Boston Globe pull quote in Tuesday’s front-page piece about the big shakeup at Suffolk University, which involves installing a dozen new trustees and appointing a new president:
The school is expected to select [outgoing president] David Sargent’s replacement in the next few months. Those familiar with the search say the ideal president would have experience leading an urban institution.
Ya think?
. . . and you get a picture of this:
Over the first three games of their series vs. the Detroit Tigers, the Yankees have gone 3-24 with runners in scoring position, and stranded 22.
That’s the perfect recipe for this:
First, of course, you had the Boston Herald’s John Tomase reporting that Boston Red Sox pitchers were drinking beer in the clubhouse on their off days, which Boston Globe sportswriters (with the notable exception of Nick Cafardo) pretty much pilfered without attribution.
Now this, from Monday’s Inside Track:
From the Things-That-Make-You-Go-What-The . . . ? File: Just hours after Red Sox [team stats] skipper Terry Francona was kicked to the curb, team captainJason Varitek [stats] and closer Jonathan Papelbon [stats] partied at Strega Waterfront, popping champagne and yukking it up in front of a roomful of shocked diners.
“The place was packed,” said Someone Who Was There. “They came in with a couple of ladies and went into one of the side rooms, but there’s a glass wall and everyone could see them.
“People were taking pictures with their phones. It was the talk of the entire place.”
Although a team source swore the two were not toasting the demise of Tito, the timing of Friday night’s end-of-a-sorry-season celebration was lousy at best. It came amid reports that Francona had been whacked because he lost control of the clubhouse and that pitchers were drinking beer during games on their off days.
And if that weren’t bad enough, while the closer and the catcher were making merry, the TVs over the bar at Strega were broadcasting Tampa Bay’s 9-0 victory over Texas!
“Either they didn’t care or they didn’t get it,” said our spywitness. “Papelbon, who blew the last game of the season, and Varitek were out drinking champagne after their boss just got fired.”
Boston Globe version:
[Friday night] Sox battery Jonathan Papelbon and Jason Varitek were enjoying themselves at Strega
Can you say “clueless”? I knew you could.
Not everyone is sold on the Washington Post’s stories (original and follow-up) about Rick Perry, his hunting camp, and its offensive name on a stone.
From today’s New Hampshire Journal:
UGLY – The Republican presidential primary contest has taken an ugly turn – the kind of ugly turn virtually every Republican primary ends up taking, to the party’s great discredit. It began on Sunday with a Washington Post story about Rick Perry’s hunting camp that once held a horribly racist name…BEFORE the Perry family leased it.
THEN Perry rival Herman Cain weighed in pouring gas all over the fire.
NHJ’s INITIAL TAKE – Perry is getting railroaded here. His campaign’s version of the story leaves him the victim of journalistic malpractice. Many of the facts are in dispute and considering the toxicity of the charge against Perry the Post ought not to have been so casual about its implication that Perry is a racist. If the story changes, if more information causes us to reconsider the facts, we may change our minds. But these kinds of cynical, disgusting attacks are among the main reasons the “mainstream media” has become one of the most distrusted institutions in America.
Let the wild rumpus begin.
Today’s New York Times breaks tradition by reporting on another paper’s scoop in a timely fashion.
Specifically, yesterday’s Washington Post story about GOP presidential timebomb Rick Perry’s Texas hunting camp:
Paint Creek, Tex. — In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.
“Niggerhead,” it read.
Follow-up Times lede (sans, interestingly, a link to WaPo):
The campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas found itself on the defensive on Sunday over a report that he had hunted at and taken guests to a West Texas camp with a racially charged name that his father, and later Mr. Perry, had leased.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that at least seven people it interviewed said the name for a portion of the property, Niggerhead, was visible on the rock at the entrance “at different points in the 1980s and 1990s,” and that a former worker said he believed he had seen it as recently as three years ago.
Say goodnight, Rick.
From Sunday’s Boston Globe Political Intelligence:
Brown, Mass. GOP try to cast Warren as un-American
The alleged evidence:
In a fund-raising appeal last week, Brown campaign manager Jim Barnett highlighted a recent video in which Warren energetically argued that factory owners had made their wealth with the help of society, so they should be willing to pay their fair share of taxes.
“Elizabeth Warren and her inflammatory rhetoric will divide our country and our Commonwealth at a time when we need to come together to confront the very serious economic challenges facing us,’’ Barnett wrote. “Let’s remember we’re Americans first.’’
So the Globe believes that equates to Warren being un-American? Kind of a stretch.
Also stretching it like taffy:
On Thursday, the state GOP – which works in cooperation with the Brown campaign – fueled the image of Warren as un-American, or at least noncapitalist.
It pointed to an article about her Senate campaign in People’s World, a newspaper that proudly bills itself as a “direct descendant of the Daily Worker’’ and claims “a special relationship with the Communist Party USA.’’
C’mon, Globies – you can put the pom-poms on for Warren better than that.
Headline in Sunday’s dead-tree edition of the New York Times:
Nowhere To Go, Except Room 516
The lede:
ON Jan. 4, 2010, Raymond Fok was changing trains on his way to kidney dialysis treatment when he collapsed on the Canal Street subway platform. Emergency medical technicians examined him and took him by ambulance to the nearest hospital, New York Downtown, near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Workers in the emergency room recorded that Mr. Fok’s speech was slurred and that he was lurching from side to side when he walked . . .
Once his condition had stabilized, the hospital moved him to a regular room on the fifth floor, where staff members expected to treat him for 7 to 10 days before discharging him to a sub-acute-care center for rehabilitation, the usual regimen for stroke victims.
Nineteen months later, Mr. Fok, 58, greeted a reporter from his bed in Room 516, eager to have a visitor. In the previous year and a half, perhaps 100 or more patients had come and gone from the room’s other bed, but Mr. Fok had gone nowhere. “Yes, I remember you,” he said. “John, right?”
The price of his treatment: $1.4 million.
And who was paying for it?
“The government,” Mr. Fok guessed, though he was not sure. “The hospital is losing money.”
The narrative that follows is absolutely compelling, as are the financial details:
ON Aug. 17, after one year, seven months and 13 days, Mr. Fok returned to his apartment in Bensonhurst, carrying 21 filled prescriptions and his hemi walker. For the $1.4 million in services that Downtown had provided, total reimbursement to the hospital from Medicaid was $114,000, [the hospital’s president] said.
Just one more reason people should pay the Times to keep doing what it’s doing.
Every weekend the Wall Street Journal publishes Sentiment Tracker: A Computational Analysis of the Conversation on Social Networks.
And every weekend the Journal fails to post the acccompanying nifty pie charts (check the dead-tree edition) on its website.
So the hardworking staff is forced to produce an analog version of this week’s feature, The Blues of the Red Sox.
It enumerates “the online buzz about the Wednesday-night loss of the Boston Red Sox, robbing the team of a chance for the playoffs.”
Campaign Outsider pieless chart:
POSITIVE 14%
“Best thing about baseball in Boston is when the Re Sox aren’t in the playoff . . . no Red Sox Traffic!”
“Hey, Red Sox, enjoy your golf!”
NEGATIVE 20%
“Red Sox just broke my heart again . . . ”
“I put all of my Red Sox attire in the back corner of my closet, and I’m not even looking at it again until 2013!”
NEUTRAL 66%
“Red Sox game on TV = no homework getting done.”
“What a poetic ending to the Red Sox season. So much to say, and 140 characters doesn’t cut it for this one.”
Sixty-six percent neutral.
What does that say about Red Sox Nation?
Nothing good, we say.
Another Collins column, another cartop canine.
It’s good to live in America.
New York Times columnist Gail Collins – who we’ve noted previously is temperamentally incapable of mentioning Mitt Romney without adding “who once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of his car” – extends her unbroken record in today’s piece.
Do you think Mitt Romney has created the bad karma that was responsible for the total collapse of the Boston Red Sox? Do you think that if he’s elected president, no blue-state team will ever win the World Series again? Do you think his favorite sport is really baseball, or maybe luge racing? Is there a way to work the fact that he drove to Canada with the family dog strapped on the roof of the car into this story?
One other question: When the rufferences become this strained, can Collins still maintain her streak?
That’s where the Seamus Sweepstakes™ comes in. Guess the date on which Collins will write about Romney without mentioning his cartop pooch and win an all-expenses-paid lunch with the hardworking staff.
Sorry, “infinity” has already been taken.
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