The Newspaper.com:

Motorists issued a traffic ticket in Massachusetts will have to pay money to the state whether or not they committed the alleged crime. According to a state supreme court ruling handed down yesterday, fees are to be imposed even on those found completely innocent. The high court saw no injustice in collecting $70 from Ralph C. Sullivan after he successfully fought a $100 ticket for failure to stay within a marked lane.

Bay State drivers given speeding tickets and other moving violations have twenty days either to pay up or make a non-refundable $20 payment to appeal to a clerk-magistrate. After that, further challenge to a district court judge can be had for a non-refundable payment of $50. Sullivan argued that motorists were being forced to pay “fees” not assessed on other types of violations, including drug possession. He argued this was a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause, but the high court justices found this to be reasonable.

“We conclude that there is a rational basis for requiring those cited for a noncriminal motor vehicle infraction alone to pay a filing fee and not requiring a filing fee for those contesting other types of civil violations,” Justice Ralph D. Gants wrote for the court. “Where the legislature provides greater process that imposes greater demands on the resources of the District Court, it is rational for the legislature to impose filing fees, waivable where a litigant is indigent, to offset part of the additional cost of these judicial proceedings.”

The court insisted that allowing a hearing before a clerk-magistrate instead of an assistant clerk, as well as allowing a de novo hearing before a judge constituted benefits that justified the cost. Last year, the fees for the clerk-magistrate hearings generated $3,678,620 in revenue for the courts. Although Sullivan raised the issue of due process during oral argument, the court would not rule on the merits of that issue.

It’s easy to see why Elizabeth Warren is a viable candidate in that state.

Warren said:

I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” “Built a factory” is a summary for a lot of work. Put up equity, designed a business, took risk to buy land, get permits, pay property taxes and use taxes and permit fees. Then, bought a bunch of equipment and had it installed …and paid sales taxes. Hired some employees and paid them a bunch of money and paid payroll taxes on top of that. Bought a bunch of raw materials from companies that paid a bunch of salaries and a bunch of taxes. Building a factory is a huge private investment that pays the public a lot of taxes for the right to be built.

“But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.” Between fuel taxes, license fees, tolls and various taxes on transportation related activities, the roads budget is smaller than the total tax take.

you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; No, you did not educate them. You babysat them for 12 years. Then I hired them, taught them how to be responsible and show up for work, taught them how to communicate in clear sentences, taught them that there are rights and wrongs and (unlike with your schools) wrongs have consequences in the workplace. Then paid for extended education for my employees so they could continue to improve themselves and better add value to what we do around here.

“You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” Funny, my factory has 24/7 security guards because the last time it was broken into, the police did not even bother to take a report, they just said “call your insurance company”. As for fire? The closest fire department is 10 miles away. My insurance company requires that I have a full wet sprinkler system to qualify for insurance because there is no local fire protection.

“You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.” Well, that is not exactly true. When the AFL-CIO tried to unionize my workforce, they staged three days of noisy protests outside my factory. The police forces just stood around and watched as the protesters intimidated my workers, vandalized their cars and destroyed my property.

You say “we” like the government and society are the same. They aren’t. My company and my community and you politicians are not “we”.

I’ll weigh in because she could be my next Senator and the Democrats here are scrambling to unseat Scott Brown. Somehow she seems like the perfect insufferable replacement for the insufferable Ted Kennedy.

She has the big 3. Harvard. Lawyer. Academic. Check.

She is shrill, contentious, and condescending as only the elite can be.

While any idiot knows that there can be no market without roads and consumers, she insults everyone’s intelligence by having to explain that to them. And then insults the successful by making it seem as if they have betrayed everyone with their talents. ...

I just got a call from the Brown campaign and gave them $110.

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mendicant98:

You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

Um – the thing is – those who built the factory and employed the workers generated the revenue that allowed the ctizens to pay for the roads, police etc. It sure as hell wasn’t built by the poor.

She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Um – again. THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN DOING THAT. Hey if she questions that – just go to a town that revolved around a factory that went out of business and see how that town is faring. The factory – as it employs the citizens and pays its taxes etc (not to mention all its fees etc under the various regulations/licensing requirements) IS TAKING A HUNK OF THAT AND PAY IT FORWARD FOR THE NEXT KED WHO COMES ALONG.” Course if the factory shuts down – then that kid loses that opportunity and the town loses a whole lot of revenue.

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Rocky 17 vented:

Elizabeth the Harvard and Rutgers Prof, Head of TARP, lawyer, marxist, head of consumer affairs, candidate for US senate in Mass. friend of Obama, friend of Harry Reid…

If anyone on this board doubts that she is for the social contract that successful people need share their success with those who aren`t successful and have no cause for personal celebration or reward, that she intends that wealth redistribution is necessary and good, that she is not a marxist, you must be Palcal. There is no successful individual except those who have earned it on the backs of others and therefore owe the masses. There are no successful countries except those that earned it on the backs of other countries and therefore owe those countries.

Thus the apology tour at the initial stages of the Obama administration, the rage at successful people, the class warfare rhetoric. She and Obama are two peas in a pod, share the same values and cannot be called anything but Marxist redistributionists. To me, this is the antithetical behavior and value of what made the US exceptional and why the country is headed into the deep morass with policies that slowly and quickly drain the wealth of America over the world.

Gosh, it looks like some Stanford grads must have gone into business and become conservative.

85-Year-Old Philip F. Laverriere Sr. has been head of the city of Lawrence, Masachusetts’ non-profit anti-poverty agency since 1974. 37 years later, Lawrence still has poverty, but the Greater Lawrence Community Action Council, funded almost entirely by federal and state tax dollars, has grown into a $30 million-a-year operation with 310 employees overseeing an array of poverty programs including child care; immigration assistance; Head Start; low-income heating and weatherization; lead abatement; and even a youth baseball league. Over the years, Mr. Laverriere’s annual salary, allowances, and benefits have grown to $144,641.

The local Eagle-Tribune investigated between Jan. 28 and March 14 (as the result of a tip) and found Laverriere was working 15 hour weeks, visiting his office weekdays between 9 AM and 12 Noon, then retiring to spend the entire afternoon relaxing at his Elks Lodge.

Via Moonbattery.

Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington have already passed similar legislation as advocated by National Popular Vote Inc.

Can’t you just picture the inevitable denoument in which, a few years down the road, the liberal democrat wins the Electoral College despite the conservative Republican gaining a majority of the popular vote, whereupon there is some serious scrambling in Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, Washington and so on?
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With its budget in bad shape, the state of Washington casually gave away an attractively located 10-acre island it purchased for $211,000 nineteen years ago, despite the fact that the island could have been sold for for millions.

Charles Krauthammer responds that “Well, there is a third option he didn’t consider. He could be a mediocre one term president, and that’s what he been thus so far in his first year. And because mediocrity does not usually encourage the electorate to re-elect you that might account for being a one termer.”

Krauthammer describes the democrat response to their defeat in Massachusetts as “a marvel of obliviousness, of obtuseness, and of unbelievably condescending arrogance.”

3:04 video

Michael Goodwin thanks the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for change we can believe in.

We the people of the United States owe Scott Brown’s supporters a huge debt of gratitude. They didn’t merely elect a senator. They ripped the façade off the Obama presidency.

Just as Dorothy and Toto exposed the ordinary man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz,” the voters in Massachusetts revealed that, in this White House, there is no there there.

It’s all smoke and mirrors, bells and whistles, held together with glib talk, Chicago politics and an audacious sense of entitlement.

At the center is a young and talented celebrity whose worldview, we now know, is an incoherent jumble of poses and big-government instincts. His self-aggrandizing ambition exceeds his ability by so much that he is making a mess of everything he touches.

He never advances a practical idea. Every proposal overreaches and comes wrapped in ideology and a claim of moral superiority. He doesn’t listen to anybody who doesn’t agree with him.

After his first year on the job, America is sliding backwards, into grave danger at home and around the world. So much so that I now believe either of his rivals, Hillary Clinton or John McCain, would have made a better, more reliable and more trustworthy president.

They warned us he wasn’t ready.

Yes, we’re stuck with him, but we’re no longer stuck with his suffocating conformity. The second Boston Tea Party opened the door to new ideas and new people of both parties.

Obama’s reactions were predictable. More self-pity, blaming George W. Bush, and claiming that the voter revolt is due to ignorance about the health-care plan they hate.

Blah blah blah. Hasn’t he heard? The magic is gone.

Massachusetts changed everything. America’s spirit of independence has been emancipated and the cult of Obama-ism is finished.

With the Brown victory over Coakley and the mighty Massachusetts democrat party machine, Massachusetts voters proved that no democrat seat is safe, and the radical Congressional democrat majority is cowering like a beaten dog.

The public had decisively rejected socialized health care and the completion of the transformation of America into a European-style welfare state for the second time. Nationalized health care has become the kind of third rail for democrats that Social Security Reform is commonly asserted to be for Republicans. Every time they try touching it, they get killed.

The 2000 election, in which Al Gore was so narrowly defeated losing West Virginia and his home state of Tennessee clearly because of his support for Gun Control, seems to have finally persuaded the democrat party leadership that Gun Control is simply too costly to be actively pursued in contests outside the most urban blue states. Perhaps the likely impending loss of control of Congress for the second time following a second power grab at health care will persuade them to put aside that long-cherished democrat platform plank, too.

When you come right down to it, it seems to me that it is possible to argue that, on the national level, when push comes to shove, the fundamental goals that democrat party politics have long been directed toward, socialism, central economic planning, the welfare state, bureaucracy, disenfranchisement of the individual in favor of officially recognized interest groups and estates, complete domestic disarmament, are all fatally unpopular with a decisive majority of Americans. When it reaches the point that voters really take a personal interest, pretty much all of the democrat party’s fundamental goals are third rails.

[I]ndependent voters… in 2008 voted like Democrats and in 2010 voted like Republicans.

Is it a backlash? It seems cooler than that, a considered and considerable rejection that appears to be signaling a conservative resurgence based on issues and policies, most obviously opposition to increased government spending, fear of higher taxes, and rejection of the idea that expansion of government can or will solve our economic challenges.

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The Financial Times looks at the Obama Presidency and concludes: There will probably be no health care bill. Obama has nothing to talk about in the State of the Union speech he recently postponed. This will not be a transformational presidency, and the White House needs to change direction and heads need to roll, or he’ll be in worse trouble next month.

They filed in and out of coffeehouses, all but crying in their cappuccinos, barely touching their carrot cake muffins, still in shock that Scott Brown – a Republican! – had been elected to the US Senate in the state that pioneered universal health care, legalized same-sex marriage, and normally sends 12 Democrats to Congress.

In the days since the unthinkable happened, diehard Democrats have been forced to confront results that suggest Massachusetts votes much the way rest of the country does – blue on the edges with a big red swath in the middle. They have grappled with the possibility that the Commonwealth, until this week viewed by the much of the country as an outpost of extreme liberalism, may not be all that. And that has left them blue – in the other meaning of the word – over Martha Coakley’s defeat.

There is no better place to sense that mood than Amherst and Cambridge, two outposts of extreme liberalism in Massachusetts. They share a self-effacing nickname – “The People’s Republic.’’ They share (along with Provincetown) the distinction of being the most pro-Coakley communities, having handed her 84 percent of the vote. And they share the shock.

“I’m upset. I’m heartbroken. I just hate the idea that the Republicans have just won,’’ said Nick Seamon, owner of The Black Sheep, a bakery/bastion of liberalism on Main Street in Amherst. Yesterday, Seamon served up one of his best-selling Republican Party cookies (“because they are full of fruits and nuts’’), and summed up the jolt delivered by the vote.

“We tend to be a little insulated here. We don’t spend a lot of time in Central Massachusetts, or wherever they voted for whatever his name was,’’ Seamon said.

Across the Commonwealth, the Democrats’ dejection was no less palpable at the 1369 Coffee House in Inman Square.

“In Cambridge I’m surrounded by disappointed and upset people now so I’m not feeling that isolated,’’ Annabel Gill, shift manager at 1369, said Wednesday as she fashioned an elegant leaf design in the foam of a skim milk latte. “But it is a little unsettling to realize that more people in this state want to vote [Republican] than I would have suspected, so that does make me feel a little isolated.’’

This week, Coakley supporters in Cambridge gazed at the electoral aftermath beyond the Republic’s blue horizon and saw a political landscape they barely recognized.

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How liberal is Amherst? So liberal, reports the Telegraph, that the town has actually voted to welcome Guantanamo Detainees.

[The same Amherst is the first town] in the country to pass a resolution welcoming detainees from the prison on the US naval base on Cuba.

Amherst remains a liberal hot spot in a state that until the shock election of Republican Scott Brown to succeed Edward Kennedy in the Senate was regarded as reliably Democratic. ...

Amherst wants to welcome any former terror suspects who have been cleared for release into its general population of 34,874.

It has set its sights on two men in particular who are languishing in Guantánamo unable prevented from returning to their home countries by the likelihood of maltreatment.

Ravil Mingazov, a former ballet dancer in the Russian army, said he was persecuted by the authorities because of his conversion to Islam. He travelled to Afghanistan in 2001 before his arrest in Pakistan in early 2002.

Also handed over to the Americans in Pakistan was Ahmed Belbacha, a 40-year-old Algerian accountant. Though deemed not to be a threat by the Pentagon in 2005, he asked to stay in Guantánamo because he so feared torture by his country’s security services. His lawyer has said he “would love to move to Amherst”.

Send them all to Amherst.

Personally, I thought the superimposed subtitles worked beautifully with hilarious results.

3:50 video

The LA Times observes that the Massachusetts special election represented a shot by the voters fired directly across the democrat party’s bows. If they do not change direction rapidly, they are going to pay.

[E]ven as Massachusetts voters streamed to the polls to anoint Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s successor, Democratic leaders showed no signs of standing down.

“We’re right on course,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said after meeting with her leadership team. “We will have a healthcare reform bill, and it will be soon.”

For Democrats facing tough reelection fights in swing districts this November, however, the spectacle of their party losing in a liberal bastion has been chilling.

Even before Tuesday, party leaders had been under pressure to pivot toward other issues high on the agenda of an angry and impatient electorate: job creation and fiscal responsibility.

“It is really time now,” said Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), “for Democrats to shift their attention to issues that will enjoy broad public support.”

Most worrisome for the party is polling data that indicates Obama’s healthcare bill has helped turn independent voters—who fueled his presidential campaign to victory—into antagonists.

“If the Democrats can’t win in a state they carried by 26 points in 2008, then they have to ask themselves: Where in the world is it safe to be a Democrat running for federal office in 2010?” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster whose firm worked with the Brown campaign. “The answer is nowhere.”

Generally speaking, would you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?

Fifty-eight percent of those polled by The Washington Post recently claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services (and, yes, it is a terrific struggle not to place ironic quotations marks around the word services).

This is the highest number for the “smaller government” category since 2002. And a full year into President Barack Obama’s term, most polls, and state elections, tell us that the electorate is walking — maybe sprinting? — back from the progressive economic policies that now dominate Washington. ...

Democrats continue to persuade themselves that the party’s problem is flawed candidates or poorly communicated messages, as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs conceded this week — because, presumably, the idea of socializing medicine is too nuanced and intellectually rigorous for the average voter to digest.

Hardly. The predicament Democrats face is the opposite. Too many voters appreciate exactly what health care legislation entails.

This is why Congress conducts clandestine negotiations on legislation and trashes promises of transparency. This is why leading Democrats have embraced procedural tricks and senatorial bribery — and now the possibility of “reconciliation,” so they can adjust health care reform and pass it with a 51-vote majority. You’re gonna get it whether you want it or not.

That’s what happens when these Democrats lose a debate. According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 33 percent believe the health reform effort is a “good” idea, while 46 percent consider it a “bad” idea — with 55 percent disapproving of Obama on health care.

What’s most striking about this poll is that opposition to Obama’s plan has increased 20 percentage points since April — coinciding, not surprisingly, with the president’s big push to convince us that it’s needed. The more people learn, apparently, the less they like. ...

[W]e have one party controlling both houses of Congress — with historically impressive margins. We have an opposition political party Americans have lost confidence in. We have endured a frightening downturn that allowed the far left to advance a menu of stunning regulatory intrusions that would normally be non-starters.

Finally, we have a charismatic and articulate president who, armed with near-national landslide, was given the stage to make his pitch on health care reform.

If, with all that, the progressives could not convince voters that the central cause of their movement was necessary, then it is not a messaging problem, it is not a leadership problem, it is not a Republican problem, it is an idea problem — a terrible idea problem.

Andrew Sullivan is in tears.

I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That’s all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch. The uninsured will even probably vote Republican next time in protest at Obama’s failure! That’s how blind the rage is.

Ditto any attempt to grapple with climate change. In fact, any legislative moves with this Democratic party and this Republican party are close to hopeless. The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair.

No man’s life, property, or liberty is safe when the legislature is in session, John Adams remarked, and at this point in history, paralysis is devoutly to be wished, followed by euthanasia at the polls in 2010 and 2012 for incumbents.

Italians scientists propose breeding living cattle backwards to a genetic match with the extinct aurochs. Heck cattle descended from Herman Goering’s similar program are available, but they are intending to use Highland cattle and the Italian Maremma.
———————————————————
Frank Fleming, at PJM, reveals more Game Changing moments from 2008:

Barack Obama’s rumored drug use was a lot more recent than most people think, but he vowed to never do it again after he woke up one morning with Joe Biden as a running mate.

Read the whole thing.

The Left is getting seriously worried about what will happen on Tuesday in Massachsetts.

Josh Marshall writes:

If Scott Brown wins on Tuesday, you can bet he’ll arrive in DC the next morning waiting to be sworn in. And there’s just not much precedent for any real delay of swearing in the winner of a special election, as long as the election result is not in dispute. (Oddly, there haven’t been that many Senate special elections—as opposed to appointments until the end of a given senate. So we’re actually trying to figure out now what precedent would apply.) At that point, Health Care Reform will be dead unless the House agrees to pass the Senate bill verbatim—which I really wonder about, given how dug in the progressives in the House are. Barney Frank doesn’t seem to think it’ll happen.

At that point, how incredibly stupid is the dawdling over the last few weeks going to look? The work of a year, arguably the work of a few generations, let go needlessly over a single special election?

It’s really almost beyond comprehension.

Late Update: TPM Reader VL responds …

Not only that, but how cruel – not only for us here in MA but for the whole country – for it to be Kennedy’s seat itself that kills health care, the cause of his life.

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IPPC 2007: Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.

Himalayan Glaciers not vanishing. No science was ever behind IPCC report’s assertion that they were. How embarrassing! London Times.
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Lucianne describes last minute democrat health care desperation: Like trying to put an oyster into a slot machine, Nelson tries to give back his bribe. Associated news agency story.

Barack Obama stooped from the office of the presidency to takes sides in last week’s incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a prolific author and African American Studies professor at Harvard, wound up arrested for disorderly conduct.

Gates and a friend were observed by a neighbor trying to force open Gates’s own front door on a street in Cambridge near Harvard. Seeing two black men fiddling with a locked door (and apparently failing to recognize her eminent neighbor), that neighbor summoned the police.

Studying matters African American inevitably promotes hypersensitivity with respect to racial relations, and Mr. Gates predictably responded to the arrival of a police officer with indignation, asking if he was under suspicion “for being a black man in America.”

Gates accused the cop of being a racist, and proceeded to whip out a cell phone and attempt to pull strings with the chief of police. You have no idea who you’re messing with, the mighty Harvard faculty member arrogantly informed the policeman.

Despite all this, merely producing his Harvard ID was sufficient to persuade the officer to leave, but Gates was not content. Bent upon retaliation, he insisted that the cop identify himself, responded to a request to move the discussion outside the house with “yo mama,” and persisted in voicing indignant accusations and abuse.

Not completely surprisingly, in the end, Gates succeeded in getting himself arrested for disorderly conduct.

As this posting of less than a week ago shows, I am not myself inclined to defend exaggerated police sensitivity and amour propre in dealing with the public. In a possible life-or-death situation, that Michigan dispatcher should have taken into account the caller’s emotional distress and overlooked a little bad language.

But, in this case, it is only too clear that Skip Gates himself turned a minor and understandable misunderstanding on the part of a neighbor, where the police were in no way at fault, into his own private melodrama of racial martyrdom. He didn’t get arrested for being black. He got arrested for abusing and trying to intimidate a police officer who was just doing his job.

If Gates had spoken politely to that Cambridge cop and treated the incident with a little understanding, it would all have ended with a handshake and a smile. Gates preferred to manufacture a symbolic national incident. And our supposedly post-racial president can be relied upon to intervene in favor of Professor Gates.

The Boston Globe removed the police report it previously posted (for some reason); but, too bad! it was saved here.

Was Gates profiled? Sure, he was profiled… by his neighbor, who mysteriously could not even recognize him. But, face it, male minority members seen forcing open doors in affluent Cambridge neighborhoods really do fall more logically into the burglars-breaking-in conceptual category than the homeowner-lost-his-keys interpretation even to a not particularly racially prejudiced observer. Minorities really do commit more break ins, and minorities genuinely less frequently own expensive town houses. It is not unfair prejudice to operate prudently on the most probable assumptions.

If that neighbor had taken out her .44, and filled Professor Gates with lead on suspicion, I’d say she leapt to a conclusion. Calling to police to look into what was happening was not any sort of irrevocable act, and normal middle class people can encounter police officers in circumstances featuring minor misunderstandings without feeling victimized.

Stereotypes were obviously at play here, but the most active, hostile, and determinative images were those running furiously inside the head of Henry Louis Gates.

Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district’s monthly meeting Tuesday.

“Fools!” said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. “We must prepare today’s youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods—not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”

The controversial school board member reportedly interrupted a heated discussion about adding fresh fruit to school lunches in order to bring his motion to the table. With the aid of a flip chart, West laid out his six-point plan for increased madness, which included field trips to the medieval metaphysics department at Miskatonic University, instruction in the incantations of Yog-Sothoth, and a walkathon sponsored by local businesses to raise money for the freshman basketball program. “Our schools are orderly, sanitary places where students dwell in blissful ignorance of the chaos that awaits,” West said. “Should our facilities be repaired? No, they must be razed to the ground and rebuilt in the image of the Cyclopean dwellings of the Elder Gods, the very geometry of which will drive them to be possessed by visions of the realms beyond.”

West has served on the school board since 1997, when he defeated 89-year-old incumbent Doris Pesce by promising to enforce dress codes and refer repeat disciplinary cases to the three-lobed burning eye. He has run unopposed ever since.

“Charles sure likes to bang on that madness drum,” fellow school board member Danielle Kolker said. “I’m not totally sold on his plan to let gibbering, half-formed creatures dripping with ichor feed off the flesh and fear of our students. But he is always on time to help set up for our spaghetti suppers, and his bake sale goods are among the most popular.”

“I must admit, he’s very convincing,” Kolker added.

West’s previous failed proposals include requiring the high school band to perform the tuneless flute songs of the blind idiot god Azathoth and offering art students instruction in the carving of morbid and obscene fetishes from otherworldly media.

Several parents attending the meeting were not impressed by West’s outburst.

“Last month, he wanted us to change the high school’s motto from ‘Many Kinds of Excellence’ to ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’” PTA member Cathy Perry said. “I asked if it was Latin, and he said that it was the eldritch tongue of Shub- Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. I don’t know from eldritch tongues, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

“We already changed the name of the school from Abraham Lincoln High to Nyalrothotep Academy,” Perry added. “What more does he want?”

Immediately before the vote on his motion, which was defeated eight to one, West gave his final remarks, arguing that the children are our future and that it’s the school board’s obligation to make sure they are fully versed in the unspeakable horrors still to come.

Plymouth as it was in the 17th century

Native Wampanoag and Colonial English men and women living their lives, as if it were the 1620s. It is living off the land. It is cooking over the fire. It is managing conflict and navigating political relations in an uncertain time. See it, smell it, hear it and experience it here.

That experience is complete with 21st century political correctness doled out by professional “Native Americans,” the kind of people who leave suburban split levels, not wikiyups, get into automobiles, not onto ponies, and go out to work as administrators in non-profit organizations equipped with degrees from state universities, rather than hoeing corn.

The guy who used to mow my yard in Connecticut also had three hundred year old New England descent, but he didn’t make his living on the strength of it or parade grievances about the cruel Episcopalians whose remote ancestors made England disagreeable enough for his Puritan forbears to feel obliged to emigrate to the New England wilderness.

CNS News:

A nine-year-old girl was recently asked to remove her “Indian” costume before entering the Wampanoag Homesite of the Plimoth Plantation, a historical site that allows visitors to experience Plymouth, Mass., as it was in the 17th century.

The outdoor museum features a 1627 English village beside a Wampanoag home site. The purpose of the museum is to educate visitors (school-children and adults) about what happened between the Native Americans and the colonists, especially during the first Thanksgiving.

The nine-year-old was one of thousands who flock to the colonial museum during the Thanksgiving season. She dressed as an Indian and her friend dressed as a pilgrim to celebrate the occasion.

Linda Coombs, associate director of the Wampanoag Indigenous Program, asked the girl to remove her homemade beaded costume before visiting the site, reducing the child to tears and upsetting her mother, the Boston Globe reported on Nov. 24.

“Native people find it offensive when they see a non-native person dressed up and playing Indian. It’s perceived as us being made fun of,” Coombs told CNSNews.com.

Coombs said she understands it was not the girl’s intention to be offensive – that she was only trying to “honor the Indians.”

“I could see that she’d put a lot of effort into making this dress and that it meant something to her … I could see by taking this dress off, I was dashing this whole thing that was going on in her mind,” Coombs said.

So she gave her a necklace from the gift shop in exchange.

“I wanted to acknowledge that she was giving up something that meant something to her and that I could appreciate everything she was feeling,” said Coombs. “Typically, in our culture, you give something away to show you appreciate what someone else has given up. And I wanted to mark that moment with her.”

Coombs said good intentions do not matter because she and the other Native staff members perceive the costumes as mockery before the wearer has a chance to explain his or her intent.

“Costumes are offensive because of what has happened in history – the Hollywood pseudo Indians, the Italian actors playing Indians, the crappy dress they put them in, the Halloween costumes. When other people dress up as Native people it’s offensive, period,” Coombs said.

She compared people wearing Native American costumes to white entertainers who put on blackface in old minstrel shows.

Jerome Tuccile reports how the arcane complexities of state firearm regulations can be selectively enforced by local officials to punish a critic.

Prolific writer Peter Manso, author of, among other books, biographies of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando, has been indicted on a dozen firearms charges by a Massachusetts grand jury and faces years in prison.

Did he brandish a gun in public? Threaten a neighbor with a drive-by shooting?

No, the guns were all stored, quite securely, in his locked and alarmed home. In fact, police discovered the weapons only when they responded to a burglar alarm while the writer was away. Either the guns were in plain view—evidence that Manso expected no legal trouble for their possession—or else, as Manso’s attorney alleges, “Truro police searched Manso’s house illegally while responding to the alarm.” ...

The main problem seems to be that Manso’s Firearms Identification Card expired after the passage of new legislation in 1998—previously, FIDs lasted a lifetime; now they expire every six years. The new law has caused endless problems in the Bay State, since authorities have not been very effective about informing gun owners of the change. ...

Manso claims that he’s been maliciously targeted by the police because of his controversial work on a new book that casts a skeptical look at the work of local authorities in investigating the murder of a writer named Christa Worthington.

Boston Globe

Once they discover that she is Dr. Kate, the supplicants line up to approach at dinner parties and ballet recitals. Surely, they suggest to Dr. Katherine J. Atkinson, a family physician here, she might find a way to move them up her lengthy waiting list for new patients.

Those fortunate enough to make it soon learn they face another long wait: Dr. Atkinson’s next opening for a physical is not until early May — of 2009.

In pockets of the United States, rural and urban, a confluence of market and medical forces has been widening the gap between the supply of primary care physicians and the demand for their services. Modest pay, medical school debt, an aging population and the prevalence of chronic disease have each played a role.

Now in Massachusetts, in an unintended consequence of universal coverage, the imbalance is being exacerbated by the state’s new law requiring residents to have health insurance.

Since last year, when the landmark law took effect, about 340,000 of Massachusetts’ estimated 600,000 uninsured have gained coverage. Many are now searching for doctors and scheduling appointments for long-deferred care.

Here in western Massachusetts, Dr. Atkinson’s bustling 3,000-patient practice, which was closed to new patients for several years, has taken on 50 newcomers since she hired a part-time nurse practitioner in November. About a third were newly insured, Dr. Atkinson said. Just north of here in Athol, the doctors at North Quabbin Family Physicians are now seeing four to six new patients a day, up from one or two a year ago.

Dr. Patricia A. Sereno, state president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said an influx of the newly insured to her practice in Malden, just north of Boston, had stretched her daily caseload to as many as 22 to 25 patients, from 18 to 20 a year ago. To fit them in, Dr. Sereno limits the number of 45-minute physicals she schedules each day, thereby doubling the wait for an exam to three months.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the government to force those rich investment bankers and hedge fund managers to pay for your health care? Unfortunately, as the late Ayn Rand pointed out, that inevitably means then that you have to pay for health care for every unemployed wino and heroin addict yourself, and you get to stand behind them in line the next time you’re sick.

AP:

When more than a dozen lambs and sheep were slaughtered on a Shelburne farm last fall, wildlife officials suspected either a wolf that had escaped from captivity or a rogue mutt on a hungry rampage.

But after the culprit animal was killed and examined, they found themselves with a bigger mystery: How did a wild eastern gray wolf (Canis lupus), an endangered species absent from the state for more than a century, find its way to western Massachusetts?

Thomas J. Healy, head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Northeast regional office, said Tuesday recent DNA tests at the agency’s Oregon labs confirmed it is the first gray wolf found in New England since a 1993 case in upstate Maine.

The discovery of the 85-pound male wolf may help solidify experts’ theories that the endangered species has been migrating south from Canada and repopulating rural parts of New England.

This wolf, though, was found farther south than any other reported spottings, and nothing indicates it had escaped or been set free by someone keeping it as a pet, authorities said. ...

According to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, the wild gray wolf was considered extinct in Massachusetts by about 1840. One was recorded in Berkshire County in 1918, but was believed to have escaped from domestic captivity.

Boston Globe

But one of his neighbors (who practices Wicca) is offended, and considers his display a hate crime.

WHIOTV video

A single Northern Spring Salamander spotted across the road from the site of Jake Halpern’s family’s intended vacation retreat in 1988 resulted in a building ban twelve years later, two years of negotiations with the state, a compromise involving the construction of two bridges, one 76 feet (23.16 meters) long.

Then, Massachusetts took the Spring Salamander off its Endangered Species list.

Reviewing Jon Keller’s The Bluest State in the Wall Street Journal, Guy Darst shares some amusing quotations on the endemic political pathologies of the Bay State.

Massachusetts does not suffer alone from its notorious affection for liberalism, it is the incubator for “Massachusetts viruses” that infect the national Democratic Party. The viruses come in many forms: “addiction to tax revenues and a raging edifice complex couched in disrespect to wage earners; phony identity politics without real results for women and minorities; reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self-serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism.” ...

Edifice complex? The state spent almost $15 billion building a highway tunnel under the city of Boston only to discover hundreds of leaks. The genius “Big Dig” builders used what might as well have been library paste to anchor the ceiling of an approach tunnel; four concrete panels weighing three tons each fell last summer, killing a female motorist.

Featherbedding? Back when the tunnel project was expected to cost half as much, a third of the costs were earmarked for “mitigation” endeavors, essentially payoffs intended to pacify unhappy neighborhoods and other malcontents demanding some reward for not opposing the project.

Reflexive anti-Americanism? Last year, FBI agents scrambling to track down what appeared to be a terrorist threat against Brandeis University were denied access to computer terminals at the public library in Newton, a Boston suburb. The librarians demanded to see a warrant; the urgent investigation was delayed for nine hours while one was obtained.

Obnoxious political correctness? The school superintendent in Amherst put the kibosh on “West Side Story” as the annual high-school senior musical after a handful of complaints claiming that the work was racist in its portrayal of Puerto Ricans. (In fact, this modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet story is the most beautiful anti-racism work in American musical theater.) “Political correctness,” writes Mr. Keller, “is the signature cultural statement of the ruling elites, undermining their moral authority and driving a wedge between them and the working class far more effectively than any right-wing demagogue could hope for.”

Three men who dug up a young woman’s corpse to have sex with it after seeing her obituary photo cannot be charged with attempted sexual assault because Wisconsin has no law against necrophilia, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

A judge was correct to dismiss the charges against twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radke, all 21, because lawmakers never intended to criminalize sex with a corpse, the District 4 Court of Appeals said in a 3-0 ruling.

The three men went to a cemetery in Cassville in southwestern Wisconsin on Sept. 2 to remove the body of Laura Tennessen, 20, who had been killed the week before in a motorcycle crash.

The men used shovels to reach her grave. They abandoned their plan and were eventually arrested after a vehicle drove into the cemetery and reported suspicious behavior, authorities said.

They said the men had seen an obituary of Tennessen with her photo and wanted to dig up her body to have sexual intercourse. ...

The men were charged with attempted third-degree sexual assault and misdemeanor attempted theft charges. But Grant County Circuit Judge George Curry dismissed the sexual assault charges in September, saying no Wisconsin law addressed necrophilia. Prosecutors appealed his ruling.

But there remain some limits to tolerance in Massachusetts.

You hear a lot of talk about “democracy” from democrats, and about “voting,” until the time comes to deliver the goods to one of their pet constituencies, then so much for democracy, so much for voting.

AP

The Boston Globe reports that the discovery in its attic of a German machine-gun captured in the course of one of the most famous American battlefield feats of valor in WWI has delivered the smalltown library of Nahant, Massachusetts into the clutches of the BATF.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 required fully-automatic weapons (even war trophies) to be federally licensed.

Sergeant Alvin York’s against-all-odds capture of a heavily fortified German machine gun nest in the Argonne Forest of France 89 years ago made York an American legend.

With seven other American infantrymen, he took 132 German prisoners and silenced German machine guns that had slaughtered Allied troops. His actions earned the humble Tennessee farmer an iconic status alongside Daniel Boone and a title declaring him the greatest American hero of World War I. He was held up as the very embodiment of humility and courage.

Which is why officials at Nahant’s public library were thrilled four years ago to discover what they say is one of the captured German machine guns in the library attic.

“I tripped over the gun one day, not knowing what it was,” said Daniel deStefano, the library’s director. “I picked up what I thought was a pipe. It was the barrel of the gun.”

Library officials say they researched markings on the gun and searched local newspaper archives and town documents for answers about the weapon’s origin, determining that the gun had been given to the town in 1918 by an Army clerk, Nahant native Mayland Lewis.

According to the research, Lewis had plucked the weapon from a pile given up by surrendering Germans and shipped it home. Briefly prized as a souvenir of the war, it was paraded through the town on Armistice Day in 1919 by Boy Scouts who towed it in a red wagon. But over the years it faded from public view.

Its rediscovery stoked dreams of a big windfall for the library, where officials had been pondering ways to finance an expansion of the cramped facility and an upgrade of an antiquated cataloging system. Library officials said they contacted several auctioneers in New England who estimated the weapon’s value at $100,000 and perhaps several times more than that.

But the dreams didn’t last long. Library officials soon learned that the gun is illegal and that they can do very little with it.

Federal gun laws prohibit possession or sale of automatic guns unless they are registered with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. In the library attic for years, the German machine gun was never registered. The library isn’t allowed to register the gun now because federal law prohibits new registrations on automatic weapons, except in rare circumstances.

Since it is illegal for the library even to have the gun, Nahant police took it and stored it under lock and key in an evidence locker, forestalling seizure by the ATF.

“We cannot hold onto this weapon,” deStefano said. “If we kept it on the premises, they were going to come and get it, and they were going to destroy it. This is a piece of history. We’re kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.”

The town has appealed to the ATF for permission to sell the gun, but so far, bureau officials have rejected the pleas.

A spokesman for the ATF said yesterday that it would be possible for the Nahant police to register the gun and take responsibility for it, which would prevent it from being destroyed. They could also possibly transfer it to another public agency, but it’s unlikely that it can be sold on the market , according to Jim McNally, a spokesman in Boston for the ATF .

He said the agency—at the request of US Representative John F. Tierney, a Salem Democrat—is researching options that Nahant might be allowed under the law, such as transferring the gun to a private museum.

“There are pretty clear-cut laws when it comes to automatic weapons,” McNally said yesterday. “This is a unique weapon, and it would be sad to see it destroyed. Whether it can raise money for what they’re looking for is another matter.”

In an effort last fall to get special permission to register the gun, town officials approached Tierney and Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry for legislation that would grant the town an exception to the restrictions. Neither Kerry nor Kennedy responded.

Tierney issued a statement yesterday calling the machine gun a “remarkable object” and said his office is engaged in discussions with the ATF.

The library’s machine gun discovery was first reported Monday by The Daily Item in Lynn.

Richard Hallion, a military historian who has studied Hiram Maxim, a Maine native who built the first effective machine gun, said he knew of no other gun from the York battle. He believes that numerous museums might be interested in preserving this one.

But Chris Berg, who owns a company that specializes in historic military weapons, said that the library’s gun is worth little because it is not registered.

“In all honesty,” he said, “it’s only worth $500.” He said if it were registered and legal to sell, he would pay at least $50,000.

Who really wants to save a U.S. House seat for Massachusetts? You gotta be kidding. The best thing that could happen for America would be for the commonwealth to shed several districts, and it’s a damn shame we can’t cede one of our two Senate seats as well.

But if the hacks truly want to inflate the state’s plummeting population by rounding up thousands of illegal aliens, it shouldn’t be difficult. First place to check is the hospital emergency rooms. They’re the ones with translators, and a lot of them will be wearing neck braces from the phony auto accidents they’ve staged. But if this harebrained scheme to celebrate diversity doesn’t work, which Mass. congressman will lose out in this low-stakes game of musical chairs? Come 2011, redistricting will be in the hands of the Legislature, where nothing is on the level, everything is a deal and no deal is too small. Let’s work our way east from the New York state line. Probably No. 1 on the 2011 Hit Parade would be Rep. John Olver of Amherst. He’s old, an unrepentant Bulger hack, and I’m not saying Olver is slow, but he’s one of the few human beings in the at-risk category for contracting Dutch elm disease. Next is Richie Neal of Springfield, a former mayor. He can make a claim few other Hampden County pols can: He has never been indicted. Not once. Moving east, we find Jim McGovern, D-Havana. This guy is so far to the left he makes Barney Frank look reasonable. Talk about your impeccable moonbat credentials – he was the first prominent hack to endorse Deval Patrick, but only because Fidel was too sick to make the run. With a Worcester County base of close to 300,000 people, he’s as entrenched as the memory of Che Guevara. Now that the Democrats control the House again, Barney Frank is going nowhere. As a committee chairman, Dick Armey’s favorite Bay State rep hasn’t had this much fun since he responded to Hot Bottoms XXX-rated personal ad. In the Fifth District, Marty “Midas” Meehan has $5 million and a solid base in Lowell. Plus, his district bumps up against a neighboring state (New Hampshire), which is always a good thing in redistricting, because it means there’s only so much gerrymandering that can be done. Marty’s not terribly popular on Beacon Hill right now, but you can buy a lot of friends with 5 million dead presidents. Next door in Essex County, John Tierney won’t make waves. He also won’t make the All-Star team. Like Midas Meehan, this empty suit would have liked to run for the Senate, but with John Kerry hovering at 5 percent in New Hampshire, that ain’t in the cards. Which brings us to the Dean, Ed Markey of Malden. After 30-plus years in Congress, most of his constituents couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, nor would they want to. Fast Eddie has outlived his district, and now it makes no sense whatsoever. Framingham? Still, Markey always survives redistricting. When it comes to the legislature, he knows how to kiss butt and spread campaign loot around. No one knows who’ll be calling the shots at the State House in 2011, but it’s a sure bet kissing butt and spreading loot will still work very well indeed

Mike Capuano from Somerville is the guy who should have Markey’s heavily Italian, eastern Middlesex enclave. Instead he represents a Cambridge-Boston district that skews black and gay, neither of which Capuano is. But he’s tight with Speaker Pelosi, so he’s safe.

Steve Lynch is from South Boston, and his district is the answer to the question, Where did Southie go? He’s safe, but Bill Delahunt might have a problem down the road. Technically he’s from Quincy but that’s Lynch-land. Rep. Dilettante’s real base is Venezuela. But he’ll be 70, and by then may be ready to cash out his various public pensions and succeed Bob Dole as a spokesman for Viagra. So what do you call getting rid of one of these dolts? A good start.