When it comes to civic engagement, Massachusetts teens could hit the ground running and automatically be registered to vote on their 18th birthday under legislation approved yesterday by a Beacon Hill committee. The Legislature’s election laws committee released a package of reforms, which includes a provision that would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to “preregister” to […]
Civil and Constitutional Rights
Posted inOpinion, Politics
The value of a vigorous press
On Friday, Boston Globe editor Martin Baron was honored as the 2012 recipient of the Stephen Hamblett First Amendment Award, given by the New England First Amendment Center. Below is a transcript of his comments, prepared for delivery at Friday’s awards luncheon in Boston. This award is named after a great publisher, Stephen Hamblett, who […]
Posted inPolitics
Rule of law triumphs in resolution to Occupy Boston
the rise and fall of the Occupy Boston encampment at Dewey Square has been hailed as a model of how police and city officials should respond to peaceful political dissent in the public sphere. Compared with video footage of cops pepper-spraying and clubbing protestors in Oakland, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere, Boston looked pretty […]
Posted inPolitics, The Back Story
Playing offense on redistricting
The last time lawmakers sat down to redraw the state’s legislative districts, they protected three white incumbents by sequestering black votes in Boston, an action that put them on the losing end of a federal lawsuit, and eventually ended the House speaker’s political career. It was the third consecutive redistricting effort to fall to a […]
Posted inOpinion, Politics
Rebels without a cause?
THE MAIN COMPLAINT against the Occupy movement that has sprung up in New York, Boston and other cities has been that the group lacks focus: the distribution of wealth, rising unemployment, unaffordable college tuition, lobbying, the iniquities of the tax system, bailouts. . . What do these people want? How can we identify with a […]
Posted inOpinion, Politics
The minority voting rights imperative
Dear Governor Patrick: Few Americans are more aware than you of the salient and inherent value of the right to vote and the importance and indispensability of representative democracy. Having once served as a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP, as chief counsel for the Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division, and now […]
Posted inOpinion, Politics
The state of black Boston: Not so good
The Urban League’s “State of Black Boston” report released Monday evokes the distinctly Hobbesian perspective that for many African-Americans in the Hub conditions are “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” To be sure, the report stops way short of describing the black community as being in a “state of war of all against all,” as political theorist […]
Posted inArts and Culture, Politics
Morphing Malcolm
Malcolm X: A Life of ReinventionBy Manning MarableNew York, Viking, 594 pagesReviewed by Kevin C. Peterson during the final weeks of his life, Malcolm X, the voluble and acerbic American Muslim evangelist, was in a veritable tailspin. No longer tethered to the Nation of Islam and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm’s tragic end was attended […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
More efficient legal services for the poor
thanks to a relatively strong economic recovery and our prudent fiscal management during the recession, Massachusetts is in a much better financial position than most other states. Read the response to this article here. Even so, we will be facing our most challenging budget in the upcoming fiscal year. While tax revenues are expected to grow as […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Plan violates separation of powers provisions
the committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) board and management staff have no quarrel, and in fact are in agreement, with the overall point made by Secretary Gonzalez. Read the argument here. We feel that legal services to the indigent, required by law to be provided by CPCS, should be supplied in the most efficient and […]