Month: August 2024

• If journalists were really honest about what Trump says …

  August 10, 2024

  The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols has come up with a hilarious-but-accurate lede that journalists could have, and probably should have, written when describing Donald Trump’s weirder than weird press conference the other day:

  “The former president, lying about abortion laws, said women murder their own babies in the delivery room. He megalomaniacally claimed that he gets bigger crowds than anyone in history, and compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. He descended into fantasy by telling a story about surviving a helicopter emergency that never happened with a man who wasn’t there.”

  But journalists didn’t write that lede. They stuck to the “bias toward coherence,” thus inaccurately portraying the train-of-thought strangeness of his rambling talk. …  

  Btw: Conservative critics love to say the media is always out to get Donald Trump. But Nichols’s piece makes clear they’re actually out to make Trump sound more coherent than he really is. Most conservatives know this to be true but will never admit it.

• As the wind industry turns …

  August 10, 2024

  The windfarm blade shards washing up on the shores of Nantucket are getting the Wall Street Journal treatment (sub.). … It’s one of the most popular stories at the Journal.

• ‘Right to shelter’ for needy Massachusetts residents, not the needy across the world

  August 10, 2024

  The Globe has a good editorial on the migrant shelter crisis – and it’s effectively backing the Healey administration’s attempts to get a handle on the problem. Here’s the part that caught our attention:

  “Massachusetts has — and should continue to have — a generous emergency shelter system for residents suffering from eviction, natural disaster, domestic violence, or other misfortune. But starting Friday, we’re seeing the consequences of overpromising. Needy families came to a state that boasted of its ‘right to shelter’ — only to find themselves out on the street.”

  The word ‘migrants’ doesn’t appear in the above graf, but the ‘came to the state’ part is clear. In recent years, the state’s shelter program has morphed from a program to help the needy here in Massachusetts into an open-ended, budget-busting program to help the needy from around the globe. No matter how “heartless” it may sound (to steal a word from the Globe editorial), the state simply can’t afford its recently expanded and unrealistic shelter promises.

• The state is paying for its overpromises to migrants, Part 3

  August 9, 2024

  Offering no alternative solutions of their own, a few dozen advocates yesterday protested Gov. Healey’s new rule that limits migrant stays at emergency shelters to five days, saying the limit is cruel and (of course) “shameful.”

  Here’s a compromise: lengthen the stay rule for those migrants who arrived here by a certain date (say August 1), due to their effectively being lured to Massachusetts by false promises that they’d be provided housing for an unspecified length of time. And who made those open-ended, financially untenable shelter promises in the first place? Among them: migrant advocates themselves. Even though they’d never admit it, they helped create the problem of migrant families wandering our streets without homes.

  Anyway, back to the compromise: Today’s homeless migrant families are ultimately victims of both overpromises and broken promises by the state – so let’s help them moving forward by providing temporary shelters beyond five days. It’s the humane thing to do. But migrants arriving in Massachusetts from this point onward? The Healey rules apply.

  P.S. – The Globe’s Yvonne Abraham is one of the few progressives I’ve seen who’s actually grappled with the “awful choice” of providing shelters to migrants or, as she notes, effectively blowing out the state budget. Of course, she doesn’t offer solutions, saying only there are “no good answers.”  She’s right. There are no good answers. But at least the Healey administration is trying to come up with answers.

• Josh Shapiro: Not a favorite of young ones

  August 8, 2024

  This is an extremely small sampling, granted, but sometimes small samplings say a lot. In this case, two Dem friends with 20-something adult children recently told me that their young ones and all their young-one pals were adamantly (as in “no way”) against Josh Shapiro as Kamala Harris’s running mate. The reason: Israel. … 

  My two friends preferred Shapiro, but said they’ve reluctantly concluded post-selection that he was “more trouble than he was worth” to the Dem ticket, based on the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel sentiments among many young Americans. … This sentiment was clearly evident before Harris picked Tim Walz. … Of course, there were other reasons Shapiro didn’t land on the Harris ticket. But the Israel angle is a particularly sensitive issue that Dems want to downplay and that Republicans want to gin up. … 

  Btw: I’ve come to really like the Tim Walz selection. So don’t attribute this post to more griping about Harris’s VP choice. I would have preferred Shapiro, but what’s done is done.

  Update – From the NYT this morning: “In Detroit, Harris Confronts Divisions Roiling Democrats Over Gaza War.”

• Stop & Shop: ‘Sterile, middle-of-the-road grocery store’

  August 8, 2024

  The Globe’s Diti Kohl has a good story on Stop & Shop, the still dominant supermarket chain in Massachusetts (barely) that’s struggling to stay competitive with rivals who seem to grasp the importance of appearance and service at stores. … One expert refers to S&S as a “sterile, middle-of-the-road grocery store” while others have noted the service decline in its butcher and seafood departments. S&S is definitely at the bottom of my go-to store options when I’m thinking of buying steaks or seafood. 

• Tim Walz: ‘Can we get him to coach the Patriots?’

  August 7, 2024

  Regarding the buzz out there about how Tim Walz’s high-school football team went from bottom-of-the-barrel losers to state champs in one year, I got the following email a short while back: “Can we get him to coach the Patriots??  Hopefully he has a new job and is too busy….”

  Fyi: Walz was the team’s defensive and linebacker coach. Jerod Mayo, you’ve been warned.

• To offset inflation, Harris should propose giving every American $1,000

  August 7, 2024

  WBUR’s Anthony Brooks has a good piece on how the economy poses challenges to Kamala Harris, particularly inflation. Presidents have little power to combat inflation. So what can she do? I have an idea: the federal government giving a $1,000 check to every adult American making $150K or less a year, similar to what the feds did several times during the pandemic. It won’t offset inflation’s total ravages over the past few years, but people will be pumped to get a check. It’s a simple, direct way to help with the groceries.

  Re arguments it’s fiscally irresponsible: It’s no more irresponsible than Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or vows to eliminate taxes for restaurant workers. … Re arguments it might exacerbate, not offset, inflation: Tie it to spending cuts elsewhere in the fed budget. … Harris needs to act soon on this. Trump might steal the idea.

  Update – And the checks might also spur consumer spending for an economy that desperately needs it.

• The general election: Is it about winning over fellow Dems or winning over the center?

  August 7, 2024

  I’ve heard this a couple of times, that Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate to maintain Dem unity, to keep the ‘honeymoon’ going. But winning in politics is about adding, not maintaining, and it’s about seeking votes in the center, not within your own party, in a general election. …  I could go on about how Harris caved to teacher unions, pro-Palestinian Dems, progressives in general, etc., etc. But enough with my griping about the Walz pick. Hopefully, it will turn out OK. He sounds like a good guy.

• The Massachusetts economy was doing well … until yesterday

  August 6, 2024

  Amid all of yesterday’s news about global stock market mayhem, the UMass Donahue Institute did release a report showing that the state’s real gross product grew by 3.3 percent in the second quarter, exceeding expectations and exceeding the U.S. growth rate of 2.8 percent in 2Q. … But that data was before last week’s disappointing U.S. jobs data and yesterday’s resulting mini-panic over recession fears.