Monthly Archives: October 2013

Cambridge Residents Alliance Endorses Dennis Carlone for Cambridge City Council

The following notice was sent out by the Cambridge Residents Alliance:
DENNIS CARLONE FOR CITY COUNCIL!

Dear Friends,

The Cambridge Residents Alliance has endorsed Dennis Carlone for City Council and we are writing to ask that you give him your #1 vote on Tuesday Nov. 5. Among a crowded field that includes other worthy candidates, we believe that Dennis stands out as the truly exceptional choice. His presence in this race comes at a crucial time for our city.Dennis

Cambridge is at a tipping point. The city faces more than 18 million square feet of recent and possible new development. More development has been approved in the past two years than was built in the previous twenty. If all plans come to pass, they will bring tens of thousands of additional car trips per day and transit trips per day into our city—with no significant improvements on the horizon for our already congested streets, intersections, subway cars and buses.

Dennis is an urban planner and architect who has worked with the city for more than 30 years. He was responsible for the East Cambridge Waterfront / Lechmere Canal redevelopment, a billion-dollar project that reclaimed 40 acres of polluted, formerly industrial land. In that project as in all others, he worked closely with the neighborhood, incorporating its needs and goals into the plans.

In fact, listening to and respecting the neighborhoods is at the very heart of Dennis’s approach to city planning. He believes current development in Cambridge is unbalanced, with too much emphasis on commercial building and not enough on residential. He is concerned about noise and light pollution, about proposals for huge glass towers that would be environmentally unsound and inappropriately placed in lower-lying residential neighborhoods. He is disturbed that people with less means are being pushed out of our neighborhoods by rapidly rising rents. He believes MIT should house its graduate students and post-docs. Dennis has declined to accept contributions from real estate interests.

While there are other able candidates running for City Council, we feel that it is essential to have Dennis’s expertise on the Council. Decisions made in the next few years will determine whether we retain the kind of economic and racial and age diversity that made Cambridge the city we love, or whether it becomes solely a high-tech, wealthy mecca. Dennis Carlone will help us chart a course that’s true to our values.

Please forward this message to family and friends, with your own personal note. And if you can, volunteer for the Carlone campaign! See contact information below. Dennis is not as well known as some of the incumbents. Every volunteer in these last few days can make a difference! Thank you!

—The Cambridge Residents Alliance

To contact the Dennis Carlone Campaign, call 617-682-0657 or email: [email protected]. Be sure to leave all your contact information and the volunteer coordinator, Sue Kennedy, will get back to you. Or visit campaign headquarters at 426 Broadway across from the Cambridge Public Library.

Cambridge Residents Alliance
http://www.cambridgeresidentsalliance.org/

Political Terrorism One-On-One

What’s the difference between Al Quaeda and the Republican Party? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Only one of them so far has been able to bring American government to its knees, undermine global confidence in American leadership, tear up the fabric of America’s legislative values and imperatives, and create uncertainty and chaos in the world’s financial markets.defund

Only one of them works everyday to corrode the underpinnings of American democracy from within and destroy our democratic system. Only one of them actively works state by state to disenfranchise the poor, turn away minority populations from the polls, as well as students, the elderly and anyone else who might vote Democratic but would never in their lives commit fraud to cast those votes.

Yes, and only one of them works everyday to turn America’s social contract into worthless pieces of historic paper. Only one of them seeks to impoverish the elderly by reducing their monthly Social Security checks, forcing them to pay more for their health care, and to turn away 30 million uninsured Americans from the health care they’ve needed, and waited for, all their lives. Only one of them works everyday to ignore global warming, to deny evolution, to fight for the right of hunters and mass killers to shoot off 150 rounds per second, and to ensure their wealthy supporters can suck out every ounce of oil and gas from American real estate even if it means destroying our drinking water and agricultural heartland.

Yes, and while the Republicans are racking up score after score in the political terrorist competition, Al Quaeda has to content itself with merely having hijacked commercial airplanes and flying them into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon.

Perhaps if the towers had been filled with the elderly, the poor and Democratic Party supporters, the Republicans might have hijacked an airplane or two themselves before deciding on their far more effective strategy of shutting down the government.

Of course, had President Obama also been in the towers…

 

 

 

 

 

Obamacare Starts, World Ends

Washington, D.C. Well, guess who got the last laugh, after all! Those Zany Republicans were on to something with all their doom and gloom over the advent of Obamacare. They told us the world as we knew it, and everyone in it, would be destroyed, obliterated in one fell swoop by Father Death and his minions.disaster

And we, foolish mortals that we were, laughed at the Republicans. Laughed at how childish they sounded, as if this were just the next round of “death panels”. So we called them out for what we erroneously thought they were: liars, self-aggrandizers, posturing pols of the worst sort, government shut-downers, the whole lot of them seeming like cockroaches caught in a midnight panic when someone turns on the kitchen light.

“Obamacare is Coming!” they shout as they scatter. “Obamacare is Coming!”

But now we know they weren’t kidding us. Now that the world has actually fallen apart with the beginning of this first day of Obamacare. Understandably, this is what happens when 30 million impoverished Americans get health care insurance for the first time. The world comes to an end.

I feel the need to apologize to those apostles of doom.

“I’m sorry, Republicans!” I plead in my heart, not certain they could hear me if I shouted it from housetops. “Can you forgive me for not believing in you? And for thinking you were acting like the weak-spined, unsavory, unprincipled piggish pawns of the 1% you seemed to be. C’mon, how many teachers or lunch bucket voters could give a good God Damn about running an oil pipeline across our corn belt? Or feel the need to shut down Head Start? Naturally I mistook you for troublemakers and political terrorists of the worst sort. So hungry to prevent Obamacare from starting up and perhaps, worst of all, succeeding, you would actually shut down the very government we all rely on, the same government you were sent to help run.

But I didn’t realize what was at stake.

Now I understand what you Republicans tried to say to us, as I look around at all the destruction and chaos. No buildings above 15 feet in height left standing, the roads totally logjammed with burnt out cars, trucks and buses. The streets eerily empty of human life.

You knew and we wouldn’t believe.

Shame on us.

Shame on us for thinking so badly of you. Shame on us for thinking you hated poor people, women, gays, students, the elderly and minorities. Forgive us for thinking you were the mindless pawns of the billionaires’ plutocracy.

We’ll know better the next time.