Adrian Walker

Adrian Walker should cut out the passive-aggressive crap

adamg — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 14:24:34 +0000

In the Globe today, Walker whines like that mosquito buzzing around your ear at 3 a.m. about how the guys running for governor (yes, like the Boston Media Consortium tool he is, he leaves out Jill Stein) are not having the sort of thoughtful, puffing on pipes as they adjust their smoking jackets kind of discussions he thinks they should:

In the six weeks or so left in this race, I think voters would love to hear how the candidates really plan to deal with the looming $2 billion deficit, how they will bring equality to education, and whether the state's pension mess can ever be brought under control. No buzzwords or gimmicks or revisionist history, please.

Oh, if only Adrian Walker were a metro columnist at the state's most influential media organization, somebody who could sit down with the candidates at Locke-Ober and hash all that out if he really wanted to. If only.

Ed sidetrack question: In commercials that have run roughly 750,000 times during Sox games this season, Walker colleague Kevin Cullen says Globe columnists are influential enough to stick up for people without "power into the juice." What does that mean?

No mean feat: Globe columnist insults thousands of Bostonians

adamg — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 16:55:37 +0000

First, a confession: I haven't read an Adrian Walker column in months. Somebody tell me if I've missed anything. But Mike Durant posts today that Walker talked to Menino, who admitted that this whole branch closing thing isn't really about money after all, so I wanted to take a look.

And I promptly remembered why I stopped reading Walker - Why waste my time on a bloviator who writes stuff like the following?

Fighting the closings had brought together a group of activists from across the city. But the truth is that the branches, some of them, are more popular when they are under siege than they are on a daily basis. If there really is a strong argument that Allston-Brighton’s three libraries cannot possibly be two, no one has made it.

Maybe, Adrian, if you'd actually showed up at any of the hearings on the proposed cuts, you'd have heard people make just those arguments. But that would have meant getting out of your comfy desk chair on Morrissey Boulevard and mixing with actual library users, instead of just chatting with your pal the mayor on the phone.

What you're missing while every single reporter covers Faux Rockefeller

adamg — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:21:52 +0000

Closing arguments could come today in the Suffolk Superior Court trial of Quincy Butler and William Wood. But you haven't heard of them because they're only charged with stabbing a woman to death and shooting out her boyfriend's eye in a drug-fueled 2004 home invasion in Dorchester, and this is their fourth trial on the charges, so it's understandable that reporters are just too fatigued to care anymore, especially when the alleged run-away nebbish with the fun fake name is on trial so far away, like in a whole other courtroom in the same building.

Same thing happened at their third trial, last year, which took place at the same time some loathsome Brit was on trial in Middlesex County for murdering his wife and daughter in Hopkinton, and which was declared a mistrial, following two other mistrials.

And by "media," I include the Globe's Adrian Walker, whose column today breaks new ground in not telling you anything you didn't already know about the Defendant.

Globe Metro columnists set their sights low

adamg — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:02:19 +0000

Yesterday, Kevin Cullen declared Boston the Worst City in the World because we haven't seen fit to temporarily rename a street after some rock band that played here once. Hey, Kevin, I'm personally outraged there's no plaque commemorating the time the seminal rock band the B-52s played the Orpheum back in the early 1980s, whom can I call, and can I count on your support?

Today, Adrian Walker does one of his patented rewrite jobs and explains that a) There's a big hole in the middle of Downtown Crossing, b) Tom Menino refused to walk by it the other day and c) The city's in a heap of financial trouble. Absolutely none of which we'd read in any Globe stories over the past week, right?

Adrian, it was a joke!

adamg — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:35:58 +0000

So yesterday, I predicted that after Yvonne Abraham and Kevin Cullen wrote emotionally gripping columns, Adrian Walker would follow up with a column about Bob DeLeo.

One guess what Walker wrote about today.

Second alleged scammer catches Adrian Walker

adamg — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:55:32 +0000

First Dianne Wilkerson and her Dejavu story. Now Walker reports he - and many other people - were had by Jake Severino, a bright young Dorchester man who, it turns out, is not dying of cancer like he told Walker he was back in September.

Jake Severino had a simple explanation for why he started telling the world he was dying. "I wanted to be loved," he said. "I wanted to be loved more than I was."

The man who brought down Wilkerson, Turner expects more arrests

adamg — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:03:32 +0000

Ron Wilburn, the "Cooperating Witness," talks to the Globe's Adrian Walker. Fans of Boston political intrigue need to go read the interview now, if you haven't already.

Ed. Frequent Critic of Walker Note: Adrian, this makes up for all those columns on the Red Sox and beach erosion in Winthrop.

Wilkerson fallout: Is Daniel Pokaski next?

adamg — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:52:44 +0000

Michael Pahre wonders why the feds waited until now to nab Wilkerson - since based on that affidavit, they had her cold last year. Are more dominoes about to fall? If so, Pahre predicts the next to go is Boston Licensing Board Chairman Daniel Pokaski - painted in a particularly unflattering way in the affidavit:

... BLB Chairman Pokaski will probably resign within weeks -- if not days -- because he stood to gain financially from the August 2007 meeting that allegedly resulted in him approving a temporary license for Dejavu while the state legislature approved a pay raise for him. ...

Meanwhile, Pahre raises an issue about the Globe: In all its wall-to-wall coverage in print today, the Globe made absolutely no mention of the role played in all this by its own Adrian Walker. Is the paper embarrassed the feds painted its columnist as a patsy used by Wilkerson to help blackmail the city council and Pokaski to get her client his liquor license?

It's not like Walker didn't want to write about the case. Yesterday, boston.com posted his musings. But after two paragraphs generically writing about his July column, Walker spent the rest of the piece sighing about what a shame Wilkerson had become. What did Wilkerson say to him to convince him to write that July column? We have no idea.

How Dianne Wilkerson blackmailed the Boston City Council

adamg — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:27:47 +0000

And got Adrian Walker of the Globe involved in her seamy little game. Allegedly, of course.

But Walker shouldn't feel too badly: Aside from then City Council President Maureen Feeney, pretty much everyone involved comes off as an inadvertent enabler of an unscrupulous, determined Wilkerson in the federal complaint against her.

Remember last year when the city council sought state legislation so it didn't have to hold a preliminary election to reduce the number of at-large council candidates from nine to eight?

According to the criminal complaint against her, Wilkerson threatened to hold up that legislation unless the city granted a full liquor license to a proposed restaurant on Melnea Cass Boulevard (unfortunately for Wilkerson, the guy giving her all those bribes wore a wire the whole time).

The affidavit claims that for her cash payments, Wilkerson worked it: She sent letters to all city councilors demanding a hearing on liquor licenses. She convinced Walker to write a column pushing the joint's application - by painting the holdup as proof the city licensing board had it out for non-insiders.

And, allegedly, she then threatened the city council: Get Deja Vu its full license or she'd hold up the election bill. City Council President Maureen Feeney got mad, the complaint alleges, but agreed to meet with Wilkerson.

Then Wilkerson put a hold on a second bill, which would have given raises to Licensing Board staffers. And she got Therese Murray to call Feeney to push for the license.

The Licensing Board eventually did agree to grant the license, after Wilkerson lifted her "hold" on the pay raises and agreed to sponsor legislation to get Boston more liquor licenses. And the council got its home-rule legislation to eliminate the preliminary.

Globe metro columnists finally have a good week

adamg — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:06:05 +0000

They must've been eating their columnist Wheaties, because last week we didn't have a single column about state fairs in other parts of the country or boring thumbsuckers called in at the last moment. They actually worked it. Yay, Globe metro columnists!

Fact-checking Globe columnists

adamg — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:49:45 +0000

Yesterday, we had Kevin Cullen declaring Delaware a Confederate state.

Today, Elias finds two factual errors in Adrian Walker's pointed, if schizo column on the former firefighter running for Jim Marzilli's seat (pointed because it's a poke in the eye of Boston firefighters, schizo because two-thirds of the way down, Walker tells us that voters in that district, which does not include Boston, don't care about the firefighter issue, and so he suddenly veers into education):

Honestly, does anyone fact check anything anymore at the Boston Globe?

I wonder what Yvonne Abraham thinks about Manny?

adamg — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:56:16 +0000

Is there some virus going around the Globe newsroom that makes metro columnists start writing about sports? Yeah, I get it, sports is the lifeblood of this town, so, OK, write about Manny Ramirez because you can't be bothered to leave your desk to actually find something new to write about, but sheesh, at least say something original.

Why are the Globe's metro columnists so lame?

adamg — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:46:59 +0000

John Gonzalez weighs all three of the columnists and finds them wanting:

... In a city that needs bold opinions, particularly now that Bailey is gone, who among them is up to the task? Walker is inconsistent. So is Abraham, who just returned to writing this spring after spending much of her first year as a columnist on maternity leave. Cullen, meanwhile, exhausted much of his first year finding his chi. What kind of cattle prod does it take these days to make a Globe columnist earn his feed? ...

He also provides the rules for the Kevin Cullen drinking game. Yes, you get points for every Irish reference.

Imagine if Adrian Walker's column were translated into another language, then translated back into English

adamg — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:32:11 +0000

Not a clue why somebody would do that, but somebody did - with his column from today. Can you notice a difference?

The column itself is a plea for the legislature to pass a same-day registration bill for voters. Sounds good to me, although does anybody know what the president of the League of Women Voters was studying in grad school back in 1986? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe somebody who'd gotten to grad school would not realize that if you're registered to vote in Amherst, you can't just show up and vote in Cambridge (at least, not yet). If it's anything related to political science, or sociology or any other field that requires some working knowledge of our political system, she might want to find another example to use to push the bill.

The answer is no

adamg — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:43:03 +0000

And the question is: Does Adrian Walker's column provide any new insights into Boston Fire Department scandals?

Howie Carr does the same basic column, only better, aside from a couple of Shaughnessy-like references to events that happened 30 years ago that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.