In the Boston Globe, we see yet another example of poor reporting, covering only one side of the story. You know, the side that supports the reporter’s favored policy outcomes.

Ms. Kay Lazar writes about the growing number of underweight children showing up at emergency departments across the country, but specifically in Boston. In telling her story, she uses the example of single, unemployed mother of three Ms. Jannell Goode (apparently the “e” from the end of “Jannelle” migrated to the end of “Good”). Ms. Goode tells Ms. Lazar she struggles to keep her family fed on government benefits and private handouts.

Truly, if the article is factually accurate, it is a travesty that any child in our country of plenty is underweight. But let’s look at some of the topics the article the author does not touch upon.

1. Ms. Lazar uses data from five cities (Boston, Baltimore, Little Rock, Minneapolis and Philadelphia) that appears to be provided by Children’s HealthWatch (yes, it’s really one word crammed together — it’s a hippie do-gooder convention), an advocacy group that would have nothing to advocate for if the problem it identified ceased to exist. Is the data provided biased or otherwise inaccurate? We don’t know, because the author does not tell us. It is curious how incurious our reporter is.

2. Doctors are referring guardians of severely malnourished children to apparently on-staff nutritionists. There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but here are a couple of questions that went unasked. Do the doctors/hospitals benefit monetarily from the use of its nutritional clinics by the malnourished? Who is paying for the treatment? Don’t you have a legal duty to report suspected child abuse? If so, why do you think that presentation of a severely malnourished child in a city where food is provided at no cost to the recipient is not prima facie evidence of child abuse at the hands of the guardian?

3. The author notes that advocates estimate there are tens of thousands of families in Massachusetts who are eligible for food stamps but are too put off by the paperwork to apply. The advocates then bemoan the cuts in funding that are causing workers hired expressly to seek out, find and enroll are being cut back. If you are too lazy or stupid to figure out how to get free food to feed your young children, you are too stupid or lazy to keep the aforementioned children. Sure, it’s tough on folks to take their (neglected) children away from them, and expensive. But if you’re really all about the best interests of the child, isn’t the child better served by being in an environment where it is at least fed regularly, whether in foster care, adoption or a state institution? And if there really are the long term effects related to malnourishment you claim, isn’t it cheaper in the long run to remove the child from that environment?

4. Massachusetts apparently has an Orwellian sounding Department of Transitional Assistance. To what state of being is the department assisting transition? Complete dependence on the government? How about we just call it what it is. Department of Wealth Redistribution? Department of Government Dependence? Or how about simply Department of Welfare.

Sometimes we learn more about a writer by what she doesn’t write than by what she does write. This is one of those times.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.