Left In Lowell

This motion will get fast tracked to subcommittee, where it will wallow.

Update:
This graph compares total voter turnout to C. Elliott’s support, for the last 6 City elections. What would happen, if this November the turnout went up to 12,000?
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Did you ever, for a minute, think the kerfuffle around LHA was about public health, or any of the touted altruistic motives that were puked up by the Blog of Record?

It was always about UNION BUSTING!
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The blog of the Blog of Record:

LOWELL TOOK center stage at times in last year’s Senate race between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown, with prominent city figures offering endorsements and frequent visits by each candidate, including a debate at the Tsongas Center. Now, with a special Senate election under way, the Mill City is poised to host a tug-of-war for voters yet again.

A “Lowell for Ed Markey” Facebook page was launched in late January, before John Kerry’s confirmation as secretary of state. Posts on the page show volunteers supporting the U.S. congressman’s bid for the seat vacated by Kerry have been at work here for almost a month, gathering signatures in Lowell and Chelmsford. Last week, the Markey campaign followed up with a corresponding Twitter account.

Markey’s opponent in the Democratic primary, U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, has called for Lowell to be the site of one of six public debates. Lynch has also won the backing of Lowell state Rep. Thomas Golden and former state Sen. Steven Panagiotakos. Lynch also hopes to win over Sen. Eileen Donoghue and lawyer Michael Gallagher.

No one on the GOP side appears to have made moves in Lowell just yet, but if the pattern continues, it could just be a matter of time before another future senator follows Warren’s footsteps into the ring at West End Gym to record a campaign spot.
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At one time, Campi used to frequent the JMac & the Bear Show. What happened? Someone should tell the Blogger in Chief that John MacDonald has renounced his party affiliation, so that he can parlez with the business/political power clout of Lowell’s ConservaDem clique. JMac is flogging what some would call, the “Anthes Prerogative.” (more…)

They are praying Scott Brown stays out of this Senate Special Election.

Frankly, it is HARD to cross party lines. No one on either side really quite trusts you. Of course, on the local level, both Rita and Dave have solid support. Mostly, because they are fairly down to earth people, that are willing to ply their skill at the ‘grip and grin’ at street level. Both are unpretentious and folksy. Almost adorable in quirky ways. (Unless you rub them the wrong way.) But, political sophistication is not their calling card. So, in the 2012 General Election, their individual choice to support Republican Scott Brown has assuredly caused them grief in ways that they had not accounted for. Note: Brown did well in the Belvidere section of Lowell. So, niether Rita or Nangle have much to sweat over, come their own respective reelections. That said, Rita will take it hard if she doesn’t finish 1st.

For both of them, the best thing that Scott Brown can do for them, … is to sit this special election cycle out. Good news for them is, it’s looking like he may:

With time running short, Washington Republicans have begun a “full court press’’ to persuade an increasingly reluctant Scott Brown to run in the special election to replace John F. Kerry, say two leading Massachusetts GOP figures.

The eleventh-hour effort, coordinated by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, comes as those familiar with Brown’s deliberations are becoming convinced that he will not run and instead will look for a job in the private sector.

Please consider how much of a pickle, especially Dave Nangle, is in right now. The MADems would be hard pressed to sweep another endorsement of Brown under the rug. For Rita, much less so, but Nangle put his personal friendship to Brown as the hallmark to his endorsement. Even though many in Dave Nangle’s crew are inclined to support Congressman Stephen Lynch, with every fiber of their ‘Blue Dog’ beings, Nangle can not simply annul his endorsement of Brown out of political convenience. Friendship has to MEAN something. Nangle’s entire political existence is, all but, built on personal fidelity.

If Scott Brown bails, this will allow Nangle, and Rita, to slip back into the fold. There will be some ribbing, but pols love to win elections. As do the staff that support them. Few will argue that Mercier and Nangle don’t offer some electoral boost. If not city-wide, definitely in The Belvidere.

UPDATE: Brown won’t run, for now.

“… I was not at all certain that a third Senate campaign in less than four years, and the prospect of returning to a Congress even more partisan than the one I left, was really the best way for me to continue in public service at this time. And I know it’s not the only way for me to advance the ideals and causes that matter most to me.

“That is why I am announcing today that I will not be a candidate for the United States Senate in the upcoming special election.”

On Sunday, in Lowell, Scott Brown held a rally. (Actually, it was more like a really?) But that can happen when you use such flawed surrogates, like Kelly Ayotte:
“I absolutely support and believe in marriage as between a man and a woman, and I do think it’s unfortunate that our state has made a different decision on that. And I know that many of you who are out there working at the state level, running for state office, I commend your efforts to repeal that law here in the state of New Hampshire. And I think that’s very important.

On Sunday, Kelly Ayotte helped Scott Brown diss on Elizabeth Warren and Federal Student Loan programs:

“Don’t let her fool you on that one,” Ayotte said, as more than 100 supporters cheered.

Brown said bills like the student-loan proposal backed by Warren are “not jobs bills, they’re tax bills.”

Yikes! 100+? The Brown clique should have kept it at the SAC club, like the last two times.

Elizabeth Warren held, what I would call, a RALLY. This rally was out in Northampton, on Sunday afternoon.

Elizabeth Warren draws 1,000 supporters in Northampton (more…)

The sickly sweet promise of a foregone conclusion:

August 13th, 2012 at 2:18 pme
I think Dave Nangle should openly endorse Scott Brown. He is facing a weak Republican opponent, so he should make the bold move.

Yes, that would be a slap to the MADP, but who cares? The state party won’t do shit to Nangle and the local party is in the tank with Nangle. There are 3 TV ads with turncoat Dems endorsing Scott Brown. Brown needs Lowell. Ward 1, Nangle’s backyard, is all Brown really needs to cinch Lowell up.

Let’s drop the pretense. Free Dave Nangle!

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I’ve already proven it before, but this bears real repeating: Scott Brown is lying about Elizabeth Warren on many fronts. The most despicable lie is not the racist “and, as you can see, she’s not” questioning of her heritage…lying, despite evidence to the contrary, that she got any benefit from letting a law directory know her verbal family history of native blood. No, the most terrible lies of all are around Scott Brown’s crass use of the dead and dying to win political points, in regards to the misleading - nay, downright untruthful - representation of Warren’s work on the Travelers Insurance asbestos case.

I’ve already pointed out that asbestos union workers are angry at Scott Brown. These are people who have family members or friends who have died or are dying of asbestos poisoning. If Scott Brown were telling the truth, these are the people who’d be applauding him. But he’s not telling the truth - he’s lying, and using their tragedy to smear Warren. As the letter from Boudrow states, “Warren represented Travelers at a time when the company was on the same side as a vast majority of asbestos victims” trying to preserve the use of settlement trusts as a tool for victim compensation (both present and future), joining the case to argue in front of the US Supreme Court.

But nothing showcases the hollow morals of Scott Brown like his latest ad on this subject. Since his campaign is either too scared or too incompetent to post the ad on his YouTube account, I took the liberty of waiting until it came on the air, and filmed my TV with my smartphone. The end result is that I missed the first few seconds (mostly the “I’m Scott Brown and I approve this message”) but got the rest online.

Here is the Globe article quoted in Brown’s ad. He selectively takes out quotes, all of them out of context, but the worst one is the last quote he pulls. I’ve highlighted in yellow the beginning of the sentence Brown’s ad highlights in green with the voiceover reading.

Brown’s ad says, quoting the Globe, “the results were ‘disastrous for victims.’” The quick focus and movement around the image of the article is, I’m certain, so you can’t read any of the rest of that sentence, which is in full, “But after Warren left the case, it continued to twist and turn through the legal system, leaving a result that has been disastrous for asbestos victims.” Hardly a condemnation of Warren when you read it in context, is it?

Here is Warren’s response to Brown’s ad, two ads featuring the real story of victims. They can’t go into as much detail as I can in a blog post, but they do call him out:

But this is what we can expect from Empty Suit Brown. He has nothing to run on that the Massachusetts voters would support, so he is attacking from his position of weakness with Karl Rove tactics of lying to smear your opponent on their strengths. Don’t let him get away with it. Your job is to tell your friends and neighbors about how Scott Brown is using victims of asbestos poisoning, against their wishes, to score misleading political points.

Poor Gov. Chris Christie. Coming off an awful Republican convention in which he was a keynote, Standard and Poor’s “lowered its credit outlook for New Jersey from stable to negative.” Why so? (Bold mine.)

While Standard & Poor’s did not change the state’s AA- rating — one of the worst among the states — it warned the more drastic step of a lower rating loomed if Christie’s nearly 8 percent growth in revenue failed to materialize.

[…]

“We revised the outlook to reflect our view of the risk of revenue assumptions we view as optimistic, continued reliance on one-time measures to offset revenue shortfalls, and longer-term growing expenditure pressures,” John Sugden, a credit analyst for Standard & Poor’s, said.

[…]

Christie has spent much of the year boasting of a “Jersey Comeback” — an assertion that has fizzled in recent months as state revenue has fallen short of expectations, unemployment has risen and foreclosures remain a drag on the real estate market.

What’s Christie’s risky revenue assumption? That cutting taxes will increase the state’s revenues! The Governor’s response to S&P? Double down!

Unswayed by the latest batch of economic news, Christie repeated his call for an income tax cut at an appearance in Bergen County and said it was a “joke” that Democrats had not yet delivered the cut.

I hate having to state the obvious, but…trickle-down economics doesn’t work. Cutting taxes does not increase revenues. It decreases revenues. If I get a pay cut at work, I don’t take in more money than I did before the cut.

Why is basic math so hard for conservatives to understand? Look, we can disagree, and do, about what government should be involved in and how much it should spend. But can we, please, just agree on basic freaking addition and subtraction? George H.W. Bush called Reagan’s supply-side plans “voodoo economics” over thirty years ago - he was right then, and he’s still right. Tax cuts have slashed revenues in states who have implemented them, and destroyed our national budgets. Conservatives complain about deficits but make them worse…the Bush tax cuts account for a very large percent of our deficit right now, along with his war bill, and the severe downturn he left behind him.

If I was a more cynical sort, I’d say that most trickle-down adherents actually know that what they peddle is a crock of snake oil, but they inflict the country with this policy anyway so that when the deficit inevitably balloons, they can slash the budget in places that will hurt the worst off in our country - that they really, underneath it all, mean “trickle-UP” - cutting taxes for the wealthy so their buddies can get even more gawd-awfully rich and the gap between them and the rest of us gets wider.

And a number of conservatives do know this, and do do this, aka the Norquist “drown it in a bathtub” admission. But I believe the real core of the Republican party, especially its voters, are merely obsessed with “supply-side economics” in a religious way, clinging to trickle-down dogma. You know, like when you see an interview with Tom Cruise, and the host tries to talk about the science of mental health, and Tom Cruise bounces up and down on the couch in denial that mental disease even exists, because his crazy ass religion tells him so. You can try to get him to stop bouncing and listen to the empirical evidence, but dogma prevents him from hearing you.

Well, that’s most trickle-down adherents for you. They keep bouncing, because if they stop and actually think logically, never mind view and digest the evidence against it, it would throw their entire worldview upside down, and that is a very uncomfortable place to be.

(Article via dkos.)

The conservative folks in America have been making quite a bit of hay with this quote by President Obama:

If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

In an effort to distract from the refusal of Mitt Romney to release more of his tax returns, the GOP noise machine has focused on the quote above, flogging it like the proverbial dead horse.

So convinced in the focus group tested power of this meme, the Romney campaign crafted this TV ad:

“My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company? … President Obama, you’re killing us out here. Through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business. Why are you demonizing us for it?”

The problem is ….
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I woke up and opted to listen to Warren Shaw’s show on WCAP. This is not my normal routine, but on occasion I check the show out. I think Shaw bends towards a more conservative view, but generally, I think he does a good job conducting the conversation. His guests, most likely reflect the AM radio listeners. (Note: I listen to the show via internet.)

Luck would have it, Shaw is interviewing two republicans, Cathy Richardson and George Boag, who are vying to challenge Democrat Collen Garry in November. I’ll tell you now, believe it or not, I was just sipping my coffee, half listening to the show. I figured I’d listen to their views on state issues. The idea of writing a blog about this was the furthest from my mind.

But … then Cathy Richardson opted to share her wingnut views.
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