Biography

I grew up in Needham and now live in Newton, home of Barney Frank. I have been a teacher, paralegal, editor, graduate assistant and now, while I look for another job, a waiter. Along with politics, I'm interested in literature, public speaking, and writing jokes. Here's one for you: One of President Obama's aides recently lost his teleprompter. The President is reported to be speechless.

Original Blog - On the Length of Bills

The health care bill runs to almost two thousand pages and took only a few months to write. War and Peace, depending on the edition, comes in at about one thousand pages. It took Tolstoy seven years. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written over twenty years, takes up six volumes, each volume containing between five and six hundred pages.

I commend our politicians on doing something great writers are notoriously unable to do: produce a massive work within the confines of a year. Not having read the bill, I'm not in a position to comment on its literary qualities, nor do I think it's reasonable to expect that bills should be written with the reader's pleasure in mind, as if a bill were a thing to read by the fire with one's dog and a glass of Riesling. (While the speeches of Burke and Cicero can be read in such a fashion, I don't know why, except as a sort of penance for some very evil deed, anyone would willingly read the utterances of our politicians). Still, in exchange for struggling through hundreds of "heretofores" and subordinate clauses, might not the reader of the health care bill-or any bill-rightfully demand that he not be made to read one more "heretofore" than necessary? We must train our politicians, or their staffs, to edit bills as rigorously as great writers edit their own work. War and Peace, while indisputably a doorstopper, could have propped the door to a vault had not Tolstoy trimmed it. Henry James, of course, was famous for his belief in editing: even the comma, he held, must have its own justification, not simply as a piece of grammar, but as a contribution to the art itself.

Now I understand why politicians make bills so long. If they made them short, they would feel obligated to read them, but by making them unmanageably long, they can rationalize basing their vote on an abstract composed by one of their staff. No one feels bad about using Cliff Notes to pass a test on Don Quixote; what embarrasses us is when we use Cliff Notes to pass a test on Ethan Frome. A bill should not detain a reader longer than a novella would, and yet most do. Therefore, I recommend that Congress, before considering another measure, pass a law prohibiting the passage of laws longer than what I consider one of the great novellas, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, which is about one hundred pages. Though I would not prevent bills over one hundred pages from being debated, and even passed, a provision of the bill would clearly state that all language past page one hundred of any bill would be unenforceable. (Those members that whip leaders wanted to discipline might have their pork barrel projects consigned to page three hundred and fifty-nine). If a sentence at the end of page one hundred carries on to the next page.

Entry One - What are the top 3 reasons Scott Brown has misled MA voters?

The fighting words of Senator Scott Brown have given way to conciliatory ones. He speaks like a politician now; the insipid phrases "reaching across the aisle" and "working across party lines" come from his lips with increasing frequency. Doesn't he know that the people waiting across the aisle are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, who still, even after her party's drubbing, seems as committed as ever to strutting around the Capitol like some colossus with her gavel ready to club anyone who disagrees with her? If politics is indeed the art of compromise, Senator Brown would be wise to ascertain the willingness of Reid, Pelosi, et al, to shift to their right before he shifts anymore to his left. The Senator himself seems to admit that he was naïve to overestimate the democrats' goodwill. In a Boston Globe article of November 5, he said, "I've voted with [the democrats] probably about 29, 30 percent of the time. They've voted with me zero." He's like a lover courting a young woman who gives him just enough to keep up his suit, but never enough to encourage it.

It was too much to expect the Senator to singlehandedly block Obamacare-we elected a man, not Hercules-but his vote in support of the financial reform bill drafted by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd was unconscionable. He was sent to Washington to stop Obama's agenda, and instead we find him facilitating the passage of a major item of it. What is remarkable is the Senator's willingness to support a bill written by the two men who helped destroy the economy and now, most obscenely, are patting themselves on their wide backs for propping it up. While the Senator's insistence that he is going to be an independent voice in the Senate is admirable, it almost appears he voted for the Dodd/Frank bill just to prove that he is not beholden to his party. He might have found other ways to satisfy us on this score than by voting for a bill that once again inflicts the collective wisdom of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd on an economy that is still reeling from the first installment of it.

In less than two months, Senator Brown will no longer be number 41. But he's already lost the spirit of being number 41. He's not the barn burner we all thought he would be. With the arrival of reinforcements in the form of six more Republican senators, and ten times as many Congressman, the spotlight has left the Senator, leaving him free to play footsie with a party that should, by rights, be seeking his approval. A year ago he seemed to Republicans so powerful; now, most strangely, he seems neutered. Recently, he declared himself the underdog for reelection in 2012. If he thinks this is because the democrats swept Massachusetts he is mistaken. It is because people are still unsure where the occupant of the People's Seat stands.

Entry Two -What are the top 3 reasons why Sarah Palin should be the next President of the United States?

In her open letter to newly elected Republicans, Sarah Palin advised them to "readjust" if liberals begin applauding anything they do. Palin, unlike her former running mate John McCain, has not had to worry about applause coming from that quarter. Indeed, tired of attacking Palin, many liberals are savaging her daughter, and undoubtedly will demand a recount should Bristol win "Dancing with the Stars." Not since bored liberal computer programmers invented games to assassinate George Bush has there been such animosity toward a politician, who does not even, we must remember, hold office. The attacks are only going to get worse, for liberals, and for that matter establishment Republicans, are no longer laughing at Palin's prospects in 2012.

Most politicians must go back three generations in their family history to find someone who lived a life Americans can relate to. (Most politicians, you see, only get their hands dirty figuratively). Think of John Edwards forever reminding voters his father was a mill worker, or Dick Gephardt telling anyone who would listen-and not many people would-that his father was a milk truck driver. Palin doesn't have to hire a genealogist to scour for ancestors who lived tough, demanding lives. She has lived such a life. The reason John Kerry was such a poor candidate in 2004 was that voters got the sense he never left the drawing room. Palin is a great candidate for precisely the opposite reason: she seems never to have been in a drawing room.

What liberals perceive as Palin's deficiencies are really her assets. Take, for instance, her education. If Palin had attended Yale and then Harvard, as Bush did, liberal elites would perhaps find her less objectionable, but how are they to comprehend someone who went to four different colleges and got a concentration in something as practical as journalism? All they can do is sneer at her, as if their own intelligence and judgment were unassailable. They're either too obtuse or scared to recognize that the next election is not going to be a referendum on Palin's intelligence (should she run), but their beloved President's, whose brilliance, most troublingly for him, is no longer being taken for granted.

If Palin lacks the traditional political pedigree, she does have the support of the Tea Party. No other prospective Republican candidate can command the potential force of this movement as she can. While Huckabee and Romney try desperately to ingratiate themselves with the Tea Party, Palin has long known the password and is now sitting at the controls. Her force seems irresistible. Unlike Obama's endorsement, hers was pined after, and those who got it generally won. Five million people watched the first episode of Palin's television show. Legions of Tea Partiers, anxious to see her on the 2012 ticket, are voting for Bristol in the meantime. Palin's new book arrives in bookstores this week. If Bristol wins and Palin's book outsells Obama's recent offering, democrats will have some very troublesome omens to interpret.