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Who's worse: Patrick or Harry Spence?

By adamg on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 10:16am

I admit it: I was dubious about Eileen McNamara's first New Bedford column, in which she said state officials failed the immigrants, because her assertion those officials knew about the raid ahead of time was based on word from a federal flack, and how could we trust that?

McNamara fills in the gaps today, and proves that not only did state officials know about the raid weeks ahead of time, Harry Spence and the governor who kept him on as DSS commissioner really should just learn to shut up rather than get caught up in a Big Lie:

... Told that, in fact, members of Patrick's Cabinet had briefed him about the operation weeks ago and that Spence had participated in a conference call with ICE the day before the raid -- a fact the commissioner himself acknowledged in yesterday's newspapers -- [a Patrick flack] reconsidered: "I'd like to retract that statement until I talk to someone who actually knows something about this timeline." ...

Topics: 
Politics
Free tagging: 
Deval Patrick
Eileen McNamara
immigration
New Bedford
Harry Spence


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Comments

By SwirlyGrrl on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 12:34pm.

Massachusetts is really pretty naive when it comes to thinking that Governors and Cities/Towns are all powerful. They are not. Should Patrick have done less to cooperate? Maybe, but what legal standing does he have? Would it have resulted in an even larger nightmare to resist?

That said, I think I've got the vapors ... Jeff Jacoby just put more than a single sentence together that is coherent and sensible. Makes me wonder if his booming personal economy is dependent on liberal immigration policies, no?

By Ron Newman on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 2:10pm.

... though it would have been VERY controversial: Notify as many of the workers as possible that a raid was impending, so they would know to stay home from work that day.

I think this is the only ethical action a social worker, or a deparment full of them, could take.

By SwirlyGrrl on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 3:36pm.

https://www.communityroom.net/donate.asp?id=331 is set up to take donations to the relief fund run by MIRA

By adamg on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 8:17pm.

Blue Mass. Group raises questions about McNamara's account.