Hillary Clinton charges $300,000 a speech, and that’s her special university rate. Her husband, Bill, earns about $189,000 per speech and once raked in $750,000 for a talk to a telecommunications company in Hong Kong. A host of politicians, from Al Gore to Dick Cheney to Mitt Romney, collect tens of thousands of dollars when they […]
Olympics 2024
Posted inOlympics, State House News Service
Patrick’s Olympic pay: $7,500 per day
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE FORMER GOV. DEVAL PATRICK will be compensated $7,500 per day when he travels on behalf of the backers of a bid to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston, according to organizers. The privately funded organization – Boston 2024 – is also spending tens of thousands of dollars on a monthly […]
Posted inOlympics
Olympics once-in-a-century opportunity
Remarks prepared for delivery to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. As I said last month, this isn’t Loon Mountain, it’s the city of Boston. But with 100 inches of snow in 30 days, we could have opened up our own ski resort. In fact, I stand before you at the tail end—knock on wood—of the […]
Posted inOlympics, The Download
An elephant in the Olympics financing room
There has been all sorts of talk about the costs of a Boston Olympics, with elected officials left and right stamping their feet, drawing lines in the sand, and otherwise declaring with the utmost gravity and certainty that they will not allow the commitment of any public funds (other than those already planned for infrastructure […]
Posted inOlympics, The Download, Transportation
Blizzard burying Olympics bid?
It’s easy to forget in the mind- and finger-numbing midst of Snowmaggedon about Boston’s 2024 Olympic bid – easy to forget, that is, if you don’t pay attention to everyone decrying the shape of the MBTA and what it will be like in eight years should millions of visitors from around the world descend on the […]
Posted inThe Download, Transportation
Great Scott!
MBTA General Manager Beverly Scott’s press conference on Tuesday was one of those rare moments in political life when an official just lets it rip. We in the press are so accustomed to dry, lifeless, measured statements that we’re not sure what to do when an official goes Full Metal Jacket. The situation was even […]
Posted inOlympics, Opinion
The real Olympics debate
EVALUATING THE COSTS as well as the benefits of hosting the Olympic Games needs to extend beyond considerations of economic or infrastructure changes. We should talk also about an even larger ramification: For any city, why and how you run an Olympics is a statement to the world about who you are morally and ethically – […]
Posted inOlympics, Opinion
Why I went from no to yes
IN THE BEGINNING of 2014, I was one of the co-founders of No Boston Olympics, a group of volunteers formed to oppose Boston’s Olympic bid. By December I had left the group, and decided to support Boston’s bid. My friends and peers have jokingly wondered who got to me, or who bought me off. But […]
Posted inOlympics, Opinion
How about a Gateway Cities Olympics?
EVEN NAYSAYERS BELIEVE the 2024 Olympic bid is a rare opportunity to generate fresh ideas about the future of the Commonwealth. For a productive conversation, a shared understanding of priorities is required. It will always be hard to generate consensus in a state with so much diversity, but if there is one issue on which […]
Posted inPolitics, The Download
A new Speaker-for-life?
If there is one man who is happy about the blizzard that will white-out coverage of almost any other news for the next few days it may be Bob DeLeo. It’s not that the unassuming House speaker actually pines for the massive storm, which could hit his coastal hometown of Winthrop particularly hard. It’s that […]