The Boston Globe is a proudly liberal newspaper. So it’s a little stunning for their staff writers Christopher Muther and Hayley Kaufman to suggest that tax refunds are best spent on conspicuous consumption. They suggested “you may want to put any windfall toward your credit card bill,” but they didn’t suggest liberal Globe readers redistribute their refund income to the poor in the inner cities, in Appalachia, or in earthquake-stricken Haiti. They suggested people drop a grand on looking “like a demi-goddess” in thousand-dollar shoes.

Muther and Kaufman began: “It's not exactly found money, but the tax refund that may eventually surface in your mailbox gives you a prime opportunity to indulge in those long-delayed purchases, such as the pair of shoes that have been whispering your name, or the fragrance that has been winking at you from across the cosmetics counter.” Many items on their list were under $100, but then there were these:

Clash of the Titans'' has nothing on these. Look like a demi-goddess in the Quartz Patent Leather gladiator bootie, from Jimmy Choo, $995.

Now that spring is here, you'll need chic specs for your al fresco adventures. These will have you looking like a star. Develay sunglasses in emberwood, from Paul Smith, $255.

Well, we’re almost here, aren’t we? The end of a long, arduous, four-month campaign for a Senate seat that you have approximately the same chance of filling as you did the pilot’s chair of the Starship Enterprise.

The notion that Massachusetts would elect a Republican to fill the seat left vacant by Edward Kennedy was the property of people who buy interesting mushrooms in interesting places. You might as well expect the House of Windsor to be succeeded on the British throne by the Kardashian sisters.

Democrats now routinely say Martha Coakley was a bad candidate who took too much for granted in Massachusetts, even taking a vacation after winning the nomination for Ted Kennedy’s place in the Senate. But would they say the bad candidate was also failed by bad reporters who took too much for granted? On Monday, Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz found a bigwig at the Boston Globe who arrogantly dismissed the race and took a vacation. He wasn’t even apologetic about the arrogance:

Frank Phillips, the Globe's statehouse bureau chief, says he missed the last few days of the campaign by taking a personal trip with his wife that he finalized a couple of weeks earlier. "I made a decision at Christmas that this was not going to be an important race, others could handle it, I could be out of town," Phillips says.

But he says Brown was going nowhere earlier in the campaign: "What would you have written? 'Things were heating up'? Things weren't heating up. It would be unfair to say we had missed it, because it wasn't there."

Boston Globe writer Lisa Wangsness can't be blamed too much for assuming that appointed senator Paul Kirk's term ends when the winner of tomorrow's election in Massachusetts, Scott Brown (photo) or Martha Coakley, is seated. Wrong. Mass. law is very specific on that term limit as Fred Barnes has noted in the Weekly Standard. The reason why Wangsness can be forgiven for her error is that it is the same assumption made by most of the rest of the mainstream media. Here is the relevant section of her article about the effect of tomorrow's election on the health care bill:

Another possibility would be for Democrats to hurry and pass a compromise bill before Brown were seated.

It is not clear how much time Democrats would have in that case. Before the new Massachusetts senator takes office, Secretary of State William F. Galvin must certify the vote, and town clerks have to wait 10 days after the election to allow time for the ballots of military members serving overseas to arrive, then they have another five days to deliver the final results to Galvin, according to state election law. After that, the new senator can be sworn in.

It seems that the flat out health care flip-flop performed recently by Massachusetts Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate, Martha Coakley, was too hypocritically self serving for even the very liberal Boston Globe to spin in a way to make her look good. Either it was that or the fact that that they aren't worried about how such a story would affect Coakley's chances in the special election on January 19 since it is widely assumed that a win in the Democrat primary leads automatically to a coronation in the general election in that liberal state. Whatever the case, Boston Globe writer Lisa Wangsness shines a light on  Coakley's blatant political hypocrisy:

State Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee for US Senate, reluctantly threw her support yesterday behind the Senate health care bill, even though it contains restrictions on abortion coverage that abortion rights groups are calling unacceptable.

During the primary campaign, Coakley said she would not have supported the House health care bill because of provisions designed to prevent federal funding of abortions that abortion rights advocates said went too far. Her stand was a major point of debate during the campaign; several of her opponents criticized her for being willing to sink the health care bill over a single issue, but she insisted that there were some things on which she would not compromise.