The Great Comic Strip Follies at the Boston Globe continued yesterday. As the hardreading staff previously noted, right before Christmas the cheapskately local broadsheet announced that it had “discontinued several strips and two puzzles” from its daily editions.
By “several strips,” of course, they meant 11.
Two weeks later, the Globe moonwalked from its comic strip mining.
And yesterday the results were in, as we learned from this editor’s note.
They gotta be nuts graf:
Seriously? Rose Is Rose instead of Get Fuzzy? Adam @ Home instead of Zippy? We’re sorry to say this, but Globe readers are idiots.
(Then again, restoring the Jumble is a good call. The old man used to toss it on the breakfast table to see who could be first to solve it without any writing implements. It was good clean American fun.)
Regardless, the Great Globe Comic Strip Tease is now officially over.
As the hardreading staff noted at the time, last month the Boston Globe announced that the cheapskately local broadsheet had “discontinued several [comics] strips and two games.”
By “several,” of course, they meant 11.
(The Globe’s math skills leave much to be desired, as we discovered when the paper played DNA newsletter for Elizabeth Warren last year.)
Regardless, that relegated the comics to a single anemic page.
Cut to today’s edition of the Globe, where the editor moonwalks on his strip mining of the comics pages.
We’ve already indicated our choices: Zippy, Get Fuzzy, Mother Goose & Grimm, Bliss, and Bizarro.
It seems that Mistah Mayah has been following our kissin’ cousins at One-Daily Town, given that this City of Boston ad appears in today’s Boston Globe but not the Boston Herald.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ain’t Sayin’) is unquestionably a political force on the national scene. But now she’s a comic book “Force” as well, although that means very different things in today’s Boston dailies.
Nice little promo for the book and the senior senator.
Crosstown at the Boston Herald, columnist Howe Carrtoon mails in – predictably – a very different take, which you can read if you like, although we don’t recommend it.
The local dailies are giving a whole new meaning to the Warren Report.
Yesterday’s Boston Globe was a Love Letter to Liz (actually a mash note, not to get technical about it). The paper devoted over 25% of its Ideas section to making a Warren for President case, starting with this rare front-page editorial.
Democrats need Elizabeth Warren’s voice in 2016 presidential race
DEMOCRATS WOULD be making a big mistake if they let Hillary Clinton coast to the presidential nomination without real opposition, and, as a national leader, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren can make sure that doesn’t happen. While Warren has repeatedly vowed that she won’t run for president herself, she ought to reconsider. And if Warren sticks to her refusal, she should make it her responsibility to help recruit candidates to provide voters with a vigorous debate on her signature cause, reducing income inequality, over the next year.
There are three – count ’em, three – other pieces playing variations on that theme in this high-priced spread:
That’s a lotta real estate for Warren to gobble up.
Not to be left home from the dance, the Boston Herald jumped on the Lizwagon today.
WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Warren, as we now know her, would make a terrible presidential candidate. But her party, the Democrats — including presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton — need Elizabeth Warren to run.
Because they need a primary, and no one else can give them one.
Starting today, all good progressives should write it on their Starbucks latte cups:
Run Liz Run.
And don’t stop there. Facebook profile pics, Twitter avatars, the dirty windows of your Priuses, Subarus and Range Rovers — even the Burberry sweater your Maltese named “Chloe” wears — take a Sharpie to that Shar-Pei and scrawl “Run Liz Run.”
The feisty local tabloid has a hill-acious dislike of Hillary Rodham Clinton, with today’s edition serving as Exhibit Umpteen.
Start with the page 2 column by the always unreadable Adriana Cohen, who rattles on about salary inequality in both the Obama White House and Clinton’s training-wheels-up presidential campaign.
Last April [Clinton] tweeted, “20 years ago, women made 72 cents on the dollar to men. Today it’s still just 77 cents. More work to do. #EqualPay #NoCeilings.”
Now flash forward to today — she’s reportedly given the top jobs, and salaries, on her exploratory presidential campaign staff to men.
But that’s not all.
Back when she was a U.S. senator for New York, reports are now surfacing that she paid women on her staff only 72 cents to a man’s dollar. Proof she’s no champion of women.
Okay, then.
Next page, Tom Shattuck’s column about a softball interview with Elizabeth Warren on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Into the middle of his rant (he called MSNBC “America’s most shamelessly partisan cable ‘news’ channel” – didn’t he read this?), Shattuck drops an H-bomb.
All anyone really cared about Warren this week wasn’t the middle-class hammering thing. Monday was the day the hated conservative genius Karl Rove’s video went viral — brilliantly using Warren’s own words, in her own voice, in a video to hammer Hillary Clinton.
Okay, then.
Moving along in our madcap review, say hello to Joe Fitzgerald, who serves up some Clinton evergreens.
Are you, too, tired of looking at Hillary Clinton?
It infuriates her when anyone suggests she rode her husband’s coattails to prominence, but who was she before Bill’s star began to rise?
Indignantly assuring us she was “no Tammy Wynette, standing by her man” when it was revealed her man was a lecher, she raged against a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for making his philandering public.
As Secretary of State, when asked by Sen. Ron Johnson if she had any thoughts on the motives behind the murders of four Americans in the attack at Benghazi, she snapped, “At this point, what difference does it make?”
PR gurus can’t hide her opportunistic quest for power
“Is Hillary Rodham Clinton a McDonald’s Big Mac or a Chipotle burrito bowl? A can of Bud or a bottle of Blue Moon? JC Penney or J. Crew?”
That was the opening question of a front-page Washington Post story on Clinton’s effort to figure out her “brand.” To that end, she has recruited a team of corporate marketing specialists to “help imagine Hillary 5.0.”
After decades of public life, even Clinton doesn’t really know who she is — or at least who she should be this time around.
As the hardworking staff duly noted, the Run Warren Run crowd ran ads in New Hampshire papers the other day promoting a rally to urge U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Sort of No) to enter the 2016 presidential bakeoff.
MANCHESTER, N.H. – They gripped signs and took T-shirts with the words “Run Warren Run,” but the 50 Democratic activists who attended the New Hampshire kick-off of an organization hoping to persuade Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to run for president came for different reasons.
Some had already publicly committed to Hillary Clinton, should she run again for president, but want Clinton to adopt a more populist message. Others said they like it when Warren speaks out on issues like income inequality but want to learn more about her personally before backing her as a presidential candidate. A handful were interested in a potential presidential bid from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont but wonder whether he is the best person to push a progressive message.
So . . . whatever.
But crosstown at the Boston Herald, the crowd was much larger.
Hope was a recurring theme at the launch rally yesterday, hosted by Democracy for America and MoveOn.org, which have promised to invest $1.25 million in Iowa and New Hampshire to convince Warren to run for president. About 250,000 people have signed a petition asking Warren to run, even though she has repeatedly said she isn’t jumping into the race.
About 125 people attended, organizers said, many donning free red, white and blue T-shirts decorated with the “Run Warren Run” logo. Sixteen locals signed up to host house parties to spread the word and convince more people to join the cause.
To recap:
A crowd roughly the size of a) The Kardashians, or b) Mitt Romney’s grandchildren showed up for Lizorama.
U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III said yesterday that “companies clearly create jobs,” putting distance between himself and potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose controversial comments on the subject are expected to be fodder for Republicans this upcoming election cycle.
One of the Bay State’s rising political stars, Kennedy said in a Herald interview yesterday that Congress needs to embrace policies geared toward economic equality as it prepares to return next month under Republican control. But he said helping businesses, big and small, to “flourish” needs to remain part of that, as Democrats — increasingly galvanized by the populist bullhorn wielded by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren — try to beat back criticism that they’re anti-business.
We-think-she’s-nuts graf:
Republicans once galvanized by President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” comment in 2012 were re-energized in late October when Clinton sent shock waves through the Twittersphere when she told Democrats in Boston, “Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”
(Columnist Joe Battenfeld piles on with this piece, in which he speculates that Joe K 3.0 “may help derail Clinton’s White House path by endorsing her potential 2016 opponent, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, much the same way the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy backed Barack Obama in 2008.”)
The problem with this Hill-steria on the Herald’s part is that it conveniently overlooks this:
Yeah – that was Elizabeth Warren two years ago, not two months ago like Clinton. So you could say Warren was the Granny of that particular sentiment.
But the Herald wouldn’t say that. Doesn’t fit their storyline, does it?
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Present Tense) has routinely refused to rule out a 2016 presidential run, saying only “I am not running for president.” Here’s a typical exchange, from yesterday’s interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, who brought up all the people urging Warren to run.
Would you tell these independent groups, “Give it up!” You’re just never going to run.
I told them, “I’m not running for president.” You’re putting that in the present tense, though. Are you never going to run?
I am not running for president. You’re not putting a “never” on that.
I am not running for president. You want me to put an exclamation point at the end?
Fabulously non-responsive, no?
But in today’s edition the Boston Globe’s Noah Bierman came up with a clever way to shift Warren to the future tense.
Warren has answered the question more definitively before. Last year, the Globe asked her at a news conference in Boston whether she would make a a more ironclad pledge to serve out her Senate term, which ends in January 2019.
“I pledge to serve out my term,” she said at the time.
On Monday, Warren’s spokeswoman, Lacey Rose, was asked by the Globe in an e-mail whether the senator stood by that pledge.
“Yep, nothing has changed,” Rose replied.
Of course, everything is different in the Boston Herald. Top of Page One:
Inside, there’s Hillary Chabot’s piece (with Matthew Stout) about Warren’s local political posse.
Bay State heavyweights eye Warren bandwagon
U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III — whose late uncle Edward M. Kennedy famously snubbed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential contest — kept the door open yesterday to another game-changing Kennedy endorsement should U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren enter the 2016 race.
“He has no doubt she will continue to be a tremendously effective leader wherever her career takes her,” Kennedy spokeswoman Emily Brown said yesterday when asked of the congressman’s thoughts about Warren as president.
The comment comes after U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Somerville) offered his support to Warren if she jumps into the presidential contest, despite the likelihood that former Secretary of State Clinton will enter the field.
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