Boston Herald

Ever get the feeling that when Howie Carr gets pressed for time, he just repastes a series of insults into his word processor? Joe Keohane helps to prove the point by looking up all the times Carr has made a "Jacques, rhymes with Fakes" crack about Cheryl Jacques, nominated this week for a judgeship, and so the subject of Carr's column today (as Keohane notes: "Naturally, because she's a politician who isn't dead or Steve Murphy, and is appearing in Carr's column, she's in for a beating.").

Margery Eagan is aghast that kids today swear like sailors. Why, back in her day, kids NEVER swore! And they walked uphill both ways in a blizzard to school. And they liked it!

Greg Gatlin to rep for Suffolk University.

You're busy, so let me sum up Margery Eagan's column today, just in case you don't have the time to read it all:

I'm a woman. I don't like Hillary Clinton. Therefore, women who voted for her wish they could be married to Bill Clinton, and that disgusts me.

UPDATE: Looks like the supply truck came in; the story's been updated with an apostrophe and an 'e'.

Let's see: The Globe today reminds us it's not too late to rush out for some portable defibrillators for Sunday's game. Really, you can't get much better than that (except maybe the howler about whether Mitt Romney is still our favorite son, but that's not Super Bowl related).

Still, one can only hope some enterprising reporter is even now contacting the MWRA to see if the system can handle the flow when everybody in the Boston area gets up between quarters to use the bathroom.

Stupor Tuesday? Tom Menino in a Giants uniform? All because Menino wants to come up with a plan to keep drunken college students from going on a rampage IF the Patriots win?

Also, WBZ 1030? That poll about whether Bostonians would rather go to a Patriots rally or vote on Tuesday? What drugs did you take when you came up with that? It's not like it's really an either/or thing, unless, of course, there are no police present, because Menino stupidly decides the Herald is right and rips up his police plan and the rally becomes the parade out of the first Batman/Joker movie (you know, the one with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson) and thousands of terrified office workers can't get home to vote because they're trapped in a murderous downtown hellhole by hundreds of marauding, angel-dust encrusted drunken college students.

Just sign me,

Curmudgeon for a Day.

Somehow, I don't think the Herald really meant what it wrote today: Subway-stalking perverts are more likely to attack women riding the Red Line than any other MBTA route.

Then again, they're pervs, so maybe they ARE attacking women getting in the way of their real prey: Subway cars.

Speaking of that PERV LINE story, gosh, I can now see why Herald editor Kevin Convey would object to some snarker calling the paper Boston's preeminent fear-mongerer.

Stephen Laniel: Thank you, Boston Herald, for continuing a glorious tradition of subtlety.

Can you imagine how much more boring, and even worse, local coverage would get without the Herald? Let's compare the coverage of yesterday's King Arthur's Lounge murder in the Globe and Herald:

One of our Sunday-morning rituals is the post-breakfast reading of the Globe comics - kidlet gets on my lap and I read 'em aloud.

Imagine our shock this morning when she pulled out the comics and THEY WERE BOSTON HERALD COMICS!

WHAT is this world coming to? Sure, the kidlet was game and tried them (read them to herself). Her analysis? "They're not even good, except for Garfield" (OK, she's a kid, whadaya want?).

What probably happened is our delivery guy also delivers the Herald and he goofed when he was putting the papers together this morning. But still, it was a rude way to start the day.

Mooninites! Boy, that's a word I was hoping I'd never have to hear again. But Associated Press did a whatever happened to? story on Peter Berdovsky, one of the Lite Brite boys, and the Herald followed up with its own story on how Berdovsky must be made to pay as hard as he can and now Geoff Edgers at the Globe is busy deconstructing what he calls "an exercise in journalistic knee-jerkism" and an example of why "why younger people are abandoning newspapers in droves" by the Herald's Joe Dwinell. He also provides a sample of the sort of art the Herald seems to imply Berdovsky should be making.

Meanwhile, over at Boston Magazine, Amy Derjue tells Berdovsky to just shut his yap and grow up already and sternly advises Boston City Council President Maureen Feeney, who wants to send Berdovsky to bed without any dessert, to stop being such an enabler.

Bonus inside-baseball fun fact: Edgers and Dwinell used to work together at the Middlesex News in Framingham (I'm also an alum of the paper, but don't hold that against me).

Sort of a mirror image of the "old" design, but still no obvious place to see all the stories from the day's paper.

John Daley likes the new look, but says boston.com still has the Herald site beat by a wide margin when it comes to actual usability.

Dan Kennedy notes how a Herald reporter's attempt to describe a Romney campaign aide turned into an insult when somebody inserted a comma where it didn't belong.

Because the FCC says he could buy it again.

Just so you don't go around thinking it's just the Globe that proclaims "trends" based on the statements of one or two people (cheesemakers, anyone?), John Gonzalez notes that today the Herald has apparently redefined the term "experts" to mean "one former flack turned BU professor" in a short story about whether Mitt Romney and Tom Finneran prove it's OK for men to bawl in public (although the story, does mention a study in the very last sentence). Gonzalez adds:

... Next, perhaps, the Herald will address other pressing, age-old questions, among them "does wearing pink make you gay?"

The Herald tries to carve up Deval Patrick for increasing the governor's office budget by 33% since he took office. The Outraged Liberal explains why the story's completely misleading.

Adam Reilly reports on rumors swirling around Michele McPhee.

Dan Kennedy, defends the Worcester Telegram's decision to run an "amplification" about the quote it lifted from the Herald rather than requiring the editor who wrote the editorial in question to commit seppuku:

... To be sure, the T&G should have credited the Herald. But the headline on Gonzalez's item — "Worcester Telegram Plagiarized Herald" — vastly overstates what happened. This was not plagiarism. Opinion pieces regularly recycle quotes from other news sources without credit.

No one could reasonably have believed that the T&G editorialist had interviewed Slater. The problem here was simply that the Slater quote was a pretty significant exclusive for the Herald, and it was cheap of the T&G not to acknowledge it. The paper's editors realized that and have made amends. ...

Boston Daily has the scoop on the Worcester Telegram ripping off a piece of the Herald's Romney/Tavares coverage; editor says, eh, he goofed, no harm, no foul, no correction.

A couple years back, a Telegram reporter lost his job for borrowing a bit more liberally from Sports Illustrated.

Seems Margery Eagan didn't refer to Barack "Osama" once yesterday, but three times. At least the Herald's fixed it online.

So Michele McPhee of the Herald aplogized for what she said the other day on WTKK about gay men and little boys. Dan Kennedy considers the odd Herald story about the apology, which never says exactly what it was that got her in trouble, but which has been reported by other media outlets:

If the Boston Herald is going to report on Michele McPhee's on-air apology for seeming to draw a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia, shouldn't the paper also report what she was apologizing for?

Possible dust-up brewing over what she may have said on WTKK about gays liking little boys. Some think she called gay men pedophiles; she basically says she was talking about the preference of gay fashion designers for stick-figure women with boy-like physiques, although it's hard to say for sure since the reporter of the piece says she said it "off the record" (dude: if somebody tells you something is "off the record," it means they're telling you they don't want it in the story; although you'd think McPhee would know better than to say anything she doesn't want quoted to a reporter).

The Herald finds a novel way to compete against free dailies: Delivery guys steal and throw out copies of BostonNow and Metro (a Herald mouthpiece, however, was shocked, shocked when informed of the practice).

In Cambridge, the editor of a neighborhood newspaper charges candidates for stories.

The Outraged Liberal notes the Herald ran an apparently verbatim interview with that human-rights guy who found himself surrounded by heavily armed State Troopers for daring to seem nervous during Needham's lockdown last Friday:

... Whatever the motives (and the Herald surely is aware that Neuer, unlike Judge Ernest Murphy, is clearly not a public figure) the Herald ultimately did wipe a bit of the smear off an innocent man. But it never should have happened in the first place.

In September Murphy was trying to keep two jobs a $100,000 + state job and his $85,000 councilor seat

He is the one that tattled on Flaherty for having an expired City Council President placard in his window. How does Howie get is inside anonymous City hall info? Ratso gives it to him.

Turned his back on 41 well trained battle worn Boston Municipal police offices. They all got laid off in January and most of them were friends who had helped him win elections.