Posted on 12/22/2008 6:34:17 AM PST by raccoonradio
Howie Carr thread covering the two week period beginning Dec. 22. Howie will probably be off from Dec 24 till just after the new year. Columns will be posted here as of course will be discussion of the radio show. Not sure yet who guest hosts will be (maybe Avi Nelson, Todd Feinburg, or Col. Hunt) and my guess is on Christmas and New Years Day, it'll be a best of.
Happy hhhhhhhhhhhhhholidays! (As Howie says, making fun of those who take the Christmas out of Christmas)
HC list ping for the two week Christmas/New Year’s period.
Today’s show should feature Max Robins as usual, 5 pm hour.
Cold/snowy enough for ya?
I’m surprised he’s on today - I thought he was implementing the “Beautiful Person” card at the station.;)
Oh, I figured he’d be on; he hinted earlier that he’d be on today and tomorrow, but then he’s prob gone till after New Yrs (back
on 1/4/09?)
Mistah speakah, when are we gonna outlaw raccoons?...
I do have a carbon monoxide detector.
(as heard on Howie’s show)
http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2008_12_23_carbon_monoxide_poisoning/srvc=home&position=4
Raccoon causes carbon monoxide fatality in East Sandwich
By Ira Kantor | Tuesday, December 23, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com
A 62-year-old East Sandwich man was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in his home Sunday morning after a raccoon crawled into his chimney flue and blocked it, police and fire officials said.
“He was of such a size that it was a complete blockage of the products of combustion from the gas appliance,” said Sandwich Deputy Fire Chief Tom Corriveau. “So there was nowhere for them to go but back into the residence.”
The victim was identified as John Van Nostrand by the Cape & Islands District Attorney’s Office. Fire officials said Van Nostrand did not have any smoke or carbon monoxide detectors in his home.
“We’re trying to get the word out to get carbon monoxide detectors and make sure they’re operating properly because the craziest things can happen that you would never think of,” Corriveau said.
Marion Larson, a biologist for MassWildlife, said that while it is common for animals like raccoons and squirrels to seek refuge in chimneys for warmth or protection from predators, homeowners should take better measures to prevent instances like these.
“That’s unfortunately the extreme reason why you should be capping your chimneys,” Larson said. “Those openings are very attractive for wildlife.”
Did Col. Hunt just call Howie a liar?
Did Howie just give him the bum’s rush?
Or am I imagining things...
Does anyone know if there is an audio copy of today's show out there somewhere?
The Christmas letters are a great yearly event
Thanks and Merry Christmas
I missed part of the show...Christmas letters were indeed great. Sometimes parts of the show are put up as a podcast on WRKO’s site (chump line, some interviews). Maybe it’ll get
re-run as part of a best of on Christmas or New Yrs’ Day?
Wed column ping
Dear Santa Deval Patrick: Where’s my property tax cut?
By Howie Carr | Wednesday, December 24, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
All I want for Christmas from Gov. Deval Patrick is my property tax cut.
At the risk of sounding like a petulant child, Deval, let me just say this:
You promised! You PROMISED me!!
All of your constituents have been waiting for our tax relief for two years now. Perhaps you’ve conveniently forgotten your pledge, but we haven’t. During the 2006 campaign, you repeatedly told everyone who would listen that you would give us a reduction in our ever-escalating property taxes. You didn’t come out and say it, but you intimated that you would handle these local, greed-crazed hackeramas and their ever-escalating demands for higher salaries, more health-care bennies, fake disability claims and new holidays, not to mention fatter pensions.
So far we get . . . nothing.
As a matter of fact, it’s worse than nothing. Most homeowners in the state are watching their property taxes skyrocket. It doesn’t matter if we vote down a Proposition 2 override, the payroll Charlies at Town Hall still figure out a way to jack up the bills.
Maybe you missed the news yesterday, but real-estate prices tanked again last month in Massachusetts. The medium home price here was $275,000 in November, compared to $330,000 a year ago. In September, prices fell 15.3 percent year-to-year, in October 13.9 percent.
Yet still the property taxes go up, even as the values plummet. It’s funny how the bloated local pols complain about their municipalities’ fixed costs. Funny how in the Dreaded Private Sector, there’s no such thing as fixed costs. There’s just another round of layoffs, and another and another.
Granted, I live in a town whose trust-funded population recently decided to build its own Taj Mahal high school - the rich kids decided they had to keep up with the Joneses, or in our case, the Cohens, as in Mayor David Cohen of Newton.
So Deval, more than ever, we need you to keep your campaign promise.
Unless you work for Massport, the economy’s in a tailspin, Deval. Casinos aren’t going to save your sorry rear-end, either.
You should have gone to Washington, Deval. But since you’re still here, it’s time you did the right thing. I don’t care how many worthless programs you have to get rid of or how many layabouts you have to fire by Bunker Hill Day. I want my property tax cut now.
You promised.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1140997
Why? With that 70%-30% defeat of Question 1, he now understands that he has a blank check here! :(
Jimmy Marzilli, “who thinks with his willie” (credit: Michelle
McPhee, 96.9 FM Talk) wants to double his pension
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/12/24/ex_senator_wants_double_pension/
>>J. James Marzilli Jr., the former state senator from Arlington who resigned in disgrace after being charged with harassing or attempting to grope women in downtown Lowell, wants the state to nearly double his pension.
>>In a request submitted to the state Board of Retirement, Marzilli, a 50-year-old liberal Democrat with 23 years of local and state service, cites a state law that allows elected officials under age 55 with more than 20 years of creditable service to boost their pension if they fail to win reelection.
>>On June 5, two days after his arrest, Marzilli announced he would not seek reelection in the September Democratic primary, and he did not actively campaign for his seat. But his name was on the ballot and he was defeated in the race, losing overwhelmingly to Kenneth J. Donnelly, a retired firefighter from Lexington.
>>Yesterday, the state retirement board voted, 4 to 0, to postpone action on Marzilli’s request until his criminal case is resolved. But the request, which would increase his annual pension from $14,000 to $27,000, stirred immediate outrage from some fiscal watchdog groups, who said the law should be changed to prevent politicians who lose elections from collecting higher pensions.
>>”They get an additional pension if their constituents get sick of them and throw them out? Am I hearing that right? Only in Massachusetts,” said Barbara Anderson, ex ecutive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. “Enough with the pension nonsense.”
Merry Christmas to all on the Howie Carr ping list!!
Agreed! Avi should be on again today. I didn’t see a Howie column in paper (site) today...
Sat column ping (below). I just heard Gene Burns calling in to
the Jordan Rich show on WBZ (my friend Morgan White Jr. hosting)
and they were both saying how Caroline might make a good
senator, good people skills, etc. And then there’s Howie’s take:
Caroline Kennedy: Pampered wannabe pol plays the victim card
By Howie Carr | Saturday, December 27, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com
Forget the Profiles in Courage award. For this interview yesterday Caroline Kennedy deserves the Profiles in Chutzpah Award.
See, JFK’s only surviving child wants Hillary Clinton’s seat in the U.S. Senate, although she has absolutely no qualifications for the position other than her last name, which by the way used to be Schlossberg until last summer.
Now all these dreadful, sweaty Albany and D.C. parvenus who actually had to run for political office are complaining about Ms. Kennedy’s ever-so-Kennedy-esque attempt to cut in line ahead of them. So Caroline grants - or should I say, grahhhhnts - an interview to the Associated Press, and she has the audacity to play the victim card. To get the Senate seat, she says, “I have to work twice as hard as anybody else.”
Huh? You’ve never worked a day in your life, honey. Your pampered-poodle existence makes Uncle Teddy look like a working-class hero. Poor Uncle Teddy is worth a mere $103.6 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Caroline’s gotta be good for at least three times that.
“I am an unconventional choice.”
No, Caroline, you are about as conventional as it gets. You’re operating under the oldest rule in the book, the golden rule. He (or she) who has the gold, rules.
“If I were to be selected,” she says, and that last word is the key one - selected. Not elected, but selected. “I understand that public servants have to be accessible.”
Wow. She pledges to be “accessible.” Her income taxes won’t be - that’s one pledge we can be sure she’ll never go back on - but she will be “accessible.”
You know just how preposterous this whole idea is by the convoluted paeans to her common touch that are being trotted out by the doddering sycophants of Camelot.
Remember Al Hunt, formerly of The Wall Street Journal and CNN, now of Bloomberg, as in Mayor Bloomberg, who is playing Cardinal Richelieu to her dauphin. Knowing quite well on which side his bread is buttered, Hunt wrote that Caroline is indeed One of Us - why, outside her mansion on Park Avenue, she has been known to hail her own cab! Was it raining too, Al?
She’ll have to work twice as hard, will she? You know how, when your basement or garage starts overflowing with junk, you have a yard sale? Caroline Kennedy knows what that’s like, only she calls one of her garage sales a “Sotheby’s auction.” In 2005, she made $5.5 million, which was a drop from the 1996 auction where she took in $34.5 million, including $2.5 million for her mom’s engagement ring.
And then there’s Mumsy’s cottage on Martha’s Vineyard. She only has 366 acres. On the ocean.
But she’d have to work twice as hard. Just like she’s always had to, right? Is it too late for her to buy herself a Pulitzer Prize? Does anyone have Ted Sorenson’s phone number?
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1141387
Regardless of what we normal, decent humans think, Caroline would be the perfect choice for the rats - - a complete idiot who will do exactly as she is told.
I'm surprised Howie didn't mention it, but didn't Caroline and John-John move to get the take from the auction of Jackie's stuff "reclassified" to pay lower taxes on it? Don't know how it went (my guess would be they succeeded!) and I don't move in the rarefied circles that can calculate the difference in inheritance tax and capital gains tax off the top of my head, but they wanted it reclassified one way or the other. You know, you must have asked the IRS for similar favors lots of times! ;-)
who knows; first I’d heard of that!
Sunday column ping. This is the Christmas/New Year’s thread which will run till next Sunday or so.
Sunshine Staters curse shady Bernard Madoff
That $#@*%$ son of Palm Beach
By Howie Carr | Sunday, December 28, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com
PALM BEACH, Fla. - This has always been a sunny place for shady people, from Kennedys on the prowl to Roxanne Pulitzer on the make to Cadillac Frank Salemme on the lam.
But all the earlier Palm Beach Babylon books are suddenly obsolete, because they don’t include a chapter on the shadiest Palm Beacher of them all - Bernie Madoff, the creator of the world’s second greatest Ponzi scheme (after Social Security).
Less than three weeks ago, 70-year-old Bernie was the toast of the town. Then the roof caved in on him and his “clients” - all of whom have turned out to be marks. No wonder he could guarantee returns of at least 10 percent a year through good markets and bad. He wasn’t investing the money, he was just grabbing it as it came in and giving it to the earlier “investors.”
Final tab on the scam, by Bernie’s own accounting: $50 billion, that’s billion with a B.
Madoff’s victims are scattered across the globe, but Palm Beach may have been the place he hit hardest of all. And now, every gold-digger and gigolo who didn’t get burned is lapping up this disaster with a spoon. Schadenfreude, anyone? Every day, new stories are breathlessly told about Madoff’s victims, some so perfect that you have to wonder if they’re urban myths.
Just Friday, word swept the island that one of Madoff’s “collectors,” a Bostonian named Bob Jaffe, had sent all of his fancy suits down to a consignment shop on Sunset Avenue to be sold for petty cash.
Then there’s the one about a suddenly penniless yachtsman who supposedly sold his multimillion-dollar boat at a pawnshop - a pawnshop? - on the Dixie Highway, and when the bust-out was offered 100 large for the deluxe vessel, began weeping with gratitude.
I also heard about an elderly retiree who, on Dec. 8, supposedly closed on a $10 million deal to sell his business. He immediately signed over the check to Madoff, 72 hours before Bernie was lugged in on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Three weeks ago, people who invested with Madoff had bragging rights. Madoff had been coming here since the 1960s. He bought his place on North Lake Way in 1967 for $67,000, and it’s now assessed at $9.3 million (he’s got it in his wife Ruth’s name). It was a status symbol to be “with Bernie.” Bob Jaffe made the introductions, and here’s some irony - Jaffe started out in Boston as a stockbroker back in the 1970s handling investments for the Angiulos.
Say what you will about Gerry Angiulo and the boys. If they owed you, they paid you off, sooner or later. Most of Madoff’s chumps will be lucky to recover a penny on the dollar.
The only boasting now is being done by people who saw through Bernie, or at least now claim they did.
Here’s how panicked everybody is down here. One of the Bostonians who got taken is Bob Lappin - Robert I. Lappin. His foundation in Salem lost $8 million and had to shut down. Well, there’s another Bob Lappin here - W. Robert Lappin - and he runs the Palm Beach Pops orchestra.
As soon as word of Bob Lappin’s loss hit the papers, people began calling the Pops office, asking if the orchestra was permanently out of business. This week the other Bob Lappin finally had to issue a statement that while he had only the greatest sympathy for Robert I. Lappin, neither he (W. Robert) nor the orchestra had been ripped off.
The weekend after the Ponzi scheme crashed, the Wall Street Journal reported that four condos had already been put up for sale at Two Breakers Row, next to The Breakers Hotel. One of the oceanfront units even moved that first weekend, reportedly at a fire-sale price - $8.6 million.
That’s poverty in Palm Beach.
Destitution, where is thy sting?
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1141579
Hell, if you couldn't sell the thing for a huge profit,
You could just consider it a vacation home.
Must be rough!
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