The House is expected to vote on health care reform today, taking a historic step toward making insurance available and more affordable for millions of Americans.
Barack Obama took office on a pledge to create "an unprecedented level of openness in government." Given the size of the federal government, its tendency to classify as top secret even the most innocuous documents and its long-standing culture of bureaucratic tail-covering, that's not a very high bar, but Obama hasn't cleared it yet.
Whether it's a sweetheart contract deal or a dubious public pension, we have found that nothing gets readers more outraged than the sense that government is pulling the wool over their eyes.
In the home stretch of the health care debate, President Barack Obama has turned up the heat on health insurance companies. There are several good reasons for this, all of them political.
Such is the nature of sports, celebrity and scandal in this country that if Tiger Woods wins the Masters his fans and followers will, if not actually forgive his extramarital sexcapades, at least quit dwelling on them.
The "birthers" have finally succeeded in accomplishing something other than embarrassing themselves. They may have driven the state of Hawaii into shutting off their requests for original copies of President Barack Obama's birth certificate.
He holds no higher office than Town Meeting member and has no real stake in the region's largest social services agency, but no one has worked harder to resolve the impasse between Framingham and SMOC than Herb Chasan.
There are national holidays, like Independence Day, and state holidays, like Patriots Day. Then there's Evacuation Day, which is a holiday only in Boston, and only for some people. Today is that day.
In typical Beacon Hill fashion, the news that aid to Massachusetts cities and towns would be cut by up to $200 million was delivered on Friday afternoon. State officials often serve up bad news at that time of the week, in hopes no one will notice.
The Founding Fathers thought the Census important enough to mention high up in the Constitution, the fifth paragraph. They commanded an "actual Enumeration," a term that literalists insist means a physical headcount and rules such shortcuts as statistical sampling.
