cos

It was pretty complicated and took me a while to sort through the information. I did it because I really cared about this particular bill, but I can see how it would've been easy to misinterpret the legislation as something that provided a lot of new money without means-testing, and someone who believed that to be true might not have spent the time to dig around and find out otherwise, if he had a lot of other legislation to research at the same time - which he did. I never hold this kind of thing against a legislator, I assume they're all concentrating on learning a lot about a few things, and miss the details on a lot of other things. I hope that they have good reasons for their opinions based on what they do know, that they're willing to tell people straight up, and that they'll re-evaluate if they get new information or a persuasive new argument, which is what I provided.

Edit: Oh, and I forgot to add: One of the things I really liked was learning about his insistence on replacing the punch card machines, before it was a big issue and other places were doing it. I'd moved to Somerville in 1996 so I hadn't been there when that happened and didn't know about it.