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Howie column ping

Want payback? Vote for Scott Brown!
By Howie Carr | Tuesday, January 19, 2010 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists

Go Scott go.

This election is payback, for everyone in Massachusetts who has to work for a living, who isn’t on the dole, or a trust fund. It’s for everyone who hates getting dozens of robo-calls from clueless pols pushing “Marsha” Coakley and from union thugs living large off your union dues.

Vote for Brown if you’re tired of the 25 percent increase in the sales tax, and the brand new 6.25 percent sales tax on alcohol, on top of the 37 percent excise tax.

Send the hacks a message.

Vote for Brown if they ignored you when you voted for the death penalty, and to cut income taxes, and they wouldn’t even let you vote on gay marriage. If you’re still waiting for your property tax cut. If you’re still waiting for the attorney general to send a corrupt pol - any corrupt pol - to the can.

Send them a message.

If you’re old and worried about the Medicare cuts they’re proposing, if you’re young and don’t want to pay the fine for not having health insurance, if you have a good health-care plan and you dread paying Obama’s 40 percent tax. Marsha - er, Martha - had a message on TV yesterday morning for everyone who falls in those three categories:

“They are wrong.”

That’s what these people always say. You’re wrong, they’re right. Nothing to see here, move along. And make damn sure you pay your taxes, and forget what Obama said about not raising taxes on anybody making under $250,000. That was then, this is now.

On Sunday I called Coakley “Mike Dukakis in a skirt.” I would now like to apologize to Mike Dukakis.

Did you see this woman on Ch. 25 yesterday? Does she ever take her foot out of her mouth? She claimed she’s been running a “positive” campaign - you know, like Chuck Schumer calling Scott Brown a “teabagger.” Then she said her big problems have been “bad weather” and “the holidays” - Christmas, in other words. You should check out the whole thing. She’s not standing for the big insurance companies, even though she went down to D.C. last week to pick up some cash from them.

You want irony? Do you realize that if the state Democrats hadn’t changed the Senate succession law twice in the past five years, they wouldn’t be in meltdown mode this morning?

Their lame (soon-to-be) lame-duck governor could have appointed whatever stiff he wanted.

Irony? Here’s another one: Steve Lynch, the congressman from Southie, was basically kicked to the curb by the unions because he wasn’t gung-ho enough for their scheme to destroy health care. Maybe he couldn’t have won the Democrat primary last month, but a couple of things you can say about Lynch.

Unlike Martha, he knows who Curt Schilling [stats] roots for, and he also knows that there are still terrorists in Afghanistan. Come to think of it, I’ll bet he can also spell Massachusetts.

This is Martha yesterday on the voters she says are wrong: “I think they’re gonna send someone to Massachusetts who has a proven record.”

That would be you, Martha. You’ll be the one we “send” to Massachusetts. Scott Brown we’ll send to Washington.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1226579

January 18, 2010
The Content of Obama’s Character
By Christopher Chantrill

On the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday, we celebrate also the first year of America’s first black president, Barack Obama.

It’s telling that 47 years ago, when Reverend King made his great speech on the Washington Mall, he did not say that he had a dream that one day, an African-American would become president. King’s vision on August 28, 1963 was less ambitious:

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Even so, Barack Obama was elected president based on the color of his skin. On the night of November 4, 2008, African Americans wept with joy because one of their own had become president against all that they had been told and all their fears about a racist America. Liberals rejoiced because of the “first,” that America had answered the question: Is America ready for a black president?

Some Americans voted for Barack Obama for non-racial reasons. Independents and disgruntled Republicans voted against the mistakes and the corruption of the Bush era.

Now that Obama is president, he is no longer being judged by the color of his skin. Now, the vast majority of Americans will judge him on the content of his character. It is his character, of course, that is the great unknown, as Charles Krauthammer has written:

Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.

But word is starting to dribble out. Reports Hugh Hewitt on the latest campaign page-turner, Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilmann:

The portrait of the president is really an effort in poison-pen pointillism, where hundreds and hundreds of razor sharp paragraphs combine to create a deeply disquieting picture of the new president. President Obama is presented as insecure and needy of reassurance (p. 25), self-important, cynical and megalomaniacal (pp 30-31), petulant and spoiled (p. 111), touchy and vain (p. 112), hypocritical (p. 119), overweening (p. 184) and deceptive (p. 120.)

Another disquieting note is the overarching theme of Obama’s first year of governance: the determination to govern against the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, which states that government gains its just powers from the consent of the governed. The American people do not consent to the $787-billion stimulus. They do not consent to the cap-and-trade bill. They do not consent to the federalization of health care.

The comparison to the character and governance of President George W. Bush is telling. We knew, before we elected him president, a lot about his character: his fight against business failure and alcoholism. President Bush’s character was confirmed in the challenges of his presidency, when he submitted to a political immolation in his second term as the price of getting the war on terror right.

The awful chasm opening before us today after the first year of Obama is the realization that we have no knowledge of the man’s character. If President Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, President Obama has been spoon-fed royal jelly by the worker bees in the liberal hive all his adult life. Even now, we know of no occasion in his charmed life when Barack Obama rose above the shibboleths and routine thuggeries of political faction.

Yet President Obama is called to lead the nation out of a nasty recession provoked by his party’s compulsive manipulation of the credit system, a history that reaches from the $400-billion losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all the way back to Andrew Jackson’s war with the Second United States Bank.

In the year ahead, as unemployment stays high and as isolated desertions in the Democratic ranks metastasize into headlong routs of whole battalions, President Obama will face challenges that test every fiber of his being. Sensing his insecurity and need for reassurance, cunning men and women will suggest ways of using his political power to get back in the game. Will he sacrifice his party and his presidency and do the right thing, or will he sacrifice the American people on the altar of political expediency?

I fear the answer to that question.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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