'Tufts love': Oh dear. My alma mater is in the news. ... Tufts is going to get the crap beaten out of it for this one. ... FYI: The story is the Page 1 splash in the Herald's print edition; the online story doesn't carry the 'Tufts love' headline, which must be small consolation to the Jumbo PR meisters. Emphasis on 'small.' ...   ¶ 12:07 PM

‘Confidence in the technology of theory has faded’: An oh-so-serious article in the Globe about Marxist critic Terry’s Eagleton’s partial rejection of academic ‘cultural theory’ on the grounds it's “shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion, and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering.” ... Hmmmm. Sounds like a tardy post-Berlin Wall rejection of Marxism in the making, if only Eagleton would pull on that string a little harder. But the whizbang kids in academia -- including Eagleton -- can’t quite bring themselves to that conclusion. ...  ¶ 5:45 AM

‘Decade of the Bus,’ Part III: The MBTA’s ‘Decade of the Bus’ -- i.e., the bus-line-that-should-have-been-a-trolley-line Silver Line -- gets off to a typical start: “It's behind schedule, over budget, and won't be fully operational when it opens later next year.”


‘Time to get behind the awesome Patriots’: The shift in attention from the Sox to Pats is now official: Boston Dirt Dogs, the frontline of Red Sox Nation, devotes its entire page to the Pats.   ¶ 7:52 AM

'Christmas Eve in Boston': JJ Daley has some splendid Dickinsonian shots of -- and commentaries on -- Boston from Christmas Eve night.

Update -- He's updated the site to show some shots of the Central Artery coming down -- on Christmas weekend, no less. Bechtel must really want to get out of town.  ¶ 9:07 AM

‘We can't miss this one as we did the silicon revolution’: The more I study the historic ebb and flow of the Massachusetts economy, the more convinced I’ve become that we’re always going to pioneer and then blow leads in various industries. First there was textiles. Then finance and, to a degree, mutual funds. Then high-tech. And now it’s biotech. ... Am I worried? A little. But not overly so. Sure, we need to fight back to protect our industries, etc. etc. That’s just good business sense. ... But we’re never going to match the cost of labor and land in other states, let alone other countries. R & D and entrepreneurship are/have been ultimately the keys to the Massachusetts economy, not protectionist industrial policies promoted by backward-looking pols and civic boosters. ... Put another way: Would we really have been better off if generations past had succeeded in artificially propping up and keeping the textiles industry here? Sometimes it’s better to move on. ...

P.S. -- Ten bucks says the biotech manufacturing jobs now being outsourced to the Carolinas will be outsourced within ten years (and probably sooner) to India or elsewhere.

Update -- Bemoan the loss of the 'silicon revolution'? Let's check out the condition of Silicon Valley these days. Ah, yes. They'e outsourcing jobs from there. ... Stand by my prediction: It's only a matter of time before biotech manufacuturing jobs are also outsourced to other countries. So why waste time and effort trying to keep them here? OK, we should try a little. But let's be realistic about the future. ...  ¶ 8:54 AM

‘There is no political message here’: Oh, yes there is. The federal jury’s dramatic decision in Boston yesterday to sentence Gary Lee Sampson to death has plenty of subtle and not-so-subtle political messages imbedded in it, U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan’s assertions to the contrary. Here are two messages that jump immediately to mind: A.) The federal government obviously is trying to ‘nationalize’ the death penalty and B.) The sentence is yet one more piece of evidence confirming that the stereotyped hyper-liberal Massachusetts population really isn’t as hyper-liberal as many pundits have long proclaimed. The nine women and three men took a mere 11 hours to render the unanimous verdict. Dems take note. ...

Having recently switched my position on the death penalty issue (I’m now against it), I’m not quite sure what to make of the federal jury’s decision, on a more personal level. The reason why I now oppose the death penalty is because I’ve lost faith in the ability of the criminal justice system to sort out the guilty from the innocent in these and other cases. The dramatic events in Illinois -- where a slew of death-row inmates were found to be innocent, as a result of investigations by lowly journalism students doing the job judges, prosecutors, cops and the media should have performed -- confirms this. But there is NO doubt Sampson brutally killed those poor people. ... So in an odd sense, I feel a tinge of, well, pride and respect for the way the jury handled the Sampson case.  ¶ 8:23 AM

Are they just screwed up? Part II: The NYT’s John F. Burns comes the closest -- with a little help from T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia -- in explaining the ‘complexities’ of the Arab mindset that condemns Saddam, praises the liberation of Iraq, and then spews hatred at America for the ‘humiliation’ of it all. Excellent piece.   ¶ 7:55 AM

Time magazine’s continuing descent into irrelevant fluff: Time magazine’s Man/Person of Year award for 2003: The American Soldier. ... Fine. Can’t argue with it. But that’s the point: They don’t want you to argue with it. They want to play it safe. Can you name last year’s winner? Oh, yeah, it’s Coleen Rowley, Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins. The year before it was Rudolph Giuliani. ... Not a big fan of George Bush, but, I mean, c’mon. He just took this country into a controversial frigging war. He’s either praised by half the world or damned by half the world. He’s Churchill to some, Hitler to others. He is a colossus straddling the world or strangling it. For three picks since 9/11, Time magazine has had a chance to jump into real history as it unfolds during dramatic times. Instead, it’s opted for cuddly fluff. ... FYI: Instapundit notes Tim Blair scooped the boobs at Time. ...

... Now back to Rick Atkinson’s superb ‘An Army At Dawn.’ Good-bye.  ¶ 11:46 AM

The Big Media isn’t reading blogs?: Try this one out. ... Dan Kennedy has discovered the same thing.  ¶ 9:18 PM

‘Head Scarf Isn’t Haute Couture?’: Nice editorial in the Boston-based CSM on France’s new laws banning students from wearing Muslim head scarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses at school. The French are simply wrong. As a Bush administration official gently put it in this NYT article: Such displays are “a basic right that should be protected.” ... But, before we engage in my favorite sport of French bashing, one should remember France’s very rocky relationship with religion, i.e. the Catholic Church. One of the more surprising things about French history is how long it took them to establish a free public education system. The church used to be the primary provider of schooling in France, well into the 20th Century. It took pitched battles to pry this cultural and political power perk away from clerics. So the French are quite sensitive to any religious group taking over schools, by storm or by stealth. The new laws are clearly aimed at radical Muslims. But, as the CSM editorial notes, the restrictions are likely to boomerang on the French. They’re addressing the wrong problems. ... And that’s Hub Blog's haute couture post of the week. ...

FYI -- Oh, what the hell. After being nice to the French, might as well skip over to Merde in France to cleanse myself of any misplaced sympathy. ...

... Via Merde in France, I found this magnificant blog on France by Roger Simon, who's just back from a visit there. If even a fraction of what he says is true, well, ...  ¶ 7:49 AM

Are they just screwed up?: Even Iraqis who hated Saddam say he should have killed a few Americans for honor’s sake. Does this strike you as profoundly nuts? ... Tom Friedman’s questions: “Is Iraq the way it is because Saddam was the way he was? Or was Saddam the way he was because Iraq is the way it is — ungovernable except by an iron fist?” ...   ¶ 9:05 AM

And the ‘October Surprise’ Award goes to ...: I could have sworn it would go to Jim McDermott. But Madeleine Albright came out of nowhere to win it. ...   ¶ 9:34 PM

Have they been to Alewife?: I suppose this is a decent idea to promote development near T stops. But the concept has been overly idealized by the smart-growth types. ... Has anyone seen the new apartment complex built next to the Alewife Red Line station in Cambridge? Not my idea of a quaint it-takes-a-village development. There’s a nearby Bertucci’s and Jasper White’s seafood restaurant, true. But there’s also: Electric transmission lines, ugly surface parking lots, the giant T parking garage, commuter train tracks, a train bridge, the Route 2 intersection, drab office buildings -- and that’s before you cross the four-lane street to get to the wind-swept Fresh Pond mall. Alewife is an isolated, depressing ‘neighborhood,’ if you can call it that. ... But it probably looked swell on paper. ...

Update -- Cosmo is dissing my dissing of his non-neighborhood neighborhood. He said it's war. ... $&#asdfjdasfad;72 ... Sorry. That was me trembling at my keyboard. ... Where does Coz get off making fun of where working people live on the working-class side of Beacon Hill? Can't we all just get along? ... Coz just reminded me that Romney's campaign headquarters is still located at Alewife. As I was saying about the neighborhood ...

Update II -- Reader No. 1 sends along a Mark Steyn column on the ‘Bike Path Left.’ ...   ¶ 8:58 AM

'The Bastard!': I knew there was a connection between Saddam and You Know Who. Read the comments. ... Hub Blog's Manhattan-based WMD spy has been uncovering similar leads, I'm sure, but he hasn't checked in for a while. I hope he's safe. ... The great showdown for Middle Earth approaches. ... ('The Bastard' via Instapundit.)  ¶ 12:33 PM

'What, did I get better since then?': Where is Danny 'Bleeding Green' Ainge taking the Celts with this trade? It looks like an old sideway-step-into-the-salary-cap-morass move mastered by Rick Pitino. ... The Celts continue to sentimentally milk the Glory Days, retiring Cedric Maxwell's number. Even Cedric is scratching his head over this one. But I'm not. It's a cynical marketing move. ... A style-over-substance distraction for fans who aren't buying it.

P.S. -- Hank Finkel also used to be a nice guy who probably deserves to have his number retired -- if being a nice guy is now the standard for Celts Immortality. ... Hank's a personal favorite of mine dating back to the '70s. He once showed up at a CYO basketball pizza party, banging his head on a basement ceiling and signing autographs for us awed kids. ... Rex Morgan, on the other hand, was somewhat of a jerk at the pizza party -- and definitely doesn't deserve a Celts ceremony.  ¶ 8:28 AM

Snow job! Snow job!: Joseph F. Casazza underestimates last week's snow storm, delays deployment of the snowplow fleet -- and then blames the snowplow drivers. ... Do GPS phones help commissioners make the right initial call?  ¶ 7:26 AM

‘I can think of a very good reason why anti-war activists ...’: Reader No. 1 writes in, in part due to the item immediately below:

“I can think of a very good reason why anti-war activists and glumfaced TV anchors such as I saw yesterday and last night (other than on Fox stations) can't sort out their feelings. It means this war has had an undeniable good outcome! Here's another reason: it would appear to boost Bush's reelection chances. (I say ‘appear’ because we should all remember what happened to Winston Churchill after WW2... and Bush 41 after Desert Storm...) ...”

And Reader No. 1 sends along this link to bolster his case.

FYI -- I initially responded to Reader No. 1, but zapped what I wrote after sobering up.

FYI II -- I suggested below that it's only a matter of time before someone accuses the Bush administration of hatching an 'October surprise' over the capture of Osama. My money's on Jim McDermott to wade first into this muck, if only because he's already saying the same thing about Saddam's capture. ... OK, so it's not such a bold prediction. ... Via Andrew Sullivan.  ¶ 8:48 PM

‘The piece that makes it more complicated for me’: Local anti-war activist Grace Ross can’t sort out her feelings over Saddam’s capture. ... Even if you were lukewarm about the war’s necessity (like moi), how can you not be happy about his capture? There’s really nothing complicated to sort out.
  ¶ 7:38 AM

We got him!: No, not Saddam. ... Rather, Keith Foulke. ... The Sox Special Forces performed magnificantly. Next up, Osama, and, well, either A-Rod or Nomar. ...

P.S. -- Saddam's capture is obviously big news. My quickie observation is that, for George Bush, this is not unlike Sherman's timely capture of Atlanta before Lincoln's re-election. Not that I'm comparing the War on Terrorism to the Civil War. Nor am I suggesting Saddam's (or Atlanta's) capture was an act of staged political cynicism. But good battlefield news is good political news. And George Bush -- and the nation -- needed some good battlefield news. ... Next up is indeed Osama. If he's not captured or killed soon, there probably will be ugly political accusations of a coming 'October surprise' next year, blah, blah, blah. Personally, I don't believe this administration thinks that way. I have a gut feeling -- just a gut feeling -- we're closing in on Osama, assuming he's still alive, and that yesterday's dramatic events give the hunt for him more momentum.  ¶ 8:56 AM

‘The big question is why’: The big question really is why. Why does the Globe cover Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard so closely? ... Similar ‘skyrocketing’ housing-cost trends are happening in blue-collar and middle-class towns across the commonwealth. The dollar amounts and lack of flashy names are different, but the price pressures are proportionately the same. Throw a dart at a map of eastern Massachusetts, hit any town, and you’d have the same story. ... So the answers to the ‘big question’ posed in the story and the twisted Hub Blog question in this post: Because they’re FILTHY RICH and ENVIOUS...

... I assume Lou Gerstner has a new stainless-steel refrigerator he’s going to install in his Nantucket ‘cottage,’ or whatever he calls his new trophy abode. Same with Abigail. ... Our 401(k) money at work. Again. ...

News Flash from The Onion!!!!! ‘Report: Poor People Pretty Much Fucked’ ... Read it. It’s a classic. ... 'The big question is why.'  ¶ 7:27 AM

Francis Farrell Coppolla?: I’m impressed. Congrats to fellow Boston blogger John Farrell! Now I’ll have to get the DVD. ... I demand an invite to the Film Festival Somewhere/Beautiful-Person red-carpet treatment at the Somerville Theater! ... John, remember me? Your old friend from 2002?

  ¶ 8:27 PM

The Hub’s secret world-conquest scheme, revealed (sort of): It’s not really about the UK being forced to hire foreign managers. As we all know, it’s really a secret plot by Boston to extend and firm up its place as the hub of the universe. ... Why do you think Hub Blog has a WMD spy in Manhattan? Why else did we plant an avowed Yankees hater as the new ombudsman of the New York Times? Okrent’s coded message: ‘I’m with you. I’m in position.’ ... The noose tightens by the day. Steinbrenner knows it. More spies and weapons are being rolled into place for the final climactic offensive.  ¶ 8:12 AM

‘It's a kind of pandering to a group he sees as hip’: No moralizing objection from this quarter about a pol using profanities. But the Brookings Institute scholar just nails it when describing John Kerry’s use of profanities in an interview with Rolling Stone: "In a way it's a kind of pandering [by Kerry] to a group he sees as hip.” ... Exactly. ... Rolling Stone, Harley’s on Jay Leno. Kerry seems so old and tired. ... Via Instapundit.
  ¶ 8:06 AM

It’s a ‘northeaster,’ not a ‘nor’easter’: It’s stunningly beautiful outside, the liquor stores are open and the Pats play at 4 p.m. Does it get any better than this? ... A quick reading of the Globe and Herald’s main snow stories this morning show an encouraging sign -- no use of the silly “nor’easter” phrase. Growing up in Boston, I never heard two things: a snow storm referred to as “nor’easter” or the Curse of the Bambino. They’re both totally manufactured modern-media hyped/phony terminology. ... And that’s my profound thought for the day.

Update - 12.8.03 -- And, yes, the liquor stores did open yesterday, despite the blizzard, and boots-on-the-ground intelligence sources say sales were brisk on Beacon Hill.   ¶ 7:34 AM

‘Bruins blog’: It doesn’t look like a blog, feel like a blog, or read like a blog. But they’re at least calling Eric Wilbur’s piece/tidbits column a ‘blog.’ So I guess it’s a blog -- and somewhat significant in terms of Boston.com experimenting with the terminology. ... Here’s an old-media outfit jumping whole hog into weblogs.

Which reminds me: I haven’t been to the The Dullest Blog in the World in a long time. ... Recent entry: “I depressed the switch on the side of the kettle. The water began to heat up until it reached boiling point. The kettle then turned itself off, requiring me to take no further action.” ... Ahhh. ... Originally discovered via MassLive.com.
  ¶ 7:28 AM

‘It’s a rout’: “Staff shakeups, repeated theme changes and even a shiny new campaign bus have failed to stop Sen. John F. Kerry’s New Hampshire nosedive ...”

Update: Mickey Kaus has launched a 'Kerry Withdrawal Contest.'  ¶ 6:34 AM

The definition of 'button up': A while back I blogged something about how the city planned to shut down some road projects in preparation for the DNC next summer. I was puzzled by the phrase 'button up' as it applied to one of Hub Blog's selfish pet-peeves: The huge Cambridge St. project. Well, here's the answer to my button-up question. ... Arghhhh. They'll never finish that project.  ¶ 12:04 PM

‘Serial ex-senator slayer Mitt ...’: Howie chronicles the slaughter. ... It’s a shame it took so long -- and ensuing tragedies -- to finally take action on these second-string cabinet holdovers. The gov should have acted sooner. But heads are at least rolling, as they should. ... So the Feds are probing misuse of federal public-safety grants. Misuse of funds? In Massachusetts? But how? Here’s how: “The money was actually pumped into salaries for apparent patronage hires, as well as computers and SUVs.” ... ‘Apparent.’  ¶ 8:16 AM

'The dog closest to the sled is the first one shot': Mitt is struggling these days. But give him a little credit: He fired the bums. None are cousins being protected/shipped to another pension-saving job in a faraway agency run by another cousin (as far as we know at this point). I suppose that’s progress, for Massachusetts anyway.

Update -- Ooops. Spoke too soon. Maloney is “taking medical leave for chronic back problems but will not return.” Must be riding it out through the calendar year for annuity reasons. ... No word yet on Lalli, McGrail, Evans or distant cousins ...   ¶ 7:44 AM

‘It’s a whole new ballgame’: I’m not sure why -- or to what extent -- but Curt Schilling’s now famous on-line chat the other day made a little history. It was exciting to see Schilling setting the record straight directly with fans themselves via the Internet, rather than working through the media. ... Boston Dirt Dogs is mighty proud and has a blow-by-blow account of the Schilling chat. ... FYI: Hub Blog is obviously not an old-media type who dismisses bloggers, but I’m also not a new-blogger type who dismisses the old media. I’ve long thought the two mediums would -- and will -- converge, probably in ways that will frustrate both sides. What’s the fancy word I’m looking for? ... Symbiotic! ... That’s it! ... Still anxiously awaiting that first blogger paycheck from evil media conglomerate Hub Blog Inc.  ¶ 8:42 AM