Left In Lowell

Please please please be careful out there. The CM’s blog has some details on where to go to stay cool during this excessive heat. Be especially aware of young children and the elderly in this weather. Check on your neighbors. Stay hydrated. If you have no AC and can’t stay cool, go spend the afternoon with your family at one of the area’s malls.

Update: Also, the Senior Center is open (call ahead first).

For all the complaints from certain quarters, I bet we’ll not see those people tonight at 7pm for Move Lowell Forward PAC’s open meeting (despite the open invite to all!), where we will be very open and honest about our endorsement process, our history, the things we’ve accomplished, our future events (hint: we’ve got a good one coming up!) and other stuff n’ junk, as well as answering any questions people have! Because it’s a lot easier to complain than to be involved…I should know, I do a lot of both.

Anyway, our open meeting is tonight, 7pm at the Lowell Art and Design Center (across from The Brush) in the Market Mill complex (technically 256 Market St, I wish that were more specific but it’s the whole building). Light refreshments will be served as well. We’d love to see you there! (We moved the meeting from last week because last Thurs was the first Master Plan meeting.)

I have a selfish reason for forwarding this status from the Lowell Farmer’s Market:

Good Monday Afternoon!! The Farmers’ Market is seeking buskers! “Busking: (Def.) Verb: Mainly Brittish, perform music in streets for money. to perform music in the streets and other public places for money.” There ya have it. If you can play something, I’d like to hear it. So would others. Message me please.

Because I love buskers! Bonus points if you are a violinist who plays Celtic music. Come on musicians! Come play for some coin.

Here’s the Market’s facebook page, or email cmartin@comteam.org or rchandler@comteam.org.

Update: Gerry Nutter has hijacked my diary to explain it in terms “long time Lowellians” can grasp. Check it out.

I saw this over on Gerry Nutter’s blog:

A rumor that has been floating around all spring (with very little proof to back it up) hits the column this week. That being City Council candidate John MacDonald is City Manager Bernie Lynch’s man in the race. Apparently perennial Council candidate Fred Doyle informed the SUN that “he is watching closely to see if Lynch shows any preferential treatment to MacDonald.”

If you read that blog, you’ll know that Gerry diligently summarizes “The Column” every Sunday. This is helpful for those that prefer the Napster version of getting….. well “news,” I guess.

Why tie Lynch and MacDonald together? The manager, on City Life, admitted meeting with just about anyone, including candidates. So, would a meeting between Lynch and MacDonald be out of place. I don’t think so. Yet, spin is being applied by Doyle. Why? Better question - who is using Doyle’s mouth to get that message out?
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Found this on my door this evening:

How about you? Have city campaigns knocked on your door, dropped you a letter or made your phone ring?

Please tell!

Video update: Aaron Sorkin’s Crystal Ball? Is it creepy or are the GOPers just this lame?

“Frankly, your speaker has it. Am I dealing with him, or am I dealing with you?”

Taegan Goddard, a national blogger type, puts out a bit on the current debt ceiling/deficit talks that strike me. For those following, House Majority Leader and young gun Eric Cantor has aggressively asserted himself in the current talks being held at the White House. The whole thing struck me as odd, because it is Obama that should be the young petulant one in the room. pssst. I heard he is a ….radical.

Anyways, the 2010 election is not likely to redefine decades of brokering between the two political parties. So, why is the gristled John Boehner making a hole and making it wide for Cantor?
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Longtime readers of the blog know that I have a peculiar dislike of our neighbors to the north. I was born there, so I’m allowed. There has been some progress there, like the passage of same-sex marriage in 2009 (though that’s in danger of repeal next year). But by and large, I wasn’t impressed with their education system…I was angered by the near-loss of all music and art programs in Manchester schools in my last year of high school…and I was furious when the NH legislature yanked funding out from under UNH, my alma mater, mid-year (ie after the budget had been passed and UNH started their fiscal year) which caused no end of chaos for departments, professors, and administrators, and the year after I left, their tight budgeting caused the loss of some of the best teachers in the departments of my major and minor. That was all between the years 1994 and 1999. You know. The boom years of our economy. *rolls eyes*

So the fact that New Hampshire (which I like to call “New Hamster” because the state is about as dumb as one) has managed to one-up the stupidity of its past actions, believe you me, is quite a feat. But it has. By defunding Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNE) (bold mine).

Planned Parenthood has stopped providing birth control pills and other contraception in New Hampshire after the state’s executive council rejected up to $1.8 million in funding for the group” because it also provides privately-funded abortions. After losing its contract — which paid for education, distributing contraception, and the testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections — the centers have “turned away 20 to 30 patients a day who have arrived to refill their birth control prescriptions.
[…]
Some women have told the center that the will likely “stop taking birth control because they cannot afford the higher prices charged by pharmacies” and an estimated 70 percent don’t have insurance to cover the prescriptions.

Did I emphasize enough that the public funding is not for abortions in any way, shape or form? PPNE does privately funded abortions. The public money helps them deliver other services, particularly for the underprivileged.

Let me tell you a little story as to why this makes me even madder than seeing my favorite Brit Lit professor laid off.

I’ve mentioned before that there was a period of time my husband and I were uninsured. Due to the great, fabulous “employer-based” system we have, we were employed by people who don’t give insurance - ie contracting and temp agencies. Yay for the American work environment.

Those same temp jobs (at the time) didn’t pay well (before we started working in MA, where the real jobs are). So we didn’t go to any GPs, desperately afraid of finding preexisting conditions, and not really in the fiscal situation to afford out-of-pocket expenses, anyway.

Except for Planned Parenthood. You see, I qualified for their sliding fee scale. In doing so, I could get heavily discounted birth control and GYN exams. In the case of birth control, it was a godsend.

Ever since those lowly days as a temp administrative assistant in NH, I have felt a profound gratitude to Planned Parenthood, so much so that I still use their services, as a full-paying insured client, so I can at least support them in that way. I have to hike to Boston to do it but it’s worth it to me. I do not know what we would have done without those services, and the fee help, during the first years of our life together. I would have been one of those women who would have lost access to birth control, which could have been devastating.

This is why New Hampshire is one of the stupidest, most backwards, idiotic states in the union. I will never live there again, you couldn’t pay me to educate my kids (if I had any) there, and if you are a woman, they’ll screw with your access to safe, legal birth control.

And just to kick women when they’re down:

“I am opposed to abortion,” said Raymond Wieczorek, a council member who voted against the contract. “I am opposed to providing condoms to someone. If you want to have a party, have a party, but don’t ask me to pay for it.”

Go fuck yourself, Raymond Wieczorek. No really, go and have an unwanted pregnancy because you couldn’t afford birth control, you whiny tiny-minded privileged old white asshole. Go back to the eighteenth century when you were born and get a leech treatment for your warts. The rest of us want progress, not old moldy assholes dragging us back to the Dark Ages.

New Hamster or Florida, both compete for Redneck Stupid State of the Year. By the by, Wieczorek is the former mayor of Manchester. Guess which years he was in charge??

So I did find a bunch of hacked files in the system, but fixing those didn’t seem to fix the fact that for some reason, all visitors are “logged in” to comments, no matter what, and then post as anonymous. My guess is that this is a hack someone introduced to allow all their spam comments to automatically go through, since that’s what’s been happening on some very old posts. Therefore, I have disabled the ability for any logged in users (that would be me, Jack, the Mr, Mimi, etc) to be able to comment without filling in all their info. For you folks, this means going back to the way things were. For all my front pagers, it means they still have to approve their own comments, but now also have to fill in the form just like you. For me, it means having to even approve my own comments, as well as filling in the form. But I’d rather than than the mess we have had the past week.

So, carry on.

Update: Ug, there’s still a bug. It works where you’re logged in (like admins) but not for the non-logged in general user. There is something deeply broken here. It may well force my hand on concentrating on the final upgrade for LiL…

Update II: Success!!! A disturbing hacked insert into the database…but once deleted, we’re back in business. Took a little extra Google-foo to find another answer that helped figure it out.

Any smaht person can read between the lines on Lyle Moran’s Sun article today, which goes over how the state is concerned about the reduction of man hours for our “weights and measures” inspector, but is really about the guy’s claim that the hours reduction is all about him being a Cox guy, but appearing to not really have been doing his job (and hence the assumption he doesn’t need as many hours to get it done). Only in Lowell…

Hynes, who has been the city’s full-time sealer of weights and measures for the last eight years, said he was told in December that the city was reducing his duties to a one eight-hour shift a week, even though Hynes was budgeted to be paid $32,201 in fiscal 2011, which began July 1, 2010.

Sounds pretty serious, right? Full time to one day a week? Says Haynes, “I think it because I’m a (former City Manager) John Cox guy…It’s all politics.”

But then you get a chance to see the underlying reason (bold mine):

But Lynch said Hynes’ ties to Cox were news to him and that Hynes’ hours were reduced because he was not completing enough inspections. When then-Interim Director of Inspectional Services Rosemary Cashman produced a report on the city’s former Inspectional Services Department in March 2010, she said the sealer visited one location a day and conducted two to four inspections.

“The number of inspections he was doing reflected that he did not need that many hours to do those types of inspections,” Lynch said yesterday.

Now, granted I am not privy to how weights and measures inspections get done (though I’d be interested to know). For instance, it must involve bringing your own set of weights and measures that you know are exact, sort of like having your tools on you when you’re a plumber. It must involve doing some paperwork and the filling out of a certification sticker (whether on the spot, or back at the office, which would matter for turnaround time). And we don’t know how complex the tests are - do they get so exact as to measure the ambient air and liquid temperatures when measuring out a gallon of gasoline at the pump, to account for possible minute thermal expansions in liquid? Etc etc.

But, those caveats aside, it seems to me that visiting one place a day on average (recognizing that a large grocery store with all its measuring implements might be a whole day or more itself, but a small deli might only have one scale to measure) for 2-4 inspections (presumably the individual items) might be a little slow.

It can’t take more than half a day to complete an inspection of a gas station. If it does, I’d love for someone to correct me, but if that’s the case, then I wonder if it’s being done inefficiently (like, going back to the office to fill out paperwork vs having a laptop or tablet with a wireless connection on site).

But what I love most of all about this back-and-forth is it perfectly illustrates the way this city does things. According to one side, it must be about persecution due to politics. On the other side, the statement is about examining how we spend our money and the possibility that maybe something is being done inefficiently - and that’s putting it nicely. How I’d put it: is the guy wasting taxpayer-funded time a la some previous inspectors in other departments? But that’s me, reading between the lines.

When it comes to city government, which would you prefer? Political crybabies, or competence and efficiency? Cuz from where I sit, that’s the choice we’re facing.

As an aside, related but off the point - can anyone tell me why Lynch would give a crap about Cox? I mean, all Lynch is, is the guy who took over after the political fallout during Cox’s departure. I still to this day have to shake my head over all this hatred of Lynch from a certain set of people. Of course, Lynch has had to deal with the results of Cox’s tenure, including some really bad decisions, and some bad hires and practices and management neglect. But other than upsetting the apple cart of graft and a free ride for Cox buds, Lynch is just doing his job. If a Cox hire is doing their job, even if they went to Cox’s house every night for dinner and were best friends, Lynch wouldn’t give a hootnanny on toast. It’s competency, not politics.

Just because that’s how Cox ran things, doesn’t mean that’s how everyone else does it. To quote the Mr., “This is the worst town I’ve ever seen for projection.”

Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.[1]

Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.

Sigh…

[FYI, if you leave a comment, please put your nickname at the end of it for now until we solve the “anonymous” problem - thanks! OK, we should be all set now…I think!]

For the time being, anonymous is an artifact of a bug. We have our best people on it.

In the mean time, enjoy your mask or sign your name in the body of the text.

We cool?