Mitt's no Massachusetts Moderate

by Donnie Bernabei
Thursday, Jan.12, 2012

Is Mitt Romney really a Massachusetts Moderate like some make him out to be?

Well, it's a lot of bull plain and simple. And this is directed at you, Newt Gingrich and especially to those liberal media outlets who paint Mitt as one.

You can decide after reading the facts about Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts from '03 to '06. With me being a life-long resident of my state, I have seen many governors come and go. But I've yet to see a governor like Mitt Romney who fought for the taxpayers and who saved them from enormous tax increases under an 85 percent liberal legislature.

Here are just some of the facts while Romney governed in which are hardly told:

1) Mitt worked for free during his four year term as governor of Massachusetts and threw his salary into the $3 billion deficit he faced.

2) During the height of a recession caused by the 9/11 attacks on our country, Mitt turned a $3 billion deficit into an $800 million surplus without raising your everyday taxes.

3) Illegal aliens were banned and ordered to be deported out of Massachusetts after Mitt mandated a policy to rid them, only until Gov. Patrick abolished his mandate when he became governor in '07. And since then the state tanked in any category you could think of.

4) Mitt mandated a state-run health care policy which insured all Massachusetts residents. It only effected the two percent who weren't insured and saved the taxpayers billions of dollars at the time, because it also didn't allow rich people and illegal aliens to show up at our clinics to claim free health benefits at the expense of taxpayers. And most important, Mitt's health care mandate did not cost $1 trillion and it didn't drain billions of dollars from Medicare unlike Obamacare will eventually do.

5) Mitt cut taxes 19 times and vetoed 800 bills under an 85 percent liberal legislature while he governed Massachusetts.

6) It took a driver to be killed in one of our Big Dig tunnels for the liberal Massachusetts legislature to give Mitt full control of the $15 billion Big Dig project after he fought so hard for. In return, Mitt fired head honcho Matt Amorello for his mismanagement of the project who overseen faulty construction work on the tunnel, which eventually led to a huge cement ceiling block to fall and crush a driver to death. This was just one out of the many structural defects that occurred under Amorello. The original price for the project was $2.5 billion and ended up being $13.4 billion over budgeted. Most of the cost over runs that torched taxpayer's wallets occurred under Amorello.

7) Under Romney, 40,000 jobs were created during tough economic times. When Romney was sworn in as governor in January 2003, Massachusetts was reeling from the end of a deep recession. With an economy more pegged to technology than most states, Massachusetts took longer to recover. At the time, the state's unemployment rate was at 5.6 percent, compared with a low of 2.8 percent just two years earlier before Romney became governor.

The jobless rate would keep rising through Romney's first year in office with a weak economy, topping out at 6 percent in August after his first year. By December 2006, Romney's last full month in office, it had fallen to 4.7 percent thanks to job creation. A drop of less than 1 percent, meaning the addition of about 40,000 jobs, may seem like a modest achievement during a very tough recovery period after the 9/11 attacks on our country. The fact is Massachusetts ended up being in a lot better shape than many other states across the country under a Romney leadership.

So these are just some of the facts while Romney governed in Massachusetts regardless of what else you are hearing about him.

Again, I will stress the fact that Romney became governor during the height of a recession caused by the 9/11 attacks and governed Massachusetts under one of the most liberal legislatures on the planet. Such a legislature was 85 percent Democrat. And such accomplishments by Romney proves to me that he is more of a conservative than what Newt Gingrich and the liberal medias paint him as.

I find it to be alarming that truths of one being's record are simply being distorted. Mitt was no Massachusetts Moderate.

In this July 2006 photo, Massachusetts Turnpike

Chairman Matt Amorello talks to reporters about

his forced resignation by Gov. Mitt Romney; this

after a cement ceiling panel came crashing down and

crushed a driver to death in the I95 tunnel.

(DNN File Photo)

Gov. keeps your $$ working for hacks

While your paycheck decreases, managers get $4 grand pay raise

There are two Americas. John Edwards was right.

But not in the way that the Anthony Weiner of the last decade could have ever imagined.

The two Americas are the Dreaded Private Sector, where the real unemployment rate hovers close to 20 percent, and housing prices have taken a bigger plunge than they did during the Great Depression.

And then there’s Public Sector America, where the good times never end.

Just ask Gov. Deval Patrick. On a day when the stock market lost another 172 points, he announced that he’s handing out still more pay raises, this time to 4,000 state “managers,” also known as hacks.

What a week. The secretary of state, Bill Galvin, gets a $10 million settlement from the thieves at Goldman Sachs, and the very next day Deval hands over the entire score to a different group of sticky-fingered payroll patriots.

No money for the state workers who actually do the menial labor, but plenty for the “managers.”

You know the kind of people who “manage” in state government. A lot of them drive state cars — with untraceable license plates, if they’re really connected. And they’ve all got fancy titles loaded with diminutives — “special assistant to the deputy director for the associate undersecretary.”

They telecommute on Fridays. And on snow days, well, would you care to guess if they’re essential or non-essential, or should I use the new hack euphemisms, “emergency” and “non-emergency.”

In case you were wondering, Deval’s 4,000 campaign contributors, I mean managers, didn’t really get a raise. It was a “wage adjustment.”

It had to be done, Deval said in a statement, in order to “retain and recruit a talented and competitive work force.”

Are you kidding, Deval? Has anyone ever quit the public payroll except under extreme personal duress? Like, as part of a plea bargain. Deval’s flack said that state managers have made “incredible sacrifices.” Right — several agencies have cancelled their weekly popover eating contests at Anthony’s Pier 4.

There’s a Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.” It sums up the difference between the two Americas.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by.”

The hack road, in other words. It’s less traveled by because it was Monday and everybody phoned in sick. Then they “worked” for three days and all of them banged in sick again on Friday. The road less taken . . .

“And that has made all the difference.”

It did for Tom Kinton. If the outgoing boss of Massport had taken the DPS Road, he’d probably be working now at a service desk somewhere in Shoppers World. Instead, he walks out the door groaning under the weight of all his gelt — a $200,000 pension, $459,000 in what is called unused sick time, another $80,000 in insurance policy dividends . . .

Getting a hack job at an early age. To paraphrase Frost, that makes all the difference.

GOOD TIMES ROLL: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick
just OK’d a raise for the state’s 4,000 managers.




Donnie Howie Michael Bill

Unlike the others, we tell you what's really happening.

Taxes keep rising despite property Deval-uation

How can this be? The value of your home keeps going down, yet the property taxes never stop going up.

Back in 2006, didn’t candidate Deval Patrick promise to cut property taxes? If he does have to testify under oath at Sal DiMasi’s corruption trial next week, I hope someone asks him about that pledge, just to establish his reputation for veracity, or lack thereof.

“Governor, did you know you were lying when you vowed to cut property taxes, or maybe we all misunderstood you, and you really meant to say you were going to cut property values? Which is it?”

It’s that time of year again. Proposition 2 1⁄2 override season. Saturday they passed one in Scituate. Wherever you go, it’s the same old story. The selectmen say they’ve made “Draconian cuts.” They’re dealing with “fixed costs.”

Fixed costs means they can’t lay off their wife’s nephew.

Isn’t municipal government grand? I can sum it up in two words: Willie Lantigua.

And so the tax bills just keep on rising. Just ask Kathy from Foxboro.

“I bought my house in 2006 for $330,000, it’s now worth $240,000,” she was saying the other night. “The town claimed I had a ‘finished basement.’ I took the assessor down to see it. It has a dirt floor, only it was mud, because it still had 3 inches of water in it from the flooding last spring.”

Surely the town did the right thing by you, Kathy.

“I got a $17 reduction. I thought it was a joke when I saw the bill. Seventeen bucks.”

Another Draconian cut. Nowadays, everybody is running down to City or Town Hall to file for an abatement. But don’t forget to call ahead. A lot of these places close early now.

Town Hall’s got a million excuses for why your tax bill keeps going up.

State law, don’t you know. What’s theirs is theirs, and what’s yours is theirs.

And God forbid anybody suggests maybe level-funding the school budget. They immediately threaten to cancel the football season.

“I bought my house in Springfield in 2005 for $150,000,” a guy named Joe was saying, “and I just sold it for $95,000. But my property taxes went from $2,500 to $3,000.”

And why do you have to file for a new abatement every year? If the house was overvalued last year, why does it go back to the old overvaluation this year?

Meanwhile, on Beacon Hill, the state hacks were holding a hearing last week to raise the income tax. They call it “An Act to Invest in Our Communities.”

Invest in our communities — sorry, I already did. In my own, and in Willie Lantigua’s.

What promise? No wonder why Deval Patrick will
not run another term. So many broken promises.
Property tax relief was just one of them.




Donnie Howie Michael Bill

Unlike the others, we tell you what's really happening.

Fuel for firing Obama

by Michael Graham


President would raise dependency on foreign oil


This is the headline from The New York Times Web site yesterday: “Obama Lays Out Plan to Cut Reliance on Fuel Imports.”

Did I say “headline?” I meant “laugh line.”

Because President Barack Obama giving a speech on increasing U.S. oil production is like Charlie Sheen lecturing me to “Just Say No.” It inspires more than merely a raised eyebrow. We’re in full-on Pelosi Forehead territory here.

Obama yesterday set a goal of reducing the amount of oil we import by 3 million barrels a day over the next 10 years. And part of the solution is his hard work promoting more domestic production, he managed to say with a straight face.

Barack Obama — oil producer? The same Obama who rejected any new drilling during the 2008 campaign?

Who actually suggested we forget drilling and “properly inflate our tires?”

Who imposed a moratorium on all new drilling in 2010?

The same President Obama who . . . well, I’ll let the liberal-leaning Washington Post take over from here:

“When was the last time an American president stood before an audience in a foreign country and announced that he looked forward to importing more of its oil? Answer: Just over a week ago,” the Post wrote, referring to Obama’s visit to Brazil, where he promised American subsidies for Brazilian offshore drilling, and the promise that “when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.”

So Obama’s plan to reduce our dependency on foreign oil is to travel to other countries, offer to pay them to drill off their own coasts so we can buy more of their oil? Please tell me I’m missing something here.

If Obama were urging everyone to develop their oil reserves, that would be one thing. But while he’s subsidizing Brazil’s oil workers, he’s simultaneously punishing ours.

In December, he announced that his moratorium on oil exploration off our own East and West coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico would continue “indefinitely.”

He still opposes drilling in the vast, empty Alaskan wasteland that is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And the American Petroleum Institute pointed out yesterday that “based on current policy, that this could be the first year since 1957 the U.S. doesn’t issue a single new drilling permit.”

In other words, “Read Obama’s lips: No new oil.”

So how do we cut down on imports?

Why, by getting more production out of our existing wells, of course!

Yeah, about that . . .

“[The Department of Energy] predicted that domestic offshore oil production will fall 13 percent this year from 2010 due to the moratorium and the slow return to drilling,” The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial earlier this year, “ . . . a loss of about 220,000 barrels of oil a day.”

When Obama claimed yesterday that existing oil production is high, he’s telling the truth — but it has absolutely nothing to do with his anti-production policies.

According to Amy Harder at National Journal magazine, “most, if not all, of the production increase recorded is likely due to action that predates Obama, since Obama didn’t take any major action expanding offshore drilling his first year in office.”

Guess what, Amy — he still hasn’t.

“Barack the Internationalist” I’ll believe. “Barack Obama, Repairer of Race Relations,” I’ll tag along. Even “Barack Obama, Savior Of The Banking Industry (especially Goldman Sachs)” I can take.

But “Barack the Oil Bringer?” No way.

Everyone already knows about the president’s true energy policy. In fact, this headline appeared in the Christian Science Monitor just a couple of weeks ago:

“Gas prices too high? Obama may not think so. He’s pumped to use high oil prices.”

Tell us something we don’t know.

President Obama, salutes as he steps off of Marine One onto the

South Lawn of the White House, to announce his 10 year plan on

reducing dependency on foreign oil.

Donnie Howie Michael Bill

Unlike the others, we tell you what's really happening.

No leadership on Libya

Obama's crafty but not smart

by Michael Graham
Tuesday, Mar. 22, 2011

Building on the success of “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” Fox Television has begun production on a sure-fire hit: “Are You Smarter Than The President Of The United States?”

And in this show — everybody wins!

That’s because almost every American citizen — with the possible exception of the members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation — is smarter about Libya than Barack Obama

Really — you are, right now, more intelligent than the Smartest President Ever.

For example, would you launch a military attack in Libya without being able to answer the question: “Why am I attacking Libya?” No way.

But that’s just what Obama has done. Are we attacking Libya to get rid of kooky Col. Moammar Gadhafi? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says yes.

“We do believe that a final result of any negotiations would have to be the decision by [Gadhafi] to leave,” she told Reuters on Friday.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Carter Ham, who’s overseeing the action, both say “no.” They can see Gadhafi still being in power when this mission is over.

And Obama?

He’s playing soccer on the streets of Rio with some school kids. Apparently “My Pet Goat” hasn’t been translated into Portuguese.

“The international community rallied and said we have to stop any potential atrocities in Libya, and provided a broad mandate in addition to that specific task,” Obama said yesterday after arriving in Chile.

So it’s just a humanitarian mission. Obama says “no” regime change.

But wait — there’s more!

“I also have stated that it is U.S. policy that Gadhafi has to go,” he added. So we’re finally going to get rid of the terror-sponsoring SOB who’s killed hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks, including the Lockerbie bombing. Right?

“We’ve got a wide range of tools in addition to our military efforts to support that policy,” Obama concluded.

So we’re just on a humanitarian mission that has nothing to do with toppling Gadhafi, except that it’s our policy to topple him, only we’re not going to use the military.

We’re only going to blow up stuff that won’t knock Gadhafi out of office? Terrific.

At this point, allow me to be the 3,749th opinion writer to point out that a policy which a) stops Gadhafi from committing atrocities against his people while b) leaving him in power to commit future atrocities is idiotic. It’s like saying, “We don’t want to catch the Boston Strangler, we just want to make sure he stays home watching TV for now.”

Some smart people believe that America standing aside and allowing Gadhafi to turn eastern Libya into the new Bosnia or Darfur would be a geopolitical disaster. They say it would undermine our allies and hurt America’s credibility across the Middle East.

Other smart people say Tripoli isn’t worth the blood of a single American airman, and we should leave the Libyans to have their civil war.

But nobody, other than the president, is saying both.

Rudy Giuliani, who knows a thing or two about leadership during crisis, told National Review yesterday that “if [Obama] thought that it would be in America’s national interest to remove Gadhafi, he should have already outlined steps two, three and four. It does not seem like he has done that.”

As for launching a no-fly zone and promising no ground forces, Giuliani notes, “I don’t know why he has to decide that right now except for political reasons. Strategically, you want Gadhafi thinking that we might use troops.”

What the president really wants people thinking is “Whatever happens in Libya, none of it is Obama’s fault.”

In this image taken from Libya State TV, broadcast,
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi says he will fight
imposed "no fly zone."

Donnie Howie Michael Bill

Unlike the others, we tell you what's really happening.