Republicans at sea — but not adrift!

Several members of the Quincy Republican City Committee enjoyed a Boston Harbor cruise with one of Boston’s best conservative talk radio hosts and columnists this afternoon.

Michael Graham, radio host on WTKK 96.9 FM and a regular columnist for the Boston Herald, entertained several hundred fans on the two-hour cruise, which featured Graham’s signature brand of humor and conservative commentary. Among the highlights: Two 1950s song parodies for the presidential candidates. Graham’s “Ooooo-BAAAMA” — performed to the tune of Ritchie Valens’ big hit, “Oh, Donna” — lampooned the mainstream media’s love affair with their Democratic messiah, while “Johnny McCain” (set to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Good”) poked fun at the Arizona sentor’s gruff demeanor.

The cruise also featured a trivia contest, during which six selected contestants attempted to answer questions from the U.S. citizenship test — real brain teasers, such as “What three colors are on the American flag?” and “How many U.S. states are there?” (Someone actually got that wrong!) While no Quincy Republicans’ names were pulled from the hat to participate, we did compile quite an impressive number of correct answers to questions that stumped the official contestants — particularly during the presidential trivia round. Frank McCauley correctly named William Howard Taft as our heftiest president, while I managed to pick up a WTKK 96.9 t-shirt for knowing that the president whose last name at birth was Blythe was none other than William Jefferson Clinton.

(Oh, the irony — that I should win a prize for knowing something about Clinton!)

 

Michael Graham greets Quincy Republicans aboard the Odyssey. From left: Denis Tardo, Jerry Marquis, Kumu Gupta, Graham, Frank McCauley, Sandra McCauley and Jennifer Logue

 

 

 

The New York Times: All the news (and opinion) that’s ideologically approved

Conservatives have long accused The New York Times of presenting a blatantly liberal view of the news. The Times will be hard pressed to refute such claims in the future, however, after its op-ed editorial page editor refused to publish a commentary from John McCain.

The ABC News web site is reporting that the Times — which had recently published a similar piece under Barak Obama’s signature — refused to publish Sen. McCain’s opinion piece rebutting the Obama commentary unless the Senator made changes to his submission.

But here’s the kicker: The Times didn’t just request changes in phrasing or grammar. According to ABC News, here’s an excerpt from Editor David Shipley’s email to the McCain Campaign:

“I’d be very eager to publish the Senator on the oped page. However I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written. It would be terrific to have an article from Sen. McCain that mirrors Sen. Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms how Sen. McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troop levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate.”

As anyone familiar with the senator’s stance on Iraq knows, Sen. McCain has steadfastly refused to set artifical timetables for troop withdrawals, noting that to do so would be tantamount to telling the terrorists when it was safe for them to come back and ravage the country.

For the New York Times to therefore insist that Sen. McCain lay out such a timetable is not merely requesting edits for clarity or brevity, but essentially demanding that McCain change his entire position on Iraq if he wishes to grace the Times‘ opinion pages. 

 The New York Times, it seems, has decided that henceforth, its opinion pages will only present those opinions that mirror the ideological viewpoint of its editors. And that’s a sorry state of affairs for American journalism and democracy.

RMV latest casualty of ill-conceived Concourse

Yesterday’s Patriot Ledger trumpeted the relocation of Quincy’s Registry of Motor Vehicles office — as if moving the Registry from downtown Quincy to the outskirts of Braintree is somehow more convenient for most citizens.

The Quincy Center Concourse has struck again.

This ill-conceived four-lane roadway straight through Quincy Center hasn’t even been built yet, and already it’s wreaking havoc on downtown Quincy. While the road languishes on the drawing board — some 40 years after it was first proposed — vacant lots are cropping up throughout the downtown area, as vibrant, successful businesses are demolished and displaced to make way for a road that nobody wants.

Ironically, our elected officials claim the city “needs” the Concourse to prevent downtown companies like Stop & Shop from leaving Quincy Center. Well, here’s a reality check: The Registry of Motor Vehicles was a downtown employer, too, and one that brought thousands of people to Quincy Center every week — people who may have stopped for lunch, picked up a newspaper or run a few errands while in the downtown area to get their license renewed.

It seems, in fact, that history is repeating itself. When Sears left Quincy Center in the early 1980s, many patrons abandoned downtown Quincy to flock to Sears’ new location in Braintree. Now, thanks to the Concourse, the building that replaced Sears is being demolished— once again driving downtown businesses and their patrons to Braintree.

And City Hall calls this progress?

Abolish the Electoral College? There they go again!

Once again, Democrats have begun sounding the call to abolish the Electoral College, and anyone with half a brain knows the real motivation behind this latest attempt to tamper with our Founding Fathers’ handiwork.

The Boston Herald reports that this time, the leaden trial balloon is being floated by Mike Dukakis –which should be an indication in and of itself as to the merits of this idea. According to Dukakis — the genius who thought it would be a good idea to give violent, convicted criminals weekend furloughs — the Electoral College should be abolished because currently “only winning the swing states matters” and thus other states get ignored.

What Dukakis doesn’t say is that if the Electoral College were abolished, the Democrats wouldn’t even need the so-called swing states. Instead, the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party could theoretically carry an election by focusing on those few areas of the map where they are strongest  — populous liberal enclaves like New York City, Massachusetts, Detroit (and those areas are doing so well, aren’t they?) — and ignore all those pesky, troublesome, conservative voters. You know — those of us who didn’t attend Ivy League colleges on Great-Grandpapa’s trust fund; those of us who so clearly need Liberal Big Brother to tell us how to live our lives.

Rubbish. The call to abolish the Electoral College is nothing more than another liberal end run around our system of government. Much like they’ve done with our courts, if the Democrats can’t win fair and square under our existing system, they’ll simply attempt to change the system to one where a few “correct-thinking” liberals will get to make decisions on taxes, health care and education for all of us. How scary is that?

Ironically, this renewed call for an end to the Electoral College may be a good sign for John McCain. For if Barack Obama’s starry-eyed groupies were really so confident that their messiah was going to win in November, I doubt they’d be dragging prehistoric liberals like Dukakis out of mothballs to try and game the system.

Remind me again who’s looking out for the working class?

Michael Graham’s column in today’s Boston Herald exposes one of the great myths promulgated by the Democratic Party: that Democrats look out for the working class. As Mr. Graham points out, since taking office Deval Patrick has proposed numerous spending increases — including still more toll hikes and his controversial plan to offer in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants. And how has Gov. Patrick proposed paying for these budget busters? Why, through casino gambling and a huge increase in the cigarette tax, of course – two proposals that would disproportionately hurt poor, working-class residents who can least afford yet another hit on their wallets.

And our state legislators wonder why Massachusetts residents are mobilizing to abolish the state income tax…

Support our troops: Send a card or letter to an injured U.S. soldier!

As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, now is the perfect time to show our troops that we appreciate their service and their sacrifices. The Quincy Republican City Committee has joined forces with Weymouth’s CarePacks — a non-profit that sends care packages to U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq — to collect cards and letters for injured U.S. servicemen. Click here to learn how you can participate and brighten the day of a wounded American hero.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Quincy Republicans blog — the place to find the latest on what’s happening in the City of Presidents and the state of Massachusetts! Please check back regularly for new posts on the 2008 presidential and senate elections as well as grassroots news about what’s happening in Quincy.