Don't tell me the end of summer isn't until the third week in September. Virtually everyone understands summer ends on Labor Day (or the Friday before for those who want to beat the rush.) The leaves are beginning to turn. Crickets are making a racket at night. Returning college students are clogging the streets with …
Category: Politics
Boston’s mayoral mish-mash
The good news is that there are more than a few candidates running for mayor of Boston who are at least as credible as Hizzonah Mayor Menino 20 years ago. The bad news is that sorting them out is so difficult. For me, the differentiating factors in these late summer days are still impressionistic. A series of fragments.News …
Whitey withdrawal symptoms?
At first I thought a verdict in the trial of Boston gangster Whitey Bulger would spur profound withdrawal symptoms. I'd be missing the daily, nay, hourly updates on the grizzly testimony given about the murderous career of the Hub's most notorious and despicable psychopath. Despite having followed Whitey as a journalist, despite having covered his ever-loyal brother, …
Larry Summers for the Fed? Spare us.
The Federal Reserve may not be the center of the solar system, but it is a key inflection point in American politics and, through its interest rate policies, can have a profound impact on the nation's economy. The Fed chairman's pronouncements, for better or worse, affect the stock market and, quickly thereafter, the value of our …
“This Town” captures a place and time
Tom Wolfe's 1987 masterpiece Bonfire of the Vanities captured the greed, class, ambition, and politics of Reagan era New York City. So, too, does Mark Leibovich's This Town capture early 21st century Washington, D.C. Bonfire, however, is fiction and This Town is for real. Leibovich, who is the New York Times magazine national political reporter, …
Anthony Weiner more than a sick joke
Yesterday may have been National Hot Dog Day, but Anthony Weiner has nothing to celebrate. Anthony Weiner is a .....Good taste prevents me from playing with the punning headlines of the New York Post and Daily News. I'm sure there is a clinical explanation, some personality disorder classification having to do with reckless, self-destructive behavior, …
Zimmerman verdict gnaws at us
Arrests were made overnight in Los Angeles and Oakland as crowds protesting the "not guilty" outcome in the Trayvon Martin murder case turned violent. Had the verdict gone the other way, others would have protested. Even though, according to juror B37, the jury doesn't seem to have viewed the case through the prism of race, it's hard …
Charlotte Golar Richie: the next mayor of Boston?
I have crossed paths with Boston mayoral candidate Charlotte Golar Richie at various times over the last few decades, but without getting a real sense of her as an individual. Certainly, I knew her from her bio: Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya; two master's degrees; two-term member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where she chaired the Housing …
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Warren unfairly under fire on affordable housing
Newton Mayor Setti Warren is catching flak from some Garden City liberals for withholding $1.4 million in city-controlled federal money for a ten-unit building in a former fire station in the Waban section of Newton. The so-called Engine 6 project would house nine chronically homeless and an attendant, bringing to the residential neighborhood individuals with a history of …
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Court ruling hints at evolutionary process
Not much has changed with the Supreme Court ruling that the challenge to Texas' affirmative action policy should go back to the lower court for "strict scrutiny" to be applied. Strict scrutiny means that universities will have to show that non-race conscious strategies were tried to achieve diversity before having to utilize race-conscious policies. So where …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 