In the last school year alone, Boston taxpayers shelled out $1.3 million from the trust to help teachers with wills, bankruptcy, real estate, name changes, and legal defense against some misdemeanor criminal charges, according to the Boston Globe. This year taxpayers will contribute $8.4 million to the teachers’ trust, even as the district faces an anticipated $63 million budget gap that is necessitating the closure or consolidation of 18 schools, the Globe reports.

This unnecessary expense is ludicrous considering the current economy, and is urging city leaders to eliminate the trust as they craft a new collective bargaining agreement with teachers. The city’s residents, struggling to cover the rising costs of their own health coverage, shouldn’t be required to subsidize these extra perks for public school teachers.

Samuel R. Tyler, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, said it best when he told the Globe that “It’s time to rethink health and welfare and treat teachers exactly as other employees in terms of benefits, and eliminate the expenditures for these other services. “It really ought to be an item on the list in terms of trying to negotiate changes,” he said.

The Boston Teachers Union has predictably defended the fund, negotiated in 1968 as an alternative way to compensate teachers. “It came in lieu of salary,” BTU President Richard Stutman told the Globe.

Unfortunately times have changed, and Boston taxpayers can no longer afford to shower their public school employees with millions of dollars in special perks each year. Private sector workers in virtually every industry have sacrificed to keep their employers afloat, and we see no reason why Boston teachers shouldn’t be required to do the same.

We suspect that the vast majority of Boston taxpayers do not view a softball league or private real estate advice for teachers as a critical expense necessary to educate the city’s school children. With an expected $63 million budget gap, the district should be eliminating every expense that it can to maintain student programs and avoid cuts that would impact academics.

The fact that the BTU continues its lame attempt to justify the existence of this enormous annual expense only further demonstrates that its true priorities have little to do with educating the city’s youth.

New Englanders, for example, boast t-shirts and bumper stickers which tell us that the “Yankees suck” — despite the 27 World Series rings for the Bronx Bombers and the seven for the Red Sox that would seem to indicate that we, in fact, are the ones who suck.

We also call Boston The Hub, as in the Hub of the Universe. That’s right. Our tiny little city’s got megalomania issues … which probably explains why 90 percent of  diversity-loving voters in Brookline and Cambridge pulled a lever for Obama in November 2008. No Bostonian worth his chowder, by the way, has ever called the city Beantown.

The intellectual elitism is so profound here that the average plumber in Boston — and I come from a long, proud line of Local 12 guys — thinks that he’s wicked smaht, smahtah even than a brain surgeon from Alabama. It’s just the way we’re raised — snobbish old blue-blood Brahminism adopted by everyone from Boston’s nouveau riche to the old Irish-Catholic working class.

So the arrival of Sarah Palin in Boston Wednesday was like a visit by an alien being from the planet of idiots in the eyes of the local so-called intelligentsia.

Naturally, with so much brain power and so many institutions of higher education here in the Hub, there’s an obvious question to ask:  What did we Bostonians learn from Sarah Palin’s romp through town Wednesday for Boston Tea Party II?

Well, here’s what we learned. We learned that nobody is more intolerant and more illiberal than the angry faux-intellectual “leftists” who still infect Boston politics, media and academia like a nasty case of herpes that won’t go away.

As noted in  a recent post here on Big Government, I stopped calling them “liberals” years ago. Today’s so-called “liberals,” especially here in Boston, are nothing but angry leftist ideologues, not true liberals in the classical sense. Their unhinged reaction to Palin is proof.

Consider our lefty friends at the former newspaper turned big-government mouthpiece called The Boston Globe: “Palin has yet to show a shred of intellectual depth, nor much capacity for anything other than superficial analysis,” wrote one Globie Thursday.

Ahh, the profound “Palin is stupid” argument.

Ironic words from a publication that a) fails to understand the basics of economics; b) beats the racially divisive drum of identity politics with the wide-eyed lunacy of Keith Moon; c) is a vapid mouthpiece for failed leftist ideology and ideologues; and d) whose one tired solution to every social ill is “more government.”

Please, Globe. Learn to balance a budget or spare us the lecture.

(By the way, my paper, the Herald, ran four homepage stories Tuesday about the upcoming Tea Party; the Globe led its Tuesday coverage with a photo essay about 40 years of gay pride in Boston. We can’t make this stuff up.)

But the attacks from the Globe were nothing like the anger we saw at The Weekly Dig, a local outlet here in Boston for crazy lefty causes. It ran artwork labeling Palin a “bitch,” a “moron” and a Nazi. Apparently, in lefty circles, you’re a Nazi when you advocate less government, individual gun rights, Zionism and Christian values – you know, a complete contradiction of Nazism.

Those clever little lefties must be too bright for me.

Then there were the over-educated and ponytailed “moonbats” (the word for “crazy lefties” that’s common in Boston vernacular). They showed up Wednesday to assault members of an otherwise peaceful Tea Party. One moonbat was wrapped in a Cuban flag with the face of Che Guevara on it. Brilliant! The flag of a socialist hellhole that’s so poor and corrupt that people risk their lives to escape to the U.S. on leaky homemade balsa-wood boats, coupled with the image of a bloodthirsty commie revolutionary.

Personally, I’m still waiting for Michael Moore to defect so that he can go to one of Cuba’s world-class hospitals and get that stomach-stapling operation he so desperately needs.

But then again, I’m probably not bright enough to comprehend the tolerant and sophisticated intellectual nuance of the Che-Cuba imagery.

Finally, a lefty friend of mine summed up her side’s feelings in a post on my Facebook page: “We hate Palin because she’s stupid.”

Again, the “stupid” argument. I had to remind my lefty friend that “hate” conflicts with the alleged leftist ideals of open-mindedness, tolerance and love for our fellow man. It’d be a sad world, I said, if we shared our love only with people of a certain intellect. But as we all know, leftists are tolerant only on paper, not in practice. They’re tolerant only of those who agree with them.

And that’s the appeal of Palin to me: her very existence proves that today’s leftists are intellectual frauds.

Palin, as noted here last week, raised five children, rose from nothing and lived the role of citizen-politician. She fought corruption in both parties in her state. She battled big oil. She’s grown rich. She’s a symbol of female empowerment to millions of open-minded women. She brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan.

Real liberals admire those qualities in a woman.

But see, Palin, as also noted here last week, didn’t go to Harvard. She hunts. She’s pro life. She deviates from the illiberal leftist dogma about the place of women in society.

So she’s ridiculed, even “hated,” by today’s intolerant leftists who merely pretend to be liberals.

The intellectual fraudulence of the left was on full display here in Boston this week, the city that once prided itself as the Cradle of Liberty, back when the city’s intelligentsia was comprised of real liberals.

In today’s Boston, the not-so-intelligentsia in the Harvard-Beacon Hill-Boston Globe moonbat alliance is comprised only of imaginary fake ”liberals.” Yes, that’s right, I said it. They’re posers and pretenders.

We know they’re fake because, this week in Boston, stupid Sarah Palin exposed each and every one of them as intellectual frauds.

Tuesday night, January 26th at 7:00 when most people would like to be home relaxing after work, almost 500 average citizens from Massachusetts packed a convention hall in the Boston suburb of Braintree. They shared some common interests. They’re either running for office or helping someone else run for office. Some of them are running for federal or state offices, some for seats in local towns and cities and some for school boards. The one sentiment they share is clear: They’ve had enough.

A capacity crowd!

The event they showed up for was a “candidate school” offered by Boston talk radio host Michael Graham of 96.9 WTKK, a man the Boston Phoenix dubbed “Boston’s maestro of conservative controversies.” In between his tenure at WTKK and a career in stand-up comedy, Graham ran political campaigns. Today, he is sharing his knowledge with the citizens of the Bay State and encouraging them to participate in the system.

Attendees included people like Francis McLaughlin, a retired Boston fire fighter and registered Republican since 1975. McLaughlin is running for the Massachusetts House of Representatives for specific reasons:

“The Massachusetts legislature is totally ineffective. They’re not protecting children from predators, taxes are too high and there are way too many entitlements.”

Another attendee was Vernon Harrison, an “Independent Republican” who works in the computer industry and is planning a run for congress.

“I’m tired of the size, scope and spending of government. I also think people are tired of self serving career politicians.”

Potential candidates weren’t limited to Republicans. Marty Hogan of South Boston is a Democrat who’s gearing up for his second run for Boston City Council.

“Boston is not getting any better for Bostonians and we need real transparency. We need to return the seats to the people.”

The panel of speakers arranged by Michael Graham included every political persuasion. Holly Robichaud, a Republican strategist who blogs at the Boston Herald website as “The Lone Republican” gave a step by step explanation of a political campaign and former Boston City Councilman Bruce Bolling, a Democrat, offered an inspiring call to public service based on his own experiences. Tea Party activist, Corie Whalen provided advice on social networking software and Dennis Corrigan, a Libertarian, broke down the do’s and don’ts of campaign finance law.

Whalen, Graham, Robichaud, Bolling and Corrigan.

Speaking of Libertarians, another attendee was Joe Kennedy, the former rival of Scott Brown and Martha Coakley in the recent Massachusetts senate race. Kennedy is a Libertarian who ran as an Independent and when asked about Brown’s victory, graciously remarked:

“I’m very happy to see the effect of the election on Washington, DC.”

Of course the happiest person of the evening seemed to be the organizer of the event himself. When I caught up with Michael Graham at the end of the night, he was beaming.

“This was phenomenal, Scott Brown inspired hope. These are all people who came here from work and these are the people who can win.”

In March, Graham will conduct the third in his series of candidate school sessions.

“By the time we’re done, we will have trained a thousand people to run or help someone else run.”

With the election of Republican Scott Brown, Massachusetts became the subject of national interest over the last month. If this new wave of average citizens turned candidates follow through with their goals, Massachusetts may set a new standard in politics which hearkens back to America’s roots.

A government truly of, by and for the people.

In researching the ever-intensifying Massachusetts Senate race between Democrat Martha Coakley and her Republican challenger Scott Brown, it only takes a few keystrokes to unearth her ongoing history of questionable judgment and puzzling prosecutorial decisions.  Even though the election has been effectively nationalized, with some polls showing the underdog Brown within two points or so of the colorless Coakley, she remains largely unknown outside New England.

So as a public service to the voters of the Bay State, during the run-up to the special election on Jan. 19, Big Journalism will be offering some of the Martha’s Greatest Hits, so that they can fully make up their minds whether she would make a suitable successor to the late Edward Moore Kennedy – who, as you recall, began his illustrious career by being expelled from Harvard for cheating, went on to drown Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, and then turned to a life of drinking and debauchery, including the infamous “waitress sandwich” with soon-to-be-retired Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, before attempting to inflict “universal health care” on the country shortly before his death last year.

You can read all about Ted here in this classic profile of the last and worst of the Kennedy brothers by the late Michael Kelly.  Be sure to read the whole thing, just to get a flavor of the kind of candidate Massachusetts voters seem to like.

Homework done?  Good.  Because Martha Coakley, the current Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and thus its top law enforcement officer, is shaping up as a worthy heir to the Lion of the Senate.(more…)

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