• Home
  • :
  • :
  • Member Center
  • :
  • Make This Your Home Page

Editorials

07/10/2009

Editorial: Ethics and the constitution
It is disappointing that the Rhode Island Supreme Court, in a 3-1 ruling, has made it harder to prosecute legislators for ethics violations — though encouraging that the state’s new chief justice, Paul Suttell, wrote an impressively reasoned dissent.

Editorial: What do the Marbles say?
Now open in Athens is the New Acropolis Museum, near the outcropping of rock on which sit the ruins of the Parthenon, the symbol of ancient Greece.

All-Star at last
The old warrior finally got his due. Tim Wakefield, 42, the long underrated knuckleball specialist of the Boston Red Sox, was thrilled to be tapped for the All-Star game for the first time in his illustrious 17-year career.

07/09/2009

Editorial: Menino’s brave apostasy
Increasingly, Americans are looking toward educational freedom and parental choice as ways to boost the performance of public schools. President Obama certainly is, in pushing through $5 billion of taxpayer funding for education-reform initiatives, including charter schools. And Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, one of the Bay State’s most prominent politicians, has joined the movement.

Editorial: Palin failin’
Sarah Palin’s stunning, rambling announcement that she will quit at the end of the month, halfway into her first term as Alaska’s governor, would seem to signal the doom of whatever presidential ambitions she had. People who can’t take the pressure of being the governor of a sparsely populated state for one full term are rarely deemed presidential timber.

07/08/2009

Editorial: Regulating older drivers
With elderly drivers blamed for five serious traffic accidents in recent weeks, Massachusetts lawmakers are considering plans to tighten the regulations governing older motorists. Their concern is well founded.

07/07/2009

Editorial: Mass. tightens ethics law
Recent Massachusetts political scandals, especially the latest big ones involving indicted former House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi and former state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, have brought some good news in their wake: a tighter state ethics law. (Never waste a crisis, as they say.) And such has been public anger about scandals that both houses of the now fearful legislature passed the new law unanimously.

Editorial: Out-of-bounds search
The U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow for common sense late last month when it ruled that school officials’ strip search of a 13-year-old girl was unconstitutional. The case involved Savanna Redding, an honors student at an Arizona middle school with a zero-tolerance policy on drugs. When another student alleged in 2003 that Ms. Redding had given her prescription-strength ibuprofen, school officials checked the girl’s backpack and outer clothing.

07/06/2009

Editorial: Eelgrass comeback
Eelgrass meadows used to stretch as far as the eye could see along the shore of Narragansett Bay and the dozens of shallow estuaries and salt ponds of Rhode Island. The green shoots waved in the breeze — dry at low tide when they were habitat for innumerable clams and crabs, immersed to the tips at high when they became a protected nursery for immature stripers and other fish. Such 19th Century painters such as Martin Johnson Heade and Edward Bannister were fascinated by southeastern New England’s vast eelgrass beds.

07/05/2009

Editorial: Mass. boosts sales tax
Massachusetts might not become “Taxachusetts” again but the recession has taken its toll. The biggest impact: The state will raise its sales tax to 6.25 percent from 5 percent on Aug 1. Further, the new budget law will let municipalities add 0.75 percentage point to the tax to help pay for local services, raising it to a maximum of 7 percent. They’ll also be allowed to impose a 2-percent lodging tax, which would presumably fall disproportionately on out-of-staters.

Editorial: Darkness in June
June 2009 is the second dimmest month (and the sixth coldest June) on record at the Blue Hill Observatory, in Milton, which has weather data going back to 1885, the longest continuous record in North America. Its pyroheliometer records sunshine by means of a glass sphere that burns a line on a card when the sun is shining. This month has had less sun in the Northeast than any June since 1903, when the sun was out less than 25 percent of daylight hours. The clouds and rain that have plagued us put the sunshine last month at 27 percent of daylight hours.

Editorial: Edging out of Iraq
In the latest stage of an American troop pullout by the end of 2011, U.S. forces withdrew from Iraqi cities and towns last week.