The Ottowa gunman, Mayor Menino’s battle with cancer, and the death toll in Syria are all important news from this week that you should read up on and discuss over the first beer of the evening—but man, they do not make for great bar jokes. As the night wares on, the banter gets lighter, and you want to make jokes while seeming to know something about the world around you, stick with the classics: bros rioting, angry sculptors, and the ever-comical Green Line. More
It’s been almost eight years since Massachusetts had a Republican governor, but for many it feels like a lot longer. Since Deval Patrick took office in 2007, Massachusetts has continued to confirm itself as a bastion of progressive politics. With the exception of Scott Brown’s two-year tenure as a US Senator, most major victories have belonged to the left. With the next gubernatorial election just over four months away, Massachusetts appears poised to elect another Democrat to run the state. More
Unless you are a) running for governor or b) working for someone who is running for governor, chances are you haven’t been paying attention to the governor’s race. Don’t worry about it too much — the candidates haven’t really been paying that much attention to you either. Instead, the Democrats have devoted the last few months to courting the 4,000 – odd hardcore party members who attended the party convention last weekend in Worcester. (The Republicans held their convention last March in Boston). And their vote on Sunday radically changed the course of the race, knocking out two democratic campaigns entirely and propelling Attorney General Martha Coakley, State Treasurer Steve Grossman, and former Medicaid head Donald Berwick into the primary. More
President Barack Obama has been speaking out for years in favor of an increase in the federal minimum wage, but due to the resistance from most Republicans to most of Obama’s ideas, it’s unclear that any kind of increase will be passed at the federal level.
