Bob Kraft/Ricki Noel Lander (Or Is That “Landed”) Edition

August 14, 2012

Patriots owner/Myra Kraft widower Robert Kraft is once again “upon the Town!” (to borrow from James McNeill Whistler’s legendary Ten O’Clock lecture, which you should absolutely read).

Via the decidedly less august Boston Herald Inside Track:

Hanging in the Hamptons

Patriots bigwig Bob Kraft and his lovely lady friend Ricki Noel Lander hit Pharrell Williams’ annual ‘Apollo in the Hamptons’ fundraiser Saturday night. The event for the legendary New York theater drew a crew of boldfacers including Usher, Jennifer Hudson and the Isley Brothers. The Pats poohbah spent the rest of the weekend at his house on the Cape, where he was spotted on a paddle board, sans Ricki.

Sans Ricki, avec Ricki – this is just wrong.

The Boston Globe didn’t have this story.

Good for them.

 

 

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Paul Ryan, Paul the Time Edition

August 13, 2012

After Mitt Romney (R-How You Like Me Now?) announced his choice of running mate Saturday morning, the Paul Ryan Express roared through the news media, very much including Boston’s dailies.

Sunday’s Boston Herald front page (via The Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):

The local tabloid devoted its first 10 news pages to Romney’s Veep Leap, along with one editorial and three – count ’em, three (here, here, and here) – op-ed columns.

Crosstown, the Boston Globe gave three broadsheet pages to the story, along with one editorial.

(Just for scale, the Globe’s kissin’ cousin New York Times featured four-and-a-half broadsheet pages, plus one Sunday Review piece.)

The Paul Ryan Express just accelerates from here.

 

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Slamming/Not Slamming the Mass. Democratic Party Edition

August 11, 2012

Yesterday’s local papers nicely illustrated the yin and yang of the 10th Congressional district election coverage.

From the copyediting challenged Boston Globe:

Democrats launch new attack on Tisei

Website part of new strategy

Democrats on ramped up Wednesday their efforts to turn the tables on Republican Richard R. Tisei, whose challenge to US Representative John F. Tierney has been boosted by the legal troubles of Tierney’s family.

State party officials announced a two-pronged effort to allege that “Tisei personally benefited by at least $30,000 dollars from the sale of a house that was among the assets his parents were alleged in court to be hiding from parties they damaged.”

The allegations — denied by Tisei, a Wakefield realtor who served in the state Senate — were recently reported in the Boston Phoenix.

The Democratic Party put up a website, http://www.TiseiFacts.com, and state party chairman John Walsh held a conference call with reporters.

Pretty straightforward, yeah?

Not if you read the Boston Herald, mister.

Front page (via The Newseum):

Joe Battenfeld column:

Mudslinging Dems sink to an all-time low

Smearing someone’s family is about as low as it gets in politics, but Massachusetts Democrats are setting a new standard in sliminess.

The party’s new website targeting Republican congressional candidate Richard Tisei claims to show his family’s “web of fraud and deceit,” but all it really shows is how dirty the Democrats are willing to get to win an election.

The joys of living in a two-daily town, yes?

 

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Let the Voter-Push Rumpus Continue! Edition

August 10, 2012

The dustup over the voter registration of welfare recipients is turning into a perpetual motion machine.

Start with this morning’s papers. The Boston Globe featured this on Page One:

Only Mass. sent out voter registrations after lawsuit

Massachusetts is the only state that has agreed to send mass mailings to register welfare recipients to vote, following a series of state lawsuits brought by the liberal group Demos, which is chaired by the daughter of Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Republicans say the mass mailings indicate that Massachusetts went above and beyond what was necessary to turn out likely Democratic voters for the November election.

Other states have settled Demos’s lawsuits by agreeing to less costly steps, such as better training for welfare officials or upgraded computer systems.

But Demos says it pushed Massachusetts to mail the voter registration forms to thousands of welfare recipients because the lawsuit here was filed so close to the election that simply allowing recipients to register the next time they went to a public assistance office was not practical.

The Globe also editorialized about the issue:

Mass. is justified in mailing voting forms to aid recipients

Mailing voter registration forms to people on public assistance isn’t part of a partisan plot to help Democrat Elizabeth Warren beat Republican Senator Scott Brown: It’s part of an interim settlement over a lawsuit alleging that Massachusetts consistently failed to comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

Through the mailings, Massachusetts is taking steps to do what the law requires it to do — encourage voter participation in that great American enterprise known as democracy, including through public-aid agencies. To vote, citizens first must register. Government should do all it can — and all that the law requires — to help achieve that goal.

Yeah, tell that to the Boston Herald, which once again had four – count ’em, four – bites at this apple. First up, a news report:

Welfare chief declares Elizabeth Warren ties ‘ridiculous’ 

State welfare commissioner Daniel Curley said yesterday he never communicated with Elizabeth Warren’s daughter and he rejected claims that the department’s taxpayer-funded drive to get welfare recipients registered to vote was politically motivated to help Warren.

“This gets to the ridiculous,” said Curley, who heads the Department of Transitional Assistance. “There has been no communication from DTA to any of those officials — or their daughters.”

This morning’s Herald also featured an editorial (“Just sign ’em all up”), a Jessica Heslam column (“Recipients decry voter push waste”), and a Michael Graham column :

Coincidentally, fix in

No justice in lawsuit to boost Warren

In America, the wide-eyed and innocent believe in unicorns and the Tooth Fairy.

In Massachusetts, they believe in “coincidence.”

For 10 years a Lowell woman had been getting her welfare benefits at the local office without, she claims, being asked to register to vote. She never bothered to do anything about it until now. What a “coincidence.”

Right – but isn’t that what the law- . . . never mind. Let’s just keep moving.

To the web, this afternoon, when this popped up on the Herald site:

Brown: Warren must reimburse taxpayers for welfare mailing

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown demanded challenger Elizabeth Warren cough up nearly $300,000 to reimburse taxpayers for a push undertaken by her daughter’s liberal think tank to register welfare recipients to vote.

”It’s been disturbing for a lot of people to learn that the state’s welfare department undertook an unprecedented voter registration drive at the behest of Elizabeth Warren’s daughter and the organization she represents,” wrote Brown in a statement. “It is clear that this was done to aid Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign. Professor Warren has more than $13 million dollars in her campaign account, and if she wants to mail every welfare recipient a voter registration form, she should do so at her own expense, not taxpayers’. She should immediately reimburse the state for the cost of this mailing and stop playing politics with the taxpayers’ money.”

The Globe posted much the same on its website.

This gambit is so ridiculous, it’s actually smart. And it ensures the perpetual motion machine won’t stop anytime soon.

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Herald Foursome Whacks Warren Edition

August 9, 2012

The Boston Herald has sunk its teeth into the EBT Voter Push story and is taking bigger bites every day. Yesterday the feisty local tabloid ran three pieces (to the Globe’s none in its print edition). Today the Herald has upped the ante to four.

The beauty of this story, of course, it that’s its a twofer for the Herald: They get to rough up the welfare layabouts while inflicting maximum collateral damage to Elizabeth Warren, the paper’s particular bête noire.

Today’s edition kicks off with Warren on the defensive:

Elizabeth Warren: Nothing fishy about my kid’s role in EBT campaign

Elizabeth Warren scoffed at U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s charges that her daughter is leading a taxpayer-funded crusade to get welfare recipients out to vote for her mom, even as records show the Democrat scored thousands in campaign dough from the group’s bigwigs — including a former Boston Globe publisher.

“The organization that Amelia’s involved in was working on voter registration issues I believe before she ever joined,” Warren said. “And they were working in several different states, they’re working with other organizations and they were working with the commonwealth of Massachusetts before I ever became involved in the campaign.”

There’s also a backgrounder on Demos, the group organizing the campaign. And what would a pig pile be without the smooth stylings of Howie Carr?

It’s not enough that Granny Warren, the fake Indian, is raising more campaign cash from the Beautiful People and, yes, the machine, than any congressional candidate in the country. Now Brown has to contend with campaign mailings from the Department of Transitional Assistance, i.e., welfare, paid for by money extracted from the taxpayers — his voters.

Oh, yes – just for good measure, the paper tossed in an editorial:

A true voting scam

Ah, yes, we can hear the governor once again blaming the Herald for “making sure you’re angry” with yesterday’s front page story on how nearly $300,000 of your tax dollars will be spent to tell welfare recipients how to register to vote.

That the national voter registration effort is led by a left-leaning group whose board is chaired by Amelia Warren Tyagi, daughter of Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is, well, just one of those funny political coincidences — no?

And etc.

Meanwhile, the crosstown rival Globe ran its story – an expanded version of what the paper posted yesterday afternoon on its website – front page above the fold. The broadshet also ran this chinstroker about  the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s “aggressive effort to expand upon and invigorate the grassroots organization that propelled Deval Patrick to two terms as governor after 16 consecutive years of GOP control over the Corner Office.”

We’ll see tomorrow who makes an aggressive effort to expand upon and invigorate the voter registration story. We’re laying plenty of eight-to-five it’s the Herald.

 

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Strip Club Edition

August 9, 2012

The Boston Herald earns Headline o’ the Day honors for this:

Strip club vows to keep guns out

The same Herald piece is also in the running for Empty Quote o’ the Day:

“Public safety is the highest priority of this establishment,” said Glass Slipper attorney Kenneth Tatarian . . .

The Boston Globe, on the other hand, gets the nod for better  – actually only – graphic (since the Herald doesn’t have any):

There are other compare-and-contrast goodies as well.

Globe on the dispute that triggered the shooting:

Two patrons at The Glass Slipper strip club in downtown Boston were shot in the head by another patron during an ­apparent fight about a booth early Wednesday, authorities said.

Herald on same:

The Glass Slipper erupted in violence at 2:13 a.m. when a fight broke out between patrons over who had dibs to a viewing booth, authorities said.

Oh – a viewing booth.  That explains a lot.

Globe on apprehending the shooter:

The alleged gunman — Steve A. Gayle, 34, owner of a video gaming company in Jamaica Plain — was arrested by Boston police moments after the shooting, which occurred inside the club at 22 LaGrange St.

Gayle was apprehended outside, holding a silver-colored handgun and carrying a backpack with 16 rounds of ammunition, authorities said.

Herald on same:

Steve A. Gayle, 34, of Jamaica Plain was arrested as he scurried from the club, brandishing a silver revolver and backpack with 16 bullets, right past a Boston cop on a detail at the neighboring strip club, Centerfolds, according to court records.

Scurried? Seriously? These papers really do inhabit entirely separate universes.

 

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Herald “Welfare Voter Push” Edition

August 8, 2012

The Boston Herald hit its favorite target – Elizabeth Warren – with a one-two punch this morning, starting with this piece:

Welfare voter push has GOP crying foul
Critics blast state’s Dems for ‘inside job’

The state has mailed out voter registration letters to nearly 500,000 welfare recipients, in a push sparked by a group led by former ACORN bigwigs that critics say is a naked bid to boost Democrats at the polls in November.

The letters, mailed last month by the state’s Department of Transitional Assistance, went out as Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren have been locked in a neck-and-neck race.

The welfare system’s get-out-the-vote push came in response to a suit brought by New England United for Justice (NEU4J), which is led by three former leaders of the controversial Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. ACORN was disbanded in 2010 amid a voter fraud scandal.

Yow. Then there’s the follow-up:

Brown blasts welfare vote group chaired by Warren’s daughter

HYANNIS — An exasperated U.S. Sen. Scott Brown today said a taxpayer-funded push by a group chaired by rival Elizabeth Warren’s daughter to register welfare recipients is “outrageous.”

“It’s like another thing you shake your head about. Here we go, we have Professor Warren’s daughter leading the charge at taxpayer expense to get welfare recipients out,” said Brown, who added he will fight just as hard for the votes of those on welfare. “It’s not about getting people out to vote, it’s the fact that Professor Warren’s daughter is leading the charge at taxpayer expense, getting out the vote for her mom …I think it’s outrageous and when does it end?”

Yikes – that’s about as high as Brown’s dudgeon gets.

But wait . . . there’s more. The Herald couldn’t resist taking a whack at the group organizing the voter push, hitting the trifecta with a piece headlined, “Group fueling registration doesn’t fall far from ACORN.” (Or maybe they couldn’t resist the pun.)

Regardless, the Globe finally jumped in the pool this afternoon with a web posting:

Scott Brown criticizes efforts to register welfare recipients

US Senator Scott Brown today criticized the state’s welfare department for sending voting registration forms to 478,000 people on public assistance, saying the mass mailing was a ploy to boost the ranks of Democratic voters and benefit rival Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.

The Globe piece also featured this response from the Warren campaign:

“For Brown to claim this is some kind of plot against him is just bizarre,” said campaign manager Mindy Myers, adding that the attack on Warren’s daughter was “ridiculous.

“His entire attack is built on efforts in multiple states to enforce a law passed almost 20 years ago with bipartisan support. Even the Bush Justice Department filed suit to enforce this provision of that law,” said Myers.

And, yes, the Globe did credit the Herald for breaking the story, for those of you keeping score at home.

 

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Whitey Bulger Testify Edition

August 7, 2012

Most Bostonians thought they’d never live long enough to see this headline in the Boston Globe:

Bulger plans to take stand in his defense

What follows is a straightforward recounting of what J.W. Carney Jr., Whitey Bulger’s lawyer, told news organizations yesterday:

James “Whitey” Bulger, once America’s most wanted criminal, will for the first time address the charges against him, taking the stand in his own defense in hope of convincing a jury that federal officials once granted him immunity for his many crimes, his lawyer said Monday.

J.W. Carney Jr. announced that plan during a hearing in US District Court in Boston. He said Bulger wants to provide a firsthand account of his relationship with the FBI and the deal he had for working secretly as a government informant.

“He is going to tell the truth, if the judge permits him to,” Carney later told reporters outside the federal courthouse.

The Boston Herald, not to be outdone, has two straightforward recountings of what Carney said (here and here).

So that’s a wash. It’s the columnists who provide today’s compare-and-contrast moment.

First, Herald resident wise guy, Howie Carr.

There are three chances of Whitey Bulger testifying at his own trial next March.

Slim, fat and none.

As a taxpayer, I demand a refund from Whitey’s public defender J.W. Carney. Is this the best you can do, Jay?

And it’s not just Howie who says that.

“I guarantee you that punk won’t take the stand,” Boston defense attorney Tony Cardinale was saying last night.

Globe columnist Kevin Cullen, though has a different take in this web piece that didn’t make the hardreading staff’s copy of the paper:

Did you really think that Whitey Bulger was going to sit there in the courthouse named after his old neighbor Joe Moakley and merely take notes on a yellow legal pad while federal prosecutors painted him as a killer of women, an enabler of drug dealers, and, egads, worst of all, a rat?

It was always in the cards that Whitey Bulger was going to take the stand in his own defense. His lawyer, J.W. Carney Jr., has been saying as much for much of the last year, making it official with Monday’s announcement.

The only surprise is that anybody’s surprised. Whitey may be venal but he ain’t stupid. What’s he got to lose? This is the last dance. He has one shot to counter the prevailing image that took hold while he and Cathy Greig spent what Judge Doug Woodlock deliciously called “16 years of extended banality” on the run.

Who’s right? Flip a coin. Then wait until March.

 

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Globe Rips Off Herald Edition

August 6, 2012

From Glen Johnson’s Boston Sunday Globe Political Intelligence column (headline: “Warren draws criticism over comment on Wall St. Support”):

Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, a proud champion of the middle class, nonetheless claimed support from the very same Wall Street crowd she so frequently targets for criticism.

“Every now and again, I meet with someone who’s been very successful on Wall Street, who says, ‘I want to support your campaign because I believe you will save capitalism,’ ” Warren said during an interview with the National Journal’s Jim O’Sullivan published July 29.

By Monday, the comment was pinging around the Internet and Twittersphere, accompanied by a fairly snarky reaction.

Pinging around the Internet and Twittersphere?

Seriously?

Warren’s quote was Page One of the Boston Herald last Tuesday, as the hardreading staff duly noted:

Elizabeth Warren Saves Capitalism Edition

U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren (D-Capital!) kicked off her Wall Street waltz with this quote in National Journal, according to Hillary Chabot in yesterday’s Boston Herald:

“Every now and again, I meet with someone who’s been very successful on Wall Street, who says, ‘I want to support your campaign because I believe you will save capitalism. I believe in capitalism, and I understand there have to be rules. And they have to be consistently enforced.’ ”

That earned Warren this front page photo in the feisty local tabloid:

 

More from Johnson’s piece:

That prompted Warren to backpedal . . . as she made a campaign stop in Somerville.

“I passed along a comment that was over the top, and it was silly for me to do so,” she told reporters. Warren repeated the statement to each question on the topic.

 

Old news, Glen – not to mention unattributed.

From IGTLTDT:

[Last Wednesday’s] Herald had not one, but two columns (conveniently side-by-side) whacking Warren for the walkback, among other things.

First up, Joe Battenfeld:

Warren’s cop-out may represent a turning point in her campaign, because it’s the first time she’s actually disavowed something in such record speed.

But don’t expect Warren to go all silly on us. She is still claiming American Indian heritage, and that she created “much of the intellectual foundation” for Occupy. And she still claims she’s the sheriff who cleaned up Wall Street, despite what a few “over the top” executives may say.

Next up, Howie Carr:

How does Granny Warren do it? I mean, do you know how much time it must take, saving capitalism and simultaneously providing the “intellectual foundations” of Occupy Wall Street, which wanted to destroy capitalism?

Talk about keeping balls in the air. She’s both an Indian and “Okie to her toes.”

C’mon, Globe editors – and Glen. Credit where credit’s due, eh?

 

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Any Given Sunday Edition

August 5, 2012

From our Compare and Contrast in Clear Idiomatic English desk

Sunday Boston Herald, Page One:

 

Boston Sunday Globe, Page One:

 

(Both via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages.)

Here’s the thing: There is virtually nothing of real import in the Herald today.  That’s not to say human-interest and crime stories don’t have their place, or that the Herald never runs consequential stories. Just not today.

The Globe, by contrast, has two major takeouts front page above the fold. The RFK papers story is entirely maddening (representative sample:  “‘Ethel has been given control of documents that she couldn’t even legally read because she didn’t have a security clearance,’ said a former National Archives official who had the authority to handle top secret information regarding the RFK papers.”)

The Scott Brown biopiece is a major headscratcher, making you wonder how adept Brown is at separating myth from memory, and casting some light on the more braggadocious statements he’s made lately (Papaya King, anyone?).

And that’s not even addressing the rest of the Globe’s content, which makes the contrast with the Herald even starker.

Is the hardreading staff essentially comparing Apples and PCs here? Maybe. But it’s good every once in a while to take a step back and realize what we have in this two-daily town.

 

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