Boston Herald hack Howie Carr got another spotlight dance with himself out of yesterday’s James “Whitey” Bulger court proceedings.
Carr’s column today is largely about the exceedingly odd nature of Bulger’s defense.
Whitey defense team falling into a rat trap
Whitey Bulger is obviously acting as his own lawyer, and as the old saying goes, he has a fool for a client.
How else to explain his increasingly bizarre defense, which ended yesterday in a fitful flurry of F-bombs between him and his minion, Kevin “Two” Weeks?
Talk about ironic: Whitey’s gravedigger buried his old boss, and he did it under cross-examination, by Whitey’s own lawyer.
All Bulger cares about, Carr says, “is not going down in gangland history as a rat.” (Not to get technical about it, but Whitey also cares about not going down in gangland history as the killer of two young women, Deborah Hussey and Debra Davis.)
Regardless, as so often happens, it eventually becomes all about Howie:
Yesterday, Weeks outlined five murders, and afterward all Carney would ask him about was his informant status — that and his alleged plot to kill me. Two Weeks said he and Whitey both wanted to whack me.
“I even knew his address — 99 Concord Road.” No wonder I’m still alive. I lived at 91 Concord Road.
Just for the record: Today’s Boston Globe coverage doesn’t mention Carr.
Even as it continues a cheerful quarter-billion-dollar print and television ad campaign about how the Gulf has returned to normal, BP is crying foul. “It was never our intention for the company to become an open cash register for every claim or project anyone could dream up,” says spokesman Geoff Morrell. Locals say BP may have been naive. “This is Louisiana, after all,” says Danny Abel, a longtime New Orleans plaintiffs’ lawyer not involved in the case. “A big foreign company with deep pockets and you’re surprised there’s a feeding frenzy? Come on, man.”
Now comes Joe Nocera’s Tuesday New York Times op-ed column:
Justice, Louisiana Style
You can actually pinpoint the moment when the oil company BP began to get hosed in Louisiana: March 2012.
By then, BP had paid out around $6.3 billion to some 220,000 people and businesses in the Gulf Coast region for damages suffered as a result of the 2010 oil spill. The money was distributed by Kenneth Feinberg, who had parceled out the 9/11 fund, and subsequently managed other victim compensation schemes.
In return for the payouts, however, Feinberg had insisted that the victims sign documents agreeing not to sue BP . . .
But Louisiana lawyers found that agreement “offensive,” Nocera wrote, and so:
[A] group of lawyers — known as the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee — persuaded their clients to skip the Feinberg process and sue BP. And in March 2012, BP settled with those lawyers. As a condition for settling, the plaintiffs’ lawyers insisted that Feinberg be replaced by Patrick Juneau, a good-ol’-boy plaintiffs’ lawyer himself. BP also agreed to expand the potential universe of claimants, knowing full well that this would likely mean that people whose economic losses had no connection to the spill would receive “compensation.” It estimated that the settlement would cost it an additional $7.8 billion.
BP has finally said genug, and appealed to a federal court in New Orleans for relief.
Don’t hold your breath, though, waiting for BP sympathy from, well, anyone.
As the hardreading staff noted yesterday, the Boston Herald has been uncharacteristically shy about quoting former Boston Bruin Tyler Seguin’s latest homophobic Twitter puck-up.
Yesterday’s print edition of the feisty local tabloid didn’t even mention the incident, while this AP story on the Herald website remained entirely vague:
Stars’ Seguin: Twitter slur came from ‘hackers’
DALLAS — Recently acquired Dallas Stars forward Tyler Seguin says an anti-gay comment that showed up on his Twitter account came from “hackers.”
The Stars said in a statement Sunday that they had “addressed the issue directly” with Seguin. The tweet showed up on his account Saturday and was quickly removed.
As the hardworking staff just noted, there are dueling TV spots out now in the battle of the budget-busting Obamacare. One is for the Obama front Organizing for Action, the other for the Koch brothers front Americans for Prosperity.
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, has weighed in on the AFP ad.
The fight to define health care’s implementation: After the Supreme Court upheld the health-care law and after Obama won re-election, the White House assumed — as did most everyone else — that it wouldn’t have to fight again over the law’s legitimacy. Well, so much for that assumption. As Republicans fight implementation of the law and as the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity is planning to air TV ads attacking the law,Obama’s Organizing for Action is up with its second TV advertisement touting its benefits.
“My daughter Zoe had her first open-heart surgery when she was only 15 hours old. Before Obamacare, insurance companies could put lifetime caps on your health insurance… Zoe was halfway to her cap before her first birthday… Thanks to Obamacare, we can now afford the healthcare that Zoe needs. And for her, that’s a lifesaver.”
The New York Times: “Though many of its rules will not take effect for months, President Obama’s health care law is already the subject of an aggressive advertising campaign by Republicans to sow doubts about how it will work. In one of the largest campaigns of its kind, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group financed in part by Charles and David Koch, will begin running television commercials this week asserting that the law will limit Americans’ health care choices. The group is spending more than $1 million on the campaign, which will initially include television advertising in Ohio and Virginia, along with online ads asking people to test their ‘Obamacare risk factors.’”
The spot:
It’s all about the Moms, yeah?
Also of interest: this front-page piece in Monday’s New York Times:
Campaign Ad Cash Lures Buyers to Swing-State TV Stations
When Allbritton, the media company that owns Politico, put its seven television stations up for sale this spring, analysts quickly singled out one as the most attractive: WJLA, the company’s ABC-affiliated station in Washington, D.C. It is the biggest of the bunch, the best known and, perhaps most important, a magnet for political spending.
WJLA took in $33 million in election-related and issue advocacy advertising last year. Only three stations in the United States earned more for political ads, and two of those were also in Washington. That’s because the stations’ signals reach citizens in a crucial battleground state, Virginia, as well as the political power brokers in the nation’s capital. If Allbritton were to sell WJLA by itself, it could fetch $300 million.
Not to mention Ohio:
For stations blessed to be in swing states, political ads routinely represent a third of their overall ad revenue in election years.
For instance, WBNS, the highest-rated station in Columbus, Ohio, grossed about $50 million in advertising last year, of which at least $20 million was attributed to campaign spending. Columbus is the nation’s 32nd largest TV market.
Last time now-former Boston Bruin Tyler Seguin got all homophobic on his Twitter feed, the Boston Herald beat the Globe on the story. This time it’s the other way around.
If Tyler Seguin is as good at shutting down his Twitter account as he was at getting shut out on the scoresheet in the playoffs then his days of 140-character missives are — like his days donning the Spoked-B — done.
Both the Bruins and Twitter being Seguin-free seem like good ideas right now, quick fixes to aggravating problems. But they might prove rash overreactions in the end. Professional athletes have to learn how to deal with the consequences of celebrity in the social media age and patience has to be shown with a potential franchise player whose talent level far exceeds his maturity level.
The Bruins gave up on Seguin too soon, trading him July 4 to the Dallas Stars and confining him to the dustbin of failed face-of-the-franchise forwards along with Joe Thornton and Phil Kessel after just three seasons . . .
A few days ago the hardworking staff noted the New York Times full-page ad offering new print subscribers a 50% discount for a limited time.
Yesterday the Times got even more plaintive:
On one hand, it’s sad to see the Good Grey Lady rattling the tin cup. On the other, the results will determine the fate of reporting like N.R. Kleinfield’s wrenching report from the Times Sunday edition:
The Girls Who Haven’t Come Home
The last time they took Vernice Hill’s children away, the time they didn’t give them all back, was the afternoon she went to see her neighbor. Ms. Hill lives in a hulking building on East 188th Street, in a frayed neighborhood in the Bronx. It was May 1, 2005.
Inside her apartment, her two little girls, 3 and 6, were napping. Her two teenage boys, Jmapie, 13, and Matthew, 15, were supposed to be tidying up their room. Around noon, Ms. Hill went to catch up with a frail woman she gossiped with. First, she had some beers. A pot of neck bones and kidney beans simmered on the stove.
Ms. Hill figures she was gone at best an hour. (The police report suggested several hours.) Her keys lay inside. When she returned, she banged on the door and got no response. Rather than clean their room, the boys had gone out — Matthew to the park to play basketball and Jmapie downstairs to a friend’s.
Ms. Hill asked her neighbor to call 911. Firefighters and the police came and pried open the door.
When the officers wouldn’t let Ms. Hill in, she got cross. The police report quoted her as saying, “If you want my kids, take them,” and then punctuating that with a vulgarity.
The rest is just totally sad.
People, you need to pay for that kind of coverage.
Yesterday Andy Murray, the Great UK Hope (Scotland Division), channeled Fred Perry, defeated Novak Djokovic, won the Wimbledon Championship – the first time a Brit has done so since 1936.
Djokovic beat Murray at the Australian Open in 2011. Murray beat Djokovic at the US Open last September. Djokovic beat Murray at the Australian Open this January.
More important, perhaps: Murray lost the Wimbledon final to Roger Federer last year.
Murray was asked how his mind-set might be different in his second Wimbledon final than it was 12 months ago.
‘‘I’ll be probably in a better place mentally. I would hope so, just because I’ve been there before. I won a Grand Slam. I would hope I would be a little bit calmer going into Sunday,’’ Murray said.
He certainly was, especially at 5-4 in the third set against Djokovic, when the Serb overcame a 0-40 deficit and had two chances to break, which could have triggered a classic Novakian comeback.
The final two points:
Murray not only dumped Djokovic. He dumped the albatross around Great Britain’s neck.
Whitey defense team falling into a rat trap
