The Globe’s Adrian Walker is right (mostly): Mayor Michelle Wu is in a strong position to win re-election this year against one rival, and possibly another rival, both with ties to the business community. … To be sure: Wu is no Tom Menino, her once-upon-a-time mayoral mentor. She’s no ‘urban mechanic,’ no Ms. Fix-It. She’s a mild disappointment precisely because she often chooses ideology over pragmaticism. She also has a sanctimonious streak that’s off-putting to many. But she’s not off-putting enough for most supporters to abandon her. She’s still an incumbent mayor who has run and won citywide elections. And her $650,000 performance in D.C. the other week certainly didn’t hurt her prospects.

Sen. Chuck Schumer was right to reluctantly clear the way for passage of a GOP-crafted funding bill, arguing the alternative was a government shutdown that would have given the Trump-Musk tag team further excuses to slash government programs. The NYT has more. … 

Just to emphasize: I support efforts to control and occasionally cut government spending. I don’t necessarily like it. But I know it’s often necessary. It’s necessary for private businesses to do the same. It’s necessary for households too if the numbers don’t add up. That’s why there’s a part of me that welcomes some of the spending cuts underway at the federal level. But there’s responsible spending cuts – and then there’s irresponsible spending cuts, as WSJ’s Peggy Noonan points out. What we’re seeing today is reckless, ideological-driven cuts at the federal level – and arguably unconstitutional cuts as well. There’s no need to make a bad situation even worse, as Schumer rightly notes, by shutting down the entire government.

 

One way to get around constitutional concerns about eliminating an entire federal agency without congressional approval is to claim you’re not really eliminating an agency – just reducing it in size and redistributing much of its functions to other agencies. That’s what the Trump administration has done with USAID and is currently doing with the Department of Education: They’re deliberately breaking the agencies beyond repair, leaving them mere shells of their old selves. It’s the Humpty Dumpty downsizing strategy, if you will:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again

WBUR reports that dozens of DOE positions in Massachusetts have already been eliminated.

Update – Speaking of kings, good for AG Campbell et gang, via the Globe: “‘The president is not a king’: Mass. joins nearly two dozen states suing Trump for dismantling US Education Department.”

The Globe’s Rob Gavin has harped on it. Others have noted it too. Now the NYT’s Ezra Klein is pounding away at it, i.e. Blue States’ high-cost-of-living problem. And it is a problem. A major problem. … Klein piece via the inestimable Contrarian Boston.

The WSJ has an intriguing story about a “faculty-on-faculty war” underway at Columbia, pitting humanity and poly-sci types against science, engineering and business types. The divide is not as clear cut by studies as portrayed. There’s a Jewish-faculty component that’s tied to concerns over pro-Palestinian protests on campus, the WSJ reports. But the political divisions by schools are definitely there – basically far-left humanities professors versus more moderate professors in other fields. … And I strongly suspect there’s similar faculty divides on other campuses.…

Faculty members at colleges across the country will present a unified front against Donald Trump’s blunt-ax assaults on academia. But underneath the veneer of solidarity are some simmering hard feelings, much of it tied to the antics of radical far-left academics on campuses.

There’s no doubt that stocks are taking a beating these days amid widespread economic fears of a recession, tariffs, trade wars, etc. But you have to wonder if there’s more than a little hysteria at work when you read headlines like this from the Globe: “Should you sell all your stock? Buy a car now? Don’t panic: Here’s how to handle the economic turbulence.” … Fanning panic while pretending to tamp down panic. … Okaaaay.

So what’s really going on? Well, as stated, there really are some genuine economic concerns out there. But there’s also a strong element of hysteria being whipped up by a MSM that’s once again revealing its old left-of-center biases – as well as hysteria being whipped up by your usual-suspect partisans in general. As Justin Wolfers, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Michigan, pointed out in the NYT regarding recent economic news: 

“You could almost hear people on the left squeal with delight that the data were confirming their concerns about the Trump presidency. Those squeals led to equally absurd counterclaims from the right.”

Answer: Yes. … The Globe’s James Pindell has the details. … And let’s hope Dems show more common-sense on a lot of other issues, like immigration and public safety, as well as focusing more on the needs of the working class.

Here’s the list of 60 colleges the Trump administration is now targeting for possible sanctions. I count a total of nine schools from New England. … Is your college on the list? Mine is. And I’m sort of proud of it, similar to how many considered it a badge of honor to be on Richard Nixon’s original enemies list.

… I’m obviously not proud Tufts and other schools stand accused of potential antisemitism. I also don’t want to see the schools slapped with huge financial sanctions. But I don’t for a minute believe antisemitism is the real reason the Trump administration is going after these schools. As noted over the weekend, it’s about ideology. It’s about payback time. It’s about DEI and woke and CRT and radical left-wing professors and earthy environmentalists, and, going way back, the 1960s and Black Panthers and hippies etc, etc., etc. It’s about the raw anti-leftwing sentiment that’s totally consumed the right. Sooner or later, they’re going to crack down on a school for whatever reason. Might as well make the list now. … 

Update – Like Larry Summers, I have my own principled complaints about colleges, such as their infuriating double-standards on campus free speech and their long-time intolerance of non-lefty viewpoints on campus, etc. But as Summers said of the Trump administration’s recent Columbia action: “This kind of heavy-handed indiscriminate sanction will slow scientific progress, deny opportunity, chill legitimate discourse, and undermine the rule of law.” … Summers comments via Globe.

The Herald’s Peter Lucas goes there. … I gotta admit: I’ve been thinking the same thing with all her recent high-profile national appearances etc. But a White House run seemed so far-fetched, I dismissed it. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Here’s why: Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Bill Weld, Jill Stein, Elizabeth Warren, Seth Moulton, Deval Patrick, etc. etc.

A month after announcing a round of layoffs, MGB is back with yet another round of layoffs, the BBJ reports. … The deficit situation is apparently worse than thought — or at least worse than what pundits like me thought. … No mention of probable federal health-care funding cuts to come.