Massachusetts Politics

Deval Patrick, a former two-term governor of Massachusetts, must be smiling at the news out of the University of Massachusetts School of Law at Dartmouth, formerly Southern New England School of Law. On Thursday of last week, the school announced that its incoming class of first-year students, numbering 94, is 17.5 percent larger than last year’s, which had 80.   In a press release marking the start of the academic year, the school also said: - Its incoming class is 42% larger than the class that entered in 2016, the year the school first earned full accreditation by the American Bar Association; - First-year students come from 25 different states; - Average age of first-year students is 27; - Applications for admission increased this past year by more than 20 percent, from 782 to 940; - 57 percent of applicants were admitted this year, whereas 64 percent were the previous year; It's getting harder to get in. - Members of the Class of 2017 passed the bar exam on thei...

With all due respect to the mayor of Somerville, sometimes you just got to have a Sam -- a Sam Adams beer, that is. Which is why, today, it’s looking like the recent Trump-favorable remarks by the inventor of Sam Adams are not going to hurt beer sales, calls for a boycott notwithstanding. Let’s back up to the start of this story. On the night of Tuesday, August 7, Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Co., which produces Sam Adams, was among 13 business leaders invited to a dinner-conference at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.   It was a political event designed to highlight the president’s economic agenda and record. Following a brief speech, the president asked every business leader in the room to stand, introduce himself, and offer brief remarks.   When Koch’s turn came, he said, in part: “I’m not quite sure why I’m here.   I’m like the smallest company by far.   I’m Jim Koch and I started making Sam Adams Beer in my kitchen 37 years ago…I gu...

THAT the Massachusetts Senate, during its brief informal session today, adopted a resolution congratulating David Sullivan , special counsel in the Office of the Senate President, on his retirement from state government, where he served ably for 41 years, winning countless friends and admirers along the way.   Sullivan provided counsel to former Secretary of State Mike Connolly ( Bill Galvin’s predecessor), the Ethics Commission, and the Senate Ways & Means Committee.   He also served as general counsel in the budget office of former Governor Deval Patrick , now rumored to be considering a run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 2020. THAT Whitman’s state representative, Geoff Diehl , a candidate for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Elizabeth Warren , yesterday found a novel way of distinguishing himself from the incumbent by vowing not to write a book if he’s elected to the Senate.    Reacting to the news...

One of the great things about computers and the Internet is they allow you to appear as if you are hard at work when you are not -- and when you are in fact loafing at some remote location and merely checking your emails and returning the occasional phone call to create the appearance of serious engagement.  For example, today I am in Harwich on Cape Cod, where my wife and I are enjoying the hospitality of her sister at a house on a beautiful quiet side street, shaded by ancient pines and oaks and punctuated with birdsong during the day, while back in the urban heat island of Boston, my diligent colleagues are suffering the tortures of the damned. But do not fear.  Our president has assured us that climate change is totally not real -- "fake news" propagated by Democrats, eco-terrorists and those horrendous "enemies of the people," the news media.  (Joe Stalin does a jig beneath the Kremlin Wall every time Trump trots out ...