Mass. Politics

Even in a depression, the Massachusetts solon wants to tax & spend

If there’s a silver lining to the current economic crisis, it’s that there’s no money in the budget for the usual pork-barrel spending and apparently little interest in new taxes to pay for them. At least the liberal leadership in Massachusetts’ Legislature doesn’t have the appetite for it, although the rank-and-file are still seem hungry for it.

DeLeo’s bare-bones budget has had one predictable outcome, whetting the appetites of rank-and-file lawmakers for a broad-based tax hike. State Rep. Brian Wallace (D-South Boston) said there is a growing acceptance of some kind of tax increase in the Legislature, because it’s the only way to restore their pet projects.

Said Wallace: “We’re going to have to do something with taxes, I think. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”

Or you could, you know, do without. When times are tough and there’s not enough money for everything we want, a normal family cuts not only luxuries but even necessities that can be deferred. But not the Massachusetts Legislature. they couldn’t possibly do without, say, the Quinn bill, a boondoggle that gives raises to cops for going back to school, yet the programs are essentially diploma mills—no real school work required—and results in law enforcement officers getting lifetime raises of 10, 20, or 25 percent. Raises that also inflate their eventual pensions.

Or, for example, studying the winter moth caterpillar. I could be convinced to see the value of studying this pest so we can prevent infestations… when we can afford it. But right now even $150,000 is too much to pay.

How about something potentially even more devastating, like $850,000 for homosexuality indoctrination programs in public schools? On Friday, MassResistance reported that funding for these programs had been cut from the budget, but then later updated the report to say that amendments have been filed—at the urging of the homosexual lobby—to restore the funding. I won’t lie to you: Even in the best of times this is a bad use of money, but now, there is no excuse for it. Morally, we can’t afford it ever. Financially, we certainly can’t afford it now.

But the tax-and-spend crowd have forgotten what it means to do without. They have become gluttons at the taxpayers’ expense and blindly propose new taxes that will force us ever deeper into an economic depression to satisfy the lobbyists’ and pressure groups’ desires to re-engineer our society at any cost and to keep the money spigot flowing to their political friends and campaign funders.

It’s time to say No. But has the Massachusetts taxpayer had enough? Can anything wake them from their slumber before it’s too late?

The trouble with the Boston Globe

Speaking of Boston newspapers, the blog The Liberty Papers writes about the recent and ongoing troubles of the Boston Globe and opines that it’s not just another victim of the general decline of the newspaper industry and the economy, specifically, advertising revenues. No, the author of the piece, says the Globe’s problems go much deeper than that.

In fact, he says, the newspaper’s advertising revenues have been declining much faster than other newspapers in the region, including it’s sister publication with The New York Times Co., the Worcester Telegram. And the same thing goes with a decline in the subscriber base.

In 2008 the Globe’s average weekday circulation fell to 350,605, down from 382,503, or 8.3 percent [since 1992 when it was purchased by the NYT]. Sunday circulation fell 6.5 percent to 525,959. The competing newspapers for the Boston Area, the Boston Herald, and the Patriot Ledger (and to a lesser extent, a smaller local paper, “The Enterprise”), are doing alright… as much as any newspaper is anyway. Both are down about 4%, HALF the decline of the Globe; and counter to the general trend in the newspaper business (actually in most any business) of the second and third papers in a market (which they are) losing more circulation in a downturn than the market leader.

Then the question becomes, Why is the Globe doing so much worse? His conclusion may surprise you. In fact, he says, the Boston Herald and Patriot Ledger remains somewhat conservative newspapers (or as he describes them, “moderate center left” and “moderate center right”, which is pretty conservative in Massachusetts), even as the Globe has gone more and more hard left ever since being purchased by The New York Times Co. Well, that matches the liberal population in Massachusetts, right? Not quite, he says.

Massachusetts has a reputation as a very liberal state, and Boston a very liberal city; and to an extent that’s true. Certainly it is reflected in the states voting record, and much of it’s congressional contingent.

However, regarding Massachusetts as a liberal stronghold, fails to take into account the true nature of the states liberalism.

The vast majority of the Boston area is blue collar, and low level white collar, union, catholic, old line northeast democrats; with a significant minority of what we used to call Boston Brahmin democrats (rich, socially and politically conservative on a personal basis; but they support liberal politicians to seem “progressive”, to make sure “the right people” run things, and because democrats are easier to buy off).

Outside of the immediate Boston area, Massachusetts is basically politically identical to western Pennsylvania. It’s union Democrats, and center right Republicans; pro gun, pro hunting, pro business, and anti-leftist. Hell, still today, Western Massachusetts, and the adjoining parts of Connecticut and New York, are the firearms manufacturing capital of the western world.

It’s a very interesting perspective and probably not far off. I’ve found in one-on-one conversations with folks, especially older folks, that it’s not that they support very liberal social engineering and wealth re-distribution, but that they’re still stuck in the idea that the Democrats are the party of the average guy versus the fat-cat elite Republicans. But the fact is that you’re as likely to find liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats hobnobbing in the cities, while more conservative Democrats and Republicans find common ground outside the cities. This is why the liberal elites on Beacon Hill couldn’t possibly allow same-sex marriage to come to a general vote of the populace: Because they knew that they’d lose the vote before they had the chance to indoctrinate the populace sufficiently that two men or two women can be married and to think otherwise is bigoted. They needed time to let the Kennedys and their ilk indoctrinate the those one-time Reagan Democrats into the new reality.

Yet, perhaps the Globe outpaced the populace and went further left faster than the people could be brought along. Oh sure, the glitterati and the politicians that the Globe is supposed to cover have all come out of the woodwork to lament the possible loss of the newspaper. But the people have been voting with their pocketbooks for years, dropping their subscriptions to the newspaper with every bizarre anti-Bush screed or anti-Catholic editorial cartoon. Herald columnist Howie Carr has gleefully filled up not one but two recent columns full of the Globe’s follies, including some shoddy reporting in which the desire to advance a liberal cause resulted in retractions because they just didn’t get the story right. After a while, the people began to notice.

Will it be the end of the world if the Globe shutters its doors? Competition is always better for the consumer, so I’d prefer two healthy competitors in this market to one, even if the one I prefer was the winner. On the other hand, if the business can’t offer a product that the consumer wants, then let another take his place.

Photo credit: Flickr.com user gwbstr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

$800 million is not enough for Boston public schools?

Parents of students in Boston public schools are protesting plans to bypass the city’s school system when handing out federal “stimulus” funds. They claim the schools are underfunded:

Parents spoke of how their kids’ schools, already depleted of arts teachers and librarians and lacking modern facilities, will be further crippled by the $812 million budget that the Boston School Committee approved Wednesday. The package calls for eliminating 536 education positions, including 212 classroom jobs (134 teachers and 78 teacher aides).

So, they’re spending more than three-quarters of a billion dollars and they’re talking about cutbacks and how it “cripples” the students’ education. How much should we spending? What are we spending all that money on? And yes, even though I don’t live in the city of Boston, I said “we”: the city school system—like all public school systems in Massachusetts—receives an enormous amount of money from the commonwealth.

The Boston public school system has 56,000 students. That means they spend $14,500 per student each year. In 2006, the average per-pupil spending in the United States was $8,287. Massachusetts spent the third most of any state at $10,693. Yet Boston spends $14,500 and that’s not nearly enough! In national achievement and accountability assessment, Boston falls short of the standard in nearly every category.

Parents say the schools are falling apart, the athletic fields are crummy, the textbooks are old. Let’s set aside the fact that Massachusetts has had an unprecedented boom in school construction in the past decade or so—maybe Boston has been left out of that a little—where has all the money gone?

Back in 1994, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby identified the culprit: “In the Boston system, 40 percent of the budget never gets to the classroom; it is absorbed by the School Department bureaucracy.” If you look at this story about 2008’s budget woes for the school district, you get the sense that the percentage never improved: The fact that there are 80 unfilled jobs in the bureaucracy available to be cut indicates how much bloat there really is in the system.

(On a side note, in 1996 Boston Mayor Tom Menino called school reform his top priority and said in his January 17 State of the City address: “I want to be judged as your mayor by what happens now in the Boston Public Schools. I expect you to hold me accountable. … If I fail, judge me harshly.” The schools are still a mess more than a decade later. Voters have never held him accountable.)

What we see here is that government is the worst entity for educating our children because in an environment without accountability and a free rein to dump money on cronies and pet projects and ideological indoctrination, actual education suffers. It also shows that the standard metric of per-pupil spending is meaningless when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of schools. Yet spending money is about the only tool most politicians have.

Which is yet another reason we’re going to homeschool our kids. I just wish I wasn’t wasting my taxes on schools that don’t educate other peoples’ kids.

Photo credit: Flickr user kevindooley. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Placing more tolls on fewer drivers is not the solution

When you’re in over your head, stop digging. That old saw same to mind as I read this article that says fewer people are using the Massachusetts Turnpike because of rising gas prices so they’re thinking of raising tolls to compensate. Huh?

Drivers, struggling with high gas prices, avoided the debt-plagued Pike this summer as the department’s finances inched closer to junk-bond status yesterday.“This is yet another wake-up call,” said Pike board member Mary Connaughton. “Barring some type of state aid, the only solution is a toll increase.”

Typical liberal thinking. It ignores actual economic behavior or that people will act in their own self-interest. What we see is that commuters who are cost-conscious are finding alternate means of getting to work because of a rise in the cost of commuting. So is the solution really to increase the cost even further? That will only drive even more tollpayers away from the Pike and exacerbate the problem.

I’ve told the story before of the Democrat Senator in the early 90s who asked the Congressional Budget Office to conduct a study of the potential revenue from a 100% tax on income over $1 million. That is, you pay normal rates on all the money you earn up to $1 million, but every dollar you earn above that you turn over to the government. He was actually surprised to learn the CBO’s answer: The potential revenue would be ZERO. If the state confiscated all income over $1 million why would anyone bother earning that much? Better to let the company keep the money to invest in itself, in new employees, pay raises, capital improvements, than to simply give it away.

What the liberal Senator—and the liberals running the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority—don’t seem to get is that taxpayers and commuters act in their self-interest and aren’t just waiting for some out-of-touch bureaucrat or politician to tell them what to do.

I have a suggestion to the Turnpike Authority: How about cutting tolls and then cutting costs and seeing how many more people, not fewer, start using the Pike.

Lawmakers angry at being held accountable

Democrat House lawmakers in Massachusetts are mad at their leadership because they’re being forced to vote on a same-sex marriage bill in an election year.

“He has no concern for the members,” said one legislator, who requested anonymity. “This is stuff we should be dealing with in the first year (of the session). It’s a lose-lose for anyone facing a challenger.”

Let that sink in for a second. Despite their claims, the politicians admit that the same-sex so-called marriage is so unpopular with the voters, even in liberal Massachusetts, that they don’t want to be held accountable for their vote. Instead they’d prefer to expand it into the rest of the United States, but only if they can do so when they have the maximum possible time to let voters forget. Or they could emulate their craven Senate brethren and just hold a voice vote so as to avoid being counted in the crowd.

These are your legislators, ladies and gentlemen. Cowards.

The fact is that they know that if they let democracy actually work, they would never be able to push their re-engineering deconstruction of society forward. This is why they also hide behind legislative tricks and gimmicks to avoid allowing a popular referendum on a constitutional amendment. It’s the traditional disdain for the average voter inherent in the liberal worldview. They see all of us as so bigoted, so stupid, so incapable of doing the “right” thing— as they envision it—that they must circumvent our right to self-governance and impose the solutions of a minority on the majority. We don’t live in a democracy nor a constitutional republic anymore. We are ruled by oligarchs who blind us with bread and circuses, or to use a more updated phrase, earmarks and pork-barrel spending.

The good news is that the legislators are feeling the pressure and are worried that going on the record today will affect their electoral chances in November. It means that constituents are contacting their legislators. Some representatives’ offices are reporting that calls, emails, and letters are coming in 6-1 against the bill that would repeal a 1913 law that keeps Massachusetts from spreading her errors.

(The law makes it illegal for out-of-staters to be married in Massachusetts if the marriage would be illegal in their home state. Homosexual lobbyists make much of the fact that the law’s original intent was to prevent “miscegenation” or mixed-race marriages. Whatever the original intent of the law, it’s effect today is to prevent out-of-state homosexuals and lesbians from getting marriage licenses in Massachusetts and then suing back home by invoking the “full faith and credit” clause of the US Constitution. The clear propaganda goal here is not just to repeal the law, but also to create the mental equivalence in the minds of the public between race and sexual preference.)

Photo: Kjetil Ree (Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0)

A tax cut is “unreasonable”

The Massachusetts Senate president wants the taxpayers to know who’s really in charge. And it’s not the taxpayers.

Sen. Therese Murray went before a Boston business community meeting this week to ask for their help to “educate” taxpayers on why it would be a bad idea to lower the state income tax rate in November, as a ballot question will ask them to do.

(Incidentally, it won’t “repeal” the tax, as the story claims, but lower it back to 5%, the rate it was before the state Legislature passed a “temporary” 18-month-long increase back in … 1989.)

Every time the topic of the Legislature keeping its promise comes up, we get the same song and dance. When economic times are tough, we’re told we just can’t afford it because revenues have dropped. But when times are good we’re told we can’t afford it because … times might get tough again. Murray is an expert at this soft shoe.

“We need the support of the business community to educate the public and make sure we don’t fall victim to a reckless vote in November,” she said yesterday morning at a packed breakfast meeting at the Hyatt Regency Boston hotel.

Ever notice how it’s a “reckless vote” whenever the voters might vote in a way that the liberals don’t like? Oh that messy democracy. Those silly voters think that they’re the ones in charge. But we know better, don’t we? Just ask the state Supreme Judicial Court and the attempt to have a “reckless vote” on the preservation of marriage.

As expected, the usual catalog of destruction is trotted out to scare voters.

The result, she said, would be widespread devastation.

“Revenues from our income tax represent $12 billion - that’s 60 percent of our total tax revenues and 40 percent of the entire state budget,” she said.

Without revenues from income taxes, school teachers and police officers would lose their jobs and road improvement projects would be stalled, she said.

Fearmongering

Photo is in the public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

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Lawmakers wonder why gas prices are so high

Mass. lawmakers are calling hearings to figure out why gas prices are so high. Here’s a start for them: weak dollar, constrained supply, competition from India and China, lack of domestic drilling, high gas taxes. So which of these do state lawmakers have control over?

“People are curtailing their Memorial Day and summer travel plans. You can’t help but think there’s someone out there who’s benefiting from all this - and it’s not us,” said Sen. Susan Fargo (D-Lincoln).

Gee, you think? Who might that be? Could it be the people who drill the oil out of the ground? Certainly, the person who has to buy the gas—and pay for others’ gas through higher prices—aren’t benefiting.

“People can barely afford to get back and forth to work,” Pacheco said. “The point of this is to talk to consumer experts about what is going on here, and what we can and can’t do about it.”

Yes, let’s see what the politicians can do about it. Hey, maybe they can penalize the oil companies and gas station owners! Certainly, lowering the gas taxes is out of the question.

“There’s no way I would recommend doing that without some way to replenish the funds we would lose for roads and bridges,” Pacheco said. “Yes, we would be able to help consumers for a very short period of time, but we would lose revenue for the same roads and bridges that we hear complaints about all the time.”

Here’s a simple lesson from the Ronald Reagan School of Supply-Side Economics. High prices are deterring people from buying gas, as Pacheco acknowledges, and if people avoid buying gas it means they’re paying fewer gas taxes anyway. So if we lower the gas tax perhaps, just perhaps, that will spur people to buy more gas and thus increase gas-tax revenues.

But no, liberal politicians don’t seem to grasp basic economics and assume that consumers/taxpayers are “sheeple” who will not be influenced by changing circumstances. In fact, some are even proposing raising gas taxes to fund infrastructure.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

If Kennedy resigns, who would take his place?

James Taranto at “Best of the Web Today” outlines a very interesting possible scenario should Ted Kennedy leave office prematurely and a replacement be needed. (Kennedy’s regular term expires in 2013.) As Taranto points out, the Democrats in 2004 changed the age-old rules for replacing a US Senator who leaves office before his term his up.

In 2004, Massachusetts Democrats anticipated another Senate vacancy, when one of their own—a haughty, French-looking one, who by the way served in Vietnam—received a presidential nomination. The governor at the time, Mitt Romney, was a Republican, and Democrats, including Sen. Kennedy, wanted to keep the seat in Democratic hands.

So the Massachusetts Legislature voted along party lines to strip the governor of his appointment power, even that of appointing an interim Senator, requiring instead a special election with 145 to 160 days after the vacancy. In that case, it was to strip a Republican of his power. In this case it would prevent Democrat Deval Patrick from appointing a replacement.

While it would seem the Democrats are still favored, there would be a lot of jockeying for the seat on their side. Meanwhile, the Republicans have a contender who managed 41% of the vote against Kennedy in 1994, then won statewide office eight years later. And he happens to be unemployed at the moment: Mitt Romney. Could he win? Maybe, maybe not. If he still holds presidential aspirations, it might be worthwhile to throw his hat in the ring and give it a shot.

Of course, we shouldn’t put it past the Democrats to change the rules in the middle of the game and just reverse their previous law. After all, using and abusing the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government to advance your own agenda and power is the name of the liberal Democrat game in Massachusetts.

Still it makes an interesting thought experiment.

“Underperforming” semantics by the Board of Education

What’s more important? That we not feel bad about our failure or that we stop failing? In politically correct Massachusetts, it’s the former. The state Board of Education has decided that it will no longer use the words “failing” or even “underperforming” to describe schools that are failing. (Isn’t “underperforming” already a euphemism?)

To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure.

Instead of calling these schools “underperforming,” the Board of Education is considering labeling them as “Commonwealth priority,” to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale.

Schools in the direst straits, now known as “chronically underperforming,” would get the more urgent but still vague label of “priority one.”

The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students’ self-esteem.

Rather than addressing the actual problem—why are schools and students failing?—they’ve spent three meetings discussing what to call it. And in the end, whether you call it “failing”, “underperforming”, or “Commonwealth priority” (there’s Orwellian newspeak if I’ve ever seen it), those who are indeed failing know that they’re really failing.

This is bureaucratic cowardice that fails to address the real issues—incompetent educators, unsupportive parents, students who need extra time or attention—but instead pretends that everything is hunky-dory and would anyone like more taxpayer-funded grants for field trips and computers and Earth Day programs?

Ironically, it’s the token student on the Board of Education who cuts through the baloney:

Zachary Tsetsos, a senior at Oxford High School and the only student on the board, said he finds the debate frivolous.

“Why are we spending time on this?,” said the 17-year-old. “I don’t want to tiptoe around the issue. I’m not concerned about what title we give these schools. Let’s work on fixing them.”

Or John Silber, former president of Boston University, former head of the Board of Education, and former gubernatorial candidate:

“Changing the name doesn’t change the reality. I think Shakespeare had a good line: ‘A rose by another name would smell as sweet.’ A skunk by any other name would stink.”

[…]

“Now here they have schools that are not doing adequately, so they’re changing the name?” he said with dismay. “Why don’t we call them special schools?”

 

Reminds me of the dialogue from “The Incredibles”, where Elastigirl tells her son, Dash, “Every child is special.” To which he replies, “If everyone is special, then NO ONE is special.” In other words, your words and your reality don’t match up.

Into the (abortion) danger zone

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley—to absolutely no one’s surprise—has declared that wider restrictions of the free speech of pro-lifers in Massachusetts are not, in fact, restrictions on their free speech. Her brief in response to a lawsuit by pro-lifers makes the same argument she made before the Legislature last year when she backed the law that expanded abortion clinic buffer zones from 18 feet to 35 feet.

What the abortion clinics and their pet politicians want is to use the coercive power of the legislature and courts to silence an inconvenient opposition

(The buffer zones prevent pro-lifers from approaching or talking to anyone with that distance from an abortion clinic’s entrance or a 6-foot floating buffer around people going in or out of a clinic. How you’re supposed to guess the intention of someone walking down the sidewalk in the general direction of the clinic is beyond me.)

Of course, Coakley is trying to feed us baloney and tell us it’s prime rib.

The “act does not ban any expressive activity, but instead ‘merely regulates the places where communications may occur’ during clinic business hours,” Coakley wrote in the brief.

Typical political doublespeak. So-called “expressive activity” is being banned within a particular place. And, yes, that’s permissible under the Constitution. No one has the right to say anything at any time. Yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre is the standard analogy. But let’s not beat around the bush here.

The “suggestion that under the act ‘leafleting and solicitation [are] completely banned from public places’ is incorrect,” the brief said. “… Plaintiffs, and everyone else, may continue to hold signs, pray, sing, chant, leaflet, converse, and engage in any other kind of lawful speech so long as they do so from outside any buffer zone.”

I haven’t seen the original complaint she’s quoting, but this is disingenuous too. At how many feet of buffer zone does our free speech become effectively nullified? 35 feet? 50 feet? 10,000 feet? What if the whole state of Massachusetts were one, big buffer zone? We’d still be allowed to hold signs, prayer, etc., as long as it’s not within the boundaries of the state. Free speech!

If we’re pushed beyond the limits of the human voice (or eye, in the case of signs) such that we can no longer effectively communicate our freedom of speech has become irrelevant.

The question should be: What is harassing about a sign or a prayer or a conversation or any kind of lawful speech.

Speech should be restricted only for a very compelling public safety and order issue. Yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre puts lives at risk because it can cause a panic. Making a false police report puts police and the public in danger as they search for a non-existent criminal. Using “fighting words” puts people in danger because it cold cause violence.

How does a Hail Mary endanger a life? How does a level-headed request for a conversation with a woman about to abort her child risk public order?

If inconvenience and undesirability were to be the guidelines, I’d like them to pass laws against aggressive panhandlers and petition holders and people canvassing for politicians with whom I disagree and so on. But part of living in a free, democratic society is putting up with speech we dislike, disdain, or disagree with.

What the abortion clinics and their pet politicians want is to use the coercive power of the legislature and courts to silence an inconvenient opposition whose success is success at saving lives—and siphoning coins from their coffers—depends on being able to warn these mothers of the truth of what they contemplate.

If they have to ravage the Constitution to accomplish this goal, so be it.

Skyrocketing costs, new taxes…. surprise!

Mitt Romney and the exceedingly Democrat state Legislature in Massachusetts passed a universal health insurance coverage law before he left. It’s universal in that every business with more than 10 employees has to pay for insurance for employees, never mind whether they can afford or not, and every citizen has to have approved insurance, whether they can afford it or not.

Of course, if they can’t afford it, then that’s where the Massachusetts taxpayers step in. Oh, we were assured that no new taxes would have to be raised to keep the plan affordable— just like we were once assured that the Big Dig (the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project through the center of Boston) would only cost $5 billion and take 10 years to finish. It took 20 years and $15 billion and, by the way, leaks like a sieve and has already had one collapse that killed a driver.

So now, experts say the universal health care plan costs are skyrocketing and taxes will have to be raised in 2009 to cover it. Of course.

Why does anyone believe these politicians any more?

An end to homelessnes in our time

All hail, the Savior, Deval! That’s right, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has a $10 million plan to end homelessness. How will this happen, you ask? Details, details! Why, he’s spending $10 million, that’s how.

I’m only partially kidding. The truth is decidedly less humorous.

Gov. Deval Patrick is set to unveil a major new $10 million push to virtually eliminate homelessness in Massachusetts in the next five years.

Yes, but how will this $10 million do what 40 years of the so-called “War on Poverty” and several trillion dollars in welfare spending have to do?

The goal of the initiative is to come up with better ways to detect when individuals and families are on the verge of falling into homelessness - and move in swiftly with aid and support.

In other words, they don’t actually have a plan yet. The $10 million will be spent on coming up with a plan. Because, you know, it’s so difficult to tell when someone’s about to fall into homelessness.

Another goal is to quickly move those already homeless into permanent housing, including an increased use of housing vouchers.

Which does nothing to attack the root cause of homelessness. So you give people vouchers to move into permanent housing. After the voucher is used up, how will they pay for the next month’s rent and the month after that? But this sort of plan isn’t really about ending homelessness, is it?

As a down payment on the plan, Patrick’s proposed state budget will include $1.75 million for MassHousing and $8.25 million for the state Department of Housing and Urban Development, an administration source told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity ahead of the formal release of the budget on Wednesday.

Ah, there’s the crux of the plan. In reality it’s a thin tissue of a scheme to “end” homelessness covering the real goal which is to shovel ever more millions of dollars into the hands of political cronies and appear to his liberal base to be “doing” something about the problem by expanding government.

“At the root of most homelessness issues in most instances is a lack of affordable housing,” he added. “How do we do a better job of detecting when families or individuals are at risk? How do we assess that?”

At the root of most homelessness is an inability to pay for housing. Gee, thanks. How many millions did we spend on that in-depth study? Of course, not all homelessness falls into such a category. More than a few of the homeless are the mentally ill or the hopelessly addicted, people who refuse to pull themselves out of the gutter in despair or cussedness or a lack of will.

The flaw in Deval’s vision—and that of so many liberals and even some conservatives—is a failure to appreciate that giant bureaucracies are incapable of addressing root causes for individuals. At best they deal with the large swath of symptoms related to the “disease” without effecting a cure.

The best way to deal with such social problems is the way Christians have done it for millennia: one by one, bringing charity and the love of Christ to each individual. Unless families, friends, neighbors, and local parishes get involved in the lives of the people who are afflicted, the problem will continue in perpetuity. Even then, Christ promised that we would always have the poor.

But today we have the Messiah of the Big Government to save us from every ill that might befall us, taxing us in into poverty so that bureaucracies can be erected to treat out poverty in a never-ending circle of misery. Deliver us, Lord!

You can’t legislate common sense

Yet more evidence of the flawed thinking in today’s political environment, where we think that every problem has a solution in a politician’s newly filed bill. A college student in Boston recently died when he took a drunken plunge from an apartment building’s rooftop. He’s not the first to do so and he won’t be the last, but no one could claim that there’s an epidemic of people falling from roofs with about one per year reported in the newspapers.

That doesn’t deter Boston City Councilor Mike Ross who wants to pass an ordinance to make hanging out on a rooftop illegal, except where there is a permitted roof deck. He envisions multi-hundred dollar fines as deterrents. Ross claims, “This will make rooftops safer.”

That is complete bunk. The passage of this ordinance will do no such thing. Rooftops will be just as safe or unsafe as they were before. All this does is provide a mechanism for penalizing folks who knew how to use their roofs responsibly.

The only solution to this tragedy and others like it is simple common sense.

Think about your average college student party. How many laws do you think were being broken that night in Allston? Underage drinking? Illegal drugs? There was certainly fighting and disturbing the peace. If there had been a fine for partying on the rooftop, it would not have been a deterrent. That would have made it more enticing as the forbidden fruit.

Every time something tragic happens, politicians know that they have to appear concerned and have to justify themselves. They need to show the voters that the politician has been put in office because he can singlehandedly change the world for the better. He can’t.

The only solution to this tragedy and others like it does not come written on a ticket or a summons. It is simple common sense and that’s not something you can legislate.

Unfortunately, people don’t want to hear that. They want to be told that the Columbine and Virginia Tech killers could have been stopped with more gun control laws. They want to be told that wildfires and earthquakes and plane crashes could be prevented with more regulation and red tape. What they don’t want to be told is that sometimes bad things happen in a fallen world and sometimes those bad things happen because a nice kid with a life full of opportunity does something stupid, something that a hundred other people get away with. But he doesn’t because he steps left instead of right and a bad choice escalates into a tragic accident.

An instinctive turn toward political solutions is evidence that we harbor a false hope that we can build a perfect world without pain or heartbreak or loss if only we could find the right combination of laws to compensate for our occasional lack of common sense or just plain bad luck. Sorry, but it isn’t going to happen.

Vindication for Catholic leader; but blow to journalistic integrity

Last year, Larry Cirignano, who at the time was head of the group Catholic Citizenship, was charged with assault after being accused of shoving a woman to the ground at a pro-marriage rally. This woman, Sarah Loy, is an official with the Massachusetts ACLU and she was standing in front of the speaker’s podium holding a pro-gay sign. Cirignano escorted her away and the woman took a header. She claimed he slammed her to the ground. While other bystanders disputed that claim, a reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, sister publication of the Boston Globe and owned by the New York Times, supported Loy’s version of events.

Well, a year later, after having had his reputation trashed in the local media, Cirignano has been found innocent by a jury. In fact, the jury completely rejected Loy’s claims and the supposedly unbiased eyewitness account of the reporter, Richard Nangle.

Worcester Telegram-Gazette reporter Richard Nangle misreported the story from the beginning and eventually became a star witness for the prosecution. Telegram Metro columnist Diane Williamson openly mocked the defense case in an Oct. 18 piece entitled “Fishy Excuse Shouldn’t Get Him Off,” and called Nangle the only “objective” witness.

[…]

At the trial, only two of the prosecution’s witnesses supported Loy’s account of the “assault.” Nangle, who was covering the rally for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and Unitarian minister Aaron Payson both testified they saw Cirignano push Loy. However, Cirignano’s defense counsel established with video and photos that neither man was close enough to have reliably witnessed the event.

Several witnesses who were in the immediate vicinity testified that Cirignano led Loy away from the lectern with his right arm against her back and had started back to the lectern before Loy fell down. According to witnesses, Loy tripped backward over a 13-year-old girl’s foot, landed on her buttocks, curled up into a fetal position and began to cry. She did not seek medical treatment. Loy said in her testimony that she had felt continuous pressure on her back, but had not actually been pushed down.

Yet with all that established, look at what Nangle wrote for publication the day after the events:

WORCESTER – Tempers boiled over at an anti-gay marriage rally yesterday when the executive director of the Boston-based Catholic Citizenship emerged from behind a lectern outside City Hall, rushed toward a female counter-demonstrator, and pushed her to the ground.

Sarah Loy, 27, of Worcester, was holding a sign in defense of same-sex marriage amid a sea of green “Let the People Vote” signs when Larry Cirignano of Canton, who heads the Catholic Citizenship group, ran into the crowd, grabbed her by both shoulders and told her, “You need to get out. You need to get out of here right now.” Mr. Cirignano then pushed her to the ground, her head slamming against the concrete sidewalk.

Here’s an important point to consider: Despite claims to the contrary, an objective reporter on stories related to the major cultural issues of our time is a rarity. I’ve been at pro-life sidewalk counseling and prayer, at the March for Life in Washington, at Operation Rescue demonstrations, at pro-marriage rallies in Boston, and rarely has the coverage in print or broadcast in the mainstream media been accurate. In fact, I’ve seen what can only be described as willful distortion. I’ve seen with my own eyes pro-abortion activists fighting with police only to have the TV reporter show the footage in such a way as to leave the impression that it was pro-lifers fighting with them.

In other words, a reporter is not necessarily an objective witness and every report on such things should be read with a critical eye and a grain of salt.

Slot machines as the great socializers

Got to love the spin coming from Mass. Governor Deval Patrick’s administration in favor of his plans to legalize casino gambling (via Squaring the Boston Globe):

From today’s Boston Globe casino story:

“Gambling and other forms of entertainment associated with resort casinos can also provide social benefits associated with increased social stimulation and reduction of isolation,” particularly among the elderly, [Health and Human Services Secretary Judy Ann Bigby] said.

Anyone who has watched seniors hypnotically feed quarter and nickel slots can testify to the truth content here.

In software marketing they say, “It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!” We can apply this to other initiatives. For example, think of all the benefits of the brutal genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region: Many fewer mouths to feed, after all.

It’s ironic that the Health and Human Services secretary sees the benefits of senior citizens gambling away their fixed incomes and financial safety nets as a net plus.

Is there any doubt that if Patrick were a Republican proposing legalized gambling, the Democrats would be citing the overwhelming social problems brought on by legalized gambling? They would trot out those very same senior citizens as victims of soulless corporations and Republican greed and the Boston Globe would run articles bemoaning the effects on the downtrodden of society, the poor and minorities and elderly.

Unfortunately, all too often politics is just another word for hypocrisy.