Will things ever change?<\/p>\n
We have Iran ignoring the fact that its citizens believe there was vote tampering in the most recent election. Well, they’re not ignoring it as much as denying it and\u00a0incorporating violence into citizen\u00a0protests.<\/p>\n
Then there’s North Korea threatening to wipe the US off the face of the earth (charming).<\/p>\n
But even here at home there’s chaos. Nationally, we have the governor of South Caroloina disappearing for a number of days without notifying anybody of his whereabouts. The reason for this trip? An affair with a woman in Argentina. Now I could give a shit about the fact that he’s having an affair. That has nothing to do with his ability (inability?) to govern. Whether republican or democrat (Bill Clinton comes to mind), cheating on a spouse is not grounds for losing a job, whether president of a country, CEO of a company, or order-taker at McDonalds.<\/p>\n
However, leaving the country without notifying staff about the details of your trip is irresponsible in the highest degree. If there was an emergency of any sort (riot, explosion, death of lieutenant governor, etc…) he needs to be reachable. For that, he should be fired.<\/p>\n
And even locally, despite having ALL forms of Massachusetts government controlled by democrats, there are still control issues with how things are done. Most recently, legislative leaders “compromised” on an ethics bill that the governor has been pushing for. I repeat…compromised. Being ethical is being ethical…there’s no compromise about it.<\/p>\n
Now, I don’t hate or love Deval Patrick. I’m not a flag waving fan, nor am I a vocal opponent. But the poor guy can’t get a break with the legislature. Everything he’s proposing (most of which I agree with) is being fought by the rest of the government: tax reform (I’m against sales tax increases, though I am for gas tax increases), I’m for complete ethics reform, I’m for complete pension reform), I’m for complete transportation reform. But every step of the way the legislature is watering down his proposals.<\/p>\n
I mean, come on, Patrick’s ethics bill would have banned gifts to lawmakers, but legislators changed it to\u00a0only “most” gifts\u00a0are banned), and they also changed wording so lobbyists can still make or solicit campaign donations. They also altered the “open meeting” laws so that they aren’t included. How convenient.<\/p>\n
Ethics? I give up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Will things ever change? We have Iran ignoring the fact that its citizens believe there was vote tampering in the most recent election. Well, they’re not ignoring it as much as denying it and\u00a0incorporating violence into citizen\u00a0protests. Then there’s North Korea threatening to wipe the US off the face of the earth (charming). But even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2086"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2087,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086\/revisions\/2087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}