Archive for June, 2006

Nope, I’m not talking about a sequel to Rent, but about the monstrous immigration bill passed by the Senate but fiercely opposed by House Republicans. In a clever attempt to stall the Senate version of the bill – which grants amnesty to the perhaps 20 million illegal aliens in the U.S. and vastly expands legal [...]

Aristochavs booze and brawl at the Royal Ascot race track in England, according to British tabloid The Sun. Shocked onlookers told how plastered racegoers punched, kicked and even headbutted each other on Wednesday. They also pulled fenceposts from the ground to use as weapons and hurled chairs at one another. Others tried to glass each [...]

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t it seem like we’re hearing about Boston’s annual population loss just about every quarter?

Boston Globe scores with this mysterious riddle of a headline: “Troopers would arrest immigrants” They would now, wouldn’t they? Does that mean troopers can’t arrest me or other immigrants now? Or does it mean that troopers will start arresting immigrants en masse? Neither, of course. What the headline alludes to is a porposal by Massachusetts [...]

Soccer is slit-your-wrist boring, but the World Cup is kind of exciting. Here are some shenanigans from this year’s Cup in Germany that illustrate my point: Here’s a bunch of English fans singing that old standby “10 German bombers.” The German cops on the ground are more difficult to handle. Poles and Germans go at [...]

Tomorrow is my last appointment with my hairdresser, as she has decided to join the Army and this is her last week as a civilian. Now there’s something that’s never happened to me before. She’s pretty much picked her specialist track already, from what I understand, and provided that she can make it through boot [...]

Online auction and e-commerce giant eBay will hold its annual event eBay Live in Boston in June 2007. It will be the first time a Live is held in the Northeast. The exact location hasn’t been announed yet, but I imagine it will be at the new convention center. This year’s event was held in [...]

I don’t necessarily disagree with Boston Herald‘s crime reporter Michele McPhee when she writes that a guy who wounded a cop should have been given life, as the prosecutor urged, instead of the 40 to 42 years in prison that he actually got, but I don’t think it’s quite right to call the sentence “paltry,” [...]

Boston Globe‘s metro-columnist Eileen McNamara is liked by many for her supposedly passionate “little man on the street” approach to news. I dislike her columns because they rarely make much sense, and her work today is a good example. In “Jobs don’t negate losses” Ms. McNamara blasts Massachusetts politicians for throwing subsidized land, tax-breaks and [...]

Yes, as Robert Reich argues, companies should fully fund their pension plans. And unions should stop demanding pensions. Take the money upfront and stop dreaming about payouts 30 years down the road.