Harvard and Tufts try to help solve Somerville organizing and calendar problems

Steve Clift is one of the most successful community media advocates in the nation. His e-Democracy is both a standard and a clarion call for more participatory journalism. In part this is a response to the failure of traditional media to cover what we need-to-know, and their inept response to the medium of the internet. [...]

Where are Senator Jehlen, Representatives Toomey, Provost, and Sciortino on holding state-chartered corporations to account to their shareholders for their political influence?

The timing of support is worth lots more than just a single vote.

What a price for tenure? And how can you tell your professor is crazy!

Banks and Verizon need to be held to the kind of standards they use to torture their customers.

Perversely (in both literal and political sense), the Shanley case shows that Brown may not have been as bad a choice as Coakley. And that gloating rarely makes up for lousy organizing on behalf of an arrogant and opportunistic candidate. Thanks Carl, Thanks Martha for the lesson. We will remember.

Pittsburgh floats a sales tax on college tuition!

Hyatt or Tufts, Deval’s choice is the hotter bed.

A five month delay in filling Kennedy’s seat with a similarly minded temporary successor guarantees a health care bill to the advantage of current insurers. Can it be coincidental that CEO of the largest of those insurers in Massachusetts, Pilgrim Health Care, would not materially benefit from a delay in filling this seat? How much [...]

In spite of the overwhelming cupidity of the Board of Aldermen, one or more may ask why or how the Mayor connects “access” to higher tickets across the board? … The obvious conclusion is that he cares nothing about access, and everything about money. While that may be good for his budget, it is at real cost to citizens and businesses, and, ultimately, to the management system that justifies – or rationalizes – that cost.

Last Thursday, responding to requests from the Actors Shakespeare Company and Arts at the Armory, I attended the Board of Zoning Appeals hearing. Testimony at that hearing was a revelation in several very different – and conflicting – ways.

The issues themselves were simple and there was a clear preponderance of support to extend the hours [...]

On Friday I was a guest at the high school’s Multicultural Fair. It was the most dramatic and most successful cultural event I’ve ever seen – beating everything from Lincoln Center to the MFA.
Dozens of cultures were brilliantly represented with music, dance, food and talk. The presentations were person-to-person, with teens talking with teens, reflecting [...]

Isn’t it odd that there has been no discussion in Somerville at all about the Cambridge Biolab 3, pending in East Cambridge?? The requirements for transporting its contents mandate “no tunnels” so everything that goes to Logan goes through Somerville. And everything is virtually all that’s in the Biolab 4 except fissionable materials!