Cruella goes to Jail? (You wish)

Between Scott Brown's great victory and the stampede of congressional democrats heading for the exits, it's understandable that many conservatives are being lulled into complacency in anticipation of the big shootout in November. Don't let down the guard, there is still a lot at stake in the short term, Most importantly the infamous Health Care Bill which keeps rising from the crypt.

On Friday, none other than Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi was in Boston for a fundraiser. Super thanks to Iron Mike and his small cadre that showed up at the ironically-named Liberty Hotel (The Olde Charles Street Jail, sans cells) to show the flag and let Nancy know we are still on the job. Read Mike's report of the event HERE. Predictably, the Globe was quick to minimize the significance of the protest, labelling it as a Tea Party event. This, of course, comes right out of the Alinsky playbook which calls for isolating and ridiculing the opposition. As if it was just a few Tea Baggers that elected Scott Brown. And yes, we do know the too-clever-by-far double entendre for tea bagger.


But don't miss the importance of Ms. Pelosi. There is a lot of talk about the Reconciliation process but what it boils down to is if the House can muster the votes to pass the Senate Health Care Bill, the 2,000 page, plus bill that no one seems to have read fully, it will go to the President's desk in a heartbeat. Yes it's a long shot as the Democrats do not seem to have the House votes, but don't think for a minute they aren't pulling out all the stops to make it happen. This is the big enchilada for the Left. Let's not take our collective eyes off the ball.

Hold the Tomatoes

During the winter months, Florida tomato growers provide the bulk of the fresh tomatoes consumed in the U.S. Most of it coming from the middle of south Florida, just east of the View's current location. Due to prevailing low temperatures, production is well below normal. To wit:

A shortage of tomatoes from weather-battered Florida is forcing restaurants and supermarkets to ration supplies amid soaring prices for America's most popular fresh vegetable.

As reported by a recent ARTICLE in the WSJ.

As part of the View's continuing commitment to public service, we are pleased to provide an "on the ground" report confirming the reported weather conditions. It's cold here in paradise. The beaches are windswept and empty, pools lie unused and even the golf courses are suffering. All is not lost, however, as the polar bears at the Naples zoo are feeling right at home.

So, faithful readers, be sure to pass this information on to your favorite promoter of Global Warming. I am sure they are trying to convince everyone that the "no tomatoes" signs at your local Wendy's are part of a capitalist plot. Does Al Gore need a giant wedgie or what?

A New Point of VIEW

Sorry for the lack of new postings, faithful Readers, all three of you, but the afterbuzz of the election that sent Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate carried on to flow into the preparations for our annual Florida migration. Busy times, indeed. But while our geographical orientation has shifted, know that our commitment to truth, justice and the American way endures.

Amid the jubilation at Brown's victory was a bit of jealousy perhaps as the MSM took our own candidate and thrust him onto the national stage. But we were proud of our lad from Wrentham. There were even a few feeble attempts to minimize the event by downplaying Scott and the significance of his win. Patrick Kennedy's comments come to mind. But this event was bigger than Kennedy's eloquence, even as the chattering class tried to understand it. The following two vignettes now, in 20-20 hindsight, turned out to be key indicators of the Brown vote surge:

On the Saturday prior to the election, the Brown Campaign bus made a stop at at the Plymouth campaign office. The candidate, shaking hands and posing for pictures waded through the large and enthusiastic crowd that included more than a few union representatives. But it was one one large hand-made sign that was a real eye opener. Written in white letters on a blue background the sign proclaimed: "Local 103 IBEW for Brown." I'm not sure anyone outside of greater Boston understands the significance of such a statement but if the Democrats had lost the support of Local 103, all bets were off. We will probably be discussing for years who was dumber: The guy who advised Obama to go after the unions' "Cadillac" health plans in his quest for socialized medicine, or Martha Coakley who went down the line for Obama's health care fiasco.

Standing outside the Precinct 5 polls with our signs on election day, we watched, and waved, as a steady stream of voters suggested a strong turnout that was officially clocked at 65%. Prominent among the throng was a significant contingent of seniors who, through the seriousness of their expressions, and an occasional jaw jut, telegraphed the concern they were bringing with them. Tip O'Neill knew what he was talking about when he called Social Security the third rail of politics. Someone should have pointed out to Obama and his water carrier that there is a certain linkage between SS and Medicare before he allowed a major cut in Medicare to be a prominent feature of his "reform" of American health care..

In Plymouth we had an extra reason to celebrate on election night. In addition to the senate race, voters had a chance to make a binding vote on a proposed increase to the meals tax. It went down by a four to one margin. Power to the People!

All in all, it was an election night for the ages.

A Tough Month for Writers

Today marks the end of January which brought with it a good dose of the bleak mid-winter with enough snow, wind and cold to make anyone question the notion of global warming. The month also, in a dizzying eight-day period, marked the end of life of four very influential writers. If this starts to sound like a well-reasoned academic analysis of four authors and their works, you will have to look elsewhere. The influence I refer to is the influence that these writers had on me as I made my way to adulthood.

I have always been a voracious reader, driven by a desire, or perhaps a need, to learn more about life as it unfolded before me. For reasons that won't be touched on here, I was largely left to myself to plumb the mysteries and pursue a measure of truth about the world into which I was born as I struggled to understand the opportunities which would allow me to aspire to greater things.

As I entered my teen years in the late fifties, I learned that one of the books that seemed to be on every thinking-person's reading list was the Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. I read the book several times in an effort to unlock the wisdom that, I reasoned, must clearly be the basis of the book's popularity. I had a sense that I should have been entertained by Holden Caulfield's great adventure in New York City, a place I had never been but seemed to have a bottomless capacity for adult-level evil. But I had a hard time understanding that he would turn his back on what seemed to be a rich comfortable life of learning at his prep school. I wasn't exactly sure what a prep school was, but it sure sounded different than my public junior high school. So the net result was a sense that I had failed to unlock the wisdom of Salinger's book. Perhaps the real lesson to be learned was that there was a lot for me to learn. At this point in my life, I had yet to learn the way to appreciate the author as a separate entity from the book itself. Of course Salinger's reclusiveness was a factor. I wonder how many others on hearing of his passing on January 27th at age 92 didn't privately marvel that he had survived all this time.

When Love Story exploded on the scene in 1970, both as a novel and in film, I was a young husband and father, a year out of college, and in the beginning stages of a business career. This was the tail end of the post-war era. And while there were student demonstrations in places like Cambridge and Boston Common, primarily against the Viet Nam War, observers would also note the beginnings of social changes that would rock our culture to its core. But that was to come a few years later, after Watergate when fashions began to dictate long hair sideburns and wide wide neckties, even on normally buttoned-down business types, as the youthful madness of the sixties spread to engulf a wide swath of the entire culture. But, for a brief moment before that there was Love Story in which Oliver Barrett IV, a Harvard student with all the cultural and economic support he could have, lays it all on the line for the love of Jennifer Cavalleri, a beautiful, brainy Cliffie but who also was a product of gritty Cranston Rhode Island. To add a small dimension of adventure to the manor-born Barrett, author Segal cast him as a varsity hockey player, scrappy enough to take his licks in the Ivy League rinks. I glommed onto the fact that this character and I shared the love of the same game. In fact, my school teams and I had practiced at the Harvard rink. When the movie came out, kids would go down to the theatres and check out the exiting audience to see how many had been crying. Having read the book, I knew what to expect, but watching Ryan O'Neal say good bye to a dying Ali McGraw made sure that I was among those who gave the kids something to laugh at. On January 17th, Eric Segal died at the age of 72 in London. I was never able to forget Love Story but I was able to forgive him for allowing Al Gore to claim a shred of reflected notoriety.

While he wrote some 60 books, both fiction and non-fiction, it was Louis Auchincloss's beautiful descriptive stories of the old New York aristocracy that I found irresistible as it spoke to a way of life that may well be gone for all time. He wrote of wealthy urbane men who peopled the white-shoe law firms. He was a white-shoe lawyer himself spending the latter part of his career caring for the personal trusts and estates of many who resembled the characters in his stories. He was a maestro with the language who could capture just the right mood with his deft choice of words that seldom needed an expletive to make it clear. As New York Society has been subsumed by hedge fund cowboys and corporate raiders, the body of American literature will miss his writing skills which are receding in the face of emails and tweets. Louis Auchincloss died on January 26th at age 92.

If Auchincloss wrote about the cream of society, Robert Parker went to the other extreme and wrote mostly about the dregs. While his prolific output included books about a small town police chief with a drinking problem and even a few westerns, he is probably best known for his hard-boiled crime novels featuring Spencer the private investigator. An ex cop, and ex boxer and all around tough guy, Spenser, with his sidekick Hawk would pursue their quest to solve the mysteries that regularly came their way. Parker tried hard to capture the raw underworld of Boston and in doing so, he created a number of colorful, if a little one-dimensional characters. And while this may not have had the ring of authenticity as does Dennis LaHane, his dialogue was something to behold. Spencer was so good at having the perfect comeback remark, it sometimes consisted of just a thin smile. Academics seemed to have a field day pointing out the shortcomings of his writing, and I often felt that a little too much Cambridge Lefty found its way into the mouth of a guy who could be a perfect Neanderthal, but I read every Parker novel I could get my hands on, usually without putting it down. Robert Parker died on January 19th at age 77.

A grateful reader wishes that all four men rest in Peace as their words, thankfully, live on.

Yes We Did!

The day at Precinct 5 in Plymouth got off to a strong start. From the moment the polls opened, there was a steady flow of voters to the polls. By 11:00, we knew that we had a strong turnout, and based on the numbers of horn honks and thumbs up we began to ratchet up our belief that Scott Brown could carry the day.

The afternoon brought a steady rain, but we stood our ground and waved our Brown signs as the after work crowd began checking in. By the cold and soggy end of the day, we went home, buoyed by the strong turnout and looking forward to the final state-wide results. Seeing those final numbers up on the screen made all the effort worth while.

Congratulations to Senator-elect, Scott Brown, and his family and to all the "believers" who worked so hard to get him elected.

Scott Brown Comes to Town

For at least an hour yesterday morning, we all waited in the cold, brandishing our Scott Brown signs and waving at the cars going by, honking their horns in support and giving us the thumbs-up for Scott. There were so many Brown supporters that the din of honking horns seemed to keep up without hardly a lull. When Scott Brown's Bus finally appeared we all gathered beside the campaign office on Long Pond Road to welcome our candidate who soon appeared, and, in shirtsleeves, worked his way through the crowd, signing autographs and shaking hands with the hundreds of supporters on hand. After visiting with the phone bank volunteers inside, he came out and climbed into the bed of a pickup truck with our own Vinny de Macedo, who welcomed Scott to America's home town.

The enthusiasm was palpable among the crowd. And while there were certainly some younger campaign workers there, there was also a large contingent of older solid citizen types, many of whom stood quietly and listened carefully as Scott addressed the crowd. There was a sense that there were many people here who, while perhaps not Republican activists, and perhaps not Republicans at all, had been drawn out by Brown's straightforward message of fiscal sanity and thoughtful government. We had the sense that these were representatives of the great American middle, who have become appalled at the excesses of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis, and were looking for a return to a moderate balanced government.

Significantly lacking were the low-ball personal attacks that the other side has been firing at the Brown. Brown's only acknowledgement was a call for shame on Martha Coakley, and her minions, for attempted character assassination. When asked what he thought of the president's planned Sunday trip to Boston, Brown said:" I wish him a safe trip to Boston and I can recommend a few good restaurants where he might eat. Then, I wish him a safe trip back to Washington." Besides being an articulate proponent for thoughtful, effective policies, Scott Brown is a classy guy, a good family man and someone we would be proud to have filling "The People's Seat."

Bubba to The Rescue?

With the Mass Senate race in a virtual dead heat, the Dems are resorting to a desparate Hail Mary play. Bill Clinton will be in town today to try to help the Dems maintain the seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy, but more accurately known as "The Peoples Seat." As Reported in HUMAN EVENTS:

Most Americans have seen Bill Clinton on television, mobilizing worldwide humanitarian assistance in the wake of the earthquake that devastated Haiti.

But before he takes up his new portfolio as UN special envoy to Haiti, the 42nd President of the U.S. will try to shore up another potential disaster area closer to home: Massachusetts, where a Suffolk University poll released last night showed Democrat Martha Coakley trailing Republican Scott Brown by four percentage points statewide and only four days before they compete in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

Let's all hope that Bubba can do for Martha what he did for his wife during her ill-fated presidential campaign.