Days are numbered for Boston Globe

Article 4-26-09

Globies planned own wake, called it a rally



by Howie Carr
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Apr. 27, 2009

To all you silly-billies at the Globe - enough already with the groveling. Self-pity is not good box office. Stop weeping into your brandy Alexanders and start looking for a job - a real job.

I can imagine the signs at the rally - “In Barney Frank We Trust,” “Viva Fidel, Hugo y Teddy!” and of course, “Hands Off My Trust Fund.”

Outside, bowtied bumkissers will be chanting in unison, “Hey hey ho ho, Globe-a-phobia’s got to go.”

The Globe union is running buses up from Morrissey Boulevard, a wise move, considering that a lot of the blow-in Ivy League drifters they’ve hired over the past 15 years or so probably couldn’t find their way downtown on a bet, although I’m sure they’d do just fine in the Hamptons.

At the top of the rally press release is the seal of the Boston Newspaper Guild, which includes these puzzling words: “We built this newspaper.”

Is that really something to be bragging about - you built a newspaper that fell asleep for 20 years, printing nothing but left-wing claptrap and paeans to gay marriage while losing $50 million in 2008, and maybe as much as $85 million this year?

If you built that newspaper, then you richly deserve to be fired.

Now one of the Globe’s parrots, a gigolo named John Forbes Kerry, steps up and says, “It’s difficult to imagine Massachusetts without the Globe and I’m not going to try.”

That’s OK, Liveshot, I’ll try to imagine it enough for both of us. But hey, Liveshot’s rooting for the Globe for the same reason John Henry is. The only difference is, the Red Sox owner is candid about his own self-interest - he doesn’t want to lose that crew of sports-page homers who cheerlead for his team, any more than the corrupt Democrats at the State House want to lose their pom-pom wielding shills from the Globe.

You think I’m kidding? Check this out from the Globe in 2003:

“If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”

That’s not journalism, that’s hagiography, which means, lives of the saints.

Sorry Globies, but your death throes are nothing less than the popping of a festering, pus-filled boil on the gluteus maximus of Massachusetts. To quote, Oscar Wilde, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.”

All these years, the Globe has been telling us how evil capitalism is. Now they really know. They were against corporate welfare - until now. They were for corporate democracy - except for their masters at The New York Times, where incompetent heirs filled up the newsrooms with their fellow clueless rich kids as they steered their dreary left-wing sheets right over the cliff.

My only regret is that Ray Shamie, Ed King, Dapper O’Neil and Jimmy Kelly didn’t live to see this day.

JOBS ON THE LINE: Dan Totten, addressesBostonGlobe
employees at a rally held yesterday at Faneuil Hall
to support the newspaper, which is facing a
Times Co. shutdown threat. (DNN Staff photo)

Bernabei, Graham, O'Reilly, Carr, Siciliano,

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Friends don't let friends deny Global Warming

(Article 4-21-09)

Global Warming proving to be more hype


by Michael Graham
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Tuesday, Apr. 21, 2009

Believing that global warming is a potential problem doesn't make you a kook. But every day it appears harder and harder to be concerned about global warming without catching brain fever. Here are a few examples:

Does one not get the feeling that all this propaganda over the terrifying threat of global warming is beginning ever so slightly to turn people’s minds? Caroline Lucas MEP, the leader of the Green Party, last week agreed on television that flying to Spain was “as bad as knifing a person in the street”, because air travel like this is causing people to die “from climate change”.

Dr Richard Dixon, director of the Scottish WWF, was at the same time claiming that failing to ensure one’s home is “energy efficient” was a “moral crime”, as “anti-social as drink driving”, and “we should be having a discussion as to whether it should become an actual crime”.

This echoed the recent observation of Ed Miliband, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, that opposing wind farms should be as “socially unacceptable” as not wearing a seatbelt.

Drunk driving, not wearing a seatbelt, flying an airplane....STABBING someone. It's all the same, right?

This stupidity would still be, er...stupid, even if the evidence of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change were solid. But every day there's another story like this one:

Arctic ice is growing not going away:

This is hardly news to the folks stranded in Colorado last week due to a massive mid-April snow storm, nor to the current British "polar ice" expedition that can't seem to make progress because it's, well, so damn cold.

Once again, I'm not saying Al Gore is wrong about everything (though he is certainly wrong about a great deal). I'm just rejecting the idea of shutting down 50 percent of our electric grid, throwing 1 million more Americans out of work, or accusing everyone on the Delta Shuttle of attempted murder. Facts first, panic second. That's my suggestion.

Polar Bears Stranded on an Iceberg. A news story ran on February 2, 2007 showing polar bears stranded on an iceberg. The headline stated that this is what we can expect as the result of global warming. Actually, these polar bears are simply hunting seals that sunbathe on the ice floe as they have done for thousands of years. The bears swim to shore and back to the ice floe as they please. (Arctic Wild Life Photo)

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Need the Globe? Don't make me laugh

(Article 4-13-09)


Bad reporting ruined Boston Globe

by Howie Carr
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Apr. 13, 2009

Now the bow-tied bumkissers are telling us we “need” the Globe.

Maybe, but only for comic relief. The Globe is the “SNL” of newspapers, a yuk on every page. Let’s go straight to the list, a very partial list, of Globe blunders.

- March 2003: Since-indicted Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner holds a news conference at City Hall, complete with a blowup of a still he claims shows an American soldier raping an Iraqi woman. The video capture turns out to be from a Hungarian porn movie. Alone among the media, the ever-gullible Globe runs the XXX-rated photo over three columns, even though readers can see 1-inch square sexual images within it, as the ombudsman later put it. An editor’s note follows.

-The Joe Yandle scandal. The imprisoned murderer claims he became a heroin addict while serving in Vietnam. The Globe campaigns to free the killer, 60 Minutes picks it up, his sentence is commuted, but then he’s rearrested. Turns out Yandle was never in Vietnam, a fact uncovered, never by the Globe’s trust-funded reporters, but by a Viet vet who simply asked the Pentagon for Yandle’s military record. Yandle was paroled last June; his Boswell is now a metro columnist.

-April 2005: The Globe runs a horrific story about Canadian hunters shooting harp seal cubs by the hundreds, the sea running red with blood. In fact, no such hunt had taken place. An editor’s note follows.

February 2007: A geriatric Globe columnist hisses that “global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

-April 2006: The Globe runs a front-page sob story about an ex-con who can’t get a job because of the state’s draconian CORI laws. The ace scribe notes the jailbird just finished a 40-year term, but doesn’t say what crime he committed. He murdered a Boston cop.

-October 2006: A Globe writer opines how much he loves the change baskets at the Mass Pike tolls in Allston. “Occasionally,” he writes, “I even throw the basket a head fake.” The last baskets had come down three years earlier.

-The Globe’s coverage of Whitey Bulger through most of the 1980s portrays him as a cross between Robin Hood and Jimmy Cagney. When a Globe photographer gets pictures of a city work crew doing a job at his liquor store, the Globe refuses to embarrass “Jimmy” by printing them. Jimmy gives money to priests, the Globe reports. And don’t forget that with the help of his fearless fed friend Zip Connolly, Whitey “kept the drugs out of Southie.”

-July 2006: The Globe runs a blockbuster scoop about a memo warning of the dangers of the Ted Williams Tunnel, supposedly written in 1999. Turns out the memo’s author is a rather dodgy sort, no one had ever seen the memo before the Globe printed it and the events mentioned in it hadn’t occurred until years later. An editor’s note follows.

-And now the latest, as their rag hemorrhages almost $2 million a week, Globe reporters shake down corrupt pols for quotes about how much the city needs their corrupt, bankrupt newspaper in order to ferret out . . . corruption.

Forget the Internet. You pampered clowns ought to put your lame act on Comedy Central.

Every dog has his day: Due to bad reporting,
readers have turned elsewhere, forcing the
Globe to make $30 million in cuts, or
face closure. (DNN Staff photo)

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Mayoral rivals slam Menino's job-slashing proposal

(Follow-up 4-9-09)

Candidates take aim at mayor

by Richard Weir
DNN Follow-up
Thursday, Apr. 9, 2009

It was open season yesterday on Mayor Menino’s $2.4 billion budget plan with the Hub’s three mayoral hopefuls blasting his fiscal blueprint as lacking vision and failing to provide a thorough overhaul of wasteful government spending.

“I would say it is void of reforms,” said City Councilor Michael Flaherty, who aims to unseat the incumbent mayor should Menino run for re-election this year. “This budget cuts employees who provide critical services to our citizens while at the same time it keeps overpaid consultants on the payroll.”

City Councilor Sam Yoon, also a mayoral challenger, criticized the mayor for his “take-it-or-leave-it” wage-freeze bid that will result in the axing of 212 teachers and classroom aides by July, and possibly 67 cops in October, if their unions don’t yield to his demands.

He also faulted the mayor for not reigning in police and fire department overtime, which soared to $17 million and $5 million over their respective budgets. “This year’s budget looks like last year’s budget, which looks like the previous year’s budget,” Yoon said.

Another mayoral candidate, businessman Kevin McCrea, also attacked the mayor’s hard line, saying Menino is punishing the unions that don’t accept his wage-freeze. “Instead of making value judgments about which programs need to be prioritized, the most severe cuts are directed at the unions who have not caved to his demands,” McCrea said, noting that the school department represents 34 percent of the budget but bore 60 percent of the overall cuts.

In outlining his $2.4 billion budget yesterday, the mayor, who has not announced whether he will seek a fifth four-year term, called his proposal a “responsible plan for Boston’s future” that would maintain library hours and trash pickups, repave 42 miles of city streets and expand or add six K-8 schools.

“Most of us have never seen an economic downturn so severe and so far reaching,” Menino said, adding that this was “the toughest budget” he’s ever had to assemble with 565 city jobs being eliminated to plug an initial $140 million budget gap.

The mayor said that while some city departments bore 7 percent cuts, the school department’s budget was trimmed by 1.9 percent, the police department’s by 2.4 percent and the fire department’s by 4.7 percent.

He defended his tough stance with the reluctant unions, particularly the teachers’, noting that 22 other city unions accepted a wage freeze to avoid layoffs.

The big tax and spender in the past, Mayor Menino, takes
out his fiscal problems on the city's workforce, who
are the ones that keep his city running each day. (DNN
staff photo shows Menino lashing out on city unions.)

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Menino set to cut 565 city jobs

(Report 4-8-09)


Budget ax expected to be announced today

by Edward Mason and
Hillary Chabot
DNN Reports!
Wednesday, Apr. 8, 2009

Two of the biggest Hub unions that refused to cave to Mayor Menino’s demand for a wage freeze are slated to bear the brunt of layoffs in an austere budget proposal that axes 212 classroom jobs and 67 uniformed officers.

Menino balanced the $2.4 billion budget by laying off 565 city workers at a savings of $28 million. He’ll present the budget today to the City Council.

Boston Public Schools would be hit hardest, with 364 layoffs - 212 teachers and teacher’s aides, and another 152 administrative positions.

Boston police would lose 67 uniformed cops among 123 positions slated for elimination.

A dramatic $62 million drop in state aid triggered the city’s fiscal mess. Yesterday, Menino pleaded with Beacon Hill lawmakers for the power to raise meals and telephone-pole taxes to stave off devastating cuts.

“This is a real crisis,” said Menino “It’s not a pretty budget.”

Union officials cast aside the budget blueprint’s gloomy design. Boston Police Patrolmen’s chief Thomas Nee said he isn’t convinced that such deep cuts would play out.

“We continue to work with them on both a national and local level,” Nee said. “And we’re sure at the end of this process there will be no legitimate reason to lay off a Boston police officer.”

Boston Teachers Union honcho Richard Stutman insisted no teachers need to be laid off.

“We are not at all convinced we’re slated to have any layoffs whatsoever,” Stutman said.

Dot Joyce, a Menino spokeswoman, said while teachers and cops rejected the freeze, 22 unions accepted it, saving the city $8.7 million and 196 jobs that would have been cut. She said there’s no bluff in the mayor’s budget.

“These are real numbers,“ Joyce said. “I don’t know how much more real they can be than when they’re in black-and-white.”

The city plans to keep 67 cops on the payroll through Oct. 1 while it competes for federal stimulus money. If that fails, Joyce said, the jobs will be gone.

Menino’s budget chief Lisa Signori crafted a spending plan that cut $44 million across all city departments and dipped into reserves for $40 million - one-third of the city’s piggy-bank. Signori said a halt to new hires in October along with austerity measures helped the city avoid even deeper cuts to essential services.

While refusing to reform city government first,
Mayor Tom Menino proposes to tax utility polls,
increase the meals tax along with cutting
565 city jobs. (DNN Staff photo)

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Rep drops bid to license illegals

(Follow-up 4-8-09)

Rep. Tom Sannicandro (D) changes tune on illegal licenses


by Edward Mason
DNN Follow-up
Wednesday, Apr. 8, 2009

A controversial plan to let illegal aliens get Massachusetts driver’s licenses, tucked within a bill overhauling the state transportation agencies, was withdrawn last night amid opposition.

Rep. Tom Sannicandro (D-Ashland) proposed a measure that would bar the Registry of Motor Vehicles from asking for a Social Security number when awarding licenses.

Sannicandro quietly withdrew the amendment last night, hours after it was reported by DNN. He could not be reached by phone last night.

The overhaul bill, which lawmakers were still debating well into the evening , creates a new entity called the Massachusetts Transportation and Infrastructure Authority.

Like the bills put forth by the Senate and Gov. Deval Patrick it also eliminates the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, long a patronage dumping ground.

But the House measure leaves the MBTA in place as a free-standing authority.

The House also proposes adding to the bureaucracy by creating a Mass Transit Division, even though it would not include the T - the largest mass transit provider in the state. And it also creates a Constituent and Municipal Services division.

Turnpike tolls are slated to double on July 1 without some sort of new revenue stream.

Patrick has proposed a 19-cent gas tax increase, which would give the state the highest gas tax in the country.

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Proposal seeks to give illegals licenses

(Report 4-7-09)

Transportation reform could give illegals licenses


by Hillary Chabot
DNN Reports!
Tuesday, Apr. 7, 2009

Illegal immigrants in the Bay State could be issued driver’s licenses under a controversial amendment tucked inside the house’s comprehensive transportation reform bill yesterday.

Minority Leader Rep. Brad Jones (R-North Reading) blasted the measure - which could come up for a vote today - saying undocumented aliens could use their driver’s licenses to try to vote or to board planes illegally.

“I don’t think this is the time or place for this,” Jones said. “If you’re here illegally, this driver’s license could be a breeder document to get so many other things.”

Rep. Tom Sannicandro (D-Ashland), who filed the amendment, said the measure would ensure safety on streets because immigrants would learn the local rules of the road.

Plus, he said, the licenses would help officials determine how many illegal immigrants reside in the state.

“We’re just putting our heads in the sand now. We could be verifying who these people are,” Sannicandro said.

The amendment is one of more than 100 attached to reform legislation that would abolish the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and establish a mega-authority headed by the governor to oversee all the state’s transportation departments.

Transportation committee co-chairman Rep. Joe Wagner (D-Chicopee) was unsure if the measure will pass.

“It’s possible some of these amendments will be considered beyond the scope of the reforms,” Wagner said.

Issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants has been a hot button issue across the country. The idea has drawn support from both Gov. Deval Patrick and President Obama.

DNN photo captures illegals on route to break American
laws by illegally crossing the U.S./Mexican border into
the U.S. On average, they cost American taxpayers $2.6
trillion per year.

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Fox News Channel soaring since Obama takeover

(Article 4-6-09)

Folks turning right for straight talk on Barack


by Bill O'Reilly
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Apr. 6, 2009

Shocking many of its listeners, the left-leaning National Public Radio recently ran a commentary pointing out that Fox News Channel, which NPR considers to be very conservative, is amassing record ratings in the wake of the Democratic takeover in Washington.

All things considered, that was not great news for some NPR folks.

The reason that FNC is doing so well while some committed-left media operations are failing is what I call the remorse factor.

Almost 62 million Americans voted against Barack Obama last November, many of them convinced that his vision for America was, well, kind of dangerous. Also, exit polling showed that some who supported the president did so out of disgust with the Bush administration, which lost control during its last two years in power.

When financial chaos intruded on Obama’s honeymoon period, millions of news consumers flocked to agencies that have been a bit skeptical of the young president. Obviously, news organizations considered to be in the tank for Obama are of little use to people worried about their financial well-being.

In politics, there is always an element of hatred, even in a noble country like the United States. If you are an Obama-hater, you are likely to go where your opinion is reinforced. If you are neutral on the president but worried he may be in over his head, you might seek a more skeptical view of his policies. Thus, the rough bumps the president is experiencing have been deadly for the liberal media that just a few months ago cheerled him into office.

Truth be told, I have been a beneficiary of the president’s early troubles because my television ratings are through the roof. Folks know that while I respect Obama and do not take cheap shots against him, I am skeptical of his big-government, nanny-state philosophy. Also, my guests represent many points of view, unlike my cable news competition that spins nearly everything positive in Obama Land.

However, I do not want Obama to fail. I want him to see the light. This is a great country because most of its citizens are responsible, hard-working people who realize that cradle-to-grave entitlements will ultimately bankrupt the nation. Call me crazy, but I want to persuade the ultra-intelligent president that his Swedish-entitlements vision for 300 million Americans is an opium-fueled pipe dream. Self-reliance has made this country great, not federal foot massages.

I will consistently deliver that message to the president, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid and the rest of the gang who couldn’t spend straight. I’ll do that hoping the Democrats will wise up and impose some discipline in the fiscal area. If they do not control federal spending, they will suffer big losses in the congressional races just a year and a half from now.

Until then, here’s looking at you, good ratings.

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The "O'Reilly Factor" continues to be the number one
rated show in America, as its ratings continue to soar
further. (TV Vid photo)

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