Columnist.
Charlie Baker knew the question was coming. As the state's secretary of administration and finance in 1998, he wrote a memo to the file that described the financing of the massive Big Dig project as "simply amazing" and warned that its soaring bottom line would force "draconian" cuts on other transportation projects. Yet in his public comments to legislators and reporters, he insisted that nobody "could argue that the artery will be pulling money away from non-artery projects." Why, moderator Charlie Gibson asked during the final televised gubernatorial debate last night, was he saying one thing in private and something else in public?
My 7-year-old son knows better than to believe in the Tooth Fairy, but he was happy to act as if he did in order to cash in when he lost three teeth this month. He played his part convincingly, even slipping a note under his pillow asking if he could keep one of the teeth and still get paid for it. ("Dear Micah," said the note he found the next morning, "My name is Tooth Fairy because I keep the tooth. But I will make an exception this time . . .")
Barney Frank can be ruthless in debate, especially when laying into opponents who try to evade the historical record. But as he pursues a 16th term in the US House, Frank seems to be attempting a little evasion of his own.
Nothing about Israel could be more self-evident than its Jewishness. As Poland is the national state of the Polish people and Japan is the national state of the Japanese people, so Israel is the national state of the Jewish people. The UN's 1947 resolution on partitioning Palestine contains no fewer than 30 references to the "Jewish state" whose creation it was authorizing; 25 years earlier, the League of Nations had been similarly straightforward in mandating "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." When Israel came into existence on May 15, 1948, its Jewish identity was the first detail reported. The New York Times's front-page story began: "The Jewish state, the world's newest sovereignty, to be known as the State of Israel, came into being in Palestine at midnight upon termination of the British mandate."
"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last spring about her party's 2,000-page health care overhaul. What she didn't realize was that the more Americans find out about ObamaCare, the more they turn against it. Virtually from the day it was signed, a majority of Americans have favored repealing the massive law. According to two polls released this past week — one a national survey by Rasmussen, the other a poll of key congressional districts for The Hill — they still do.
What do you call a Supreme Court that within the last few terms has ruled that carbon dioxide can be regulated as "air pollution" by the Environmental Protection Agency? That gave captured terrorists and enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay the right to petition for release in federal court? That has relied on foreign law when defining provisions of the Constitution?
The policies of the Chinese government make it possible for Americans to acquire a vast array of products at affordable prices. For that high crime and misdemeanor, the US House of Representatives voted last week to punish China.
Elected officials don't usually acknowledge wanting to torture people in dark alleys, so it made news recently when Boston Mayor Thomas Menino expressed such a wish during a talk at Emerson College.
I generally see her after dark: an old woman in a conical Vietnamese hat, making the rounds in my neighborhood the night before our weekly trash pickup. She is out in all kinds of weather, checking the bins that residents have set out on the curb, helping herself to the aluminum cans. I've smiled and nodded hello once or twice, but she looks right past me and moves on. I figure she's too busy working to lose any time on pleasantries.
"Get excited about Single Stream!" trills the flyer that comes from Brookline Town Hall. A letter from the commissioner of public works hails the "exciting change" beginning next month, when town residents will no longer be required to sort their recyclable trash into separate blue bins — one for paper, the other for cans, bottles, and plastic containers. Instead recyclables will all go into 64-gallon "toters," which will be emptied at curbside on trash day.
Terry Jones's 15 minutes of fame have run out, the foreign media have left Gainesville, and we aren't likely to hear much more about the fringe Florida preacher and his abandoned plan to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11. But there are some lessons worth taking away from the episode. Here are three:
"When I was young, I was a Democrat because I wanted to help people," says Sean Bielat, who is running to replace Barney Frank in the US House of Representatives. "Now I’m a conservative because I want to help people."
Talia and Yitzhak Ames met as students at Moscow University. They got married in 1985, and had two children by the time they emigrated to Israel in 1991. Four more children followed in the next 19 years, and Talia was nine months' pregnant with their seventh when she and Yitzhak were murdered by Palestinian terrorists last week.
In the market for a used car? Good luck finding a bargain: The price of "pre-owned" vehicles has climbed considerably over the past year. According to Edmunds.com, a website for car buyers, a three-year-old automobile today will set you back, on average, close to $20,000 — a spike of more than 10 percent since last summer. For some popular models, the increase has been much steeper. In July, a used Cadillac Escalade was going for around $35,000, or nearly 36 percent over last July’s price.
James Thomson, an embryologist at the University of Wisconsin, cultivated the first embryonic stem cell lines in 1998. By then the prohibition on using federal funds for scientific research in which human embryos are destroyed was already on the books; President Bill Clinton had signed it nearly three years earlier. So how did Thomson secure a government grant to finance his landmark achievement?
The New York Times reported last week that the Obama administration intends to expand opportunities for Americans to visit Cuba, loosening the rules under which academic, religious, and cultural groups can travel there. The new regulations are seen as a signal of presidential support for legislation sponsored by US Representative Collin Peterson that would repeal the travel limitations altogether.
Five years ago this week, the Gaza Strip was forcibly purged of its Jews. In the largest non-combat operation in the history of the Israeli military, 50,000 troops were deployed to expel some 9,000 residents and destroy the 21 pioneering communities in which some of them had lived for nearly four decades. (Four communities in northern Samaria on the West Bank were also evacuated.)
Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio joined the chorus of Republicans amenable to rewriting the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees American citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Should the Constitution be altered, Boehner was asked on NBC’s "Meet the Press," to deny such automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants? "I think it’s worth considering," he replied.
Late in July, a Hollywood honcho uncorks a blast of anti-Semitic bile, the sort of malignant stereotype about Jews one might expect from David Duke or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Is that newsworthy? It certainly was in 2006, when Mel Gibson, arrested in Malibu for drunken driving, demanded to know whether the arresting deputy was Jewish, and then launched into an anti-Semitic rant: "[Expletive] Jews," he raged. "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
