And then there were one...

Remember a couple of weeks ago when some crazy lady announced she was running for mayor against Lisa Wong? Well, she's not anymore.

Yes, Rachel Rosenfeld is out of the mayoral race, probably because of that evil shadow government that hates free speech or something.

Actually, here's her stated reason:

Rachel Rosenfeld announced Sunday she is dropping out of the mayoral race, saying her health is not good enough to continue.

"I'm not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of dying on the job and letting people down," she said.

Rosenfeld, a local blogger known online as "Really Rachel," suffers from a rare neurological form of sarcoidosis that limits her to a wheelchair and affects her breathing.

Rosenfeld's condition has been stable in recent months, but a visit to a doctor in Boston Tuesday revealed her condition could worsen at anytime [Sic], she said.

Oh no! Who could have possibly seen this coming?

Allow me to quote myself...

Now, here's a prediction for you.

At some point before the primary (assuming there is one) Rachel will drop out. It might be because Tran enters the race, and of course Rachel isn't going to run against her special buddy. Or it could be because she's gotten enough ego-stroking out of her little crusade and doesn't want to suffer the humiliating defeat she's bound for. Or it could be because everyone's treating her campaign as a total joke and she discovers she needs to drop out due to "health problems."

Now, I'm not saying her health problems aren't real. But I am saying that pretty much any illness "could worsen at any time" and that it's an awfully convenient excuse to drop out of a poorly-planned publicity stunt of a mayoral run.

So, let's wish Rachel a not-so-fond farewell by quoting one last little bit of insanity before we go right back to ignoring her entirely:

"Things are going to continue to get worse," she said. "Right now we need a leader of people."

The next mayor need to see the residents of the city for who they are and value each life, she said.

"This city is made up of human beings, not dollars and cents," she said.

Yes, Mayor Wong, please stop selling the residents of Fitchburg to be ground up as dog food! What the hell is your problem?

Anyway, Godspeed you crazy ex-mayoral candidate! May a new lunatic take your place soon!

More mayoral madness!

Sadly, it's time for another post about mayoral candidate Rachel Rosenfeld (aka "Really Rachel", aka "Patricia A. Collins", aka "Patty Anne Collins", aka "Angry Anteater").

Personally, I'm already sick of talking about her. But I will soldier on. For the people!

Or, more accurately, Jason at Save Fitchburg soldiers on and I'll just direct you to this post of his, which is quite good.

Or, more accurately, the second half of it is good. The first half is an interview with Rachel, and is a bit tedious. Read it if you're feeling masochistic, or if you're unfamiliar with Rachel's unique brand of condescending inanity.

The second (good) half is Jason's assessment of the situation, and is actually interesting. I'll quote a bit of it here and throw in my own take.

[L]et's try to probe the thoughts of Rachel here. Does she really want to be mayor, or does she want a larger soapbox to hammer Wong, her archenemy? While the S&E pointed to her blog today as her launching pad, I'm arrogant enough to guess old SF does much better business, and that this is really where she made her bones. While I love old SF, let's be honest here, it's a limited audience. What's really her goal? Is she in it to win it, or hammer at Wong for the next eight to 10 months?

Yeah, this occurred to me as well.

This doesn't strike me as a serious campaign to become mayor, but rather as an exercise in self-promotion. A rather bizarre one at that.

Jason's quite right that it's not Rachel's blog that is the launching pad for her campaign. She hasn't even mentioned the campaign there at the time of writing. Even though both the S&E and the Telegram have made a big deal of her being a "blogger," she's mostly a commenter.

Which means that the launching pad for her "campaign" is actually the comments section of Save Fitchburg. I'm not sure if that's really sad or really funny. Both?

I'm sure people who actually read all the comments at SF (which is what, maybe a couple dozen people? I rarely venture into SF-comment-land.) have an opinion of Rachel, but most of the city doesn't know her and couldn't care less about some "blogger" with no money, no political experience, and no platform except "Lisa sucks."

In other words, there are very few people who give a shit about local political blogs. There are even fewer who give a shit about the comments sections. Rachel would be better off basing her campaign around comments on popular YouTube videos.

Anyway, moving on.

Jason writes:

Similarly, is she a stalking horse for someone? She clearly makes the rounds, talking to councilors and other city movers-and-shakers. Is she going to throw bombs and clear the path for another candidate? If I didn't know any better, I'd bet on Tran considering his remarks in the paper today. But that's too cynical, I think. But weirder things have happened in politics.

Well, I am that cynical. Here's what Tran said in the S&E story yesterday:

Tran, however, called Rosenfeld "more than qualified to sit in the corner office."

"I've never met anyone with more knowledge of politics and government than she has," Tran said Wednesday.

Once upon a time I thought Dean Tran was actually fairly intelligent. That time is over.

Dean, if Rachel Rosenfeld is the most knowledgeable person you know when it comes to politics, you really need to meet some new people. Maybe you should see if you can audit a couple of Civics classes at the high school? Or better yet, I'm sure FSC has some very smart poli-sci students.

One more quote from Jason:

Rachel at some point is going to have answer to a lot of things she has said on her blog and in other spaces in the last two or three years. Some of it would cause people to take pause. I'd love to say I'm going to do it, but the thought of rolling through thousands of comments makes me want to cry. It's a long campaign, I guess I have time.

Don't cry, Jason! Use Google!

For instance, here are 176 results showing comments she made on SF. Put a space in her name and you get 84 more.

Hell, I've got 74 results myself, and she swore off reading my "idiotic rants" quite awhile ago!

Sure, those are comment pages with multiple comments on each page, but you can always add more search terms to narrow things down. Considering Rachel's logorrhea, it shouldn't be too difficult to find some examples of crazy. Just add "trash" as a search term and you're halfway there.

Enough of that. Now, here's a prediction for you.

At some point before the primary (assuming there is one) Rachel will drop out. It might be because Tran enters the race, and of course Rachel isn't going to run against her special buddy. Or it could be because she's gotten enough ego-stroking out of her little crusade and doesn't want to suffer the humiliating defeat she's bound for. Or it could be because everyone's treating her campaign as a total joke and she discovers she needs to drop out due to "health problems."

Whatever the case, I don't think I'll be doing much more writing about her unless she actually becomes a more credible candidate than Ron Dionne was in 2007.

And she has a long way to go before she even reaches his level.



PS Oh, I also added a couple of new links over on the right, to Fitchburg Tension and the Rabbit Hole Blog. Check them out, won't you?

Meet the new Ted DeSalvatore!

Sometimes, when I get bored, I reminisce about the mayoral election of two years ago. It was fun, what with Ted DeSalvatore being a candidate. He was always good for a chuckle, or failing that, a few hours spent tearing out your hair.

"Unicow," I would say to myself, "what you need is another crazy person running for mayor to lift your spirits."

Well, that's what we have now. The new, not-very-improved Ted DeSalvatore comes to us in the form of one of the original DeSalvatore's harshest critics, Rachel Rosenfeld.

Here's an article from the Sentinel: Fitchburg blogger "Really Rachel" running for mayor.

Those of you who were paying attention to such things back in 2007 may remember that I was loosely allied with Rachel, in the sense that we both thought DeSalvatore was scary dangerous. Because he was.

I'll go into the whole story at some point, but let's just say that we're not allied anymore.

Rachel was pretty nutty even when we were on the same side, but since that time she's gone way over the deep end. I suspect she's probably been reading the WingNutDaily too much or something.

Anyway, it's still morning and I'm tired and haven't sharpened my teeth just yet, so I'll just mention a couple of things.

First, Rachel doesn't have a chance in hell of winning. She at least seems to recognize this on some level. Fitchburg may have its flaws, but DeSalvatore's stunning defeat proved that voting for certifiable lunatics isn't one of them.

Anybody who actually reads Rachel's blog can see pretty much instantly that she's just an old crank with a personal grudge against Wong. That's not a platform.

Second, there was one hilarious little quote in the S&E article:

Rosenfeld, an independent voter who said she plans to register as a Republican, said she would like to set up debates with Wong during the campaigns. She said she does not believe partisanship will play a large role in the race, but expressed her belief that Wong is too extreme in her liberal approach.

"There's a group of progressives in this city that are really, really nasty because they don't believe in free speech, and Lisa Wong is in that group," she said.

What's awesome about this is that you can replace "Rosenfeld" with "DeSalvatore" and discover that the two are almost identical in their thinking.

Here's an old quote from DeSalvatore, for comparison:

DeSalvatore said "information terrorists" called his supporters and spread negative information about him.

"As long as that ultra-liberal sense continues we don't have a chance," he said. "Without a prevailing common sense, the city is done."

And here's another from Rachel:

"(Wong) is a bright young girl, but she's got no common sense," Rosenfeld said.

So we have the focus on meaningless "common sense," the demonization of liberals, the paranoid fantasies about some shadowy cabal that's either out to stifle free speech or spread lies, and even the "independent" who spouts nothing but Republican talking points most of the time.

I can only conclude that Rachel Rosenfeld is actually Ted DeSalvatore 2.0 1.5.

This should be entertaining.