| Mentally ill patients can wait days, or even weeks, in emergency rooms for care |
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| This says so much about the pathetic state of mental-health care in America today. From Liz Kowalczyk at the Globe: “Some patients with mental illness, particularly children, are spending days stuck in tiny windowless rooms in hospital emergency departments waiting for treatment, a persistent problem despite new statewide rules designed to resolve the backlogs. From February through May, 155 patients in mental health crisis spent at least four consecutive days in an emergency room, according to Massachusetts officials who began gathering the data six months ago. A few patients slept or ‘boarded’ in the ER for two weeks.” |
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| Speaking of the mentally ill … |
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| Neal Simpson at Wicked Local reports that before Weymouth police officer Michael Chesna and Vera Adams were gunned down with a stolen handgun on Sunday morning, Weymouth police received a frantic 911 from a woman warning them that her 20-year-old boyfriend had been acting erratically and was prone to manic episodes. Specifically, she said her boyfriend suffered from a bipolar disorder. That boyfriend, apparently, was none other than Emanuel Lopes, who yesterday was ordered held without bail on charges of murdering Chesna and Adams, as the Globe reports.
We’re not making excuses for Lopes. He stands accused of murder. But he was also clearly mentally ill and, well, see the above post about how society deals with the mentally ill. He was, it appears, a ticking time bomb. |
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| Towns and cities see drop-off in police recruits |
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| Regarding the dangers of police work, from Mary Markos at the Herald: “The number of men and women willing to join the Thin Blue Line is plunging in an era of execution-style killings of cops and heightened scrutiny of officers’ split-second decisions in high-stress situations, police commanders say. Once a much sought-after job that offered honor, prestige, good benefits and lucrative details, there are now dramatically fewer people sitting for the civil service exam, and retaining veteran cops is becoming a problem.”
Obviously, this past weekend’s killing of a Weymouth police officer isn’t helping matters. |
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| GOP candidates fume over Warren’s two-track campaigning |
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| The Herald’s Hillary Chabot reports on the intense frustration among Republican U.S. Senate candidates over U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s apparent simultaneous bid to win re-election here while also maneuvering for the Dem inside post in the 2020 presidential election. But before Republicans get too outraged, remember that former Republican Gov. Mitt Romney did roughly the same thing early last decade, i.e. running the state while running for president, as Democrat Phil Johnston notes in Chabot’s piece. For that matter, ditto for former U.S. Sen. John Kerry in 2004. |
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| Meanwhile, Walsh hits the campaign trail in … Ohio? |
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| From the Globe’s Matt Stout: “In moves that will undoubtedly stoke speculation about his own political future, Mayor Martin J. Walsh will kick off a tour of Midwest states that figured prominently in Donald Trump’s 2016 victory to stump for like-minded Democrats and rally local laborers this week. The second-term mayor is scheduled to fly to Ohio Thursday before visiting Indiana for a two-day trip through Republican-leaning districts where Democrats are vying for open congressional seats or mounting challenges to longtime incumbents.”
Walsh says his trips, similar to those by other big-city mayors, is being done out of party loyalty, not personal ambition for higher office. |
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| Scott Lively shifts into full conspiracy-theory mode over opioids, government control of citizens, etc. |
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| This must be his idea of a political pivot. From Matt Stout at the Globe: “Scott Lively, the controversial pastor mounting a long-shot conservative challenge to Governor Charlie Baker, indicated Tuesday that it’s ‘plausible’ the state’s elected officials are conspiring to use government-funded programs to control the citizenry, with the intent of funneling federal money to the state’s coffers and keeping hold of their respective offices.” Specifically, he says “cynical politicians who have controlled this system” are “using (opioid) addicts like cash cows.” |
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| Keating goes there: ‘Our president could be compromised’ |
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| As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reports, there used to be a time when suggesting President Trump might be getting blackmailed by the Russians was “Something We Didn’t Talk About.” No more, he notes. Not after President Trump’s performance at this past weekend’s Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Locally, U.S. Rep Bill Keating is among those going there: “This raises very serious questions … that our president could be compromised,” Keating said of the Helsinki summit, as reported by WGBH’s Tori Bedford. “That issue is an open issue, but it’s one, given the actions of the president, that can’t be dismissed.” |
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| Other Helsinki-horror stories: ‘How bad is it? So bad that … ‘ |
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| Even though the president yesterday was backtracking from his controversial Helsinki comments, there was no shortage of local reactions from pols and bleacher-seat pundits over the president’s original remarks that were seen as exonerating Russia of any election-year meddling. “How bad is it?” writes the Herald’s Joe Battenfeld of Trump’s Helsinki debacle. “So bad that Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Lively, best known for blaming the Holocaust on gay Nazis, gave it ‘two thumbs up.’ So bad that Gov. Charlie Baker himself had to come out of his shell to condemn it.”
Speaking of Baker, he initially said yesterday that it’s important that the election-interference investigation of Robert Mueller continue – but that he didn’t know what was said in Helsinki, reports Shira Schoenberg at MassLive. But, as Battenfeld writes, the governor later condemned the president’s remarks as “disgraceful.”
But state Rep. Geoff Diehl, who is running for the U.S. Senate in the GOP primary, thinks the Helsinki summit went just swell, reports Mary Whitfill at the Patriot Ledger.
The Globe’s Renée Graham agrees more with Gov. Baker: “What happened Monday at their post-summit press conference in Helsinki was nothing short of an American president, in the presence of a tyrant, collapsing like a cheap beach chair.” The Globe’s Scot Lehigh writes that things sure are getting “stinky” for Trump.
Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern is pressing House Republicans to fund grants that help protect U.S. election systems from foreign hackers, Schoenberg also reports at MassLive. |
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| Ah, yet another anti-Trump protest, this one over his Helsinki statements |
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| We must be suffering from a variation of the Trump fatigue that the Globe’s Annie Linskey was writing about the other day, for, even though we’re as shocked as others about the president’s Helsinki performance, we really can’t get worked up by the fact that left-wing groups, including MoveOn, Daily Kos and Need to Impeach, etc., are planning vigils this evening at the State House and across the country to protest Trump’s statements, as SHNS’s Michael Norton (pay wall) reports. It’s just, well, the same old outraged protesters.
As Linskey wrote: “There have been nationwide protests on a slew of topics: marches to oppose Trump’s inauguration and to support women’s rights, marches to oppose the Muslim ban, marches to support gun control, amid a spate of mass killings, and marches to oppose Trump’s now recanted policy of separating immigrant families arriving at the southern border. It’s a lot of outrage and an awful lot of protesting.”
Andrew Bacevich, in a Globe opinion piece this morning, is advising the left to calm down a bit: “If there is a paranoid style in evidence in American politics today, it is proliferating like kudzu among anti-Trumpers who have allowed their understandable dismay with the president to become an all-consuming mania.” |
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| Mr. President, about that shipment of Russian LNG to Boston … |
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| OK, one last Helsinki-related item: We didn’t know that President Trump, who recently criticized Germany for its natural-gas deals with Russia, was asked point blank by a Russian journalist about this past January’s shipment of Russian LNG to Boston. The president dodged the question. Craig LeMoult at WGBH has the details. |
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| Woman who threatened to shoot newspaper reporter held without bail |
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| After the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, better safe than sorry. From Norman Miller at Wicked Local: “A Wrentham District Court judge on Tuesday declared a Shutesbury woman accused of threatening to shoot a reporter in the Walpole Times office a danger to the public. Judge Maureen McManus said there were no conditions of release for Amy Zuckerman, 64, that could protect the reporter or the public at large, ordering Zuckerman held without bail for 120 days.” |
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