President Joe Biden ought to stay at Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower during the Democrat Party convention in August. That would show former President Donald Trump who is the boss. The 92-story lavish hotel with a huge TRUMP sign on its facade looms over Chicago the way Trump looms over Biden. It also looms over the United Center, the site of the nominating convention. The lush hotel, with its expansive views of Lake Michigan, the Chicago River and everything beyond, is only 4 miles from the Unity Center or 10 to 15 minutes away by limo. By taking a score of rooms at $ 500 a night ..read more

No matter how vile and greedy a career criminal you are, before your sentencing, you can always find somebody to write a letter to the judge attesting to your fine, upstanding character and how this string of unspeakable felonies you committed was merely some kind of tragic misunderstanding. Just ask thieving, disgraced ex-Mass. State Police Sgt. Bill Robertson, age 62, sentenced this week to three years in federal prison for conspiracy, theft from a federal program and four counts of mail fraud in the gigantic years-long overtime grift. Judge, this is so unjust. He was a Cub Scout! In 1995, h ..read more

The intifada has come to Boston. Lost in the national news out of Columbia and Yale were the raucous protests at Emerson College and Harvard that resulted in injured cops and more than 100 arrests. The defiance of protesters against police and their fellow students is part of a wider trend that signals the beginning of the end of the overpriced, elite university system in the United States. While what’s happening at Columbia, NYU, and Harvard are all disturbing, the reckless nature of the student protesters and weak-kneed response from Emerson, my alma mater, is especially unsettling. Followin ..read more

There is no artificial intelligence without the vast trove of human knowledge. Today’s generative AI applications were built on a foundation of such information, drawn from across the internet and from various databases totaling, according to at least one estimate, somewhere around 300 billion words. That’s a lot of intellectual property, much of it produced by generations of professional writers, honed and polished by editors and sent out into the world by publishers in newspapers, magazines, books and more. Hard to put an exact price on such a thing or even to measure the collective value of ..read more

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into claims that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are violating antitrust laws and will be filing a lawsuit soon. Maybe. Justice won’t comment on an open investigation, but The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have both reported the department will be filing a lawsuit this month over the company’s alleged violations of antitrust laws. According to the Journal, the suit “would allege the nation’s biggest concert promoter has leveraged its dominance in a way that undermined competition for ticketing live events,” though the specific claims were sti ..read more

Diana DiZoglio’s pro-union audit of the rideshare industry raises questions about whether she’s using her taxpayer-funded office for political purposes and playing favorites with campaign supporters. The release of the audit appears to have been partly coordinated with the Teamsters and a pro-union legislator and used a study by a union advocacy group to reach its conclusion that rideshare companies were shortchanging the state by hundreds of millions of dollars by not classifying its drivers as employees. For someone who prides themselves on independence and political courage, DiZoglio’s ride ..read more

The elegant building at 46 Beacon Street, now under contention, would make the perfect governor’s mansion. Massachusetts is one of the few states that does not have one. Gov. Maura Healey currently lives with her partner Joanna Lydgate and her two children in Lydgate’s Arlington home. The vacant Boston building, which overlooks Boston Common on Beacon Hill, sits between the State House and Charles Street. A governor living there could walk to work as well as have a place for meetings and entertaining visiting dignitaries, something she cannot do in Arlington. The facility could be like the cit ..read more

The Federal Reserve voted to keep interest rates at a 23-year high Wednesday, as inflation continues to climb. The Fed is waiting for inflation to hit the sweet spot of 2%. With Joe Biden at the helm, it will be waiting a long time. Raising interest rates during a time of high inflation is just one tool in the kit to bring costs down. Getting a tighter rein on spending is crucial. Biden must have been absent when this was covered in Economics 101. The president hasn’t tapped the brakes on running up the national debt, not by a long shot. It was announced Wednesday that the Biden administration ..read more

It was the age of “Duck and Cover,” the civil defense drills that taught children to crouch under their desks in case of nuclear attack. The Cold War gave rise to many such exercises in dealing with the unthinkable, and Boston was on the front lines. When this May 3, 1960 photo was taken, firefighters were using a building being demolished in the West End as a backdrop for a civil defense test. A rescue team was dispatched from a nearby “command post” after simulated air attack. (AP Photo/Bill Chaplis ..read more

Here’s a headline from the Harvard Crimson that may cheer you up: “State Legislature Is Considering an Endowment Tax; Experts Say It Could ‘Cripple’ Harvard.” The sooner the better, I’d say. Who says Beacon Hill never does anything for working-class Americans? Or tries to, anyway. If I were a state rep, this is what I would say: “Mr. Speaker, I make a motion to suspend the rules and proceed to an immediate roll-call vote of the ayes and nays on this long-overdue tax-Harvard-back-to-the-Stone-Age bill. “And then after enactment, Mr. Speaker, we can attach a rider to dispense with the 90-day wai ..read more