A Front Page Globe Shocker

A pension article on the front page of the Boston Globe? You're kidding me?! That never happens.

The recipe for a Boston Globe page 1 headline seems to be any spurious thing linking DiMasi to something bad (Hey, Andrea Estes, did you know Sal's friends w/the bogeyman?), anything related to a pension, or when the Sox win a big game. It's a farce of a newspaper.

Note: I'm not saying pension articles shouldn't be printed in the Globe - and I'm not saying this wasn't a worthy one - but this is hardly A1, top of the fold material. Furthermore, they rarely get the whole story in any of these articles. For example, while these 'trapdoor' pensions have ended up with disabled retirees getting more than many disabled retirees, there's many disabled firemen and woman and police officers who end up struggling mightily because they were disabled before they reached their high income years, ensuring a better pension. Furthermore, disabilities are likely to result in increased household costs - that's just common sense. So, while the loophole the Globe brought up may be exceedingly generous and often abused, it may make sense to give some sort of extra thought into how disabled veterans should be compensated. If the Globe took that perspective in the article, it would have been a more interesting one - instead, they retreated to their comfort zone of pension attack, attack, attack. It's not until the end of page 2 in the online version that they start to tackle any of those questions. Perhaps the journalists writing these tire of watching their 401(k)s dissipate precipitously.

In any event, it reconfirms my longstanding notion: pensions are the new third rail of politics in Massachusetts, thanks to the Globe and Herald.