Meehan Picks his Resignation Date

According to the AP, outgoing Congressman Marty Meehan (D-Lowell) has announced the date he will submit his resignation from Congress, May 9th. His resignation letter is the event that will officially kick off the special election to replace him in Massachusetts' Fifth District. Meehan decided on this date after consulting with Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who wanted to make sure that the election wasn't held during the summer, when low-turnout would be expected. The date of May 9th, Meehan said, would "insure a September primary for the special election."

Would it, though? The law says that the election must be held sometime "between 145 days and 160 days of when the letter is submitted." The primary would be six weeks before the general. Assuming that election day will be on a Tuesday, his May 9th letter would give us the following three possible dates for the special election:

Primary	General
Tuesday, August 21, 2007	Tuesday, October 2nd
Tuesday, August 28, 2007	Tuesday, October 9th
Tuesday, September 4, 2007	Tuesday, October 16th

Only one of these dates puts the primary in September, and that day is the day after Labor Day. If your goal is to increase turnout, it seems to me that the day after Labor Day is a terrible day for an election -- with school starting, vacations ending, etc, people are going to have more immediate concerns than a special election for Congress. Why Meehan must force the state to choose that day, rather than hold off submitting his resignation for another week is beyond me. We all know he's leaving. Does it really matter to him what exact day he submits his resignation?

Meehan to UMass-Lowell?

The AP is reporting tonight that Congressman Marty Meehan (D-Lowell) is in talks with officials at UMass-Lowell about potentially taking the Chancellor's job. Here's the story from Boston.com:

Meehan is expected to meet with the school's search committee officials in early February, according to a source familiar with the hiring process who requested anonymity because the proceedings are confidential.

[...]

The Lowell congressman, who was elected in 1992, has previously denied having interest in the job.

It's somewhat surprising to me that Meehan would be thinking about leaving the Congress just when the Democrats have taken control. Meehan is currently the chair of the House Armed Services oversight and investigations subcommittee, which could be the scene of high-profile investigations of Iraq and Afghanistan. There have, however, been signs that Meehan has been tiring of the House of Representative, anyway, as he was openly considering a run for John Kerry's Senate seat in either 2005 (had he been elected president) or in 2008, had the Senator vacated it. Now that Kerry is seeking re-election, the Senate is off the table until at least 2012. Meehan may prefer to pass the time until then closer to home.

If Meehan did leave the Congress before his term is up in 2008, it would trigger an off-year special election. That would certainly attract many state legislators who would not have to risk their own seats for a chance to advance to Washington.

Update: The Boston Globe has the story on its front page this morning.

Global Warming Day in MA

Three items crossed my desk today related to global warming. The first was the news that Governor Deval Patrick has re-joined Massachusetts into RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Under the agreement, Massachusetts would be given a certain number of carbon dioxide allowances, which the state will then auction off to the highest bidder. Patrick has pledged that the money generated from that would be put toward programs that encouraged energy savings. I'm hopeful that this will help Massachusetts reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, and frankly, I think that fears that it will put us at a competitive disadvantage are overblown. All of New England except tiny Rhode Island has signed the same agreement, as have the governors of New York, New Jersey and Delaware. It is now a cost of doing business in the region and anyone who wants to do business in the entire northeast has to contend with these new rules.

Second, there's an article in the Watertown Tab about Doug Plante, who attended training earlier this year to give Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" slideshow. I know Doug from the Deval Patrick campaign here in Watertown -- he was a fellow volunteer. I'm looking forward to seeing him give the presentation locally.

Lastly, Congressman Marty Meehan (D-Lowell) has sent off a letter to President George W Bush concerning the rumors that the President will include some talk of climate change in his State of the Union address next week. Meehan comes out in support of a federal cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gasses and encourages the President to do likewise.

Read the entire letter inside...

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing following recent media reports announcing your intentions to outline a policy on global warming in your State of the Union Address next week. I believe that climate change is having catastrophic effects on our environment and strongly urge you to develop a policy that adequately addresses this crisis.

I call on you to respect the serious threat that climate change poses to the United States and the World in your State of the Union address, by supporting a federal cap on greenhouse gas emissions. We can not afford to keep any option off the table that could lead to slowing Global Warming.

According to a report in January 17th’s Washington Times, you "will argue that global warming can be better addressed through technology and greater use of renewable energy sources than through caps imposed on businesses and industries." This is a false choice. The United States can continue to invest in innovative new technologies and make greater use of renewable energy sources while also imposing emission standards through a federal cap-and-trade system.

Global Warming is a crisis and the evidence is clear and overwhelming. Last year was the warmest year on record for the continental United States with temperatures over 2 degrees higher than the mean temperature for the 20th century. Your own Interior Department proposed adding polar bears to the list of endangered species because their habitat in the Arctic is literally melting away. More troubling is the growing number of children who are falling victim to the effects of this crisis, whether it is from high asthma rates in urban areas throughout the country, or malaria in Kenya and Tanzania.

While these examples show the devastating effects that climate change is having on our environment and on our well-being, there is still time to act. This time, however, is shrinking; action on this issue must be swift and prompt. Our nation needs a federal policy that aims to reduce carbon emissions, creates incentives for renewable energy, and increases basic research so that our scientists can discover the links between pollution and diseases like autism and breast cancer.

The United States, with only 5% of the world's population, produces roughly onequarter of all global greenhouse gas emissions. This is unacceptable. We must make it a priority to reduce our emissions.

A federal cap-and-trade system has the potential to cut carbon emissions in the United States by 80% by 2050. However, the benefits will go beyond cleaner air and slowed global warming. A federal cap-and-trade program will create new opportunities for businesses and research facilities, specifically those who focus on areas of environment-friendly materials and alternative energy development.

This week, Congress has taken the first step to putting America on a path to energy independence by repealing billions of subsidies given to big oil and investing in renewable energy technologies and improving energy efficiency. I strongly urge you to add to this effort by announcing in your State of the Union Address that you will support a cap on emissions from the country's largest polluters, that you will join with countries from around the world to develop a global agreement on climate change, and that you will increase federal investments in renewable energy and basic research that investigates the links between pollution and life-threatening diseases.

I look forward to continuing to work with you to address this issue which we all agree is having a devastating effect on our environment and our welfare. As the most advanced nation in the world, it is essential that America lead the fight to slow and eventually end global warming.

Sincerely,
Marty Meehan
Member of Congress

Speaking of Global Warming

On Saturday, Congressman Meehan noted that the town meeting was carbon neutral. That is the carbon produced by the event -- including the 50 pounds of CO2 from my car, I hope -- was being offset by a donation to some sort of wind power concern. There was a piece in Sunday's Globe Ideas section that I finally got a chance to read outline the problems of carbon neutrality. I admit that I am intrigued by a market-based solution to reducing emissions, but the article gives us reasons to be skeptical. Here's why:

[T]o Robert Stavins, director of Harvard's environmental economics program, if an offset system actually were reducing emissions there'd be no reason to worry about people buying offsets for their Gulfstreams and Hummers. If it's worth the price of an offset to someone to drive their SUV, and the money they're paying actually buys a reduction elsewhere, that's the definition of economic efficiency. "That's the system working," says Stavins. The point, as he sees it, is to reduce emissions, not to reward individual virtue.

The real problem with offsets, for Stavins and other economists, is that they fail to do this. Even if all of the carbon offset companies held themselves to the highest standards -- and in what is still a completely unregulated industry that is a big if -- economists doubt that offset vendors can assure that a certain amount of money paid by an individual will buy a certain amount of greenhouse gas reduction.

"What you have," says Stavins, "is a comparison to an unobserved and unobservable hypothetical." How does an offset company know that a landowner wasn't going to preserve his forest anyway, perhaps because the timber market was weak? Or that an electric utility hadn't decided to build the wind farm long before it got the offset money? In such cases, the offset money is simply allowing the forest owner or utility to make more money for a decision already arrived at.

I did some research into offsets when I first heard that Al Gore used them to make the promotional tour of An Inconvenient Truth carbon neutral. Some of the companies doing this seemed sketchy, and given that this line of business is brand new and completely unregulated, my impressions may have been correct.

Saturday's Climate Change Town Meeting

On Saturday, I attended a Town Meeting on Global Warming hosted by Congressman Marty Meehan (D-Lowell) at UMass Lowell. Around 1000 of us crammed ourselves into an auditorium with only one more Saturday left before Christmas to hear what Bay State leaders and experts had to say on the topic. You can read the Lowell Sun's description of the event, or the one from the Associated Press. Lynne from Left in Lowell was also there, though I don't think she's blogged about it yet.

Meehan told the crowd that a typical car emits about a pound of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per mile. That made me feel a little guilty for making the 25-mile trek each way from Watertown. It reminded me of when my wife and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth because our air conditioner was broken. Meehan's speech cribbed heavily from that film, and he not only played a scene from it, but he got Al Gore himself to shoot a five minute video welcoming us to the event.

One thing that Meehan kept repeating that I thought was interesting was that this should not be a political debate. What debate there is should be a scientific one, and that one has pretty much been decided. In Meehan's words, "the verdict is in." He expressed some optimism that climate change skeptics were no longer in charge of the House and the Senate, but he still expected resistance from the White House.

Following Meehan's remarks was Dr. Paul Epstein from Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ken Geiser and Dr. Amy Cannon from UMass Lowell and Lee Ketelsen from Clean Water Action. The doctors were all heavy on the science, with Epstein reciting a litany of dire consequences should we fail to act to combat global climate change. Geiser and Cannon spoke about the outstanding work on alternative energy that is currently going on at UMass Lowell, particularly in the new field of green chemistry, which I had never heard of before. Ketelsen -- an activist, not a scientist -- gave a political pitch. Rather than preach to the choir, she spoke of the importance of massive citizen pressure to get action from Washington. In order to do that, we need to convince our friends and neighbors that clean energy is not only good for the planet, but it's good for their pocketbook as well.

Deval Patrick spoke after the panel and those familiar with his alternative energy ideas would find his speech familiar. He repeated his desire for Massachusetts to become a center for development of renewable energy because, "if we get that right, the whole world is our customer." He also pledged that he would enter the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) which Governor Romney had opposed.

By the way, for anyone worried that Patrick has lost any support from activists over the past month, there was no evidence of this in the auditorium. I think he managed to get three standing ovations -- once when he entered the hall, once when he began his speech and once afterwards.

Meehan promised to use his web page as a portal for more information. As of now, the invitation to this event is all that's there. I'm not sure what they have in mind, but at the very least I hope they make the materials from Saturday available online. There was a lot of energy in that room for a Saturday morning, and it would be a shame if it could not be harnessed.

Friday Combination Platter

Sorry for the light posting this week. I feel like I'm still catching up from my vacation and I've got a million things I should be doing. In any case, here are some of the things I didn't have time to talk about this week:

• Overrides on the Rise: The Globe reported this that the number of Proposition 2 1/2 override attempts almost tripled between 2000 and 2005. Cities and towns are being starved of local aid, and that is putting a lot of pressure on their budgets. Without that extra money, the only tool in their toolbox is to raise property taxes. This is why talk of lowering the income tax doesn't make sense to me. It's the wrong tax! Let's handle the property tax crisis first before we potentially cripple the state's ability to help cities and towns.


• Globe: Gabrieli too Boring to be Gov: Yesterday's Boston Globe had this curious article in advance of Chris Gabrieli's announcement. I'm not sure why they felt they had to write a whole article which basically said "some people think Gabrieli is boring" rather than make this a sidebar in the article they knew they would be writing for today. It's almost as if they went out of their way to have a negative article about him on the day he made his run for governor. Anyhow, judge for yourself.


• Patrick Endorsed by DFA: Deval Patrick has been officially endorsed by Democracy for America. The endorsement sites how he "earned the support of DFA members across Massachusetts by empowering people to participate in his campaign and the democratic process" and could bring in donations from out of state, as well as publicity. In other Patrick related news, his campaign has upgraded their blog and is starting to fill it with audio and video content. The Phoenix's Adam Reilly is excited, and I think it has a lot of potential.


• Bloodsucking Vampire, Tom DeLay: I really liked this post from Whitescreek Journal. I'm not even sure how I came across it, but it's really well written and worth checking out.


• Good News for Fish: Mercury levels in fish from Massachusetts lakes and streams are down by as much as 32% in the seven years since tough regulations were put on local incinerators. This is great news because it really shows how changes in the law can really effect the environment, even in the short term. Not only that, but these results prove that local efforts can have a dramatic effect on the local environment, and we can make strides to clean up Massachusetts even if the Federal Government is not interested.


• It Could Be Worse: Even though Congressman Marty Meehan (D-Lowell) wants to hamstring political blogs with campaign finance regulations, it could be a lot worse. In Singapore, they just banned political podcasts in the weeks before an election. (via BoingBoing)

There are also a few other things that I feel I owe larger posts, so look forward to that. It's been another busy political week in Massachusetts. What's on your minds?

Why do Marty Meehan and John Tierney Hate the Internet?

I've been meaning to post about H.R. 4194, the Orwellian-named "Internet Anti-Corruption and Free Speech Protection Act of 2005" sponsored by Chris Shays (R-Ct) and Marty Meehan (D-Lowell), for a while now, but Lynne did such a good job last week that I've put it off. Check out her post, which in turn points to this post at DailyKos.com.

While the Shays-Meehan bill would protect individuals who have blogs from having to report to the FEC under campaign finance law, it would not protect group blogs, such as DailyKos.com, MyDD.com, or any other group blog that spent or took in more than $1000 in a calendar year. The $1000 includes server space and bandwidth costs, which can easily exceed that much over the course of a year for a popular website. What does that mean for the blogosphere? It means that while Bill O'Reilly can stump for any candidate he wants on his TV or radio shows, any group blog or other web endeavor (a wiki, podcast, or mailing list, for example) that spends or takes in more than $83 a month could not do so without violating election law unless they register as a political committee.

Proponents of the proposed measures fear that a company, for example, could start up a blog attacking or supporting a candidate, and avoid campaign finance regulations altogether. They worry that without regulation, groups could spend unlimited amounts on Internet ads. If it's ads you're worried about, though, I think there's a limit to how much you can spend on Internet advertising before you run into diminishing returns. Plus, ads on the Internet generally require people to choose to click on them to see the detailed content. That's not true of TV ads that are pushed out onto viewers. That said, there's a difference between web ads and weblogs -- something that people unfamiliar with the medium may not understand. An advertisement has a measurable value -- the amount one charges to put it on the web. What is the value of a blog post? How would you classify it as an in-kind contribution?

Meehan's colleague, Congressman John Tierney (D-Salem), is a cosponsor on H.R. 4194. Of all of the Massachusetts Congressmen, only Mike Capuano (D-Somerville) cast a vote in favor of H.R. 1606 -- the bill which would have codified the FEC rules the Internet operated under during the 2004 campaign cycle. That bill failed, largely due to the efforts of Shays, Meehan and campaign finance groups that have good intentions, but don't necessarily understand the consequences of regulating speech on the Internet. I would hope that the rest of our Congressmen would either reject their new efforts or amend them so that at least Internet commentators get the same protections as commentators in the traditional media.