The Joke's On US

Given the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of representatives, yesterday's 345 to 75 vote for cutting off all federal funding for ACORN was an eye-opener as a large majority finally recognized that it was time to throw this gang under the bus. EaBo Clipper, over at Red Mass Group, has an interesting POST which highlights the fact that eight of the ten members of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation voted against measure. Talk about drinking the Kool Aid?, the ACORN eight must have a Kool Aid IV. But to those of us in the Massachusetts 10th, the significant news was our Congressman Bill Delahunt who voted to keep the federal money flowing to those wonderful rascals at ACORN!

Some might say that at least he showed up, unlike Barney Frank, that tower of Jello, who managed to be AWOL for the vote in spite of having been present for a vote only minutes before. As a small blessing, we should also be glad that Bill wasn't in Caracas with his bud, Hugo Chavez, who seems to be doing his best to join the Iran-lead push to creating another atomic weapon coalition.

Meanwhile, back at health care debate, many of us in the 10th are wondering if we somehow missed Bill's Town Meeting to collect input from the constituency regarding this mother of all social programs. Not to worry, no such meeting was held. So just jot your thoughts down in an email and send it off to:

William.Delahunt@mail.house.gov

Unless the email servers are still in meltdown, Bill will surely appreciate your input.

And don't worry if you missed the August 22nd demonstration at Delahunt's Hyannis office. CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO. Apparently, Bill missed it too.

So during this, our summer of discontent, we can jokingly ask: "where is our Congressman?" But the punchline is not quite as pleasant. He appears to be running unopposed for re-election. The better question is where are the voters of the 10th?

Taking It To The Streets, II

To say that coverage of last Saturday's march in Washington drew minimal coverage from the MSM could be the understatement of the year. Not for nothin' the best article we could find was from the UK's Daily Mail Click HERE to read about the huge turnout of private citizens concerned enough about the left's raid on the U.S. Treasury to spend countless hours riding buses from all over the country to our nation's capital to express their frustration and concern directly to the federal government.

The few articles we could find in the MSM reported "tens of thousands" of demonstrators, clearly an attempt to minimize the impact of this historical event. The Mail mentions as many as one million in attendance, but before we get drawn into a side bar argument on attendance numbers, click on Sharilee's POSTING on Worcester County Freedom Trail to see the evidence that time-lapse photography produces.

Reporting in National Review On Line, Mark Hemingway provides some interesting insights into the makeup of the marchers:

As for the composition of the crowd, well I personally spoke to people from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Idaho, Alaska, Delaware, Tennessee, Nevada, California, Montana, as well as Virginia and Maryland, natch. (And I'm probably forgetting a few.) What also bears noting is that a lot of people came by bus — and of the people that came to the march by bus, almost all came on privately chartered buses organized by someone they knew. I asked one guy, who came up from South Carolina with 160 people on three buses, who put his trip together. He laughed and said, "My neighbor." Can we drive a stake through the astroturf claim now?

Click HERE to read the rest of Mark's report and view the great photos.

Perhaps the lack of coverage may keep some uninformed, but you Can be sure that the members of Congress know about the march and now have even more reason to question whether they want to support the president's crusade to bankrupt the U.S. to finance his socialistic agenda.

Congressman Joe Wilson may have been impolite, but he sure wasn't wrong. Do the math.

Taking It To The Streets

The protests of the Sixties with vast crowds marching to call for the end of what they saw as an unjust Asian war, using tactics copied from the civil rights movement, brought a new dimension to American politics. And whether you agreed with the cause or not, you couldn't help but acknowledge the impact that these events had on the political establishment. Many, in those days, dismissed the protesters as rowdy hippies, but we were seeing what happens when elected officials fail to read a marked change in public sentiment. Frustration overcame the sending of polite letters to one's elected officials.

Which brings us to the September 12, 2009, March on Washington. This protest is being billed as an effort at defending liberty, and restoring our Constitution by reducing the size and scope of the federal government, especially with respect to the proposals for nationalizing health care. Put another way, In this march, the Tea Party Movement Goes to Capitol Hill.

This march represents a national focus on a movement that has grown up from the town hall meetings held across the country where many elected officials ran into a buzz saw of resistance to the Democratic plans for a socialistic national health care system. In an ironic reversal of roles from the Sixties, the liberal Democrats are labelling the their critics as a small band of right-wing nuts, a characterization that seeks to marginalize the growing breadth and strength of this movement.

An article by Ben Stein entitled, Why We Must March, provides an excellent analysis of the issues at stake, which extend well beyond the health care proposals.

In the last year or so those of us who cherish liberty have been pushed up against a wall. We have watched the federal government bail out the elites on Wall Street for their own bad decisions. We have seen a new president waste a trillion dollars on failed economic ideas and increase our debt to dangerous proportions.

We have heard the soaring rhetoric and watched the media fawn all over this new president who we are told is a new FDR. But we don’t want another FDR. We want our freedom, we want less government in our lives and we want to be left alone.

Which brings us to the present:

Now we come to the heat of August, and the protests and town hall meetings are keeping the pressure on the politicians. As one woman in Pennsylvania told a prominent senator, “You have awakened a sleeping giant.” This month the media and the left will continue to write us off, or malign us, but we will press on. And once the dust settles and the politicians return to Washington, they will think that it is all over. They only wish.

As the politicians return, we will follow them to Washington. We will come from every state, in big cities and small towns, to descend upon the capitol building with one voice. Our message will be a simple one: we demand our freedom. We reject the growth of the federal government and want our republic restored. This is not, and never will be, a socialist nation.

Read the entire ARTICLE. Better yet, send it to your elected officials. This is far from over.

Also, don't forget to sign the ON LINE PETITION

Grass Roots at Town Hall

They’re un-American,” says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “They’re spreading lies and distortions,” says senior White House adviser David Axelrod. They are “being funded and organized by out-of-district special-interest groups and insurance companies,” says the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

"They," as you probably guessed, are the concerned citizens who've shown up at town-hall meetings across the country to express their displeasure over what President Barack Obama and the Democrats are about to do to our health-care system. But who are they really? What motivates them? And why are they so angry?

So begins an excellent article by John Goodman, President of the National Center for Policy Analysis in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal which looks at the makeup of the rising tide (Tsunami?) of realization that proposed health care reform bill is a neutron bomb of change to health care as most of us know it.

Remember, according to a Fox News poll conducted last month, 84% of Americans rate the quality of their insurance as "excellent" or "good." When they voted for Mr. Obama for president, they thought "universal care" meant helping some unfortunate Americans obtain insurance they cannot otherwise afford. Not once did candidate Obama say he was going to make changes that affected them and their health care. In fact, he promised the opposite.

As Tonto once said to the Lone Ranger: "man speaks with forked Tongue"

The left is quick to characterize the outpouring of concern for the proposal as something sinister that is being orchestrated by Right Wing subversives. Look again at the picture above. Where are the uniform tee shirts and professionally-designed signs that characterize the "spontaneous" left wing protests? What the Democrats are slowly learning, is that they have kicked over a hornets nest of anger among the vast middle class of Americans who don't want their medical care messed with. And these folks are not being misled by partisan interest, they are horrified at the actual provisions of the legislation. Maybe the legislators are too busy to read the bills, but the voters aren't that dumb.

Want to do something? Click on the ON LINE PETITION and add your name to the 1.1 million of concerned citizens who have signed the Free Our Health Care Now petition. And don't take any one else's word for it, read the bill's language and don't let a bunch of socialist wannabees bulldoze the best health care system in the world into the abyss.

The Bust of a Rolling Stone

By now, everyone on the planet knows about the famous Harvard professor who got himself pinched by the Cambridge Cops for mouthing off while they were answering a report of suspicious activity. But the coverage of an eerily similar episode that took place a few days later in New Jersey seems to have garnered negligible coverage.

As described HERE by abc news, A mere forty years after Woodstock, where he did not perform, and fifteen years after Woodstock 94, where he did, Bob Dylan apparently needed a few hours of down time from his current tour stop at the Jersey Shore and took a walk around a nearby neighborhood. Seeking anonymity, he disguised himself as a mental hospital escapee as he tromped around in the rain checking out local real estate listings. The neighbors knew a weirdo when they saw one and called the cops. Just like Skip Gates, Dylan was asked for ID to prove he really was Bob Dylan. The cop, twenty-something Kristie Buble, recognized the name Bob Dylan, but didn't see how the soaking-wet reprobate in the back of her squad car could possibly be someone who was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, as he claimed. Nor was he recognized by any of the other cops who eventually came on the scene. Maybe if he had been wearing his harmonica?

Unlike the dust up in Cambridge, however, the situation was quickly de-fused when the cops brought Dylan back to the hotel where the tour was staying and someone finally produced an ID. Dylan, apparently, took it in stride with no hard feelings.

To some extent, that's the end of the story, but many are asking difficult questions. Is there a double standard that a national flap erupts when a black man is arrested breaking into a (ok, his own) house, but when a 68 year old white man (who is still a celebrity in the minds of many aging music fans) is arrested for merely dressing funny and walking around in broad daylight (and the rain), there is no reaction from the White House, or (with the exception of one abc news article) from the media. Why weren't Bob Dylan and the cop, invited to the White House for a beer? What does this say about America? How is it that we can read about the Dylan bust and smile, while the Gates fiasco brought the world to a standstill?


At least Bob Dylan's travails provide a small break from the never-ending health care debate and shouting match.

Common Sense? What a Concept.

As we watch the hurtling train wreck of Health Care "Reform" slam its way through Congress, The View is over-whelmed with a sense of helplessness. How do we stop this juggernaut before we all end up in socialized medicine hell? I could write to my Congressman, but he is high atop the liberal bandwagon, and our Senior Senator is Ted, "Public Health care is Us", Kennedy.

As we clutch for some thread of good news, we happened upon Peggy Noonan's article in the weekend edition of the WSJ. Essentially, Noonan takes a step back from the minutiae of the health care maze and focuses, instead. on a more practical analysis:

I think the plan is being slowed and may well be stopped not by ideology, or even by philosophy in a strict sense, but by simple American common sense. I suspect voters, the past few weeks, have been giving themselves an internal Q-and-A that goes something like this:

Will whatever health care bill is produced by Congress increase the deficit? “Of course.” Will it mean tax increases? “Of course.” Will it mean new fees or fines? “Probably.” Can I afford it right now? “No, I’m already getting clobbered.” Will it make the marketplace freer and better? “Probably not.” Is our health-care system in crisis? “Yeah, it has been for years.” Is it the most pressing crisis right now? “No, the economy is.” Will a health-care bill improve the economy? “I doubt it.”

Read the rest of the article, and give it some thought.

This morning on This Week, George Will described the President of being ubiquitous. We would agree, he is everywhere and into everything. He has taken his election victory and sees it as a carte blanche to involve himself anytime anywhere. At this point, even the Democrats are looking for relief. Witness his chiming in on the Gates flap in Cambridge this week. He may not know the facts, but "Skip" is a friend of his" which means the Cambridge PD must be stupid. One of his staffers might have read the POLICE REPORT before he jumped in. The proposed solution? Gather the participants at the White House for a "beer" Then they can all bump fists and have a photo op. For a guy who is anti-profiling Obama seems quick to generalize that a drink of beer would be appropriate for Sergeant Crowley, an Irish cop. That kind all like beer, right?

Maybe the new Surgeon General should prescribe some Ritalin to her new boss.

Good Ideas at Plymouth Town Hall

State Lieutenant Gov., Tim Murray, accompanied by members of Municipal Affairs Coordinating Cabinet (MACC), rolled into Plymouth last Friday for a discussion meeting at Plymouth Town Hall. Billed as a "listening tour", this meeting is part of a state-wide effort to develop ideas of ways for the state government to work more closely, and efficiently, with local governments.

There was at least one very familiar face among the panel members. Former Plymouth town manager, Mark Sylvia, now Director of the state Division of Green Communities, happily greeted many of his former co-workers. At one point, Sylvia shared a moment with Selectman, Dicky Quintal. We're not sure what they discussed, but we suspect it was not the $101,000 payout that Sylvia received on his way out the door last winter, as they both appeared to be smiling.

One of the more interesting presenters was Dolores Mitchell, Executive Director of the Group Insurance Commission. Essentially, the GIC helps municipalities save significant money by providing employee health insurance through the state process, rather than group policies negotiated by each individual group of employees. Due to the available economies of scale, Cities and Towns can save significant money by providing employee benefits through the GIC. But individual employee groups have been slow to accept the new approach. According to Mitchell, only 26 municipalities are presently taking advantage of this money-saving option, presumably unwilling to trade local control for significant savings to the taxpayers. perhaps if this trade off were re-cast, it might be better received. Mitchell mentioned that the Town of Swampscot saved enough money from the switch to the GIC that it was able to avoid twelve teacher layoffs. If some thought were given to splitting the savings, we might even achieve a win-win result.