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Memorial Bridge Funding in Danger

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Saturday, February 19, 2011 — This just in from Ben Porter at SaveOurBridges.com: Today the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution to continue funding the U.S. Government for the balance of this fiscal year. Missing from this continuing resolution was the funding for the TIGER Stimulus Grants that would have provided $20 million for the Memorial Bridge replacement project.* This puts the project in jeopardy. There are several things that we can do to reinforce the importance of this critical infrastructure investment project. This note summarizes what can be done, and the critical timing of getting it done. There are two parallel efforts that …

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Tet Plus 43 Years

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Monday, January 31, 2011 — Today marks the 43rd Anniversary of the start of the Tet Offensive, the most catastrophic success in U.S. military history, and Vietnam’s most successful military failure ever. In the early morning hours of January 31st, 1968, more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong troops carried out hundreds of attacks on almost every significant city and town in South Vietnam. No one was more surprised that the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the Pentagon’s headquarters in Saigon. The most shocking attack was on the U.S. Embassy, less than 6,000 yards southeast of the MACV compound, where Embassy personnel …

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The Café Formerly Known as Brioche

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Sunday, January 30, 2011 — Sara asked, in a Comment on yesterday’s Beer Girl post, “is there some issue with Breaking New Grounds I don’t know about that you won’t mention their name?” In a word, yes. Café Brioche welcomed The New Hampshire Gazette. We used to distribute more than 5,000 copies of the paper there during the course of a year. After Brioche closed, we asked the new management at that site if we could continue distributing papers there. The answer was “No.” That was, of course, their prerogative. That decision, though, forced us to find and install the red plastic distribution box which …

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Beer Girl Sighted

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Saturday, January 29, 2011 — Under ordinary circumstances, when covering the news, we try to apply a wider perspective or dig more more deeply than other media. Just being the first usually strikes us as a meaningless endeavor. Not today, though. We don’t have a broader picture on this story, and we don’t have any details to speak of. All we can tell you, dear Reader, is that at 3:13 p.m. today, Beer Girl was seen exiting the Provident Bank on Daniel Street. She then crossed Daniel Street in the vicinity of the Café Formerly Known as Brioche. She was last seen heading west on …

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Big Day Tomorrow

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Friday, January 21, 2011 — We just received and approved a Comment in response to this post, which we liked well enough to convert into this post: Meanwhile, check out this Comment is Free article in The Guardian. The title is “New Hampshire’s place in geopolitics.” An excerpt: ‘”All politics is local” is a common phrase in America. It is astonishing just how true that is when surveying the current landscape of the 2012 race for the White House. Forget “blood libels” and healthcare repeal votes and the new head of the RNC. Instead, pay very close attention to an obscure vote taking place in …

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Funny You Should Ask, Dave …

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Sunday, January 16, 2011 — A fortnight ago we celebrated the arrival of the New Year with a little experiment. We hung a blank page up “in the cloud,” just to see what would happen to it. Bud in Kingston promptly used it to pass on a friendly word, and, for a while, that was that. A couple of days ago we began some long-overdue remedial posting, to fill the big gap between the kludgy PDF archives of our 2008 and 2009 papers, and the present. So far we have posted ten Fortnightly Rants, from January 15 through May 21, 2010. Our plan for today …

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