Remember, at the stroke of midnight tonight, Lowell’s government access programing will jump from cable channel 10 to cable channel 99. So if you want to watch the city council meeting tomorrow night – and who wouldn’t? – be sure to tune to channel 99.
March 19th, 2012
Mass Memories Road Show this Saturday
Bring your Lowell photographs to Tsongas Industrial History center, located at the Boot Mills, 115 John St. in Lowell this Saturday, March 24, from 10am-3pm for a community history project. Your photos will be scanned and immediately handed back to you and you might be asked to go on camera yourself and explain the significance of your photos. Bring up to three of them – they can be old or contemporary – as long as they are meaningful to you.
March 19th, 2012
“Reaganomics” by John Edward
John Edward, a resident of Chelmsford who earned his master’s degree at UMass Lowell and who teaches economics at Bentley University and UMass Lowell, contributes the following column:
I am, in fact, the legitimate heir to the Reagan movement.
Newt Gingrich
America must decide who to trust: Al Gore’s Texas cheerleader, or the one who stood with Reagan. (The cheerleader reference is to Texas Governor Rick Perry)
Ron Paul
There’s no question, the older I get, the smarter Ronald Reagan gets.
Mitt Romney
That guy who was too conservative — you remember him? (A reference to Reagan)
Rick Santorum
I understand why Senator Scott Brown would want to invoke the Kennedy legacy (however feebly) when running for office in Massachusetts. I understand why a candidate for the Republican nomination for President would want to establish their credentials as a Reagan Republican.
Candidate Reagan promised to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget. By President Reagan’s second term, Ron Paul was no longer standing with him. In his 1987 letter resigning from the Republican Party, Congressman Paul observed, “Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party have given us skyrocketing deficits, and astoundingly doubled national debt.”
Whether you call it supply-side economics or trickle-down economics or voodoo economics, President Reagan’s economic policies left a legacy we should all run away from. I do not understand why anyone would want to be associated with Reaganomics.
Reagan ran the largest peacetime deficits on record to that point. When he took office, the national debt was 32 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By the end of his eight-year tenure, the national debt was 52 percent of GDP. By the time his Vice-President George H. W. Bush left office, it was 63 percent.
During the Reagan Presidency, federal government purchasing almost doubled. That excludes welfare programs and social security. After adjusting for inflation, total federal spending increased by about 3 percent per year. read more »
March 19th, 2012
In the Merrimack Valley: Former Methuen Mayor Manzi for Register of Deeds
Rumors have been running about the Merrimack Valley that former Mayor of Methuen Bill Manzi was gearing up to run for the Register of Deeds seat in northern Essex County. The seat is currently held by first termer Robert Kelly of Andover. Kelly has been targeted by some - particularly FOX News-Channel 25 – as one who works at his private law practice, runs personal errands and more while on his publically paid job. Is that the impetus for the Manzi run? In an Eagle-Tribune front page story today, Manzi tells reporter Brian Messenger - ”You need a full-time register to bring the staff up to the next level. I think I could make the register a better place for everybody to do business.”
If Bill Manzi takes a page from the book of how Dick Howe, Jr. – Register of Deeds Northern Middlesex – runs that office and operation, he will be on to something for the staff, registry constituents and residents in Essex County North. In saying that “I haven’t made a full announcement… unless something changes, the race is on” - Manzi is throwing down the gauntlet to Kelly who claims he’s “moved on” from any errors made. Meanwhile both Manzi and Kelly are collecting signatures for the September 6, 2012 Democratic Primary.
Stay tuned as this interesting race ramps up and runs its course!
Read the full article here at eagletribune.com.
March 19th, 2012
What–a–Day
While tomorrow officially is the first day of Spring, this year you have to give it to yesterday on points. After baking for two hours in the sun at mid-afternoon, my car registered 89 degrees on the temperature control inside. Outside, the heat was closer to 80 degrees, enough for people to dig their shorts out of the bottom drawer and in a few cases put the air conditioner back in the window. I was at a college athletics complex in southern New Hampshire after lunchtime, and it was like Spring Break had caravan’d up north the way everyone was dressed or barely dressed for the sunshine. I watched a baseball team practicing double-plays and throws to second with all the casual grace of veterans in July. Pick a sport, and some group of young women and men were into it—football, lacrosse, soccer, advanced Frisbee. When I got home the South Common across the street looked like the Occupy people had found a new park to take over. Yesterday was a day when everyone got the same message: Get outside and enjoy the gift.
The way the weather is freaking out around the country, we may yet get a big snowstorm before May, but it won’t stand a chance of sticking to the ground for more than 48 hours the way things are going in 2012. I was so ready this year, with three Home Depot orange plastic utility buckets full of salted sand for the driveway, shovels of various sizes leaning at the ready against the house, and a new ice chopper for the Arctic jam that always sets in the dip at the entrance to the driveway. A couple of nuisance short-story snowfalls after January, and that was about all Mother Nature wrote after her multi-volume horror blizzard saga of October. Can we never again be without electrical power for three, four, and more days?
Lowell offers regular signs of spring organized by people: the annual Hynes Tavern Five-Mile Road Race and the community charity breakfast for St Patrick’s Day. These harbingers point toward yellow forsythia, Easter tulips, and baseball on the local diamonds. Yesterday’s sign was organized by the cosmic planners who must have figured that we needed a lift. I’ll take it.
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