It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

This is mother’s milk to our feisty local tabloid.

The Boston Herald is on the Massachusetts welfare abuse scandal like Brown on Williamson. Today’s edition goes yesterday’s one better, with three – count ’em, three – full pages of pleased-as-punch coverage.

You’ll notice there are two Truth Squad screeds (here and here) about Deval Patrick’s no-show response to State Auditor Suzanne Bump’s audit of the Department of Transitional Assistance, along with one Howie Carr mail-in, a high-dudgeon editorial,  and this editorial cartoon.

There’s also this roll call (You Asked for It!) of the Senate votes last week rejecting photo IDs on EBT cards 30-8. (Full vote here.)

And this convenience store receipt purportedly showing a seven grand balance on someone’s EBT card.

It just doesn’t get any better than this for the Herald (from its editorial):

[I]t isn’t just the zombie-benefits problem.

It’s the individual who claimed to have had his EBT card lost or stolen — 127 times. It’s the use of a Massachusetts benefits card in St. Thomas — over a period of four months (surprise, they happened to be the coldest months of the year in New England). It’s the double-dipping, and all of the other clear signals of fraud that DTA missed along the way.

But the Herald’s not missing any.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, the DTA rumpus is just monkey-business as usual. Page One:

But instead of piling on, the stately local broadsheet goes the misery-loves-company route.

New Bay State slogan: Thank God for New Jersey, eh?