Massachusetts Lieut. Gov. Healey says the elderly are the reason that their own taxes are high, and in the same breath blames them for housing shortage. Her insidious remarks call for her resignation.

In a published interview, she states that overtaxed seniors in large suburban houses should move to “more appropriate housing.” After all, if they are living in a four bedroom house and are not using all of them, then that is a waste, according to the Lt. Gov. Think of the apartments that could be made out of that. The old people are wasting their own homes, that they paid for and have lived in most of their lives. How dare they not share with the state! Send them to the gulags, Stalin.

“To extend tax breaks to seniors in order to keep them overhoused and isolated in the suburbs is not necessarily the right answer.” says Healey. “Bring them into our city and town centers, into more appropriate housing and free up those properties to get back on the tax rolls of the community,” she said. Well, what if they don’t want to do that? Did that thought ever occur to Ms. Healey? Maybe some people actually like living with a bit of space in a ONE family home.

First she tells them that they are not living their lives the way she wants them to, and how dare they live in their own private homes. Then Healey says that not taxing them to death would be great, but that’s not the answer. We’re going to keep raising taxes so that they are forced to live in small apartments. We want to turn their regular homes into apartments, too. In essence, the state will make the elderly do their bidding. There will be no more suburbs or country.

In other words, ruin the people who worked hard for their homes and communities, and blame them for the strained budget and housing shortage. Definitely don’t blame massive amounts of immigration and Third World culture for the overcrowding.

I would like to say thank you to Healey for one thing, and that’s for finally voicing the plan the political mites have worked so hard to keep secret for all these years: reversing the American Dream.

Constitutional Affairs Minister Christopher Leslie has confirmed that under current legislation Camilla Parker Bowles would automatically become Queen when her future husband, the Prince of Wales, accedes to the throne.

Questioned by a lawmaker, Mr Leslie confirmed the upcoming marriage would not be “morganatic”, therefore Camilla automatically inherits the title of Queen when Charles becomes monarch.

Though at the time the engagement was revealed, it was announced Camilla would be given the title of Princess Consort when Charles is king, current British law dictates otherwise.

Government sources have said legal changes will be necessary to “comply with (Camilla’s) wishes not to become queen”. Labour MP Andrew McKinlay points out that legislation would be needed in many countries – namely, wherever the British monarch is head of state.

Taking public sentiment into consideration, the Prince of Wales had announced that, after his April 8 wedding, Camilla would become the Duchess of Cornwall. She would then take the title of Princess Consort when he accedes the throne.

The origin of the Easter Bunny dates to the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility, Oestre or Eastre, whose mythical companion was the ultimate symbol of fertility, the hare.

Over the centuries the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus became entwined with the pagan celebration of the annual rebirth of life each spring. German immigrants brought the Easter rabbit across the Atlantic in the late 1800s, and he’s become the secular symbol of the Easter season.

Harold Brooks-Baker, who died on Saturday aged 71, was a self-appointed authority on all matters royal: his great advantage for journalists was that he was always available to make an arresting comment; his disadvantage was that he was often wrong.

He claimed the most intimate knowledge of the lives of members of the Royal Family, such as the sleeping arrangements of the Queen and Prince Philip. When he was right, it was because of the most pedestrian judgment, as when he predicted that the Prince of Wales would remarry “because he’s the kind of person who almost always remarries”.

Brooks-Baker presumed, with all the assurance of an American, to pontificate on constitutional issues. He would offer the simplest explanation of how the Queen could give up her position as head of the Anglican Church, and warn that Britain stood a 50 per cent chance of becoming a republic. Yet he was quick to assure the Queen that she would be safe from Islamic fundamentalism because he had discovered she was related to the Prophet Mohammed. He also proposed that she be created Empress of Europe.

Despite such kindly suggestions, Buckingham Palace found the flood of Brooks-Bakerisms hard to take. Although it dislikes commenting on stories in the press, it issued a rare statement to the effect that Mr Brooks-Baker did not know any members of the Royal Family and that he spoke without authority or knowledge.

The son of a Washington lawyer, Harold Brooks Baker was born on November 16 1933. He was educated at Trinity School, Hartford, Connecticut, and the Harvard Law School, where one of his contemporaries was the future Senator Edward Kennedy. As a student he helped to arrange debates for local broadcasters and also worked for Harold Stassen, the Minnesota politician who wanted Christian Hert to replace Richard Nixon as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1956.

Brooks-Baker became a foreign correspondent for the weekly Washington Observer from 1960 to 1963, discovering more pleasure in interviewing European royalty than in covering wars. At the end of this period he married Countess Irene Marie, daughter of Count Robert-Elliot du Luart de Montsaulin, a member of a Maine family with genuine French aristocratic connections.

He then became vice-president of an American securities management company for six years, and added Brooks to his surname because French bureaucracy would not let his children, educated in France, have Brooks as a middle name. From 1976 to 1981 he was managing director of Debrett’s Peerage Limited in London, where he displayed an undoubted flair for publicity.

He oversaw publication of Debrett’s Book of Distinguished People of Today, s well as The English Gentleman and The English Gentleman’s Wife, whose author Douglas Sutherland died pursuing what he regarded as his rightful royalties. Another book was Top Dog, a guide to the poodles and pooches of Belgravia and its environs, in which he recalled an order from Charles II’s time giving special privileges to spaniels.

But there was much talk of chaos in the office when the company was acquired by Ian McCorquodale, Dame Barbara Cartland’s son. Brooks-Baker left after a bitter row, to win a claim for an undisclosed sum from an industral tribunal. Later, he and some associates acquired the rights to a series of spin-off books published by Burke’s, Debrett’s rival, but not its famous Peerage. Never the less a photograph of him holding a volume was often published. This venture, too, went into liquidation, and he next went in for marketing Scottish feudal baronies. Despite his carefully burnished image, he wrote little, apart from a few book reviews, and edited no books.

“Brookie” as he liked to be known, lived in Royal Avenue, Chelsea, wore tailored English suits and treated those he met with lazy charm and unEnglish flattery. If the tabloids and television continued to quote him, serious newspapers were careful to refer to him as head of Burke’s Marketing Limited. Some attempted to ban his name from their pages; but such efforts were often frustrated by young reporters.

Harold Brooks-Baker, who had polio and was latterly wheelchair-bound, was divorced from his first wife and, in 1997, married Catherine Neville-Rolfe. His two daughters have claims to be in remainder to the dukedom of de Bisaccia in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The Norwegian Seaman’s Church in New York was packed Sunday evening to welcome King Harald and Queen Sonja. The royal couple was starting a weeklong visit to the US, to celebrate 100 years of diplomatic relations between the two nations.

The US was the first country to recognize Norway’s sovereignty when it broke out of a rocky union with Sweden in 1905. That’s why it’s among the countries getting royal visits this year, as members of the Norwegian royal family travel around the world in their homeland’s centennial year.

Queen Sonja has been in Antarctica and London in the past two weeks, while Crown Princess Mette-Marit headed for Malawi and Crown Prince Haakon to Sierra Leone. Haakon will travel to Japan in mid-March.

Eleven countries will be visited in direct connection with Norway’s centennial: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia, China, South Africa, India, Canada and the US.

The king and queen are starting out in New York before heading on to Houston and Washington. Sunday evening’s event at the Seaman’s Church highlighted young Norwegian and Norwegian-American artists, part of a cultural theme that’s especially important to Queen Sonja.
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