“DEAD PEOPLE voted!” “In Wisconsin, a ‘glitch’ added over 100,000 votes to Biden’s tally in the dead of the night, and ZERO to any other candidate.” Tweets from President Trump? No. A fundraising email from Massachusetts Republican Party chairman Jim Lyons. Taking a page from the man he’s shown unstinting loyalty to, Lyons is parroting […]
Michael Jonas
Michael Jonas works with Bruce in overseeing CommonWealth Beacon coverage and editing the work of reporters. His own reporting has a particular focus on politics, education, and criminal justice reform.
Michael has worked in journalism in Massachusetts since the early 1980s. Before joining the CommonWealth staff in 2001, he was a contributing writer for the magazine for two years. His story on Boston youth outreach workers was selected for a PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. His CommonWealth work has also won awards from Capitol Beat for state government coverage and from the New England Newspaper & Press Association for work in several areas.
Prior to coming to CommonWealth, for 15 years Michael wrote a weekly column on local politics for the Boston Globe. Michael has also worked in broadcast journalism. In the late 1980s he was a co-producer for "The AIDS Quarterly," a national PBS series produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, and in the early 1990s, he worked as a producer for a weekly news magazine program on WHDH-TV (Ch. 7) in Boston.
Posted inPolitics
Baker really is a RINO
GOV. CHARLIE BAKER’S status was sealed last night: He is now an officially certified leading figure among the ever-shrinking ranks of major elected Republican officials who question the sanity of their party. It came when CNN’s Don Lemon, whose nightly show has been part of the cable network’s four-year monologue on the destruction being wrought […]
Posted inPolitics
Biden trumps Trump
AFTER FOUR TUMULTUOUS years under Donald Trump that upended countless norms of the US presidency and four days of vote-counting that kept the country — and world — on edge, Joe Biden was elected the country’s 46th president. Victory came on the 77-year-old former Democratic vice president’s third run for the White House, and also […]
Posted inPolitics
One place Trump gained in Mass.: heavily Latino cities
DEEP BLUE MASSACHUSETTS, where Joe Biden ran up his biggest margin of any state, was an afterthought in the presidential race, which was largely fought in a dozen or so battleground states. But results in Lawrence and a handful of other Massachusetts Gateway Cities with large Latino populations show a striking pattern that lines up […]
Posted inPolitics
Race in doubt, polling in the cross hairs
WE DON’T KNOW who will win the presidential election, but it seems clear who is getting tagged with a big loss: pollsters. “We still don’t know much about this election — except that the media and pollsters blew it again,” reads the headline over Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan’s early-morning dispatch posted at 5 […]
Posted inPolitics
Blue wave rolls across state
WITH AMERICANS CASTING ballots in an election unlike any other, Massachusetts residents voted in record numbers, with Democrats hoping that a blue wave washing over Bay State contests extends to the presidential race and pivotal US Senate contests as well as to down-ballot races for seats in the already Democrat-dominated state Legislature. From the home […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
Shots fired — at cars and the media
GUNFIRE RANG OUT yesterday afternoon in the Back Bay. The casualties? Several cars — and confidence among some in the media’s coverage of gun violence. No one was hit in the gunfire exchange, which occurred near the corner of Fairfield and Boylston streets, but several cars were struck. With gun violence on a troubling upswing […]
Posted inEducation
For Catholic schools, class is in session — and in person
WHILE THE SCHOOL YEAR has been upended for thousands of public school students across the state, Corrin Stokes’s school day this fall looked largely the same as it did last year. After donning her school uniform and eating breakfast, the friendly 7-year-old hops in the car with her mother, Arleaya Martin, for the drive from […]
Posted inPolitics
Biden’s lead has supporters…worried
WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL election now eight days away, we have a pretty good sense of where things stand. Or do we? There’s been an avalanche of polling this cycle, and it all seems to point to a consistent lead for Joe Biden, but there’s been no end to the nail biting among campaigns and political […]
Posted inEducation
Could exam school admissions changes have unintended consequences?
COULD THE CURE be as bad as the disease? The Boston School Committee appears to be on track to rush through a major change in the admission procedures for next fall for the city’s three selective-entry “exam schools.” The plan, unveiled at a School Committee meeting two weeks ago, is to scrap the use of […]