News

(Co-authored with Pioneer’s partner, Muckrock, which has extensive experience with public records requests at the federal, state, and municipal level) Hot on the heels of “Sunshine Week”, when MassPIRG celebrated the Patrick Administration’s commitment to transparency, we thought we’d collect some best...

As Pioneer’s Steve Poftak has pointed out, the Office for Administration and Finance has been crowing about an “A-” transparency rating given to it by the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, which applauded the state’s Open Checkbook portal. But while Open Checkbook...

Our next adventure in accountability and transparency in state government starts with the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, helmed by Greg Bialecki. That office (or at least one of its subunits) oversees the Capital Access Program. The intriguing thing about...

(See correction/clarification below) In an effort to aid in the Governor’s quest for greater accountability in state government, Pioneer turned its transparency efforts towards the UMASS Law School. Pioneer has long been a critic of the law school project but let’s see...

http://boston.com/community/blogs/rock_the_schoolhouse/2012/03/national_education_standards_a.html Published on April 1, 1857, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was Herman Melville’s last novel and one in which he coined a new term for American hucksters. Melville’s satirical tale has some relevance for better understanding the drive for national education standards,...

The Boston Foundation has put out an interesting document, City of Ideas: Reinventing Boston’s Innovation Economy. In it, they conclude that that state lottery (run by Treasurer Grossman) is a drain on poor communities, returning far less in local aid then their...

http://www.wickedlocal.com/weston/news/opinions/x770709648/Gass-Legacy-of-the-Know-Nothings#axzz2NcNYjWOG “The Irish are perhaps the only people in our history with the distinction of  having a political party, the Know-Nothings, formed against them,” wrote John F.  Kennedy in his 1958 book, “A Nation of Immigrants.” Today, few people realize  that the...

Got your attention? The Metropolitan Area Planning Council got mine earlier this week with their finding that implementation of the MBTA’s two deficit reduction scenarios would cause “roughly 10 avoidable” to “about 15 avoidable deaths per year”. That’s right, 10 – 15...

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/opinion/commentary/jim-stergios-and-joshua-archambault-consider-what-worked-with-romneycare/article_cde520a3-9336-54dc-8e3c-da202ecd9f8c.html Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has taken considerable heat during the Republican primaries for the health-care legislation that passed while he was in office. Sadly, election-year politics have overshadowed the real lessons of Massachusetts’ experiment. The core question then-Gov. Romney was...

Yesterday’s Globe brought news of an initiative by the City of Boston to move folks out of emergency rooms and into Community Health Centers, for treatment of non-acute conditions. That’s a laudable goal, but it brings to mind the inconsistency of the...