Blue Mass Group

An Open Boston City Council http://anopenbostoncitycouncil… Ask your favorite candidate about the stenographic machine record of the public meeting of the City Council. Unofficial List of Certified Candidates for District 7 City Councillor Special Preliminary Municipal Election – February 15, 2011 DISTRICT SEVEN 1. Natalie E Carithers Dorchester 2? Haywood Fennell ? Roxbury? Sticker campaign? 3. Althea Garrison Boston 4. Tito Jackson Dorchester 5. Cornell Mills Roxbury 6. Roy Owens Roxbury 7. Danielle Renee Williams Roxbury

Our Anti-Marxist scold has insisted that we take a look at The Climate of Krugman, an article by John Hayward on Human Events in answer to a recent column. The first sentence told me that this was a raving moron. And if raving morons are your cup of tea, you will not be disappointed.

The first thing that one learns is that John Hayward suffers from Demolisher’s favorite accusation: poor reading comprehension. Here’s his opening sentence with the insanity edited out

Within hours of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, … Paul Krugman raced to put up a blog post blaming Sarah Palin and the Tea Party for the attack.

Mr Hayward didn’t link, terrified of giving Mr. Krugman more traffic, but you can find the post here. It begins

A Democratic Congresswoman has been shot in the head; another dozen were also shot.

We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that “the whole Tea Party” was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous “crosshairs” list.

Mr Hayward’s response to these lines:

Somehow the New York Times left Krugman on the payroll after this disgusting example of mindless idiocy.

Editor’s note: The original version of this post was so full of invective and other garbage not consistent with our rules that I considered deleting it.  However, the link is to new information about the Middlesex Sheriff’s Office.  So the post stays, in this edited form.  Here is a story about the late Sheriff James DiPaola. http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp…

Sounds pretty definite. “There’s no elective office for me,” Kennedy said. Although she has said all along she isn’t interested in seeking the seat her late husband long held, the speculation and the cajoling have continued. Now, with Democrats starting to look in earnest for a compelling candidate to challenge Republican US Senator Scott Brown, Kennedy says that though she’s flattered by the sentiments, there’s no chance she’ll change her mind. “There will not be a yes,” she said in an interview this week. “The Senate is not where I see my future.” Barney Frank is apparently not running either (though he will seek reelection).  And I believe Deval when he says he will serve a full second term, which precludes running for Senate in 2012. So, OK.  For real, now, who’s your candidate?

Except that they don’t at all, and the equivalency arguments are surreal.

From Crooks and Liars, a list of right-wing stuff that just doesn’t happen on the left:

– July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how “liberals” are “destroying America,” walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

– October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.

– December 2008: A pair of “Patriot” movement radicals — the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted “to attack the political infrastructure” — threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.

– December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

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Lots more beneath the fold…

If there is one thing that my team at the Marion Institute hears over and over from me it’s “lets walk our talk”. I believe that we need to authentically be the change we wish to see and advocate for this change through example. So I, along with many of my teammates, am striving towards a more sustainable life-style. While writing this piece, my car is parked in my driveway at home as this is my “work from home day” and my rule is to not drive at least one day a week. I also try to carpool, use the train, take reusable bags, mugs, cutlery and to-go containers wherever I go, re-ware my clothes until they smell;), eat local, healthy, organic food (this is where having an organic farmer for a boyfriend comes in handy- I highly suggest it;) and the list goes on and on truly. Enter the dilemma… As the executive director for the Marion Institute I have responsibilities (that I love I may add) and one of those responsibilities is to empower people on the ground in many different places around the globe and although I do most of this via skype, email, phone, social networking [...]

Cross-posted locally. OK, technically Wikileaks is a website, and websites can’t pull triggers. Unless it’s Sarah Palin’s website. And so the Republic is tested again. This is the only story in politics right now. The House could declare war on Canada, and I would hardly notice, as long as the Senate hadn’t voted yet. I want Gabrielle Giffords to get well and hold a press conference. I want her to crack a joke, and to announce that her next “Congress on the Corner” event will take place as soon as she is healthy enough to do it. I know that I may not get this, any of it, but that’s what I want. And all of that is to say, I’m not making fun of her, the victims, or the situation. But I find it odd that, last month, so many people were defending Wikileaks, which was dealing with matters of life and death and war. This month, some of the same people are saying, “Words matter. Words have consequences.” Um … yes. That’s why we use them. I’ve read the threads at Blue Mass Group and Blue Hampshire with great interest. Three comments spoke the loudest to me: this [...]

BMGers, I would like to invite you to visit my new blog. It’s called Letters Blogatory. For the non-lawyers out there, a “letter rogatory” is a request by one court for assistance from another court–an area of law called “judicial assistance”. The topic of my blog is going to be international judicial assistance. I’ve found that these sorts of issues crop up ever more often in my civil and commercial litigation practice, and maybe other lawyers feel the same way! In any case, please do stop by. I plan to keep the blog current with newly decided cases, comments on new articles, etc. If anyone is interested in contributing, I’d love to talk! TedF

In 1968, a song of sorrow burst on to American radio.    ”Abraham, Martin, and John” described the grief that coursed through the nation when Martin Luther King,and Robert F. Kennedy fell to assassin’s bullets within less than two months of each other.   The reference to Abraham and John was of course to Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, two more victims of political murder.

We now need another song now that captures our mourning about the level to which our country has sunk.   And we need more than sadness: we need to action to restore our political culture to decency and to stem the ceaseless torrent of guns.

The new song, I suggest, should be called “Myers and Giffords and Green.”

TPM reported that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had send a message to congratulate Trey Grayson for his recent appointment as director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Trey Grayson was the Secretary of State of Kentucky and lost to Rand Paul in the GOP primary for Representative. In the message she talked about meeting with him to discuss promoting moderation and toning down rhetoric.  TPM has the entire email, but here is the excerpt: After you get settled, I would love to talk about what we can do to promote centrism and moderation. I am one of only 12 Dems left in a GOP district (the only woman) and think that we need to figure out how to tone our rhetoric and partisanship down. Hopefully, instead of continuing the violent rhetoric maybe it’s time introspection instead. But unfortunately, based on the Herald story on our local talk radio folks, somehow I doubt it.