Bangkok Under Pressure

Once again, I was checking out Boston's Big Picture the other day, and I came upon this gallery about unrest in Thailand. The Red Shirts want new elections and have been protesting for over a month. When they stormed the parliament building last week, the government gave greater power to security forces to quell the protests. It has turned violent. However, the violence did stop for the Lunar new year.

Brown Takes Washington

Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts has arrived in Washington DC. The Boston Globe is suggesting that it's important that he and Senior Senator John Kerry get along, and I tend to agree:

“Within any legislative body, all the incentives are to collaborate,’’ said Marty Linsky, a politics professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It’s not in either Brown’s or Kerry’s best interests not to get along and not work together. In the past, [senators in opposite parties] actually found it good for the state to be able to collaborate. It gave each one of them access to the other party.’’

And that, Linsky said, makes it easier to bring home the federal bacon.

In the Senate, he added, “you can’t afford to alienate anybody, particularly someone in your own jurisdiction. We’ll see a lot more collaboration than conflict.’’

It will be interesting to see how this relationship develops.