Here we go again. The Globe is boldly urging lawmakers to show some spine by imposing congestion pricing for cars entering the city’s downtown – and then mentioning that a non-courageous “quick and easy” approach would be to let DOT bureaucrats raise Mass Pike tolls even higher than they are now while making no mention of possible tolls on I-93, Route 1 and 2, etc. (“You just flip the switch,” says one enthusiast of raising Pike tolls). … Way to show spine, Globe editorial board! … Any Worcester area, central Mass. or Metrowest lawmaker (and that includes you Karen Spilka) who goes along with this cockamamie plan to further stick it to Pike drivers alone – commuters who are already are paying for the Big Dig and maintenance of other non-Pike drivers’ roadways – ought to be voted out of office, pronto … Btw: a suggested new battle cry: No I-93 tolls, no Congestion Pricing!

Some slightly off-the-beaten-path stories you may have missed over the past week:

— He’s obviously not a big fan of his successor: “Ex-Boston Mayor Marty Walsh backs Brownsberger, a senator Mayor Wu is trying to defeat” (Boston Herald)

— Most people get watches when they retire. BU honchos get mortgages to buy multimillion-dollar condos: “Boston University backed six-figure loans for former president, two administrators” (BBJ)

— Jon Keller goes after ‘bike supremacists’ who are using a tragic death to try to reimpose radical bike-lane policies: “Mayor Wu’s biker backlash” (MassterList)

— It’s part of the new station owner’s attempt to rebuild the brand: “NECN hires former WCVB reporter Matt Reed as anchor, eyes relaunch in September” (Globe)

— AI firms are throwing money around: “Where Did All the Computer-Science Professors Go?” (The Atlantic)

— Is the Middle Kingdom going the way of 1990s Japan, i.e. an overly hyped and feared economic rival? “China’s Moment of Weakness” (Foreign Affairs)

— The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine admirably stands firm: “Orange-stained pardon can’t keep cop-punching Jan. 6 doc from losing her right to practice medicine” (Universal Hub)

— Spot-on advice that too many don’t want to hear: “If the Democrats Actually Want to Win, This Is What They Have to Do” (NYT)

— Meanwhile, an old-school conservative lets the VP have it: “The endlessly pliable JD Vance has no aversion to conversions” (Washington Post)

— Unfortunately, both military and Ivy League types look on him as a sort of freak for choosing to serve: “I’m an Army general. My education shouldn’t be unexpected.” (Washington Post)

Isn’t this just great. U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern rips Republicans for hurling accusations of “communists” against Democrats and then turns around and hurls accusations of “fascists” against Republicans. … And so goes our two parties’ polarized political discourse. Unfortunately, Heather Cox Richardson seems to think McGovern’s denunciation of extreme rhetoric with extreme rhetoric is somehow OK. … Anyway, all of this kind of proves Kristen Soltis Anderson’s point in the NYT that the “rigid alignment” of our two parties in Congress doesn’t come close to reflecting the more complex reality of the American electorate.

The Globe has a big story this morning on the good, bad and ugly surrounding Cambridge’s new pro-housing zoning rules. The number of new units being built in the city is quite impressive. The new rules are definitely working in that regard. But there’s also a growing backlash to this laissez-faire, Houston-like approach to new housing construction, as the Globe story also makes clear. My hunch is the backlash is going to get worse. Sooner or later, a developer is going to really overstep, and the uproar will lead to changes. Hopefully, those changes will entail common-sense tweaks to recent reforms, not all-out repeal. … See prior post below for related thoughts, complaints, and links, etc.

Good news on the housing front: State House lawmakers are mulling legislation that would allow ‘duplexes by right’ in most single-family neighborhoods, as the Globe and B&T report. It’s a great idea yours truly wrote about last fall. … Meanwhile, this is sort of good news, in the sense it might avert bad news caused by good intentions: B&T is separately reporting that Cambridge is thinking of rolling back some of its more radical pro-housing measures that have risked backlashes against zoning reforms, something I’ve also written about before here and here and here. But it seems Brookline’s YIMBYs are determined to repeat some of the same mistakes made in Cambridge, as B&T reports in the same piece. Sigh. …

Finally, all the above housing articles and a B&T column by Scott Van Voorhis point to how pro-housing lawmakers on Beacon Hill are switching their legislative  tactics a bit, from pushing big hard-to-pass housing bills with lots of items in them to smaller easier-to-pass housing bills focusing on just one or two issues. It’s a smart move. As Scott notes, smaller victories add up over time.

So I’m not being paranoid. Steve Bannon has been talking about an emergency election declaration since February (“Declaring a national emergency over our elections to stop foreign interference”) and was repeating it again last week (“Steve Bannon says Trump’s Thursday night speech must be a ‘predicate’ for a ‘national security emergency executive order’ on elections”). … After a long introductory windup, Heather Cox Richardson delivers the pitch: last Thursday’s speech was much more than just a presidential whine session. … The original Political Paranoia Alert can be found just below.

Before last night’s bizarre primetime speech by President Trump, someone emailed the following to me: “Do you think there’s a possibility that Trump will declare some sort of emergency tonight and rule he must oversee November’s election? He might not do it tonight, but the speech could be a set up for an ‘emergency declaration’ in the fall.”

Normally, I’d dismiss such speculation as pure paranoia. But this is a president who has praised and pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters, describing the violent right-wing nuts who tried to block the 2020 election results as “patriots” and Jan. 6 as a “beautiful day.”  So, yeah, I think he’s more than capable of radical, unprecedented actions involving national elections. He’s already proven that. …As it was, he obviously didn’t make any emergency declaration last night. But you have to wonder what the hell he’s up to with all of this. …

Fyi: ABC, NBC and CNN were absolutely right not to cover the speech live last night. But Trump’s new favorite old network carried the speech — in a weird ‘middle ground’ sort of way.

What is it about the Healey administration and big-bucks state contracts? First it was the MassPike service plaza debacle. Now it’s the ugly Springfield courthouse development/lease mess involving none other than Conan Harris, the ex-convict-turned-consultant hubby of U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and John Barros, the interim executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and former economic development czar for the city of Boston. Their joint partnership, CoJo Partners, has somehow — surprise, surprise! — latched onto Liberty Junction’s winning bid for the nearly $2 billion regional justice center contract, as the BBJ reports. … I don’t know which is more depressing. The Harris/Barros political connections or the fact Gov. Maura Healey is dismissing the controversy, as the Herald reports.

Update — 7.21.26 – From the Herald’s Joe Battenfeld: “Ayanna Pressley’s constituents deserve answers about her wealth.”

Update II –– 7.24.26 — The Globe’s editorial board questions the procurement process and thinks Barros’s involvement is more concerning than the Harris angle. They’re probably right, but how did Harris get involved in this project? It wasn’t because of his major construction project expertise, that’s for sure.

As I read this WSJ piece (“The Hard-line Activists Ramping Up for the War With AI”) my mind kept drifting back to long-ago controversies during the early years of the biotech industry in Boston. Sure enough, I found this Harvard Crimson piece on initial activist fears of Recombinant DNA research, as summed up by a 1976 headline in the Boston Phoenix: “BIOHAZARDS AT HARVARD.” … Well, as we now know, those and related fears were more than a little overwrought, considering all the medical advances produced by biotech firms over the past half century and all the jobs and companies biotech has produced since the controversies of the ‘70s.

Then again, the subtitle of that Phoenix headline reads, as the Crimson article notes: “Scientists are on the brink of undertaking revolutionary genetic research which creates new life forms …” Hmmm. I suppose “mirror technology” and genetically altered human babies kind of fall into that new-life-forms-concern category, right? 

Just pointing all this out as I follow the old Hub Blog thought process, from dismissing overwrought crazies to conceding they may have a cautionary point or two. … 

Update — I forgot to mention that I stumbled upon the following Atlantic article during my quickie research for this post: “When People Feared Computers.” … No mention of Hal, in case you’re wondering.