Targeting the Globe

Visit the Web site of the Second Amendment Foundation — a pro-gun lobbying group — and here's what you'll find:

• "SAF Files Ohio Lawsuit ..."
• "SAF Sues Library System ..."
• "SAF Files Texas Lawsuit ..."
• "SAF Files Amici Curiae Brief ..."
• "SAF Sues To Overturn ..."

Keep that in mind as you read this Herald story about the foundation's efforts to have Globe columnist Steve Bailey fired over an allegedly illegal 2005 gun purchase he was involved in while researching a piece on lax gun laws. (Why now? Bailey talked about it on Tom Finneran's WRKO program recently.)

As former prosecutor Randy Chapman, who heads the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, tells the Herald, "I don't see a criminal intent there. I just see someone facilitating a news story." The Herald also notes that the SAF has gone after Sam Donaldson, too.

Here is the SAF press release on Bailey, in which the Globe is helpfully identified as being "owned by the anti-gun New York Times." And here is Bailey's 2005 column.

I hope the lawyers don't tell Bailey he can't write about this. It's ridiculous, and the Globe ought to stand up to the Second Amendment Foundation, which makes the National Rifle Association look reasonable by comparison.

Web design gone wild (II)

A day after the Herald transformed Tony Massarotti's Red Sox report card into a 33-screen Web epic, the Globe comes back with a DIY "Midseason Report Card" that is — get this — 63 clicks long.

Delivering the goods on Romney

I have to agree with the Outraged Liberal — today's installment of the Globe's Romney series, by Brian Mooney, really delivers the goods.

Here are a couple of highlights that the O.L. doesn't mention. First, this ought to negate any lingering belief that Romney cut taxes in Massachusetts — or even held them steady:

Data compiled by The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, shows that during Romney's four years as governor, the state and local tax burden in Massachusetts increased from 10 percent to 10.6 percent of per capita income.

Next, consider what William Monahan tells Mooney. Monahan is described as having had a "long personal and political relationship" with Romney, but the governor pushed him out as chairman of the state's Civil Service Commission because he had bought property from organized-crime figure Jerry Angiulo 23 years earlier. Mooney writes:

That night, from his lake house in Wolfeboro, N.H., Romney called Monahan, who quoted him as saying: ''Bill, my stomach is turning.... My senior staff is unanimous that I have to ask for your resignation. I don't want to do this, but I am outvoted.''

I don't want to do this, but I am outvoted. Absolutely amazing.

According to the Herald, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is now on Romney's case, too.

Lenore Romney and abortion rights

Part four of the Globe's series on Mitt Romney flatly asserts that a family tragedy led his mother, Lenore Romney, to favor abortion rights in her 1970 run for the U.S. Senate. Neil Swidey and Stephanie Ebbert write about the stance Mitt Romney took in his own Senate run in 1994:

Although he always said he was personally opposed to abortion, Romney sought to reassure Massachusetts voters of his pro-choice bona fides by citing his mother's example. Lenore had run for the Senate on an abortion-rights platform, a stance forged by the death of her son-in-law's teenage sister from an illegal abortion.

''My mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter,'' Romney declared. ''And you will not see me wavering on that.''

Note how the sentence I've boldfaced is constructed — as a straight declaration of fact, with no attribution. Yet that statement has come under question in the past.

In June 2005, Globe columnist Eileen McNamara reported there was little evidence to suggest that Lenore Romney, who died in 1998, had spoken out in favor of abortion rights during her unsuccessful campaign.

In response to McNamara's column, Romney released a statement that encompassed what his mother had said at the time. Among other things, Lenore Romney said: "I support and recognize the need for more liberal abortion rights while reaffirming the legal and medical measures needed to protect the unborn and pregnant woman [sic]."

The Globe rightly observed, "It was not clear what specific positions Lenore Romney was advocating in the statement." And, oh yeah, the reporter was Stephanie Ebbert.

Given that the Globe is asking us to wade through some 35,000 words on Romney this week, you'd think that it could remind us there's some disagreement over how he characterized his mother's beliefs — especially since that disagreement plays into the criticism that Romney will say anything to advance his ambitions.

All known facts

If your heart sank this morning when you encountered part one of the Globe's seven-day, all-known-facts package on Mitt Romney, imagine how we felt at Media Nation Central. After all, you don't have to read it. I do. And though today's nearly-5,000-word entry, by Neil Swidey and Michael Paulson, is surprisingly sprightly, the purpose of such presidential profiles is strictly defense: by next Saturday, if the Globe has done its job, there won't be a single Mitt tidbit for the national media to pick up on that the Globe didn't have first.

Online, what's notable is how far the Globe has come since its big John Kerry special of a few years ago. I can no longer find the Kerry stuff in order to make a direct comparison, but the Romney package strikes me as far richer, with a Web-only Paulson story on young Romney's near-fatal car accident in France, where he was a Mormon missionary; an interactive Google map of France; a Michael Kranish piece on Romney's draft deferral; a slew of photos and documents, even one of Romney's report cards (PDF); and several videos, including this fairly creepy look at how Romney's appearance has changed over the years. Given this cynical foolishness, I especially enjoyed a video of Romney speaking French.

Just remember: Packages like this are meant more to be admired than read. I'll be reading. And if find anything startling, I'll be sure to let you know.

Gareth Cook has Ideas

A big week for former Phoenicians — Gareth Cook has been named editor of the Globe's Ideas section, replacing Wen Stephenson, who's moving to WBUR Radio's "On Point." The announcement follows news that Yvonne Abraham will be one of the Globe's two metro columnists.

Under Stephenson, Ideas has become somewhat more accessible and newsy than it had been in its original incarnation, edited by Alexander Star. I'd like to see Gareth push it more in that direction. In any case, Ideas will certainly be in capable hands.

Two smart choices

As you've probably already heard, Globe editor Marty Baron announced this morning that Kevin Cullen and Yvonne Abraham will take over the metro columns recently vacated by Brian McGrory, the new metro editor, and Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen McNamara, who's decamped to Brandeis.

This strikes me as smart on two levels, both macro and micro.

Macro is the mere fact that Baron decided to fill the slots — something he'd already said he was committed to doing, but which he might have been tempted to back away from on the theory that scarce resources could better be devoted to local reporting rather than pontificating. Fortunately, Baron realized those columns are popular with readers, and that jettisoning them might save a few pennies now but cost more than a few dollars down the line.

Micro is that Cullen and Abraham are reporters first and foremost, and can be reliably expected to use their new positions to contribute to local coverage. That's what McGrory and McNamara did when they were on, but I suspect Cullen and Abraham will push even farther in that direction. Along with the incumbent metro columnist, Adrian Walker, who also brings a reporter's mindset to the job, we can expect the left-hand side of the City & Region front to consistently tell us stuff we didn't already know.

It's easy to picture Cullen as a columnist. In fact, some years ago, he wrote a column-like feature for a while. Abraham — a former Phoenix colleague — is harder to peg. But she writes with a strong, distinctive voice, and has handled news and feature stories with equal aplomb. Give her a little time and she'll be terrific.

Seth Gitell also approves the picks, though I've got to disagree with his assessment that Cullen is the "logical successor" to Mike Barnicle. Cullen's specialty is original non-fiction.

Update: Adam Reilly of the Phoenix has some interesting things to say about the move, and offers a first-rate bit of Abraham prose from her Phoenix days. The Weekly Dig snarks predictably, but does make one good point: Peter Gelzinis of the Herald would have been an inspired choice — although, in my view, no more inspired than Cullen or Abraham.

Mr. Fussy writes a correction

With apologies to Alex Beam, by way of Roger Hargreaves.

The Globe today publishes a correction that is superfluous bordering on confusing. It reads:

Based on incomplete information on a congressional website, a graphic with a Page One story about a plaque commemorating the origins of gerrymandering wrongly said Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry and state Senator Israel Thorndike attempted to keep their Republican friends in power. They were members of the Democratic-Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Democrats. The Republican Party was not founded until the 1850s.

But as anyone who's studied American history should know, the Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, was universally known in its early days as the Republican Party. This Wikipedia entry gets it right despite being from, you know, Wikipedia. And hand it to Wikipedia again, which correctly notes that the Republican Party started to be called the Democratic Party around the time of Andrew Jackson's presidency.

If the Globe's editors thought they needed to clarify this at all, instead of calling it a "Correction" they should have trotted out an old standby from years past: "Amplification." Mr. Fussy really would have liked that.

Ron Borges' departure

As you probably already know, Globe sportswriter Ron Borges has quietly left the paper. That means his two-month suspension for lifting chunks of a column from the Tacoma News Tribune will stand as the last word on his long career at 135 Morrissey Boulevard.

David Scott, who's been blogging prodigiously on this (see this and this), invites me "to comment on the significance of the botched Borges bye-bye." Well, I don't know. At the time of Borges' suspension, I wondered if he'd ever come back. I guessed he would, since the Globe has been his platform for various broadcasting and outside writing assignments. I guessed wrong — hardly the first time.

Readers of Media Nation know that I'm an exceedingly narrow sports fan. Since Borges didn't cover the Red Sox, I've read very little of his stuff over the years. I do recommend this John Gonzalez profile of Borges in Boston Magazine, which includes the following hilarious passage:

Boston sports junkies might be surprised to hear this. Dan Shaughnessy has always been the guy they'd most like to dump into the harbor. But over the past few years, Borges seems to have supplanted his fellow Globe scribe as the most vilified writer in town. "We should have one of those Globe polls — 'Who do you hate more?'" Shaughnessy says. "I've challenged Borges to see who could get out the vote. It would be close. And it would be a lot more interesting than who's going to win the MVP."

Actually, it would be a lot less interesting than to see who's going to win the MVP, but that's Shaughnessy: a sportswriter who doesn't seem to like sports all that much.

One aspect of Borges' meltdown continues to trouble me. You cannot judge whether or not he committed plagiarism without taking a close look at the disclosure that ran with his football notes column, as well as with the notes columns of several other Globe sportswriters: "[M]aterial from personal interviews, wire services, other beat writers, and league and team sources was used in this report."

How do you hang someone out to dry for lifting material when there was a huge, blinking sign telling readers that the material they were about to read was at least partially — yes, lifted from other sources? Of course Borges should have rewritten the stuff he was taking, but it's not as though he'd claimed that it was the fruit of his own labors. To this day, I doubt that he thinks he did anything wrong. (Just to be clear: He did.)

The most fully reported piece on Borges' departure is by Jessica Heslam, in the Herald's Messenger Blog. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Borges — who actually returned to the Globe two weeks ago — realized that his outside work was not going to disappear if he left, and that he'd rather pursue that than stay with an employer who had publicly accused him of being a plagiarist.

Update: Cold, Hard Football Facts, the Web site that first reported on Borges' light fingers, weighs in on his departure — right down to some Snoop Dogg-style boasting about the size of its virtual testicles. Really.

David Ortiz's non-roid rage

Did the Herald do David Ortiz wrong? Globe columnist Jackie MacMullan ups the ante today with a lengthy piece on the fallout from the headline on a short Michael Silverman item in Tuesday's Herald. The headline: "Papi unwitting 'roid user?"

MacMullan writes: "The headline was a disservice to Ortiz, and to Silverman, who does not write his own headlines. In fact, no writer at a major paper writes his or her headlines."

OK, the headline was kind of idiotic. But, as these things go, it wasn't that bad. Here's how Silverman's item begins:

On the topic of steroids, Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz said he is not 100 percent positive that he's never used them. If he did, it happened when he was much younger.

"I tell you, I don't know too much about steroids, but I started listening about steroids when they started to bring that [expletive] up, and I started realizing and getting to know a little bit about it," Ortiz said Sunday. "You've got to be careful.... I used to buy a protein shake in my country. I don't do that any more because they don't have the approval for that here, so I know that, so I'm off of buying things at the GNC back in the Dominican [Republic]. But it can happen anytime, it can happen. I don't know. I don't know if I drank something in my youth, not knowing it."

I'd say the headline was an exaggeration of what Ortiz actually said, but not by that much. MacMullan says this about the Herald's headline:

It was an inflammatory rhetorical question that set off a national chain reaction of speculation. One of the first hints was when Red Sox manager Terry Francona said a Toronto reporter entered his office and declared that Ortiz had exposed himself as a steroid user.

The Toronto reporter needs a reading-comprehension lesson.

This is the second time the Globe has let Ortiz vent about the Herald; here is Gordon Edes' piece from Thursday's paper. And yes, I think the Herald could have written a more deft headline to describe Ortiz's remarks.

But the real story here is that Ortiz let himself get caught thinking out loud at a moment when everyone is baseball is freaked out about steroids. He said nothing wrong, but, sadly, in the current climate, he probably shouldn't have said anything.

McGrory named metro editor

The Herald's Jesse Noyes has the news, and Universal Hub's Adam Gaffin has the link. All I've got are the leftovers, but what the heck.

Globe metro columnist Brian McGrory has been named the paper's new metro editor, replacing Carolyn Ryan, who recently left for a job at the New York Times. According to editor Marty Baron's memo to the staff, McGrory will be replaced. So much for my theory that, with Pulitzer-winner Eileen McNamara already gone, Baron would find a new home for remaining metro columnist Adrian Walker and let the position wither away.

Gee, this won't short-circuit McGrory's sideline as a restaurant critic, will it? Check out his review today of Mamma Maria. The first reference to the food comes in, yes, the 10th graf.

The Obama difference

To quote Alex Beam, I write this with my head, not my heart. I don't have a dog in the 2008 presidential hunt. But I'm mystified by Beam's assertion in today's Globe that Barack Obama is this year's version of Howard Dean, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley and Bruce Babbitt.

Dean, Tsongas, Bradley and Babbitt were all utterly without charisma; Dean and Bradley came across as rather unpleasant fellows to boot. Tsongas, Bradley and Babbitt got a big boost from media types who were suckers for their cerebral, moderate politics. (Yes, Bradley ran as a liberal in 2000, but that wasn't his reputation as a senator.) Dean was the darling of the netroots, but actual voters never warmed up to him.

By contrast, Obama oozes charisma. His campaign's biggest asset, by far, is himself. Members of the Beam Quartet were small-timers trying to break into the the big time. Obama is a big-timer who may not quite be ready.

Obama may or may not be chosen as the Democratic presidential nominee. But if he's not, it certainly won't be because he's suffering from Howard Dean syndrome. And unlike the Beam Quartet, if Obama falls short, I suspect he'll get another chance somewhere down the line.

McCain and abortion rights

Scott Helman's story in today's Globe about Republican flip-floppers only provides a hint of Sen. John McCain's tortured history with respect to abortion rights. Helman, whose intent is to show that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is not the only GOP flip-flopper, writes this about McCain:

McCain has also made conflicting comments about whether he believes Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, should be overturned. He told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999 that he did not support a repeal. But earlier this year, speaking to about 800 people in Spartanburg, S.C., he sought to assure conservatives that he did.

"I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned," McCain said, according to the Associated Press.

That's true, as far as it goes. But McCain did not wait eight years to renounce his 1999 remarks about Roe v. Wade, as you might be led to believe from Helman's article; in fact, he started backpeddling almost immediately. Yet even though McCain had been a pro-life conservative for his entire political career, he was never quite able to reassure the right during the 2000 presidential campaign. Every time he opened his mouth about abortion, he committed a gaffe, defined by Michael Kinsley as when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Consider, for example, a Robert Novak column from Aug. 26, 1999, shortly after the Chronicle reported McCain's seeming change of heart. (I couldn't find the original Chronicle article.) Novak began thusly:

Perhaps spending the day with rich, liberal northern California Republicans, who cannot win elections but contribute lots of money, had its impact on Sen. John McCain. That is the only plausible explanation for his telling the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board last week that "certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade."

"It was a mistake, a terrible mistake," a McCain adviser told me, contradicting his presidential campaign's official line that the senator's opposition to abortion had not diminished (using the old saw that his remarks were taken out of context). McCain spent the weekend trying to straighten out his position, and was still sculpting his language Tuesday, five days after his first remarks.

McCain's mistake was explained privately by supporters as common to Republican politicians who don't care much or know much about abortion. They try to please both grass roots, pro-life activists and the well-heeled, pro-choice campaign contributors, in abundance last Thursday when McCain addressed San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. But it is a special problem for McCain. Waffling on abortion confirms his developing image as the most liberal Republican candidate, which might give him momentary pleasure as runner-up, but deny him ultimate satisfaction as the nominee.

McCain's abortion problem was no mere slip in San Francisco. His staff knew he blundered and sought quick correction. Appearing Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition," he no longer mentioned "the long term," but still opposed getting rid of Roe v. Wade "immediately." That didn't work either. Later that day, he issued a written statement: "I have always believed in the importance of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and as president I would work toward its repeal."

But in both Sunday's CNN interview and his written statement he repeated the canard that immediate repeal "would force thousands of young women to undergo dangerous and illegal operations."

After much polishing by his staff, McCain sent a letter to the Right to Life Committee on Tuesday, affirming his desire to overturn Roe v. Wade, with not one word about "dangerous and illegal operations."

I caught a glimpse of McCain's attempts to have it both ways in February 2000, when I spent several days following McCain and George W. Bush around South Carolina in the run-up to their pivotal primary. Among other things, McCain was desperately trying to stress his conservative credentials after allowing himself to be portrayed as a moderate in libertarian New Hampshire, where he had handily defeated Bush.

Unfortunately, I didn't quote McCain on abortion rights, so I can't report exactly what he said. But I did write this, about an appearance McCain made on MSNBC's "Hardball" at Clemson University: "McCain stressed his archconservative stand on social issues including gay marriage ('it's crazy'), abortion rights (he hopes the Supreme Court will someday overturn Roe v. Wade), and affirmative action (he's staunchly against quotas)."

As I also wrote at the time, McCain was in trouble with the right for answering a hypothetical question about his 15-year-old daughter's becoming pregnant by saying it would be her decision whether to have an abortion. He later "corrected" it by saying it would be a family decision.

The point of Helman's story in today's Globe is certainly valid: McCain and Rudy Giuliani, no less than Romney, have changed their minds on key issues as they seek the Republican nomination for president. Romney himself went after his two chief rivals earlier this week; Helman cites an Associated Press report in which Romney criticized McCain's one-time opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade. The former governor said:

Senator McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts. Now he's for them. He was opposed to ethanol. Now he's for it. He said he was opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade. Now he's for overturning Roe v. Wade.... That suggests that he has learned from experience.

So why does the flip-flopper charge seem to stick to Romney more than it does to his rivals? Republican operative Roger Stone tells Helman:

I think you can certainly move your political positions within a career and even within a campaign, but when you trade in your old philosophy for a new one, and you did it overnight across the board, it smacks of opportunism.

Well, yeah. I don't think I can recall a politician who has so conveniently and quickly done a 180 on a whole range of social and cultural issues in order to repackage himself for a different audience and a different audience. Yes, they all do it to some degree, but Romney is unique in his thoroughness, moving from socially moderate — even liberal — to ultraconservative virtually overnight.

McCain is another matter. Eight years ago he failed in his attempts simultaneously to appease conservatives and moderates. This time, he's falling short in his efforts to move to the right and stay there. Of course, as McCain himself has said repeatedly, he probably has no chance unless the war in Iraq — his main issue — starts to look like a winner. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much chance of that.

Talking (and talking) politics

Globe North today has a nice feature by Steven Rosenberg on the indomitable Michael Goldman, the political consultant turned talk-show host turned political consultant. And here's the sidebar. Yes, Goldman lives in Marblehead and grew up in Malden, but this should have run throughout the paper.

The Northeastern Globe

Congratulations to Michael Naughton and Hailey Heinz, two Northeastern journalism students whose investigative report on a dubious anti-gun initiative by Boston Mayor Tom Menino appears on the front page of today's Boston Globe.The mayor has proposed suspending the driver's licenses of gun offenders; but Naughton and Heinz found that few gun criminals even have licenses.

Naughton and Heinz did their work as part of an investigative-reporting class led by my NU colleague Walter Robinson, the Globe's Pulitzer-winning retired Spotlight Team editor.

A Pulitzer for the Globe

Congratulations to the Boston Globe and Washington-bureau reporter Charlie Savage, who've won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Savage was honored for his series on President Bush's use and abuse of presidential signing statements, which he's employed to sign legislation into law even while signaling that he intends to ignore it.

The prize comes at an interesting moment for the Globe, which has been downsizing its way into an almost entirely local paper. While I think that makes a lot of sense in an era when national and international news sites are just a click away, Savage's award demonstrates that it's important for the paper to look beyond Route 495 as well.

The Globe's other finalist, the Spotlight Team's "Debtor's Hell" series (helmed by my Northeastern colleague Walter Robinson), didn't win. Last week, though, it won the Society of Professional Journalists' Public Service Award, itself a significant honor.

Science, religion and global warming

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby leans heavily on MIT scientist Richard Lindzen — and not for the first time — in arguing that global warming is nothing to worry about. Lindzen has a commentary in the current Newsweek suggesting that we should all calm down, a sentiment that Jacoby heartily endorses.

To their credit, Lindzen and Jacoby are too intellectually honest to assert something they know to be false. Neither is willing to deny that global warming is real, or that human activity is at least partly responsible. Indeed, this is how Lindzen opens his piece:

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it?

Both Lindzen and Jacoby go on to say that we should relax because global warming might be good for us. True, Lindzen does say that global warming might prove not to be as bad as current models predict. But his essential view is contained in this sentence: "A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now."

This is religion, not science — not far removed from Frosty Hardison, the guy who likes global warming because he believes it will hasten Jesus' return to earth.

Jacoby and other conservative commentators should be careful about invoking Lindzen. The fact is that Lindzen accepts the science of human-caused global warming. Thus we are under no more obligation to accept Lindzen's value judgments than we are those of Frosty Hardison.

Globe bites Times Co.

Kudos to the Boston Globe this morning, which runs an op-ed piece blasting the New York Times Co. for outsourcing 45 Globe jobs to Bangalore, India.

The column, by Massachusetts AFL-CIO president Robert Haynes and journalist-turned-PR-consultant Jeremy Crockford, makes the point that the Times Co. is shipping jobs overseas just as the leaders of more-enlightened companies are beginning to realize that's incompatible with quality customer service. They write:

If it doesn't make sense for Comcast or Dell, it certainly doesn't make sense for The Boston Globe. Bad business decisions have dogged the Globe over the last 10 years and helped push circulation and revenues steadily downward. It's time the paper's owners turned to their own business pages and followed the lead of more savvy corporate thinkers. It's time to give local people back the jobs they are sending to Bangalore.

Here is an earlier piece, on the AFL-CIO Web site, about the labor group's efforts to stop the Times Co. from outsourcing Globe jobs.

Welch takes no for an answer

Jack Welch now says it's obvious that the New York Times Co. isn't going to sell the Globe to him and advertising honcho Jack Connors. "There was a time when it would have been right," Welch said in a speech at MIT, according to an account by Reuters. "Management has made it very clear to us that they have no interest in selling the Globe."

This is not a big surprise. The Times Co. hasn't budged since last fall, when Welch first made his interest known. (In keeping with the theme of the day, I'll point out that Mike Barnicle somehow figured into all of this.) Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. apparently believes there are better days ahead for the Globe. As a reader, I hope he's right. (Via Romenesko.)

Carolyn Ryan is N.Y.-bound

Scratch Globe metro editor Carolyn Ryan from the list of possible replacements for columnist Eileen McNamara. The New York Observer reports that she's accepted a job as deputy metro editor for government and politics at the New York Times.

I've known Ryan since the early 1990s, when she was covering Beacon Hill for The Patriot Ledger of Quincy. As a media reporter, I always found her to be accessible and a straight shooter, and I wish her well in New York. (Via Romenesko.)