redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
( Sep. 2nd, 2024 08:31 pm)
Tomorrow's Democratic party primary in Suffolk County, Mass., includes the job of clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court (which is what Massachusetts calls its highest court, and a lot of people have been wondering why is this an elected position at all, and also, why does only one county vote for it?

The answer turns out to be the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

More specifically, it's because the state court in 1851 decided that law applied to a man who had escaped slavery and was living in Massachusett. After Boston-area Abolitionists broke the man out of jail and helped him escape to Canada, they decided something should be done about the court. It's not clear from this article how "we should get to elect judges" turned into an elected court clerk. The article explains why it's only one county, but that bit of the story doesn't seem as interesting.

ETA: This also explains why I hadn't heard of the job before, despite having moved to Massachusetts in 2016L I was living in Middlesex County, which doesn't elect state court clerks,
A Massachusetts legislator is introducing a bill that would coerce prisoners to donate organs and bone marrow:


"Mass. Prisoners Could Choose Between Freedom And Their Organs"


Please, if you live or vote in Massachusetts, write to your state legislator to oppose this bill.

This is what I wrote to Rep. Honan, in case a script would be useful. (As usual, if you live in the same district, rewriting rather than sending the same exact message would probably be more effective.)

I am writing to urge you to oppose HD.3822. This proposed law would pressure incarcerated citizens to donate organs and bone marrow by offering a reduction in their sentences.

We are rightly horrified at news that China is forcing prisoners to donate organs. It would be equally wrong for Massachusetts to pressure them to do so.

Donating organs is never risk-free. Prisoners do not reliably have access to good medical care, and neither do people who were recently released from prison.

Also, this proposal may be a violation of federal law. It's illegal to pay for organ donations, or to offer donors any significant compensation. This would probably include a reduction in someone's time in prison.

(I got this from [personal profile] minoanmiss.)
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
( Oct. 3rd, 2021 07:28 pm)
[personal profile] cattitude and I just got back from a whale-watching trip on Massachusetts Bay, and it was excellent.

We saw four or five whales, some of them several times each, so good looks at two humpback whales, including their flukes, and the bodies of the whales swimming or floating near the surface of the water--the guide said she thought they were napping part of the time. We also saw a fin whale, and lots of sightings of them exhaling through their blowholes. I think there may have been more than one fin whale; I didn't see everything, but I saw a lot, and enjoyed myself a lot.

It was cold enough on the water, especially when the boat was moving fast on the way to, and from, the areas where the whales are, that I was glad that my coat pockets contained gloves, because I have a pair that I just keep there. There is indoor seating, but we started sitting outside, for the better view, and mostly stayed there. Everyone who was outside moved around the deck as the guide announced that a whale was visible from one or the other side of the boat, so I spent a lot of time on my feet, but it's about an hour from the dock to the part of the water where the captain thought we would have the best chance of seeing whales.

ETA, the next morning: Also, I saw a small bird flying around/ above the boat deck and railing while we were well away from shore. Poking at bird ID sites the next morning, probably a swamp sparrow, maybe a chipping sparrow or American tree sparrow; I'm pretty sure it had been with the boat as we moved away from the shore. (Red/rufous crown, brown body, small.)
The state has now announced when people in different groups, including "everyone else at least 16 years old," will be eligible for the vaccine. Of note: Rather than grouping everyone under 65 as "gemeral public," they'll be making people between 60-64, and then 55-59, eligible a little sooner. Also of note, the supply is lagging behind eligibility, and they don't expect that to change.

Details here.
Posting this here because we can use some good news:

The state legislature has overridden the governor's veto, and the ROE Act, to explicitly protect abortion rights in Massachusetts, and allow 16- and 17-year-olds to get abortions with permission from a parent or judge, is now law. I got email with the good news both from the activist group that has been working for it, and from my state senator, because I'd written to ask him to make sure this got through.

If you live in Massachusetts, remember: Charlie Baker vetoed a bill to protect abortion rights, because he didn't want teenagers to be able to choose an abortion.
Massachusetts is trying to trace the contacts of people who have tested positive for th coronavirus. There's a problem: a lot of people are ignoring the calls, because a lot of people don't answer calls from phone numbers they don't know.

Those calls should be identified as from "MA COVID Team", but right now that only works if the recipient is paying for caller ID. They have arranged that all the contact tracing calls come from numbers with an 833 or 857 prefix, and they're asking people in Massachusetts to answer unknown-number calls while we're dealing with the pandemic.

As far as I know, right now this is something only Massachusetts is doing, so relevant for people who either live in Massachusetts, or have been here recently.
This is an incomplete list, as of March 23. The Somerville Community Alert System sent it out, and since I can't find it on the city website (at least not yet) I'm pasting it here for reference:

Read more... )
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
( Oct. 16th, 2018 07:44 pm)
Tomorrow, October 17, is the Massachusetts voter registration deadline for the upcoming election. You can check your registration status, and if necessary register/update your registration, online. (I got a text message reminder about this from the ACLU, and an emailed one from Freedom for All Massachusetts, today, but I suspect the people who most need the reminder aren't on all those email and text lists because you're busy with other things or don't want that many political texts and emails.)
I just wrote this, in response to [personal profile] siderea asking for people's advice on who to vote for, and why:

Patalano: she promises to reduce cash bail and work against mass incarceration and the racism that permeates decisions about who is indicted and for what.

I am also to some extent voting against Ryan [the incumbent], for her/her office's behavior and foot-dragging over setting aside the tainted drug lab convictions. (I was one of I don't know how many people calling to say "these are all based on fraudulent drug "testing" results, set them aside and release the victims now," and what I got was staffers who clearly had no idea of what to do with calls from the public. The relevant part of their voice mail system wanted to give me instructions on how to appeal any specific one of those cases, or get information on the status of a single case, when the point was that she shouldn't be waiting for phone calls and paperwork for "release this person, he's in prison on entirely bogus charges" in each case. I want a DA whose reaction to a widely publicized and clear set of injustices won't be "here's how to fill out paperwork to set aside 1% of it."
Massachusetts has a primary election next Tuesday; a number of races will effectively be decided that day, because they have more than one candidate in the Democratic primary, and no other-party candidates for that office.

I'm in Middlesex County and the 7th Congressional district, so the relevant races for me include Congress (Capuano or Pressley) and district attorney.

DA is the easy one, for me: I'm supporting Donna Patalano, who I heard about via the ACLU's What a Difference a DA Makes campaign.
Reasons to vote for Patalano:
  • She promises to immediately end cash bail for nonviolent offenses (that would be enough, imho); she promises to change the approach to road safety, to remove the assumption that a cyclist or pedestrian is at fault when hit by a car, and the driver is not;
  • She wants the state to repeal mandatory minimum sentences as a way to fight mass incarceration;
  • She supports "presumptive discovery," meaning the prosecutor turns over all evidence to defense attorneys unless there are specific (narrow) reasons not to. She says she'll lobby for a bill requiring that throughout the state, and practice it in her office in the meantime.
  • She says sensible things about conviction integrity, whereas I am unhappy with the incumbent (Ryan)for dragging her feet on setting aside known-tainted convictions after the drug lab scandal. (I made numerous calls to her office about that; they clearly weren't prepared for calls saying they should set aside all the convictions, rather than asking about the procedure for getting a specific conviction dropped.)


I'm undecided on the congressional race, because there doesn't seem to be much difference between the incumbent, Mike Capuano, and the challenger, Ayanna Pressley. Capuano's campaign flyer is about how strongly he will resist Trump; Pressley's talks about bold leadership and says she will promote Medicare for all, gun-violence reform, and "get[ting] money out of politics." Capuano seems pretty sound on the issues I care about, if less visible in the press than (say) Katherine Clark, who represented me when I lived in Arlington.

Similarly, with governor: I will be voting for the Democratic candidate in November, because both Gonzalez and Massie are a lot better than Gov. Baker, let alone the gay-bashing pastor who is running against Baker in the primary. However, there doesn't seem to be a lot of policy difference between Gonzalez and Massie; Gonzalez is the one with significant previous government experience, and Massie is an activist/lobbyist. If you know of any substantive reason to support one over the other, please tell me.

Similarly, I'm looking for opinions and information on the Secretary of State election (Galvin is the incumbent, Zakim is challenging him) and Lieutenant Governor (Palfrey, who identifies himself as a former assistant DA, vs. Tingle).

If the election was today, I'd be voting for Gonzalez, because I apparently am still annoyed at Massie for standing with a large number of supporters right where the Pride Parade route fed into City Hall Plaza, and it felt like he was trying to make Pride into a Massie rally. (Lots of politicians marched, also with supporters, but seeing them walk past me felt different than walking past that crowd right at the end of the parade.) I realize this is basically a style point; Gonzalez was there shaking hands as I waited to enter the State House for a rally in support of the $15 minimum wage a few weeks earlier.

(My incumbent state legislators, both of whom I am quite happy with, are unopposed, as is the Middlesex County Register of Deeds; Senator Warren will have a Republican opponent in the general election. The only office the Libertarian Party has a candidate for is Auditor; that will be a three-way race in November.)
I feel like I got a lot done today, some of it stuff I'd been putting off.

I went to a rally this afternoon, in favor of a $15 minimum wage and paid family medical leave. Those are separate proposals, but being backed by many of the same people and organizations, both of which may be on the Massachusetts ballot in November.

The rally was in the Massachusetts State House. Yes, inside. (I don't know what permits are needed to hold a rally, with microphones, there.) There are at least two disadvantages to that location: it got uncomfortably noisy (even with earplugs), and I had to wait in line to go through a metal detector. Also, it will definitely be noticed by the state legislators, but not people just passing by—and a rally across the street on Boston Common will get passers-by. I assume that the organizers think it's worth it to be sure the state legislature will notice them. (Some of the emails etc. I got about this event talked about "lobbying" as well as a rally, so maybe they figured that the core group would have to be in the building anyway,)

I didn't stay as long as I'd intended to, because the noise was getting to me; I was feeling slightly unsteady on my feet; and the first speaker seemed to be talking more about religion than about the issues. (To be fair, if I'd listened longer he might have said more about what we were rallying for and less about his belief that working for this was not just a good but a godly thing.)

So I went back outside and sat on a bench, and then on the grass on the Common, before getting a late lunch from a food truck. To my pleasant surprise, "Bon Me" did have something I wanted (rather than all being too spicy): Chinese barbecue pork, which I had over brown rice, with lettuce and pickled daikon and radish. Somehow, at that moment, this was comfort food. While I was eating, I saw other people who'd been at the rally (based on stickers and SEIU local 1199 t-shirts), which made me feel better about not staying longer.

On my way home, I went to the main Boston and Somerville libraries to pick up books I had on hold. There are half a dozen apple trees in bloom in front of the main Somerville library right now. (The whole area is full of flowering cherries this week; I haven't seen many apple trees.)

This morning, before heading out, I called the physical therapy place where I went for my hips and made an appointment for a first session of PT for my left knee, which I'd been putting off in the hope that maybe I didn't actually need it. I told the receptionist I didn't care whether I saw the same therapist again: continuity of care seems less relevant now that it's a separate course of treatment, and the person I was seeing for my knee had done a few things that annoyed me.

[Edited to fix a copy/paste error that ate about a line of text.]
Background: last month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court [which is the highest court in the state] ruled that Massachusetts police have no legal authority to hold people based on ICE civil detention orders. (It's not clear whether doing so would inherently be against the state constitution, on due process grounds, as distinct from them not being allowed to do it because there's no law saying they can.)

Governor Baker's response was to file a bill saying that they can do that. (His press release says it would "authorize but not require" the police to do so in certain cases; the proposed bill leaves the decision to individual police forces.)

The ACLU and a couple of other groups organized rallies against Baker's bill, and for the Safe Communities Act, which explicitly says they can't do that and has some other protections. [personal profile] cattitude and I heard about the one in Boston because we're signed up for ACLU text messages, and we decided this was important enough to make time for even while planning a move.

The rally drew a couple of hundred people; there were speeches, and chants, in Spanish as well as English. (There was one chant I hadn't heard before, which I translated for Cattitude: "Baker, escucha, estamos en la lucha," which in English is "Baker, listen, we are in the fight.")

Various organizers brought extra signs for people to hold: we both started with "ACLU freedom agenda" signs, and I replaced mine with an SEIU bilingual "here to stay" sign and then with an SEIU one reading "America united to protect immigrants and refugees." (It felt more appropriate, since I'm not an immigrant.)

The last speaker said we would end with a song from the Civil Rights movement. My first thought was "We Shall Overcome," and then she started singing "We Shall Not Be Moved." I joined in almost immediately, thinking "thank you Pete Seeger."

After the rally Cattitude and I took the T to Hynes Convention Center to have lunch at the Cornish Pasty Co., because it sounded good from [personal profile] sovay's recent post. The pasties were indeed good, though I was disappointed by the tea. Thence to Toscanini's, because I seem to have decided that I should stop for ice cream on my way home from rallies and protest marches.
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