"‘The hard part is, there’s no crystal ball’: MIAA facing its worst financial crunch" by Bob Hohler Globe Staff, June 15, 2019, 9:18 p.m.
These are the glory days, the indelible moments when the best high school spring sports teams in Massachusetts compete for state championships, but there are serious problems behind the scenes — financial strains and bitter divisions within the agency that manages the tournaments — that threaten to diminish the experience for thousands of student-athletes and increase demand for public funds to relieve the fiscal stress.
A Globe review has found that the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, the nonprofit responsible for running the tournaments, has spent itself into trouble with multimillion-dollar investments in retirement benefits and with salary hikes for its executive director, William Gaine Jr., and his staff during a decade when revenues remained flat because of flagging tournament attendance.
I don't know what they mean by flagging attendance. I go to the basketball tournament every year, and crowds have grown larger over the last few years.
From 2015 to 2018, the association’s available cash and investments dropped by 35 percent, to $1.2 million, its lowest balance in a decade, and, according to the MIAA’s most recently available federal tax returns, the nonprofit posted a deficit of $684,000 over the last two years.
All this occurred while the MIAA’s payroll for 29 employees increased by 22 percent from 2015 to 2018, to $1.3 million. Gaine, however, says the fiscal crunch is related to shrinking attendance at high school sports tournaments rather than personnel costs.....
Game over!
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Is there not one agency in Ma$$achue$etts that isn't riddled with feather-ne$ting f**ks?
Maybe they should put a woman in charge:
"Democratic women marched against Trump. Will they replace him with a female president?" by Jess Bidgood Globe Staff, June 15, 2019
NASHUA — When it’s time to choose a Democratic presidential nominee next year, Maureen Leary, a former Hillary Clinton supporter, is probably going to pass over several female candidates and vote for a man: Joe Biden.
“I’ve loved Joe for decades,” said Leary, 55, giddy after squeezing into a selfie with the former vice president and current Democratic front-runner under a bracing spring mist here.
What a fool (where were his hands, btw?).
Leary’s best friend, Krysten Evans, 44, accompanied her to see Biden in May, but was less convinced. “I would rather a woman or a person of color,” Evans said. “I’m done with old white men.”
About 2½ years after Trump’s victory, Democrats — especially women — have organized to send a historic wave of women lawmakers to Congress and state houses, and the party is now considering an unprecedented six female candidates for president, but it isn’t yet clear how important it is to female voters to try to put the first woman in the White House in 2020, leaving friends like Leary and Evans on opposite sides of the question.
At the moment, male candidates seem to be drawing more support from women voters than female candidates are. Despite Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s recent gains, a national Quinnipiac Poll released last week showed Biden with about as much support from women as all of the female candidates combined. It remains to be seen whether that trend is a function of his near-universal name recognition or a sign of enduring female backing.
I guess some guys are above #MeToo.
“What’s surprised me is, 2018 didn’t translate into an automatic appetite for a woman,” said Celinda Lake, a pollster who has worked with Hillary Clinton and Biden. “They have to fight for it.”
Interviews with more than 50 female voters at campaign events around the country underscored these divisions between a long-held goal for some voters, and the complexities of the 2020 race. Many women said they feel a tug to try again to send a woman to the White House after Clinton’s 2016 loss, but expressed a willingness to support male candidates they believe are well equipped to take on Trump. At the same time, there is a sense of frustration that the race so far has been largely defined by male front-runners and an “electability” narrative that seems to give male candidates an unearned advantage.
Leaders of women’s political groups said it is much too early for women to coalesce around any particular female candidate, especially when there are so many to choose from. That on its own, they say, is a sign of progress toward gender equality in politics, as is the fact that both male and female candidates are working hard to appeal to women voters by speaking directly about abortion rights, family leave, and equal pay.
More than nine in 10 Americans say they would vote for a female president, but a Pew Research Center poll released last month found that only 37 percent of Democratic women said they would feel more enthusiastic if the 2020 nominee were a woman.
I don't care what gender or color the nominee is, I just want to know one thing: will they stand up to Israel?
Related: "The episode marked a striking departure from the down-the-line support for Israel that has characterized the upper ranks of most Democratic primaries....."
Also see: Democrats defend Representative Ilhan Omar
Just kicking the tires a bit on that pos.
Amanda Renteria, the board chair of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office, said she hears palpable anxiety from members of her network over whether female candidates can keep up their recent political gains in 2020.
Even Democratic congresswomen elected in last year’s midterm wave hesitated to say the burgeoning female support that helped propel them to office means a woman will necessarily become the Democratic nominee.
“I think the activism has not abated, at least in my community, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily focused on gender,” said Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania.
Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois said it was simply too early to tell. “We’ve never had a female president. We’ve never had a female vice president. So when we have a [former] vice president who enters the field, it’s no surprise he would come in as the top-rated candidate,” Underwood said.
Experts say voters set a higher bar for female aspirants to executive office — such as president or governor — than in legislative bodies such as Congress, and the election of Trump, a man caught on tape bragging about touching women’s genitals, has sparked anger among women, but also worry about nominating a woman to run against a man who has gotten away with that kind of misogyny.
My bar is the same for them all, man, women, or even trans.
“I just feel that after Hillary Clinton, maybe our country’s not ready for a woman yet,” said Shirley Sylvester, 62, a Democrat from Hampton, N.H., who participated in the Women’s March in Orlando and volunteered for Clinton in 2016. “More than a woman, we need someone who can beat Trump.”
Clinton's problem as not her gender, it was her past.
Related:
Graffiti was visible Saturday morning on the facades of the Boston Public Library and the parish house of Trinity Church.(Jonathan Wiggs/Globe staff)
The vandal was due in court.
The six women candidates have worked to allay any gender-based reservations.
They only mention Harris, Warren, Klobuchar, and Gillibrand -- leaving Gabbard and Williamson out (they must not have a chance, huh?)
Related:
"US Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said her priorities are climate change, immigration, US standing on the international stage, and controlling prescription drug prices. She answered questions about the opioid epidemic, US foreign policy in Venezuela, and how she compares to other Democratic presidential candidates....."
Many women voters, particularly those who are leaning toward female candidates, are rankled by the shape of the Democratic race so far. They see the same sexism they experience in their own lives — forcing them to be better prepared than male colleagues, or to have to work harder to prove themselves — playing out in a campaign in which highly qualified female candidates must compete for the media flattery heaped on less-experienced male contenders, such as Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke.
Related:
"Despite such nods to bipartisanism, however, O’Rourke offered many positions Saturday that were liberal enough to make moderates nervous. He vowed to legalize marijuana nationally, defend abortion rights, strengthen unions, and bring home all troops from the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....."
Well, Obama promised the same thing so..... I guess a black woman will have to save us by making headlines and taking the 2020 campaign to their rivals’ turf.
Julie Chamberlain, 36, a Warren supporter from Rochester, Minn., already is tempering her expectations.
I guess the Dems are not ready for Elizabeth Warren’s angry populist message.
“I think the best we can hope for is vice president, but we’ll keep going,” said Chamberlain, who drove to Mason City, Iowa, to watch Warren speak at a brewery recently. “Why she’s not further, and why some of the other female candidates aren’t further in the polls, it’s a little deflating as a woman,” but Crystal Lee, a Detroit public schools teacher, said she was only more determined to back a woman in this election. “The glass ceiling that’s up there — women are tired,” Lee said. “We have let men try to rule. Let the women show them how to run a house.....
Related: "Welcome to 21st-century fatherhood, presidential campaign style. It is a shift that reflects changing American expectations around what, exactly, makes a good dad....."
I good dad these days is one who has been castrated and is a good cuckold.
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Related:
"In this time of ferocious female discontent, women are increasingly demanding a conversation about their periods and a reconsideration of public policies surrounding the cost and distribution of menstrual products....."
Ugh, the Globe put that on the front page in a push for free menstrual products.
Is it just me, or is the Globe obsessed with the political poop.
"Ukrainians will vote in a country divided between east and west, between corruption and a desire for honest government, between struggling, ordinary people and an ultra-wealthy business oligarchy. Even by the standards of former Soviet societies, Ukraine is a country of chronic pain, where people suffer from the dysfunction of their leaders, losses in war, and poverty. It is also a country with living, vibrant politics...."
Looks like the U.S., doesn't it, and ‘‘we tried to do our part, but nobody heard us.’’
It is almost as if “they are operating in this complete alternate reality,” and we are “a nation are trapped by lies.”
[flip to below fold]
As right whales surge north, one death too many
See: Born Again
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How Hong Kong’s leader makes the biggest political retreat by China under Xi
It's "New York Times News Analysis" so I didn't bother reading it because it is never enough.
"News Analysis: In faceoff with Iran, escalation may depend on who prevails inside Washington and Tehran" by David E. Sanger and David D. Kirkpatrick New York Times, June 15, 2019
WASHINGTON — On Friday, national security adviser, John R. Bolton, met for three hours at the White House with the acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, and General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss the tanker attacks and a proposal the Pentagon is weighing to send as many as 6,000 additional troops to the Gulf region, including warships and fighter jets.
The question now is whether escalation prevails, or whether the instinct to back away from direct confrontation — by Trump and those in Iran who see some kind of accommodation with the West as the only way out of the country’s isolation — kicks in.
It is hardly guaranteed, but it has happened before.
The two countries were closer to conflict a decade ago than was publicly apparent at the time. During the Bush and Obama administrations, Israel was repeatedly talked down from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. If retaliation followed, that would almost certainly have sucked in US military forces.
We are all waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it will.
Both conducted complex cyberattacks on the Iranian facilities to buy some time, and Obama began negotiations behind the backs of the Israelis and the Saudis. He ultimately reached the deal Trump denounced as one of the worst in history, but the national security team that dominated Trump’s first 15 months in office — the national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster; the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson; and the secretary of defense, Jim Mattis — was unanimous in the view that the president should expand the deal, rather than reject it.
Yeah, I am occasionally wistful for Obama if for no other reason than that. It quickly passes, though.
Btw, the Stuxnet cyberattack was an act of war and some suspect it wormed its way into Japan and Germany, but was a reminder that US officials must be ready to defend the American power grid.
As soon as Tillerson and McMaster were forced out, Trump withdrew from the deal, and their successors devised a sanctions regime. Trump loves saber-rattling but often hesitates when he senses his more hawkish advisers are driving him toward conflict in a region of the world where he has promised to bring US troops home.
There they go again, trying to goad Trump into war.
To think that he is the only check on the neocon warmongers is scary!
In May, when headlines suggested that the two nations were hurtling toward an inevitable clash, Trump signaled that it was time to rein in those aides.....
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Speaking of aggressive cyberwarfare:
"US buries digital land mines to menace Russia’s power grid" by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth New York Times, June 15, 2019
WASHINGTON — The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.
That is an ACT of WAR, dammit, and flies in the face of the narrative regarding the poor U.S. as a victim of Russian, Chinese, or Iranian meddling (if it was even them, which I doubt. It's more false flag skullduggery from the government and $oftware firms)!
In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of US computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.
There is no comparison. This could turn dangerous. Ballot boxes and voting machines won't melt down and blow up.
Related: Russia set to air TV series that reveals US role in Chernobyl nuclear disaster
Now I am really worried.
Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI that Russia has inserted malware that could sabotage US power plants, oil and gas pipelines, or water supplies in any future conflict with the United States, but it also carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.
Well, they said they found malware code attributed to Russians in Vermont, but that turned out to be another damn lie.
The administration declined to describe specific actions it was taking under the new authorities, which were granted separately by the White House and Congress last year to US Cyber Command, the arm of the Pentagon that runs the military’s offensive and defensive operations in the online world, but in a public appearance Tuesday, President Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the United States was now taking a broader view of potential digital targets as part of an effort “to say to Russia, or anybody else that’s engaged in cyberoperations against us, ‘You will pay a price.’ ”
He's on the front lines, 'eh?
Power grids have been a low-intensity battleground for years.
Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid, but now the US strategy has shifted more toward offense, officials say, with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before. It is intended partly as a warning and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.
This could really end badly, and the Russians should be pissed. Goes all the way back to Obummer, too.
I wonder what Putin has to say.
The commander of US Cyber Command, General Paul M. Nakasone, has been outspoken about the need to “defend forward” deep in an adversary’s networks to demonstrate that the United States will respond to the barrage of online attacks aimed at it.
Looks OFFENSIVE to me.
“They don’t fear us,” he told the Senate a year ago during his confirmation hearings, but finding ways to calibrate those responses so that they deter attacks without inciting a dangerous escalation has been the source of constant debate.
Trump issued new authorities to Cyber Command last summer, in a still-classified document known as National Security Presidential Memoranda 13, giving Nakasone far more leeway to conduct offensive online operations without receiving presidential approval, but the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”
So not only is Trump out of the loop, the military is out of control.
Oh, yeah, Mueller.
Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.
“It has gotten far, far more aggressive over the past year,” one senior intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity but declining to discuss any specific classified programs. “We are doing things at a scale that we never contemplated a few years ago.”
The critical question — impossible to know without access to the classified details of the operation — is how deep into the Russian grid the United States has bored. Only then will it be clear whether it would be possible to plunge Russia into darkness or cripple its military — a question that may not be answerable until the code is activated.
I'm sure the Russians are deep into finding it by now.
Both Nakasone and Bolton, through spokesmen, declined to answer questions about the incursions into Russia’s grid. Officials at the National Security Council also declined to comment but said they had no national security concerns about the details of The New York Times’ reporting about the targeting of the Russian grid, perhaps an indication that some of the intrusions were intended to be noticed by the Russians.
In other words, the New York Times was willingly acting as a megaphone for this government's agenda.
Speaking Tuesday at a conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, Bolton said: “We thought the response in cyberspace against electoral meddling was the highest priority last year, and so that’s what we focused on, but we’re now opening the aperture, broadening the areas we’re prepared to act in.”
He added, referring to nations targeted by US digital operations, “We will impose costs on you until you get the point.”
This guy is truly an evil fuck!
Two administration officials said they believed Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.
Therefore, he doesn't know what his own government is doing, or even worse, doesn't care!
Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.
That is where my print copy ended it.
Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.
Russian intrusion on US infrastructure has been the background noise of superpower competition for more than a decade.
A successful Russian breach of the Pentagon’s classified communications networks in 2008 prompted the creation of what has become Cyber Command. Under President Barack Obama, the attacks accelerated, but Obama was reluctant to respond to such aggression by Russia with counterattacks, partly for fear that the United States’ infrastructure was more vulnerable than Moscow’s and partly because intelligence officials worried that by responding in kind, the Pentagon would expose some of its best weaponry.
Instead, he instigated a coup in the Ukraine!
At the end of Obama’s first term, government officials began uncovering a Russian hacking group, alternately known to private security researchers as Energetic Bear or Dragonfly, but the assumption was that the Russians were conducting surveillance, and would stop well short of actual disruption.
That assumption evaporated in 2014, two former officials said, when the same Russian hacking outfit compromised the software updates that reached into hundreds of systems that have access to the power switches.
“It was the first stage in long-term preparation for an attack,” said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a security company that has tracked the group.
Believe it or not, they worked for the Clintons.
In December 2015, a Russian intelligence unit shut off power to hundreds of thousands of people in western Ukraine. The attack lasted only a few hours, but it was enough to sound alarms at the White House.
A team of US experts was dispatched to examine the damage, and concluded that one of the same Russian intelligence units that wreaked havoc in Ukraine had made significant inroads into the US energy grid, according to officials and a homeland security advisory that was not published until December 2016.
“That was the crossing of the Rubicon,” said David J. Weinstein, who previously served at Cyber Command and is now chief security officer at Claroty, a security company that specializes in protecting critical infrastructure.
Like we would believe anything this government claims.
In late 2015, just as the breaches of the Democratic National Committee began, yet another Russian hacking unit began targeting critical US infrastructure, including the electricity grid and nuclear power plants. By 2016, the hackers were scrutinizing the systems that control the power switches at the plants.
The DNC servers weren't breached. A disgruntled insider named Seth Rich thumbdrived the stuff and sent it to Wikileaks because Sanders was being robbed of the nomination. Rich was later shot and killed for it.
After Trump’s inauguration, Russian hackers kept escalating attacks.
Trump’s initial cyberteam decided to be far more public in calling out Russian activity. In early 2018, it named Russia as the country responsible for “the most destructive cyberattack in human history,” which paralyzed much of Ukraine and affected American companies including Merck and FedEx.
When Nakasone took over both Cyber Command and the NSA a year ago, his staff was assessing Russian hackings on targets that included the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corp., which runs a nuclear power plant near Burlington, Kansas, as well as previously unreported attempts to infiltrate Nebraska Public Power District’s Cooper Nuclear Station, near Brownville. The hackers got into communications networks, but never took over control systems.
In August, Nakasone used the new authority granted to Cyber Command by the secret presidential directive to overwhelm the computer systems at Russia’s Internet Research Agency — the group at the heart of the hacking during the 2016 election in the United States. It was one of four operations his Russia Small Group organized around the midterm elections. Officials have talked publicly about those, though they have provided few details, but the recent actions by the United States against the Russian power grids, whether as signals or potential offensive weapons, appear to have been conducted under the new congressional authorities.
As it games out the 2020 elections, Cyber Command has looked at the possibility that Russia might try selective power blackouts in key states, some officials said. For that, they said, they need a deterrent.
In the past few months, Cyber Command’s resolve has been tested. For the past year, energy companies in the United States and oil and gas operators across North America discovered their networks had been examined by the same Russian hackers who successfully dismantled the safety systems in 2017 at Petro Rabigh, a Saudi petrochemical plant and oil refinery.
I'm sure the Russians are responsible for post-nasal drip and farting in elevators, too.
The question now is whether placing the equivalent of land mines in a foreign power network is the right way to deter Russia. While it parallels Cold War nuclear strategy, it also enshrines power grids as a legitimate target.
What, it could backfire?
“We might have to risk taking some broken bones of our own from a counterresponse, just to show the world we’re not lying down and taking it,” said Robert P. Silvers, a partner at the law firm Paul Hastings and former Obama administration official. “Sometimes you have to take a bloody nose to not take a bullet in the head down the road.”
Oh, right, Russia did JFK, too.
I will say this, I feel a lot more safer and secure knowing we are putting our thumbs in the eye of the Russian bear.
How about you?
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At least Germany and Italy will be on our side this time:
"Straight-faced and stiff-lipped, Amanda Knox, the American whose murder trial riveted the world, dodged flashbulbs as a coterie of bodyguards kept the press at bay. She had returned to Italy to speak about wrongful convictions in her first trip to the country since 2011, when an appeals court in Perugia acquitted her of the murder of her roommate, British student Meredith Kercher, but even as Knox shunned reporters last week, a videographer on her team was tracking her every move, and when Knox finally broke a self-imposed three-day silence on Saturday, at the Festival on Criminal Justice in central Italy’s Modena, she wept....."
She must miss the attention, and that was Old Italy. They won't be knoxed flat with the EU behind them and will be knoxing on the Russian door until they are knoxed out. Of course, if it doesn't work out and the Russians start knoxing around Italy, then justice will be served!
More allies in the fight:
"Slovakia’s first female president, Zuzana Caputova, takes office in a divided country" by Marc Santora New York Times, June 15, 2019
PEZINOK, Slovakia — Zuzana Caputova rode a wave of public disgust with a political system rife with corruption to a victory widely seen as a rebuke of the illiberal and nativist strain of populism that has swept the European continent in recent years.
Caputova is proudly European, supports minority rights and does not shy away from controversial stances, like her support for gay rights, including the adoption of children by same-sex couples.
Significantly, she was able to do so in a way that many in this still deeply conservative country did not find threatening, perhaps offering a model for others.
Looks like the template for rigged elections throughout Europe, 'eh?
By any measure, it has been a remarkable year in this small Central European nation, which emerged from communist rule in 1989 and became independent in 1993, after a peaceful split with the Czech Republic.
The revolt against the governing party, Smer-SD, began after the murders of a young investigative reporter, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, in February 2018. Kuciak had been looking into the nexus between politicians and the Italian mob, the ‘Ndrangheta. A prominent businessman, Marian Kocner, would later be charged with ordering his killing, but that came only after hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets and town squares across the country, the largest protests since the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
Looks like they got Trumped.
The protests brought down the government of Prime Minister Robert Fico and paved the way for Caputova’s election a year later, but her ascension promises to be anything but smooth, as she is about to enter a political maelstrom that will test her skills and determination.
I'm sure she is up to the task.
An unlikely supporter of Caputova is Ivan Kocner, the brother of the businessman charged with ordering Kuciak’s murder. His brother also had a stake in the landfill that Caputova fought to close and had once, not so subtly, threatened her.
While Ivan Kocner became a documentary filmmaker, his brother surrounded himself with people who saw the country’s transition to democracy as a chance to get rich quick. Many of them would go on to become central figures in the organized crime world.
The state is still “ignoring the will of the people.”
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Why is no one addressing the elephant in the room in Mozambique (a possible weather weapon for the insertion of western and U.S. forces)?
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Time to come home:
"The influx of poor immigrant families brought a flood of resources as the school’s official poverty rate rose above 90percent: an after-school program, three interpreters, and a steady infusion of federal funding, but in recent years, as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began to reverberate through the nation’s public schools, the students who had been such a fiscal asset have turned into a budgetary liability. Education leaders in Baltimore say White House policy proposals are prompting immigrant families to forgo services they fear could land them on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s radar or jeopardize their path to citizenship....."
Yeah, it is all about the $$$$$$$$!!!!
Government cares more about illegals than they do about you, dear citizen.
Related:
"It was a fairly typical encounter for Steven Meier, 39, who, with hundreds of volunteers around the country, is working with National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses’ union, to build grass-roots support for the single-payer bill, a long shot on Capitol Hill and a disruptive force in the party. A single-payer health care system would more or less scrap private health insurance, including employer-sponsored coverage, for a system like Canada’s in which the government pays for everyone’s health care with tax dollars. Democrats not ready for that big a step are falling back on a “public option,” an alternative in which anyone could buy into Medicare or another public program, or stick with private insurance — a position once considered firmly on the party’s left wing. Lawmakers like Abby Finkenauer, the young Democrat who took a Republican’s seat last year in this closely divided district, mindful of the delicate political balance in their districts, fear the “socialism” epithet that President Trump and his party are attaching to Medicare for all....."
I used to be all for single-payer; however, this government is far to corrupt for that to be allowed.
Not going to happen anyway:
"While the bills would give relief to insurance industry workers, they would provide no such compensation for investors. Not surprisingly, the insurance industry and many other health care industries vociferously oppose these plans and plan to spend heavily in fighting them....."
Will they still cover cancer?
Also see:
Advocates say e-mails show that census question discriminates
You hungry?
Maker of plant-based burger struggles to meet chains’ demand
That New York Times burger is made from soybeans.
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Time to hop on the T and see where it takes you:
"Seeing red over the mess that is the MBTA" byGlobe Columnist, June 15, 2019
There’s nothing like a disaster to focus the mind, but will we still be livid about our basket case of a transit system once the Red Line is back to what passes for normal around here?
Let’s hope so, because sustained rage is the only thing that will get us out of this mess. Tuesday’s derailment— and the misery it brought travelers on that benighted line — has again exposed the woeful limitations of our transit network. Not just of the T, but the trains, buses, roads, and ferries around it, all utterly inadequate to serve our expanding region.
Many commuters had no choice but to endure the delays caused by the accident. Those who opted to travel by car found traffic moving like sludge. Those who sprang for ride-share services — which have served to further choke our roads over the last year — were gouged by surge pricing. That’s what happens when one of the slender threads by which our transportation system hangs is snapped.
On the upside, a derailment, or a crippling snowstorm, has a way of making everybody sit up and take notice. More people start to use the c-word.
“This is a crisis,” says Chris Dempsey, head of advocacy group Transportation for Massachusetts, who for years has been describing the system that way. “I know I’m a broken record, but you’re seeing others start to use that word, which I’m excited about.”
A crisis means more people besides those directly affected by the latest misery take notice. Most of the time, T riders have don’t have much juice. The folks who make things happen on Beacon Hill seem to value the votes of the drivers who clog the roads over those of the suckers who ride the rails. The governor, and too many legislators, have been allergic to higher gas taxes and toll hikes and congestion pricing and other measures that might make motorists less likely to crowd into a city already crammed with vehicles. We don’t want to make them angrier., but by all means, let’s raise MBTA fares. Think you’re suffering now, Red Liners? How about we charge you 6 percent more for that pain come July? You’re welcome!
A crisis, for as long as it lasts, means T riders aren’t alone in their anger, and there are so many people to be angry with right now. Start with the short-term thinkers on Beacon Hill who neglected the transit system for decades, underfunding it and failing to plan for the region’s expanding needs until too late. And Governor Charlie Baker. While Governor Fixit deserves credit for investing more on T upgrades than has been spent in years, he refuses to reckon with the fact that running a transit system that does more than tread water requires serious new investment. He has also refused to take a ride on the T himself in the wake of the disruptions, declining invitations from his critics (and me).
His transportation department has an ambitious vision for the region’s needs, including an end to gas-powered vehicles. No way should voters give Baker a third term unless he has a plan for turning that vision into action, and let’s put more heat on the business community. More corporate leaders than ever seem to agree that decades of inaction imperil their bottom lines. Boston Chamber of Commerce chief Jim Rooney was especially vocal last week, using the c-word and demanding the MBTA take a bolder approach. (Fun fact: Rooney collects one of the generous MBTA pensions the Baker administration blames for the T’s financial woes.) But a bunch of business groups, including Rooney’s outfit, fought a tax on millionaires that would have provided an estimated $2 billion a year in funding for transportation and education.
If his members don’t like that kind of revenue raising, they ought to say what funding plan they can get behind, and soon. A world-class transit system is expensive. It’s time for everybody to pay their fair share, and that will happen only if enough of us stay angry.
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Here is your next stop:
Martin Richard remembered at opening of Martin’s Park
Moving on:
Man describes unexpected encounter with alleged Ortiz shooter
As the conspiracy continues to unravel.
Burke valedictorian inspired by promise to beloved grandmother
One is Korean and the other Austrian.
Massive blaze in Boston damages homes
You know what else is hot?
Taylor Swift calls out homophobes on new song, announces 7th album
Just come out of the closet already.
Cuba Gooding Jr. turns himself in for allegedly groping woman, denies allegations
He says the security video will exonerate him.
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Renée Graham
Celebrating Juneteenth — our true independence day
Related:
"The origins of the day lie in the arrival of a Union general and his troops in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to free tens of thousands of African-Americans who were still in bondage two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation....."
They should put up a monument, imho.
Ideas | Peg Tyre
How to survive in an AI world
OPINION | MICHAEL COHEN
Trump’s latest betrayal strengthens the case for impeachment
OPINION | BARRY BLUESTONE
Finally — the tiny apartments that millennials need
Editorial
A grim 20th-century plaza deserves a green makeover
Well, I'm out of Ideas.
