This is cool: ‘plug-and-play’ solar panels that you simply hang on your back porch/wall/balcony and plug in. No electricians needed. … And they’ll only get better and less expensive by the day.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin, via a Peter Wehner op-ed in the Times, isn’t the first person to point out that the Republican Party has become an anti-left party with no other consistent governing principles, excluding its cult-of-personality devotion to Donald Trump, of course. But Levin does explain it well. 

Scott Van Voorhis has an excellent remembrance of the late Jack Connors, who, among many things as a behind-the-scenes civic leader in Boston, helped save Fenway Park. … Meanwhile, Dan Kennedy looks at Connors’s two attempts to buy the Boston Globe. Just as well they were unsuccessful attempts. Connors et gang would have paid a ridiculously high price for the Globe compared to the later bargain-basement deal John Henry got from the NYT.

Update – From a reader: “The Fenway story brought back memories… sketches of the new stadium that was to seat 44,000 (I recall an upper deck), Mindich blasting away weekly in the Phoenix.   It was three-cornered newspaper war, which I read daily on the way to downtown on the Orange Line.  Great stuff and a happy ending for the team and the Fenway.   Although I would like to know when the bridge over the Pike will reopen to two real lanes of traffic (probably never…)”

I know it’s early in her campaign, but Kamala Harris will have to do a lot better – and I mean, a lot better – talking about economics than she has recently. According to this AP story, Harris has started to “craft her own narrative around the economy” by focusing on “ending child poverty, promoting labor unions, reducing the costs of health and child care and protecting ‘dignity”’ in retirement.” With the exception of the labor item, that doesn’t sound  like an economic agenda. It sounds more like a social-policies agenda. And it’s simply not going to cut it. 

Harris has got to talk about taxes, tariffs, trade, housing construction, small businesses, infrastructure projects, manufacturing, regulatory issues, and income disparities and good-paying jobs. And, yes, she has to confront inflation. The Republicans are going to pound into that issue – and she can’t hide from it. 

She has to understand that ���it’s the economy, stupid,” not the social policies, stupid.

Btw – Harvard’s Michael Sandel says Harris needs to address the economic grievances of working-class voters, such as their concerns about immigration and inflation. I don’t like some of his “reimagining the economy” proposals, but he’s on the right track about focusing on key economic issues.

Re the closures of Steward hospitals: I’m a big believer in the free enterprise system, but there’s something profoundly wrong when private equity firms are allowed to play double-dealing shell games with previously non-profit hospitals founded with the charitable dollars and cents of rich and poor people alike. … Maybe a law like this from Elizabeth Warren is needed. … Again, I’m pro-free enterprise. But I’m not utopian about it. There are abuses out there. And if pillaging an entire hospital system isn’t an economic abuse, then there’s no such thing as economic abuse.

You know there had to be a Massachusetts angle or two – and James Piereson at the New Criterion and Ed Kilgore at the Intelligencer have found ‘em. The former writes that all the excitement surrounding Kamala Harris reminds him of Michael Dukakis circa summer 1988. Meanwhile, the latter thinks Republicans will try to give Harris the 2004 John Kerry treatment. … Via RCP, both pieces are a bit of a stretch. I’ll be more impressed when they come up with a legit John Adams angle.

Update – I liked these lines from the NYT’s Ross Douthat on the Harris anointment:

“Democrats have made their peace with her nomination, but they are making a virtue of necessity, not crowning a victor or rewarding a great success. …

“For the establishment rallying around her, the question is whether the united front that’s contained Trump but failed to bury him has enough remaining juice, enough potency in spite of its divisions, to achieve a great and heretofore unlikely seeming feat: making Kamala Harris happen.”

I’m a little surprised this investigative story by STAT News, owned by the Boston Globe Media Group, isn’t getting more play, i.e. how insurance giant UnitedHealth’s “unrivaled leverage over physicians” is used to generate revenue for both its insurance arm and clinicians – “similar to how Standard Oil amassed power as both the buyer and seller in oil refining.” … Squeezed in the middle? Patients, of course. … Maybe this is one of those stories that has to sink in for a while before the rest of the media starts referring to it in future pieces about UnitedHealth. … Here is STAT’s own link to the story (sub req.)

The WSJ’s Peggy Noonan is impressed so far with Kamala Harris’s candidacy: “Ms. Harris has not, in five years on the national stage, shown competence. She is showing it now, and that is big news. Her rollout this week demonstrated talent and hinted she may be a real political athlete.”

One note of caution from Noonan: Harris has to “scramble toward the center and try to hold it every day” but “it isn’t at all clear that is her intention.”

Update – Andrew Sullivan is ripping into the Harris anointment, calling her the “weakest and most woke” candidate, and he points to past negative articles on Harris like this and this and this to make his point. … For now, I’m leaning in Noonan’s direction. Harris has impressed so far.

Try as I might, I can’t get too excited about the upcoming Summer Olympics. I’m certainly happy Boston isn’t hosting the games, that’s for sure. But I long ago tuned out the Olympics in general for a variety reasons, including the God-awful television coverage in the U.S. that has emphasized the sentimental story lines of individual athletes over actual sporting events. My primary reason for tuning out the Olympics, though, is that they’ve gotten too big and gaudy, with too many silly sports that distract from what used to be the jewel in the crown of the Games, i.e. track and field (now lumped into the generic “athletic” category).

If the governing Olympics committee was ever wise enough to appoint me czar of the Summer Olympics, herewith are some of the sports I’d eliminate, pronto. Note: I’m getting rid of some the world’s most famous major sports because they have their own championship games that are valued far more by athletes than the Olympics, such as soccer’s World Cup, tennis’s Wimbledon and U.S. Open, golf’s Masters and British Open, rugby’s World Cup, etc. Then I’d go after other often dubious sports with the goal of narrowing the Olympics focus to core sports, especially track and field. Here goes with my elimination list:

Flag football (yes, it’s coming in 2028), football (i.e. soccer), Rugby Sevens, badminton, baseball/softball, basketball 3X3, beach volleyball (i.e. bikini volleyball, not to be confused with indoor volleyball), breaking, golf, skateboarding, short climbing, surfing, cricket, lacrosse, tennis, table tennis, trampoline, rhythmic gymnastics.  

I’ve left a few major and silly sports off the list for old-fashioned tradition and ridicule’s sake.

Here’s an interesting piece comparing 2024 to other tumultuous years in U.S. history. As bad as we think things are today, it’s nothing compared to 1968. Nor 1940, for that matter, as war loomed for America and as democracies fell one after another in Europe. I’m not sure about including 1973, but it was indeed a crazy time. I’m a little puzzled why 1860, perhaps the most consequential election year in U.S. history, wasn’t included.

Btw – With all the talk these days of civil war, we’re living in comparatively tame times compared to 1970, when terrorist political bombings were out of control. They weren’t as lethal compared to later terrorist acts, but they were a destabilizing and unnerving constant in America.