Posted on 07/24/2011 2:09:40 AM PDT by raccoonradio
Howie thread for the week starting with his Sunday Herald column
Sun column thread
Look out, Scott: Challenger has friend$ in high places
By Howie Carr | Sunday, July 24, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
Photo
Photo by Harry Hamburg
Scott Brown must be shaking in his boots — the candidate du jour against him is a 62-year-old moonbat from Oklahoma who blew in to Massachusetts in 1995.
Her name is Elizabeth Warren, and she is no relation to the previous candidate du jour, Setti Warren. She’s a professor at Harvard Law School, and she’s being “urged” to run by the usual trust-funded suspects currently clipping coupons on Nantucket. I’m not saying she’s not a mainstream Democrat — in 2002, she donated $500 to Robert B. Reich, another carpetbagger who drifted into Harvard Square and then began lecturing the hoi polloi on their shortcomings.
Mrs. (or should I say Ms.) Warren was supposed to get one of Barack’s new pencil-sharpening, paper-shuffling agencies, and dammit, she deserved it. After all, she started giving to Barack Obama in 2003, when he was a state senator from Illinois.
But alas, it was not to be. Somehow she couldn’t bond with the Congressional riff-raff — last year she appeared before a House committee and informed them she only had an hour to spare to answer their questions. Now she’s looking for a parachute, so why not the U.S. Senate?
After all, she’s given to all the Politically Correct candidates — even the late, sainted Paul Wellstone.
Then there’s Warren’s husband, another Harvard Law School professor. His name is Bruce Mann. If possible, he’s even further to the left than his lovely bride. Over the years he’s given $9,700 to Obama, $2,000 to John “Liveshot” Kerry and in 2007 he chipped in $2,300 to the now-indicted ambulance-chasing ex-senator from North Carolina, John Edwards.
Mann is also a big contributor ($20,000) to the Progressive Patriots [team stats] Fund, which appears to be a creation of ex-Sen. Russ Feingold, who retired from politics last year due to ill health. The voters of Wisconsin got sick of him. Elizabeth Warren also dug Russ Feingold, to the tune of $3,000.
But here’s my favorite part about Mr. Elizabeth Warren. He’s a fat cat contributor to MoveOn.org. Remember that lefty outfit, the moving on they first wanted to do was from Bill Clinton’s perjury and sex scandal.
Prof. Mann gave more than $10,000 to Feingold, and he also contributed to Teddy Kennedy and Sen. Barbara Mikulski. On the local level, he gave $500 to Robert Reich and chipped in $400 to the drunkard ex-Sen. Anthony Galluccio, who spent most of the winter drying out at the Billerica House of Correction.
These bums really know to pick ’em, don’t they? Pointy-headed intellectuals that can’t park a bicycle straight.
A couple of years ago, when Cambridge Police Sgt. Crowley was going toe-to-toe with Skippy Gates, who do think Elizabeth Warren and her husband were rooting for?
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1353763
How, if you are reading this... Well done, it is even better than your first book!
Death pool at 4.
Steve from Montreal calling Howie a crackpot. Aren’t there any Canadian shows you could be listening to, Steve?
Chats we’re unlikely to have with gov
By Howie Carr | Wednesday, July 27, 2011 |
http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
So Gov. Deval Patrick is deigning to have “summer conversations” with the hoi polloi.
If you live in Beautiful People Land, you might even run into him. Martha’s Vineyard, Lenox, Jamaica Plain — not going to be a lot of blowback in any of those la-de-da precincts about raising the gasoline tax. Of course, if the hacks at the State House were considering an excise tax on bicycles, or backpacks ...
I wonder if Deval will run into Elizabeth Warren on her not-so-much-listening-as-lecturing-the-riff- raff tour.
Do you think he’s selling many of his tomes in the assorted people’s republics he’s visiting? Last time I checked, “An Improbable Life” was doing improbably bad.
Did you catch what Deval said as he signed off on next month’s sales tax holiday?
“We do it, frankly, not because it’s particularly fiscally prudent, but because it’s popular.”
In other words, let them eat cake. You know those little people, they care about those crumbs like a 6.25 percent discount, and not having to pick up the tuition tab for illegal aliens. Bitter clingers. No summer conversations with the governor for them.
Then there were the stories over the weekend about the Big Dig, the bottom line of which seemed to be, it’s not if there’s going to be a disaster down there, but when. In the first draft of an official report, the word “leak” was used 34 times. In the final draft, the leaks, er, drips became nothing more than the water from “three garden hoses.”
And this was Deval’s response:
“The supervision and oversight of the contractor to whom this project was assigned was sloppy and lacking and some — not all — of the work was shoddy. None of that is news. None of that is news.”
Once again, paging Marie Antoinette. I’m going to guess the Tip O’Neill tunnel is another place that’s going to be passed over for a “summer conversation.” Ditto, any of the commuter rail stations. Or at State Street Bank, where they just laid off a few hundred people.
So much for “growing” all those jobs that Deval keeps talking about.
I’d like to ask Deval what’s the over-under on how many more transportation secretaries he’s going to go through in the last three years of his term.
Maybe they can send the lieutenant governor, Tim Murray, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, out to some of the grittier precincts when he returns from his special mission to Puerto Rico. Right now he’s at a “policy conference” of the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association ... in San Juan. Funny, I thought you went to San Juan for the winter policy conference, but what does Tiny Tim care? The reception started at 6 last night.
See you at the candlelight vigil, Deval.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1354350
Fri column ping; btw Herald site makes it look like Howie has 2 columns; there’s a small banner that says “Howie Carr” and Howie’s pic but that second one is actually a Peter Gelzinis column
Hey gov, I bet it’s corrupt
By Howie Carr | Friday, July 29, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
Photo
Photo by Nancy Lane
“If we populated the new (gambling) commission with the disciples and Jesus Himself, Howie Carr would still write something about it.”
— Gov. Deval Patrick, yesterday
You’re damn right I’d write about it, governor. Because in any scurvy crew of 13 people you’d appoint, there’d be more than one Judas Iscariot, or at least somebody who flunked the bar exam seven times, or liked to launder money for hacks, or at the very least guzzle chocolate martinis in the bathtub instead of watching her kid.
And any “disciple” you appointed wouldn’t have accepted any 30 pieces of silver either. No, they’d have ponied up 30 pieces, and probably considerably more, to both you and your little lieutenant governor, Tiny Tim Murray.
And while we’re on the subject, Deval, I don’t know if the Governor’s Council will have the power to confirm the members of the proposed new gambling oversight commission. But if the Council does get confirmation power, you could get at least four of the eight votes for anybody you nominated — up to and including Whitey Bulger.
And when the vote was 4-4, you’d tiptoe into the chambers, take the gavel from Tiny Tim and let him cast the deciding vote for Whitey.
Deval was on the radio yesterday yapping about his latest gambling proposal — with one (but only one, wink, wink) slots parlor. Don’t like that idea? No problem, just wait five minutes and Deval will have a different one.
So he started talking about this new gambling oversight commission. Of course you don’t get much “oversight” from oversight commissions, just like the only blue-ribbon you get from blue-ribbon commissions comes from Pabst.
“We need appointees,” the governor told my fellow columnist Margery Eagan on her 96.9 WTKK-FM radio show, “who are above politics, whose ethics rules are even more rigorous than the ones we put in place a couple of years ago.”
Can’t you feel the higher ethics? Only one ex-speaker convicted so far this year. No ex-state reps indicted since last week.
“I think they need to be adequately compensated.”
Ah, he gives the game away. In Deval-speak, the synonym for adequately compensated is $125,000. A mere six-figure salary doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s gotta be at least $125,000, so your 80 percent pension comes in at an even $100,000.
First member of the Gambling Oversight Commission: Tim Cahill, for obvious reasons. You’ll need an anti-former state Sen. Sue Tucker. She could handle the adequate compensation. Then maybe somebody from Chelsea. You could pay him in scratch tickets. And finally, to show how the governor celebrates diversity, an illegal alien, I mean undocumented worker.
Commissioner X, to make it harder for ICE to round him up.
Hey, Deval, you bet I’ll keep vetting your sticky-fingered hack appointees. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1354841
Former House Speaker Tom Finneran — who faced his own public scandal with a humiliating felony conviction — compared his disgraced successor, Sal DiMasi, to ordinary jobless Americans struggling to find work in a dismal economy.
“Any human being feels for somebody else who’s going through it,” said Finneran, now the morning-drive host on WRKO-AM (680). “You’ve got millions and millions of Americans who are unemployed. Most of them are desperate for work, so you feel for anybody who is in that situation and has the self-respect and the determination to stand on their own two feet and provide for their family.
“In that regard, Speaker DiMasi is in a tough boat. He’s in the same boat that millions of Americans are in.”
Finneran — who lost his own law license after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in 2007 — refused to weigh in on DiMasi’s move yesterday to keep practicing law pending his appeal, but the radio yakker expressed sympathy for DiMasi.
“This is about an oppor-tunity — no guarantee, certainly, but an opportunity — for him to provide in some small measure for his family while he awaits a highly uncertain future,” Finneran said last night outside his Mattapan home.
He also acknowledged he would like to have his own law license back — and hasn’t given up on returning to the bar one day.
“It’s something that I’ll focus on probably a little bit more in the out years,” he said.
DiMasi — once the state’s most powerful politician, much like Finneran — was in court yesterday fighting to keep his law license while his lawyers appeal his conviction on extortion, conspiracy and fraud charges. The out-of-work ex-pol faces at least 12 to 15 years behind bars; his sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 8.
In court yesterday, a prosecutor from the Office of the Bar Counsel urged Supreme Judicial Court Justice Margot Botsford to suspend DiMasi’s law license while his attorney argued that the 65-year-old North End Democrat needs to reboot the law practice he sacrificed to serve as a lawmaker.
“The man needs to earn a living,” said DiMasi’s attorney Thomas R. Kiley. “What’s the rush?”
DiMasi was convicted of pocketing $65,000 in bribes while in office to land two multimillion-dollar state contracts for a Canadian software firm.
Botsford is reviewing First Assistant Bar Counsel Nancy Kaufman’s petition to temporarily yank DiMasi’s license and ask the Board of Bar Overseers for more permanent action.
“He’s been given the benefit of the doubt,” Kaufman said. “Once he’s convicted, it’s the public that gets the benefit.”
Laurel J. Sweet contributed to this report.
Um tommy boy, millions and millions of Americans didn't try to scam taxpayers out of money. No sympathy here pal.
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