In just a few days, we will be celebrating the 234th anniversary of our republic. To mark the occasion, I thought it would be fun to go back to one of the great acceptance speeches of the past 50 years – Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1980 Republican convention – and cull eight important themes for 2010: More than anything else, I want my candidacy to unify our country, to renew the American spirit and sense of purpose. I want to carry our message to every American, regardless of party affiliation, who is a member of this community of shared values. He went on to criticize his opponents for saying that the United States has had its day in the […]

MassDoT Secretary Jeff Mullan used this term yesterday in reference to a move to have more snow plowing done in-house, rather than by private contractors. I’m skeptical to say the least — the Turnpike to MassHighway analogy used in the article (where the Turnpike uses in-house staff while MHD uses a lot of contractors) is a false one — Turnpike is a discrete asset, MHD has lot more miles spread out over the state. And I hope any analysis done is all-in — you’ve got to count the capital cost of any new equipment plus factor in the maintenance of that equipment (or the reduced lifecycle if you don’t do it). Plus the overtime and/or lost productivity (for other tasks) […]

The Globe’s James Carroll regularly writes op-ed columns* that utilize available newspegs to hammer home one of his key themes: the utter rottenness at the core of “America” and its rapidly approaching collapse. A tour through his back catalog yields lots of examples — disparate items like Christmas, soccer, and the Somali pirates all provide important insight into this theme. So, to save the reader of today’s Globe the trouble of plowing through his whole column, just take your newspegs as the oil spill in the Gulf and General Petreus’ collapse during his testimony last week, then add the usual theme: …..The two Washington hearings captured the widespread American mood of exhaustion and dread. The nation has been drastically confronted […]

To: Mitchell Weiss CC: Lisa Signori, Chris Osgood Boston About Results should be the centerpiece of the Mayor’s plan for “making over basic city services”. Here’s some key steps to fixing it: 1) Bring the data to life: Don’t break the data up into scores of static PDFs. Provide the data in multiple, user-friendly formats, like Excel, so it can be easily analyzed. 2) Make data comparable: Right now, it shows year-to-date data for this year and full year data for previous years. Provide apples-to-apples data so users can see how this year’s performance stacks up against previous years. 3) Open up the process: Other cities have formal ‘citistat’ meetings and some release the detailed analyses used in these meetings. […]

Hot off the presses, the Needham Times brings us this vital piece of gubernatorial race insight: “If these two gentlemen were running a summer camp for girls I would want send my daughter to go to the one being run by Deval Patrick,” Khoury said.

As you probably know, Boston.com has kindly invited me to blog on their website regarding how to move our state and country forward on education. It’s called Rock the Schoolhouse, and I’m pleased to have the opportunity. As you might expect, several commenters ask about Pioneer, and often they ask if this is a conservative, a liberal, libertarian organization or some fudge among the three. Such was the query today from “Abrahamson”. I had posted a blog noting that elected officials who don’t support school choice are often the products of school choice or private schools. Abrahamson queried me on two points: (1) The conservatives always preach that the government is not supposed to guarantee equality, that those who work […]