By Michael Goldman
Lowell Sun
January 12, 2015

Gov. Charlie Baker has made some very good choices for his new cabinet, but he really got it right when he named Marylou Sudders to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Can you say superstar?

Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, a former governor of Arkansas, an unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate, and now a former Fox News Channel talk-show host, got it wrong when he recently quit his show because he is considering another run for president in 2016.

Paging Harold Stassen.

It was a very close call, but my gut tells me the federal appeals court got it right when it both refused to delay the Marathon Bomber trial and refused a request for a change the venue.

The crime was here, and here is where the trial ought to be held.

Just my opinion, but Jeb Bush has got it wrong if he thinks his quitting a whole bunch of corporate boards is going to protect him from in-depth scrutiny, either from the press or his Republican political opponents in 2015.

So how do you spell "special interests," anyway?

Sad as it was to see former President Ronald Reagan's press secretary, James Brady, finally succumb from the shots fired by John W. Hinckley Jr. during a March 1981 attempt to assassinate the president, the Justice Department got it right when they decided not to charge Hinckley with murder.

Truth is, Hinckley was crazy back then and at 59, is simply not the same man he was when he fired those shots.

Bristol Palin got it wrong -- very, very wrong -- recently when she lamented that there ought to be less emphasis on the separation of church and state when it comes to the governance of the United States.

Clearly, she's watching way too much of the "War on Christmas" gibberish broadcast by the Fox News Channel.

If you think President Barack Obama lately has not got it right, then explain the increase in jobs, the drop in gas prices, the rise in consumer confidence, the decrease in unemployment, the rise in the minimum wage and the decrease in crime.

And I failed to mention the new housing starts and the booming stock prices on Wall Street.

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, it seems Americans got it wrong when they agreed that President Obama got it right by deciding the United States ought to keep thousands of troops in Afghanistan indefinitely in order to help that nation's army fight the resurgent Taliban.

At some point, the U.S. has to just admit thousands of deaths and thousands of injuries plus billions and billions of dollars poured down the drain in that faraway sinkhole can't change the fact that Afghanistan's future needs to be in its own hands, not ours.

The Boston Herald editorial board, hardly the home of left-wing partisans, got it right when it called on the House Republicans in Washington to replace their new No. 3 leader, U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise after it was not only revealed he had addressed a white-supremacist organization, but also that the white supremacists had urged their members to vote for him because "he was a longtime supporter of us."

It is ill-advised decisions like this one from the Republican leadership team in Congress to support Scalise that keeps Reagan Democrats from actually leaving the Democratic Party for good.

The police in New York City got it wrong -- so wrong -- when they politicized the funerals of two murdered colleagues by turning their backs on NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.

There's a time for confrontation and a time for respect. Funerals demand respect.

Finally, kudos to the leadership of the State Legislature, which got it right to let die a last-ditch, back-door proposal that would have made ATMs available inside all of the newly approved casinos in the state.

If this inconvenience of location saves a single gambler from draining his bank account in a desperate effort to get even after losing a bundle to the casino, I say three cheers for this obstacle.

Michael Goldman is a paid political consultant for Democratic candidates and president of Goldman Associates in Boston.

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