Colonel Brown's War

To think, when Scott Brown finally retires from the Maryland National Guard as a bird Colonel, he will likely be in line to collect a much bigger pension than the disability allowance collected by my white haired old father.
Oh Elias do be fair, Colonel Scott Brown earned that pension by working hard in the Judge Advocate's Office writing briefs, making useful contacts, making with the glad hand.
Herculean labors indeed for the barefoot boy from Wakefield.

All my father ever did was make a Last Stand for the Republic in the Ardenne Forest and then stopping a shell with his head on the German side of the Rhine River.

Fair is fair after all.

If the Extreme Court

sends "Obamacare" (that market based solution to universal healthcare) for a terminal dirt nap, what is to stop congress from creating a single payer system on the Top Down British or the more Organic French Model?
Constitutionally speaking, nothing stands in their way.
Except of course, the same Extreme Court packed as it is with malevolent reactionary ideological warriors and about ten thousand healthcare lobbyists in Washington eager to keep their phony baloney jobs and about a half a billion dollars in campaign contributions bribes, consultancy gigs etc etc etc.
But if "Obamacare" does go down, then it is an article of faith among wingnuts that Obama will be swept from office with it.
Historically, this does not hold up, Roosevelt survived the Judicial Extinction of the NRA in fine form, in fact the National Recovery Act's disappearance paved the way for new legislative initiatives notably the Social Security Act, Tax Fairness and the National Labor Relations Act.
All I can say to the differently winged is "Be Careful What You Wish For...."

Murder in Vermont...

A sort of downmarket Leopold & Loeb have been accused of graphically murdering a school teacher in Vermont.
Nasty business, plotted seemingly at random and caught almost immediately...just like Leopold and Loeb minus the pointless exactitude of a pair of "War of Warcraft" champions.
My point is, just listen for the shrill cries for the Death Penalty on this one, this one is so very nasty it is bound to reverb in the State Legislatures of New England.
Mind you, as a theoretical proposition I'm not opposed to Capital Punishment (there are just some miscreants out there who need to be turned to dust soonest, forget about deterring crime they just need to leave this Earth)...Its just that I don't trust the Massachusetts State Legislature to write a fair just equitable law that will punish the guilty, any more than I trust the legislatures of Vermont, Maine Connecticut or ghod help us New Hampshire and Rhode Island to do likewise.
If this debate rekindles, I suppose then it is pointless then to plead for calm deliberation...No not with all sorts of angry "believing minds" controlling the discourse.

Scott Brown is transferring into the Maryland National Guard

apparently to forestall any attempts to politicize his utterly unmemorable record of service in the Guard.
What I wanna know is, who is trying to politicize Scott's service record?
Because there isn't much there to work with, it is a record of some thirty years of drudgery in the Judge Advocate's Office uncontaminated by any hint of heroism with some smart looking cammies thrown in for good measure.
Frankly the person who has relentlessly politicized Scott Brown's National Guard Record has been Scott Brown.
Back in 2010 all his mailers featured Scott in full combat drag...I mean who is this knuckle dragger kidding with all these worries about "politicizing his record"?
This sudden decamp to Maryland though, makes me suspicious that there is something worth covering up in his Guard Service after all...
At the very least it is a gratuitous flip off to the Commonwealth in the style of Scott's Political Mentor, Mitt Romney.
Ah well, lets be real here, if the media and public never punished Dan Quayle and George Bush Jr for their lamentable records in the National Guard then Scott Brown will likely never be held accountable for his unremarkable & forgettable assignment to the Judge Advocate's Office.
I don't even know why he remains in the National Guard unless it is for the political brownie points he has wracked up. Brown is too old and improperly trained to be sent into combat anyway....He could be mustered out sans any reproach as far as I am concerned.

The Herald got all worked up about liberal bloggers

hatin' on Dick Cheney's heart transplant....on the front damn page!

My only complaint is that as usual, the Herald declined to name names.

Honestly the dinomedia is losing their sense of humor at an exponential rate.
Shee-it you can read my Sunday post to Cheney verbatim and Humble Elias promises you, that if Dick Cheney is a real US Politician he'd laugh....fuh real.
And if not, then he is one of those useless paper dolls that infest the current political process in the USA and is probably too delicate for help to begin with.
Besides, I seem to recall Howie Carr was none too gentle with Edward Maximus during his final illness...just sayin'.
Meanwhile lets put aside petty partisanship in a manner pleasing to the Brian McGrory's of this world and hope
And pray
That Dick Cheney doesn't end up with Demi Moore for a hospital room mate.
The woman was huffin' nitrous...huffing nitrous...
You can't make this shit up.

Belmont Anecdote

In the late fall of 1980, I was attending a second rate prep school in Boston's Back Bay. I had to take  the #78 bus from Arlington to the #1 bus in Harvard Square, then take it on the hoof.
One day we were idling at an intersection in Belmont when a hit and run driver mowed down a middle school girl on the opposite corner.
This poor thing was sprawled in the street in obvious pain with broken bones, crying piteously for her mother.
A most distressing scene.
So, being a newly minted Eagle Scout (just nosed under the wire a few days prior to my 18th Birthday) I piled out of the bus and started banging on doors trying to get someone to call 911.
On my third house I finally got a crabby old pensioner who made a surly call to the police while warning me to get off his front stoop.
In retrospect I'm sure I presented a somewhat suspicous sight, banging on his front door demanding someone call the police.
By the time I got back to the accident scene, the police and EMT's had arrived and gotten down to business.
I think back on this incident because IF Massachusetts had a "Stand Your Ground Law" on the books in 1980, that crabby old retiree would have been well within his rights to shoot me between the eyes out of fear that I might have been a danger to him.
Just sayin'....

Jeff Jacoby insists that

Mitt Romney will be a big smash on college campuses this election year with his blustery promises to balance the federal budget and thus spare the kids the awful burden of public debt.
Well...what can I tell yuh, Walter Mondale himself came to my college campus in 1984 and made the exact same accusation and made the same promise and my fellow students still flocked to vote for the GOP second biggest GOP deficit spender of all time, Ronald Reagan.
If it didn't work for Mondale in 1984, it won't work for Romney in 2012.
And anyway what is worse in a historic sense?
A government carrying debt to bridge a time of crisis or a government that won't meet its obligations because it is run by professional welshers and conservative posers?`

Dick Cheney got a heart transplant...

Why?
He has functioned perfectly well at the apex of GOP politics for decades without any indication of either having or needing a heart.

Oh that was cruel...

Well if he wakes up weeping with sympathy for the poor and infirm, then the transplant was a success...

I'm warning you, you'll make Jeff Jacoby's list for sure this year!!!

Sorry but a new heart is no cure. Cheney is still gonna crave human blood when the moon is full, the medical team should have consulted Hammer Horror Films for confirmation of this.

STOP!!!
WRONG!!
I Kid!
I Kid because...I love....
I love
To Kid.

David Bernstein

(Who may be the best political reporter in Boston) answered a question on his Blog as to any nascent presidential ambitions on the part of Former State Senator Scott Brown.

Bernstein sez "no", Humble Elias though has a different view, mostly on grounds that at this point four out of our last four US Senators have contracted Potomac Fever, nothing in Scott Brown's political DNA suggests he has any immunity to the disorder.

Justice is having a very rough Friday...

Apparently those "last stand laws" the NRA foisted on us are enough to put a well armed mall cop beyond the reach of justice with respect to Trayvon Martin.

Ah but that is the NRA at work, making sure the intellectually and judgement impaired are not, unarmed when push comes to shove.

Meanwhile here in Boston the Suffolk County DA can't seem to put away some gunslingers in Mattapan.

Four citizens dead and not one conviction...No one seems to be covering themselves with glory at the Court House.

Like I said, this has been a good friday indeed for the cause of sheer Injustice.

Gaffe Disease

is apparently contagious.
Mitt Romney is a chronic sufferer and now he has infected poor Eric Fehrnstrom who compared his employer to an "Etch-A-Sketch" toy as a metaphor for The Former Governor's capacity to flip from conservative to moderate on a moment's notice.
I can understand why Romney sez such laughably stupid things, there has always been a clumsy disconnect between what he believes and what he says and the way he says it.
But Fehnstrom?
He is an glib egomaniacal toady, exactly the sort who should be kept as far away from political chat shows as the Bill of Rights will allow.
You'd think Brand Romney would get that, Ted Sorenson a factotum's factotum made exactly one public speech in the whole thousand days of J.F.K.'s Presidency. He sure as shit knew to stay off chat shows boy howdy.

Jeb Bush has endorsed Mitt Romney for President...

I think those two embrace, look each in the eye, smile and see the other one as a very very credulous pawn.
I wonder what this means?
Is Florida Senator Marco Rubio's Vice Presidential Star descending at last?
Does Jeb now crave the second spot on the ticket?
I wonder how well the two of them (Rubio & Bush) are polling nationally and as a means to deliver their home state?
I'm gonna guess that Children of Bush Senior have an aversion to the Vice Presidency and it's reputation for political suspended animation.
That is of course, if Romney wins the Big Brass Ring.
On the other hand, running and losing with Romney does vault Jeb into A-List contention in 2016, but then the same can be said for Rubio.
La Famiglia Arbusto and The Former Viceroy have a long storied relationship that mostly revolves the selective exploitation of Romney by the Bush Family coupled with sporadic attempts by Mitt to use the Bush Clan's Seal of Approval to bolster his own lackluster conservative bona fides.
In other words, it is a fluid situation whenever Bush and Romney try to serve each other's interests.

Mitt Romney wants a bigger US Navy...

cuz according to him our navy is the smaller than the one we had in 1917.
This is the sort of specious invidious comparison one can expect from a candidate who spent his whole adult life trapped in a high finance cocoon.
As usual The Former Viceroy doesn't take into account the vastly increased capabilities of our current navy. Nor does he note that we lack a ocean going military competitor similar fleet diversification (Inventory note, we have eleven carrier battle groups, the PRC has one, the Russians have...one.).
But amidst all the promised tax cuts and the chimera of a balanced budget, Mitt still wants more ships and planes and tanks, but being Romney he won't tell you how he will pay for all this hardware (probably deficit spending it's the preferred option of the chronically passive aggressive).
And anyway, you can have the biggest fleet in the world and still fail in your mission to control the sea lanes. Case in point, Germany's U-Boat campaign against Great Britain in World War One. The Royal Navy's battleship heavy fleet tonnage proved no impediment to the use of submarines in a purely economic war against the British Empire.
Romney might realize that, if he took time to read some history instead of that lifelong diet of dividend statements and spreadsheets he has woefully consumed.

Grover Norquist...

Got profiled in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine today, with due diligence rendered up to his power and scope in Washington and his No Taxes Pledge.
It occured to me though, that if your goal was to keep the Federal Government's deficit very high indeed the best policy to pursue is to impose a pledge on conservative legistlators to never ever raise taxes under any circumstances.
If you are truly worried about spending (and I submit that much of the concern about the deficit is political and situational) then the last thing you want to do is tie the hands of your negotiator when it comes time to talk turkey over the budget.
You may think these pledges are preventing tax increases, in fact they just demonstrate a lack of seriousness and an inability to manuever.
Who wants to negotiate with partners that are all "pledged out"?
Keep in mind, legistlators have no problem passing the deficit buck forward onto succeeding generations, they pass ever more diresome problems to our progeny every day. In fact it is rare for a legislature to eschew such measures...I can't think of one quite frankly.
So lets be honest, lacking any substantive bargaining with real pain on both sides the deficit is gonna be with us for a long time to come.
No, the pledge is nice sharp rhetorical weapon designed to hamstring authentic progress and perhaps bring such pleasing chaos on the Republic as can be blamed on the liberals.
Because sheer eliminationism, is never too far from the thoughts of Modern Movement Conservatism and that is what I think is at the core of the No New Taxes Pledge.
It is childish and a little crazy, but it is what Grover wants.

Times are so tough that

some of these columnists down at the Boston Globe have to take second jobs.
Adrian Walker for example seems to have taken a part time stenographer's position with Former Mayor of Cambridge Ken Reeves.

Yesterday...

Rick Santorum rather churlishly barked at Puerto Rico that they would have to "speak english" if they wanted to achieve statehood.
Now...most people thought this was The Ricktator being his usual asinine ethnocentric self.

Humble Elias thinks High Pitched Rich did this deliberately as Mitt Romney is down in Puerto Rico hunting delegates in their primary and the Ricktator is probably obliquely warning Willard not to get hoity toity and start speaking spanish.
Imagine the shit storm Gingrich and Santorum would scream up if Mitt started in with the Espanol.

Just sayin'....

Idle Question for the day...

Does Freshly Minted Country Music Star Ayla Brown use birth control?
And if so, who pays for it?

If some fresh faced High School coed wants to ask Senator Brown this question the next time he drops by to bloviate, that would be just swell.

Don't forget to video his response and post to Youtube while yer at it.

So with two major losses in Southern Primaries last night...

to add to Mitt Romney's ever lengthening rap sheet, I guess we can deduce that the endorsement and active support of comedian Jeff Foxworthy doesn't count for shit in Dixieland.

A month ago or so...

the meme was that Ron Paul was in this race to run ideological interference for Romney thus to elevate his ne'er do well Senatorial Son to the Vice Presidency or extract a pledge to study revival of the Gold Standard from the "Romney Admin".
But that is Ron Paul, he is a fantasist, everything he seemingly wants is sheer immaterial delusion.
Nowadays though, I'm wondering why Newt Gingrich is still in this race? Basically as of last night all the bloated Former Speaker of the House is good for is sucking up twenty eight to thirty percent of the vote that would otherwise go into an overwhelming electoral coalition against Mitt Romney and thus Advantage Santorum.
Given the fact that Newt hasn't delivered on much since carrying his own state, I'm thinking just maybe it's in Romney's interest to keep his opponents active and divided.
The problem is, that the Former Viceroy is such an inept politician one doubts he could effectively manipulate Gingrich who theoretically is vulnerable to appeals to his morbidly obese ego.
Humble Elias doubts Newt would nibble at the Vice Presidential Bait, but on the other hand how do you offer someone the second slot as a means to keep them in the race?
A trick like that requires a deft political hand which  of course, Romney does not have.
So if it comes down to Gingrich having second thoughts, maybe bailing out over the short term to write a book and get his snout back in the conservative welfare trough...then Perish Romney.

NPR reported today

that the net worth of People's Republic of China's rubber stamp People's National Congress tops eighty nine billion dollars.  Eleven times the net worth of the US Senate and the US Senate is hardly a back country poor house.
Apparently the NPC has become a gaudy refuge for the richest most powerful capitalists in the PRC.
The CCP legalized membership for the wealthy some ten years ago and viola' instant oligarchy!

There are a lot of ways you can look at this "Chairman Mao is spinning in his grave" being the most obvious one.
My thinking is, the whole situation pretty much scientifically demonstrates that Marxist Dialectics are a load of rubbish, not even Antonio Gramsci could talk his way out of this one.
That and the fact that the Chinese have superceded post industrialism & literally revived the defacto Oligarchy of the Roman Senate, which was nothing but the political arm of the wealthy in Ancient Rome.
It was governance for the elite, by the elite and of the elite period end of story...then in Ancient Italy and now in Modern Beijing.

Apparently...

Governor Patrick is skipping next week's Annual Convocation of "Windbag's Anonymous" in South Boston, in favor of a vacation trip to the Virgin Islands.
Ditching the Saint Patrick's Day Corned Beef & Cabbage Breakfast in Southie automatically qualifies one for a severe verbal slagging from the Nimble Wits of Those Present.
But that is, in my opinion a very small price to pay for escaping an event that has become a exercise in diresome torpid self parody.
Most of these mooks think themselves hilarious, in fact their talent from comedy runs a short range from the  merely Gubernatorial to the outright Limbaughian.
They say the whole thing was funnier when Billy Bulger was the Master of Ceremonies, but that alone is all I need to know to give this mishaugas a wide berth.
Frankly the classiest thing Mitt Romney and Tom Reilly both have in common is that they politely stopped dancing in attendance on this nonsense and now, Deval Patrick joins those ranks.
Someone ought to gin up a Saint Patrick's Day Banquet that is both  funny and inclusive, lord knows we need one.

A Rising Tide Lifteth All Boats...

There has been a lot of palaver recently in the press about Scott Brown's sudden surge in the polls in his race for re-election to the US Senate.
A lot of the chatter centers around Brown's steadfast support for the anti contraception "Blunt Amendment".
People seem to think Brown's uncharacteristic die hard advocacy somehow solidified his bona fides with conservative "Reagan Democrats" etc etc.
Never mind the fact that Brown for two weeks was in effect demanding Sharia Law in the Workplace...
Nonethless, he is up in the polls five percent nine percent the numbers vary.
My own guess is, that as the economy improves especially the job creation numbers, that Brown's own prospects concurrently improve.
In other words, good news for Barack Obama is good news for Scott Brown.
Seems to me that his polling and the rising economic trends do seem to dovetail chronologically.
Hell I could be wrong, Humble Elias is no numbers cruncher.
Moreover, this bodes ill for the democrats in some ways, because a return of confidence, undercuts in some sense Citizen Warren's anti Wall Street pitch, which is her strongest issue without question.
That having been said, neither candidate has grounds for complacency...This is gonna be a long hard fought campaign, Brown may have done nothing to alienate Massachusetts voters but then again he has done almost nothing to their benefit either. Watching Scott decide on a major issue is like watching a snake digest a Slinky.
Everyone has their work cut out for them.

Kwiet Friday...

Tis Chilly in South Boston...

Over in the Boston Globe, Scot Lehigh sighs and half heartedly tries to gin up Mitt Romney as a nice harmless republican moderate...again.
Didn't we already go thru all this in 2008?
Right now even as I right this somewhere in America, Mitt Romney is ineptly and timorously saying crazy sh*t in a bid to get the votes of people that he typically disdains and dismisses.
The Scot Lehigh's of this world say "don't worry he really doesn't mean it".
The word for that is "opportunism" and if that is the best thing you can say about Mitt Romney, then heaven help us!
Especially the incompetent way Romney tries to game the process...

The Boston Globe reports today

some amazement that Rick "High Pitched Rich" Santorum isn't going over bigger with catholic voters.
Well what can I say?
Sometimes one has to remind oneself of a candidates particular religion, the way we must remind ourselves periodically that Hitler and Mussolini were both catholics and Stalin was a seminarian.
In Rick's case his catholicism is easily forgotten as he barnstorms the nation in the name of theocracy & autocracy, the man sounds every bit like Westbrook Pegler gone mad on roofies, I mean the traditional catholic social concerns get back burnered completely when the candidate starts ranting and raving about bestiality etc.
He is literally drowning out his own religion with a cataract of fury, revenge and verbal brutality...Stylistically he is a protestant revivalist in every way.
Then again, I have to keep reminding myself that Citizen Elizabeth Warren and Former State Senator Scott Brown are both protestants fuh ghod's sake so what do I know?

An idle thought...

The next time Scott Brown shows up at some High School to bloviate, I'd love to see some petite blonde girlie girl stand up and ask him "Let me get this straight, you are fine if I wanna have a pistol, but if I need bith control pills then it's a whole mishaugas??"
And if some other enterprising adolescent could video the Senator's "response" and post it to Youtube whether good or ill, that would be the crowning touch.

Not that I have a lot of high school kids in my aud...but the idea is still funny nonetheless.

Never before has one candidate for President been so

been so diminished by mere victory as Mitt Romney.

The former viceroy keeps spending and winning (winning ugly to be sure, but victory all the same) and the GOP base keeps backing away from him.
Rick Santorum is a nasty twitchy little freak.
Newt Gingrich a morbidly obese political voluptuary...
Ron Paul lives in a fantasy world.
But to a man they all keep grinding away at Romney no matter what the outcome the night before.
Romney ought to have put them all away long ago, but alas Mitt is a jobber at heart he just cannot prevail in a fair fight.
It is just plainly strange how Willard Mitt Romney excites such truculent intransigence in other candidates. By now the sweet strains of "Come to Jesus" ought to be heard in the GOP primary, but right now it's nothing but three different versions of the "Ride of the Valkyries".

It is SUPER Tuesday!

Put on your cape, fly to the polls and vote! (For Barack Obama of course, this blog has lost none of it's partisan edge thank yew very much)
Of course we all have the ill fortune to live in a politically marginalized state, I think CNN will run the primary results from Dogpatch, Erewhon, The Commonwealth of Brigadoon and Barsoom before they get to Massachusetts.  We will be lucky if the final numbers run before the Farm Report tomorrow morning.
But that is no excuse, if Massachusetts is dismissed & disliked we still need to get out there and cast our ballots like a free people.

Tomorrow is the Massachusetts Presidential Primary...

a political event that has receded to the very stern of everyone's mind, active measures must be taken repeatedly to remind the electorate to vote.
The last time there was a contested Massachusetts Primary with some impact on the larger outcome was quite literally in 1976 when George Wallace decided to make his last stand against Jimmy Carter's Milk of Moderation in Boston of all places.
Since then, our Primary has become a sort of guilty afterthought, one gets the impression that the lack of press attention it garners is an embarrassment to the Commonwealth's democrats and republicans alike.
The reasons for this are fairly obvious, the State's moderate to liberal politics are anathema are a political schism unto themselves when seen in a national context. More importantly, the Commonwealth has harvested a bumper crop of unsuccessful presidential aspirants these past twenty five years, all of whom can be relied upon to make sure the fix is in when the Primary Rolls around.
For a few minutes in 2008 it looked like the primary might have some impact on the democratic race, Obama did some campaigning, Clinton did some campaigning, Gallup called it for Obama and Hilary ended up clearing the boards.
A surprise outcome however is no great treatment for what amounts to decades of neglect...And soon enough the whole mishaugas was back to being an unloved chore.
Sad really.

It has been a bad week for

"Controvores."
Andrew Breitbart died abruptly, and Rush Limbaugh was compelled to apologize after calling a Georgetown Law Student a "slut" on the congressionally licensed public airwaves.
As the Late Doctor Raoul Duke famously observed, "bad craziness".
Of course, there is a distinction here, an important one as well, between the controvore and the workaday pundit.
A controvore is rhetorical arsonist intent on keeping a specific electoral cohort in a state of perpetual fear and ecstatic hatred.  Controvores make big bucks by consuming controversy (both real and imagined) and exuding a diresome aura of fear, loathing and a false consciousness of persecution.  It is important to note that controvores bear no relation either to journalism or pure entertainment though they often travel under both designations as flags of convenience.
Jacques Ellul opined that functioning democracies cannot generate effective propaganda, when they do, they automatically cease to be democracies.
"Controvores" are the next best thing to propaganda in a functioning democracy, they literally serve a nonexistent entirely internalized autocracy.
Owing to the current degraded & dementia ridden state of conservatism in the USA, controvores generally tend to reactionary and pseudo populist in outlook as the right wing offers them a better more fearful audience and more lucrative opportunities.
There are a some liberals out there who are trying to become controvores without compromising their politics, but are making little progress as far as I can see. They lack the soothing myth of grievance perhaps.
Pundits, on the other hand, coming as they do almost entirely out of journalism, have to traffick in the facts on a regular basis.
They may not like it, or even be good at it, but they cannot fully give themselves over to counterfactual point of view, it would not be "Good Form".
Moreover such a counterfactual frame of mind probably isn't sustainable in the current journalistic stream wherein information is arrives in the form of a barrage.
A pundit therefore is literally frightened of the facts in a way that is completely alien to today's controvore.
A pundit cannot isolate himself from reality the way a controvore can, when he or she does, voila! A Controvore is born!

Isn't it odd how

Scott Brown has changed his mind about almost every current issue on the roster, usually on the basis of what was best for his political fortunes and what best served the needs of his sponsors on Wall Street.
"No On Monday, Means Yes on Friday" as Humble Elias has said many many times before...
Yet the one issue where he has been steadfast from beginning to the last, has been in allowing private companies to deny contraceptives for religious reasons to their employees.
In effect Scott just voted to allow Sharia Law into the private health care plans of the USA...Okay maybe that is hyperbole, but what is good for the Bishop is also fine with the Imam.
Suddenly when women needed his vote, Scott became a puritan.
Funny how that works.
Now, the political calculus is that Brown was trying to pull some "Reagan democrats" into his coalition...male Reagan democrats mostly I would think.
The wives girlfriends daughters and mistresses of those Reagan democrats might take a different view as this campaign rolls forward.
***
I have come to the conclusion that a large part of modern conservatism revolves around repealing the hard fought rights of any cohort that has gotten mainstreamed in the past forty years. Doesn't matter who, gays, women, Latinos, Blacks, somehow the GOP has got to make an example of someone, and take something away.
It is less ideology and more psychology at this point.

Waaal...

Ah swan, but it seems Citizen Warren now trails Former State Senator Scott Brown in current polling.

This was to be expected, Brown is now in full campaign mode, he has money nor has any destructive scandal to his name, so believe me the race is gonna seesaw back and forth as the year rolls on.
Elizabeth Warren is the underdog, keep repeating that to yourselves.
Now, Joanie Vennochi seems to think that the current contraception controversy might be driving down Citizen Warren's numbers, for once I won't rule out the possibility. Because at the very least, Joanie isn't trying to wish away the glass ceiling in the Commonwealth's Politics.
I myself think that the problem is more subtle & psychological in nature.
 Humble Elias suspects that a lot of male voters in Massachusetts go into the polling booth with the following notion in their heads "I already live in the Most Liberal State in the Union, why should I live up to that reputation by voting a woman in as Governor/Senator?".
So it follows, that if Citizen Warren wants to win she needs to confront the mass psychology of the Glass Ceiling and furnish irrefutable reasons to vote for her and thus dispense with the services of Scott "Beefcake" Brown.
Otherwise Warren cannot win, if she simply ignores the glass ceiling, that tactic didn't work for Swift, Healey, Coakley or O'Brien, and it won't work now.
And in a larger context, this is the candidate, this is the campaign, everyone has their strengths and shortcomings, we are gonna have to win this one with what we have...expect no miracles in the 2012 Massachusetts Senate Race.
Because believe me, if we do not depose Former State Senator this year, we will never be quit of him til his pride swollen head carries him off to the New Hampshire Primary and certain electoral annihilation.