Commentary – Everett Leader Herald

Has our image, reputation been tainted?

By STEPHEN PINTO

Interesting how the administration is having trouble attracting qualified professional people to fill top city jobs.

Has the word been passed around to stay clear of Everett and the current mayor?

Is this possible?

Yes, it is.

It is more than possible. It is likely.

We need someone to head the library system.

We need a planning board director.

We are missing a Director of Elections during, of all years, a citywide election year.

This position is absolutely crucial.

We also lost the head of engineering who also was in charge of the DPW.

He has been replaced but that was in-house. No search necessary.

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Amen to two great sports heroes

For those of us old enough to recall the great days of Bill Russel and the Boston Celtics, of Red Auerbach and John Havlicek, well, it didn’t get any better than that.

Havlicek died two weeks ago. He died as he lived and played, that is, with nearly everyone who knew him, who watched him, who loved him for his sports theatrics when life was very different than it is today recalling what a great guy he was.

He was humble. He was talented. He went off into the sunset after his career never looking back.

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Aretha Franklin’s Death a Great Loss For Everyone on This Earth

By Josh Resnek

The death of Aretha Franklin at 76 is a great loss not for black people alone, but for all of us, white and black, who were mesmerized by her voice.

That powerful, melodic, extraordinary voice pierced our sensibilities during the 1960’s and 1970’s, and in ways that were unimaginable for white kids growing up in all white suburbs in the relatively segregated America of that time and day.

Ms. Franklin’s song, “Respect,” stands as one of the all time great musical coming together songs for the ages.

It was a song sung by all of us, black or white, and often shouted out with vigor when we were young, because it was a song about the energy of a great a generation coming up – a giving birth song if you will, reminiscent of the few great things that rocked our world when we were much younger than we are today.

To have been a white teenager in an all white community, in an all white America at the time that song came out, was to have become transformed by something one had never heard – and which we will likely never hear anything quite like it again.

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The Mayor And Fiscal Responsibility

No sooner had the $12.5 million payment from Wynn Resorts been received then it was gone.

Gone. Just like that. With the snap of a finger.

This tells a story about money and municipalities.

It tells a story about Everett. No amount of money is enough.

The implication of the $12.5 million gone before it was deposited into the city treasury is obvious. There is no subtlety to it.

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Questions On Top of Questions

Staff Report

It’s been a week since Steve Wynn resigned as chairman and chief executive of the corporation that bears his name in the wake of an explosive Wall Street Journal report that outlines years of menacing sexual misconduct. He denied the allegations, but only as he was tumbling down multiple flights of stairs. It’s 2018 and things happen freakishly fast when someone gets caught in the #MeToo vortex. No big-wig is too big to fall. Continue reading “Questions On Top of Questions” →