HAPPY MISERS! Colleges Across Boston Refuse To Pay For Basic City Services

A bunch of fancypants colleges and universities in Boston blatantly fail to pay voluntary fees for essential services provided by the taxpayers, such as police protection, fire protection and snow removal, an analysis by The Boston Globe reveals.

The private schools and their ultra-valuable campuses are tax-exempt by law. However, the city of Boston sends each school a bill twice a year, which requests — but does not demand — payment for basic services rendered.

Out of the 19 schools the Beantown municipal government asks for payments, only six gave even as much as half of the amount sought. The remaining 13 provided less than half — and often way less than half.

At Harvard University, school officials chose to contribute just 44 percent of the amount the city of Boston sought in 2015.

Harvard’s endowment is $36.4 billion. It is larger than the entire gross-domestic product of Jordan and, in fact, larger than half the economies on the planet.

In 2010, Harvard Magazine published a 5,342-word article entitled “Time to Tax Carbon.”

Other schools in Boston were similarly miserly this year when asked to pay any share for services.

Boston College gave just 23 percent of the amount Boston’s officials have sought, for example.

Northeastern University provided just 11 percent of the amount requested.

Northeastern’s endowment of $713 million is about the same as the annual GDP of the archipelago island nation of Comoros.

In March of this year, the Globe reported contemporaneously, officials at Northeastern made a late payment of $886,000 for essential services in the face of criticism.

Before that, the private school had provided exactly nothing at all for its share of city services.

In 2013, the director of Northeastern’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy signed a statement backing then-Gov. Deval Patrick’s plan to increase income taxes for Massachusetts residents.

“We believe there needs to be a significant increase in investment to make sure we remain economically competitive,” the director, Barry Bluestone, told the Globe at the time.

Boston’s four-year-old program of voluntary taxes asks private, tax-exempt institutions which hold property worth over $$15 million to pay for the basic amenities the city provides.

Not all the wealthy private schools in town have been so stingy. For example, Boston University ponied up 86 percent of its voluntary payment. That amounts to over $6 million.

Tufts University paid its full amount of $491,400.

Other nonprofits, such as hospitals, have paid far more generously than colleges and universities have under the program.

Via: Daily Caller

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Why Not Martin O’Malley? (One can think of a thousand reasons)

On April 10, Elizabeth Warren joined Jon Stewart on the Daily Show and declared, “Powerful corporations [and] rich people have figured out that if you can bend the government to help you just a little bit, it’s a tremendous payoff, and if you can bend it to help you just a little bit more and a little bit more, the playing field just gets more and more tilted, and the rich and the powerful just do better and better.” A week later, Martin O’Malley stood before a packed crowd at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and proclaimed, “Concentrated wealth has accumulated concentrated political power in the halls of our Congress, and also in many, many, many of our state houses, making it harder than ever to get things done.”

Both of these quotes are emblematic of a nascent populist movement in the Democratic Party. Both reflect a deep concern that all Americans don’t have an equal shot at prosperity. Both demonstrate a growing opposition to the centrist Democratic policies of the Clinton era—the trade policies and the welfare reform—that seemed to mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans.

Yet it is Martin O’Malley, not Elizabeth Warren, who has a proven record of accomplishing real progress on these issues on a state level. It is Martin O’Malley, not Elizabeth Warren, who became the first major Democratic politician to endorse a national $15 minimum wage at the Institute of Politics on Thursday. And it is Martin O’Malley, not Elizabeth Warren, who is seriously considering challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.

So why have political pundits come to the consensus that Elizabeth Warren is the only one who could give Hillary a run for her money in the Democratic primary? Perhaps it is O’Malley’s lack of name recognition. He is currently polling at around 0.3 percent in the Iowa Democratic Caucus, compared to Clinton’s 58 percent, and Warren’s 17 percent. But that number is increasing, and O’Malley received a warm reception in recent trips to New Hampshire and Iowa.

Via: Harvard Political Review

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HARVARD FEMINIST SAYS ACADEMIC FREEDOM SHOULD BE ABOLISHED

A Harvard University feminist student writing in the campus newspaperThe Crimson recently posited this:

“If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

The column was titled  “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom – Let’s Give Up On Academic Freedom in Favor of Justice.”

Its author, senior Sandra Y.L. Korn, a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality major, called for the end of academic freedom and in its place “a more rigorous standard: one of ‘academic justice.’”

“When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue,” she wrote. “The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do.”

Uh huh. She went there.

Via: The College Fix

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Obama's Stunning Snub

He almost was not asked to speak.

In October 1863, President Abraham Lincoln received the same plain envelope that was sent to hundreds of people, requesting attendance at a dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery here.

Col. Clark E. Carr, a confidant of several U.S. presidents and a member of the commission that organized the event, later admitted that commissioners scrambled to send a more personal invitation after Lincoln indicated he would attend.

Asking Lincoln to deliver a “few appropriate thoughts,” Carr said, was “an afterthought.”

You see, the dedication's real headliner was Edward Everett. A former secretary of State, U.S. senator, Massachusetts governor and Harvard president whose nationwide tour helped to save Mt. Vernon as a national shrine, Everett was considered the great orator of his time.

When Lincoln arrived, Gettysburg remained raw from the horrific battle that raged here for three days just five months earlier. More than 70,000 Confederate troops engaged 83,000 Federal troops around this crossroads town; the battle claimed more than 50,000 souls and 3,000 horses, and it changed the course of the war in the Union's favor.

The bones of dead horses still were strewn over surrounding farmlands; vultures hovered over the landscape, and unburied coffins stood stacked in town.

Lincoln had plenty of justifiable, honorable reasons to beg off from the ceremony: His 10-year-old son, Tad, lay sick with a fever in the White House; the war was going poorly out West; he was locked in a budget showdown with Congress; and his re-election bid looked grim against a general he fired for incompetence a year earlier.

Via: Fox News

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[VIDEO] Alan Dershowitz: 'I Hate MoveOn'

(CNSNews.com) - Attorney and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who describes himself as a liberal Democrat, says he's disgusted by a petition on the MoveOn.org website that calls on the Justice Department to arrest House Republican leaders, including John Boehner and Eric Cantor, "for the crime of seditious conspiracy against the United States."

"I hate Move On because they're a bunch of radicals -- they're not liberals, they are not tolerant of differences. I am a centralist liberal, and I get along very well with centralist conservatives. What I don't like are extremists on either side, and Move On is an extremist organization and an irresponsible organization," Dershowitz told Fox News's Megyn Kelly Thursday night.

Dershowitz said he'd gladly defend the Republican leaders if they were tried for sedition: "This would really be an easy case to win," he said. "It's the same thing that some liberals tried to do to Tom Delay and, of course, his conviction was reversed in the Texas courts. What the Republicans tried to do to Bill Clinton. Let's punish people politically if you disagree with their politics, but let's not use the criminal justice system improperly."

Via: CNS News
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BREAKING NEWS: SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW EPA CLIMATE RULES

The Supreme Court has today granted cert to review the EPA’s greenhouse gas rules.  This is highly significant.  The  high court clearly botched the last global warming case, Massachusetts v. EPA, back in 2007.  Maybe they’ll correct themselves.

My rabbi in these legal tangles, Jonathan Adler of Case Western University law school and the Volokh Conspiracy, comments:

This is quite significant. Although the grant is limited, it focuses on one of the most important legal questions raised by this litigation, and puts some of the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources in play.

Harvard’s Richard Lazarus comments:

The Court’s jurisdictional ruling is significant in terms of both what the Court granted and did not grant. The regulations the Court has agreed to review represent the Obama Administration’s first major rulemaking to address the emissions of greenhouse gases from major stationary sources across the country. At the same time, the Court declined to review EPA’s determination that greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles endanger public health and welfare and therefore has left intact the government’s current regulation of motor vehicles emissions to address climate change.

I largely agree, but would go farther in certain respects. . . the question presented will force the Court to confront the consequences the Mass decision. In particular, this case will force the Court to reconsider the assumption made by Justice Stevens in Mass v. EPA that application of the Clean Air Act to GHGs would not produce absurd results. As we’ve since learned, applying the CAA to GHGs does produce such results.

Via: Powerline

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