By Jay Fitzgerald – A blog about Boston, Hub of the Universe, and everything else.
Weill Cornell Medicine has produced a sharp video and article package that features my brother, Dr. Daniel Fitzgerald, who discusses Weil Cornell’s amazing partnership with the Weill Bugando School of Medicine in Mwanza, Tanzania. As the article notes, the Tanzanian center associated with the school serves more than 15 million people – a population the size of NY, LA and Chicago combined. Incredible.
The Herald’s Howie Carr makes a rare return to his long-ago muckraking roots, exposing the generational hackerama at the Boston Water and Sewer Commission. Yes, the same commission that’s been experiencing more than a little turmoil of late.
Note: Two Herald-driven posts in a row? The Herald may be a shell of its old self, but it still produces some scrappy copy.
This is the type of thing that makes this ardent DOGE critic an ardent DOGE supporter. From the Herald: “A Boston school custodian cleaned up as he retired with $567,427 in take-home pay last year, with a barrelful of that cash coming from unused vacation time.”
No use-it-or-lose-it vacation policies in government. … The custodian in question, whose base salary was $108,815 last year, claims he didn’t use 6,000 hours of vacation time “over decades,” or roughly 150 weeks of unused vacation time. … Does this sound plausible? Can the public see his vacation stubs?
Re the jaw-dropping Zelensky-Trump showdown yesterday, one word summarizes my reaction: sadness. Sadness that an America I used to know and be proud of is gone. It’s a deeper and more profound sadness than the one I felt the other week.
Another thing popped to mind yesterday: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” I thought of this infamous Donald Trump line after watching MAGA types scramble yesterday to defend the president and denounce Zelensky.
But there are still a few principled conservatives left. From the NYT’s Bret Stephens: “There’s no getting around the fact that Friday was a dreadful day — dreadful for Ukraine, for the free world, for the legacy of an America that once stood for the principles of the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt and Reagan must be spinning in their graves, as are Churchill and Thatcher.”
The NYT’s Tom Friedman wonders aloud: Imagine Trump and JD telling Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that the “war with Hamas had gone on too long, too many lives had been lost and it was costing America too much money,” etc. etc. It would never happen. Unless Putin factored into the equation somehow.
Update – The Atlantic: ‘It Was an Ambush.’ … I’m not buying it. And I don’t really care who started it. Only hyper-partisans care about such things. … What matters is the substance of what was said and conveyed as the cameras rolled.
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