Excerpts of recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New England newspapers:
The (Meriden) Record-Journal (Conn.), Oct. 21, 2015
Sorry Taylor Swift fans, but it’s hard to imagine that decades from now the singer will still have legions of fans.
No knock against Ms. Swift; the vast majority of musical acts have a short shelf life. Remember Leif Garrett, A-Ha and 98 Degrees? How about Dexys Midnight Runners? Vanilla Ice?
The list of flash-in-the-pan acts goes on and on.
Musical legends are few and far between, and their legacy lives on long after they’re gone.
Two such icons would have celebrated big birthdays in 2015. John Lennon would have turned 75 this month, and in December, Frank Sinatra would be 100.
Countless tributes of all sorts have been held in honor of the birthday boys, and they’re deserving of the pomp.
Think about the songs John Lennon left us with: “Imagine,” ’’Instant Karma,” ’’Working Class Hero.” And these came after he left a pretty good band called The Beatles.
Ol’ Blue Eyes’ catalog is incredible, as well, with hits like “My Way,” ’’Summer Wind,” ’’Strangers in the Night” and “New York, New York,” to name a few.
Lennon and Sinatra sang about heavy stuff; love, war, peace, regret. They took on big topics, which, clearly, resonate with people, as their work continues to sell and be celebrated.
The same can’t be said for the Bay City Rollers, Rick Springfield, M.C. Hammer, Chumbawamba, the Backstreet Boys … You get the point.
Sinatra once said, “Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.”
Lennon also spoke about the importance of connecting with his audience. “My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”
Sinatra died in 1998 at the age of 82. Lennon, of course, was gunned down outside his New York City apartment in 1980. He was just 40 years old.
Who knows, maybe there will be tributes marking Taylor Swift’s 100th birthday in 2089 and fans will tear up listening to “Shake it Off.” It could happen … right?
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The Morning Sentinel (Maine), Oct. 14, 2015
Used appropriately, painkillers can be a safe and effective remedy for those who need them. The drugs, though, also have a downside - diversion, addiction, overdoses and crime - that’s become the subject of countless headlines and policy discussions in Maine and nationwide.
A 2014 federal rule change that allows pharmacies to take back unused medications was supposed to help curb the opioid abuse epidemic. The reluctance of big chains to take part in the voluntary federal program, however, has kept responsibility for drug collection and disposal in the hands of law enforcement.
But a county in northern California has an innovative idea - a take-back program funded by drugmakers, not taxpayers - and Maine should watch closely to see if this is a solution that would work here as well.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced a year ago that pharmacies could accept and destroy consumers’ unwanted prescription drugs. The move was intended to get addictive medications out of family medicine cabinets, where they’re easily accessible to curious teenagers and adult addicts. Bad enough in and of itself, painkiller abuse can also drive those dependent on these drugs to try heroin, a cheaper and more deadly option.
But the response to the federal policy has been lackluster. Just 1 percent of pharmacies have put in place disposal programs, “with none of those belonging to the two largest chains, CVS and Walgreens, which have balked at the cost and security risks,” The New York Times recently reported.
How to safeguard the collected pills before they’re transferred to a disposal facility is one concern, according to the Times; the cost of incinerating the drugs is another.
Community pharmacies are taking part (including about 10 in Maine), but the stores with the most locations aren’t involved. So instead of being able to dispose of unwanted drugs whenever they go to the drugstore, consumers have just two opportunities a year to toss their old medications: the semiannual Drug Take-Back Day sponsored by Maine and federal law enforcement officials.
We the taxpayers pick up the tab for these take-back programs. But why should we? The companies that produce and profit from the product should be stepping up to pay for the harm it can do; instead, the costs are being shifted to us.
Holding industry accountable is a concept known as “product stewardship” - and it’s at the core of an Alameda County, California, ordinance that forces the pharmaceutical industry to underwrite drug take-back programs. The law passed its final court test in May, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a drug industry challenge of the measure, allowing it to stand.
Alameda County’s drugmaker-funded drug disposal program could become the first to launch next year. Rolled out over three years, it would include 110 sites for drug collection, at police stations, pharmacies and hospitals. Maine should pay attention - a plan that could save both lives and money is something we can’t afford to overlook.
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The (Newburyport) Daily News, Oct. 22, 2015
When the Electoral College was created by the Constitution in 1787, the United States was a vastly different place, starting with the fact that only 13 states were united under the Constitution after they ratified it.
The modern two-party system lay years ahead, and the idea that candidates for the White House should spend years campaigning for the job would have appalled men like Washington, Adams and Jefferson.
Still, many of the concerns that led the founders of the nation to create the Electoral College still apply.
A principal concern was that election of the president by direct popular vote would promote the growth of factions and regionalism - allowing candidates heavily supported by one region to triumph and serve the interests of only that region.
But many consider the Electoral College an anachronism and have organized an effort to abolish it and elect the president by a national popular vote.
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed a law five years ago aligning the state with others that pledged to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national vote, regardless of the preference of their own voters,
Now a group of Republican legislators has stepped forward seeking to repeal that decision. The proposal got a hearing this week at the Statehouse.
The Republicans argue that if such a change is to be made, it should be done by a constitutional amendment.
“This is a system set up by our founding fathers, and if we want to change it, we should amend the Constitution, not find a way around it,” said state Rep. Bradley Jones Jr., R-North Reading, chairman of the House Minority caucus.
Jones also argued that changing the system could frustrate the will of Bay State voters.
“So, for example, if Hillary Clinton wins the state vote, but Donald Trump wins the national vote, we would still have awarded our electoral votes to Trump regardless of who won the state outright,” he said. “That’s the deal we agreed to.”
Backers of the change argue that Massachusetts would gain clout by killing the Electoral College.
They point out that the candidates for the White House tend to focus their energies on so-called swing states that could be won by either candidate based on the decision of a relative handful of voters in those states.
States like Massachusetts that are considered locks for one party or the other receive scant attention.
They would get a lot more if candidates needed their votes to offset a narrow loss in one of the swing states.
“A vote in Massachusetts would suddenly become important under a national popular vote,” said John Koza, chairman of National Popular Vote, the group pushing for the change.
Of course, the state would also get more attention if it weren’t so reliably blue.
Critics of the Electoral College system also decry the fact that it’s possible for a candidate to win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote and thus the White House and all the power that goes with it.
Just ask Al Gore, who lost in 2000 after narrowly winning the popular vote but losing a Supreme Court case that awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes to George W. Bush.
Democrats are still smarting over that result, which prompted the soul-searching over the electoral system.
But consider the alternative. The Florida vote was contested for weeks, with recount after recount. If the popular vote had been the decisive factor nationally, many more states might have been snarled in recounts and court challenges, leaving the nation in the lurch.
The Republican effort to kill the Electoral College deal signed by Gov. Patrick is likely to go nowhere in such a one-party state.
But the national campaign to abolish the Electoral College is also going nowhere fast.
The deal cannot go into effect until states representing at least half of the 585 electoral votes agree to participate. So far only nine other states in addition to Massachusetts have signed on. They represent 165 electoral votes. Even if the campaign ultimately succeeds, the inevitable court fights would further delay matters.
The Electoral College system has served the nation well for almost 300 years. An overhaul largely driven by one party may have unintended consequences that make us wish we had heeded the founders’ wisdom.
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The (Lebanon) Valley News (Vt.), Oct. 21, 2015
The right things sometimes get done for the wrong reasons in politics. That may well be the case as momentum builds in Congress to pass long- awaited and long-overdue mental health reform legislation.
The context is the escalating number of mass shootings in recent months combined with a lack of political will to deal with the underlying problem by passing sensible restrictions on firearms. Unless members of Congress suddenly become eligible for spine infusions under the Affordable Care Act, the only measure that appears capable of attracting bipartisan support is mental health reform. That would at least give the impression that Congress is doing something to address mass killings.
Indeed, a comprehensive study of mass shootings indicates that 61 percent of those doing the killing had at least some symptoms of a serious mental health disorder, according to The New York Times. But it’s also true that while research indicates that people with serious mental illnesses do pose a modestly higher risk of violence, most people who are mentally ill are not violent. So it’s reasonable to fear that mental health reform legislation passed in reaction to mass killings will perpetuate an inaccurate stigma.
That’s a risk worth running, as advocates for the mentally ill and key legislators seem to have concluded. Indeed, they should make the most of the political moment. Who knows how long it will last in the current environment?
Bills are pending in both the House and the Senate that address different and sometimes conflicting currents of thought about how to overhaul the mental health system, something that both Vermont and New Hampshire have struggled to do. As The Washington Post noted Monday, families of those afflicted often want greater access to information about their relatives’ illness than privacy laws typically allow and seek increased ability to intervene and mandate treatment. Advocates and many patients stress the need for prevention and early identification of the onset of mental illness, along with better access to care. Both bills already propose to remove barriers to Medicaid funding for mental health treatment, address privacy restrictions and fund more psychiatric beds nationwide, so perhaps the conflicts in approach can be reconciled as well.
Interestingly, with the first hearing on these bills set for later this month, a large government-funded study has concluded that patients suffering from schizophrenia show greater progress when anti-psychotic drugs are reduced and are augmented with one-on-one talk therapy and increased family support - especially when the onset of the disease is recognized early and treated promptly. This is a key finding for the 2 million Americans who suffer from this disease, because the normal dosage of these powerful medications often produces such intolerable side effects that fully three-quarters of those patients taking them stop within a year and a half.
Of course, such a combined approach depends on the treatment infrastructure being in place and patients having ready access to it. That will require funding, something that nobody is yet talking about. Equally important, whatever commitment Congress makes to mental health reform has to be sustainable and not allowed to wane when public attention shifts from mass shootings to the next crisis.
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The Providence Journal (R.I.), Oct. 24, 2015
Vice President Joe Biden finally made a long-awaited announcement regarding his presidential ambitions on Wednesday. After months of deliberations, the 72-year-old decided to forgo seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
The vice president made the right decision, one that will spare him a lot of wasted energy and anguish, particularly in the wake of the death of his son Beau from cancer. While the vice president was doing quite well in polls of likely Democratic voters - hovering somewhere between 10 and 20 percent - he was surely helped by the fact that he was not running.
Because he was not a formal candidate, Mr. Biden was not being subjected the media scrutiny that would have inevitably weakened his run. And the truth is, Mr. Biden’s two prior presidential candidacies were disasters.
In 1988, then-Senator Biden’s candidacy died even before the Iowa caucuses, after it was revealed that that parts of his speeches had been plagiarized from a British politician. His support collapsed mere months into the campaign, and he dropped out.
In 2008, the American people were again offered a Biden presidency, and they overwhelmingly declined. Suffering anemic national polling and prone to embarrassing gaffes, he drew less than 1 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and dropped out shortly thereafter. While Mr. Biden has improved his standing as vice president, a job in which it is easier to avoid the spotlight, and while questions of character surrounding the private email and Clinton Foundation scandals have dogged Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it seems doubtful the American people would be eager to elevate him to the top job. Had he chosen to run this time around, he almost certainly would have gone down to defeat.
Thanks to her fierce determination, her excellence on the debate stage and the profound weaknesses of her challengers, Ms. Clinton appears to have an easy path to the Democratic nomination. Should she avoid indictment over her email issues (a matter the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to probe), we can expect her to be the Democratic nominee for president. Who the Republican candidate will be, of course, remains anybody’s guess.
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The (Barre-Montpelier) Times-Argus (Vt.), Oct. 21, 2015
A look at the difficulties afflicting some of the close allies of the United States may shed light on the paralysis presently afflicting the U.S. House.
Some of our closest friends - Canada, Britain, Israel - have parliamentary systems requiring their legislative bodies to choose their prime ministers and form their governments. It often happens that the party with the most members of parliament fails to have an actual majority, so it must form a coalition government with a small third party to put together a majority capable of governing.
The U.S. House is not fractured by multiple parties, but the Freedom Caucus, comprising about 40 extremely conservative Republicans, is acting like a third party, trying to exact concessions from the main body of Republicans before it agrees to allow the Republicans to form a majority. Until the Republicans can muster a majority, they will be unable to choose a speaker and the present speaker, John Boehner, will be trapped in a job from which he has said he plans to resign.
Among our allies, third parties exist on the left, the right and the middle. In Canada, the New Democratic Party might have prevented the Liberals from achieving a majority in elections Monday, but the liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, gained an outright majority. It is a remarkable rebirth for the liberals, who in recent years had lost ground to the Parti Quebecois.
The two major parties in Britain have been pressed from several directions. The Scottish National Party has eaten into the support for the Labor Party in Scotland. On the right, the United Kingdom Independence Party has pushed an anti-European, anti-immigrant agenda that has threatened the Conservative Party.
Throughout Europe, right-wing, anti-immigrant parties are making inroads in response to immigration pressures. In the United States, tea party hostility to immigration has pushed anti-immigrant sentiments forward in the Republican Party to the extent that Donald Trump has gained ground through overtly racist remarks.
The Freedom Caucus is not a separate party, and the House is not accustomed to letting a splinter group dictate its agenda. Even so, the parties have long histories as coalitions of divergent interests. For decades the Democratic Party consisted of urban bosses, unions and liberals, joined with segregationist Southerners. They made their compromises, generally at the expense of African-Americans.
The Republican Party used to consist of big business, small town and rural interests, environmentalists and progressives, including those interested in civil rights. This coalition cracked apart when the Republicans under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan became the party of the segregationist South.
What is left includes a xenophobic, anti-immigrant faction, a racist faction seeking to curb the voting rights of minorities and an anti-government faction willing to tear down the government through shutdowns and defaults in order to eradicate programs and cut taxes. Tied to these radical factions is the mainstream of the party, which is trying to rescue the party as an institution capable of governing. Many business interests oppose the radical wing, though the fossil fuel industry occupies its own radical position in obstructing action on climate and energy.
In the House, with the 40-member Freedom Caucus seeking to dictate terms, it is the tail wagging the dog. Conceivably, establishment Republicans could join forces with centrist Democrats to form a sensible majority, but the Democrats appear to be in no mood to bail out the Republicans. Boehner may use his remaining days in office joining with Democrats to pass essential pieces of legislation - the debt ceiling, the budget - getting revenge on the conservatives who forced him out.
But whoever takes the speaker’s gavel after Boehner will be stuck with the same irreconcilable minority that is seeking to force a conservative agenda on a majority from both parties that wants no part of it. Republicans are apparently looking to Rep. Paul Ryan as the savior who, if elected speaker, could reconcile the irreconcilable. Ryan’s unwillingness to take the job suggests he has little faith he could pull it off.
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