I have been tending toward supporting Steve Grossman who is a candidate for Governor of Massachusetts.

I have heard a remark about someone being dead set against him because as a former head of AIPAC, he has a very bigoted view of Arabs. Anyone who has read many of the things that I have posted about Israel and Palestinians would know that I am one Jew that would take a very dim view of this purported attitude of Grossman. In fact, I take such a dim view of such attitudes, that many of my relatives have unfriended me on Facebook. How’s that for my bona fides?

So, I thought that I really ought to do some research on Steve Grossman to see if these accusations are warranted. Below is the result of my research. Let me cut to the chase. I have not found any evidence that would support the allegation. In fact quite the opposite. After doing this research, I am a much stronger supporter of Steve Grossman than I was when I started. I am grateful that the disparaging remarks about Steve Grossman encouraged me to do this research.

Google search steve Grossman for governor Palestinian

MA-Gov 2014 is on: Senator Dan Wolf blasts Treasurer Steve Grossman.  There is nothing in the article itself about Grossman and Arabs, but there are some comments that allude to the topic. For technical reasons, I can only include them here as an image. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Steve Grossman, ex-AIPAC chair, running for Mass. governor from JTA – Global Jewish News Source.

He served as chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
from 1992 to 1997.

In Mass. governor’s race packed with Jewish candidates, much talk of repairing the world

Steve Grossman, the state treasurer and a past chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, quotes from Isaiah in describing his
ambition to close the gap between rich and poor.

“I received my Jewish heritage, my background, in being that person
who can be a repairer of the breach between those who are well-to-do
and those who lack the things people aspire to,” he said in an
interview.

Other Jewish candidates according to the article are Dan Wolf, Evan Falchuk, Don Berwick,

Grossman, 67, takes pride in his role reconciling AIPAC to the
Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations launched under Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s.

“Rabin’s exact words were, ‘AIPAC is the most important American
Jewish organization and I need your help,’ ” Grossman recalls of his
1993 meeting with the late Israeli leader.

Grossman immediately convened a phone conference with the AIPAC
board, and it became the first U.S. Jewish group to endorse the
talks.

“That was probably as meaningful a conversation I’ve had with any
leader,” Grossman said. “I felt I was participating in a small way in
Jewish history.”

The Boston Phoenix March 16 – 23, 2000 article Is Grossman our next governor? This article was the final straw in my research.  There is so much other positive info in the article than what I have excerpted below, that I have become convinced that my choice of Steve Grossman is absolutely the right choice.

Not everyone is so enthusiastic, of course. To critics such as Lou
DiNatale, the director of state and local policy at UMass Boston’s
McCormack Institute, Grossman is a fundraiser, a rich Newton
businessman, a vanity candidate, a dilettante. “Grossman is the
functional equivalent of a Democratic Steve Forbes,” DiNatale says. “He
inherited a company from his family. His credentials are simply those
of being a fundraiser.”

But a closer look at Grossman reveals a
long-time activist committed to the ideals of grassroots politics — a
family commitment that goes all the way back to his grandfather.
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The war had personal as well as political consequences for
Grossman. At Harvard he signed an anti-war petition, despite the
warnings of career-conscious classmates who said it would harm his
chances to get a job. Later, he accelerated his business-school program
and joined the US Army Reserves, which fulfilled his military
obligations. That’s where he met Edward Markey, a young man from
Malden. “We were always talking about politics,” Markey remembers.
When Markey announced that he was running for a congressional seat in
1976, Grossman called to offer his family’s support.
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During the campaigns of 1992, Grossman acted as a one-man
Democratic truth squad, trailing Governor Weld and his fellow
Republicans as they traversed Massachusetts campaigning for GOP
candidates. And after Paul Tsongas dropped out of the presidential
race, Grossman threw his support to Bill Clinton, whom he had met when
he briefed Clinton on Mideast policy before a speech that the
then-governor of Arkansas made to AIPAC in 1989. By the time Clinton
was inaugurated, Grossman was chairman of AIPAC, and his ties to the
president would serve him well in that capacity. When Grossman met with
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Jerusalem the very day the news broke
that the Israelis and the Palestinians had secretly been negotiating in
Oslo, Rabin told Grossman the peace deal could not move forward unless
he had the support of the American Jewish community. Toward that end,
Grossman worked with President Clinton to sell the deal and deliver
American backing.

By 1997, Grossman had left AIPAC and was
preparing to take a break from communal work, but his involvement in
party affairs was about to intensify. The fundraising scandals
surrounding the DNC were coming to a head. The party found itself
$20 million in debt, and donors were reluctant to contribute more
money. At this dark moment, Michael Whouley recommended Grossman to
Vice-President Gore for the chairmanship.

I have provided links to all my sources.  You should read them yourself, and you should do your own research.

Mark Twain said

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So please be careful about what you know for sure about Steve Grossman. I will continue to keep my eyes and ears open so that I can be sure, too.

I just received the Official Sturbridge Annual Town Election Results by email.

Here are the Annual Town Election Results translated to a form you can actually read. This file is also readable as an MS Excel spreadsheet.

I don’t know if the embedding below will be more or less easy for you to read than the whole file in the link above. Take your pick. It might be easier to download the above file to your computer if you wish to save it.

In your browser you can use the controls or shortcut key to shrink this down so that you might be able to see it easily on this page. On Windows machines the shortcut is Ctrl– (Control minus). To get your browser window back to normal size the shortcut on Windows is Ctrl-0 (control zero).

I got an email from Organizing For Action with the subject “Climate change is more than data”. I might be tempted to chalk this up to synchronicity with my previous post April Snow Highlights Global Climate Change.

Whatever, the cause, the email led me to some interesting places.

There was a suggestion to Go watch the trailer for “Years of Living Dangerously,” and share it with your friends today.

On YouTube it is Years of Living Dangerously Trailer #2.

It’s the biggest story of our time. Hollywood’s brightest stars and today’s most respected journalists explore the issues of climate change and bring you intimate accounts of triumph and tragedy. YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY takes you directly to the heart of the matter in this awe-inspiring and cinematic documentary series event from Executive Producers James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The edited full episode is at Years of Living Dangerously Premiere Full Episode.

Hollywood celebrities and respected journalists span the globe to explore the issues of climate change and cover intimate stories of human triumph and tragedy. Watch new episodes Sundays at 10PM ET/PT, only on SHOWTIME.

The interleaving of different threads of the story is maddening, and I still think Thomas Friedman is an a-hole, but the show is still very much worth watching. “most respected journalists” indeed. They couldn’t have done worse to find a journalist with “more respect” except if they had picked someone from Faux Noise. Thomas Friedman has been glibly wrong about more things than anybody but perhaps Tim Russert.

I have seen a few comments about how this snow storm is incompatible with the idea of global warming.  First I have to point out that what we see in the northern hemisphere is only half of what is in the global climate.  Remember what is below the equator?

Then I have to bring you a sad recollection for those of you who are under the age of 37. May 9, 1977 Historic NorthEast Snowstorm, This Day in History.

May 9, 1977 — A late season snowstorm hit parts of Pennsylvania, New York State, and southern and central New England. Heavier snowfall totals included 27 inches at Slide Mountain New York and 20 inches at Norfolk, Connecticut. At Boston it was the first May snow in 107 years of records. The heavy wet snow caused extensive damage to trees and power lines. The homes of half a million people were without power following the storm.

We were living in Bolton at the time.  The number I seem to recall was 17 inches of snow.  We returned from a vacation in Florida to find our house without power.  We didn’t bother to unpack.  We just headed for a motel in Ayer.  Shelah commuted to school in Bolton from Ayer for a few days.

So if you measure the changes over the last 37 years, a sprinkle of snow in April is global warming. If it’s not warming, then hold onto your hats, May is coming.

Just one idiosyncratic, non-scientific point of view. (In other words, this post is meant to be humorous 🙂

Matt Bors has the cartoon Our Rad Justice System: The even hand of the law.

By not prosecuting people responsible for the financial fraud collapse of 2009, we are implicitly saying that white collar injury to large numbers of people is not as bad as a petty crime. This is why the lack of jail sentences in the fraud case is so harmful to our society.

When are we going to wake up to who is a greater threat to us and who is not?

Naked Capitalism has the article Paul Ryan’s “New” Austerity Budget by Jeffery Sommers a associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Not all economic crises are created equally. Some are mostly supply-side (not enough resources, e.g., oil), such as the 1970s. Meanwhile, others are primarily demand-side (insufficient wages to purchase what can be made), such as in the Great Depression of the 1930s and now. Ryan’s budget proposal tenders supply-side solutions (austerity) to deal with a mostly demand-side crisis

I don’t know how the economics could be explained any more clearly.  I don’t know how more simply the inflation of the 70s could be differentiated from the situation we face now.  How much more obvious could it be made that the Republican solutions are the wrong ones for what is happening now?

If facts mattered in this debate, the argument would be settled.

Sommers ends his article by showing the tricks Ryan is playing to make you believe his budget is something that it is not.

Worse yet is Ryan’s intellectual dishonesty. Ryan asserts his budget cuts are in fact small and don’t represent austerity at all. This slight of hand trick results from arguing the budget is only modestly cut, but this fails to mention that his cuts to health and research are massive. Thus, overall spending cuts are only smaller because of his massive proposed increase to military spending. Moreover, Ryan’s ‘orange-alert’ warnings about Medicare drowning in debt have to be re-thought in light of rapidly declining growth of healthcare costs. Indeed, the past five years have shown the slowest increase in health costs since records were kept.

Maybe it is silly to keep harping on this stuff.  For the idealogically committed facts don’t matter.  This is probably why the current crop of Republicans (unlike some of their better predecessors) have a disdain and a dislike for education and science.  Facts are just too bothersome when you already know the answers.

YouTube has the video Something everyone should know on Tax Day.

Robert Reich has a special Tax Day message, explaining why the wealthiest 1% pay a much lower tax rate than the rest of us–and what we can do about it. You can sign his petition here: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/the-1-should-pay-their

Alternet has a transcript of the video in the story Robert Reich: Happy Tax Day VIDEO—Why the 1% Pay a Much Lower Rate than You. I have lost my faith in Alternet, but the transcript seems pretty faithful.  Here is the last statement in the video.  I have a bone to pick with it.

When the rich are let off the hook in all these ways, the rest of America has to pay more in taxes to make up the difference – or have services cut because government doesn’t have the funds.

I wish that Reich wouldn’t reinforce the myth that on the federal level their is any concept such as “…  government doesn’t have the funds”.  The federal government creates the funds it spends.  Unless it runs out of computer bits there can never be a situation where the federal government does not have the funds.

I finally found a news report on the Sturbridge Town Election Results.  The Wocrecester telegram and Gazette has the story Sturbridge votes 18-year-old onto Tantasqua board.

A recent Tantasqua Regional High School graduate is now the youngest member of the Tantasqua Regional District School Committee.
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Mr. Ryan, who is a member of the Tantasqua Regional High School Class of 2013, received 461 votes, which was enough to beat incumbent Elizabeth Tichy, who received 397.

Patricia M. Barnicle, a former school committee member, was the top vote getter for two three-year seats, with 515.
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In the only other race, Craig A. Moran was victorious over Donald B. Fairbrother, 409-389, for a one-year selectman’s seat made vacant by Thomas R. Creamer’s resignation.
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Only 817 of the town’s 6,648 registered voters came out for Monday’s annual town election, according to Town Clerk Lorraine Murawski.

The vote is a turnout of about 12%.

The comments on the news story were not as bad as what I have come to expect from The Telegram.  These expectations were the reason for my cancelling my subscription and rarely referencing the Telegram on this blog anymore.  Many of the complaints blamed the lack of advertising of the election for the low turnout.

I added my own comment.

Word of the election was posted on many people’s facebook page and also on the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee’s page

I urged all the people I knew who had Facebook pages to mention the election on their pages. Not that many people took my advice.

As for the Selectman’s race, the person who won had a propensity for wanting to study issues that he apparently was unaware that many studies had already been done and were posted on the Town’s web site. I’d expect someone who wants to run for office would be aware of what is going on in town, and not need to find out what is already known.

That is why Jacob Ryan’s win was a good one. I know that he is really involved in what is going on in the town and has well studied knowledge of the issues he will face.

At the time I wrote that comment it hadn’t even occurred to me a simpler question to ask the people who complained about lack of advertising about the election.  When all these people traveled around town and saw all the political signs of candidates for office for 6 weeks before the election, what did they think those signs were for?  If they couldn’t figure out that an election was coming up, maybe it is just as well that they didn’t vote.

What I learned about the winning selectman after the election was hair raising, and people who know me know that I don’t have that much hair to raise.  Of course this new information didn’t matter to me.  I voted for Don Fairbrother who is a known quantity to me. We’ll see how his one year term turns out, and then we will have a chance to reconsider the vote.

I don’t know if this is an American trait or if it is world-wide, but we sure do love to wallow in misery.

to indulge oneself in possessions, emotion, etc: to wallow in self-pity.

The Boston Globe is just one example that is pretty typical across all of our media.  Here is a sampling of headlines in today’s newspaper.

1. Marathon victims’ families attend brief, quiet ceremony
2. The resilience of optimism
3. Emotional impact of attack runs deep, wide in Boston
4. Year since bombings proved Boston was always strong
5. Marathon bombing anxiety likely to return in children
6. A year since Marathon attacks, many of wounded struggle
7. Marathon victims’ families, survivors gather in Boston
8. Boston Globe wins Pulitzer for Marathon bombing coverage
9. Businesses on Boylston say it’s time to have fun again
10. ‘Stronger’ by Jeff Bauman with Bret Witter
11. Would better data have helped?

I haven’t actually read any of the stories above, but I feel safe in making comments about them.  The pattern is so familiar.

The pattern that takes the cake is the one presumably in item 5 Marathon bombing anxiety likely to return in children.  The Boston Globe reports to its complete amazement the lingering effects.  They no doubt have no self-awareness of the role that The Boston Globe itself plays in perpetuating the anxiety.

We just cannot seem to let this story go.  We want to hold onto the pain and misery as long as we possibly can.  We keep wanting to relive the victimhood that those awful people imposed on us.  It is almost – if we never forget it or even let it sink lower down in our memories, then we will be punishing the perpetrators.  We never seem to think that holding onto these memories and continually refreshing them is a way to elevate the perpetrators to mythical status.  Is there anything good that a person could do that would prolong their fame and glory as long as the memory of what an evildoer “accomplishes”?

What other disasters  do we seem to love to celebrate – Pearl Harbor, The Twin Towers attack, Oklahoma City bombing, Fort Hood Shooting, Columbine, Sandy Hook?

Perhaps this wallowing takes our minds off the real and solvable problems we face.  I am just grasping at straws for an explanation.  Perhaps you have a better one.

My previous post Monetizing Internet Content provided an explanation of how someone or some company or some organization providing content on the internet could get paid for their effort without resorting to an individual paid subscription model.  I further explained why the traditional subscription model just does not fit with what is possible or desirable with today’s internet technology.

As for the technology to implement my suggestion, I said:

Google already is able to collect this kind of information as a way of extracting payments for the ads that it places on web pages.  It also shares some of this revenue with web sites on which it has placed the ads. It does the collecting and distributing on a per click basis.  If nobody clicks on your ad, you don’t pay and the web site doesn’t get paid.

Somebody just needs to turn it around and use it as a way to distribute subscription income.  There is not a far distance from what Google is already doing and my new idea.

I probably was not explicit enough on just what Google technology I meant. I as talking about Google AdSense.

Google AdSense provides a free, flexible way to earn money from your websites, mobile sites, and site search results with relevant and engaging ads.

AdSense has helped over two million partners grow their businesses in the last 10 years. Have AdSense fund your content so you can focus on creating even more.

The only small twist that is needed in this technology is to get Google to pay you for your content directly rather than for the ads they place on your website.  What’s in it for Google?  They would charge a reasonable subscription fee to  your potential readers.  In return Google would provide access to the content provider’s website (that means your web site).  Google would take a small fraction of the money the subscriber paid to Google, and pay it to you for each piece of content the subscriber viewed.  The actual details of what a “piece of content” and a “viewer access” means will have to be worked out.  I hope you can make the leap in your own mind to understanding the general idea I am talking about.

The difference between this way of doing business and the traditional subscription model is that Google is not selling you a subscription to a single source.  Google is selling you, the subscriber, access to all the sources that have signed up with Google to receive micropayments from Google for each view of their content.

Rather than the subscriber paying a monthly subscription of even one dollar per month to the thousands of sites the subscriber could potentially want to access, the user would pay one lump sum of maybe even $10 per month that would be divided up among the sources the viewer actually accessed that month, not the ones the subscriber could have potentially accessed.  Given that there are only so many hours in a day, there is only so much content that a subscriber could possibly access per day.

The content provider would get a fairly small micropayment for each access.  However, with the amount of readership that one could get via the internet, this could amount to enough money to pay you for the effort you expended to create the content.  You also wouldn’t have to waste your time begging people to chip in a little for the content you are providing.  This web site you are currently reading has  been read 1,482,673 times from 89,619 internet addresses over the seven or so years I have had it online.

The purveyor of this subscription service would need a way to direct subscribers to the content providers.  I imagine it would look something like this page.

If you can make any significant money with the AdSense plan from Google which depends on the number of people who access your web site, then you ought to be able to make money without the ads, but just because of the content you provide under my suggested plan.

I am going to continue to discuss this plan from time to time on this blog, until I finally come up with a way to explain the idea to some enterprising person who can make it happen.  I am not even charging for the idea.  Such a deal.  How can everybody resist?  Keep in mind that Google is making billions of dollars per year with the schemes they are already using.  You can wait until Google finally wakes up to this additional way of making money, or you can try to make your own billions with it.