Aunt Amanda and the Tractor Salesman

John F. Kerry, Massachusetts’s senior Senator, never ceases to amaze. You would think the man would get tired of putting his foot in his mouth, but no, he just keeps up the inane blather. His lat­est

was a clip I heard over the weekend where he came out lambasting our blood-collecting policies here in America. The Senator said the rules should be revised and gays and those men who participated in ho­mosexual activity should be allowed to donate. The Senator reasoned (that’s probably quite a stretch) that here we have a segment of our population will­ing to give blood and we’re discriminating against them. He opined that with blood collections down, we should welcome every potential donor. A couple of days later researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine that the AIDS virus can hide in bone marrow, avoiding drugs, and then reawaken later when the bone marrow cells eventually convert into blood cells. Dr. Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan explained the virus is dormant in the marrow cells but can be reactivated and cause renewed infection. The vi­rus

kills the new blood cells and then moves on to infect other cells. So it’s obvious there is still much about this dreadful disease we still do not under­stand, and we need to continue to safeguard our blood supply with conservative, cautious policies. The Senator’s statement was broadcast on the radio and has not appeared in print. Gee, I wonder why? His staff bails him out again.

Our tax dollars at work: Akutan, Alaska, a vil­lage of less than one thousand people, is getting an airport, and it’s scheduled to open in 2012. The total cost will be $64 million, with $59 million of it being federal money. What a great country. Gee, and I thought only Norfolk had that kind of money to spend.

Did you know that caskets are rectangular and coffins have six sides? Well now you do.

National Football League defensive back Anto­nio Cromartie has been a busy lad. He is twenty-five years old and has seven children by six women in five states. One woman reports he is $25,000 in arrears on his child payments. It just shows what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it, doesn’t it?

A few days ago, on March 5th to be exact, marked the anniversary of the death of country singer Patsy Cline back in 1963. What a great sing­er. Her “Walking after Midnight” and “Crazy” are two great tunes. Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker was in Walpole recently and was quoted as saying “it’s really all about jobs and the economy and state budget and taxes. That’s true no matter where I go.” Well, he hasn’t been to Norfolk yet. We’ll show him spending, and taxes be damned.

In our global warming update, New York City has broken its 114-year-old record for snow fall. I’m sure Al Gore and his followers will assure us it was a “warm snow.” Do you watch the Boston Bruins games on TV? Besides the fact that they are a wretched team, having to listen to color analyst Andy Brickley’s constant giggling makes the broadcasts nearly un­watchable. Congressman Bill Delahunt is retiring and will not stand for reelection. Real quick now, name one accomplishment he’s managed in fourteen years. Another Massachusetts empty suit.

Edward Corliss was paroled for a conviction of murder. He has just been arrested and charged in a practically identical murder, that of a convenience store clerk in Jamaica Plain. The parole board is conducting an “internal review” of how it handled Corliss’s request for parole back in 2006.

Far be it from me to be a Doubting Thomas but isn’t this somewhat analogous to having the foxes conduct an inquiry on their wiping out all the chickens in the midnight raid on the chicken coop? The Massachusetts jobless rate hit a 34-year-high at 9.5%, only 0.2 % lower than the national rate. Am I the only person concerned about this? Toyota is in the news of late and not much of it has been good. Whoever is in charge there has quite a bit to answer for, it seems to me. There are very serious questions about their products, and Toyota has been neither honest nor forthcoming in their addressing these problems. The faulty throttle mechanism is a problem they’ve known about for some time and have unsuccessfully at­tempted to sweep under the rug. They now have declared the problem fixed, yet there are reports from some that the fixdidn’t work. Toyota’s Tacoma trucks experienced severe problems with the frames rotting out, forcing Toyota to buy the trucks back from many owners, but yet they continue to advertise the truck as “too tough to kill.” The frames on the full-size Tundra trucks are also rotting out in some cases. But recently a new story has surfaced which I find most troubling. Toyota installs “black boxes” in their vehicles similar to the data-gathering de­vices found in airplanes. Toyota blocks the use of the data by using proprietary software. They also will not reveal what information they are record­ing. Other manufacturers are much more open about their “event data recorders” and share in­formation. The Associated Press, which has inves­tigated, maintains that Toyota has frequently re­fused to provide key information sought by crash victims and survivors and has avoided supplying the info either by settling out of court or by provid­ing printouts with key data missing. Many crash experts maintain that if Toyota were to supply the data from the event data re­corders

much of the confusion could be cleared up. So the question becomes what are they hiding and how concerned are they over self-incrimination.

This lack of candor, of honesty and straight talk, is too much like the Watergate cover-up. It should not be allowed to continue. The United States federal government needs to get tough with Toyota . My old friend Stan Machowski, the “Polish Prince,” told me once he would never buy a Jap­anese car. They bombed us at Pearl Harbor and killed our people, he explained. Another example of Stan being right on the money.