Politics

• Peter’s posterior tongue-tie got corrected yesterday. He went through the procedure well (it’s really a rather simple procedure), and has more tongue movement now. It still remains to be seen if it’ll help him breastfeed.
• I’ll be judging the Magic Worldwake prerelease in Hartford on January 30, and I’ll be judging a variety of Magic events at PAX Boston in March.
• Hannah’s learning new words and skills every day. It’s really quite amazing to watch.
• I’m very excited that Scott Brown has a shot at winning the Senate seat. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’ll be much better than the alternative.

The more I look into it, the less happy I am with really any of the candidates. I’m questioning my support of Brown over Robinson. But either of them would be better than the others. It’d be nice to have someone who I agreed with everything on, but then again, the only way I’d get that would be if I ran myself (which I won’t do). So, I need to figure out which principles I’m willing to compromise to try to get someone in office who I at least agree with somewhat.

My wife and I last night finally looked into the candidates for the upcoming special U.S. Senate election. Our choice is Scott Brown. While we wish he were even more conservative, perhaps that means that he’s actually electable in this state. Perhaps thinking that someone even somewhat conservative is electable in this state is too much to hope for. My dad says that he was impressed when meeting him while working with the Chernisky campaign, which is an endorsement that means a lot to me.

A long time ago, likely when I was complaining about how generally every candidate I vote for in an election loses, consoled me a bit by suggesting that I think of representatives from other areas as representing me. That is, I still have some representation at the state and national level, even if those representatives aren’t the ones assigned to my geographic area. I thought that it was a nifty way of thinking about things.

• Charles Flaherty: Resigned in 1996 after pleading guilty in federal court to tax evasion and admitted to the State Ethics Commission that he received free vacation lodging from lobbyists and business interests.
• Thomas Finneran: Resigned in 2004 and three years later pled guilty to criminal obstruction of justice charges.
• Salvatore DiMasi: Resigned in January 2009 due to allegations, and was just indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

Somehow, my level of confidence in our state government is not increasing.

Well, out of all the positions on the ballot and all 5 questions on my ballot, with the exception of one unopposed candidate that I voted for, no race went the way I voted for it.

“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” — Romans 13:1 (NIV)

I voted this morning. I’ve never seen a line that long in Charlton before, but it moved quickly.

The most interesting thing I saw there was a large campaign from the Highway Dept. trying to get people to pass Question #4. I guess it must not be as irrelevant as I thought. They probably figure that if they get it to pass, they have a good shot at calling a Special Town Meeting and getting the borrowing for it to pass.

Question #4 or #5, depending on where in the district you are, is a non-binding public policy question to give a suggestion to the state representative for our district, as follows:

“Shall the state representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation distributing $450 million from the state’s ‘rainy day’ stabilization fund to the cities and towns of the Commonwealth for residential property tax relief?”

There’s a lot more involved in this question than meets the eye at first. Part of Ron Chernisky‘s campaign against Rep. Geraldo Alicea is that Alicea voted against some amendments that would have taken money from the “rainy day” stabilization fund and distributed it to towns as unrestricted local aid. In fact, part of Chernisky’s campaign staff worked at getting this question on the ballot in this district. (It’s on the ballot in a few other districts as well, unrelated to the Chernisky campaign as far as I can tell.)

“4. Shall the Town of Charlton be allowed to exempt from the provisions of proposition two and one-half, so-called, the amounts required to pay for the bond issued in order to design, construct, and equip a new highway operations facility?”

As a little background for those unfamiliar with Prop. 2½, it was a measure passed by ballot initiative in 1980. Each municipality in Massachusetts has a “levy limit”, which is the maximum that they can levy in property taxes each year. This limit gets increased each year by 2½% plus an adjustment for any new growth in the town. However, a town can pass a ballot question to increase their levy limit permanently (a “Prop 2½ Override”) or temporarily to pay for something (a “Prop 2½ Debt Exclusion” or “Prop 2½ Capital Outlay Exclusion”). (Although often colloquially the temporary form will be called an “override” as well.)

Question #3 would prohibit dog races on which betting or wagering occurs.

This seems like a question that targets people’s emotions. “Oh, think of the pretty dogs and how they’re abused.” While I’m sure that some abuses occur, I would tend to think (not really knowing anything of the industry) that if you own a champion racing dog, you’d try to take good care of it so that it would win you races for as long as posible.