After looking over GOP speeches from this primary cycle, especially those wherein Mitt Romney stated (and restated) his belief in man-made global warming, it occurred to me that many of his positions sound eerily familiar, if not strikingly similar, to those held by President Barack Obama. And after looking more closely, it was interesting to set statements from the two side by side and see how little difference there actually is between them on environmental issues.

First of all, as I alluded to above, they both believe in man-made global warming. For example, during the 2008 president debates Obama said, “I think that the climate change issue is the most serious environmental issue that we face.” And in between the time he was elected president in November 2008 and the time he was sworn into office in January 2009, he voiced his belief that man-made global warming was taking a serious toll on the earth:

Few challenges facing America – and the world – are more urgent than combating global climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coast lines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.

When Romney gave a speech in New Hampshire this past summer, he made clear his belief in man-made global warming as well:

I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer. I can’t prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.

While we know empirically that Obama’s belief in global warming translated into a pursuit of cap-and-trade policies, green jobs, electric cars (that catch on fire), and what is quickly becoming an energy disaster for our country, it’s important to note that Romney also wants to act on his global warming convictions. As he said in New Hampshire: “I think it’s important for us to reduce our emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing.”

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Paul Tsongas for President? Romney Ultimately Voted for Bush

After John McCain’s opposition file on Mitt Romney from 2008 was leaked, there was this curious line: ““Romney voted for Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary.” Newt Gingrich has also attacked Romney for his support of Paul Tsongas, a former Massachusetts Democratic senator who ran for his party’s nomination in 1992. Tsongas lost to political upstart, Bill Clinton, and you know the rest.

Left out of most of these analyses is this: “[Romney] added he had been sure the GOP would renominate George Bush, for whom he voted in the fall election.” (Scot Lehigh and Frank Phillips, “GOP’s Romney Declares, Says Kennedy Out of Date,” The Boston Globe, February 3, 1994).

Romney’s support of Tsongas actually proves something other than Romney’s most vociferous critics are claiming: Mitt Romney’s willingness to work across the aisle to tackle the deficit.

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The gist of a recently released opposition research document from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is that the former Massachusetts governor is not a real Republican because some of his centrist positions and alliances with Democrats. Researchers working for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) reportedly authored the file during the 2008 Republican primary.

But some of the claims may simply illustrate a man who is committed to his own ideals, loyal to those around him and perhaps trying to do what is morally right–maybe even by hiring advisers to offer him objective perspectives so that he doesn’t just have people around him who mimic his own views. Among some of the exacerbated criticisms are the following with an alternative counter-point below each allegation:

1. “Romney voted for Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary”

Tsongas was a Senator from Massachusetts, Romney’s own state.

2. “Romney was an independent until deciding to run for the Senate in 1994.”

Mitt Romney’s 1994 bid for U.S. Senate was his first attempt at running for political office. It should be no surprise that he was independent before then since independents make up the majority of Massachusetts voters–some of whom remain non-party affiliated or “unenrolled” so that they can opt to vote in either primary in each election. According to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Elections Division online records, in February 1994  there were 418, 298 registered Republicans, 1,283,986 registered Democrats, but 3,174,759 total voters, which leaves 1,471,500 unenrolled voters. Romney was no different than the largest class of Massachusetts voters.

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Democratic activist and former member of the Obama administration, Elizabeth Warren, has opened up a seven-point lead against incumbent Republican, Sen. Scott Brown, in the 2012 Senate race in Massachusetts, according to a recent poll.

Sen. Brown, who portrayed himself as a guy who “drives a truck,” won a special election in January of 2010 to fill the Senate term of the late Ted Kennedy, becoming the first Republican senator from “blue” Massachusetts since 1972. Mr. Brown ran against Democrat Martha Coakley in a stunning, come-from-behind campaign. Sen. Brown’s victory inspired him to say, “Tonight, the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken. This Senate seat belongs to no one person, no one political party. … This is the people’s seat.”

The election of Scott Brown was significant in several ways. First, it broke the Democrats’ 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Second, it was the forerunner of the “shellacking” President Obama and the liberal Democrats experienced the following November when a group of conservative Republicans won back the House for their party and redefined the core principles and values of that party. Third, it legitimized the power of the grass roots Tea Party, which remains the primary thorn in the side of the president and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

With the support of the Tea Party and other conservatives across the country, Scott Brown was swept to victory. However, only a month after his historical election, he began distancing himself from the grass roots group, refraining from joining the Tea Party caucus, stressing, instead, his desire to be an “independent voter and thinker and focus on the very real issues and where we find commonality.”

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The blockbuster revelations in Big Peace editor Peter Schweizer’s Throw Them All Out about Congressional insider trading have prompted vigorous calls for reform from various lawmakers. First, Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry spoke out against the now-legal practice in a campaign ad. In the House of Representatives, a bill by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) to ban Congressional insider trading currently has 118 co-sponsors.

Today, Sen.  Scott Brown (R-MA) writes an op-ed to promote the STOCK Act, a bill he has recently sponsored in the Senate to “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge.” He explains his support for the legislation is based on Schweizer’s reporting.

From the Boston Herald:

I’ve always thought legislators should live by the same laws that govern everyone else. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Recently a “60 Minutes” expose brought to light a glaring loophole allowing members of Congress to legally profit from trading stocks based on non-public information. It also revealed various ways that members may have used the powers of their office to benefit their personal financial and real estate portfolios. This is wrong.

For example, if a member of Congress on the Armed Services Committee were to learn through connections at the Pentagon that a major defense program was suddenly on the chopping block, then that member could sell his or her stock in the defense contractors affected and score a profit — or avoid losses — when the news breaks. Under current law, the congressman would likely walk away with a fatter investment account. For everyone else, it could mean you go to jail. (more…)

So Elmer Fudd Barney Frank announced yesterday that he would not be running for re-election in 2012.  His stated reason was that his district was gerrymandered, which is true.  But Frank was no longer safe in a  safe-district. Remember it took a last-minute infusion of DNCC money to save Barney Frank in 2010 and even then, his 54% of the vote was the lowest he had ever received since his first election in 1980. Frank is retiring because he is chicken, he almost lost last time, and doesn’t have the guts to try again.

In his 31+ years in the House of Representatives Frank was always there to remind people why term limits should be added to the constitution. Be it the brothel that was operated out of his house, his lover that worked for Freddie Mac which led to his unbridled support of Fannie and Freddie which helped cause the housing bubble and great recession, his progressive stances which would make the most avid socialist proud, or that unexplained arrogance (he has nothing to be arrogant about).

Today is a good day for America because Barney Frank’s days in Congress are numbered, to understand why he was so bad for the country, I put together this video “tribute.”

In the video below Frank sits in a 9/10/03 House Financial Services Committee hearing and says Fannie and Freddie are sound, and there is no housing disaster coming.

Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.): I worry, frankly, that there’s a tension here. The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios.

Here Congressman Fudd Frank stood up on the floor of the House of Representatives and told America that there is undue concern about the housing market and even though prices were growing very quickly the housing market is not like the Dot.Com industry, the housing bubble will not burst.

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Elizabeth Warren might just be the motivation that conservatives need to get behind the re-election campaign of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA). Until now, the Tea Party activists that helped push Brown to an historic victory in 2010 had been grumbling about Brown’s leftish voting record. But Warren’s embrace of tax-and-spend policies, and her disregard for constitutional checks and balances, are giving conservatives new reasons to care.

I once admired Warren–and told her so. I was a student at Harvard Law School when she was plucked from her teaching job to serve as the congressional “oversight czar” for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In that role, Warren stood out for her unique willingness to criticize Obama administration appointees, notably treasury secretary Tim Geithner, for failing to comply with basic transparency and reporting requirements.

Warren had also been extremely popular among her students–so much so that our graduating class awarded her the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award in 2009, even though she hadn’t taught since the previous fall. I hadn’t had the privilege of being in one of her classes, but I congratulated her on the award, and told her that as a conservative, I felt she was speaking for me, too, in holding the Obama administration accountable.

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From MSNBC:

Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney’s landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney’s own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare.”

The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs reviewed by NBC News, show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.

“The White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts,” said Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the Romney administration on health care and who attended five meetings at the Obama White House in 2009, including the meeting with the president. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model.”

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Now we know why unionists were fighting so hard for a federal “card check” law.  Organizers can unionize private and public employees, forcing them to pay hundreds in union dues, before they even know anything about it.

That’s the situation at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in Orleans, Massachusetts.

Last week news broke that the reputable charter school was the second in Massachusetts to be organized by the American Federation of Teachers.

Various sources indicated that the unionization effort was somewhat less than forthright. Several teachers complained that they were never informed about the process and were never asked to vote on the issue.

“The union effort was coordinated by group of teachers and staff that did not include all employees,” one teacher wrote. “In fact, a number of employees were not approached at all and found out, quite by accident, that a union had been formed without our input.

“A full vote of the faculty and staff was never taken and plans to unionize went ahead, anyway.”

Unionization without a vote of the staff? That sounds like the nasty little practice of “card check,” which allows pro-union employees to gang up on co-workers and pressure them to sign a union membership card. Once 50 percent of them do so, the union is automatically certified.

There are no private ballots involved in the process. Those who refuse to sign are exposed to all the pressure and intimidation that the union can muster. Under those conditions, it probably doesn’t take very long to gain 50 percent approval.

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It seems Gov. Scott Walker’s ideas are catching on, even in Massachusetts. From Boston.com:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

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The former Governor of Massachusetts and semi-declared candidate for President, Mr. Romney, has the Massachusetts health care “solution” called now “RomneyCare” (a plan upon which the widely unpopular “Obama Care” plan is based) to discuss with the American people. For some on the Left this provides Mr. Romney with a strong gravitas, but how will RomneyCare play on the Right?

“RomneyCare’s” association with “ObamaCare” and the rampant unrealistic, excessive nanny-statism (and legislative strong-arm process that passed the national plan) combines to create a difficult marketing/public relations challenge for Mr. Romney in the upcoming election should he decide to run.

Michael Graham in the Boston Herald of April 12, 2011 writes,

As a health care plan, Romney care is an unmitigated fiasco. It has caused costs to skyrocket, insurance premiums to soar and nonprofit providers like Blue Cross to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Illustrative of the deep rift across the country about RomneyCare/ObamaCare and too many other contentious issues to discuss, Graham cites a new Suffolk University poll showing dissatisfaction with the Massachusetts Romney Plan.

But after five years of actually experiencing this new universe, even the Kennedy Democrats have had enough. A new Suffolk University poll showed that nearly half of Massachusetts voters say the law isn’t helping, while just 38 percent say it is. As Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute pointed out, Romney care is almost as unpopular here as Obama- care is across America.

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Canadians will go to the polls on May 2nd to elect a Prime Minister.  The election has gained almost no attention in the U.S. but one candidate suddenly has a very American problem.

As reported in the Toronto Sun, Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal Party candidate for Prime Minister stated in a 2004 interview with a U.K. journalist:

“I am an American Democrat. I will vote for Kerry in November.”

Ignatieff, a professor at Harvard University, was living in Cambridge, MA at the time.  He had been away from Canada for over 30 years, having arrived at Harvard as a graduate student in 1969. In the 70s he moved to the UK, but eventually found his way back to Cambridge and settled in as an academic.  He became so settled that it was a shock to many in Canada when returned in 2005 and announced his intention to run for Parliament.  Many questioned if he was a U.S. citizen.  Feeling the pressure, Ignatieff told the Toronto Star, ”

“I’ve never been a citizen of any other country.  Nor was I a green card holder in the United States.”

If that is true, then voting in the U.S. was illegal. And a professor at the Kennedy School of Government would have known that.

A conviction for illegal voting in Massachusetts carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.  For each time that he voted.

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Yes, it’s true my home state of Massachusetts is the native habitat of that frigthening political specter, the moonbat.

But not everyone in the Bay State is lefty loon. Some are downright proud to be American, and enthusiastically support our veterans. Consider the story of Kimberly Rogers and Paige Haley, two friends from the town of Pepperell who just introduced 50 Back lager — half the profits are given to veterans charities.

Among the organizations they support are the USO and Homes for Our Troops, a Massachusetts charity that builds handicapped accessible homes around the country for wounded veterans.

We wrote about them today in The Boston Herald. Right now the beer is available only in Massachusetts. But I thought the nationwide Big Government community would like to hear their story. If the beer catches on, as I imagine it will, then the sky’s the limit.

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Last week I wrote about the certainty that Americans, particularly those younger, healthier Americans who insurance companies need to buy coverage in order to sustain President Obama’s new health care regime, will game the new system of individual mandates, just as they have in Massachusetts.

A new report from the Congressional Research Service, released to Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, details the near certainty that this situation will be gamed by the American people to an unprecedented degree — including drawing out a few fascinating points which weren’t discussed to any great detail during the legislative process. The report paints a far worse picture of the likelihood of gaming the system — rather than just those younger Americans I suggested would choose month to month liquidity over the cost of insurance, this suggests that several other groups will have incentives to game the system.
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My latest Health Care News podcast, brought to you by FreedomPub, is with Merrill Matthews, executive director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance and a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, about his latest column on the individual mandate. You can listen to it here or stream it below:

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When I’m asked on the radio or in person about the biggest problem with President Obama’s health care reform, the answer I usually give isn’t that it’s a recipe for trillions in costs for the American people, that it creates massive new taxes on businesses and entrepeneurs, that it effectively divides us into two Americas, that it squelches innovative programs or that it’s possibly unconstitutional.

My answer is much simpler: it’s a model of health care which is proven not to work, because it assumes consumers will act irrationally.
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The Chowdah Revolution is far from over, if recent reports are read critically.

And its scent has been picked up as far afield as Rhode Island and down on the Cape.

Delahunt with his "excellent friend"

This past week Congressman Patrick Kennedy announced that he will not be seeking reelection, ending 50 years of Kennedy incompetence in federal government. Like his father, the younger Kennedy had a strong penchant for strong drinks and driving — although he seems to have enjoyed pills as well.

Today, The Boston Globe reports that Cape Cod congressman Bill Delahunt (MA-10) might be the next to go. The Boston Globe seems to think that Delahunt’s ties to Chavez and a controversial home heating program will be helpful to him in his possible re-election bid. I have my doubts.  Two weeks ago, I wrote an analysis of Delahunt’s weaknesses. Here’s an exercept:

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The Scott Brown revolution is alive and well in Massachusetts.

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:

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In the wake of a stunning political result in Massachusetts, it’s time to assess the future Scott Brown dictates for health care, the market, the Democrats, and the country. It’s the third week of January 2010, and here’s the latest edition of Coffee and Markets, a weekly podcast from The New Ledger on politics, policy and the marketplace with Francis Cianfrocca, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Dan McLaughlin: Seven Lessons of the Brown Bombshell

WSJ: Obama Scales Back Health Care Plans

Paul Krugman: Obama Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For

The Chicago Tribune reassures its readers – White House: Mass. ‘messages heard’

And what were those messages?

Axelrod said: “You know, I’ll let others assess responsibility. I think the main thing that we saw in Massachusetts was the same sense of concern on the part of middle class folks about the economic situation, about their wages being stagnant, about jobs being lost, about their economic security that’s been in jeopardy.

“And this is something that predated the big recession that we’re going through,” the president’s chief political advisor said. “And that’s something that we have to pay a great deal of attention to. It is the focus of this president’s attention at all times. And we have to convey that.”

Translation: Coakley lost because the people of Massachusetts share the same concerns as the President; They all hate Bush, even if they don’t know it.

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