From The New Bedford Standard Times April 17, 2015 in an article by Steve Urbon:

The idealistic young woman with the long hair and huge eyeglasses had just graduated from Yale Law School, the future holding nothing but potential. But instead of shipping off to a New York or Washington law firm, she joined Marian Wright Edelman's fledgling Children's Defense Fund (which Edelman, Yale Law Class of 1963, still leads).

Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently would have you believe that, in 1973 she had forgone a career at a lucrative Washington D.C. law firm to instead, serve the public at Yale University's Children's Defense Fund (CDF). Possibly but not likely the exact truth..but that's not the whopper I speak of yet. She seems to have embellished the path which brought her to work for Yale's CDF. While she did indeed work for the CDF and including among other places, New Bedford in 1973, it seemed more like Plan B than her passion, but this was her fate and it served her well.

Hillary Rodham took the exact course typical of ambitious political law school grads out of the Ivy League. It seemed she went for for the big bucks at that dreamy law firm in D.C....but she failed to pass her bar exams in the District of Columbia, instead eventually passed them in Arkansas.

In last night's acceptance speech, Secretary Clinton told a story of her experience on the South Coast of Massachusetts in the City of New Bedford as an attorney for the CDF that didn't all add up according to my radio colleague Chris McCarthy:

"My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She

ended up on her own at 14, working as a housemaid. She was saved by the kindness of others.

Her first-grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch and brought extra food to share the entire year. The lesson she passed on to me, years later, stuck with me: No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up.

And she made sure I learned the words from our Methodist faith: "Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can."

"So, I went to work for the Children's Defense Fund, going door-to-door in New Bedford, Mass., on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school.

I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school — it just didn't seem possible in those days. And I couldn't stop thinking of my mother and what she'd gone through as a child.

It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action.

So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities."

Of all the mill cities in all the world..she had to pick on ours? As Chris McCarthy observed, "this story has B.S. written all over it". I was coming to WBSM a bit late from my Boston Herald Radio appearance earlier this morning and by the time I had pulled into the parking lot at 10:07 a.m., Chris opened the show and had already impeached the WHOLE Hillary whale of a story (New Bedford is known as the Whaling City). Now, Chris is extremely sharp and the local reference in her story caught his attention as he watched her speak last night. We hashed over the odds of plausibility and possibilities over the next two hours. When we departed, I decided to investigate. You may see Chris on national tv later on this weekend or next week. Who knows?

Here's what I learned; The Mayor of New Bedford in 1973 was a guy I happen to know, Mayor John Markey (81 years old and a lifelong Democrat now living in Dartmouth, MA). Mayor Markey is also a retired judge and a man whose credibility and character are beyond reproach. "Jack" as he is known, is eligible for both court and municipal pensions but only accepts one. All he has had to do for decades now is sign a piece of paper. He is not one to "double dip". I called Jack and asked him a few questions about handicap services in 1973 at the New Bedford Public Schools, including wheelchair accessibility.

“I took over as Mayor in January of 1973. We had a budget for vans with drivers and provided services to students with disabilities. It was Tremblay Bus. They would pick them up and drop them off at their homes. Now, they may not have been able to go to the local neighborhood school, depending on whether or not the schools were accessible for wheelchairs and may have had to drive uptown or somewhere in the city but there were many schools then which could and did accommodate our handicapped students in wheelchairs".

“In fact, we had a local guy (Katz) who was a paraplegic, injured in a diving accident who came to my office many times to advocate for the disabled and I actually spent an entire day in 1973 in a wheelchair to better understand the challenges they face everyday. Soon after that we were cutting out sidewalks for wheelchairs and doing things in New Bedford before the laws ever compelled us to."

So despite the progressive and good works of the New Bedford leadership in 1973 to make the city schools and streets more handicap accessible, Hillary (no pun intended) rolled New Bedford local government under the bus last night in front of the world. And needed to lie to do it. It just didn't seem possible in those days Hillary, because it wasn't true in 1973 New Bedford. *While she (and 44 others in her position at the CDF that contributed to the overall report) did important work to expose the needs not yet met in some school districts across the nation, this was not a city without wheelchair accessible schools and services to get the students to the schools.

Maybe today's Mayor Jon Mitchell will offer to find this girl in the wheelchair on that porch as he did when challenging MA Governor Charlie Baker's New Bedford anecdotal about a New Bedford fisherman, a "mountain of a man" who last made Baker cry. with a hardship story..which turned out to actually be true.

And you thought she changed...silly you.

(Edited July 30th , 31st))