Buried inside the Globe’s Sunday sports section was a story about a Pop Warner football game last month where five children between the ages of 10 and 12 suffered concussions. All of the injured children played for the Tantasqua Pee Wees, who lost the game to a team from Southbridge by a score of 52-0. […]
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Posted inPolitics, The Download
Scott Brown’s unforced error
What in the world was Scott Brown thinking? In a campaign appearance in Taunton on Wednesday, Brown charged that paid actors were portraying relatives of victims of asbestos-related illnesses in television ads for his opponent, Elizabeth Warren. “A lot of them are paid,” Brown said, according to the Taunton Gazette, when asked by a Taunton […]
Posted inPolitics, The Download
Women — can’t win without ’em
Everyone seems to be going after the women’s vote. But nobody, it appears, knows exactly what the “women’s vote” is except that they want it and it’s key to being elected. Women, after all, have consistently turned out in larger numbers than men for the presidential election since 1980. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are […]
Posted inPolitics, The Download
Obama, John Elway matter; Ross Perot not so much
To the surprise of exactly no one, President Obama endorsed Elizabeth Warren for the US Senate. The POTUS stamp of approval can’t hurt. Expect Warren to run with the endorsement of a personally popular president who is very likely to win Massachusetts in a romp. Even if he didn’t give her The Job. Monday was […]
Posted inPolitics, State House News Service, The Download
The Senate money pit
Campaign fundraising by Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown continues apace, which is to say it is happening at ridiculous levels. Brown, who used to have a campaign war chest that terrified opponents, raised just under $7.5 million in the past fundraising quarter. That would be an impressive number anywhere else, except that Brown is trying […]
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For Patrick, the heat is on
Gov. Deval Patrick’s breakfast cereal yesterday probably didn’t go down too smoothly if he ate it while reading the Sunday Globe. The front of the paper’s Metro section featured a story on Patrick hopscotching the country on behalf of President Obama’s campaign while a crisis at the state drug lab threatens to spring thousands of […]
Posted inCriminal Justice, The Download
Boston braces for crime surge from state lab scandal
What was interesting about Thursday’s press conference at Boston City Hall on how the city plans to cope with the fallout of the Annie Dookhan scandal was who showed up — and who didn’t. Mayor Thomas Menino was there, along with Police Commissioner Ed Davis; Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley; US Attorney Carmen Ortiz; […]
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Putting a face on the opposition
You’d never know by the civil face-to-face encounters across the state yesterday that underlying many of these contests is a nastiness – in some cases, outright disdain – for election opponents that seems to be quieted by the physical presence of the object of their ire. Then there’s the Tierney-Tisei race, but you already knew […]
Posted inPolitics, State House News Service, The Download
Brown and Warren head way out west
All things Western Massachusetts get a rare opportunity to shine when Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren take their campaign cage match to Springfield tonight. The candidates’ early vows to keep the US Senate race positive now seem positively quaint. In an age where political campaigns study polls like tablets from on high and react accordingly, […]
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Hard times at the New York Times
New York Times union employees staged the world’s most polite union walkout yesterday, filing out of the newspaper’s headquarters for a brief period to protest the slow pace of contract negotiations. The Times Newspaper Guild has been engaged in protracted contract talks for 18 months, and the talks look like they’re going nowhere. So the […]