Pick your poison

Happy Saturday. Haircut day, finally.

The Portland Press Herald has a message for President Trump.

The MBTA governing board has decided, as its own little protest, to stop transporting Boston Police officers on T buses when they deploy to large public events. One of the reasons that the police use those buses is to minimize the number of cruisers parked in places that could become volatile, where those cars might incite the situation or be burned or vandalized. Not to mention that getting a lot of cops around in cars through crowds is dangerous for everybody. And, this gesture apparently doesn’t even apply to the MBTA’s own police force. They can still ride the buses. How does any of this make sense? It really doesn’t.

It’s not a healthy thing for this country when anonymous federal and military police are deployed to solve local problems. But that’s what’s happening. It would be fruitless for our local politicians to try to defund their local police only to have them replaced with nameless federal agents or soldiers. Worse, not better.

In the Sunday Book Review, A.O. Scott writes about Wallace Stegner. I always thought Stegner was underrated. There’s a depth and craft to his writing that you don’t see often with other writers. And speaking of other writers, when Stegner was teaching in the creative writing program at Stanford, among his students were Wendell Berry, Sandra Day O’Connor, George V. Higgins, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry. That’s not a bad legacy.

And the pizzas just keep on coming. Bad news for a guy in Belgium but good news if you like news that reads like a Python sketch.

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