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The Wall Street Journal is reporting a significant legislative win for Democrats in the U.S. Senate, made possible by the support of the two Republican Senators from Maine. Speaker Pelosi will call the House members back from the break to vote next week. The President is expected to sign the bill,…
Read More »The NYT today has an update on the Bill and Melinda Gates/Warren Buffet trolling-for-billionaires initiative. They are having a great deal of success in getting people to pledge to give at least half of their riches to charity. Read the article here, and consider buying a copy of the NYT if…
Read More »Why are we starting to talk about a Kerouac Center for Creativity in Lowell? Aside from the facts that Lowell was founded by inventors and entrepreneurs, that the city is a contemporary hub of the creative economy, and that higher education institutions like UMass Lowell and Middlesex Community College demonstrate the positive results…
Read More »I’m not a big fan of the Obama Administration’s financial team. Too many are the products of Wall Street and have twisted the old “What’s good for GM is good for America” phrase into “what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.” Back in the early 1990s when banks…
Read More »The NYT today has an article about artists and creative entrepreneurs working to inject vitality back into Detroit, which has become the default example of a failed Rust-Belt city. Read the story here, and consider buying a copy of the New York Times if you appreciate the reporting.
Read More »Today Senator Kerry announced that he would delay the Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote on the new START Treaty. It appears that several Republican senators are on the verge of committing to vote for it, but have submitted several questions to the Obama Administration that they want answered before they…
Read More »The federal budget affects cities like Lowell that struggle to provide high levels of public service. Federal funds support many human services programs offered by Community Teamwork and other agencies, Community Development Block Grants, grants for law enforcement, research grants for Middlesex Community College and UMass Lowell, support for small businesses, etc.,…
Read More »To anyone who has been involved in public education in an urban setting for the past decade or two, today’s front-page story in the Globe reporting that students who frequently switch schools tend to do poorly in school is not exactly a revelation. I remember sitting in a school site…
Read More »Columnist and “talking head” Thomas L. Friedman of the NYT has his fans and his detractors; he turned off a lot of people with his support for the Iraq invasion. The current mess in Afghanistan can be traced in large measure to the bad decision to start a second war in…
Read More »The Roll Call of voting in the House and Senate on the Casino bill reported out by the conference committee makes for very interesting reading. My bold for legislators from the Greater Lowell/Merrimack Valley area. This is from the AP and found on the WCVB-TV web-site: “Here’s how members of…
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