislature to rescind the federal agreement that sets forth the electronic billboard ban.  Given that federal highway funds are tied to the agreement, a rescission is unlikely, and the OOA should enforce the electronic billboard ban.

[Cross-posted from the ProgressMass blog.  Like ProgressMass on Facebook and follow on Twitter.]

Republican Scott Brown holds what he frequently refers to as “the People’s Seat,” despite the fact that he refuses to meet with “the People” in an open, public town hall forum well-advertised in advance.  OK, fine.  For the most part, we lowly constituents have to rely on written missives from Brown (unless we also listen to his misleading and hypocritical “Radio Report” series of paid advertisements).

But that begs the question, does Republican Scott Brown actually write anything himself?  There are plenty of reasons to believe he doesn’t.

First, we recently learned that Republican Scott Brown used the Bush family ghost writer to draft his autobiography.  (It’s not really much of an autobiography if someone else writes it, right?)  Sure, plenty of politicians use ghost writers, but they’re all Washington D.C. elitists, right?  Not Scott Brown!  Oh, well.

Second, we all recall when Republican Scott Brown was caught plagiarizing from Republican Elizabeth Dole’s biography, fabricating a fictitious background for himself – and he didn’t even have the courtesy to pay Liddy Dole as a ghost writer!

“This kind of plagiarism makes me wonder how many things about Scott Brown are really genuine,” said Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge 21st Century.

He added: “The fact that he can’t come up with a personal values statement of his own, that he has to steal someone else’s, I think is very instructive of what kind of politician he is.”

It’s doubly funny (or perhaps doubly shameful) that Brown resorted to the old scapegoat tactic of blaming an intern for his mess.  American Bridge 21st Century chronicled Brown’s plagiarism scandal:

Third, this headline kind of says it all: “Scott Brown’s Pledge To Keep Out Third Parties Written With Help Of Third Party.”  What are they talking about?  As Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Elizabeth Warren were negotiating the terms of the “People’s Pledge” (the agreement for which Brown has had to pay fines twice for violations), Brown’s negotiations were not drafted by the Brown campaign, but rather by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), one of those very “third parties” that the People’s Pledge has operated to keep out of the process.  NRSC lawyer Sean Cairncross served as Republican Scott Brown’s ghost writer on this one.  It’s as ironic as it is disingenuous.

Fourth, and perhaps most telling, compare these two passages:

She is a far-left ideologue and her liberal friends from across the country are helping her: She has the Harry Reid Democrats, the Hollywood Crowd, the Far Left Juggernaut, the Occupy Wall Street Bunch, and the Massachusetts Machine raising money hand-over-clenched fist. [...]

This is why Washington insiders, celebrities, elites, occupiers and leftists are pouring money into their attack campaign against me, and why I need your generous help again, right now, whether it’s for $25, $50, $100 or some other amount, to fight back hard and win.

and

I try not to divide people up into easy categories – assuming the best because they agree with me, or the worst because they don’t.

The first passage, in which the writer divides people up into “easy categories,” comes from a fundraising e-mail dated April 10, 2012, and entitled “Warren’s liberal friends.”  The e-mail was signed “Senator Scott Brown, The People’s Seat.”

The second passage, in which the speaker insists that he doesn’t “divide people up into easy categories,” was uttered by – wait just a second! – Republican Scott Brown in a speech given on May 2, 2012, just twenty-two days after Brown very clearly “divided people up into easy categories.”

This clear disconnect in rhetoric suggests one of four scenarios:

1. Brown wrote the first passage but not the second (passing off ownership of the rhetoric until he delivered the second passage in his speech).
2. Brown wrote and delivered the second passage while blissfully unaware of the first having been sent out by his campaign.
3. Brown didn’t write either passage, which is plausible since he doesn’t seem to write anything else.
4. Brown wrote both passages and simply lied in his speech about not dividing people up into “easy categories,” thinking he could Etch-A-Sketch away his earlier childishly partisan rhetoric.

If Republican Scott Brown ever held town hall meetings, maybe we could ask him which scenario was accurate.  (And maybe that’s one of the reasons why Brown hides from his constituents and refuses to hold town hall meetings.)

Obviously, U.S. Senators are very busy people and they can’t personally write every single word that is communicated from their office or campaign.  However, when Republican Scott Brown time and time again doesn’t bother to communicate his own words (on top of his aforementioned refusal to hold town hall meetings), we have to question how genuine he is and whether or not he’s simply a puppet of his right-wing partisan Republican leadership and corporate benefactors on Wall Street and in Big Oil.

Dear lefty Obama haters/skeptics, or those convinced that the Democrats are worthless: Please consider this alternative scenario.

Had the filibuster not applied, the United States would have a market-based system to control carbon emissions, which would limit the damage from global warming, vitalize the clean technology sector, and challenge other large polluters like China and India to do the same. The new health care law would have a public option. Children of undocumented immigrants who served two years in the military or went to college could become US citizens. Women paid less than their male colleagues because of their gender would have broader legal recourse against their employers. Billionaires would not be able to manipulate the political system from behind a veil of anonymity.

via Taking on the F-word – Boston.com.

I suppose you can blame Harry Reid et al for the continuation of the filibuster; however, considering that a GOP takeover of the Senate is well within the realm of possiblity, the Affordable Care Act would be much easier to repeal, much less Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Think on it.

More from the picture worth more than 1,000 words department. This graph is from the Sentencing Project with the red annotation added by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

I’ve noticed some complaining about the dumb voters and how to appeal to them.

I thought this would be a good time to introduce this lecture from TVO’s Big Ideas show about the divided brain. Although it’s more interesting than politics, basically the conclusion of this researcher is that favoring the left brain will lead you into all kinds of trouble.

My own little topical contribution is that voters will pick the candidate best for their personal economy, that is, their personal effort to make a living, relying on emotion because that’s the way we do most or even all of our thinking. These voters may say it’s for some social reason because they can’t articulate the economics, or the social is more related to the economics than the losing side would like to believe or care to investigate. Anyway here’s the lecture:

http://backend.tvo.org/video/176966/dr-iain-mcgilchrist-divided-brain

Rumors, rumors, rumors. The latest is that Judge Robert Mulligan is being investigated for his role in the lease with Cummings Properties in Woburn for the Middlesex Superior Courthouse. There seems to be two areas of concern. First the broker in the deal is rumored to be Mulligan’s nephew and the rent agreed upon was significantly higher than market rate.

Usually these types of rumors turn out to be true. Now as I’ve mentioned before, I only spill inside baseball crap here when it is widely known among the widely known. Like this.

No surprise here about Judge Mulligan. He’s the one that paid-off a Supreme Judicial Court Justice with a job for her son-in-law in return for her deciding vote in re-appointing him.

The guy’s a slime ball and he should be held accountable. Unfortunately he conspired with the Globe and the SJC to take down a guy that bugged them. Yet it turns out he’s the biggest player of the system to come down the pike in a long time. This pompous and arrogant jerk thought he had everyone fooled. But it appears that as this plays out the only person with larceny in his heart is Judge Mulligan.

Anyway I hope Martha or the feds are sending out subpoenas on this one. Not to mention the Judicial Conduct Commission.

The people who run the courts can’t be trusted with money. I’m tellin’ ya. The waste more freakin money on real estate and goodies for their offices. They’re fucking pigs sometimes. But hey, I’ll take the appointed for life dick head over the elected judge. Mass still has the best system and we have great judges.

—–

Hey, suppose you are an adult guy on vacation and decide to take a sauna at the luxury hotel where you are staying. Now suppose there is also a 15 year old boy in there. Just the two of you. Now, imagine that you sweat some of the hang-over out and leave the sauna feeling great. Quick cold shower to close the pores then back to the beach and frozen margaritas.

Now work with me here. Imagine that as your sitting on the beach local cops come up and you are told that the kid in the sauna said you came in the sauna, exposed your penis and began masturbating with your left hand while starring at the him.

The kid said you then removed his towel and touched his shoulders and back and then leaned over and forced the his penis in your mouth. The kid said he couldn’t move and at the same time you reached around and forced your fingers up his anus.

The kid said he was able to push you off and ran out. He called 911 as soon as practical.

Later you are told that the kid is very credible and law enforcement wants to indict. The evidence, according to seasoned sexual assault detectives, is more than enough for indictment and conviction. They are mystified as to why the local prosecutor did not follow custom and indict.

A civil suit is filed against you and you settle for an undisclosed sum.

Hmmmmmmm

These are the facts of Stanley Mcgee’s version of events. (I added the margaritas).

This guy is a child rapist and most likely political pressure kept him from getting indicted and he still works for the governor.

Where is the Globe on this? Hey Deval, what makes you different than Bernie Law? Stanley McGee is your Willie Horton. I mean the Gloebbels won’t tell us much of your harboring the child rapist but your opponent and most other newspapers will.

So the child rapist is a hero in the corner office and Tim Cahill is nuclear active.

The lemmings now being told to accept the child rapist. I guess if you are a Rhodes Scholar from Harvard with influential friends in government and the press you can finger fuck any kid you want whenever you want and nobody cares.

So on behalf of every kid that forcibly was finger fucked and blown at the same time by some creep who stuck his head in a bucket of Clorox I say:

Fuck you Deval and all your friends. And fuck you Boston Globe you sick mother fuckers. I guess it’s not about the kids. It’s about money and power. Thanks for reminding me.

And don’t make this a gay thing either. Not anymore. This is no different than a guy finger fucking and eating out a 15 year old girl. A freshman in high school.

It’s child rape you enabling frauds.

Why is this guy still around?

Republicans in the House have approved a budget that allocates $3.7 billion more than the Pentagon is seeking. This just underlines the fatuousness of GOP claims that they are concerned with deficit spending and that the federal government doesn’t have money. Time:

The House has approved a $643 billion defense-spending bill for 2013 that’s $3.7 billion more than the Obama Administration, and its Pentagon, is seeking. That’s just about the same amount the Congressional Budget Office estimates the House bill’s push for an East Coast missile shield will cost over the next five years.

It’s amazing that a country without money can consider building a missile shield against a threat that doesn’t exist.

True, we’ve already invested billions building such a West Coast system against the threat of a North Korean missile attack, so why shouldn’t we build a mirror system on the other side of the country to protect its denizens from attack by the Iranians?

The House proposal “postures our Armed Forces for potential future threats,” says Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the armed services committee. “Despite a tough fiscal environment, we have provided our Armed Forces with the tools they need to win the war today and deter against the wars of tomorrow.”

(Cross-posted from The COFAR Blog)

In many of the photographs that Rosemary Dumont has of her son Stephen, a red vertical wound can be seen at the top of his forehead, almost seeming to divide his forehead in two.

That wound is the result of Stephen’s habit of banging his head on any hard object near him, such as the corner of a table.  Before he was admitted to the Glavin Regional Center in Shrewsbury five years ago, he would open up the wound on practically a daily basis.

Community-based residences and hospitals tried to solve the problem with drugs, which didn’t work.  It got to the point where no community-based group home would keep or accept him as a resident.  At one point, the only place his parents, Rosemary and Will Dumont, were able to find for him was the controversial Judge Rotenberg Center.  There, Stephen was given electric shocks when he banged his head.  But that didn’t stop the behavior. 

The story was finally different at the Glavin Center where the staff have been able to reduce Stephen’s head-banging episodes to once or twice a year through constant supervision and supportive behavioral treatments.  Now, he’s able to go home to stay with his parents on weekends without the threat of a flare-up of his aggressive behavior.  Those home visits weren’t possible while he was in the community system.

The Dumonts know this “miracle” of treatment for their son will disappear when Glavin is closed, as the Patrick administration is moving quickly to do.   Not only is there no community-based setting that is likely to accept, much less successfully treat, Stephen, any change at all in his living arrangement is likely to trigger a descent into his old cycle of self injury. 

For Stephen, who has an intellectual disability in addition to having cerebral palsy and deafness, the act of leaving a long-term home such as Glavin and its staff and fellow residents results in a conviction that those people have all died.  “He loves all these people (at Glavin) to death,” Rosemary says.  “He can’t handle the change.”

For that reason, the Dumonts are desperate to keep Glavin open.  And they know that for now, the fate of the center rests with one man — State Senator Stephen Brewer of Barre.

Under the Legislature’s current budget process, it is totally up to Brewer whether to approve a state budget amendment that would require an independent cost analysis before the Department of Developmental Services can move more people out of Glavin and subsequently close the center.  Brewer, who is chairman of the powerful Senate Ways and Means Committee, has the authority to decide whether to place all proposed budget amendments in either a reject pile or a pile of amendments headed for a single up-or-down vote on the Senate floor this week.

So far, Brewer hasn’t given the Dumonts much reason for hope that he will accept the study amendment for the floor vote.  When the Dumonts and a small group of other Glavin family members met with Brewer earlier this month to urge him to allow the study amendment to reach the floor, Brewer told them that he “didn’t have the energy” to fight for the Glavin Center, Will Dumont said.  Dumont said Brewer referred to it as a “losing battle.”  The Dumonts, who live in North Brookfield, happen to be constituents of Brewer’s.

The administration is closing Glavin and three other developmental centers, contending they have become too costly to continue to operate.  The Dumonts and other supporters of the centers disagree with the administration’s cost analysis.  COFAR,  a family-supported nonprofit organization that I work for, maintains that the administration’s cost analyses for all of the centers have been flawed and that an independent study is needed.

COFAR moreover believes it would be cost effective to the state to expand the missions of Glavin and the other developmental centers by enabling them to provide medical and other hard-to-get services to community-based DDS clients.  Glavin, for intance, has long provided medical, dental, speech, psychology, guardianship and other services to intellectually disabled persons throughout central Massachusetts. 

It’s the hope of the Glavin families that an independent cost study will establish once and for all that the savings in closing the facility are illusory.  That, they hope, would convince the Legislature to block the administration’s plans to close Glavin.

But the administration strongly opposes an independent study, as does the Arc of Massachusetts and the Association of Developmental Disabilities Providers, which are vocal opponents of the developmental centers.  And Brewer has shown little inclination to oppose those organizations or the administration, as evidenced by his statement to the Dumonts about lacking the energy to fight for the facility. 

Yet, if the battle has been a losing one, that has at least partly been because of Brewer himself.  Last year, Brewer scuttled a similar independent study amendment, which had been filed by Senator Michael Moore of Worcester. Moore has once again filed the study amendment.  It would require that the cost study be done by a non-governmental entity selected by the state Inspector General.

Will and Rosemary Dumont are hoping this time they can scrounge up enough local support for Glavin that they can put some counter-pressure on Brewer.  Will Dumont has enlisted all his friends in his hunting club near his hometown of North Brookfield to call and email Brewer’s office.  Last week, Will, Rosemary and some other Glavin family members visited legislators’ offices in the State House.  Meanwhile, Rosemary has been signing up friends on Facebook to support the cost study, and said last week that her effort had “gone viral.”  Other Glavin families are making calls and sending emails as well and urging their friends to do so.

We may know whether their efforts have paid off by tomorrow when the Senate begins debate on the budget.  We hope Senator Brewer has enough compassion for the residents and families of the Glavin Center that he will at least put the amendment for the cost study into the pile for a Senate floor vote.

Not surprised the stock is tanking. I have to take the scenic route to my own information, four or five screens to get to the list of my own friends, when it used to be right there. The whole thing is full of these detours to get me to do something else.

This picture may be worth more than 1,000 words. A helpful list of Scott Brown’s votes to slow the Massachusetts economy and expand the deficit by maintaining discredited Bush-era Republican economic policies is here.

[Cross-posted from the ProgressMass blog.  Like ProgressMass on Facebook and follow on Twitter.]

What did we learn about Republican Scott Brown this week?  (Or, more accurately, what did we already know about Republican Scott Brown that he just re-confirmed for us?)

·    Republican Scott Brown just can’t quit JPMorgan Chase, and they love him right back!  But Brown really doesn’t want to talk about it.  After all the backroom deals Brown has secured for his Wall Street benefactors, it’s no wonder he’s one of Wall Street’s favorite Senators.

·    Republican Scott Brown’s campaign can’t seem to decide if his super-secret New York fundraising committee is a whole bunch of people he refuses to disclose or if it’s just one man he’s willing to identify.  He might want to get his story straight.

This photo is courtesy of Brett Jelenek, who is creating onsite video and photo recordings of events in Chicago.  It was taken on May 18, 2012 according to Brett.  I call it “A Warm Chicago Welcome” or “You shall not pass.”

Not only were there premptive warrantless arrests, but folks were shuttled about in unmarked cars, held for as long as 48 hours, and according to Attorney Deutsch (see link to his embedded interview, here) all charges are fabricated and provocatuers planted phony “evidence.”  Pretty strong statements.  So if you are hearing that three “terrorists” were arrested, understand that this is more likely than not media hype to justify the actions of CPD (Chicago Police Department), FBI, and Homeland Security in Chicago.  One of the fellows arrested is an EMT student, all of them bunked at the home of a young guy who was brewing beer long before they came to Chicago.

I love the National Lawyer’s Guild Press Release.  You should all read it here..  Don’t expect to find it in the Boston Globe, after all.  Don’t expect these pictures of the huge military presence in Chicago to show up in the Globe, either.