Councilor Michael Flaherty’s idea to slash the city’s motor pool by having workers ride the T is a brilliant strategy for doubling the number of employees on the payroll. How else does he expect to maintain the same level of productivity when workers are forced to spend half the day waiting for trains and buses that run infrequently and arrive late, if at all?
Is Flaherty trying to save the city money or earn points with the unions by creating jobs for their members?
I sent this letter to the Boston Herald on June 8. Unfortunately, they declined to print it. Although I wasn’t reading the entire paper every single day around that time, I don’t recall the Herald printing a single letter, column or article defending the Obamas against the attacks on them for their “date night” in New York City. Shame on the Herald.
I am sorry to say that the “boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)” movement against the state of Israel is once again picking up steam in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League has published a good overview of recent events as well as a response to the BDS campaign which explains far better than I could why the movement is misguided.
What I will say is that if you look closely enough at the leadership of most of the organizations participating in this movement, you will find anti-Semites and people whose ultimate goal is not to end the Israeli “occupation” of “Palestine,” but rather to end the existence of the state of Israel. The participants who are truly supporting this movement out of a desire to uphold human rights are, by and large, being misled and manipulated by those who wish to destroy the Jewish state.
The BDS movement has chosen June 2009 as the time to aggressively organize boycotts against stores that sell products imported from Israel. Trader Joe’s, in particular, has been targeted. If you oppose the BDS movement as I do, and if you live in an area with Trader Joe’s supermarkets, then now would be a great time to shop at Trader Joe’s. While you’re there, ask to speak to the store manager, and thank him or her for carrying Israeli products and not giving in to pressure from anti-Semites. You can also contact them on-line.
Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East and the only one in which ethnic and religious minorities are given full civil rights. These attacks against Israel are simply unconscionable, and we must stand up to them.
In a recent email message to me entitled “Fighting the Good Fight,” friend, author and politician Michael Burstein referred me to Kate Hutchinson’s blog entry about spamming by Sam Yoon. Michael is an avid reader of my blog and therefore knows that I’ve been in more than a few scraps of my own like Kate’s. What is most amusing about Michael’s referral is that I, too, have first-hand experience with Yoon’s spamming. Here’s the complaint I sent to Yoon on March 3, 2009:
I heard a pundit on the radio this morning say that “of course they need 60 votes in the Senate to pass” the credit-card bill of rights legislation.
It seems that it is now taken as a given that any law which the minority party does not like will be fillibustered if they can muster up 41 Senators to oppose it.
I do not think it’s supposed to work this way, and as far as I know it didn’t work this way until relatively recently on the scale of how long there has been a U.S. Senate. As I understand things, fillibusters are supposed to be reserved for only the most critical issues.
Am I naive? Was it always this way and I just didn’t realize it? Or has the partisanship in Washington really gotten so bad that Congress has become completely dysfunctional and is simply no longer working the way the Founding Fathers intended?
I was the “lead” letter to the editor (i.e., the one in the grey box in the center of the letters page under a photo of the front page I was writing about) in yesterday’s Boston Herald. It’s here on their Web site; here’s the text in case it’s no longer accessible there. Following their text is the text of the original letter I sent them, before they edited it. (more…)
Good: I just spoke to the U.S. Airways reservations desk and booked my wife and kids on the same flight for tomorrow that they’d originally been scheduled on for today. That’s the good news.
Bad: The fare for the Tuesday flight is $100 higher than the fare for the Monday flight at the same time, so they charged me $500 for the fare increase. Funny, but when an airline cancels your flight and puts you onto a cheaper one, I don’t recall them refunding the difference to you.
Unbelievable: When I called tonight to change the reservation, the agent informed me that there was already a fee waiver coded on my wife’s reservation.
I got the letter from the nurse in Georgia, confirming that my wife was too ill to fly today, at 3:00pm today, Eastern time.
Ten minutes later, I queued up that letter as well as an explanatory cover letter to be sent to the fax number that the customer relations agent had given me.
Five hours later, the fax still hasn’t been successfully transmitted, although I’ve been trying to send it pretty much every five minutes. (more…)
I waited on hold for almost two hours before finally being connected to someone in the customer relations department at U.S. Airways.
I started out by asking if I could just get someone to read my letter rather than being forced to tell the whole story again, and she said that was impossible — they get too many faxes to be able to find a particular fax, so no one would be able to review my fax until it got distributed to agents with the rest of them.
So I told the agent my story and asked, once again, for a reduction or waiver of the ticket change fees.
And, once again, the agent informed me that the terms and conditions of our tickets did not include a waiver for medical emergencies and therefore the fees could not be waived.
I faxed the letter below to the U.S. Airways customer relations department over 40 minutes ago. So far, no response (no surprise there).
I then tried to call them using the toll-free voice number on the slip of paper they gave me at the airport (to tell them I had sent them an urgent complaint via fax), and I was greeted with a recording informing me that their call volume (complaint volume, more like) was so high that they couldn’t take my call and I should write to them through their Web site instead.
Then I tried calling the long-distance phone number given on the slip of paper as “alternate tel,” and I got a recording informing me that I had dialed the wrong extension (I didn’t dial an extension!). Love it!
Finally, I tried the original toll-free voice number again, and this time I actually got put into a queue, where I’ve been waiting for almost 25 minutes.
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