Nation Commutes Bush Presidency

Humor courtesy of David Schrag's blog, The Schrug, not to be confused with his other blog, The Schlog.

Western Avenue Disruption 7/7: WGBH Bridge Removal

In North Allston, the overpass bridge for WGBH will be demolished on Saturday, July 7th.

Western Avenue between North Harvard Street and the Western Ave Bridge will be closed to vehicular traffic on 7/7 between 7am and 7pm.

There will also be lane shifts on Western Avenue on Monday 7/9 and Tuesday 7/10.

Allston-Brighton Garden Tour Saturday 10am-4pm

Saturday, July 7, 10am - 4pm: Allston-Brighton Garden and Horticultural Club Bicentennial Garden Tour. Tickets at Minihane's Flower and Garden Shop (425 Washington St Brighton, MA 02135, 617-254-1130) or Amanda's Flower Studios (347 Washington St Brighton, MA 02135, 617-782-0686).

Tickets: $10 in advance, $15 day of (at Minihane's or a Garden Club Table in front of the Oak Square YMCA).

Tour maps and brochures with the garden descriptions will be available the day of the tour at all of the gardens as well as the two ticket sale locations.

This year will be a unique tour, different from our past events-- in honor of the neighborhood's Bicentennial, all of the featured locations this year will be an encore viewing of some of our favorite gardens from the past eight years, with many more gardens than in a typical year- 21 in total. You may plan on spending most of the day visiting these peaceful havens, or, as with a menu, choose your favorites to visit and savor.

For more information contact the Brighton-Allston Historical Society at 617-782-8483 or Wilma Wetterstrom 617-787-9844.

Part of the Brighton-Allston Bicentennial.

Crowdsourced Questions for Dan Conley, Suffolk County District Attorney

Adam Gaffin's final five questions submitted to DA Dan Conley can be found here. Conley agreed to respond within one week. The questions were voted on by people over the internet; see previous post on the topic.

Contacting the White House

Got a strong opinion about a national current event or issue? Calling on the phone is always the most effective...


Contacting the White House

Mailing Address

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Phone Numbers

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

TTY/TDD

Comments: 202-456-6213
Visitors Office: 202-456-2121

E-Mail

Please send your comments to comments@whitehouse.gov. Due to the large volume of e-mail received, the White House cannot respond to every message. For further up-to-date information on Presidential initiatives, current events, and topics of interest to you, please continue to use the White House website.

Vice President Richard Cheney: vice_president@whitehouse.gov

Sale of Caritas Christi Hospitals Cancelled: What About St. E.'s New ER?

Friday's Boston Globe reported Friday that the sale of the Catholic hospital chain Caritas Christi is now formally cancelled. This confirms the month-long suspicion following last month's notice that the physician's group at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, which is the flagship hospital in the chain, overstated its revenue by $10 million.

The obvious question, however, wasn't even posed by the Boston Globe: What does this mean for St. Elizabeth's plans to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art Emergency Room building at the corner of Washington Street and Cambridge Street?

The chain has $275 million in debt, declining patient volume, and, according to the Globe, St. E.'s "is among the worst-performing hospitals in the Boston area, according to statistics compiled by the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy."

The BRA Board approved their master plan in April, ceremonial ground-breaking took place recently, and site preparation has been underway. A comment on a previous post noted that the statue of Mary was moved a few days ago. The hillside location for the ER looks awful as of today -- "denuded," as one woman told me, "like a plucked-bare mound of Venus":



My guess is that the ER construction will go forward regardless. (St. E.'s did not respond to a request for comment on the impact.) It sounds like St. E.'s could continue to spend the chain deeper into debt with the hope of building advanced facilities that will attract more physician referrals, and hence, revenue. Let's hope they don't spend the chain into bankruptcy first.

Penny Democracy vs. Million-Dollar Democracy

The City's election overseers are complaining to the Boston Globe that the Councilor-At-Large race will require a city-wide preliminary election in September -- to narrow the number of candidates from nine to eight. A city-wide preliminary election is currently required when there are nine or more candidates on the Councilor-At-Large ballot vying for the four seats. The cost of a city-wide election is approximately $500,000.

"The law requires us to do it," said Geraldine Cuddyer, Boston's election commissioner. "So we'll just have to do it."

The City's elections are currently being overseen by the Secretary of the Commonwealth, William Galvin, after the embarrassing November 2006 elections in which many precincts ran out of paper ballots for up to a few hours.

Matthew Geary is a UMass-Boston undergraduate who is on the ballot, yet has only $0.01 in his campaign war chest.

"I've heard of $1, but one penny, that's a new low," Galvin said. "That doesn't strike me as a likely success story. Presumably someone is going to need more than one penny to get a message across. Assuming that person even has a message to get across."

I believe that democracy doesn't require war chests of $1,789,842.67, like Secretary Galvin reported at the end of 2006. Doorbelling costs no money, and I would much rather meet my candidates than have them spending awful amounts of money on attack ads.

Speaking of which: I met one of Matthew Geary's campaigners already and talked to him about Geary's candidacy. That is more than I can say about all of the other eight candidates for Councilor-At-Large, or either of last year's candidates for Secretary of the Commonwealth. Geary is clearly a serious candidate in my estimation, even if he might be very inexperienced. I'll take penny democracy any day over million-dollar democracy.

The Globe also ran a front-page story about At-Large Councilor Felix Arroyo who, it notes, has only $2,728 in his campaign account. I wonder if he's raised enough money that could get his message across and make him a serious candidate? Hmmm... well, he did place 2nd in the 2005 race for Councilor-At-Large... Maybe money-raising ability isn't the key criterion to establish viability of a candidate. Maybe Mitt Romney can get those dollar bills he's raised to vote? Then he can do better than 4th-place Republican candidate nation-wide.

So I say to the Boston Elections Department and its Overseers: go ahead and spend the $500,000 on the city-wide election. Then let's get back to talking with our candidates about the issues we care about.

Bicycling Storrow Drive

Someone was bicycling down Storrow Drive recently at 11:30 pm without wearing any bright or reflective gear.

I have to admit that I have ridden my bicycle down Storrow Drive westbound -- twice.

I did so during daylight (not 11:30 pm), always with bright clothing (not dark blue), wearing a helmet, bicycling with traffic (not against it), etc.

I did so legally, but received dirty looks and gestures from the State Police. I don't think they believed someone would ride along there on a bike. Yes, it is legal to ride a bicycle along Storrow Drive (MGL 85-11B):

Every person operating a bicycle upon a way, as defined in section one of chapter ninety, shall have the right to use all public ways in the commonwealth except limited access or express state highways where signs specifically prohibiting bicycles have been posted...

Storrow Drive has no postings prohibiting bicycles, so they are therefore allowed.

Why would I do something so crazy as to ride on Storrow Drive?

I did it in the Esplanade section during massive daytime, weekend events, like something-or-other "Walk For [Against] Hunger." Otherwise I would've had to walk my bike through wall-to-wall people along the Esplanade, whacking people the whole way with my tires and handlebars. I hopped back onto the Paul Dudley White Bikepath somewhere near to the Harvard Bridge (i.e., Mass Ave). Storrow Drive traffic was so slow due to the events (especially with all the cars parked along the right-hand-side) that it wasn't dangerous at all.

Riding Soldiers Field Road west of the Eliot Bridge, and Memorial Drive (or Greenough Boulevard) all along the Charles are actually quite nice rides. Wide lanes, smooth surfaces, great for doing "time trial"-like training in the City. But don't try Nonantum Road eastbound... potholes the size of beavers line the right-hand lane. And I once saw a beaver along the side of the road there, where it approaches Brook Street, though he wasn't trying to build a dam in one of the potholes.

Casino Trachtenberg Open for Business: Schofield at "Even Money", Ciommo at 3-2

In an opinion piece in this week's A-B TAB, Mark Trachtenberg places odds on the seven candidates for this fall's election for the open Allston-Brighton District City Council seat. The article is quite a fun read, not just the guide to betting.

Here's a toast to Allston-Brighton's newest economic development project: Casino Trachtenberg!

Trachtenberg's odds on the candidates are:

Tim Schofield, even money

It’s rather surprising that somebody as “plugged in” as Tim Schofield wouldn’t have studied Felix Arroyo’s proposal to tame the BRA, an agency that can be quite a rogue elephant sometimes.

Mark Ciommo, 3-2

His lawn signs are quite an impressive display, but lawn signs don’t vote, as At-Large City Councilor Steve Murphy found out the hard way when he lost to Andrea Cabral when he ran against her for Suffolk County sheriff in 2004.

Gregory Glennon, 3-1

[While Glennon] pretty much ran [State Rep.] Golden’s office when Golden was doing his U.S. Army Reserve duty in Iraq, [he] gets viewed by many “progressive” activists as the enemy because he’s a devout Catholic and has trouble dealing with sexual politics issues such as abortion and gay marriage which the city of Boston has virtually no jurisdiction over anyway.

Rosie Hanlon, 4-1

While Rosie Hanlon readily agreed to provide the BAIA with a list of businesses in Brighton which do not sell any alcoholic beverages and thus qualify to be promoted free of charge to incoming college students as part of the BAIA’s planned alcohol-free entertainment marketing drive this coming Labor Day weekend, she also has supported various bar and restaurant owners in their applications to expand and/or extend their hours of operation.

Alex Selvig, 4-1

If you’re in the mood for a hard-core protest candidate... Alex Selvig would seem to be your best bet... Alex Selvig’s core message may be exactly what many voters in Allston-Brighton want to hear from their next city councilor, so if he can raise enough money and avoid making any “rookie mistakes,” he could be in a position to pull off the upset of the millennium.

James Jenner, 8-1

[Trachtenberg's] advice to Jenner: do the best you can in your campaign for City Council this year, go to night school to finish your college degree, volunteer for as many neighborhood organizations as you can, and come back the next time a seat opens up.

Mark Alford, 1000-1

Rosie Hanlon asked, ”Have you seen Mark Alford anywhere?” Well, I [Trachtenberg] haven’t, and, at that time, neither has virtually anybody else in local politics since the campaign began.

Well, I have seen Alford at a few meetings, including some that I ran, and I can tell you he usually sits in the back row. But then again... I didn't remember seeing Trachtenberg at those meetings. Maybe they are the Jekyll/Hyde of Allston-Brighton?

Rescheduled: Walking Tour of History of Brighton Center Area

Rescheduled Walking Tour of Central Brighton

Because of inclement weather, the walking of Central Brighton led by Bill Marchione as part of his Bicentennial Lecture Series had to be rescheduled to the following date and time:

Sunday, July 1, 3:00 pm: The tour will begin from the front of the Brighton Branch Library at 40 Academy Hill Road. It will take in the historical high points of the Brighton Center area. It should last about 90 minutes. The tour is free and all are cordially invited.

Other Brighton-Allston Bicentennial Events coming up:

Saturday, July 7, 10am - 4pm: Allston-Brighton Garden and Horticultural Club Bicentennial Garden Tour. Tickets at Minihane's Flower Shop and Amanda's Flower Shop, or call Wilma Wetterstrom 617-787-9844.

Saturday, July 7, 7:00 pm: Brighton-Allston Bicentennial Concert at City Hall Plaza, free concert by the Drifters and the Tokens. Contact Theresa Hynes for more information 617-782-1718.

Sickening Smack, Part III: MBTA D-line

The MBTA has recently been cutting down trees along the D-line, particularly close to the Reservoir station. Writes Ben Ostrander:

One would think the T would order new trains that fit on the tracks it currently had rather than buy the trains, discover that someone couldn't measure, and then replace all the tracks! At least that is how I understand the problem. Well, the T has recently been shutting the D Line down every weekend to cut down all the trees at all the stations (at least from Resevoir to Fenway). You can especially notice the difference at Reservoir (where we used to have a mini forest on the inbound side of the station) and at Brookline Village where a whole hill of trees was chopped down leaving a whole hill of stumps.

Q/A With Dan Conley, Suffolk County District Attorney

A local blogger, Adam Gaffin (adamg) of "Universal Hub", has arranged for a written question-and-answer with Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley.

People have submitted questions already, and he has whittled it down to ten. Vote for your top five; the top five questions go to the DA. Conley will have a week to answer those five questions.

No, I did not submit any questions to Gaffin's project. But I did vote.

Update (6/30/07): Journalist and commentator on the media, Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University (and blog MediaNation), refers to this process of voting on the questions as "crowdsourcing." I've never heard the term before, and the poor wikipedia entry doesn't seem entirely applicable. A neat word to watch, though.

Accusations and an Admission at the BC Task Force Meeting

The June 19, 2007 meeting of the BRA's Boston College Task Force was a lively, noisy, and, at times, unruly sideshow. While I previously reported on the substantive material presented as part of the unannounced agenda -- and also on a past police log incident apparently related to the individual who caused a disturbance late in the meeting -- there was more going on in the meeting than has been reported to date.

After Mark Alford objected to the meeting being held on account of the failure to provide advance, public notice of the agenda, Patrick Galvin levied a general accusation that -- here, I'm guessing on a few of the details because it was hard to hear clearly over the air conditioners -- one or more members of the BC Task Force had accepted "gratuities" in the past from BC. No specifics were given as to the individuals or the gratuities, although I heard somebody, I believe, mention something like, "tickets for athletics events."

Now, normally I wouldn't post an unsubstantiated accusation like that on the blog, except that task force member John Bruno later responded with some specifics. First, Bruno admitted that he had, in the past, received some tickets to BC games (like hockey) which he had then handed out to youth players when they showed up to practice and/or games. These kids thus got to attend a college athletics game. He expressed the opinion that this was a pretty good thing, and it's hard to argue with him on that; BC even touts such giveaways as part of their community benefits. It is unclear if these youth ticket giveaways were the gratuities implied by Patrick Galvin's comments, or if Galvin meant something else, since I believe Galvin had let the room by the time that Bruno made these comments.

Bruno's second admission, however, was a whopper. He confirmed that his son currently attends Boston College on a full, tuition-free scholarship: "Yep, my son is there. I see $40,000 a year" in benefits from the scholarship. I assume he means $35,150/year for 2007-8, which is the tuition cost to attend BC as an undergraduate. Since Bruno is a resident of Allston-Brighton, his son's scholarship is presumably one of the ten "Allston/Brighton Scholarships" allocated annually by BC to A-B residents as part of community benefits agreed upon through past Article 80 master planning processes. (It was touted as such by Thomas Keady, Jr., BC's VP for Governmental and Community Affairs, at the January 16, 2007 meeting of the BC Task Force.)

I must say that I was personally surprised to hear a member of the BC Task Force acknowledge that he is the recipient of $35,000-$40,000 per year from the very institution whose master plan he is supposed to be studying, discussing, and eventually voting up or down to recommend to the BRA for approval or disapproval. I also find it rather odd that the A-B TAB's article fails to mention this admission by Bruno, although their reporter appears to have been present both at the beginning of the meeting (for Alford's and Galvin's comments) and the end of the meeting (for the ejection/scuffle with Costello). Strangely, they reported the unsubstantiated allegations of "gratuities" without reporting the response later in the meeting.

What do you think about all this? I welcome comments to this post -- as I do to all posts -- but the comments cannot be anonymous (or offensive), and I note that they are moderated.

Dueling Campaign Fundraisers Thursday Evening

James Jenner:

Campaign Kickoff Fundraiser
June 28, 2007 7-10PM@The Kells 161 Brighton Ave,Allston MA
Food, Music and Cash bar
All are invited
Suggested Donation- $25, $50, $100, $250.

Tim Schofield:

Please join us to kick-off my campaign to represent Allston-Brighton on the Boston City Council. The event is this Thursday, June 28, 2007 from 6:30PM-8:30PM at the Green Briar, 304 Washington Street, Brighton. No donations required.

Secretary Stick Mosquito Tries to Block Mayor Imbecile From Ballot

The 2005 agreement between the U.S. Justice Department's voting rights division and the City of Boston Elections Department required the City to print ballots in Chinese, including both Cantonese and Mandarin dialects.

The problem, according to Secretary of State Stick Mosquito, is that proper nouns are usually translated into Chinese using Chinese words or characters that are phonetically similar to the sounds of the names, according to today's edition of the Boston Globe. Many candidates' names are then transliterated to sound like good, unfavorable, or nonsensical strings of words in Chinese, according to Secretary High Prominent Noble Educated, who has taken oversight of the City's elections department after embarrassing events of the 2006 election.

Secretary Stick Mosquito wants to keep Mayor Barbarian Mud No Mind of His Own off of the ballot, instead inserting the boring the name of Mayor Thomas Menino in its place. Secretary Stick Mosquito also wants to avoid having Mayor Imbecile or Mayor Sun Moon Rainbow Farmer on the ballot, as well as Former Governor Uncooked Rice Sunny Nun of Massachusetts and/or Utah, Senator Whole Boundary Oh Bus Horse of Illinois, and Former Senator Virtue Soup of Tennessee.

According to Glenn Magpantay, whose name I cannot determine as being romanized or transliterated Chinese, these kinds of transliterations into Chinese have worked well in other big cities with large Asian populations, like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This "success" is quite apparent, since all have Chinese-Americans serving as Mayor.


Note (added 7/6/07): The Boston Herald has picked up the story. Secretary Stick Mosquito's argument is "ignorant":

“It’s like saying that an English speaker would see the name ‘Mr. Green’ and think he is a green man,” activist Lydia Lowe said. “The argument that transliteration has all these other meanings is actually quite ignorant.”

Harvard's Outgoing President on the New Allston Campus

Outgoing Harvard President Derek Bok has released his June 2007 President's Report to the Board of Overseers (covering the 2006-7 school year). It was also published in hardcopy form as an insert to the most recent issue of the Harvard Gazette.

In his June 2007 report, President Bok writes:

Work on developing Allston has also gone forward on schedule. In December, the University filed a master plan to describe how the property might be developed over the next 50 years. Under the direction of Stefan Benisch, architectural drawings for the first complex of science buildings are nearing completion so that construction can begin within the year. Architectural plans are also underway for extensively renovating a large building in Allston that will house the University’s art collection during the long-awaited renovation of the Fogg Museum and then provide permanent space for Museum staff and for galleries dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

Hmmm... he seems to have gotten the date wrong for the release of the master plan, which actually came out in January, not December. I wouldn't blog on this little technical mistake if he hadn't continued on writing about...

..."renovating a large building in Allston that will house the University’s art collection."

For those who have been paying attention in the last six months, Harvard is currently still on record with a proposal to put their art storage/museum in a new building at Barry's Corner. In December 2006 they discarded their April 2006 plan to renovate a large building in North Brighton (not technically North Allston) in favor of the Barry's Corner idea.

Has Harvard's President just served notice to the community that they are returning to their April 2006 building renovation plan for the art storage/museum facility, abandoning the December 2006 Barry's Corner plan?

I have heard a number of people say that President Bok has been generally uninvolved in the Allston Campus project, at least in comparison to former President Larry Summers. My guess is that Bok used old information when writing his June 2007 report, and just hasn't been paying much attention to the Allston Campus this past year.


I can just imagine a memo from Chris Gordon, head of Harvard's Allston Development Group, to President Bok after reading this report. (Note for the uninitiated: this is known as satire... or at least an attempt at it.)

June 19, 2007

To: President Bok
From: Chris Gordon

Re: Allston Campus Talking Points

Have you read the latest report that I left on your desk about Harvard's 50-year master plan for its Allston Campus? We wrote a version of it as an Executive Summary (draft), so that it wouldn't take you much time to scan through it.

Did you read through all the other stacks of documents I keep leaving with your secretary? Or are you just piling them in that corner of your office under the sign labelled, "Drew"?

Let's make a few things clear. I suggest memorizing the following talking points, so that we can try to be on the same page when speaking or writing publicly:

1. We want the art museum to go into Barry's Corner in a big new building close to neighborhood houses, not an empty, mothballed, existing building further west. It's important to leave those empty buildings empty. The empty buildings have a very important purpose called the "interim use plan." Very, very important.
   
2. The Allston Campus is a focused development: focused on being, well, a little bit of everything. Originally, we thought it would be a "science campus," but other people had other ideas, like professional schools, cultural activities, or housing. So we decided to define "science campus" as including systems biology, chemical biology, bio-inspired engineering, innovative computing, public health, education, athletics, business, art museum, performing arts, undergraduate housing, and graduate housing. Just don't say "science campus" anymore -- it's so 2002. Or, if you do, be expansive in your definition.
   
3. "No significant impact" on the neighborhood. Approximately 1000 employees will be moved into North Allston to work at the Science Complex, but we'll be reducing traffic, not increasing it. Read our traffic study. Or just repeat: "No significant impact." I'll get you a bumper sticker for your car, or we can have someone paint the phrase on the back of your car.
   

Please read this memo, as well as those other documents in the corner. It's important that we avoid misunderstandings like that in your 2007 President's Report.

Globe Sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy on BC Baseball

The "Eagle in Atlanta" blog -- written by a Boston College sports fan living in Atlanta -- recently interviewed Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy about his upcoming book about his son:

[ATL_eagle:] Despite being a high-profile member of the Boston Sports Media, Dan Shaughnessy is rarely on the BC fan radar. It wasn't until I found out that he was writing a book about his son (current BC Baseball player Sam Shaughnessy) that I pursued him for this interview.

ATL_eagle: You mentioned big-time football and big-time basketball…BC is obviously trying to upgrade its baseball program and facilities. And that’s been a hot button with the Brighton residents. You’re a long-time Newton resident. From a BC grad and BC student perspective it seems like we have the worst town-gown relationships in Boston. Harvard, Northeastern and BU can kind of do what they want without objection. Why do you think BC gets so much antagonism from Brighton and Newton and the locals, especially something like the new baseball stadium which wouldn’t be that big of an impact in the neighborhood?


DS: I’d quarrel with the distinction that BC gets a hard time. I think the people at Harvard would certainly say they get a hard time. But I also think that BC is bordering communities where people have money and they have means and they have voice and they have clout. It’s a little different if you’re bordering Chestnut Hill, Brookline, Newton as opposed to bordering Alston, where perhaps the constituency is not as loud and powerful. And [Alston] is more transient. Those factors go into it.

It doesn’t surprise me what BC goes through. A lot of people have been living in these regions a long time. When the school expands, you’re going to get that.

Sickening Smack at 1954 Comm Ave

The owner of 1954 Comm Ave has chopped down all the beautiful trees on his property during the past week. I saw many of the stumps on Sunday morning, and it looked awful.

You might think this to be the owner's right, but it apparently isn't, according to reporting by the A-B TAB: since the property is protected with a deed restriction and has landmark status within the Aberdeen Architectural Conservation District, he needed prior approval.

This is the owner who has applied first to demolishing the house to build a large development, then to move the house to another location. He was rejected both times. He has listed the property with a real estate agent among "commercial" or "land" properties, not residential.

Before (photo: Meaghan Ackermann of A-B TAB):


After (photo: Karen Elowitt of A-B TAB):


Yuck.

New City Council Candidate Blog

James Jenner now has a blog up and running (using the free blogger.com site!), as well as a website, as part of his candidacy for the open Allston-Brighton District City Council seat.

Brighton-Allston Bicentennial Riverfest Last Saturday

Last Saturday was the Brighton-Allston Bicentennial's Riverfest at Herter Park along the Charles River. Event co-chairs Catherine McGarty and Tim Schofield put on a great event with lots of activities oriented towards families. Many, many volunteers contributed their time, too, so that the event seemed to happen without a hitch.

View of the festivities from the Charles River:


Boat ride on the Charles, with tour guide Charlie Vasiliades:

Many adults quickly figured out that this boat was the only place in the event that had a (cash) bar.

Pony rides:


And, of course, the requisite "moon walk" -- actually a castle: