Boston Bull****

My wife Helene and I have brought daughter (and my co-blogger) Jessie up to Beantown for a few days to visit friends and to nose around Harvard exploring the possibility of a summer internship in physics. You thought she was at Bryn Mawr? You obviously don’t know about “Fall Break.” That’s a relatively new week-long (9 days counting the bracketing weekends) vacation — the more expensive the college, the less time you actually have to spend there. As far as I can tell, this new vacation was instituted to relieve the stress induced by the recently completed moving in and unpacking for the fall term.

Anyway, here we are, and our visit has led to some interesting observations. First, I have a new fail-safe solution to the Iraq problem. Forget bombing; forget invading. Simply export several hundred Boston “drivers” to Baghdad; given the mayhem that would surely ensue, no regime could long survive their presence.

Next, the NYTN (New York Times North), sometimes known as the Boston Globe, has a wonderful OpEd today by one Derrick Z. Jackson on the NRA and the Washington sniper. Wonderful, in the sense that’s it’s hard to find so much bull*** (or perhaps it’s bean****) in one place. Go look at it. A couple of my favorite snippets:

For all the whipping up of fear, Americans do absolutely nothing with it as far as it regards guns.

In other countries, such as Britain and Australia, massacres led to near instantaneous and monumental changes in gun laws. [No mention of the effect of those laws.]…

Individual murders by men of wives and girlfriends come and go without much reflection and certainly without 24-seven CNN coverage. Male politicians have not leapt to make domestic violence a lighting rod for gun control, even after a 1990s study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that home gun ownership dramatically increases a woman’s chance of dying from a bullet….

The National Rifle Association, our shadow government, the sniper laying waste to our sanity, hopped back in its van, looking for politicians to scare and issues to gun down.

No political group was happier when George W. Bush was appointed president by the Supreme Court in 2000 than the NRA.

You get the idea.

UPDATE – I’ve now, of necessity, spent some more time with the Boston Globe, and I’ve decided that, with regard to partisanship in its news stories, it’s what its corporate owner, the New York Times, would be if it really let itself go.

The big “news” today, dominating the City & Region section that contains local political developments, were TWO front page (of the section) articles by Globe reporter, Stephanie Ebbert, ostensibly analyzing but in fact condemning Mitt Romney’s (the Republican candidate for governor) gift of a million dollars to the business school named after his father at his alma mater, Brigham Young University. The question, insofar as there was one, is the degree to which Romney should be tarred by BYU’s anti-gay policies.

The first one begins:

Mitt Romney declined yesterday to reconcile his financial support of Brigham Young University, which bans homosexual conduct, with his opposition to discrimination against gays and lesbians, saying it was inappropriate to raise religious issues in a political campaign.

The second one maintained the oppositional, antagonistic tone.

Criticized this week for contributing $1 million to a university that has antigay regulations, Mitt Romney explained that he was not a member of the board of Brigham Young University and thus not in a position to advocate a change in university policy.

But Romney served on the boards of two companies and one organization – the Boy Scouts – without advancing the gay inclusion that he supports on the campaign trail. The Boy Scout board has maintained a policy of excluding gay men as Scout leaders, even as a US Supreme Court case sparked a national debate in 2000.

Left unsaid is that the Supreme Court held that, as a private organization, the Boy Scouts have a First Amendment right to insure that troop leaders, etc., reflect its values.

After quoting a Scout official defending its policy, the Globe reporter devotes two paragraphs to quoting a gay activist’s disagreement with it, and with Romney.

But Mary Breslauer, a gay political activist working with Democratic nominee Shannon O’Brien, charged that he was “complicit” in the policy, at a time when other board members took stands. She noted that filmmaker Steven Spielberg resigned from the Boy Scouts’ board based on its policy of exclusion and was recently honored by the Human Rights Campaign for his stance.

“Other people have chosen different routes because they understood that discriminating against gay scouts was wrong, that it hurts young people, and that it hurts councils in Massachusetts,” she said. “Romney can’t have it both ways. He can’t say he didn’t do anything at BYU because he didn’t sit on a board and then sit on a board and do nothing. It’s insulting.”

Both these articles read as though they were written from Democratic Party campaign material. The reporter was so concerned in both articles to insinuate that Romney, a Mormon, must share all the positions of the Mormon Church — the first one quoted the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, who said: “You buy into the whole package when you make a donation” — that she never paused to ask whether the Democratic candidate, Shannon O’Brien, should be similarly assumed to share the Catholic church’s opposition to abortion, women priests, gay rights, etc.

The only place in today’s paper I could find that balanced approach was in a column by Brian McGrory.

Imagine that! Partisanship in news columns. Haven’t we seen that somewhere before?