Tom Keane

The Week That Was: Trump Reaches 100, Bruins Bust, A Shadier Common And More

It was the week when oncSaturday we finally got to day 100 of the Trump presidency. Only 1,362 days to go!

• Is Trump going soft? This week the president reneged on two key campaign promises, agreeing to hold off on building a border wall in order to get a budget passed and also agreeing with Mexico and Canada to keep NAFTA in place. But are Trump supporters worried? Not at all — a new poll shows only 2 percent regret voting for him. Why? Maybe it’s because his tweets are still as outrageous as ever.
• The Bard and the president. Speaking of tweets, Trump was furious when a San Francisco judge this week blocked his attempt to withhold federal dollars from so-called “sanctuary cities.” “See you in the Supreme Court!” he tweeted. Maybe. He made the same promise when courts blocked his immigration ban. Since then, nothing much has happened. I’m starting to think these executive orders are a lot like tweets — “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
• Keep your money, please. Trump also this week unveiled a tax cut plan that would increase the deficit by $5.5 trillion over 10 years. Hmm. How politics has changed. I remember the days when it was Republicans who were the deficit hawks while Democrats were the blithe big spenders. When, exactly, was that, you ask? Oh yeah. Last year.
• We’re all winners! To no one’s surprise, the Boston Bruins lost in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. And let’s face it: They never should have been there in the first place. It’s a big problem facing the National Hockey League. More than 50 percent of the teams (16 out of 30) make the playoffs. Rather than a grownup sports league, the NHL is more like a Tiny Tots league, where there are no losers and every player receives a “participation trophy.”
• Re-definition. The dictionary defines “diversity” as “different.” But judging from efforts on college campuses across the nation to stop conservatives from speaking — including this week’s ban of Ann Coulter from the University of California Berkeley — “diversity” actually means “stuff I agree with.”
• Travelin’ man. Scott Brown’s nomination to be ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa was enthusiastically endorsed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen. Warren originally beat Brown in Massachusetts in 2012. Then Brown moved to New Hampshire to challenge Shaheen, who also beat him in 2014. The old cliché is, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Even better, though, is to keep your enemies half a world away.
• Shady dealings. In an epic session this week, Boston city councilors debated and approved a measure to allow a new building to cast early-morning shadows on the Boston Common. Whether you agree with the council’s decision or not, here’s what’s outrageous: Now the city must seek approval from the state Legislature. Why? Because state law actually controls what Boston can do with its parks. Apparently, Boston — and only Boston — can’t be trusted to govern itself.
• Don’t they have anything better to do? Massachusetts regulators cited a Target store in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood for selling beer too cheaply. Really and truly. The state actually has pricing guidelines for liquor. Your government at work: Making sure we pay high prices.
• How to lose friends and dishearten people. The Massachusetts Democratic party debated a resolution denouncing Israel's settlements in the West Bank until saner heads persuaded members that (a) they know absolutely nothing about foreign affairs and (b) the last thing the party needs (after having already lost white, blue-collar workers) is to alienate yet another longstanding and key group of voters.
• We like picking on you because you’re easy to pick on. And finally, the Massachusetts Legislature is about to pass a law to prevent welfare recipients from using their benefits to buy recreational marijuana. Right now, those on welfare are also banned from using benefits to buy booze, pornography, cigarettes or lottery tickets. It’s an important message: If you’re poor, you’re not allowed to have fun.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 28, 2017.

 

The Week That Was: Dems Rejoice, O’Reilly Exits, Patriots Visit Trump And More

It was a week where Democrats thought they triumphed and the king of no spin decidedly did not.

• Comeback kids. The Democratic party was elated when, a week after it failed to win a Congressional election in Kansas, it also failed to win a Congressional election in Georgia. Look, I get it. The party’s doing better than expected, benefiting from a Trump bump that’s energizing voters and helping raise tons of cash. But better than expected so far hasn’t resulted in a victory. Moreover, the party’s a mess — riven by divisions that seem to be driving it further leftward. The thing Democrats don’t get is that much of its base voted for Trump despite how awful he was. Becoming pseudo-socialists won’t win them back.
• Killing Bill. So, does Fox deserve kudos for finally ousting Bill O’Reilly, its “king of cable news”? Not really. The company seems to have a high tolerance for sexual harassment (see Roger Ailes and Megyn Kelly). What finished off O’Reilly was not some new-found enlightenment by the Murdochs and the rest of senior management but rather that advertisers -- under pressure in turn from their customers — were jumping ship. The story can be summarized in four words: Money talks; Bill walks.
• Shell game. Remember the aircraft carrier Trump said we sent to North Korea, the “armada” he bragged about to China’s boss Xi Jinping? Actually, it was off the coast of Australia, conducting training exercises. No doubt, deception is an important part of warfare. George Washington did it in 1776 when he painted logs black and stationed them on Dorchester Heights to look like cannons. But an aircraft carrier? Kim Jong Un must be thinking Trump is as delusional as he.
• Hot air. The Trump administration is showing signs that the United States may stay in the 2015 Paris climate accord after all. If so, that would appear a major about-face from Trump’s campaign trail promises. Really, though, it isn’t. The administration is still busy gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, killing Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and pushing to make coal king again. Sure, we may remain as signatories to the accord. But we’re kind of like a club member who never pays his dues. You have to wonder: At some point, when does the rest of the world kick us out?
• Bad optics. Is it completely unfair to observe that Aaron Hernandez died by apparent suicide on the same day that Robert Kraft, Bill Belichick and many Patriots players were yucking it up at the White House, listening to Donald Trump compare his win to the team’s Superbowl comeback and that — if one wants to extend the metaphor even further — there’s a dark underbelly to both storybook tales?
• Word play. People professed themselves shocked when Adidas sent out an email to runners saying “Congrats, you survived the Boston Marathon!” Clumsy? Yes. But please, spare us the faux outrage. Saying anyone “survived” a test of endurance, be it a long run or simply taking the SATs, is such common parlance it’s almost cliché. I feel sorry for the poor PR person whose real mistake was not realizing that in today’s hypersensitive world, we look for any excuse to take offense.
• Fake is real is fake again. Six weeks ago, Trump boasted about strong employment gains for February. Much was made then of the president now reveling in data that on the campaign trail he called "phony." Lately, however, we haven’t heard much about the economy from the White House. Why’s that? Well, the March numbers were terrible — only 98,000 new jobs. Moreover, a new report from Gallup shows that consumer confidence is now at a five-month low — a harbinger that spending may decline and the economy may dip. What does Trump do now? Own it — or just reverse himself again?
• Ah, college. And finally, an editorial in Wellesley College’s newspaper sparked a firestorm of comments when it argued that “shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech.” In the students’ view, that included “racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia” and other discriminatory speech. Some, of course, might argue that questioning Creationism is some sort of “Biblephobia” and that it, too should be shut down. Therein lies the problem. Open the door to banning some speech, and it’s pretty easy to ban it all.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 21, 2017.

Accepting Death, Gaining Peace At The End Of My Mother's Life

My mother died last Friday. Jeff Bezos would not have approved.

Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is only one of the many titans of Silicon Valley who have embarked on various well-funded efforts to delay or simply stop death. Their lives are just so important, they think, their value so great, that the world should never be deprived of their genius.

The rest of us may not have the titans’ billions, but in our own ways we have the same hubris, trying to deny the inevitable. I watched that happen as a series of maladies struck my mother and we fought back, trying to hang on even as we knew in our hearts the end was near. But I saw also that there is virtue in sometimes acknowledging reality, of learning to accept.

My mother, Betty Ann, was born in 1930 and led an extraordinary life, bearing witness to the end of the Great Depression, the traumas of World War II, the rise of the middle class in the '50s, the political and cultural shocks of the '60s, the incredibly bad fashions of the '70s, the rise of various liberation movements — from feminism to LGBTQ rights, the dawn of a new century, the advent of computers and the internet and, to her great delight, the inauguration of an African-American president. And she managed to do so while raising 11 children who in turn produced 35 of their own progeny. She was caring, vital, smart, funny and embraced living with relish. She had no desire to die and those who loved her had no desire to see her die either.

But her body had other plans.

As we age, our bodies break down. We see it first in new wrinkles, twinges of the joints, a slowing of movement. But then it accelerates. We become a Jenga puzzle as one block is pulled out, then another, and eventually, even though the structure is still there, we are vulnerable. One more complication is like the removal of that final, critical block. We try to stop it, but the last move sends the whole thing crashing down.

In my mom’s case, she had a dizzying array of medications. For more than two years, there was a round-robin of trips to the hospital, to rehab and then back home. There was a fall, circulatory issues, cellulitis, fluid build-ups, heart issues. Each was addressed in turn by truly competent physicians and nurses. A wound care specialist recommended one course of treatment; her cardiologist another.

There was much living during this time, but towards the end my mother seemed to understand what was happening. She began to rail against the tubes in her arms, the multiple X-rays, the needles in her lungs. It was we, her children, who kept hoping for one more solution, one more fix that would allow her to go home, to return to the independent life she once had. We wanted her around for yet another special occasion — Easter, a wedding, a summer vacation, Thanksgiving.

And then her medical team sat down to tell us the bad news. They weren’t going to be able to cure her. At best, the care they could offer was palliative. Medicine could make her comfortable, yes. But keep her alive for much longer? No. They suggested we move her to a hospice.

It was a crushing moment. Signing the papers for her discharge felt like signing a death warrant — and indeed, it truly was. On a Friday she was moved to the Stanley Tippett House in Needham. A week later, Good Friday, she was gone.

But during that time at the hospice, we got a gift — three gifts, really.

The first was simply the time to say goodbye, to tell my mother we loved her, to reminisce about her life and our lives, about what had been and what was yet to be.

The second was simply to gather together and renew the bonds of affection among the members of a very, very large clan. Being with my mother, cycling in and out of her room (far too small to accommodate all of us simultaneously), sitting together as her breaths grew ever more shallow, gave us the opportunity to see what really mattered, to put away the small stuff that too frequently pushes us apart.

And the third was acceptance. My mother understood she was dying. Indeed, at the hospice she told her social worker just that, then added, “But I’m not sure my children know.”

We knew, Mom, we knew. It’s just that we had so much wished it weren't true.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 20, 2017.

 

The Week That Was: Airstrikes, Apologies, A Pulled Pepsi Ad, And More

It was week when Pepsi apologized, Sean Spicer apologized, Oscar Munoz apologized, and Bill O’Reilly … went on vacation.

• How many bombs does it take to get to 50 percent? President Trump saw his approval ratings jump after he dropped 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase. And that is why Kim Jong-Un should be very nervous.
• “I love WikiLeaks” I wonder if Putin wishes he could have a do-over on Russia’s tampering in the U.S. election. By leaking information on Hillary Clinton, he was hoping to defeat a candidate he hated. Now, arguably, things are worse with Trump than they would have been with Clinton. Which raises the question: Did the Russians also hack into Trump’s computers? And if so, when’s the big reveal?
• "Logical fallacy." And by the way, Eric Trump’s claim that the Syrian strike validates “the fact that there is no Russia tie” is ludicrous. It could, of course, prove the opposite: that Trump, desperate to refute the Russia allegations, did so as emphatically as possible.
• Small victories. Democrats were thrilled when they just barely lost a congressional election in Kansas. Yes, really. Thrilled. And that tells you a lot about the party these days: It measures its successes by the narrowness of its losses.
• End run. Massachusetts is trumpeting the news that some driver applicants who passed Uber and Lyft’s background checks failed the state’s own check. How so? Largely because, in a major reform five years ago, the Bay State banned private employers from performing background checks that delve more than seven years into a job applicant’s past. It was a controversial policy, one intended to allow people with checkered histories a chance to start anew. But, somewhat hypocritically, the new policy didn’t apply to the state itself. So now a classic rebound job – driving – is off limits to ex-cons. And companies unhappy with the seven-year policy have a solution: Just let the government do it.
• Where’s Olivia Pope when you need her? Hasn’t United Airlines ever heard of crisis management? Ever since the 1982 Tylenol murders, when some bottles were laced with cyanide, it’s been one of the basics of business school. Heck, there’s even a TV show about it. But instead of learning from everyone else’s mistakes, United made a series of textbook errors after a passenger was forcibly dragged off a plane. CEO Oscar Munoz spent days glossing over the incident, calling it “re-accommodation,” defending the employees involved, and taking shots at the passenger himself. Everyone else watching this saga unfold knew exactly how it would end: With groveling apologies. What took Munoz so long?
• Foot in Mouth Disease. If it took Munoz a long time to finally say “sorry,” at least he got there. But Sean Spicer’s Assad-was-worse-than-Hitler apology just dug him further into a hole. My favorite: His attempt to explain that Hitler had not used toxic poison “on his own people.” Except that the German Jews were, of course, Hitler’s “own people.” Does Spicer survive in the soon-to-come shake-up of White House staff? My guess is both he and Steve Bannon are gone.
• Ch-ch-changes. That shake-up, by the way, is a sign of Trump’s rapidly shifting positions. He now likes NATO. He’s no longer a big fan of Putin. He’s willing to cut a trade deal with China. And the “America Firster” is now suddenly (and sometimes scarily) engaged with the world, be it Syria or North Korea. The question is: Has reality just hit him square in the face? Or did he never believe this stuff in the first place?
• Congratulations, Governor! A new poll finds that Charlie Baker is the most popular governor in the country. Three-quarters of Massachusetts residents approve of the job he’s doing; a scant 17 percent disagree. Given that Baker’s a Republican in a solid-blue state, those numbers elicit some head scratching. I’m not sure why, though. Baker is studiously non-ideological, caring more about problem-solving than partisan one-upmanship. Moreover, on a host  of issues, including spending and transgender rights, he’s to the left of many of the commonwealth's Democratic politicians – including, notably, Robert DeLeo, speaker of the House.
• Slugs. And finally, media across the country hailed a report from British researchers that a hot bath can burn as many calories as a 30-minute walk. The excitement goes to prove, I think, that we’ll look for any possible excuse not to move.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 14, 2017.

The Week That Was: Fans Return To Fenway, Advertisers Flee 'The O'Reilly Factor,' War Crimes In Syria, And More

Baseball began, investigations continued, and both Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon looked set to end.

• Pennant fever grips Hub. Fans were ecstatic about the prospect of another World Series title after the Red Sox won their season opener, which shortly will degenerate into utter despair when the team inevitably loses a game.
• Double standard. Advertisers started to flee from "The O’Reilly Factor” after a report that Fox had paid $13 million to a series of women sexually harassed by Bill O’Reilly. You gotta feel sorry for O’Reilly. If he had decided to become president instead of hosting a TV show, he’d be just fine.
• Arm’s length. After trashing the Freedom Caucus when it rebuffed his health care proposal, Donald Trump reached out to Democrats who – seeing how the president treats his allies – decided it would be better to remain enemies.
• The White House is just too small. Thursday, Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his luxurious Mar-a-Lago retreat in an effort to prove that our plutocrats have nicer houses than their plutocrats.
• Wait – didn’t he once agree with Obama on this? Trump blamed Barack Obama’s inaction for a chemical attack by Syria that killed at least 70. This kind of excuse – blaming the other guy – has a limited shelf life, kind of like how wishing someone “Happy New Year” in February makes no sense. And by the way, Obama’s not to blame. Most likely culprits: Bashar al-Assad – and the Russians (ahem, Mr. president), who support him.
• Built for obsolescence. The federal government signed off on the MBTA’s estimate of $2.3 billion to build the Green Line extension into Somerville and Medford. Officials estimate the project will be finished by 2021, at which point driverless cars should be largely perfected, meaning none of us will be taking public transit, anyway.
• You’re all guilty! Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser, was the latest name dragged through the Russia-Trump mud, making even more complex the swirl of allegations and accusations, all of which cry out for an impartial, bipartisan investigation. Oh wait. The Senate is actually doing one? Hmmm. So rather than our amateur, speculative and conspiracy-driven sleuthing via Twitter, Facebook, TV and radio, should we maybe let the investigators do their jobs?
• Evil exits, stage right. Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster removed white nationalist and Trump chief strategist Steven Bannon from the National Security Council’s principals committee. The move raises a question: Is the Trump administration finally growing up — or is McMaster merely a lone voice of sanity?
• Hoisted with their own petard. Faced with Democratic resistance to Neil Gorsuch, Republicans got rid of the filibuster rule, allowing a simple majority to approve his nomination to the Supreme Court. Normally, changing the rules midstream would have sparked howls of outrage, except that, ummm, back in 2013, when the Democrats were in the majority, they did exactly the same thing: getting rid of the filibuster for all other federal judges. With the tables now turned, it was hard to come up with any sort of principled argument as to why the GOP shouldn’t do the same.
• The one that got away. The region’s fishermen denounced a study by Massachusetts scientists that came to the same conclusion as did much-derided federal surveys conducted over the last several years: Stocks of cod are at dangerously low levels. However, even though the state analysis fixed supposed methodological faults in the federal investigations, it still had one, gigantic flaw: It didn’t come to the conclusion the fishermen hoped for. Good science, it turns out, is science that produces the result we want.
• Regulated to death. The demise of the taxicab industry has been well-documented, with fault variously assigned to Uber and Lyft, medallion owners, and even surly cabdrivers. But blame should also go to the city of Boston and its antiquated regulation of the industry. The latest example? The city’s Hackney Division (so called because of the hacks who run it, I think) refuses to permit drivers to use a simple app that allows passengers to pay fares electronically. Why? Because the app doesn’t use the two – only two! – credit card processers approved by the city. Ridiculous.
• Bright Lights, Big City. It took 317 years, but Framingham will finally get big boy pants. Residents decided this week (by a narrow 105-vote margin) that the town will become a city. Good for you, Framingham residents! Now you too can experience the joys of having city councilors and mayors whose sole ambition is to use their jobs as jumping-off points to higher political office.
• RIP. When it comes to Donald Trump, when you enter a room, you have to kiss his ring. People don't mind, but he has it in his back pocket. (With apologies to Don Rickles.)

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on April 7, 2017.