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Political Happy Hour: Sept. 15, 2016

Here’s your 12-piece stemless wine glass set of politics, from Joshua Miller of the Boston Globe at newspaper HQ in Dorchester.

Sign up your drinking buddies for this newsletter here: http://www.bostonglobe.com/politicalhappyhour

HEAD ON A PLATTER, via Milton J. Valencia on BostonGlobe.com: “The former head of a local Teamsters union reluctantly pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal attempted extortion charge for using strong-arm tactics against a TV production crew in a case with ties to City Hall. ... ” http://bit.ly/2cz70QB

FOR BAKER, IT ALL COMES BACK TO THE FISHERMAN. ER, FISHERMEN. From Katie Lannan of the State House News Service: “Gov. Charlie Baker is ‘deeply disappointed’ by President Barack Obama’s plan to designate an area off the New England coast as the first deep-sea marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean, a move the Swampscott Republican’s administration sees as undermining Massachusetts fishermen.

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Obama on Thursday announced the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a 4,913 square mile area that includes three underwater canyons and four underwater mountains that provide habitats for protected species including sea turtles and endangered whales.

Recreational fishing will be allowed in the protected zone but most commercial fishing operations have 60 days to ‘transition from the monument area,’ according to the White House. Red crab and lobster fisheries will be given seven years to cease operations in the area, which is about 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod. ...

The monument plans won praise from environmental groups ...” Link via the Patriot Ledger: http://bit.ly/2cz1de6

OCCASIONAL FEATURE — RANDOM MASSACHUSETTS STATISTIC. Because numbers can be telling. As of Sept. 3, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had 87,618 full-time equivalent employees (not including quasi-public agencies like the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority), according to the governor’s budget office.

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Are you one of the 87,618 and have a good story for the Boston Globe? joshua.miller@globe.com

Need more anonymity in this age of hacked emails? Snail mail, yo.

Joshua Miller, c/o Metro Desk, The Boston Globe, 135 William T. Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125

FUN MASS. POLITICAL YARN — IN PLYMOUTH COUNTY, THE STRANGE CASE OF THE CANDIDATE FROM WHITMAN, by Globe State House Bureau Chief Frank Phillips: “The last vestiges of some of Massachusetts’ most colorful and bizarre politics are found in county governments — and Plymouth County does not fail to meet those standards. The latest episode was a strange and convoluted flare-up in the election battle to fill two of three county commissioner posts. It involved a bipartisan legal fight to deny a ballot position to a GOP candidate who had suddenly moved his address from a nice suburban home in Pembroke down the road to a rooming house in Whitman. Here’s what happened ...” http://bit.ly/2cMc086

BUSINESS TALKER — WITH GE CAMEO, via the Economist: “Disruption may be the buzzword in boardrooms, but the most striking feature of business today is not the overturning of the established order. It is the entrenchment of a group of superstar companies at the heart of the global economy. Some of these are old firms, like GE, that have reinvented themselves. Some are emerging-market champions, like Samsung, which have seized the opportunities provided by globalisation. The elite of the elite are high-tech wizards — Google, Apple, Facebook and the rest — that have conjured up corporate empires from bits and bytes. ... [T]he superstars are admirable in many ways. ... But they have two big faults. They are squashing competition, and they are using the darker arts of management to stay ahead. ...” http://econ.st/2cz3dmG

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MASS. UNEMPLOYMENT DROPS, via Deirdre Fernandes on BostonGlobe.com: “The Massachusetts unemployment rate dropped to 3.9 percent in August, its lowest point in 15 years, the state announced on Thursday. The last time unemployment hit 3.9 percent was in August of 2001, before the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ...” http://bit.ly/2cz6RNe

R.I. UNEMPLOYMENT RISES, via the AP in Providence: “Rhode Island’s unemployment rate rose to 5.6 percent in August. ...” Link via the Washington Times: http://bit.ly/2cz2NN1

CONN. EDUCATION BATTLE, via Daniela Altimari of the Hartford Courant: “The state’s top lawyer will appeal a controversial school funding decision, asserting that the ruling represents a broad overreach of judicial authority. ... Attorney General George Jepsen[’s] ... announcement comes eight days after [a] Superior Court Judge ... issued a sweeping decision that orders the legislature to overhaul the way public education is funded and delivered, from elementary to high school.

[The judge] gave lawmakers and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration 180 days to devise a new funding formula for public schools, calling the current method arbitrary and irrational, and declaring that it shortchanges poor children. He also directed the legislature to devise a new way of evaluating and compensating teachers, principals and superintendents, as well as instituting a graduation test for high school seniors and revising the way special education services are delivered. ...” http://cour.at/2cbg6B9

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LOL — NOT JUST MASS. DEMS WHO ARE HELPING CHARLIE BAKER, via WMUR: “[New Hampshire] State Democratic Chairman Ray Buckley and Democratic National Committeewoman Kathy Sullivan held a news conference in Manchester and took aim at [GOP] gubernatorial nominee Chris Sununu. ...

‘He is going to try to pretend he is not the extreme right-wing candidate that he is,’ Sullivan said. ‘He is going to try to run like he’s Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, but if he is ever elected governor of New Hampshire, he will govern like Paul LePage of Maine.’ ...” http://bit.ly/2cMbmas

ELIZABETH WARREN’S NEXT BIG BATTLE? MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR SEPT. 20, via Bloomberg: “U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren questioned whether Wells Fargo & Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf should keep his job amid allegations that the bank opened millions of accounts without customers’ knowledge. ‘He needs to be held accountable, as does the rest of his senior management,’ Warren, one of Wall Street’s loudest critics in Congress, said Thursday in a Bloomberg Television interview. ‘You should not be able to keep your job and keep raking in millions of dollars in bonuses.’

Wells Fargo last week agreed to pay $185 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulators to resolve claims that employees opened more than 2 million accounts that consumers may not have known about. ... ‘Something is badly broken at this bank,’ said Warren, who will get a chance to grill Stumpf in person at a Sept. 20 Senate Banking Committee hearing. ...” With video: http://bloom.bg/2cMe2oP

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WARREN VS. FBI, via Victoria McGrane on BostonGlobe.com: “Elizabeth Warren is turning the tables on the FBI. The Massachusetts senator sent a letter to FBI Director James Comey Thursday demanding he release notes and other documents the bureau has on its investigations into individuals accused of contributing to the devastating 2008 financial crisis.

Her argument: The FBI broke its longstanding practice of keeping its investigation notes private when it released dozens of pages of documents related to its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server as secretary of state. The FBI did so, Warren notes, claiming it was in the ‘public interest’ to be more transparent in that particular case. ...” http://bit.ly/2cz2qSy

WHICH COMES FIRST, THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG, via press release: “UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, WBUR, and The Boston Globe on Tuesday, September 20, will host the second in a series of weekly debates exploring in depth the four statewide ballot questions to be decided by voters in the November 8 election. Tuesday’s debate will focus on Question 3, which would prohibit certain forms of confinement of animals raised for eggs or slaughter [and mandate all eggs sold in Massachusetts come from cage-free hens].

Paul Shapiro, vice president of farm animal protection for The Humane Society, will speak in favor of the new measure. Bill Bell of the New England Brown Egg Council will speak in opposition. WBUR’s Meghna Chakrabarti will be joined by The Boston Globe’s Joshua Miller to moderate the hour-long debate ...” The debate will be livestreamed on BostonGlobe.com.

HEADLINE I CLICKED ON — ‘DINOSAUR AVOIDS EXTINCTION IN SAUGUS’ via itemlive.com. With photo: http://bit.ly/2cz3lCp

PRETTY GOOD POLITICAL AD FROM DEM US SEN. CANDIDATE IN MISSOURI. I mean, with a combination of a gun and a blindfold, you can’t go wrong. Thirty seconds: https://youtu.be/-wqOApBLPio

Back tomorrow.


Joshua Miller can be reached at joshua.miller@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jm_bos and subscribe to his weekday e-mail update on politics at bostonglobe.com/politicalhappyhour