Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for the Doors, died today at 74. As as aspiring rock-and-roll musician of 17 in the late sixties, Ray Manzarek was an icon and an idol. Though I realized as I matured that he was at best mediocre, that made no difference in 1967 when I wore out my copies of the first two Doors albums learning every note of every solo.

RIP, Ray Manzarak. An age has passed.

I would like to highlight three different episodes to contrast and compare with the Marathon Bombing. I suggest that each of the three arguably reveals a more important and more urgent failure of public policy. I want to explicitly include the treatment by the mainstream media — especially the Boston Globe — in this discussion.

Here are the three other events I’d like to consider:
1. The NECC/Ameridose Scandal
2. The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal
3. This weekend’s fatal fire at 87 Linden Street in Allston.

I suggest that each of these three reveals a far more significant failure of government. The death toll from the NECC scandal is 48 and counting. The drug lab scandal puts an enormous number of dangerous offenders back on the street. I believe the scale of that scandal betrays the eagerness of overly aggressive prosecutors to gain convictions at any cost. I am confident that authorities knew that Ms. Dookhan was manufacturing results favorable to the prosecution, and carefully looked the other way. Finally, the fatal fire at 87 Linden Street occurred in a “two family” house that had an astounding NINETEEN students living in it. A similar fire gutted a similarly overcrowded property at 84 Linden Street in January of 2012. City officials claim they didn’t know about the overcrowding at this most recent fatal fire.

How many inspections of rental properties in Allston would even ONE of the expensive high-tech “No Smoking” signs scattered throughout the MBTA have provided? You know, the expensive high-tech signs that were supposed to provide vital information in the case of a terrorist emergency? The ones that flashed their meaningless messages on empty platforms because the entire system had been shut down to apprehend one wounded and bleeding suspect.

How many drug lab inspectors could have been hired with the money that bought the impressive fleet of hundreds of swat vehicles, the thousands of responders, and all the weapons, ammunition, communication devices, and everything else that provided our “security” that Friday? How much did shutting down the entire city of Boston cost all of us, when we include lost wages, lost business, spoiled restaurant food, ALL of it. How much “public safety” did we buy with that all that money? How does that total compare with the delta between the Governor’s tax proposal and Mr. DeLeo’s meager counter-offer? Would we have been more safe with twice as many responders? How about half?

How do we measure the improvements in “public safety” we derive from all these enormous expenditures in police and military preparedness for our “war on terror”?

It seems to me that government in Massachusetts is failing at its most basic purposes. Criminals are going free. Students are dying in fires in unregulated housing. Patients are dying from polluted medications distributed nationwide by unregulated medical suppliers. All this happens while we contemplate ever more intrusive “security” measures while shouting down those who dare to suggest that we’ve already gone too far.

I’d like to see media like the Globe redouble their efforts to reassert their adversarial status with government and authority. I’d like to see less front-page handwringing and more investigative pieces that pick up where Brian Ballou started.

How does a rental property go more than twenty years with only two inspections? What government officials are charged with inspecting properties in Allston, or compounding companies in Framingham, or state drug labs? Did those inspections fail because there weren’t enough inspectors? Did the inspectors lack the resources needed to do their jobs?

Where is our government investing its resources, what priorities do those investments reflect, and do those priorities line up with our genuine (as opposed to maudlin) passions?

One of the major problems facing system solutions for public transportation in Massachusetts is how we handle communities outside the immediate service area of the existing commuter rail routes. I suggest that the technology pictured here offers a solution. While these are prototypes (they show Japanese technology dating from 2006/2007), I believe they point towards an approach that is very promising for Massachusetts.

What if larger versions of these vehicles, about the size of an existing bus coach, were used throughout the state? Imagine, if you will, revised local bus routes that traverse towns like Palmer, Billerica, or Groton (chosen mostly randomly), picking up passengers in the morning and dropping them off in the evening. What if those buses, loaded with passengers, stopped for about thirty seconds at designated rail/highway transfer locations, dropped their (steel) rail wheels into place, perhaps coupled together into 4-5 car trains, and proceed to follow existing or perhaps new commuter rail routes to destinations in Boston, Worcester, Springfield, and perhaps Hartford, Nashua, Manchester, and so on?

It seems to me that this approach provides a solution towards the “last mile” problem that so bedevils public transportation in a geographic distribution like we have, preserves the efficiency of rail transportation for the longer portions of these trips, and is able to use whatever combination of highway and rail right-of-way that makes the most sense from a “system” view of our region.

Surely Massachusetts should be pursuing this technology as we belatedly invest in our collective future.

Schematic showing key components

Video showing prototype, carrying passengers

More recently, though, each and every reload has slowed to a crawl — as in seconds and often tens of seconds of a blank screen before I see anything at all. I note in the browser status bar that I see references to cdn.api.twitter.com, apparently doing a counter. Firebug reports a spinning wheel after minutes — perhaps a missing timeout? I also see references to something like “static.facebook” going by.

I’m wondering if this is specific to me or if it’s more widespread.

Update on 6-May-2013:

This problem is getting worse. The server just dropped a comment I attempt to post, after stalling for minutes. I see status messages about both facebook and twitter. Those calls almost surely can and should be wrapped in timeouts so that they are bypassed when their respective targets are unresponsive.

I am far more concerned, verging on freaked out, by uniformed and heavily-armed police using “public safety” as an excuse to impose immediate martial law. I’m as concerned about the deaths and casualties as anyone. As tragic as these are, today’s lockdown is way beyond reasonable.

If our three centuries of freedom are ever lost, this is how it will play out.

Here are the two specific quotes that concern me:

and to be specific, we are speaking to the residents of Watertown, Newton, Waltham, Belmont, Cambridge, and the Allston/Brighton neighborhoods of Boston. To those people, we are asking you to stay indoors, to stay in your homes, for the time being. We are asking businesses in those areas to please cooperate and not open today until we can provide further guidance and information.

…

“No vehicle traffic is going to be allowed into or out of Watertown until further notice”.

NECN link here (no embed available).

I’m sorry, but our constitutional and human rights of free assembly, pursuit of happiness, and freedom from unreasonable search are far too important to be so brazenly removed. The media hysteria is making this situation worse, not better.

I think it’s time for the police to take down the tapes, go about the search for the remaining suspect, and start saying “Nothing to see here, move along please”.

I hope that we who call Boston home will react to this horrific event with compassion and courage. Compassion for the victims — beyond the families and loved ones of the dead and wounded, all of us are victims. Courage to redouble our efforts to hold fast to the values we live for, in the midst of hysteria, fear, and panic. In my view, this is a time to open up rather than shut down. A time to join forces with cities throughout the world and throughout history who have experienced attacks like this and moved beyond them.

There will be, inevitably, calls for “increased security” and a clamoring to “suspend” even more of our basic human and constitutional rights. If we succumb to these calls, the bad-guys will have won.

I hope that all of us can dig deep and connect to the best of our historical and intellectual traditions as we come to grips with today’s events, each in our own way. Freedom, and the benefits of a truly free and open society, is dangerous and costly. We received, today, another first-hand lesson about how radical the American vision really is — and how much it can cost.

That’s right, an open door.

According to NECN:

Spokesperson Joe Pesaturo said: “…the (MBTA)…has developed a new inspection procedure for the older Red Line cars that have this type of mechanism in the door. All of the older Red Line cars are being checked.”

Sorry, Joe, but this is too little too late. Do passengers have to die to cause something to be done? While we have all this dishonest happy-talk from hacks who care more about putting a casino at Suffolk Downs than about funding desperately-needed government services (like transportation), the MBTA spirals towards catastrophe.

Shut down the MBTA. Now. The entire region will be paralyzed. Perhaps THAT will be enough to goad these hacks into doing the right thing.

April 4 11:30a update

This just gets better and better. I called the NTSB “Office of Railroad, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Investigations” (202 314-6000) to find out how to report this serious incident. I was rather curtly informed that any investigation would be done by … wait for it … the MBTA.

Let me see, did we ask Fung Wah to “investigate” their safety issues?

This is truly appalling.

April 4 6:45a update

The same incident was reported in today’s Globe. Sadly, I only find it in the “ePaper” version — it is apparently not (at 6:45a) available from the linkable “today’s paper” site. I’ve emailed the Globe reporter (Matt Rocheleau) with a request for follow up on three questions I have:

1. Why didn’t the operator of these cars know that door was open, and why didn’t that operator stop the train? The doors have lights on the outside designed to illuminate when the door is open. Were they functioning? Was the operator looking? Are those lights repeated on the operator’s panel?

Mr. Rocheleau’s story says that the video was taped at Andrew Station, an astounding four stops inbound from Quincy. Ms. Myllmaki reports that she noticed the problem at Quincy Center. How did a train with an open door make at least four stops and starts?

2. What follow up will be pursued by external agencies like the NTSB? Surely this incident reveals safety issues as threatening to public safety as any that caused the recent shut-down of the Fung Wah bus company. Do passengers have to die in order for the current MBTA to be declared an “imminent hazard to public safety”?

3. What safety systems and/or interlocks do the “older Red Line cars” share with other cars on other lines? The failures here extend well past the door closing mechanism — the fact that a train with an open door could travel so far so fast without the apparent knowledge or intervention of operators is a FAR larger problem than failing door hardware of any specific equipment.

The Boston Globe buried the truth about the impact of climate change , while promoting the lie that cheaper oil is a good thing. The truth is that anthropogenic climate change already greatly multiplied the strength of “frankenstorm” Sandy — New Jersey and New York will be dealing with the catastrophic impact for a very long time.

More egregiously, the Globe lies by omission in today’s piece on fracking. A prominent, front-page, above-the-fold story that extols the many claimed benefits of fracking (this time for shale oil) and mentions NONE of the dangerous climate-change impacts.

The headline (“Shale oil reviving refinery industry”) and subheads (“Fracking offers a cheaper supply” and “Keeps gas prices from rising more”) loudly proclaim the benefits — nowhere in the piece are the devastating impacts of continued CO2 emissions mentioned. This is like a piece proclaiming the benefits of eating and drinking from leaden plates, cutlery, and cups — and making no mention of the unfortunate fact that the same lead kills you.

This, like the happy-faced local TV news announcers celebrating “fantastic” 70 degree sunny weather in January, exemplifies the literally suicidal failure of our political system to confront the truth of climate change and its implications for energy policy.

My snow-blower, like every other snow-blower, is useless without shear bolts/pins. I bought it from Home Depot three years ago. Home Depot still sells them. I need some spares (I’m down to my last set), so I checked the Home Depot website to ensure they were in-stock in the Assembly Square store near my home.

Bingo — Model # 73203900, “Item can be picked up in store“. Item price is $6.49/package (3 in each package).

Wrong. I went to the store, only to find that the store has just two varieties on their shelves — neither is the right size, neither will fit my model, and they were unable to locate the very same page I found on their website. They were able to take my money so that I can “order online, ship to store.”

I just ordered three units through Amazon. They will arrive Friday, to my home, and they cost $4.85 each.

My learning (and this is not the first time for Home Depot)? Don’t shop there. The entire point of operating a brick-and-mortar outlet is so that I can pick up the things I need when I need them. Websites that lie about availability do far more harm than just saying “out of stock”. Forcing me to order goods to be shipped to their store colossally misses the point of internet shopping. It is yet another example of pushing onto the customer services that the store should rightfully do (in this case, inventory management).

Charging sales tax on my online purchase has NO IMPACT on my decision to buy these from Amazon. I predict that in 6-12 months, we will learn that Home Depot is closing stores (like Circuit City and Barnes & Noble), along with much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how unfair and harmful the “internet” is.

That whining is wrong. Home Depot has lost a customer, for good, because of their own incompetence, dishonesty, and arrogance. They deserve to go the way of Circuit City.

Could the editors (or, perish the thought, we) maintain some sort of issue tracking/status page, where the community can see where we are on various technical aspects of the site?

Just a thought …

A college in the US state of Texas is on lockdown amid reports of a shooter on the campus.

Gunfire reportedly rang out on the campus of Lone Star College in the north of Houston.

The slaughter continues.

Four people, including an armed suspect, died after an hours-long police standoff Saturday at a Colorado townhome, authorities said.

Police Sgt. Cassidee Carlson said a SWAT team was called after gunshots were heard at the Aurora, Colo., home at about 3 a.m. Investigators said three victims, all of them adults, appeared to have been killed before officers arrived.

Carlson said the suspect shot at officers at about 8:15 a.m. and was killed during a gunfight about 45 minutes later when police entered the home. It remained unclear if officers shot the suspect or if he shot himself.

Of course, we don’t know any of the specifics yet. I’m not sure it matters. I find this particularly ironic coming on the same morning that I read and welcomed the announcement of a “Sabbath to Stop Gun Violence” this weekend.

This unnecessary, savage, and pathological carnage will continue until civilized Americans put a stop to it.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will postpone filibuster reform until later this month, giving him time to negotiate a deal with Republicans, say Democratic lawmakers and aides.
[snipped]
“I think the conversation is going to continue between [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell [(R-Ky.)] and Harry Reid about this. I think they’re going to see if there’s a way to reach a bipartisan agreement, they’re still talking,” said Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.).
[snipped]
Reid and McConnell will use a bipartisan proposal crafted by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) as the basis of their talks.

Say WHAT? This is NO time to “negotiate” ANYTHING with Republicans. This is the time to END the call-in filibuster, right now. Stop it, by a simple majority vote. Then, and only then, does it perhaps make sense to discuss other rules. John McCain could and should have made any proposals to his own leadership two years ago, when Mr. McConnell embarked on his racist scorched-earth campaign to destroy Barack Obama. Mr. McCain’s silence was deafening. Mr. McCain was supposed to be a “moderate”, and he did nothing at all to restrain the GOP lynch-mob.

We have watched the Senate be paralyzed for two long years by the thankfully-failed efforts of Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans — including John McCain — to destroy the Barack Obama presidency. John McCain and the rest of the GOP voted in lock-step on EVERY significant vote. They should now pay the price for their failed political assassination.

Millions of Democrats gave sweat, blood, tears, and money to re-elect Barack Obama, increase the Democratic lead, and put progressives like Elizabeth Warren in office. We did not do all this so that Harry Reid (or anybody else) can smile, mouth platitudes, and allow the political terrorists that held the Senate hostage for two years to retain their political assault weapons. We need to disarm them, NOW.

I invite this community to suggest and then act on ways to deliver this message, loud and clear, Harry Reid and the US Senate:

End the call-in filibuster RIGHT NOW!

The GOP has dedicated itself to what I call the “Pinocchio Principle” — “if you believe in something strongly enough, it will happen”. This delusion emerges from certain schools of religious thought (not all), and is the result of construing “faith” as something that opposes reason and observation.

We see the Pinocchio Principle at work in the steadfast and relentless GOP insistence that anthropogenic climate change is a “liberal” conspiracy (or worse). GOP stalwarts like Senator Inhofe apparently really BELIEVE that a vast conspiracy is fraudulently synthesizing the many aspects of climate change that surround us. I will resist the temptation to compare this to the strikingly similar Creationist belief system that asserts that the similarly compelling array of facts in support of evolution are the work of Satan.

The Pinocchio Principle is the best explanation I can think of for the continued GOP insistence on “austerity”, in the face of growing and compelling evidence that their dogma doesn’t work and in fact pessimizes an already difficult economic situation. Case in point is their continuing faith in “Supply Side economics”, the “Laffer Curve”, and the rest of the utterly failed and discredited GOP economic narrative. This “voodoo economics” (to quote one of the few times that George H. Bush was correct) is laughably fallacious — future historians will roll their eyes in disbelief that ANYBODY actually took it seriously.

The fundamental paradigm of the “Pinocchio Principle” is that when actions based upon a bizarre delusion fail to produce the desired results, the reason is that the practitioners didn’t “believe” fervently enough — and so efforts to make the delusion reality must be redoubled, over and over.

This belief system is, in my view, the common thread that joins the political terrorism of the “fiscal cliff” and debt ceiling attacks with the GOP passion for unrestricted assault weapon production and sales and the resulting episodes of domestic terrorism.

Today’s GOP has replaced reason and rationality with self-serving demagoguery, expressed as superstition and empty dogma that they mistakenly understand as “faith”.

We had a campaign where essentially NOBODY TALKED ABOUT the sad fact that fifty percent of Americans live one paycheck away from poverty, all while those at the very top continue to prosper. I get that Barack Obama and the Democrats had to do whatever it took to win, and they did that. The anemic recovery we are all slogging through is made MUCH worse by the dramatic contraction of federal, state, and local government employment. In fact, the private sector IS recovering and IS creating new jobs. The unemployment rate remains high largely because governments are laying off more workers than private industry can absorb.

Funding the extended unemployment benefits program is one of the most efficient (in terms of its effect on the economy) forms of stimulus available to the government. The GOP callously ignores the devastating impact of its termination — the pain is imposed on that 47% that the GOP has already written off in its war on workers.

We are now on the brink of doing real and permanent damage to millions of long-term unemployed workers. The loss of these benefits means that students will be forced to leave colleges, homes will be lost, neighborhood businesses will shut down. All because the GOP is so committed to its self-serving political dogma of increasing the wealth of the 1% whatever the consequences.

It’s time to ACT.

This was a big night for him. He is very involved politically (I wonder where he gets that from?), and I’ve watched him grow into the kind of idealistic pragmatist that I think offers great hope for our future. Two years ago, when he moved from his mother’s house to ours, he wanted nothing to do with the political process at all — he was convinced that the entire system was broken, that nothing he did could make a difference, and that even pursuing a college degree was “waste of time” because the future he saw was so bleak.

Today, thanks to a lot of hard work on his part, huge contributions from the excellent team at Somerville High School (they epitomize the best of urban public education), and maybe a little help from his step-mother and me, he is enthusiastic about his undergraduate program at UMass Boston. He is excited about political science, excited about philosophy, and best of all sees that he CAN make a difference. He traveled an hour through rush hour, waited in line for an hour and a half, and did all that after a long day of classes because he felt, passionately, the Elizabeth Warren MUST be our next senator.

He blushed a bit when the room erupted in applause as I took the photograph of his first vote. I am very proud of him.

1. The United States is woefully unprepared for natural disasters of this magnitude, and

2. Hurricane Sandy is just the first of what will be an increasingly frequent parade of natural catastrophes. It is already too late to stop the impact of what we’ve already done. The challenge now is to withstand the onslaughts that are coming.

Our parents and grandparents recognized the meaning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and jumped into action, united and energized, to meet the imminent threat.

Are we prepared to do the same?

December 7, 1941

September 11, 2001

October 29, 2012

Four days from now, we vote in a historic election. One party has been telling us for years that climate change is a “hoax”. That same party brought us the isolationists while war was brewing in Europe and Asia (FDR defeated isolationist Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940). The attack on Pearl Harbor ended isolationist sentiment in 1941.

Hurricane Sandy’s attack on the Eastern US should do the same today.

The Boston Globe reports in today’s hard-copy edition that Mr. Villamaino and his wife, Courtney Llewellyn, are each charged with nine felony counts as well as three lesser counts each.

In a bizarre twist, Mr. Villamaino and Ms. Llewelln apparently married in hopes of using spousal privilege to protect each other. According to the Globe piece:

Villamaino and Llewellyn married several weeks ago amid the investigation in an ­alleged attempt “to frustrate the investigation,” presumably to invoke spousal privilege in the event prosecutors tried to get one to testify against the other, [Hampden District Attorney Mark G.] Mastroianni said.

Mastroianni said witnesses allegedly saw Villamaino a couple of hours before his wedding searching online about how to secure an annulment or ­divorce.

Ah yes, another display of the profound commitment to the sanctity of voting and marriage displayed by the Massachusetts GOP.

Mr. Brown has blocked several efforts to provide additional Federal Unemployment Extensions. He has blocked multiple jobs bills. Last night, when Elizabeth Warren highlighted these votes against working men and women, he pivoted from unemployment to welfare (28:19-28:24):

“There was no one that lost any unemployment benefits. Listen, my mom was on welfare. I remember that it’s there as a safety net for people.

Later, he makes this same assertion and then goes on to associate unemployment compensation with food stamps.

Senator Brown, unemployment compensation IS NOT WELFARE.

WASHINGTON — Florida elections officials said Friday that at least 10 counties have identified suspicious and possibly fraudulent voter registration forms turned in by a firm working for the Republican Party of Florida, which has filed an election fraud complaint with the state Division of Elections against its one-time consultant.

The controversy in Florida — which began with possibly fraudulent forms that first cropped up in Palm Beach County — has engulfed the Republican National Committee, which admitted Thursday that it urged state parties in seven swing states to hire the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting.The RNC paid the company at least $3.1 million — routed through the state parties of Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia — to register voters and run get-out-the-vote operations. Wisconsin and Ohio had not yet paid the firm for get-out-the-vote operations it was contracted to do.

The RNC severed its ties to the firm Thursday after questions arose about the work Strategic Allied did in Palm Beach County, where election officials have turned over to prosecutors 106 voter registration forms submitted by one worker, some of which contained apparent forgeries and other problems.

Seems like a whole lot Republicans who were loudly outraged by the ACORN kerfuffle in 2008 are suddenly very quiet. Is this another case of IOKIYAR?

In any case, we are seeing what real voter fraud looks like. As has so often been the case, this real voter fraud is at the hands of the GOP.

Is the recession over? Is the unemployment problem in solved in Massachusetts? I don’t think so.

I’m all too aware that this is an election year, and that our elected representatives are therefore paralyzed. Nevertheless, is this kind of abrupt cut-off (during the holiday season, no less) really going to help the national and Massachusetts economy?

I mean, seriously guys, and I’m not making this up — more than one right-wing Protestant Preacher has interpreted hurricanes as divine speech (is this the next decision after “Citizens United”?).

So how about it? If Hurricane Isaac hits Tampa, will the GOP change its tune? If it misses, will the GOP claim it as divine endorsement?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Here’s the email:

Elizabeth Warren for Senate
____________________________________________

Tom,

I spend a lot of time talking about Scott Brown’s voting record — and Scott Brown doesn’t like it one bit.

Yesterday, a news reporter asked Scott Brown to respond to my statement that he supports the national Republican agenda. Scott Brown said — and I quote:

“I don’t need Professor Warren talking or speaking or commenting on my votes.”

Sorry, Scott. I am not going to stop talking. If you don’t want anyone to talk about your votes, you shouldn’t have voted that way.

Scott Brown voted against three jobs bills that would have supported 22,000 jobs in Massachusetts. I’m going to keep talking about that.

Scott Brown voted to protect tax breaks for oil companies, some of the most profitable companies on the planet, rather than investing in clean energy. I’m going to keep talking about that.

Scott Brown voted against the Buffett Rule, legislation that would make sure millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes. I’m going to keep talking about that.

Scott Brown voted against equal pay for women. I’m going to keep talking about that.

And Scott Brown voted for the Blunt amendment to limit women’s access to birth control and cancer screenings. I’m going to keep talking about that.

I’m not going to stop talking, and I hope you won’t either. Talk to your friends — call them, Facebook, tweet, send them a fax if you’re old fashioned. Talk to the person behind you at the grocery store, and talk to the person pumping gas next to you.

Let them know why this race is so important.

We can do a lot more than talk about Scott Brown’s voting record — we can hold him accountable for it on Election Day.

Thank you for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

P.S. There is a lot at stake for women in this election. Listen to our new radio ad about the dangerous Republican agenda for women:

I think we’re seeing the other side of the “likeable” Scott Brown in the Herald piece — “I don’t need Professor Warren talking or speaking or commenting on my votes.” Sounds like another example of the contempt Scott Brown has for women. It sounds to me as though our junior senator prefers his women to be silent and subservient.

The “facts of the case”, as reported in the above link, are the same related by the protesters this afternoon:

8 former workers are owed back wages. Work was preformed at Mumbai Chopstix, Cafe of India, Bukhara, and Diva Indian Bistro. These restaurants are part of the One World Cuisine restaurant group owned by Amrik S. Pabla. The workers were working more than 70 hour weeks and being paid under the minimum wage and without overtime pay. For several weeks the workers received no pay at all. They are asking One World Cuisine to pay them the wages that are owed. The workers are being represented by an attorney through Centro Presente. The workers are organizing a public campaign to pressure One World Cuisine to pay them the wages they are owed.

Sound familiar (as in a certain pizza company)? My oldest son and I joined the march for a time, and I am happy to see my representative walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

Denise Provost, by the way, has a primary opponent. She is a solid progressive who deserves re-election.

The district attorney in Hampden County is investigating whether a ­Republican candidate for state representative orchestrated an illegal scheme to cast absentee ballots on behalf of hundreds of voters in hope of winning a primary election.

State election officials were tipped off to the potential voter fraud when a suspiciously large number of residents of the Springfield suburb of East Longmeadow suddenly changed party registration from Democrat to independent, making them eligible to vote in the upcoming Republican primary.

When contacted, several of the voters said they had not changed party affiliations, raising concern that someone had switched their party in an attempt to cast fraudulent absentee ballots on their behalf.

Lest anyone fear that this is some sort of Democratic Party witch-hunt, the facts in the case seem reasonably clear (emphasis mine):

Angelides detected the possible fraud while gathering infor­mation from the town clerk’s office about Republicans who requested absentee ballots for the Sept. 6 primary. When campaign workers began calling the voters, they discovered that the residents had not requested absentee ballots and were not even Republicans.

The Angelides campaign workers had expected about 50 requests for Republican absentee ballots, but they found about 450 requests, according to Spencer H. Kimball, ­Angelides’s attorney. The absentee ballot requests were not scattered either, but were concentrated on certain streets and in certain neighborhoods. Also, many of the voters were age 60 or older.

Finally, in a stunning display of incompetence that seems to be the hallmark of everything the Massachusetts GOP attempts, the final tip-off was the identity of those requesting absentee (Republican) ballots:

“We recognized there may be a problem,” [Kimball] said since some of those listed as requesting Republican absentee ballots were “hard-core Democrats, includ­ing members of the Town Democratic Committee and a retired judge.”

At that point, Kimball contacted Secretary of State ­Galvin’s office. “Something was really wrong,” he said.

“Something was really wrong” — indeed. Something is really wrong with the entire Massachusetts GOP.

Sadly, this episode exemplifies the truth about Massachusetts voter fraud — and the GOP’s role in it.

Multiple sources report that the driver has a “lengthy” driving record:

According to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, her license is currently in non-renewable status for unpaid parking tickets, unpaid excise tax and an unpaid toll violation.

In 2010, she was involved in a crash in Roxbury and found to be at fault.

Her license was also suspended from November 2006 to March 2007 for failing to complete a safety course.

The MBTA confirmed Friday that she was operating a bus during that time period because she failed to report the suspension, as she was required to, to the MBTA .

I’m sorry, but this is simply absurd. I’m happy to hear that the MBTA began receiving “regular reports” from the Registry in 2009. Why was this driver allowed to continue endangering the public with this record? Her license is in “non-renewable status”? A traffic scofflaw is driving an MBTA bus? Surely it is not hard to get the Registry to report this information to the MBTA. The Boston Herald reports that “dozens of T (sic) bus drivers have been put out on the streets despite terrible roadway rap sheets”. From the same Herald piece:

T spokesman Joseph Pesaturo said officials are alerted only when there is a change in an employee’s license status, not when there is a single accident.

“No action was taken, nor warranted,” he said, referring to the 2010 crash. “One accident in an employee’s personal vehicle does not automatically trigger disciplinary measures.”

Say WHAT? These are allegedly professional drivers handling huge vehicles in tightly congested urban settings. When one of those drivers is involved in an accident in which that driver is more than 50% at fault, it most certainly DOES warrant “action” — that driver should not be behind the wheel of an MBTA bus.

And the Herald tells us there “Dozens” like this. Dozens? REALLY?

This is totally unacceptable. I suggest that we have every right to expect and demand excellence from MBTA bus drivers. In particular, we have every right to expect and demand zero tolerance for MBTA bus drivers with at-fault crashes (whether on or off the job), and zero tolerance for MBTA bus drivers who are traffic scofflaws. I’m not sure how we got here, and I’m not sure what has to change to correct this problem, but this is totally unacceptable.

Authorities in Oak Creek, WI belief that a ‘White Supremacist’ is behind ‘Domestic Terrorism’ that killed seven, including the shooter.

Last night, a Mosque was destroyed by arson, the second blaze this summer.

The GOP has cynically and shamelessly pandered to these vile prejudices, over and over. The mainstream media has been shamefully silent about this blatant hate.

Now we begin to see what happens when these dark spirits are summoned in our society.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I fear the worst is yet to come.

Given the explicit and prominent role this organization and its leadership (including Mr. Perry) have given to their extremely conservative Southern Baptist religious beliefs, is it unreasonable to ask whether perhaps the God they worship has spoken?

RIP, Don Perry.

It seems that the standard youtube embed html is now an iframe. That iframe is not supported by the wordpress code we use. The youtube videos used to provide an embed tag that worked fine, but I don’t see how to get that now.

Since the editors (and apparently some of us) are still able to embed videos (such as in this comment and this diary, the capability still exists. Can someone please post the steps for doing so?

Here’s an iframe embed in the thread-starter, to see if this part works differently from the comments.

This follows the iframe.

Interestingly, I notice that the iframe code is apparently being stripped out. I click “Edit Post” and paste the iframe HTML. It’s there when I click the “Update” button, but no embed appears on the published version. When I again click the “Edit Post” button, the iframe code is missing from the HTML source.

Green lies are no better than any other lies.

While I enjoy bashing the opposition as much as anybody, I must say that I share the sentiment expressed by others here that BMG seems to have gotten more negative than I’m really comfortable with.

Eight of the twelve front-page stories, as I write this, are bashing Scott Brown, Mitt Romney, or the RNC.

I know we’re in “silly season”, but seriously — can we perhaps focus a little more on what our team is doing that we like?

Just a thought.

As President Obama helps the world avoid a catastrophic collapse of the global economy, the Guardian reports that R. Glenn Hubbard — a senior adviser to the Romney campaign — did his best to sabotage the fragile progress being made by the President and European leaders. Mr. Hubbard offered a German-language diatribe in Germany’s leading business newspaper. From the Guardian piece:

In an op-ed in Handelsblatt, Germany’s leading business newspaper, R Glenn Hubbard, the dean of the Columbia Business School, said Obama’s strategy was “unwise” and revealed “ignorance of the causes of the crisis and of a growth trend in the future.”

It received a rebuke from White House officials who said airing the criticism in an overseas media outlet broke with political convention and undermined American foreign policy.

In the piece, Hubbard said it was a mistake for the US to encourage Germany to “stand up financially weak governments and banks in the eurozone”.

“Unfortunately, the advice of the US government regarding solutions to the crisis is misleading. For Europe and especially for Germany,” Hubbard wrote, according to a New York Times translation of the article from the Handelsblatt.

The photo, showing Mr. Hubbard in a meeting with the advisory board of George W. Bush, succinctly captures all I need to know about Mr. Hubbard — he, and the Romney campaign, now seek to impose their failed dogma on the world, relying on the same economic advisers that nearly destroyed the US economy in 2008.

The European nations know that the “austerity” measures advocated by this delusional dogma will destroy the world’s economy, just as similar measures destroyed the US economy of 1937 and the Japanese economy of the 1990s. The banking systems of Greece and Spain teeter on the edge of collapse.

None of this matters to the Romney campaign — they are so desperate to destroy the presidency of Barack Obama that they now attempt to throw the entire global economy under the bus rather than risk the political challenge presented by successful resolution of the European crisis. Just as in climate change, the GOP approach to the current economic crisis is to dive into delusions.

“Austerity” is not going rescue the EU, just as “austerity” is not going to help the US economy. To the contrary, anybody who understands history will understand that government support of the economy — in Europe and the US — is the key to restoring the sustainable prosperity we all seek.

The economic policies advocated by Mitt Romney would have destroyed GM. The economic policy implemented by Barack Obama saved it. The economic policies advocated by Mitt Romney will destroy the European banking systems and the EU. The economic policy encouraged by Barack Obama will save it. This is the bitter pill that Mitt Romney and his campaign cannot swallow.

This brazenly delusional and flagrantly political attack on President Obama — in a foreign language and in a leading foreign newspaper — in the midst of a delicate, fragile, and enormously important diplomatic crisis is despicable. Mr. Romney and all Americans should be ashamed and appalled.

VATICAN CITY — The Legion of Christ religious order, still reeling from revelations that its late founder was a pedophile, admitted Wednesday that it knew that its most famous priest had fathered a child years ago yet didn’t remove him from teaching morality to seminarians or speaking publicly about ethics.

In a statement, the Legion said it was sorry it hadn’t acted “earlier and more firmly” to remove the Rev. Thomas Williams from his very public ministry as a spokesman, author and high-profile television personality. It said it took responsibility for the lapse, but didn’t admit when Williams’ superiors knew of the existence of his child.

So the beat goes on. This story comes just days after the AP reported widespread abuse allegations against the same order (emphasis mine):

The investigations mark the first known Vatican action against Legion priests for alleged sexual assault following the scandal of the Legion’s founder, who was long held up as a model by the Vatican despite credible accusations — later proven — that he raped and molested his seminarians.

The Legion, which is now under Vatican receivership, has insisted that the crimes of its late founder, the Rev. Marciel Maciel, were his alone.

But the Vatican investigation of other Legion priests indicates that the same culture of secrecy that Maciel created within the order to cover his crimes enabled other priests to abuse children — just as abusive clergy of other religious orders and dioceses have done around the world.

As the trial against the now-disgraced John Edwards plays out, I wonder whether our right wing is willing to hold the Vatican to the same standards it applies to John Edwards (and Bill Clinton).

This Vatican still imposes today the same “culture of secrecy” that this cult was famous for. The pervasive hypocrisy is striking, even after being so evident for so many years. The evidence of institutional complicity in covering up and enabling abusive and predatory sexual behavior among priests is overwhelming. In this case, not just “priests” but the most influential leaders of this powerful Catholic cult.

I am appalled that this institution (explicitly as opposed to its adherents) has any significant influence on the governance of America. These scandals reveal the ugly truth of the institution that the GOP so eagerly panders to.

Is it possible to add a “Spam” button alongside the “Recommend”, “Tweet”, and “Like” buttons so that we have a one-click way of alerting the editors to the spam?

What if we encouraged this behavior by treating wealth the way we treat bass (the sport fish) — what if we created a culture that celebrated “catch and release” economics, so that after the scores were counted and the winners congratulated, the wealth was returned to the “reservoir” (perhaps with a set-aside for personal consumption)?

Bass tournaments long ago imposed catch-and-release rules on their participants, because that community realized that they were destroying the bass population in the waters they fished. Today, most of the men and women I know who are serious about fresh-water fishing practice catch and release (I like to fish, though I’m not nearly as serious as some). We do this because we love to fish, and we understand that this is the best way to ensure that we and our progeny can continue to enjoy our pastoral pastime.

Isn’t this an appealing metaphor for taxes? I don’t hate the wealthy, and I don’t see taxes as stealing from me or anybody else. Instead, I recognize that there is a limited amount of wealth in the country (and the world) and I think we need to find a sustainable way to maintain and expand it.

If we built a wealth-culture as committed to returning (through taxes) the wealth we harvest (after enjoying the game of collecting it) as bass fishermen (and fisherwomen) are to returning their catch at the end of the day, then I am convinced that all of us would live better lives — and the Bill Gates, Warren Buffetts, and Larry Ellisons of the world could still play and enjoy the game they are so accomplished at.

Full Disclosure: This appealing metaphor is the invention of my best friend, Chuck.

According to a reports published today, the Newt Gingrich campaign has borrowed a page from Massachusetts Republican Dan Webster and bounced a check — in this case, the filing fee required for Mr. Gingrich to appear on the Utah ballot.

Utah Elections Director Mark Thomas said a designated agent for the Gingrich campaign brought the filing papers and a check for $500 in March, but the state was notified by the bank that the check had bounced. He said the office has tried to contact the Gingrich campaign through the telephone number and email provided on the application, but has not received a response.

Recently, the state sent a certified letter to the campaign, stating that if the fee isn’t paid by April 20, Gingrich will be disqualified and will not be on the ballot.

I guess all this helps us to better understand why the GOP so readily blocks efforts to raise the debt ceiling — perhaps they assume the US government will write rubber checks just like they do.

“I wish they weren’t called the Bush tax cuts,” he said, chuckling, during a speech at the New York Historical Society. “If they were called someone else’s tax cuts, they’d be less likely to be raised.”
[snipped]
The tax breaks, implemented early on in Bush’s presidency in 2001 and 2003, were pegged by his administration and other Republicans as a mechanism for job creation. The logic is that upper-income taxpayers are also often employers and that funds that would otherwise become government tax revenue could be used to boost economic growth.

“If you raise taxes on the so-called rich, you’re really raising taxes on the job creators,” the former president said in his speech at the historical society event, which was sponsored by the Bush Institute. “And if the goal is private-sector growth, you’ve got to recognize that the best way to achieve that growth is to leave capital in the treasuries of the job creators.”

Indeed, but they are called the “Bush tax cuts”, and with very good reason — he and the GOP foisted them on America and, together with the two un-funded wars he and they began, initiated the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression.

I hope that Mr. Bush continues to speak out, that will surely help the American voters better understand who created this mess — and how little has changed in the dogma of the GOP. Mr. Bush will help President Obama show the American voters that the “cure” offered by this crowd is far worse than the disease it purports to “cure”.

With “friends” like George W. Bush, the GOP doesn’t need enemies.

Rick Santorum announced Tuesday that he is suspending his Republican presidential campaign after a weekend of “prayer and thought,” effectively ceding the GOP nomination to Mitt Romney.

I want to personally thank Mr. Santorum for contributing so generously to the wealth of anti-Romney material available to the Obama campaign. Of course, Mr. Santorum’s contribution pales in comparison to the treasure-trove of similar material generated by soon-to-be-ex-candidate Newt Gingrich.

I sincerely wish Rick Santorum a long and quiet post-political life.

Rest in peace, Mike Wallace

A key issue in the Trayvon Martin tragedy, and in the front-page Globe piece, is the racist assumptions too many Americans make when they see adolescent black males in hoodies. I appreciate the Globe’s effort to put that issue front-and-center. All the same, that racist association is fueled by decades of media stereotypes that greatly exaggerate the criminality of young black males. Short video clips of groups of black men in hoodies breaking store windows and overturning cars are a staple of evening news broadcasts targeted at the white families living in the suburbs.

The stereotype of the black male as someone who will “rape our women” is among the oldest and most pernicious of the many aspects of America’s racism. Like most stereotypes, it springs from a kernel of truth (men DO rape women, and some of those men are black) greatly exaggerated by the fear (and guilt) of white society and by a media engine that profits from pandering to that fear.

It therefore strikes me as incredibly insensitive editing (at best) to put a story of a 28 year old alleged rape, complete with photo and big headline, right beside the dominant head-shot of a young black man wearing a hoodie above the fold on this morning’s paper. This exemplifies the kind of media attention that reinforces the racism that killed Trayvon Martin.

I’ve pasted an image of the front-page. What are YOUR thoughts — racism, incompetent editing, or nothing at all?

Here’s the three choice bits of this very brief video:

“Of course you get rid of Obamacare (sic), that’s the easy one”

“Planned Parenthood — we’re going to get rid of that.”

“The subsidy for Amtrak — I would eliminate that.”

This, from the “electable” candidate who’s not crazy?

From the video in the piece (the embed code is mislabeled):
Anchor: “Take me back to when you first realized that the priest had an issue with you being a Lesbian”

Barbara Johnson: “The first moment that I realized that the priest had an issue with me being a Lesbian was when I was standing in front of him with my hand out to receive communion.”

From the piece:

Barbara Johnson knew last Saturday, the day of her mother’s funeral, would be difficult. But she and her lesbian partner of 20 years had no idea that the priest at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Md., would be a source of her grief.

Johnson, 51, of Washington, D.C, walked into the church, mourning the mom she described to msnbc.com as “a really cool woman; she was 85 going on 58.”

When Johnson and her partner arrived at the church — which her mom had attended, and her dad, too, before he died years prior — they were summoned by Rev. Marcel Guarnizo, a man they were meeting for the first time. He didn’t express his condolences, Johnson said, instead curtly getting down to business.
[snipped]
The day, already tense, was about to get significantly worse. Johnson said the priest denied her Communion at her own mother’s funeral, telling her he couldn’t give it to her because she was gay.

When it came time to hand out bread and wine, Guarnizo “issued a strong admonition that only Catholics in a state of grace can receive Communion,” Johnson told msnbc.com. “I went up. I was standing next to my mother’s casket and he covered the bowl, and said, ‘I cannot give you Communion because you are with a woman, and in the eyes of the church, that is a sin.’ I stood there with my mouth open in a state of shock for — I don’t know how long.”

But he wasn’t finished, Johnson said. Guarnizo had finally agreed to allow two eulogies, but she said family members told her that he proceeded to walk out of the service in the middle of Johnson’s dedication to her mother – something he didn’t do during her niece’s eulogy.

As the final insult, Johnson told msnbc.com, Guarnizo failed to attend her mother’s burial: “When the funeral home director appears, he says, ‘Father Marcel has taken ill. He says he has a migraine and is unable to accompany your mother’s remains to the cemetery.’ This was, for me and my family, his most egregious act.”
[snipped]

I invite your responses.

This morning, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a follow-up offering Edward DeMarco a chance to respond. His response?

Nothing immoral went on, Edward DeMarco says. The agency’s multibillion-dollar bets against homeowners being able to refinance were “ordinary business transactions.”

Saying he is “completely puzzled by the notion that there was something immoral that went on here,” the man at the top of the agency that regulates Freddie Mac has explained why he believes the taxpayer-owned mortgage company did nothing wrong when one of its arms, as NPR and ProPublica have reported, “placed multibillion-dollar bets against American homeowners being able to refinance to cheaper mortgages.”

A joint report from NPR and ProPublica earlier this week reveals outrageous and shocking (even to jaded cynics like me) behavior of Freddie Mac: the agency is simultaneously making it far more difficult for struggling homeowners to refinance high-interest mortgages, while profiting handsomely from hedge funds based on those mortgages.

From the NPR piece:

Simply put, “Freddie Mac prevented households from being able to take advantage of today’s mortgage rates — and then bet on it,” says Alan Boyce, a former bond trader who has been involved in efforts to push for more refinancing of home loans.
[snipped]
Plus, in 2010 and 2011, Freddie didn’t just hold a simple pile of loans. Instead, for hundreds of thousands of home loans, it used Wall Street alchemy to chop these loans up into complicated securities — slices of which were sold in financial markets.

This hypothetical example may help explain what happens:

1) Freddie Mac takes, say, $1 billion worth of home loans and packages them. With the help of a Wall Street banker, it can then slice off parts of the bundle to create different investment securities, some riskier than others. The slices could be set up so that, say, $900 million worth are relatively safe investments, based upon homeowners paying the principal on their mortgages.

2) But the one remaining slice, worth $100 million, is the riskiest part. Freddie retains that slice, known as an “inverse floater,” which receives all of the interest payments from the entire $1 billion worth of mortgages.

3) That riskiest investment pays out a lucrative stream of interest payments. But Freddie’s slice also has all the so-called “pre-payment risk” associated with that $1 billion worth of loans. So if lots of people “pre-pay” their old loans and refinance into new, cheaper ones, then Freddie Mac starts to lose money. If people can’t refinance, then Freddie wins because it continues to receive that flow of older, higher interest payments.

If the homeowner is unable to refinance, the Freddie Mac portfolio managers win, Simon says. “And if the homeowner can refinance, they lose.”

Oh, and by the way, the individual Freddie Mac managers who put this obscenity together received multimillion-dollar bonuses.

This should be a big story. It exemplifies the structural bias against the 99% that OccupyEverything has been highlighting.

The GOP now strives to lionize Steve Jobs, spawning another round of lies to prop up their failed dogma. The lie goes something like “Steve Jobs created more jobs than President Obama’s stimulus package” (the version told by Mitch Daniels) or “Apple should reaffirm for us that American innovation is alive and kicking…Naturally, President Obama has a plan: punish them.” (John Sununu, today’s Globe).

The GOP would like to cast Steve Jobs as a “job creator”. Being dead, the late Mr. Jobs is not in a position to rebut the castle of lies the GOP is attempting to construct on his barely-cold body (unless spinning in the grave counts). One awkward truth is that Steve Jobs and Apple was famously and passionately anti-political. Another is that when Steve Jobs did contribute, he gave to Democrats. He gave $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2000, and $26,700 to the DCCC in 2006 (IEEE Spectrum: In the Politics of Innovation, Steve Jobs Shows Less Is More). He appointed Al Gore as an Apple director, and yanked Apple out of the United States Chamber of Commerce in response to the flagrant denialism of that body.

The more profound truth about the “Steve Jobs as Job Creator” lie is that the overwhelming majority of the jobs he created were in China. Apple has created about 43,000 jobs in America. Apple has created about 700,000 jobs in China. That’s more than 16 to 1, and it exemplifies the downward spiral that the isolationist go-it-alone entrepreneur, so loved by the GOP, creates.

Paul Krugman, in yet another marvelous piece from last week, eloquently both paints the lie and spells out the superior alternative (emphasis mine):

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so furiously opposed to the single most successful policy initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.

The case for this bailout — which Mr. Daniels has denounced as “crony capitalism” — rested crucially on the notion that the survival of any one firm in the industry depended on the survival of the broader industry “ecology” created by the cluster of producers and suppliers in America’s industrial heartland. If G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they would probably have taken much of the supply chain with them — and Ford would have gone the same way.

Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t let that happen, and the unemployment rate in Michigan, which hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect, is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3 percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to apply the lessons of that success more broadly.

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

“Got his facts wrong” indeed — Mr. Krugman is too polite to call Mitch Daniels a liar. The GOP adds yet another lie to its already overweight baggage. If our political lie-detectors were as widespread as our airport metal detectors, the GOP would be landlocked and immobilized. The sheer audacity of these guys — their positive eagerness to stack one lie on another, apparently striving to reach the moon with dishonesty (is that the secret to Newt Gingrich’s moon fantasies?) — is breathtaking.

The cheesy tackiness of the GOP effort to ride the coattails of the legacy left by Steve Jobs is simply disgusting.

Our chatty-happy media personalities actively harm us with their bubbly upbeat descriptions of today’s “beautiful” weather (I apologize for not embedding the video, but I can’t find the embed code and don’t have time to code it from scratch.). Tim Kelley goes to some lengths to reassure us that it’s been warmer on this date in 1907 — presumably to make sure that none of us blames this on global warming.

Horsefeathers

The Arctic sea-ice coverage is collapsing. The seasonal changes that normally set up to create New England winter weather are missing. Even Mr. Kelley describes the high that has now stabilized off the East coast as a “Bermuda High”. A Bermuda High in the first week of January? That is a wake-up call, folks.

Contrary to what our right-wingers and mainstream media would have us believe, global climate change is happening faster and more extreme than the IPCC models have predicted. We see this in the 2011 patterns of the US southwest, we see this in the unexpected plumes of methane observed emerging from melting permafrost in northern Europe and Alaska, and we see this in the very unusual winter weather pattern we have been experiencing in North America and New Englad this year.

Is today’s warm weather directly caused by anthropogenic global warming? Nobody can say. Is today’s weather “beautiful”? Most emphatically “no”. I doubt that co-anchors could get away with talking on-air about how much they enjoy the lovely scent of the fresh smoke of a fine cigar. Why is it still ok for them to lie about climate change?

It is perhaps time to strongly encourage our mainstream media do a better job of communicating the real meaning of the tangible climate change happening all around us.

Update, 8-January-2012

In today’s Sunday Globe, we see another example of mainstream media coverage of the “unseasonable” weather that nearly avoids mention of climate change altogether.

The piece includes just this reference:

“I am giddy with delight that I have not picked up a shovel, or an ice scraper,” said Kathryn Kilroy, of Somerville. “But my Catholic upbringing also has me feeling guilty as thoughts of global warming sneak into my mind.”

I see. So realistic concerns about the relationship between unusual winters such as this and anthropogenic climate change are reduced to Catholic guilt. We are encouraged to “shed a tear for the sea turtles, count [our] blessings in snowlessness”

With mainstream media “reporting” like this, is it any wonder that our government is so paralyzed about climate change?

Let me be as clear as I can about what’s so wrong with this: it isn’t just that Rick Santorum is a racist and homophobic bigot, we already know that.

The larger problem is that he does this because it is working. He is now the leading not-Romney GOP candidate. His base LIKES this. The GOP is clearly branding itself as the party of hate. The mainstream media won’t attack this hate. Why won’t WE?

How far down this awful road do we let this go before we speak out?

First they came for the immigrants. Then they came for the women (Herman Cain). Then they came for the blacks. Yesterday they came for the gays.

Who’s next?

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

Just in case you have trouble believing he actually said this, here he is on video (start at 0:38 or so):

Never mind that the majority of recipients of these benefits are white. According to the above report, in Iowa 9% of food stamp recipients are black and 84% are white. That doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t fit the racist narrative of today’s GOP.

It gets better. Again according to the above story, candidate Santorum later lied to CNN:

On CNN Wednesday, Santorum said he reviewed the context in which he made his remarks and said, “I’m pretty confident that I didn’t say ‘black.’” The GOP contender said he “was starting to say one word, and I sort of came up with another word and moved on and it sounded like black.”

Watch and listen for yourself. He said “black”. He meant “black”. His “base” applauded and cheered his racist outburst.

Of course, the NAACP reacted immediately. Where is the voice of mainstream America? Where is the voice of THIS community? I’ve already commented on the explicit race-baiting of today’s GOP, and apparently missed the mark.

We have a crop of candidates appealing to “state’s rights”. We have an entire party attempting to block minorities from voting (voter ID is no different from poll taxes and literacy tests). We have seen our first non-white President attacked for his race (is there any other explanation for the birther lunacy?). We have seen racist attacks against Hispanics and Mexicans under the guise of “illegal immigration”. Now we have the newest not-Romney GOP candidate explicitly invoking yet another false and racist canard.

How much more explicitly racist does a candidate, campaign, political process and — yes — mainstream media have to be before we will acknowledge and name the racism? Are we ourselves afraid to rock the boat too much?

This community is visible, widely read, and widely read in high circles of government. Isn’t it time we use our influence to explicitly name and reject the flagrant racism that is animating today’s GOP?

The case is made rather well by a piece by Edward Wyckoff Williams published today and referencing a recent Reason Magazine piece. From the piece (I apologize for the lengthy quote, but it really is required reading):

Reason magazine explored the newsletters, and questioned if the racialized content would invalidate Paul’s candidacy. In the analysis, they reveal something far more sinister at work in the American political apparatus; namely, that race-baiting tactics have been used for power and profit since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and the White Redemption Movement of 1870 took hold.

Paul is a symptom of a greater metastasizing disease and the Republican Party has been skillful to hide the far-right, powerful elements in their ranks that fuel racial hatred, animus and divisive rhetoric, for the sole purpose of winning at the ballot box.

In the past few years, since Barack Obama was elected it has been easy for conservatives to run away from accusations that the Tea Party had a racial agenda, and that coded attacks on the President were simply a manifestation of social unrest tied to the present economic malaise.

A deeper look shows that not only has the GOP, like Ron Paul, benefited from the orchestrated civil divisiveness, but that it is a central component to their campaign strategies.

Much like the efforts to disenfranchise left-leaning minority voters, currently underway in State legislatures nationwide, another main GOP strategy has been to manipulate poor whites, stirring latent racist attitudes, and convincing them that Black and Brown people were the source of the nation’s problems.

A central tenet of Paul’s newsletters was promoting an image of uncivilized, urban blacks, who chose crime and welfare over hard work and education. Likewise, the newsletters fueled anti-immigrant sentiment by presenting the standard image of illegals stealing jobs, and using health care services paid for by the American taxpayer.

It is long past time we confront the ugly undercurrent of racism and bigotry that animates both the GOP/Tea Party and far too much of American culture. Sadly, as this piece points out, this nauseating hatred is immensely profitable (the Ron Paul newsletters did, after all, make money). It seems to me that we must all remind ourselves that politics is a lagging, rather than leading, indicator — these tactics are politically effective because they resonate with a very large segment of the American electorate.

Those of us who thought that racism and bigotry were eradicated with the apparent success of the civil rights movement need to wake up and smell the coffee.

How many members of the 1% depend on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac when they buy their gated mansions and luxury condos? The message of this robbing-peter-to-pay-paul gesture is primarily symbolic, and the symbolism is awful. A tax on the 1% (million-plus incomes)? Off the table. A tax on the 99% (hidden in mortgage fees)? Across-the-board approval.

Patrick Leahy and Bernard Sanders of Vermont voted “No”. John Kerry joined Scott Brown in voting “Yes”. This should tell us something.

Here are some ways we should encourage the 1% to pay their fair share:

- Eliminate the capital-gains tax advantage altogether — treat all income the same for tax purposes.
- Significantly increase the estate/gift tax rate for estates in excess of $10M.
- Impose a 70% marginal tax rate for incomes in excess of $250K/500K (individual/joint).

We Democrats should be advocating for these, while painting clear pictures of the benefits this increased revenue will provide for the 99%. My own top three? Health care, publicly-funded college education, and energy/transportation infrastructure.

How many more times will our clueless and incompetent “leaders” be shamed this way?

SUCK IT UP, DEMOCRATS, or go home.

Original Post
I am so tired of this.

No tax on millionaire incomes. No veto of pipeline attachment. No habeas corpus. Nothing but retreat, cave, and retreat again.

Barack Obama and the Democrats are weak and incompetent. They offer token resistance — stomping their feet like a toddler throwing a temper-tantrum — and then cave.

I really don’t know what is to become of America and the world. I really don’t.

What do I tell my disillusioned almost-18 year old son?

I’d like to at least raise the possibility that we will be subject to DoS attacks from the right-wing smear machine. Arranging for us to be the target of multiple spam posts is one obvious tactic, not that far removed from the antics of Eric Fehrnstrom that we’ve already seen. It might be worth doing a little nslookup hackery to just see whether any immediate connection exists among the various sources of our spam posts.

Kudos to the editors for clearing this morning’s batch. Perhaps we all might consider our options if BMG faces more concerted threats.

None — absolutely none — of the smears he directed at her are remotely relevant to the truth of what she says. He went from nauseating to absurd when he spoke of taking a lie detector test. Surely even Herman Cain knows how totally discredited polygraphs are today.

Today’s press conference, filled with one irrelevant verbal assault after another on Ms. Bailek, absolutely convinces me of the essential truth of the charges brought by these women. His decision to smear her and his attempt to publicly humiliate her is appallingly offensive.

If the mainstream media has any integrity whatsoever, they will pursue the truth of the factual claims made by Ms. Bailek. If Mr. Cain upgraded the room, if he bought the Italian dinner, if he rented the vehicle — all items that are surely in his expense account records, his charge account records, the call-sheets of the limo company, etc. — then his attempted smears against Ms. Bailek become even more starkly offensive.

This man is Guilty! Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!!

Adding to the pressure on Mr. Cain, a lawyer for the second woman called on the restaurant association to release her from a confidentiality agreement signed as part of her settlement, raising the prospect that she could publicly dispute Mr. Cain’s account of what happened. The lawyer said the confidentiality agreement had left her unable to respond to Mr. Cain’s denials of any inappropriate behavior toward the women.

“He’s basically saying: ‘I never harassed anyone. These claims have no merit,’ ” said the lawyer, Joel P. Bennett of Washington, who represented the woman in her initial agreement. “And I’m sure my client would have a comeback to that.”

Mr. Cain signed the same confidentiality clause that the accuser signed. Mr. Cain has widely and publicly disparaged the claims of the accuser, and has belatedly provided details about some of the alleged abuse. The accuser has, meanwhile, remained silent in compliance with the agreement.

I think Mr. Bennett, the lawyer for the accused, should sue Mr. Cain for violating the confidentiality clause he signed. He is harming the reputation of the accuser, and the agreement leaves her in a position where she cannot respond.

This would-be President can’t remember or can’t tell the truth about significant events in an organization he led (and nobody can tell me that a one year severance package for a sex-harassment settlement is not significant). Now, it seems, he also cannot abide by the terms of a contract he himself was a party to.

The fact that this incompetent liar is a major candidate for the GOP speaks volumes for the despicable condition of the GOP.

Here, finally, is some substance to support what those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear have known for awhile. From the CBO report:

For the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007 (see Summary Figure 1).

For nearly thirty years, the right wing and GOP have aggressively pursued government policies, legislation, and regulation to ensure that the rich get richer — literally strangling the rest of the economy in the process.

The squawking and bleating from Corporate America and the GOP about Elizabeth Warren and the Occupy Everything movement is so loud precisely because Ms. Warren and the Occupy Everything movement are so unerringly accurate in their target. This CBO report provides the substance to support the much-needed change that America so desperately needs.

At the moment, it’s essentially noise. It’s not a big deal, but when even a light-hearted comment spurs a thumbs-down, it persuades me that at least one visitor simply thumbs-down everything they read. Presumably the thumbs-up ratings are equally suspect.

This is aside from the fact that sometimes, I’m unable to click one or the other (I always use Firefox), and sometimes my single thumbs-up click adds “2″, rather than “1″, to the count. If that happened just once, I’d say somebody else gave a simultaneous thumbs up. However, when it starts, my “super approval” mode continues so that I apparently get twice the approval power of a mere mortal for the remainder of that session.

For the moment, it seems that the ratings abuse and bugs together hurt the site more than they help.

Just my thoughts … not a big deal.

From the piece:

Cain’s campaign manager and a number of aides have worked for Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, the advocacy group founded with support from billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which lobbies for lower taxes and less government regulation and spending. Cain credits a businessman who served on an AFP advisory board with helping devise his “9-9-9” plan to rewrite the nation’s tax code. And his years of speaking at AFP events have given the businessman and radio host a network of loyal grassroots fans.

Here’s another interesting tidbit. It would seem that Wisconsin was just a preview:

AFP tapped Cain as the public face of its “Prosperity Expansion Project,” and he traveled the country in 2005 and 2006 speaking to activists who were starting state-based AFP chapters from Wisconsin to Virginia. Through his AFP work he met Mark Block, a longtime Wisconsin Republican operative hired to lead that state’s AFP chapter in 2005 as he rebounded from an earlier campaign scandal that derailed his career.

Block and Cain sometimes traveled together as they built up AFP: Cain was the charismatic speaker preaching the ills of big government; Block was the operative helping with nuts and bolts.

[snipped]

Block is now Cain’s campaign manager. Other aides who had done AFP work were also brought on board.

The Koch brothers epitomize the corruption and corporate control of government, the media, and our culture that the Occupy Everything movement strives to defeat. Herman Cain is the latest cover boy purchased by the Koch brothers, joining the older model (Scott Brown).

Welcome to the 2011 model year of GOP America, brought to you by the Koch brothers.

I invite folks to watch her actual comments and come to your own conclusions about whether or not she was “kidding”. I think she’s dead serious. I think this garbage is completely consistent with her political history, and she is currently a leading contender for the GOP nomination.

Whether she admits it or not, she is striving to be America’s Ayatollah, imposing her bizarre fundamentalist Protestant religious beliefs on us and, by implication, the rest of the world. This epitomizes why some of us are extremely concerned about the influence of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity on politics and government.

The media was not shy about branding the Ayatollah Khomeini a religious tyrant. The media was not shy about making the far more restrained political statements of Jeremiah Wright a major issue during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Why is the media so reluctant to similarly brand Michele Bachmann as the religious fanatic she is?

By the way, am I the only one to notice the hilarious irony between her reference to America’s “morbid obesity diet” (whatever THAT means) — around 0:22 in the clip — and the morbidly obese audience members in the frame behind her as she offers her rant? Was this intentional?

Right now, that page opens with big open “comment” entry box. It shouldn’t.

I think that a more intuitive approach is to require the user to click on SOME reply link in order get a place to type at all. Place the top-level reply button at the bottom of the thread-starter, before the comments. Maybe put another copy at the end of the comments, but clearly separated from the comments.

I wonder if this is the way the old BMG worked?

Meanwhile, it is still true that if a user opens a properly-nested comment, enters text, and then hits “reload” (before submitting the comment), it will be bumped to the top-level after the reload. This is a bug in the page reload code.

The immigration status of Nicolas Guaman has nothing whatsoever to do with the awful crime that he apparently committed. NOTHING. He was allegedly drunk. He is accused of “vehicular homicide while under the influence, failure to stop for police, unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, and reckless conduct creating risk to a child.”

This sort of blatant pandering to already-rampant prejudice against immigrants makes a bad situation worse. As a thought-experiment, consider substituting some other ethnic, religious, or racial associations:

“Uppity negro charged in death of Milford Man”

“Catholic charged in death of Milford Man”

“Jew charged in death of Milford Man”

“Muslim changed in death of Milford Man”

I am appalled by this flagrant appeal to ignorant prejudice. Surely toxic pieces like this only make our many challenges more difficult. Martine Powers, Maria Sachhetti, and their editors should be ashamed of themselves.

Here is what LBJ said in March of 1968 (emphasis mine):

Our reward will come in the life of freedom, peace, and hope that our children will enjoy through ages ahead.

What we won when all of our people united just must not now be lost in suspicion, distrust, selfishness, and politics among any of our people.

Believing this as I do, I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year.

With America’s sons (sic) in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office–the Presidency of your country.

Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.

Barack Obama has demonstrated that he either will not or can not actually fight to advance the causes that I and we believe in. He has again caved. On each of the major issues that face us — health care, corporate tyranny and exploitation, human rights, and privacy — he has folded before even beginning the game.

I encourage my Representative, Mike Capuano, to vote against the proposed debt ceiling “compromise”. I encourage my party to find someone who will actually lead us.

I will not vote for Barack Obama for President in 2012.

The “Aligned Money and Mouth Bill” has two parts:

1. Have the CBO compile regularly (each year? each quarter?) a report that shows, at the congressional district level the net federal funds coming into or out of each district.

2. Impose legislation that specifies that if the representative of a district has voted against federal tax increases or in favor of federal spending in that district, then federal expenditures in that district are capped at whatever the district’s net contribution is.

3. Districts whose representatives vote in favor of the tax increases or against the federal spending in their district are exempted from this restriction.

Several sources (Here is an example) have noted that the “red” states, clamoring most loudly for destroying the federal government as we know it, also happen to be net recipients of federal spending. That’s right. The same states that squawk the loudest about the “out of control” deficit also receive more than they contribute. The “blue” states typically pay more in federal taxes than they receive in goods and services.

Perhaps if the voters who put these incompetent, ignorant clowns in office have to take their own “medicine” first, they might send more rational people to Congress.

Suppose, on the day when the ceiling is actually reached, President Obama addresses the nation and says that his oath to protect both the constitution and the best interests of the country demands that he “suspend” (i.e., ignore) the debt ceiling. What happens next?

After all, there is some question about the constitutionality of the debt ceiling provision.

Will banks stop honoring government checks? Will international payments be uncollectable? Who will enforce that?

I first want to address the process question, separately from the politics and the optics.

Does someone bring suit? Does congress demand an opinion from the Supreme Court? Who argues it? Who decides it? If I remember my civics correctly, responsibility for enforcing any order lies in the executive branch, which is headed by the President. So if the President, acting in his formal capacity, orders that payments continue, how would such payments be stopped and by whom?

Is this a way to the call the GOP’s bluff?

I think this is exactly the right thing to do. Continued pension payments to this convicted felon exemplify the culture of corruption in Massachusetts government that is so devastating to our collective ability to do the right thing (such as raising taxes and increasing needed state investments in infrastructure and education). Let’s not forget that taxpayers have already funded the defense of this criminal. Presumably, taxpayers will also foot the bill for his appeals. I note that his defense is the preposterous claim that he didn’t explicitly tie his support for Cognos to the secret payments he admits receiving — in essence, the “I stole it fair and square” argument. The arrogance of this man is staggering.

Let’s not forget that codefendant Richard Vitale, acquitted in this prosecution, still faces a June 30 trial on charges that he took $60,000 from ticket brokers in exchange for “influencing” Mr. DiMasi and others on scalping legislation. These are not boy scouts.

These criminals belong in jail. These criminals need to lose their pensions and return the money they stole. We need to demonstrate, loud and clear, that Massachusetts has zero tolerance for this kind of public corruption.

I understand that sh*t happens in the publishing business, I can accept that an online daily looks like this at 7:00a in the morning. Cross-browser compatibility was problem ten years ago. It should not be a problem today.

The Globe should NOT look like this at 7:00p in the evening.

While I appreciate the sentiment, this banner is seriously slowing down my access to the site (it appears to be at the top of every page).

I am still able to write a new diary, hence this message.

I know that David and the crew are working to fix whatever the problem is, I just wanted folks to know that my apparent silence doesn’t mean that I’m not paying rapt attention.

There is nary a mention of what FDR called “A Day of Infamy” on the front page of today’s Boston Globe, New York Times, or Washington Post.

Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it.

Why the deafening silence?

Commonplace storms like this should not cause these kinds of problems. Local government has failed, miserably, in its obligation to build and maintain public infrastructure.

Our media has failed to convey the actual impact of decades of reckless tax-cutting and greed-driven faux-populism. Voters support elected officials who lie about the real and immediate impacts of ill-considered tax cuts in no small part because the media is unable or unwilling to publish the facts about the impact of those cuts.

While Damsel-In-Distress Rescued By Heroic Firefighters stories make great Herald front pages, the truth is that local government is failing. Yesterday’s flooding exemplifies the consequences of substituting pure greed for public policy, for decades.

We must do better. We must raise, not lower, local government revenues.

Here’s the money quote:

BP’s chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told Sky News that Hayward is going to change his role in dealing with the spill and that the operation would be handed over to BP managing director Bob Dudley.

“It is clear Tony has made remarks that have upset people,” Svanberg told Sky News.

In my opinion, President Obama is giving us an object lesson in how an effective executive does his job — squawking from the normally-blue peanut gallery notwithstanding. Governor Patrick is doing an admirable job of stepping up to the plate and doing likewise.

Both President Obama and Governor Patrick are digging deep and showing their mojo in this important campaign season. If these two stay on their game, the evening of November 2, 2010 will be an enjoyable one for progressives.

• BP has agreed to a twenty billion dollar escrow, which is the beginning (not the end) of their exposure, and,
• BP has announced that it will stop paying dividends for three successive quarters

From the piece (emphasis mine):

BP Plc, seen as a rising default risk by credit investors, scrapped dividends and pledged asset sales to meet President Barack Obama’s demand for a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the U.S.’s worst oil spill.

BP’s Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg visited the White House today and agreed on payments over four years to finance an independent body that will settle claims resulting from a damaged oil well that’s spewing as much as 60,000 barrels of crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

and

The company said in a statement it will cancel the first- quarter dividend, already announced at 14 cents a share in April and due for payment June 21. Dividend payments for the second and third quarters also will be canceled, saving a total of $7.5 billion. The company will review the dividend policy in early 2011, Grote said.

I’d say this is a big win for President Obama.

The first-inning fireworks give Deval Patrick a dramatic first-inning lead, providing clear and substantive assistance to Massachusetts voters — especially working-class men and women and small business owners — struggling to contain skyrocketing health care costs. Former health insurance executive and leading GOP contender Charlie Baker is now in the unenviable position of defending these outrageous and justifiably unpopular premium increases as he struggles to launch his gubernatorial campaign against a resurgent and energized Deval Patrick campaign.

The auspicious opening to the 2010 campaign season comes on the heels of a bang-up finish to pre-season play, during which the Deval Patrick campaign built momentum through a winning streak of legislative, economic, and political victories.

We learned in a piece in this morning’s Globe that the Roman Catholic Church acted decisively and quickly to fully cooperate with secular authorities in investigating and prosecuting a criminal act by a high-ranking official (emphasis mine):

The former top financial officer of St. John’s Preparatory High School was charged yesterday with stealing more than $80,000 from the Catholic school, including about $45,000 to pay for two automobiles.

(snipped)

Dalphonse worked as the school’s chief financial officer for 19 years before resigning in October.

After Dalphonse’s departure, the school conducted an audit and contacted the Essex district attorney, St. John’s Headmaster Albert J. Shannon said in a statement.

(snipped)

“St. John’s Prep has cooperated fully with the DA’s office and will continue to do so as we remain focused on our educational mission and the daily life of the school,” Shannon said in the statement.

This perfectly appropriate handling of a venal crime stands in stark contrast to the treatment of priests who abuse children, highlighted by reports such as this published in yesterday’s New York Times (emphasis mine):

The German archdiocese led by the future Pope Benedict XVI ignored repeated warnings in the early 1980s by a psychiatrist treating a priest accused of sexually abusing boys that he should not be allowed to work with children, the psychiatrist said Thursday.

(snipped)

In 1980, after abuse complaints from parents in Essen that the priest did not deny, Archbishop Ratzinger approved a decision to move the priest to Munich for therapy.

Despite the psychiatrist’s warnings, Father Hullermann was allowed to return to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, interacting with children as well as adults. Less than five years later, he was accused of molesting other boys, and in 1986 he was convicted of sexual abuse in Bavaria.

The previously-secret 1962 “INSTRUCTION On the manner of proceeding in cases of the crime of solicitation” persuades me that the conspiracy to block these crimes from secular authorities is a formal policy that has been in place for nearly five decades.

I am not making any assertion about individual Catholics. In my view, this evidence does, however, clearly demonstrate that the institutional Roman Catholic Church is a dangerously corrupt and sick organization. It certainly strikes me as fitting precisely into the “criminal enterprise” language of federal RICO statutes.

Whether or not various officials can or cannot be prosecuted should not distract us from this clear evidence of who does and — more importantly who does not — matter to the institution of the Roman Catholic Church.

The flooding of the Muddy River — and the huge cost it threatens to impose — exemplifies the catastrophic impact of decades of short-sighted greed disguised as public policy.

The Muddy River floods because of the immense damage we have done to the watershed that surrounds it. We see the same impact on Route 1 in Topsfield, caused by the similar damage we’ve caused to the Ipswich River watershed.

Just how bad does it have to get before we learn just how costly these failed tax policies actually are?

Why are media outlets publicizing the rants of this psychotic? I find it appalling that his deranged ramblings are being discussed at all. Responsible news outlets don’t publish suicide notes. They don’t publish ransom notes.

The frighteningly explicit framing of this by Fox News and Scott Brown, discussed elsewhere here, is just one example of how the rightwing is advancing a terrorist agenda.

The tragedy in Austin has far more in common with the 2001 murder of 7 co-workers by Michael McDermott. I don’t recall any elected officials or commentators eliciting sympathy for his “anger”, did I miss that?

Sorry, folks, but there is a violent rightwing agenda. The Teabaggers are leading the way. Violent incidents against women’s health clinics continue. Violent incidents against contraceptive providers continue. Now, a delusional psychotic who flies an airplane into a public building (killing at least one innocent worker) is being framed as a hero.

We do not need a debate about the contents of his rantings. We should not begin to explain this as “taxpayer anger”, even a little bit.

There are terrorists among us. They come from the right, not the left, and they are being encouraged by Fox News. These extremists are thugs. The ugly passions of this mob are being fanned by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, and their ilk.

It’s time we start saying so.

Far more offensive than the annoying Netflix popunders, this was on top, rather than underneath. It seemed larger than the 1024×1024 size at which I normally keep my browser windows. I even think he was lying talking, his lips were moving (I don’t know because I keep the audio volume turned off for just such annoyances). He was doing some silly animated Clutch Cargo thing until I got the damned thing closed. I note that he also had an ad placement in the top right sidebar, unusual because my adblocker stops most of those.

Does Charlie Baker have any idea of just how strongly web users react against aggressive advertising like this? On what genre of sites does he spend most of his internet time? Does he really think that this is how to take advantage of the internet? Does he think he’s going to attract anybody with this? Who?

Or was this, instead, a dastardly prank pulled by a guerrilla go-team of highly advanced Democratic Party operatives?

I would sincerely like the Charlie Baker campaign to explain this offensive ad placement. I certainly hope it’s not the first of many.

Governor Deval Patrick proposed new limits yesterday on pension payouts for state employees, seeking to cast himself as a reformer as he heads into what is expected to be an intense reelection campaign.

I encourage Governor Patrick to build on this welcome step forward with a clear, loud, unambiguous and immediate response to the simultaneous hand-grenade exploding in Mayor Menino’s City Hall machine — City violates pension law a third time, panel finds:

The Menino administration approved a lucrative consulting job for a retired State Police detective who was already earning a sizable public pension, a move that a city watchdog agency says violated state law.

From the second piece:

The Finance Commission’s finding marks the third time in less than a year that the city has been reprimanded for violating the same pension law.

The latter piece provides a golden opportunity for Governor Patrick to demonstrate his commitment to reform. I strongly encourage him to seize it.

I wish I had taped it. It was an articulate, relatively brief, positive, and effective call.

I think the female voice at the end (telling me that it was paid for by the DNC and such) was Martha Coakley.

I know there’s a fabulous caption begging to be written for this, but I’m insufficiently caffeinated to find it. Help me out here, folks.

Congratulations and kudos to David for many jobs well-done.

The Senate has passed an $871 billion health care reform bill.

Senators voted 60-39 shortly after 7 a.m. to pass the bill, the centerpiece of President Obama’s domestic agenda. Every member of the Democratic caucus backed the measure; every Republican opposed it.

I certainly hope our Democratic representatives take to heart the level of “cooperation” they got from the GOP after gutting the bill and selling out a HUGE number of solidly blue supporters in a misguided attempt to address GOP “concerns.”

In any case, the train has left the station.

We should follow Howard Dean’s lead and kill the current health care reform legislation. I call on Senator Kerry and soon-to-be Senator Coakley to lead the charge towards killing the current monstrosity.

I will not support nor vote for ANY legislator that votes to enact this travesty.

A federal official says the Obama administration told Massachusetts officials not to use $9 million in federal stimulus money to build a pedestrian footbridge outside the home of the New England Patriots.

Last week, the state pulled stimulus funding for the project, saying it would not be ready for construction by a federal deadline at the end of February.

State Transportation Secretary Jeff Mullan on Monday said a regional Federal Highway Administration official raised concerns about using stimulus money for the project. The official cited news reports about team owner Robert Kraft and his wife recently making political donations to Gov. Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

This report, if true, certainly puts a different spin on our own Massachusetts “bridge to nowhere”.

Let’s see. Indictments against rampant and flagrant corruption in the legislature are brought by Federal officials, rather than our own AG’s office. Dangerously unsafe practices of the MBTA are called out by Federal officials in the NTSB, after our own administration couldn’t  find anything wrong. Now a questionable expenditure of $9M in Federal money is reported to be a Federal, rather than state, decision — in spite of earlier statements to the contrary by state officials.

A political hurricane is approaching, and its expected landfall is squarely on the Beacon Hill and City Hall political machine. I beseech you to think about the implications when you cast your vote tomorrow.

I’ve looked at the “comments” pages for sabutai, Christopher, Bean in the ‘Burbs, and myself. I have not seen any comments with more than one or two “zeros” — if a comment was removed because of the rating mechanism, I haven’t found it yet. Melora and kirth also report missing comments, I haven’t examined the “zero count” of any of those comments. If this removal was accidental it is, in my opinion, a significant problem. If it was intentional, it surely demands an explanation.

Bob, Charley, David — I respectfully request that you enlighten us as to what’s going on.

Brookline –

All four Democrats jostling to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat are serious, accomplished candidates who would bring different strengths to the job. But for Brookline voters, we think Rep. Mike Capuano offers the best combination of liberal ideals and gritty pragmatism – two qualities we feel are crucial to the issues that will face Massachusetts and the nation in the near future.

Conspicuously absent from the editorial is any mention of the other three candidates. I will leave to other pundits the question of whether this is an insult to Brookline resident Alan Khazei, a nod of appreciation to his Brookline neighbor Mike Dukakis (who made an unusual and high profile endorsement of Mike Capuano last Sunday), neither, or both.

I was thrilled to be able to give my children this chance to participate in “the real thing.” They were particularly excited that they were able to greet and shake hands with Mike Dukakis.

Speaking of my children, the long-haired young man in the plaid shirt with his back to the camera — center foreground —  is one of my sons. I expect clips from this will be capped and tagged throughout facebook by this time tomorrow. I’m glad to see that he’s already learned how to get himself into the shot.

Here’s what she said last week (from the story):

Coakley, in a lengthy interview last week, said she handled the case appropriately, pressing the best case possible given the specific contact described by the three young brothers. She also said she successfully negotiated specific terms of Geoghan’s pretrial probation – a routine way of expediting minor criminal cases – requiring Geoghan to undergo psychiatric testing and be barred from unsupervised contact with children for a year.

“None of the boys disclosed any touching that was basically an indecent assault and battery,&#8221 Coakley said. Coakley also said she did not believe she could have won a conviction in the case on anything more serious than the charge of making harassing telephone calls, a misdemeanor.

I contrast this response to that offered by David Clohessy, noted clergy sexual abuse specialist, quoted in the same story:

But a longtime advocate for victims and, separately, a noted clergy sexual abuse specialist both said that Coakley should have opted for a public court proceeding, even on a charge as minor as making harassing telephone calls, to warn parents of Geoghan’s presence and generate publicity that might have encouraged more victims to come forward.

“Charging Geoghan with something and exposing him publicly might well have brought forward victims, witnesses, whistle-blowers, and evidence that could have resulted in a conviction and a tougher sentence,” said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

Given Martha Coakley’s emphasis on children and family values, which direction is more senatorial — hers or Mr. Clohessy’s?

What does Martha Coakley’s answer communicate about her leadership on sensitive legal and moral issues — issues that, for many voters, transcend specific legal questions and strike a deeper chord?