If the latest charges against Trump start to fall apart, it will throw the spotlight back on Democrats and Biden, and confirm what half the country believes – that this is a politically motivated prosecution.

Trump, about to turn 77, is still in a precarious position heading into 2024, with possible indictments related to Jan. 6 and Georgia still to go. Just from a stamina point of view, it will be tough for Trump to survive the heat.

But polls conducted after the 37-count indictment on classified documents was released show the former president is still the frontrunner in the GOP race. A clear majority of Republican primary voters – 81% – say they believe the indictment for illegally keeping secret documents and lying about it is politically motivated.

That’s a clear indication that the charges won’t yet hurt Trump’s cause in the GOP primaries, and may in fact boost him. A new Reuters poll showed 43% of Republicans support Trump, while just 22% picked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But it’s still early and those numbers could change as more evidence comes back against Trump.

Trump is now in Miami in preparation for his court appearance on Tuesday, but he is already defiant in denying the indictment.

“I HOPE THE ENTIRE COUNTRY IS WATCHING WHAT THE RADICAL LEFT ARE DOING TO AMERICA,” he posted on his Truth Social site.

The question now is, will the spotlight eventually come back to Biden and his own problem with keeping classified documents in his garage?

And will voters blame Biden for bringing the case against Trump, despite the president’s attempts to stay away from it?

It’s pretty hard for Biden to claim he knows nothing about the indictments. Difficult to believe the Department of Justice wouldn’t at least brief the White House about the coming charges. The DOJ is part of the administration, along with the FBI.

If the latest indictment starts to fizzle, it could be bad news for the president and rocket fuel for Trump, much the same way the collapse of the Russian collusion case helped the former president.

Republican voters – and many independents – seem inclined to side with Trump right now in this latest attempt to wound him legally. And they are bound to take it out against Biden.

At the very least, the case against Trump is likely to drag on well past next year’s election, meaning voters will have to decide based on incomplete information.

The 80-year-old Biden – if he really does follow through with his reelection plans – better hope that Americans start to turn against his former rival soon, or there will be a reversal of the 2020 election — no matter how many indictments they bring.

A difficulty for Biden, however, is that the tax rate is more than three times bigger than he said, 25.6%, either demonstrating that he made a major mistake or qualifies to be called a political trickster. I endorse the second possibility, seeing as how the tiny-tax assertion could confuse the public enough for him to seem a hero catching cheapskate billionaires even though the top 1% of taxpayers deliver something like 43% of all federal taxes.

The way Biden arrives at his deception is by saying the billionaires and still other super-rich tax targets pay nothing for the unrealized gains they have in their stock portfolios. In fact, nobody does. The Constitution limits the personal income tax to actual income a person has received, not something that might be converted into income someday. Understand, too, that when stocks are finally exchanged for money, the money is in fact taxed.

But there is this to be said for taxes: If they are fair and honest, they are the best way to finance our government and, if they become egregious, the government should find ways to reduce the costs to what is affordable.

The worst and most common fiscal threat these days is something else: over-borrowing. Our debt has grown to an unbelievable $31.4 trillion with an ever-increasing expense of borrowing having sky-high consequences, a yearly cost of $352 billion in 2021, $475 billion in 2022 and a predicted $640 billion in 2023.

As far back as 1960, Congress decided that the federal government should establish a debt limit keeping spending and taxing within reasonable bounds by allowing no borrowing beyond cautious calculation. Knowing things could still go wrong, Congress also gave itself permission to vote to end the borrowing limit if a majority concurred. Guess what? The limit has been raised 68 times since then.

In 2006, a smart U.S. senator named Barack Obama explained it was a “leadership failure” when the government couldn’t pay its own bills from tax revenue but had to borrow and pay loads of interest. The interest paid that year, the senator said, was more than the costs of Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, education, homeland security, transportation and veterans benefits, all combined.

One of Biden’s biggest mistakes was to spend unneeded trillions on COVID-19 recovery on top of the trillions enacted under Trump that did the job by themselves. Various other factors helped initiate a recent debt-limit crisis that would have led to a ruinous default if we had not paid owed interest to foreign countries.

The catastrophe was averted because the debt limit was dropped by way of a compromise between Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who persuaded Biden to reduce some significant costs. What we need now is compromises that adjust taxes and spending in accordance with reason and reality on both sides of the aisle and a new president in 2024 unlike Biden, Trump or the previously cited sagacious senator who broke spending records as a president.

Tribune News Service

The article describing Mike Rowe’s support for skilled tradesmen was refreshing.  Plumbers, electricians, carpenters and a host of other skilled tradesmen can and do make a six-figure salary.  Vocational high schools and shop classes need to become entrenched in our public schools, again.  Also, entering the Armed Service with a goal of learning a trade is another viable option.  Free Community College is not the answer.  It is only extending the high school experience with more book learning instead of hands-on career building.

Donald Houghton

Quincy

China & climate

Your editorial raises an alarm about the possibility of a Chinese spy base in Cuba (“Editorial: Climate least of our worries as China eyes Cuban spy base,” June 9). The fact is that China already spies on us through numerous other channels. And certainly, the US spies on China, notably from within Taiwan, which is the same distance from China as Cuba is from the US mainland. This has been going on for decades.

Yet, the editorial leaps to the conclusion that we should not negotiate with China on climate change because of our adversarial relationship. Perhaps this is just reflexive criticism of anything that involves John Kerry. Still, in any case, it’s misguided to allow the hypothetical possibility of a base in Cuba to derail ongoing climate discussions.

As is often pointed out, China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Short of a shooting war, we cannot afford to stop working with them to decarbonize the world economy. Spy versus spy kerfuffles will come and go, but international cooperation on addressing climate change is the task of the moment. It would be foolhardy to drop the ball now.

Frederick Hewett

Cambridge

Christie campaign

I like rock ‘em-sock ‘em politics especially when the beanbag is tossed around with vigor, and Chris Christie is just the Republican to bring the entire burgeoning GOP field of presidential wannabes to account. The former New Jersey governor is sharp-witted, informed, articulate and fearless, just the attributes primary voters and others in the general electorate require to separate wheat from chaff. Right now there are two Republican lanes – Donald Trump and everyone else. Mr. Christie is New Jersey loud, and will generate noise enough to rival the most celebrated loudmouth in the field, going mano a mano with Mr. Trump. This will provide a third lane and an off-ramp for those whose Oval Office appetites are larger than their talents. Winnow the political poseurs, Mr. Christie, sharpen the arguments against the frontrunner and you will be heralded far from Hoboken.

Paul Bloustein
Cincinnati, Ohio

Hunter’s turn?

Shopping at the supermarket today. After the Trump indictment was announced a few days back everyone at the market had the same question. Where is the Hunter Biden indictment? You see, people are not as stupid as the DOJ thinks and know when a cover up is going on.

Paul Quaglia

Billerica

—

That’s the position of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, who visited Beacon Hill Monday in opposition to transfer tax and rent control bills.

“Rent control tries to attack a symptom of our lack of building. And that’s not the way to fix the issue. We need to build more housing,” said Justin Davidson, the association’s government affairs director, according to State House News.

“If we build enough housing, if people have the options of where to live and what type of home to live in, we don’t need rent control,” Davidson said.

That’s long been an issue in the Bay State, particularly in Greater Boston. Rents are high, home prices astronomical, and so begins the exodus to the suburbs and beyond in hopes of staying ahead of exorbitant costs. Sometimes that trek leads out of state.

Our population outpaces our housing stock, and estimates from the D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center reveal that the number of single-family housing permit approvals dropped by nearly half between the 2000s and the 2010s.

As Axios reported, housing stock increased during the last decade by just under 136,000, putting it behind the estimated 167,000 new households during that same period, according to data from the American Community Survey.

We want people to come to Massachusetts, to put down roots, work and thrive. That’s not an easy task if there aren’t enough homes to keep pace with newcomers. New builds in the city that “set aside” affordable units aren’t nearly enough.

And while elected officials in Boston are seeking to ease the pain by capping rent increases, that doesn’t do anything to increase the options for renters. It also doesn’t freeze the costs of upkeep and maintenance on apartment buildings which landlords would still have to cover, just with lower revenue.

The Realtors group pointed to increased state funding for rental voucher programs as a way to handle the problem without invoking rent control, and supports a tax-deductible savings program to help people bank away up to $5,000 per year to put toward their first property.

Helping people save for a home through a tax-deductible program is an enormous leg up in the process of buying a house, especially for young would-be homeowners who want to raise a family here.

The Realtors Association opposes transfer tax and rent control bills that many housing advocates are promoting as possible solutions, and Davidson also lumped the transfer tax into a category of “harmful policies.”

“You’ve worked with buyers that know that they can’t just come up with a few thousand extra dollars to close the deal,” Davidson said, adding that transfer fees are “exclusionary.”

If Massachusetts wants to be an affordable place to live and maintain and grow its population, then increasing the housing stock is vital.

If you build it, they will come – and stay.

It wouldn’t be an indictment of Donald Trump if it did not contain at least one count of making false statements. One surmises that this is the only count that truly shocked Trump, who was assessed by the Washington Post to have made over 35,000 false statements during his presidency alone, and that only counts public ones.

Trump apparently doesn’t have any attorneys, at least in The Case of The Stolen National Security Secrets, because more or less contemporaneously with the unsealing of the indictment, the two principal lawyers representing him quit. True to form, Trump insisted that he had fired them. But apart from the fact that nothing Trump says is truthful, no rational attorney appreciates being associated with a debacle.

Both the evidence and the law disfavor Trump – lopsidedly. Of the hundreds of classified documents that Trump deliberately took with him to Mar-a-Lago and deliberately withheld knowing that he could not lawfully do so, the Justice Department chose to confine itself to charging Trump on 31, marked either “secret” or “top secret.” These included documents regarding White House intelligence briefings, documents concerning our military capabilities and those of foreign countries, documents concerning our military planning, documents concerning our vulnerability to military attack – and documents concerning our nuclear weapons. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents,” the grand jury charged, “could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”

Trump had these sensitive documents strewn all over Mar-a-Lago – in his office, in his bathroom and in a ballroom, and actively schemed to keep representatives of the United States government from finding them. He suggested to certain of his lawyers that they lie to the FBI and the grand jury about his retention of the documents, and suggested to another that he hide or destroy documents. In familiar mob boss fashion — familiar to mob bosses and familiar to Trump – he caused another of his attorneys to falsely certify that all classified documents had been turned over, knowing, of course, that that was a lie. We will never know the scope of the harm that Trump has caused the women and men of our armed forces, or to the country as a whole. All we really now, from experience, is that Donald Trump couldn’t care less.

MAGA World responded with the usual risible nonsense, chalking the indictment up to retaliation by “the Biden Crime Family,” and so forth. William Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, was somewhat more tethered. “These documents are among the most sensitive secrets the country has,” Barr told Fox News. “If even half of (the indictment) is true then he’s toast.” Donald Trump may indeed be headed to prison at long last. But it is the country he falsely claims to give a damn about that’s gotten burnt.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The question is whether he would be running for president had not Donald Trump, as expected, been indicted again, this time on far out and desperate federal charges over alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Still, you have to hand it to the former governor of New Jersey.

He is the only one of eight or so Republicans who ran against Donald Trump for president in the GOP primaries in 2016 who is now running again.

He did not last very long back then, and probably won’t now, throwing in the towel after coming in sixth in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

Yet, Christie, 60, a former two term governor, was in New Hampshire Tuesday where he announced his candidacy for president again.

It is a given that Trump gets into people’s heads and drives them loco. This not only includes progressives who hate him, but Republicans like Christie as well.

And he is going to drive his opponents even crazier as his popularity soars and his fundraising increases following the latest questionable criminal proceedings against him.

“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States,” Trump said, echoing the thoughts of millions of Americans. But these are the times we live in. If you can’t beat him, indict him.

Christie, back when he was considered a rising GOP figure, was once against Donald Trump for president before he was for him. Now he is against him again.

Before endorsing Trump in 2016, Christie on the campaign trail referred to Trump as a “carnival barker.”

“I don’t think that he’s suited to be president of the United States,” he said. “I don’t think his temperament is suited for that and I don’t think his experience is.”

After he was routed in the New Hampshire 2016 primary he provided Trump with an important endorsement, becoming the first Republican governor or senator to publicly come out for Trump.

“I will lend my support between now and November in any way for Donald Trump,” Christie said.

Christie then went on to campaign for Trump with the hope perhaps of becoming attorney general or a cabinet secretary. Trump did name Christie to head his transition team after he was elected, but Christie was shortly replaced by Mike Pence.

Now Christie, a longshot in a field of longshots, is on the attack again.

Appearing at a town hall type setting at Saint Anselm College, Christie said, “The person I am talking about, who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but takes credit for anything that goes right, is Donald Trump.”

Christie could have been talking about Joe Biden.

But neither Christie nor any of the other Republicans candidates are running against Joe Biden. They are running against Donald Trump.

If they think Biden’s cowardly vendetta against Trump will help them, they are wrong.  Trump will campaign on the indictment, and the twisting of the justice system to indict him will only show how fundamentally fearful, vindictive and weak Biden is.

As for several of Trump’s GOP opponents, including Christie, their first (and maybe last) opportunity to confront Trump on it will come at the GOP’s first presidential debate August 23 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

To qualify for the debate, a candidate must have received 40,000 contributions from individual donors; showed at least 1 % in three national polls, or 1% in two national polls and 1% in two early state polls.

The rules are aimed toward eliminating fringe candidates.

Also, each participant must pledge to support whoever emerges as the Republican nominee for president.

Christie, well before he announced, said there was “no way” he would support Trump as the GOP nominee even though Trump does not want or need his support. Trump doesn’t even want or need the debate.

The extraordinary and pathetic indictment of a former president by Biden’s politized U.S. Justice Department on such weak charges may be enough to re-elect Donald Trump.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

It is good to see creative solutions such as Senator Collins’ now Senate-approved proposal to explore the use of converted ships to provide important and needed support services to Boston and the region. For the first time, the Commonwealth is seriously considering an alternative to address this immediate, urgent need, rather than the far-off solution proposed in the Shattuck Hospital site redevelopment, which is 5 or more years away from fruition.

Many of the challenges in cities today are land-based: space is needed for parkland, for housing and so much more. We have to remember that the solutions we build will last centuries, not just decades; and so restoring open space to historic neighborhoods of color such as Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury must be prioritized. In fact, just this week, the national nonprofit Trust for Public Land issued its annual nationwide park evaluation for the country’s most populous cities, and Boston’s score suffered due to an unbalanced distribution of park space in lower-income communities and neighborhoods of color. By restoring 13 acres to Franklin Park, we can address inequity in one of Boston’s largest areas of need.

Karen Mauney-Brodek
President, Emerald Necklace Conservancy

Trump indictment

“Fair is foul and Foul is Fair” – the words of the witches in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” are in many ways reminiscent of scenes from daily life in some parts of our beloved nation nowadays. Our Constitutional Republic is on the verge of collapse with lawlessness and disorder. For a law-abiding spectator of politics it is indeed a sad sight to watch and bear.

Trying to take ex-President Trump out of politics by any means by the Democrats and those afflicted with Trump derangement syndrome has been going on for the last 7 years. There even appears to be a competition among prosecutors (Manhattan, Atlanta, Miami) to indulge in creativity to do so.

Our current administration in Washington has been politicizing the Department of Justice to foster a two-tier justice system, one for itself and one for its opponents.

The announcement by the DOJ of the indictment of ex-President Trump on criminal charges as opposed to civilian charges related to classified documents is certainly driven by political considerations. This announcement came shortly after the Congressional investigation of Hunter Biden scandal findings of corruption and misdeeds by the sitting president.  Is this move by DOJ is intended to shift the public attention away from the Hunter Biden scandal? One expects such things under Russia’s Stalin and Putin rule and in banana republics but not in our corner of the world. Note that ex-President Trump is a leading opposition candidate in the upcoming 2024 presidential contest.

This indictment can not be viewed anything but an “election interference” and a mini insurrection of our Constitutional government and justice system.

Pichai Gopal

Braintree

The right to spread information — even information that may counter national security interests — is well established. The concerns raised by Montana and two presidential administrations go far beyond this, focusing on the app’s tracking — including gathering information about others — and collection of information on a mass scale. This collection could lead to numerous threats, ranging from future cyberattacks to election tampering to recruiting U.S. citizen spies. This information is also useful for commercial purposes such as targeting advertisements for goods and services.

The United States has several competing interests to consider. The first is constitutional: we value the freedom of speech, and TikTok is a speech platform. It is a way that millions of content creators connect with their viewers and followers. In most cases, the U.S. and state governments are constitutionally limited from regulating speech.

We also want our companies to be able to do business worldwide. If the United States is not seen to welcome foreign enterprises, other countries can justify their actions based on their perception of U.S. actions. This may limit the ability of U.S. manufacturers, farmers, software developers and others to sell their products abroad.

The United States also has a strong national interest in delivering messaging about American values to other countries. Our television, movies, books, websites and apps are all part of sharing our values and culture with those in areas less open than the United States. Again, U.S. action to limit apps and ideas from other countries can be readily used by our strategic competitors and adversaries to justify banning American content.

While the openness of idea-sharing is important and powerful, we don’t need to share all our data — particularly if this risks greater foreign-based identity theft and other cyberattacks. This is part of a broader question regarding how much data apps, websites, governments and others should be collecting (and how it should be collected and stored). Notably, foreign data storage places the data outside U.S. regulatory control, increasing the potential for misuse and reducing the accountability for abuse when it occurs.

App-based social media, including TikTok, raise concerns over their ability to collect extensive data. Such data ranges from GPS-based location tracking to personally identifiable information, such as birth date, age, and answers to common security questions, including physical attributes and background details gleaned from content. In the wrong hands, TikTok videos lend themselves to creating deepfakes and impersonations. Moreover, the problem is exacerbated by the app’s popularity, particularly among youth — a demographic that may not fully understand the implications of their online behavior. As such, social media companies must address these legitimate privacy concerns and ensure the protection of their users.

While foreign control of companies like TikTok intensifies the data problem, there can also be similar problems with domestic companies. A domestic firm may collect and share data with foreign partners, have data stolen via a cyberattack by a foreign state or state-aligned group, or even be purchased by a foreign firm. Of course, the domestic firm may misuse the data itself, or it could be stolen and misused by a domestic criminal organization.

Except for the lack of regulatory control and the organization’s intent, the domestic and foreign data collection problems are similar. Several things can be done to help.

First, we need to reduce our reliance on easily compromised identifiers. For example, the Social Security number was not designed to serve as the primary identifier it has become. Companies also don’t use it responsibly, as relying on a number that can be readily stolen from any number of locations in a singular way, typically along with some basic contact information, to extend credit or verify an individual’s identity is highly problematic. The use of the Social Security number should be phased out in deference to other secure identifying mechanisms.

We also need national privacy protections that give individuals control over how their information is used and by whom. This is a combination of a technical and policy issue. On the technical side, we need technologies that give consumers control over their identities and payment mechanisms. We will need policies that hold companies accountable for delivering what they claim to, respecting consumers’ decisions, and regulating the use of reusable legacy identifiers and other information.

Education is also essential. Everyone needs to understand and be on guard regarding their personal information, to whom they provide it and for what purposes.  Requiring companies to respect individuals’ privacy decisions is ineffective if individuals don’t do their part.  Technological and policy safeguards must protect those who lack — due to age, disability or otherwise — the ability to protect their own data.

Finally, we should require reciprocity from nations whose companies operate in our market and use access to our market to guarantee our companies equitable and fair access to other markets. We also should consider sanctions against countries that refuse to play by fair rules.  The United States must commit to promoting and enforcing digital rights, ensuring citizens have control over their data and access to an open internet.

Jeremy Straub is the director of the North Dakota State University’s Institute for Cyber Security Education and Research./InsideSources.com.

The main culprits? A small group of domestic sugar processors, sugar cane growers in Florida, Louisiana and Texas, and sugar beet producers in a handful of mostly northern states. Lining the pockets of this wealthy, politically connected pressure group costs U.S. consumers at least $2.4 billion at the grocery store each year.

Someday, the price-gouging must stop, and reformers have high hopes for the 2023 Farm Bill — the federal farm and food policy legislation that comes up for renewal every five years. Voters are justifiably angry about the high cost of food, and no doubt would support eliminating a hidden tax that assaults bedrock principles of capitalism and fair trade.

But change will only happen over the objections of politicians (like Florida’s GOP Sen. Marco Rubio) who’ve taken six-figure campaign contributions from Big Sugar. So have many other politicians on both sides of the aisle.

For decades, the sugar lobby has splashed out megabuck donations to perpetuate its government-sponsored rip-off.

The current version of the U.S. sugar program, established in 1981, directs the Agriculture Department to guarantee higher prices for farmers by limiting supplies through production quotas, while restricting and taxing imports. A “loan” program funnels payments to domestic processors, who can pay back the funds in sugar. The government also buys any “surplus” that might weigh on prices and directs it to another politically favored group: companies that turn sugar into ethanol fuel.

This system is a tour de force of anticompetitive corporate welfare and the fact that it’s still being used to stiff consumers shows the power of single-minded lobbying.

The 2008 and 2018 farm bills arguably made the program even worse for shoppers and food manufacturers. Some companies, including Coca-Cola and Pepsi, long ago reformulated many of their U.S. products with corn syrup to sidestep the sugar gouging. That’s why many consumers prefer Mexican Coke.

Consumers would benefit from letting a freer market prevail, and the industry would get more competitive, as it did in Australia, which ended sugar subsidies years ago and still produces huge quantities at world-market prices.

The leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees overseeing the 2023 Farm Bill are thought to be less beholden to the sugar cartel than some of their predecessors, and less caught up in distracting disputes over immigration policy. Food manufacturers make up a strong constituency, operating in every state, and they’re expected to seek changes to the program that would allow more imports and bring prices down.

They might not care, however, if Congress finds new ways to pay off its sugar daddies, at taxpayer expense. We urge the political forces gathering for the Farm Bill to make 2023 the year that Big Sugar finally gets told “No!”

Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service

That’s the mantra this weekend among Democrats and state-run media (but I repeat myself).

In America today, that is undoubtedly true. No man — or woman — is above the law.

Unless his or her name is, say, Biden or Clinton or Comey or Clapper or Brennan or Wray or McCabe or Strzok or Lerner or Holder or… well, you get the picture.

No man is above the law unless… he’s a Democrat. In which case, there are no laws. Or at least, none that will ever be used against you.

If you read the feds’ “sweeping” indictment of former President Donald J. Trump, the charges barely rise to the level of, “Are you kidding me?”

The key evidence — the smoking gun — seems to be a conversation Trump had two summers ago in New Jersey. He was talking with several people — also known as witnesses — concerning an upcoming book. His remarks were recorded, because Trump didn’t want to be misquoted down the road.

Trump was chatting about the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark “Thoroughly Modern” Milley, the pride of Belmont Hill School.

Milley had been dumping on Trump, around the clock, on all the stations on the RCHN — the Russian Collusion Hoax Network. Milley’s latest whopper was that after the 2020 election, Trump had wanted to attack Iran.

The president had been rummaging around in some old documents — the way anybody does who’s looking for some piece of paper that’s suddenly become germane again. Apparently POTUS had just found what he was looking for.

The crooked G-men Democrats don’t use the words “Milley” and “Iran” because that’s the official procedure if you’re on the level, which they most certainly aren’t. But Milley and Iran are who and what Trump is talking about.

This is Trump on his own tape, talking about Thoroughly Modern Milley:

“He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers. This just came up. Look — that was him.”

He was probably holding the paper up, like anybody would do.

“They presented me this — this is off the record. They presented this to me. This was him… This wasn’t done by me. This was him.”

And next comes what I guess special Democrat prosecutor who calls himself “Jack Smith” considers the smoking gun.

“This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”

To which I say, Big bleepin’ deal.

Okay, Trump shouldn’t have been waving the documents around, but so what? It’s not like he’s accused of taking $10 million in payoffs from a country to which we have now funneled at least $75 billion in foreign handouts to — do you see where I’m going with this?

The FBI has been ignoring those accusations against Joe Biden since 2020. If Republicans hadn’t won the House, the G-men would still be giving all the crooked Bidens a good-leaving alone.

But, but I thought no man was above the law.

Compared to what the Bidens are accused of, these allegations against Trump seem like very thin gruel indeed. Yet a special counsel to frame, I mean investigate Trump was appointed just last November. Now, less than seven months later, we have a 37-count indictment.

There’s a famous quote attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

A Boston lawyer named Harvey Silverglate wrote a book about how easy it is now for the G-men to take down whomever they decide to target.

The title says it all: “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

Maybe Trump did violate some obscure statute about classified documents, but does he stand accused of taking millions in payoffs from sinister foreign nationals?

Was Trump ever the beneficiary of a vast left-wing conspiracy by the “intelligence community” after his son admitted on his laptop to being Joe Biden’s bagman and picking up cash for the family from the Red Chinese?

Of course not. Because… Democrats. Call it professional courtesy.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was likewise violating the Espionage Act, only on a much grander scale, among other things destroying 33,000 emails subpoenaed by Congress. She hired the wife of an NBC “News” anchor as her lawyer. Her Democrat fellow travelers then permitted her to claim attorney-client privilege for all her aides, even the ones who weren’t lawyers. That meant nobody could testify against her. How convenient.

Yet Trump’s lawyer was just forced by a Democrat judge to turn over evidence against him because… Republicans.

At the end Hillary wasn’t indicted, because, as corrupt FBI boss James Comey lectured, “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Again, professional courtesy.

The FBI sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for months, doing absolutely nothing, trying to run out the clock on the statute of limitations. But boy did the G-men move fast on Trump making a joke about Thoroughly Modern Milley.

I’m just surprised Trump also wasn’t charged with some federal version of lese-majeste, or maybe even blasphemy, for making sport of that bloated paper-shuffler Milley. How dare anyone laugh at the teammate of Adm. Rachel Levine on the 1-6 Belmont Hill football team of 1974!

And such fortuitous timing for the indictment, the day after we finally find out what was in that FD-1023 that the G-men a week ago were claiming didn’t exist. And the charges also came shortly after the release of the incredible Durham report about the Democrats’ Russian collusion hoax, and all the bombshells therein.

Hillary’s hoax was the biggest scandal in American political history, by far. Yet nobody went to prison, nobody even lost their pensions. Instead they all got big book contracts, sinecures on state-run cable TV and lecture tours. They became “adjunct professors” of ethics and bought mansions on Martha’s Vineyard.

But no man is above the law. Remember that, all you damn deplorables. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Should the government help foot the bill?

When Medicare’s prescription-drug program was created two decades ago, it was prohibited by law from covering weight-loss drugs, which were seen as largely cosmetic. Congress also worried about health risks after several popular diet pills were taken off the market. The obesity narrative has shifted in recent years to reduce stigma, and newer drugs appear to be safer.

The American Medical Association recognized obesity as a disease in 2013.

One result is that pressure is now mounting on Congress to allow Medicare to cover weight-loss drugs, such as Novo Nordisk A/S’s Wegovy. Expanding coverage would open up a huge, lucrative market that some analysts estimate will reach $150 billion a year globally, rivaling cancer treatments. Even at $900 or more a month out of pocket, demand has been surging — to the extent that Novo recently paused its ads for Wegovy to alleviate potential shortages.

That high price has become a sticking point for insurers. Weight-loss drugs are lifelong medications. And even as more competitors enter the market, manufacturers have little incentive to reduce prices. Market share is guarded by intermediaries who get bigger fees for more expensive branded drugs — perversely driving prices up. A typical employer’s drug spending could rise by more than 50% if just half of eligible employees took Wegovy, according to one estimate. For Medicare, covering semaglutide for every eligible beneficiary could cost $268 billion a year, almost doubling the total Part D budget and surpassing total excess health-care spending associated with obesity for people of all ages.

The potential for wider savings remains unclear. It’s possible that private insurers and employers will bear the brunt of costs — thereby raising premiums — while Medicare ultimately benefits from lower spending on other obesity-related conditions. A second challenge is the lack of research on long-term health effects, particularly for older adults.

Further study is clearly needed, and measures that encourage healthy eating and exercise should remain core to obesity prevention. But given the scale of potential health benefits, some coverage is a good idea. Lower prices, meanwhile, may not be far off: Semaglutide should be eligible for Medicare’s drug price negotiations, which would take effect by 2027. An oral version of the drug, which has delivered promising results, could also be cheaper to produce than the current injectable.

A prudent first step, then, would be offering coverage to a subset of Medicare beneficiaries — for example, adopting qualifications similar to those for bariatric surgery.

While the current high costs and unknown long-term health effects are good reason to proceed with care, the potential for life-changing treatment of a deadly disease should be welcomed as a significant milestone.

Bloomberg Opinion/Tribune News Service

In the wake of Pet Appreciation Week, we can all honor the human-animal bond by supporting our local animal shelter. Local animal shelters play a pivotal role in our communities, tirelessly caring for homeless animals and providing them with shelter, medical aid, and the chance for a better life. These shelters are powered by devoted volunteers and staff members working selflessly to advance animal welfare.

Shelters need the help, too. Many people think the ASPCA and the Humane Society of the United States are national offices for local shelters. They aren’t, despite the similar names, and these national organizations spend more on raising funds than on grants to local shelters.

Consider volunteering your time, donating essential supplies, or even adopting a pet in need. Small things can make a big difference in the life of a pet in need of a home.

Will Coggin

Managing director, Help Pet Shelters

Trump vote

After reading the Department of Justice’s 49-page, 37-count indictment against former President Donald Trump regarding his handling of classified documents after leaving office, I remain thankful that a vote for Donald Trump for president will never be listed on my resume of life.

Mike Rice

Wellfleet

Indictment

With the caveat that both sides of a dispute must be heard before a legal decision is determined, it certainly seems as if the scales of justice are altered with respect to Donald Trump, leastways for an indictment, the weights and measures being assessed differently from those which were utilized for Hillary Rodham Clinton and, almost certainly, will be used for President Biden’s burgeoning legal difficulties. Political shenanigans are one thing, but when the innards of our justice system are mangled to achieve indictments, the first step on a very slippery slope to autocracy is set in motion. If Mr. Trump is guilty, then by all means throw the book at him buy, for the sake of our republic, the scales of justice must be evenly measured.

Paul Bloustein
Cincinnati, Ohio

Classified docs

Former president and front running republican candidate Donald John Trump indicted on at least 7 federal charges by Department of Justice – are you kidding me, what about President Joseph Robinette Biden and former Vice President Michael Richard Pence having classified documents? Here’s what the Bible says about hate, 1 John 2:9 “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in the darkness “.   What in God’s name is going on?

Tony Meschini

Scituate

At least that’s the claim of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left political organization that is drawing scorn for labeling Moms for Liberty and other parental rights organizations as “extremist organizations.”  The SPLC even includes them on the same “hate map” as neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Another GOP candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, just held a town hall in New Hampshire with Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. Like many SPLC critics, he dismissed the attack as “a farce.”

“The SPLC is a tentacle of the woke-industrial complex,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m proud to be the first candidate to sign the Moms for Liberty Parent Pledge.”

While often presented in media reports as a neutral authority on hate crimes, the SPLC makes no secret of its left-of-center politics. In its report lumping parents protesting school board policies with the White supremacist militia movement, the SPLC made repeated partisan attacks against Republicans. It also claimed “backlash is a political strategy,” not a natural response from concerned parents.

Among their indicators that Moms for Liberty is an “extremist group” is its support for shutting down the federal Department of Education, a policy embraced by millions of Americans and multiple presidential candidates every four years.

The SPLC report included 523 “hate groups” in its latest map, which includes 230 chapters of Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and other parental rights organizations. It also includes the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, both organizations promoting religious liberty and Christian beliefs, on the “hate groups” list.

In response, Moms for Liberty tweeted, “Last year, the Biden White House worked with the (National School Boards Association) to label Parents Domestic Terrorists. Today, the SPLC labels our organization — an org full of moms who care about their kids — a Hate Group. This is a coordinated attempt to silence and suppress us.”

Justice called the SPLC’s actions “absurd.”

“They put our picture next to the KKK? How ridiculous is that?”

Asked why the parents’ rights movement is facing so much backlash, Justice said it starts at the White House. “Look at what Joe Biden said. ‘There is no such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.’ Parents are saying, ‘No! They are my children.’ We have a right to oversee their upbringing. The culture war is in the classroom, parents are getting involved in protecting our kids, and now they’re fighting back.”

That’s not the only Biden connection. The Washington Free Beacon reports the author of the new SPLC report met with Biden’s National Security Council counterterrorism director John Picarelli at the White House earlier this year.

Jeremy Tedesco, Alliance Defending Freedom’s senior vice president of corporate engagement, said, “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a thoroughly discredited, blatantly partisan activist outfit known for sexism, racism and condoning domestic terrorism. No one should be listening to the SPLC. It is preposterous to now see the SPLC target moms and dads who simply want to have a voice at school board meetings — this is an organization that has lost its way entirely.”

Hugh Brown, vice president of the American Life League, called the SPLC “a joke.”

“It’s something that began with genuine intent when there was a need to combat racism in the ’50s, ’60s, perhaps the ’70s during the Civil Rights movement. And now, what you see is the perpetual hunt for the next created civil right. Because they have to justify their existence, they are very much just a left-wing, nonsensical group that takes its orders, more than likely, from Washington.”

“We saw the FBI, the Department of Justice target parents here in Virginia and other places, parents attending school board meetings,” Brown said. “So, they’re just following suit. Parents advocating for children is our God-given responsibility.”

Ramaswamy will be one of several GOP presidential hopefuls appearing at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia. The schedule also includes Trump,  DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Justice says her organization has reached out to Biden but received no response.

In a statement, Justice and fellow Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich noted, “Two-thirds of Americans think the public education system is on the wrong track today. Calling parents, who want to be a part of their child’s education, ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school — parents or government employees?

“We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door, and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that.”

Michael Graham is the managing editor of InsideSources.com.

But, as the saying goes, when it rains it pours.

And it poured all over the FBI when it was announced that former FBI Agent Robert P. Hanssen, 79, “the most damaging spy in (FBI) history,” was found dead in his prison cell at the supermax U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado Monday.

Hassen had been serving life without parole after pleading guilty in 2001 to selling classified information to the Russians for $1.4 million in cash, bank funds and diamonds.

Among the information he sold was that the U.S. had dug a Cold War tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington for eavesdropping purposes. Another was that he provided Moscow with the names of three KGB officers who were spying for the U.S., two of whom were later executed.

Paul J. McNulty, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Hanssen, said Hanssen’s crimes “cannot be overstated. They will long be remembered for being among the most egregious betrayals of trust in U.S. history. It was both a low point and an investigative success for the FBI.”

It was “an investigative success.” But what McNulty failed to add was that Hanssen operated as a Russian spy for 20 years before he was caught. And he was even surprised that he got away with it for so long.

Adding to the fallen image of the FBI was the arrest and indictment earlier this year of one of its former top counterintelligence agents.

That is Charles F. McGonigal, formerly head of the New York counterintelligence office, who was charged with selling access to Russian and Albanian officials in exchange for $240,000.

McGonigal, who is awaiting trial, was once considered an agency rockstar, who had access to some of the most sensitive information in the FBI’s possession.

FBI Director Wray at the time pointed out that like Hanssen, it was the FBI that initiated the McGonigal investigation, even though he did not say for how long McGonigal had been rogue.

Wray said the charges against McGonigal demonstrated “the FBI’s willingness as an organization to shine a bright light on conduct that is totally unacceptable, including when it happens from one of our own people, and to hold those people accountable.”

That “bright light” comment may come as a surprise to former FBI officials who have become persona non grata by the FBI after becoming whistleblowers and testifying on FBI wrongdoing before Congress.

It will also come as a surprise to Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Both repeatedly pressed Wray to publicly release unclassified documents — including with a subpoena — that allege that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe from a foreign national to affect public policy when he was vice president.

While Wray provided an hour-long, closed-door briefing for Comer and ranking Democrat committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, Comer said Wray still refused to turn over the documents to the committee.

However, upon the threat of contempt, Way finally caved.

No matter the outcome, McCarthy, Comer and the Republicans in the House appear determined to punish the FBI by withholding funds from the FBI for its $4 billion proposed new office building complex until it changes its ways, including stopping the politicization of the agency and ending its campaign against conservatives.

McCarthy said that the unwanted proposed structure would even be bigger than the Pentagon.

U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania, head of a subcommittee on public buildings, said all agencies that “have been weaponized” against the American people need to be scrutinized.

Republican Rep.  Andy Harris of Maryland, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said, “I think that the FBI building’s funding this year is in definite jeopardy. We should not fund the new FBI headquarters until we get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

If you don’t build it, they will not come.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

His argument fell on deaf ears.

So he went again in April of 2014, this time testifying before the House Committee on Natural Resources to discuss the opportunities for skilled trade workers in the energy industry. This time he brought props, specifically the poster his guidance counselor from high school pointed to when he tried to bully Rowe into picking a high-priced university over a community college his senior year.

Rowe said he had nothing against college, but the universities his counselor recommended were expensive. “I had no idea what I wanted to study. I thought a community college made more sense, but Mr. Dunbar said a two-year school was ‘beneath my potential,'” explained Rowe.

“Mr. Dunbar pointed to a poster hanging behind his desk; on one side of the poster was a beaten-down, depressed-looking blue-collar worker. On the other side was an optimistic college graduate with his eyes on the horizon. Underneath them, the text read: Work Smart NOT Hard,” Rowe told the committee.

“Mike, look at these two guys,” Mr. Dunbar said. “Which one do you want to be?”

“I had to read the caption twice. Work Smart NOT Hard?” Rowe recounted.

The visual was jarring, not to mention insulting, yet once again, nothing happened.

Rowe made his final plea to Congress in March of 2017 when he once again schlepped to Capitol Hill, this time for the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. He discussed how Career and Technical Education (CTE) can help close the skills gap and empower students to succeed, and he stressed the need to reform the current law.

His message was simple: Career and technical education, and skilled trade professions, need a PR makeover and a champion. “If you want to make America great again, you’ve got to make work cool again,” he said.

“So, my point to Congress was we just have to get people to think differently about the definition of a good job. And we need to put better examples of real people out there who are prospering as the result of learning a trade,” he said.

“We just shot seven or eight PSAs a couple months ago with people who we helped through the trade scholarship fund at the foundation. HVAC workers, plumbers, welders, all making six figures, and I am going to put these PSAs out there in the same spirit of those ads that made people think differently about conservation, and we are going to make people think differently about work,” he said.

The spots are pitch perfect. The first one with Chloe Hudson begins with Rowe dispelling the notion that you cannot make six figures working with your hands. It then cuts to Hudson, a welder who received a work ethic scholarship from mikeroweWORKS and went on to earn six figures a year, talking about the beauty of her life.

“I’m going to raise whatever I have to, I’m going to spend whatever I have to get these examples front and center. So that’s what I’ve got. In a way, it’s nothing new. In another way, it’s me finally saying, ‘Look, this was a good idea 10 years ago, and why not me?’ I’ll do it. I’m going to do it,” Rowe says with his characteristic charm that has endeared him to millions for more than 20 years.

Rowe said people really need to acknowledge the “unspeakable stupidity” of taking shop classes out of high schools 40 years ago. “The unintended consequences of that alone have been unraveling in ways that’s just mind-boggling. We effectively removed from view an entire category of vocations,” he said.

“In the long history of stupidity, you’d have to go a long way to find something dumber than universally removing shop class from high school. But of course, at the same time we did that, we started telling that same generation of kids that the best path for the most people was the most expensive path,” he said of the idea that higher education is the only path to success.

Which brings Rowe to wonder: Were they intentionally telling students who went into trades that they were achieving lower education?

It should make us wonder as well: Who did these decision-makers think was going to take care of their plumbing, fix their car, install their air conditioning, repair their furnace or rewire their house?

Rowe said he knows he is not going to open the eyes of the varsity blues crowd. “I can’t. They’re not persuadable. But there are a lot of people in the middle, a lot of people that just want to feel better about the possibility of exploring a career. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take my own advice. I’m going to stop telling Congress what to do, and I’m going to do it myself,” he said.

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner./Tribune News Service

The families pointed out that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals. Trump, who was playing in the tournament with his son Eric, merely rubbed salt into their wounds by saying, falsely, that “nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9/11.” Also playing that cozy day in Bedminster: the chief banker to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

U.S. intelligence concluded that MBS ordered the torture and killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The Saudis have long denied it.

Despite protests from families of 9/11 victims, the LIV golf league grew more successful, buoyed in part by the game’s surge in popularity during the COVID-19 crisis. Golfers from all over the world were offered obscene sums of upfront money (or appearance fees) to participate, and the Professional Golfers’ Association went on the attack to protect its turf.

By 2022, the PGA was denying permission for players to participate and threatening disciplinary action if they did, even as its golfers said they were independent contractors who preferred some of the LIV tournament rules that they saw as more empowering, and lucrative, for players even beyond the top tier. And before LIV came along, the players said, the PGA routinely had issued waivers.

All just business, you might say. But Jay Monahan, the head of the PGA, didn’t hesitate to lambaste the Saudi human rights record and support outraged 9/11 families.

About a year ago, at the Canadian Open, Monahan said: “I have two families that are close to me that lost loved ones,” adding, “My heart goes out to them, and I would ask that any player that has left, or that would ever consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”

“Life is all about meaning and purpose,” Monahan said, “and we’re an organization with meaning and purpose.”

What hypocrisy. On Tuesday, in news that stunned the golf world, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf announced they had agreed to a merger, ending their costly rivalry in favor of a complex structure of assured mutual profitability. Monahan, reportedly will get to run the new operation as chief executive, while Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, will be chairman.

Unsurprisingly, the 9/11 families were furious at the merger.

“The PGA and Monahan appear to have become just more paid Saudi shills,” Terry Strada, the chair of 9/11 Families United, said in a statement, “taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation so that Americans and the world will forget how the Kingdom spent their billions of dollars before 9/11 to fund terrorism, spread their vitriolic hatred of Americans, and finance al Qaeda and the murder of our loved ones.”

What a sad week for healthy competition, American sport and the beautiful game of golf. Not to mention ethical consistency. Is this what golf’s leadership really wants to teach the next generation of players and fans?

Chicago Triubune/Tribune News Service

The move comes more than 1,000 years too late for the previously ascendant Romano-British who couldn’t resist these Germanic peoples who showed up on the shores of England beginning in the fifth century, but surely, they would appreciate the gesture.

As part of an effort to make its instruction more “anti-racist,” Cambridge University is going to teach students that identities such as Anglo-Saxon are “constructed and contingent.” The school’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic is hoping to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism,” and also is keenly aware of “recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity.”

To be honest, the Anglo-Saxons have been living on borrowed time for a while now.

In 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists — worried about their association with, yes, the Anglo-Saxons — changed their name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England.

The change came after Mary Rambaran-Olm, the group’s second vice president, resigned and denounced the organization for allegedly encouraging white supremacy. As The Washington Post put it, the group effectively conceded that “‘Anglo Saxon’ is code for whiteness.”

There is no doubt that the term has been used by malicious and ignorant people over the years to make racist arguments and promote a simplified or outright false version of early English history. But that doesn’t mean the Anglo-Saxons didn’t exist or the term must be banished.

For all that the “woke” scholars warn against anachronisms, they should be careful not to imply that the Anglo-Saxons came to England wearing white hoods.

To simplify, the island’s defenses weakened after the Romans exited and tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived and established dominance, although they’d subsequently be involved in desperate struggles for survival against Viking invaders.

The term Anglo-Saxon isn’t exactly a neologism. The authoritative book by Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, “The Anglo-Saxon World,” notes that it was in use by the eighth century, when writers on the continent apparently used it to distinguish between Saxons in England and those back on the continent. King Alfred the Great, one of the important figures in English history, called himself the “king of the Anglo-Saxons.”

The Anglo-Saxons gave us the most foremost language in the world, English, which derives from Old English or Anglo-Saxon.

They unified what came to be England as we know it, while the English monarchy dates to the Anglo-Saxon period.

The same is true of English Christianity, with the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons beginning in the sixth and seventh century.
The Anglo-Saxons set out the shires that were the units of local government until the lines were redrawn in the late 20th century.

What the academics hostile to their own field of study want to do is take a term that is readily recognized, broadly understood, and generates public interest, and replace it with something more obscure for no good reason.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

That missing ingredient is… Donald J. Trump.

God knows the Democrats and state-run media (but I repeat myself) are thrashing about, trying to find some possible way, no matter how far-fetched, to blame Bad Clouds on POTUS. Thus far they appear to be flailing.

What Trump says in all those Internet memes to Republicans now applies to Democrats as well:

“Do you miss me yet?”

Having a crisis – especially a “climate crisis” – without Trump to blame it on is like having a mocktail instead of a cocktail, a near beer instead of a real beer. For the media, a Trump-less catastrophe is as unsatisfying as “mostly-peaceful rioting” without looting or Molotov cocktails.

The smoke is bad, but seriously, is it any worse than the weed odors wafting up from every bleeping street corner in blue America, puffed out by all the student-loan deadbeats and illegal immigrants loitering while awaiting their next TANF and EBT direct deposits?

These fires started in Canada. But surely that can’t be possible – next thing you know you’ll be telling me that Hillary Clinton paid for the Russian collusion hoax, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t “Russian disinformation,” despite what 51 Democrat hacks lied.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might as well be a Democrat – he nationalized the protesting truckers’ bank accounts. He wants to disarm his citizens. He’s never had a real job. His father is rumored to be Fidel Castro or Mick Jagger. He has great hair, better hair than Gavin Newsom.

Obviously, a boy, er man of Trudeau’s stature couldn’t have created this crisis, and may I be the first to suggest that this is indeed an “existential crisis?”

Or it would be, anyway, if Trump were still in the White House.

Without Trump, it’s like hell without the devil. Something big is missing.

Don’t forget that Climate Cult is an organized religion. Democrats used to have newspapers and TV stations. Now they have religious tracts, and dollar-a-holler cable channels like CNN and MSDNC.

Their “journalists,” like the false seers of yore, can see omens and premonitions in the sky. This goes back to ancient times. Right before the Ides of March, Mrs. Julius Caesar foresaw battles “fought upon the clouds … most horrible sights seen by the watch.”

Forget Shakespeare, just go to The New York Times for the most horrible sights seen by the watch.

It’s alarming, the Times screamed in print yesterday, the way these clouds are smothering, billowing, blanketing, choking, suffocating and scorching. Other features of this GOP reign of terror include “stunning” lightning strikes, not to mention forests “turning to tinder.”

I sense another very-fake-news Pulitzer Prize in the works, for overheated rhetoric.

Is the world going to end, I asked our modern Delphic oracle, the Times? Maybe, the sheeple were told. But feareth not, brethren, the end of times will come only in “the not-too-distant future.”

In other words, just distant enough in the future so that we’ll have forgotten this week’s Armageddon.

It’s so terrible, the Times announced, that this spring “scientists announced with uncharacteristic alarm….”

Huh? When was the last time you heard one of their “scientists” speak with anything other than uncharacteristic alarm? If you want to get on state-run media, you’d damn well better be running around shouting “The sky is falling!”

I would describe uncharacteristic alarm among “scientists” quoted on state-run media as a characteristic, a feature, not a bug.

Is there even the slightest chance that this might be another overreaction, you know, like COVID-19, or global cooling?

“Though there is no specific research yet attributing this week’s events to global warming,” the Times grudgingly concedes, “the science is unequivocal.”

Unequivocal science. Just like it was with COVID-19. And vaccines. And global cooling.

Do you want to know who the most superstitious, ignorant rubes in society are? All the Democrats who chant, “Follow the science.”

These are the same Biden-voting boobs who believed Anthony Fauci. They’re still wearing masks outside after all these years. Actually, those may be the people secretly most excited by this week’s sky-is-falling doomsday rhetoric.

Because now they can wear their N95’s again outside proudly and not have normal people staring at them as if they’ve just escaped from a nuthouse.

Another group of deadbeats over the moon about this: the employees who want to continue their three-year paid vacations. You know, the “work-from-home” contingent. In other words, the hippies who get paid for not working, and that’s just fine with them.

And now they have a new excuse. Dude, like we totally wouldn’t mind going back to the office, except, like, we might die, because of what the fascist in the White House is doing to the planet….

Oh wait, like, you mean, Trump’s not the president anymore? Bummer, man! Is that why The Man wants me to start paying back the loans I took out for the queer-studies program at the community college?

This wasn’t a national emergency until airline flights from the three New York airports started getting canceled a couple of days ago. If it were only private jets being grounded, the ones that carry John Kerry and the rest of the Beautiful People to the islands and to the Hamptons, then this would be a comedy rather than a tragedy.

Too bad they don’t teach history anymore. But you can still google “Year without Summer.” That would be 1816. There was a volcano that year. If you think wildfires throw off a lot of smoke, read up on the “Year without Summer.”

But without Donald Trump, something is missing. The corrupt feds are going to have to indict him. Either that, or storm into the dressing rooms at CNN and MSDNC and confiscate all the anchors’ belts and shoelaces.

What if they threw a climate catastrophe and Donald Trump wasn’t there to take the rap? Would anyone still hear it?

You might even say that would be an existential crisis.

How about another example of the media failing us?

It protected a man wearing a hoodie during most of his campaign for the Senate, following his stroke. With little media criticism they allowed Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman to participate in only a handful of debates and public appearances. The media refused to see that there was a problem here. Fetterman’s mental and physical health has been an issue even before he was sworn into the Senate. For a while he had spent more time in a hospital than on the Senate floor. While we pray for his full recovery, Pennsylvania’s presence in the Senate has suffered to a degree because of Fetterman’s absence.

Hopefully, what I saw this past weekend in the news is the start of a productive, informative, and aggressive media approach – and not an aberration.

CNN pointed out that the vast majority of the world is not backing U.S. sanctions against Russia due to the latter’s invasion of Ukraine last year. President Joe Biden’s foreign support for Russian sanctions is coincidently about the same as his job approval numbers at home – both are around a dismal 35%.

This was newsworthy and troubling because the Biden administration gave us a false impression that the world stood with us on sanctioning Russia. It explains why the sanctions have largely failed.

There are other questions the media has yet to ask about the war in Ukraine.

For example, the cost to America is also of concern. We need a quantifiable account of the dollars and military equipment that each NATO country and other allies have provided to Ukraine to date (and not merely pledged). Then we need to account for how these contributions compare to our own.

Question: Has there been an apparent reversal in U.S. policy with regard to Ukraine’s bombing and attacks in Russia’s interior? We have been led to believe that this escalation was “off the table.” The new policy would be a notable change in direction.

On another well-reported issue, CBS Sunday Morning featured a provocative analysis on continuing the practice of allowing race to be a factor in college admissions. It focused on a Supreme Court case featuring the oldest private and public schools in the land, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, respectively.

It took a deeper dive into the originator of the Harvard-UNC lawsuit before the court, Edward Blum, who professed his displeasure over quotas in the early 20th century. This seems to be the motivation behind his incessant targeting of Black people in education. Over the years Blum has used court cases/people, like he is using Asian Americans, as plaintiffs, to achieve results on race that potentially would reduce the presence of Black students at top universities.

Having briefly participated in the Old Parkland Conference in Dallas which featured those representing the Asian American plaintiffs, I have firsthand knowledge about the sentiments they voiced. They and their sympathizers feel Black people should attend Historically Black Colleges Universities (HBCUs) because they would be “better for Black people” and “Black people would feel more comfortable” in these institutions. And, yes, that is racist.

The CBS report pointed out that Asian Americans already represent nearly 30% of the students admitted to Harvard this year, even though Asian Americans comprise just 7% of the U.S. population. This begs the question: What are they complaining about?

The report also featured an Asian American woman who denounced the lawsuit and did not want to be associated with it.

Why not go after legacies or geographical placements as they too give so-called “advantages” to certain students. For geographic diversity reasons, it is easier to get into the top colleges if you live in Idaho or Wyoming, than if you are from California or New York. For a state school, it is harder to gain admission and more expensive to attend if you are an out-of-state student. Legacy candidates sometimes only compete against other legacy candidates. In short, there are many factors considered in admissions. It is an “imperfect” process.

As a child I vividly remember Alabama Governor George Wallace blocking the admissions door to Black people, as he did not want “any” Black person at the University of Alabama.

Sixty years later we have folks who want “fewer” Black people at the top schools in America. Sadly, this is truly a “Back to the Future” moment that would hurt America. It would widen an already large income and wealth gap between white and Black Americans.

CNN and CBS, thank you. But we need more forthright investigative reporting from many more news outlets. Americans are smart enough to know what and what not to believe. The public can better guide our nation when it has all the facts.

Gary Franks served three terms as U.S. representative for Connecticut’s 5th District. He was the first Black Republican elected to the House in nearly 60 years and New England’s first Black member of the House. Host: podcast “We Speak Frankly.” Author: “With God, For God, and For Country.” @GaryFranks/Tribune News Service

On a daily basis, we cheat ourselves out of the full package that life has to offer.  Whether it be popping in ear buds in order to tune out others on the T or willfully avoiding an awkward but necessary phone call by sending an e-mail or text instead, the result is the same – a dulled, incomplete and inauthentic existence.  In essence, we shield ourselves from the physical world  by hiding behind a plethora of “digital crutches.”  For better or worse, life needs to be experienced in the fullest and most authentic way possible, head on and unedited.

The net effect of our over-reliance on high tech devices not only serves to dull our visceral senses and perceptions, but at the same time, cheats us out of our most cherished institutions and traditions.  We now need cell phones to gain entrance to almost all concert venues, as tickets are now completely paperless, and so are restaurant menus.  You’d be hard pressed to find a text book at your kid’s $50K a year college.  Not to mention, going to the movies now involves an online ritual of researching a title, selecting a seat in advance, and having your iPhone scanned upon arrival.   And making new connections has been reduced to a swipe right on a glass screen!

In an already impersonal post pandemic world, the last thing we need is more harmful  social change.  We can utilize technology to the brim but the need for traditional real world interactions and experiences will always be imbedded in our collective DNA.  Nothing is more frightening than the unyielding grip that the new crop of technologies seems to have on almost every facet of our lives.

Perhaps the key to reestablishing order is to unplug from the grid for awhile in order to experience life in the raw, once again.  Or it may just be as simple as occasionally picking up that land line phone, leaving those ear buds behind when going to the gym, or dusting off that clunky desktop PC, like the one I used to write this article.

Scott Liftman is a freelance journalist who resides in Framingham.

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Climate czar Kerry sees the world through Green-tinted glasses.

“We very much hope to be able to find the pathway to a breakthrough that could make a huge difference,” Kerry told CNBC’s Tania Bryer at the January World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

That was right before a Chinese spy balloon wafted over the U.S. As NBC News reported, that balloon was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official.

That didn’t deter Kerry from mulling a visit to China to for a climate chat. He said last month that China invited him to visit “in the near term” for talks on averting a global climate change crisis even as diplomatic relations between the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters remain tense.

The United States and China must work together to address climate change, Kerry said in an interview with Reuters. There are issues that need to be clarified before a sit-down Kerry said.

Issues like spying on America?

Nope. China first must issue its plan to reduce methane emissions and advance in the transition away from coal.

Now Politico is reporting that China is in talks with Cuba to establish a foothold there to spy on the United States, two senior U.S. officials said.

The officials, granted anonymity to discuss an extremely sensitive intelligence matter, said China was in direct conversations with Cuba to set up a base on the island nation just 100 miles from the United States. It would allow Beijing to collect signals intelligence on southeastern portions of America, home to many military facilities and major industries. Evidence of the negotiations came to light in recent weeks, the officials said.

There are clearly problems with compartmentalizing climate change from politics. If Kerry makes inroads with China over carbon emissions, does that diminish the gravity of efforts to spy on the U.S.?

As Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (staff and budget unknown, good luck asking) Kerry answers to no one but President Biden. He flies above the nuts-and-bolts work of the State Department.

The world, however, isn’t black and white. Nor is it Green and carbon. The same China that might be considering, maybe, to reduce its coal imprint is the same one that’s eager to eavesdrop on America from the Cuban coast.

If anything, this latest move indicates that China will do what it wants. The only thing we can control is our response.

“It is a disaster for the Biden administration. It shows that what they’re trying, their policies are not working at all, the aggression of China continues,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Politico. “Here they’re flying over to China, maybe as we speak, to grovel to Beijing. Meanwhile, Beijing is basically giving us the middle finger.”

Kerry needs to look at the big picture.

Except that Tuesday night at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, the jokes were on him.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be the longest of long shots to win the GOP presidential nomination, but based on his last two appearances in New Hampshire (both town halls at the NHIOP), he’s decided that, wherever this campaign winds up, he’s going to have a good time getting there.

Mostly at Trump’s expense.

For example, when a member of the audience asked Christie whether, if elected president, he’d be willing to pardon Trump, he gave a serious and thorough answer to the question (spoiler alert: probably not) before adding that the question was moot.

“By accepting the pardon, the person must acknowledge their guilt. And that’s why I’m completely in the clear,” Christie said as the crowd laughed. “That will never happen.”

Christie, 60, began with a somewhat stilted, overly worked set piece about the choice between “big and small,” how petty politics and divisive leaders were making America a smaller place. “At every pivotal moment in our history, there was a choice between small and big — and America became the most different, the most successful, the most fabulous light for the rest of the world in history because we always picked big,” Christie said.

It seemed like a way to make an asset of Christie’s weight — a setup for “Go Big! Vote Christie 2024,” but the pitch never came.

But once he began taking questions from the crowd, Christie was loose and relaxed as he worked the packed room without notes or a script. A throng of national media was on hand,  a massive mismatch between press interest and candidate potential.

Christie used the NHIOP forum to announce formally he’s seeking the GOP nomination. But he also used it to address the fundamental question many New Hampshire GOP activists — who will be key to helping him build a campaign — have about his candidacy: Is he trying to win or merely play the role of political kamikaze targeting Trump?

“How are those two things mutually exclusive?” Christie said. “The guy’s ahead in the polls. Who am I supposed to be worried about — Nikki Haley?”

In Christie’s view, all the talk about lanes is pundit puffery. “There is one lane, and he’s in the front of it. And if you want to win, you better go right through him.”

“The reason I’m going after Trump is twofold. One, he deserves it. And two, it’s the way to win.”

In reality, “going through Trump” isn’t the only way to win. Targeting Trump and alienating many of the 79 million Americans who voted for him  — including the majority of New Hampshire Republicans — is one of the least likely ways to win.

Polls show that most Republicans support Trump and aren’t interested in hearing him being attacked. To many GOP primary voters, people who criticize Trump sound like Democrats. From a pragmatic political standpoint, there’s a strong argument in favor of the Ron DeSantis approach: Fight back when Trump attacks, but don’t do anything to alienate Trump loyalists — like Christie doing his impression of Trump promising to build the wall (“I’m going to build the most amazing wonderful wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it”) and mocking his failure.

It was funny, but how does it win GOP primary votes?

A 15-year-old in the NHIOP audience picked up on the paradox. He asked Christie how he planned to win over Trump voters “when you don’t seem to be appealing to the larger (group of) Republican voters?”

“I’m glad you’re 15 so you can’t vote,” Christie joked. But his question is serious, and the governor never gave a fully satisfying answer. “The way I’m going to appeal to any voter in New Hampshire is to make the case I can make,” Christie said. “I don’t have a specific strategy. I’m just going to be myself.”

Michael Graham is the managing editor at InsideSources.com.

“We continue to work with the advisory committee toward specific legislative language that would protect families from rent gouging and displacement as our city continues to grow,” a Wu spokesman said in a January statement. “We look forward to receiving additional stakeholder feedback before filing a proposal with the city council.”

So where was all that stakeholder feedback when Wu and Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper announced a “generational change” regarding John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science and Madison Park High School this week?

As the Herald reported, the O’Bryant would move from the Roxbury campus it has shared for nearly four decades with Madison Park Technical Vocational High School to the now-closed West Roxbury Education Complex. This would let both schools expand, Wu explained.

On the drawing board, a “state-of-the-art” STEM facility for grades 7-12 at the new O’Bryant campus. Vocational offerings at Madison Park would expand and allow seventh- and eighth-grade students to study there as well.

“The proposals that we’re putting out, they’re very big,” Wu said. “We’re talking about generational change at a scale that we haven’t seen in quite some time in our district. That can feel daunting.”

Expanding educational opportunities is good. So is letting parents, students, teachers and neighborhood leaders weigh in on such major “generational change.”

The mayor said these changes are partly driven by the feedback of students and staff at O’Bryant and Madison Park, who said the space constraints have, “in many ways, held the schools back.”

Did the students and staff propose that O’Bryant students now commute to West Roxbury as part of that feedback?

It’s not as if the move to West Roxbury is a win-win on costs. The site was closed for safety reasons, and officials noted it will need a complete gut renovation, “down to the studs,” to accommodate the influx of new students.

There were no other buildings suitable for this move that wouldn’t require gutting first? Nothing closer to the neighborhood in which the O’Bryant has been a part of for decades?

The mayor said $18 million has been proposed in the city’s capital budget for project design, which will help to determine how much it will cost to renovate the West Roxbury facility. So we don’t yet have a price tag for this move?

There’s been pushback. City Councilor-at-Large Erin Murphy said in a statement Tuesday “Boston and BPS have plenty of buildings and sites to choose from that would not radically disrupt the O’Bryant’s long-standing connections to the neighborhoods, families and businesses that make it thrive.”

Yes, major change can be daunting – all the more reason that stakeholders affected by it have their voices heard.

And one, former Vice President Mike Pence, even road a motorcycle, a cobalt blue Harley Davidson, and did not fall off as Joe Biden did when he tumbled from his bicycle at his summer home in Rehoboth, Delaware.

Which says something about the physical state of the GOP candidates in the wake of President Biden’s latest header on the stage at the U.S. Air Force commencement ceremony in Colorado Springs  days earlier.

At least they don’t fall, not yet anyway.

And the oldest Republican candidate, frontrunner Donald Trump, 76, having been in Iowa two days earlier, did not bother to show up at all.

The event was Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s annual GOP “Roast and Ride” political gathering, which kicked off the summer campaign season in a state that holds the first in the nation caucuses in January.

You ride to the event on a motorcycle, the way Pence, 63, Ernst and the other bikers did, and if you don’t fall off or wipe out you get to attend the barbecue.

While it is sad to watch the increasingly frail 80-year-old president take another spill  — which again instantly made news around the world — it also seriously questions whether Biden is up to the job, let alone planning to seek re-election.

You have to wonder too if Biden could have gotten up at all were it not for the three aides who helped lift him back to his feet.

It was not a good look for the leader of the free world.

Hardly had Biden tried to make light of the fall (“I was sandbagged.”) than the ever watchful and ambitious leaders of the Chinese Communist Party had a warship cut provocatively and dangerously in the path of a U.S. destroyer twice in the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. ship was conducting joint exercises with Canada in the internationally recognized waters.

A week earlier, in another provocation, a Chinese fighter plane flew directly in front of a U.S. reconnaissance plane operating in international air space in the South China sea, causing the U.S. plane to hit turbulence.

China believes it can walk all over Joe Biden and not worry about any consequences.

We would think the same way about Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping if we saw television pictures of him stumbling and falling up the steps of his plane or falling on the stage during a Chinese military parade.

Recall how Americans mocked Soviet Union leaders Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Brezhnev during the Cold War for being drunk.

At any rate  the “ Roast and Ride” at the Iowa Fairgrounds was the place to be if you were running for president.

Making the most of it was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 44, Trump’s biggest threat.

He was accompanied by his attractive wife Casey, who wore a leather jacket befitting the occasion, not DeSantis. He wore just a checkered shirt.

But it was a striking looking black leather jacket. It featured an outline of Florida on the back with the words, “Where Woke Goes to Die” along with an image of alligator.

It looked as though she were ready to hop on a motorcycle too.

Asked to define what “woke” really is, DeSantis said it was “a form of cultural Marxism” that casts merit and achievement aside in favor of identity politics. “It is basically a war on the truth.”

Sounding like Winston Churchill in his famous and fiery “we will never surrender” fspeech on the eve of Hitler’s threatened invasion of England in 1940, DeSantis told supporters, “We will wage war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education; we will fight the woke in corporations; we will fight in the halls of Congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.”

And nobody fell down.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

Wu repeatedly declined to say why the blue police lights and siren were on in her city police SUV as she was bombarded with questions about Tuesday’s accident which shook her up and injured the driver and child who were in the other SUV.

“As with any kind of departmental or city vehicle that is involved in a crash there is a review that happens,” Wu said as she entered an event in Charlestown.

Wu did add one tidbit – that “it was not an emergency yesterday where we were headed. It’s an incident that is under review and I have full faith in the team and their professionalism.”

But the incident report released on Wednesday morning didn’t even name Wu, listing her instead as a “passenger who is known to the Commonwealth.”

It was a case study in non-accountability and evasion – something you’d expect from an old boys network pol but hypocritical from a progressive who promised to hold police accountable as one of the cornerstones of her administration.

She’s supposed to be about transparency and open government.

And there are important questions still not answered. Will the police officer driving Wu be disciplined? Will the driver of the other vehicle be cited?

In fact, it took hours to even disclose she was in an accident on Hyde Park Ave. in Roslindale, and nearly a full day for police to provide the accident report. Wu showed up at a press conference hours after the accident and didn’t say a peep about it.

The next day, she still couldn’t provide basic answers like who ordered the blue lights on, and what’s the policy for her police vehicle as it navigates crowded Boston traffic.

“I’m not totally familiar with all the policies and procedures,” she said when asked about the blue lights. “I was on my phone and not really seeing what was happening as the lights were turned on at that intersection.”

Wu was also careful not to throw her female driver under the bus, repeatedly praising police and first responders who were at the scene of the crash within minutes.

Wu was also pretty dismissive of the injuries that did occur to the other occupants, Nothing to see here folks, move along.

We’ll see about that. This is the kind of accident ripe for a personal injury lawsuit.

It comes on the heels of other highly publicized cases of public officials getting caught using blue lights in their official vehicles, including former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins, who put her emergency lights on in a shopping center parking lot to intimidate another driver.

Rollins never paid a price for that incident, but she eventually was forced out last month for violating ethics laws.

Because we’re not all there.

Someone told me that joke recently, and it seemed appropriate for what’s going on. I mean, everything has been spiraling out of control here for quite some time. But it seems to be getting worse, crazier, not making any sense whatsoever.

Just to take one example – nip bottles of alcohol. There’s a movement to outlaw the little mini-containers, and I get it.

Winos chug them – the smaller the bottle, the larger the problem. They increase litter. And perhaps worst of all, they’re easy to hide and drink while you’re driving.

Remember what they found in Rep. David “Sleepy” LeBouef’s wrecked car when he was lugged for driving legless last year — multiple containers of Dr. McGillicuddy’s non-prescription Wild Grape elixirs.

So you can understand why it might be good public policy to get rid of nips. Yet at the same moment, some legislators on Beacon Hill are pushing to allow barrooms to sell mixed drinks to go.

How does that make sense? You want to outlaw mini-bottles, but simultaneously allow drivers to grab cold highballs that go down easier than straight booze, and will likely contain more booze than the standard 1.7-ounce “airplane” bottle.

Also, don’t most states, including Massachusetts, have a law on the books against “open containers” in cars?

How about gambling? First the state legalized casinos, and now sports betting. Guess what’s happened – state lottery sales have taken a big hit, especially from sports betting. Who could have ever seen that one coming?

We all understand that gambling, like booze or drugs, can get out of control. What used to be called a “vice” is now a “disease.”

Once you had to know a bookie to make a bet on a sporting event. Now you just need an app on your cell phone. How do you think business is doing?

What the Lottery did to bingo games at your local parish church a half-century ago, online sports betting is now doing to the Lottery. Once again, it’s Schumpeter’s creative destruction of capitalism, even if the Lottery is a state-run enterprise.

But the Lottery has a solution to its declining revenues. It’s peddling a new scratch ticket – a $50 scratch ticket! What could possibly go wrong?

I was only a kid at the time, but I can still remember the arguments made in the Legislature against the Lottery back in the early 70’s. Oh sure, the Catholic church said, Beacon Hill will start off with just a once-a-week drawing. But then it’ll be twice a week. Then they’ll go to daily numbers, like the Mob. Then it’ll be Keno, and punch cards, and big multi-state games….

Guess where the $50 scratch tickets are selling fastest? (Hint: it’s not Weston.)

Next we have drugs. By a narrow margin, Massachusetts legalized weed a few years back. (I voted against it.) It just didn’t seem like this society needed yet another drug, gateway or otherwise.

As the Commonwealth made it easier to get a good buzz on, we also decided to outlaw menthol cigarettes, because they’re so addictive. Now, does anyone seriously believe that if you have a severe tobacco jones, you’re just going to quit because you can’t get Newports?

No, you’re just going to switch to Marlboros or something else. Or if you live close enough to the border you’re just going to drive to New Hampshire or Rhode Island.

But cigarettes are so dangerous, right? Of course they are. On the other hand, has anyone working in a cigarette factory or distribution center ever died after inhaling tobacco dust that caused a fatal asthma attack?

But that’s just what happened to a young woman in Holyoke who worked for one of the new weed companies. She died last year after breathing in cannabis dust. The company that owned the facility just announced that it is closing down all of its operations in Massachusetts.

Newports take decades to kill you. Weed can apparently get the job done in a matter of months.

Have you heard about the plummeting tax revenues in the Commonwealth? Working people, Americans, are fleeing the state at the rate of 1,100 a week.

Non-working people, illegal immigrants, are flooding into the Commonwealth. Unlike the people who were leaving, they must be supported. In Taunton, among other places, they’ve taken over an entire hotel, 160 rooms.

According to the city, the state is paying the hotel chain more than $150 a night for each room. Plus all the illegals get three hot meals a day, delivered, which costs an additional $37 per day, per person.

No wonder the state’s taxpayers are clearing out. In terms of flight per 1,000 residents, Massachusetts ranks now fourth in the nation, trailing only New York, California and Illinois.

Just like with the death and unemployment rates during the recent Panic, Massachusetts is punching way above its weight class.

The median rent in Boston is the second-highest in the nation, behind only New York City — $3,839 a month here vs. $4,032 in New York, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

The proposed solution? A new “transfer” tax on real estate transactions. That’s what the “advocates” are lobbying for on Beacon Hill for this week – maybe up to 2% on transactions of over a million bucks.

Someone would have to pay that extra $20,000 or so to the hackerama. Who do you think would end up footing the bill – the tenant or the landlord?

But that’s okay, because the money from this latest new tax would be used for… affordable housing. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Then there’s mass transit. There’s not enough money for the MBTA. Hey, let’s make everything free! That should solve the funding problem!

Did any of these people ever hear of the old saw, that if you want to get more of something, you just have the government subsidize it. (Think illegals on welfare.)

If you want to get less of something, you just tax it more. (Think American citizens who aren’t on welfare.)

Taxachusetts – it’s back. As for all of us who’ve been in Massachusetts most of our lives, we’re here, as the old country song goes, for better or for worse.

But not for long.

This would be accomplished by bringing these vital services directly into the homes and neighborhoods of our residents by Mobile Integrated Community Care Units (MICCUs). MICCUs could serve as extensions of the local Community Health Centers in Boston with close partnership with the Boston Public Health Commission and all Boston hospitals.

These units would be staffed by an EMT-Paramedic, a clinical social worker, and an alcohol and drug counselor. They would have immediate and direct access for consultations with the behavioral health and addiction care teams as well as from primary care providers at their respective Community Health Centers and local hospitals when needed.

MICCUs would help broaden the scope of public health and safety responses for Boston residents with a particular focus on those areas in critical need such as the Mass and Cass neighborhoods. These units would provide more integrated services with specialty trained and unarmed crews in situations that include crisis intervention, behavioral health care, housing emergencies, and substance use disorder care.

MICCUs would become imbedded in each neighborhood to develop strong relationships with frequent 911 callers and their family members. This will include applying de-escalation techniques during all domestic and street mental health crisis encounters as well as provide safe transport to a higher level of care if needed.

MICCUs would also be instrumental in performing motivational interviewing and coaching techniques on those afflicted with substance use disorders and most vulnerable for fatal overdosing. They will also carry out drop-in wellness checks on those recently discharged from rehab facilities and offer immediate referrals and transport to appropriate Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) Programs or detox facilities when warranted.

Additionally, MICCU’s would help alleviate the tremendous deficiencies and inequities in our current health care and public safety delivery systems and limit costly ER visits and hospitalizations. These units will perform home safety checks and serve as extenders of the primary care team to help manage conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, lung disease, and behavioral health issues that have been responsible for many of the poor health outcomes in those infected with COVID-19.

I wholeheartedly support the recent proposal from the Massachusetts Senate to study the efficacy of converting a decommissioned ship into The Floating Hospital for mental health, substance abuse and recovery. This is a novel therapeutic strategy that truly complements this special mission of the MICCUs. These units could also serve as extensions of the Floating Hospital including immediate consultations with specialty care providers there.

Boston attracts many patients from afar to our world-renowned medical facilities. It is time to bring exceptional “concierge” type medical and crisis care services to our own medically disadvantaged residents, while also offering direct access to a state-of the-art facility in our harbor. This includes Boston’s elderly, handicapped, homebound, homeless, recently incarcerated, and people of color as well as those suffering with mental health issues, substance use disorders, multiple chronic illnesses, and limited access to primary care providers.

Dr. Hamrock is a Board Member of Power Forward, Inc., an organization dedicated to ending the stigma of addiction and providing sober living scholarships to the most vulnerable

Rape kits were performed on the victims in the 2007 and 2008 cases and the DNA collected linked to one genetic profile. No suspect, however, was identified.

That’s often the case when suspects aren’t convicted offenders, who have their DNA collected and sent to CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System. That computer software program enables police to search for DNA matches when working a case.

Without a suspect, these cases, like so many, remained unsolved, until Boston police revisited them last year, according to Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Lynn Feigenbaum, using newer “forensic investigative genetic genealogy” tools.

Thanks to this breakthrough, DNA from a suspect’s family can serve as a tool for identification, via genetic information added to genealogy databases that users opt to make public.

The last link: FBI agents followed Nilo to a corporate event where they obtained utensils and a drinking glass allegedly used by him.

Such investigative tools and innovations are vital to solving crimes and ultimately providing justice for victims, but they’re only effective if the work is put in.

Massachusetts has had a troubled history with processing of rape kits, with thousands untested for years. Finally, laws passed in 2018 and  2021 mandated speedy processing of untested kits. The backlog dwindled from nearly 6,000 to about 2,500 as of December, according to NBC Boston.

But Massachusetts was hardly alone – North Carolina’s inventory of untested rape kits is 16,223, according to early March numbers posted on the N.C. Department of Justice’s data dashboard. Other states are wading through their own backlogs.

Part of fighting crime is bringing perpetrators to justice, and that can’t happen if all the forensic evidence isn’t brought to bear. It’s unfathomable that thousand of rape and assault victims are still waiting for the system to work for them.

In February, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill to reauthorize the Debbie Smith Act, which provides state and local law enforcement agencies with resources to complete DNA evidence testing and analysis.

The Debbie Smith Act was signed into law in 2004, and named for the Virginia woman who didn’t see justice for years after DNA evidence was collected.

These efforts – from  Massachusetts working to end our backlog, to actions such as the Debbie Smith Act to fund timely DNA evidence testing – are all laudable. But they shouldn’t be necessary.

Crime victims shouldn’t have to hope for legislative action for their cases to be solved. Funding and personnel for crime scene forensic analysis should be as rudimentary for law enforcement agencies as issuing firearms to officers.

Justice delayed is indeed justice denied.

In 2014, for the first time in history, more women than men graduated with a four-year college degree.

Yet while women are an ever-increasing presence in boardrooms and C-Suites, there is one critical area where things seem stuck in time. That’s venture funding for women-led startups, especially in tech.

That’s why I’m worried about an upcoming decision at the World Trade Organization. Without meaning to, global policymakers could take action that makes it harder for women entrepreneurs – especially in the life sciences – to attract venture capital.

In the United States and elsewhere, strong protection for intellectual property rights is key to innovation. That’s what start-ups start with — a discovery or invention that’s securely their own, either because they themselves own the patent or have licensed it on an exclusive basis. When a talented entrepreneur seeks investors, she is pitching her IP as much as she is pitching the idea that she wants to take from the lab to the marketplace.

Right now in Geneva, the WTO is debating a petition to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-related therapeutics and diagnostics. Because many treatments being developed for COVID-19 have potential application to many other diseases and conditions, acceding to the WTO proposal could undermine the confidence in IP security on which venture funding depends.

To inform its position, the U.S. is currently studying the anticipated effects of such a waiver. The study should reveal how damaging such a move would be.

My organization, Springboard Enterprises, has been working for 23 years to help women entrepreneurs innovate in technology and life sciences through access to resources, sources of capital, and a powerful community of investors, industry leaders, and tech specialists.

Venture capital financing for women-owned startups peaked in 2019 at a mere 2.8% of total venture funding. Since then, the level has actually declined, to 2.3%. There’s good reason for concern that a blow to the innovation economy, such as the TRIPS waiver extension, will hit marginalized groups such as women and minorities hardest.

What a loss that would be. Despite the persistent funding biases against them, our Springboard partners have managed to build and scale companies making great contributions to the economy and our social well-being. For example, Springboard partners lent their expertise and agility to transform a home-testing kit for food sensitivities into one of the earliest and most widely available COVID-19 home testing kits.

Right now, women entrepreneurs are working to decentralize clinical trials, allowing patients to participate from their homes or other remote locations, thereby reducing the burden of participation. Democratizing clinical testing by making trials more accessible and efficient accelerates research and improves patient outcomes.

Springboard partners are also developing a proprietary platform for delivering therapeutic genes to treat diseases such as Pompe, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s.

Many proponents of the TRIPS waiver seem to be focused on railing against large pharmaceutical companies. But the waiver would harm all innovators who are creating novel solutions in life sciences, therapeutics, and diagnostics — innovators like our Springboard women. The extension of the TRIPS Waiver would threaten the viability of their enterprises — and countless others innovating to make ours a better and more caring world.

Natalie Buford-Young is CEO of Springboard Enterprises, a network of influencers, investors, and innovators dedicated to building companies at scale led by women who are transforming industries in technology and life science.