I’m pleasantly surprised that Tom Finneran chose to keep his radio talk show over lobbying. I had figured we’d be hearing any day that he was leaving WRKO. Good for him — although I don’t understand how he ever thought he could ethically do both.
Schilling wants surgery
Keep in mind that there’s no way Dr. Craig Morgan could have given this remarkable interview to the Globe’s Gordon Edes without Schilling’s permission. I’m speculating, but it looks to me like Schilling still believes he needs shoulder surgery, and that he backed down only to protect his contract. Now he’s hoping to make the Red Sox’ position look unreasonable.
“I trusted him with my career then, and always will,” says Schilling of Morgan.
Sadly, I think we all know what should happen. Schilling should retire. He was pretty amazing in the postseason, but a repeat performance is looking like an increasingly remote possibility.
Update: The Herald’s Rob Bradford had a Morgan interview yesterday, which means he talked with Morgan sometime Thursday. (I don’t have a print edition of yesterday’s Herald handy, but the story made it to LexisNexis, which usually means it was in print and not just on the Web.) Dirt Dog in chief Steve Silva noted on Boston.com yesterday that Morgan also appeared on WEEI’s “Dennis & Callahan” yesterday morning. And Edes’ own interview with Morgan was posted online shortly after noon yesterday.
So Bradford gets the gold. And Schilling is pretty obviously playing hardball to persuade the Red Sox to let him go under the knife.
Investigate the lawyers
Let’s see, now. If Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to investigate CIA torture because government lawyers had approved those practices as being legal, doesn’t it then follow that he — actually, someone else — should investigate the lawyers? That’s what Harvey Silverglate proposes at ThePhoenix.com.
Romney’s timely end
Mitt Romney has been justly criticized for moving far to the right on a whole range of issues in order to pander to conservatives in the presidential campaign. What hasn’t been noted often enough, though, is that Romney never stopped shape-shifting, adopting a range of different personas in order to suit the state of the week. Peter Canellos gets at it nicely in today’s Globe:
In the end, all those inconsistencies combined with a somewhat plastic presence on the stump made Romney seem inauthentic and opportunistic — a meat-and-potatoes car guy in Michigan who morphed into a Pollo Tropico lover in Florida.
Romney furthered those impressions by changing his emphasis in state after state, from being a social conservative in Iowa, to an anti-Washington crusader in New Hampshire, to an economic nationalist in Michigan, to the one true Reaganite who played to right-wing talk shows in the days leading up to Super Tuesday.
By the time Romney took the stage in Boston on Tuesday night, wearing the frozen smile of a politician desperate to stave off defeat, his message had unraveled into a series of generic platitudes and warnings.
Also in the Globe, Joan Vennochi mocked Romney effectively yesterday, and Scot Lehigh comes back with more today.
In the Herald, Peter Gelzinis is on fire:
Mitt Romney’s quest for the White house dissolved under the weight of some very expensive brainwashing by a circle of consultants who sold him on the ludicrous notion that he could become president by running to the right of a genuine war hero.
That would’ve been a tough sell even if Mitt had spent 13 months in Vietnam, rather than two years searching for Mormon converts in the Bordeaux region of France.
But then, when you subscribe to the world according to Rush Limbaugh — the OxyContin-popping Charles Foster Kane of talk radio who bloviates his conservative rant from behind the locked gates of his Florida compound — you’ve already lost touch with a large part of reality.
Personally, I think Republican voters took the measure of Romney’s character and found it lacking. Even by the debased standards of politics, Romney was unusual in his willingness to say anything in order to get elected. Too bad he didn’t realize that’s not the way to get elected.
As Republican political consultant Todd Domke said on WBUR Radio yesterday, if Romney were the person whom he claimed to be, he’d be sailing to the nomination right now.
Further thoughts from the Outraged Liberal, himself a recovering journalist.
Channeling the same wavelength: A Globe editorial refers to Romney’s “shape-shifting,” too.
Photo (cc) by Tim Somero. Some rights reserved.
Not the end of the world
Toward the end of a gloomy assessment of the newspaper business in today’s New York Times comes this:
The paradox is that more people than ever read newspapers, now that some major papers have several times as many readers online as in print. And papers sell more ads than ever, when online ads are included.
That’s more than a paradox. It’s salvation. The consensus view within the business, Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña writes, is that “it could take five to 10 years for the industry’s finances to stabilize and that many of the papers that survive will be smaller and will practice less ambitious journalism.”
I think he’s right on the five- to 10-year time frame, but wrong that news sites (let’s not call them newspapers) will be less ambitious. Perhaps by “less ambitious” he means more focused on local news. That’s true. With a dozens of national and international news sites just a click away, major metropolitan newspapers are going to have to concentrate almost exclusively on local news, sports, business and the arts. But that’s not less ambitious — it’s just different.
The news business has been through several paradigm shifts since taking on a form we’d recognize beginning in the 1830s. The current one may be unusually wrenching. But it only looks like the end of the world because it happens to be the one we’re living through.
It depends on the poll
Democratic political consultant Dan Payne, writing in today’s Globe about Hillary Clinton’s victory in Massachusetts, says, “Once again, pollsters failed to render an accurate snapshot of the race, missing a 56-to-41-percent landslide, making prognosticators like me look bad. This has got to stop or there will be blood.”
Really? The final WBZ-TV/SurveyUSA poll of registered voters, taken on Saturday and Sunday, had Clinton over Barack Obama by a margin of 56 percent to 39 percent. Yes, the WHDH-TV/Suffolk University poll had Obama ahead by two. But SurveyUSA called it almost perfectly.
Casino plan killed yet again
Every week or so, it seems, someone revives the Mashpee Wampanoag proposal to build the world’s largest gambling casino in Middleborough for the sole purpose of killing it again. So it is today. Stephanie Vosk and George Brennan report in the Cape Cod Times that state officials have decided to oppose the plan.
This comes on top of last week’s news that the town of Mashpee has asked the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs to call a halt to the proceedings. Thus, even if Gov. Deval Patrick wins his bid to build three casinos in Massachusetts, it’s highly unlikely that one of them will be in Middleborough.
Chris Matthews chills out
In my latest for the Guardian, I describe my evening with in front of the TV set with Chris Matthews, the MSNBC blowhard who jumped the shark with his over-the-top anti-Hillary Clinton tirades following Iowa and New Hampshire. The new Matthews seems slightly diminished, but his political knowledge and enthusiasm are unflagging.
Clinton’s unsurprising Mass. victory
I’ve got a short piece up at the Guardian right now on Hillary Clinton’s big win in Massachusetts, which shouldn’t have surprised anyone except those who believe in the mystical power of endorsements.
No surprises in Mass.
No live blogging tonight, except to observe that rumors of Hillary Clinton’s and Mitt Romney’s demise in Massachusetts were greatly exaggerated. My record of making predictions is pretty grim, but I’ll give myself a mild pat on the back for this. I’ll have further thoughts on the media and Super Tuesday in the Guardian tomorrow afternoon.