Category Archive 'Massachusetts'
23 Sep 2011

Stanford Football Fans Respond to Elizabeth Warren’s “Nobody Got Rich On His Own”

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Liberals are burbling in delight over Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s full-throated expression of the left’s soak-the-rich version of the social contract.

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.”

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One of Glen Reynolds’ readers, who signs himself Fog City sent along his own rejoinder to Warren, originally posted in a discussion of her remarks in the Current Events section of a Stanford Football Fan forum:

“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”.

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Another Stanford fan signing himself neodymian60 remarked in disgust:

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(ING) 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.

28 Mar 2011

Fighting Poverty 15 Hours a Week

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Philip F. Laverriere Sr. in his office, ego wall behind him.

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.

28 Jul 2010

State Governments in Action

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The Massachusetts Legislature passed a bill intended to bypass the US Constitution and eliminate the function of the Electoral College in presidential elections.

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.

26 Jan 2010

Krauthammer on Obama and the Democrats

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Barack Obama told ABC News that he is determined to continue to try to pass the health care bill, even if it hurts him politically. “The one thing I’m clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one term president than a mediocre two term president.”

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

24 Jan 2010

Cradle of Liberty, Grave of Obamacare

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Minuteman memorial near the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts.

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.

23 Jan 2010

No Liberal Transformation After All

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Peggy Noonan:

[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.

22 Jan 2010

Weeping into their Cappucinos in Amherst

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The Boston Globe reports from Amherst:

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.

20 Jan 2010

The Bad News from Mass Reaches the Bunker

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One of history’s leading enthusiasts for socialized healthcare receives the bad news about Scott Brown’s capture of Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. Serious carpet-chewing ensues.

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

3:50 video

20 Jan 2010

Will They Change Course?

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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.”

20 Jan 2010

Democrats Have Lost the Debate

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David Harsanyi explains that nobody has deceived the American people. Voters simply recognize that the health care bill is not in their interest. It would cause most Americans to pay more for health care and get less. It would result in fewer innovations and rationed services, and the US cannot afford it.

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.

19 Jan 2010

Delicious

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Coakley appears destined to be buried in a landslide. Who could possibly have imagined that the public reaction in the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts would be so averse to Obamacare as to loosen the party of the left’s grip on the safest of all possible democrat senate seats?

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.

18 Jan 2010

Monday, January 18, 2010

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“Chemical Ali” sentenced to death again. They’re going to have to hang that guy several times.

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James Cameron endorses ecoterrorism.

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Martha Coakley losing in Massachusetts Senate race. Democrats blame George W. Bush.

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Aurochs images from Chauvet cave.

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.

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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.

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