Manchester Rep. and school district spokesman David Scannell is the new executive director of the state Democratic Party.
That’s an excellent choice on chairman Ray Buckley’s part. David will bring a certain, shall we say, sobriety to the state party. He’ll be a good straight man to Buckley’s comedic antics.
The Manchester Republican Committee has issued a press release telling the city school district to live within its means. Mayor Frank Guinta has not kept up the pressure on the district, so the city GOP is taking a lead. Here is the text of the press release:
Manchester is facing a $13 million dollar decline in expected revenues and we have 1, 500 less students in our school system then (sic) just 4 short years ago. Every Manchester resident is facing a higher cost of living and is being forced to make tough decisions to make ends meet. The Manchester Republican Committee is calling on the Manchester School administration to stop playing politics and support Mayor Guinta’s reasonable budget reductions. We have attached a graph that shows just how much our school budget has grown over the past ten years.
Fiscal Year
Expenditures
2000 100,573,352
2001 106,832,425
2002 115,808,857
2003 125,898,267
2004 126,575,275
2005 137,499,619
2006 142,203,719
2007 145,500,000
2008 147,250,000
2009 153,100,000
2009 #’s reflect budget request
“Many Manchester residents are making tough financial decisions every day. While school enrolment (sic) is continually going down, the Manchester School Department’s (sic) expenditures have risen by over 50%. I am sure that the average resident has not seen their income rise by this level during the same time period. With the rising cost of living, and uncertain economic outlook, the school department’s request cannot be seen as anything but unreasonable. Manchester residents cannot continue to be asked to dip into their pockets year after year. We are urging the Alderman (sic) and the School department (sic) officials to support Mayor Guinta’s reasonable budget reductions,” said Manchester Republican Committee Chairman John Castleot.
If you’ve read the news stories of Pope Benedict’s mass in Washington this morning or his speech at the White House yesterday, you might have entirely missed the message the pope was trying to deliver, what with the obsession over the priest sex abuse comments.
Here are links to the text of his White House speech and his mass at the Washington Nationals’ ballpark. They are really eloquent speeches, beautifully addressing faith and hope, love and redemption, and how to deal with the troubles of modernity.
Will former Gov. Steve Merrill re-emerge to take on Gov. John Lynch this fall? I have no idea. I have been told that if he does, he could and would beat Lynch. I have no opinion either way, but I’m not sure the state is really the same as it was when Merrill was governor from 1993 to 1997. A lot of voters have moved into New Hampshire since then.
Some people think Merrill’s name recognition and reputation will give him an automatic advantage. That might be the case. But if he were still as famous as he was a decade ago, someone probably would have bid on this autographed picture of him on ebay by now. (Note that it was posted by some collector in Ohio, who probably wishes he didn’t make that investment.) Ditto for this signed letter, posted by some guy in Oklahoma.
By the way, if you’re looking for a signed item by a professional athlete named John Lynch, here you go. If you want something by Gov. John Lynch, good luck.
Dartblog founder Joe Malchow up at Dartmouth has won a $10,000 prize as the first winner of the America’s Future Foundation’s College Blogger Contest.
Congratulations, Joe. That’s a well-deserved recognition for an outstanding blog.
It’s hard not to be impressed with the job Manchester’s firefighters do. Last night they put out three fires in one night. They remind me of Jonathan Pappelbon, always reliable in a jam.
And speaking of Jonathan Pappelbon, he is a force of nature.
Some might call this overreacting, but the Dover police responded appropriately, I think, when they temporarily beefed up security at the middle and high schools when an expelled high school student they consider a potential threat to the schools went unaccounted for for a few hours.
A bio of Barack Obama’s mother, from Time magazine.
That bio might help explain Obama’s elitism, as Bill Kristol discusses by comparing Obama’s words to Marx’s — the bad Marx not the good one.
John Clayton’s first column as a freelancer.
At the Manchester Transit Authority Web site, you can check the status of the bus on your route — assuming you have a Blackberry or a laptop at your bus stop.
Want to lease an old Navy prison that was modeled after Alcatraz?
The Wilton-Lyndeborough Cooperative High School keeps its Indian warrior symbol.
John Sullivan, Revolutionary War general and New Hampshire’s second “President” — what is now called “governor.”
Carl Bernstein on what a Hillary presidency would look like. His prediction: “the whole Clinton three-ring circus.”
For-profit cell phone companies might save the Third World.
Vidal Sassoon: Anti-Nazi street brawler.
Bill Kristol posts a few excerpts of his recent interview with President Bush, and I think they provide a useful insight to the President’s determination to win in Iraq.
At the end of the piece, Kristol notes that Bush often meets with service members returning from Iraq or with the family members of those killed there.
“The one thing parents and wives of slain soldiers and Marines most often asked of him, the president said, was to complete the mission for which their son or husband had died. And the president quietly said he was determined to do everything in his power to see to it that this country kept their loved ones’ faith and honored their sacrifice.”
When the mothers whose sons were killed in Iraq ask you to keep fighting, how hard must it be to contemplate pulling out?
Kristol also reveals that Bush was close to tears at the Medal of Honor ceremony for Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor when the President looked up from his speech and saw every SEAL in the room crying.
Starting Monday, Ricky Gervais will be in Boston to film his new movie, “This Side of the Truth.” Now that would be worth the drive to Beantown.
Gervais has been in and around Lowell scouting locations for the past few weeks.
If you have never seen the original “The Office,” you’ve really been deprived of great joy in this life.
The John McCain campaign just sent out a press release urging Republicans to “join the ticket” and run for office in New Hampshire.
“The New Hampshire Republican Party is seeking candidates for offices up and down the ticket all around the state. If you are ready to step up to the plate and serve a cause greater than yourself, please consider becoming a candidate…”
That’s pretty smart. Mike Hamilton and Fergus Cullen of the state GOP got together with the McCain campaign’s New England regional director and put together the release, which went out to McCain’s New Hampshire e-mail list.
I went with my two young sons to Maple Butternut Farm in New Boston for the past two weekends to see owner Sam Dane make his syrup. It was a great learning experience for this non-native New Englander.
Sam runs an old-fashioned operation in an old-fashioned sugar shack. He’s got his evaporator set on top of an iron stove that appears to have been made in Quebec in the last century, and he runs the sap from a big metal tub down into the evaporator by the power of gravity. Although he’s got no sign on the main road, except on Maple Syrup Weekend, locals know how to find him. When I was there last Saturday people just popped in at random. One woman stopped by and picked up $50 worth of syrup.
Sam kindly answered all of my questions and let us hang out for a while and watch him work. I thought I’d share some of the photos of Sam in action (or inaction, as most syrup-making involves sitting around and watching the sap boil). And if you can find him, his shack is worth a stop. It’s a great old shack on Pine Echo Road in New Boston, right off of Rte 136 on the way to Francestown, and the syrup is excellent.
Aside from his unlistenable music, Elton John continues to provide reasons to dislike him. As he did in his concert in Manchester last month (here you can see a pic of Elton on a Segway Human Transporter inside the Verizon Wireless Arena), on Tuesday at a Hillary Clinton fund-raiser he blamed Ronald Reagan for spreading AIDS. And this time he upped the ante, saying sexism is to blame for Obama leading Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
I don’t mind celebrities publicly sharing their political opinions. As Viggo Mortensen told me in an interview before the primary, he’s a citizen, too, and the country belongs to the citizens, not the government or the “experts.” If his celebrity status gets people to listen to a politician like Dennis Kucinich (Mortensen’s choice for President), then good for Viggo and Dennis.
However, I do mind foreigners coming to America and presuming to tell us everything we’re doing wrong, criticizing our politicians, slapping offensive labels like “sexist” on us, and doing all of this without bothering to become informed on the issues first.
Elton John has made a career out of feeding the middle class sappy, middle-brow ballads dressed up as sophisticated alternatives to ordinary pop music, while at the same time mocking the values, beliefs and traditions of the very people whose money he gladly accepts. Which is probably why Hillary loves him so much, and vice versa. They are peas in a pod — arrogant liberals contemptuous of ordinary Americans and so full of their own self-importance that they genuinely believe the world must be reshaped in their own image, by force if necessary.
