The old Silicon Valley boy (me) is delighted to have a newly purchased house in Boston and be a part-time Massachusetts resident. Mass, oft joked about as hyper-liberal and high tax, joins fellow hyper-liberal California atop most world league tables that matter in the emergent Global Economy … income, high-tech start-ups, start-up financing, tertiary+ education, various talent-attraction measures such as diversity, etc; if it’s on the leading edge and it happened in business, the odds are amazingly high that it happened (or at least started) in MA or CA. Cradle of the American Revolution and home to the most influential abolitionist leaders as well, MA’s patriotism score is tops, too (much of our peerless arsenal, from WWII to today, was developed in MA as well)—even if the wounded Patriots football team, circa 2005, doesn’t look set for a three-peat. (FYI: Mass’s divorce rate is also in the lead—lowest in the nation.)
But that self-congratulatory ramble is mere prelude to saying how utterly disgusted and personally embarrassed I am, even as a part-timer, that Congressman William Delahunt (Dem, MA) is in the process of accepting discount heating oil from the utterly disgusting, contemptible president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Good Lord, has Delahunt no shame? Sure, I’m a lucky one with a few pennies in the bank, but I’d rather freeze as Washington’s army did in Baahstan in 1776, than warm myself with Chavez’s filthy oil.