Hats off to the brave lawmakers at Halitosis Hall! The folks whose shortsightedness brought you our current budget mess are quite prepared to make withering cuts to the needy, while complaining about how hard it is to make these choices. When it comes to taking the hit themselves, they turn tail and run like Iraqi Army soldiers.
Phillipe + Jorge refer, of course, to how the majority of State House hindleggers are not willing to help pay for their own taxpayer-funded health insurance packages. What a blatant and spineless cop-out even as other state employees take it in the chops. (Or sensibly bail out via the early retirement packages being offered, which should do wonders for the Biggest Little’s institutional memory and the quality of practical performance once all the experienced workers have vamoosed.) “We feel your pain”? Not bloody likely for these courageous souls.
When they discuss the “State House leadership,” an oxymoron of the first water, you needn’t search for any of their names as being willing to take the financial hit, even as they soliloquize about how badly they feel about making tough choice.
In reality, the tough choices are the ones they didn’t make through the years, so we now face the hole we are in. What a wonderful name these people give to “public service.” But don’t worry, you will be rewarded. Wayward legislators may find a Dollar Bill in their future.
Sleep tight, John Celona and Gerard Martineau, wherever you are.
Qoute of the week
From legendary former 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, via Carol Felsenthal’s new book about finger-wagging, red-faced zipper boy Bill Clinton, Clinton in Exile, as noted in a New York Times’ review of the book on April 28:
“[Monica Lewinsky] did more to change the world than Cleopatra,” Hewitt said, noting that had Billary not screwed the pooch, er, intern, while in office and put a knife into the Democrats 2000 presidential chances, “there’s not one kid who has died in Iraq who wouldn’t be alive today.”
And yet we seriously consider putting his partner in crime, Hillary, and the whole sordid, self-serving mess that is the Clintons back into the White House? Or four (or 100?) more years of Bush-shit via “Dubya” McCain?
Stop the madness and vote for Obama, who offers what we need most — true change from the past, which got us into the sad state the country is in.
All Pawtucket, All the Time
Like any exciting and swiftly evolving community, Pawtucket needs a vibrant and viable newspaper or two. Sad to say, the Journal Register Company, longtime former owners of the venerable Times of Pawtucket, was not big on the concepts of vibrancy or viability. The company’s most distinctive oversight feature was its allegiance to the bottom line.
Thankfully, there are still some good reporters left at the Times (in particular, the great Jim Baron), but too many of the old hands, the paper’s true institutional memory, are gone, victims of buyouts and cutbacks. That’s why your superior correspondents want you to know that there is a new weekly out on the streets of Pawtucket, All Pawtucket All the Time.
The publisher is Jim Hanley, the man behind My Back Yard, a popular community weekly for the past nine years. The executive editor is Doug Hadden, one of the Times’ veteran (18 years) reporters who got pushed out by management priorities.
In the initial issue of All Pawtucket All the Time, which hit the Bucket last week, Hadden wrote, “Our mission is to focus on what’s news everywhere in Pawtucket, from neighborhood goings-on and activities by community organizations and local businesses to pocketbook and other important issues from the schools to City Hall.”
He continues, “Of course what will be most vital about the paper will be its ability to reflect Pawtucket itself, a city along a fast-rushing river whose distinguished industrial history traces almost to the founding of the Republic, yet it is as contemporary as the burgeoning arts community that today is refilling its old mills with creative people and new ideas.”
If anyone can capture the pace and patter of Pawtucket, it’s Hadden.
The Bud-I, most of the time
We recently spoke to some Bristol denizens who were shocked — shocked! — that marching in their mighty Independence Day Parade this July will be none other than former Providence mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr., aka the Bud-I. (Well, not actually “marching.” You know he’ll be in some sort of gas guzzling macho-mobile.)
All we can say is that the good people of Bristol (with the possible exception of the DeLeo family) should just get over it. Bigger chowder-heads than the Bud-I have marched in Bristol on the Fourth. (Proof positive: Jorge has twice ridden on a float in the parade.)
Also new on the Bud-I front was the lead story in Monday’s “National” section of the New York Times. It was Dan Barry’s weekly “This Land” column, entitled, “Now Free to Speak His Mind, an Ex-Mayor Is Doing So.”
