Recent Capuano Statement on Green Line Funding

Since Congressman Capuano made his initial comments to the Somerville Board of Alderman on December 8th, he has been under great pressure from Somerville advocates to support the full build out of the proposed Green Line to Route 16. In order to keep the readers of our Blog aware of the political maneuvering going on not only for the present, but for the future as it impacts Medford we ask that you read the editorial letter sent by Congressman Capuano. We continue our efforts to educate those directly affected by the current proposed light-rail expansion, but also participate with other concerned residents of Medford to inform all of the pressure by developers to extend the additional trolley service to Route 16.

To read the Capuano letter click here:

Winchester Residents oppose Freight Train Spur

According to Winchester Patch Editor Daniel Marra, "Winchester could see freight trains driving through town in the near future." Over 25 residents crowded into the Board of Selectmen meeting room [recently] to oppose the possibility of having freight trains stopping in town. According to Winchester resident Susan Busher, a railroad switch has been established by the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad (MBCR) at Cross Street at the request of Tighe Trucking, Inc. She said "that a railroad siding will be installed that will bring freight trains off the commuter rail for the delivery to the back side of Tighe Trucking at 45 Holten Street." If you haven't weighed in on this issue,and wish to, you should call a member of the Selectmen's Board and/or your town meeting member(s)!

To read the full article click here:

Congress sees the Light over Bulb Ban

By Howie Carr

The forces of of science and rationalism won a big victory in Congress this week over superstition and religious intolerence, but somehow I doubt the American Civil Liberties Union is celebrating. Here's the headline: "Congress overturns incandescent light bulb ban."

That's right. The ban on 100-watt incandescent Thomas Edison light bulbs, which was supposed to begin January 1st, was put off. Congress has denied the green fundamentalists any funds to impose their eco-sharia law on the rest of us infidels who have figured out that global warming is a scam, or should I say false religion. Is that blasphemy, what I just said? Am I a denier? It's certainly lese majeste, because the ruling classes, Republican and Democrat alike, have embraced this this strange cult.

You can see the fanatical true believers engaged in their bizarre rituals, sorting out their trash and depositing each type at a different altar in the suburban landfills - a different one for cardboard and newsprint and green glass bottles and clear bottles and tin cans and aluminum cans. Like all new cults, the Greens have zero tolerance for the older religions. Just because they believe in global warming , it must be true, and therefore anyone who opposes them is an infidel who must be shunned. They have their own Book of Revelation - the movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

Alas, the inconvenient truth is that the date of the apocalypse keeps getting moved back. Temperatures aren't rising, theyr'e falling, thus the now-famous memo from alleged scientists (actually high priests) about "hiding the decline" in global temperatures. Archbishop Barack Obama,who in 2008 predicted tht his nomination would be the day the sea levels stopped rising, now admits he can't control the weather. Well, even St. Augustine was plagued by doubts. What's ironic about the Church of Green is that these are the same people who want government out of their bedroom, or their uteruses, now want government in your light socket, or your toilet.

As late as the 1960's, Roman Cahtolics were forbidden to eat meat on Fridays. It was a mortal sin - an express ticket to hell - to enjoy a cheeseburger or a pepperoni pizza. Yet, no Catholic pol would have ever dreamed of filing legislation to ban everyone from eating meat on Friday. But the shock troops of this new religion have no such qualms. First they came for your toilets that flushed, next they came for your incandescent light bulbs. Whatever happened to the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?" Or the Hippocratic oath: "First, do no harm." Stopping the light bulb ban, at least temporarily, was a small victory for us nonbelievers. At least we have something to be thankful for this Christmas, or, as the Greens describe this season, "the winter solstice."

States move to Cut early Voting Days

More than a half dozen states have passed laws to reduce early voting, setting up a clash with civil rights groups and Democrats who claim the rules could disenfranchise minority voters in the 2012 elections.

Among the states with new restrictions: Wisconsin and Florida, presidential swing states that are key battlegrounds in the fight for control of the Senate, narrowly held by the Democrats.

In Florida, nearly 3.3 million Democrats cast in-person ballots before Election Day in the 2008 contest that swept President Obama into power. By contrast, 810,666 Florida Republicans participated in the in-person early voting that year, according to the Florida secretary of State's office. Obama won the state by 3 percentage points.

In five other states - Georgia, Maine, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia - this year approved laws shortening early voting, according to the non-partisan National Conference of State Legislatures. With the exeption of West Virginia, Republicans control the governor's offices and legislatures in those states.

The Republican-controlled Legislature in another key presidential battleground state, North Carolina, plans to revisit a proposal next year to reduce early voting voting from 16 days to 10. North Carolina Rep. Bert Jones said he sponsored the bill to cut the state's early voting by six days to reduce the influence of political money in state and local elections. "The longer voting period gives that much more of an advantage to candidates who have more money to spend." said Jones, a Republican. "Ten voting days is still a generous amount of time." Opponents say early voting restrictions, along with new laws in six states requiring photo identification at the polls, will thwart traditionally Democratic voters, including college students, African Americans, and Latinos.

Republicans think their path to victory is through limiting eligible voters'access to the polls." said Obama campaign spokesman Ben MaBolt. "Our goal is to maximize participation." The Obama campaign scored a very key victory last week when Ohio officials certified that the law's opponents had collected enough signatures to get a repeal petition on the November ballot. That delays the implentation of the law.

Obama's political operation, Organizing for America, helped run the petition drive, which collected nearly half a million signatures. Efforts are underway in other states to combat new voting restrictions, campaign officials said. Early voting has surged in recent years. More than a dozen states launched or expanded early voting programs from 2001 through 2010, according to data compiled by Jennie Bowser of the National Conference of State Legislatures. Overall, 34% of voters in the 2008 general election cast ballots before Election Day, up from 22.2% four years earlier, according to data from the Associated Press and Edison Research. Michael McDonald, an elections expert at Virginia's George Mason University, said it's too soon to tell whether the new laws will lower turnout. The changes may lead to longer lines on Election Day, he said. But, "in a high-profile presidential election, people are entusiastic about voting and will often overcome the barriers put in their way.

Today's protesters will be back - as tomorrow's plutocrats

By Frank L. McNamara Jr.

If what is past is prologue, the recently busted "Occupy Boston" protesters can take solace from what eventually became of their 1960s forerunners, whose example they so conspicuously emulate. (But surely itwould be unfair to call those arrested early this morning sixties wannabees.)

History records that a surprising number of the college professors of the 1960s, after starring in their own movies by protesting the depredations of unbridled capitalism, the military industrial complex, and the Vietnam War, discovered...money! Or, more accurately, the lack of it, going on to become themselves overly compensated Wall Street investment bankers, hedge fund managers, partners of white-shoe law firms, and chairmen and CEO's of companies doing business with that government, including the military that they had so long despised.

I suspect that in due course many of those arrested last night will experience a similiar metamorphosis. The arc between protester and plutocrat is not that long. Those who traverse it will end up contributing disproportionately, just as their sixties counterparts did and do, to entrenched, mostly Democratic, polititions. (Big Business, which controls government and does business with it, likes its government to be Big.) In so doing they will forget that the polititions they support are successors to people like Mayor Menino, enjoying symbiotic relationships with the very public sector unions (in the case of the Boston police union) whose buzz-saw tactics the "Occupy Boston" protestors now deplore.

So, in the final analysis, what can be said of the arrested "Occupy Boston" professors? Or of the entitled plutocrats against whom they protest? Or of the entitled, unionized police who arrested them? Or, for that matter, of the entitled entrenched, politition who ordered their arrests?

That they deserve each other's throats?

That the more things change, the more things remain the same?

How about this: We all desire change and more just society; but the only change worthy of the name is brought about by men and women who are prepared to suffer at the personal level.

Protesters, plutocrats, police, and pols who are at once desirous of fame and money, yet fearful of failure and sacrifice, are not reliable agents of the change we all seek.

Frank L. MaNamara Jr., a lawyer at Bowditch & Dewey, is a former US Attorney for Massachusetts.

The President of Contempt

By Bret Stephens

Nixon was tricky. Ford was clumsy. Carter was dour. Reagan was sunny. Bush 41 was prudent. Clinton felt your pain. Bush 43 was stubborn. And Barach Obama is...

Early in America's acquaintance with the man who would become the 44th president, the word that typically sprang from media lips to describe him was "cool."

Cool as a matter of fashion sense - "Who does he think he is, George Clooney?" burbed the blogger Wonkette in April 2008. Cool as a matter of political temperment - "Maybe after eight years of George W. Bush stubborness, on the heels of eight years of Clinton emotiveness, we need to send out for ice" approved USA Today's Ruben Navarrette that October. Cool as a matter of upbringing - Indonesia, apparently, is "Where Barack learned to be cool," according to a family friend quoted in a biography of his mother.

The Obama cool made for a reassuring contrast with his campaign's warm-and-fuzzy appeals to hope, change and being the one we've been waiting for. But as the American writer Minna Antrim observed long ago,"between flattery and admiration there often flows a river of contempt." When it comes to Mr. Obama, boy does it ever.

We caught flashes of the contempt during the campaign. There were those small-town Midwesterners who, as he put it at a San Francisco fund raiser, "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them." There were those racist Republicans who as he put it at a Jacksonville fundraiser would campaign against him by asking, "Did I mention that he was black?" There was the "you're likable enough Hillary," line during a New Hampshire debate. But these were unscripted disgressions and could be written off as such.

Only after Mr. Obama came to office did it start to become clear that contempt would be both a style and method of his governance. Take the "mess we have inherited." line, which became the administrations ring tone for its first two years.

"I have never seen anything like the mess we have inherited," said the late Richard Holbrooke-a man with memories of what Nixon inherited in Vietnam from Johnson -and about Afghanistan in February 2009. "We are cleaning up something that is-quite simply-a mess ," said the president the following month about Guantanamo. "Let's face it, we inherited a mess," said Valiere Jarrett about the economy in March 2010.

For presidential candidates to rail against incumbents from an opposing party is normal, for a president to rail for years against a predecessor of any party is crass-and something to which neither Reagan nor Lincoln, each of them inheritors of much bigger messes, stooped.

Then again, the contempt Mr. Obama felt for the Bush administration was mearly of a piece with the broader ambit of his distain. Example? Here's a quick list: The gratuitous return of the Churchill bust in Britain. The slam of the Boston police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates. The high profile rebuke of the members of the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union speech. The diplomatic snubs, of Gordan Brown, Benjamin Netanyahu and Nickolas Sarkozy. The verbal assaults on Wall Street "fat cats" who "caused the problem" of "10% unemployment." The never-ending baiting of millionaires and billionaires and jet owners and anyone else who, as Black Entertainment Television's Robert Johnson memorably put it on Sunday, "tried rich and tried poor and like rich better."

Now we come to the last few days, in which Mr. Obama first admonished the Congressional Black Caucus to "stop complainin', stop grumblin', stop cryin'," and later told a Florida TV station that America was losing its competative edge because it "had gotten a little soft." The first comment earned a rebuke from none other than Rep. Maxine Waters, while the second elicited instant comparisons to Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech. They tell us something about the president's political IQ. They tell us more about his world view.

What is it that Mr. Obama doesn't like about the United States-a country that sent him hurtling like an American Idol contestant from the obscurity of an Illinois Senate seat to the presidency in a mere four years?

I suspect it's the same thing that so many run-of-the-mill liberals dislike: Americans typically believe that happiness is an idividual persuit; we bridle at other people setting limits on what's "enough"; we enjoy wealth and want to keep as much of it as we can; we don't like trading in our own freedom for someone else's idea of virtue, much less a fabricated contempt of the collective good.

When a good history of anti-Americanism is someday written, it will note that it's mainly a story of disenchantment-of the obdurate and sometimes vulgar reality of the country falling short of the lover's ideal. Listening to Mr.Obama, especially now as the country turns against him, one senses in him a similiar disenchantment: America is lovable exactly in proportion to the love it gives him in return.

Hence his increasingly ill-concealed expressions of contempt. Hence the increasingly widespread couter-contempt.

The Dignified Statesman

By Brian McGrory

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine - Patten's Berry Farm is the kind of place a Hollywood producer would want to invent if it didn't already exist, with Mrs. Patten selling corn, apples, and pumpkins on the side of a country road in this impossibly pretty town.

I happened to be chatting about the Patriots with the nice woman at the cash register on a quiet Sunday morning when a gleeming black sedan pulled into the parking lot. The front doors opened and men emerged. The back passenger door opened. When I looked up again, George H. W. Bush, the former president, sat in a wheelchair between his car and mine.

This is not unusual, seeing George Bush, the original George Bush, in this town. He was, until a couple of years ago, a fairly regular golfer at Cape Arundel, a fixture on his power boat, an occasional diner at the Hurricance in Dock Square. He orders lobster rolls at the Clam Shack and roams the aisles of the Bradbury Bros. Market. There is little in this world as authentic as George Bush's love of Kennebunkport, Maine.

As we returned to the car, the former president continued to sit, smiling at something I couldn't see. And then I did - our golden retrievers, two of them, their heads poking through the back window pleading for his attention.

"Beautiful dogs," he said. He asked their names - Baker and Walter - then smiled at the answer. I brought up Ranger, the lessor known of his two springer spaniels from his White House days, a dog he loved that died much to young. He said he has a couple of smaller dogs these days.

I didn't tell him I wrote for a newspaper, not that he would have cared, or that I covered his successor, Bill Clinton, or that I once spent the better part of a day with his son when he was governor of Texas. It wasn't worth clouding a moment this clear.

The president extended his arm to shake hands, with me and Pam, who led me on this produce run. I told him he looked good, because he did, sharp and oddly boyish, even at 87 years old in the confines of a wheelchair.

"Spiritual," he replied, whimsically. "I hope I look spiritual. I'm just coming from church."

When we were done, the former president continued on his quiet errand. I should have felt invigorated by this uniquetly American encounter. What I really felt though, was a deep sense of loss.

Five minutes with George H. W. Bush, and the problems of the present are made more vivid by the virtues of the not-so-distant-past. Say what you will, but the unimpeachable fact is that he knew how to govern. His compromise on a tax hike (which cost him his presidency), combined with the spending caps and cuts he put in place, paved the way for the roaring prosperity of the 1990's and the federal surpluses that accompanied it.

He reached across the aisle to pass the Clean Air Act of 1990 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, two landmark accomplishments that have a profound impact on every day life. The war to oust Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait had a clear mission and a defined end.

That Washington doesn't exist any more. There are no leaders risking their careers in the name of the common good. There are precious few officials seeking compromise rather than cheap political points. There are no bridges, just roadblocks, no reasonable debates, just frantic threats. The extremes, especially on the right, have overwhelmed the middle, and the result is an economy in a government-prolonged rut.

This wasn't exactly a revelation on the side of a country road in Maine, but a moment of clarity. George H. W. Bush's presidency, maybe even Washington as a whole, was quided by decency and dignity.

You don't outgrow these virtues, you simply abandon them. And to spend even a few fleeting minutes with what we had only makes it more regrettable about what we've become.