FOR THE better part of a year, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has been warning that pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in the name of pandemic relief and economic stimulus was likely to have a dangerous side effect: reawakening the sleeping dragon of inflation.

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IT'S THAT time of the decade again.

With the final results of the 2020 Census in hand, legislators are rejiggering the boundaries of congressional districts, in order to ensure that each of their state's US House members represent a nearly identical number of residents. All too often, though, the straightforward arithmetic of redistricting gets entangled in the complicated calculus of politics.

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DURING SUNDAY'S "On the Record" roundtable on WCVB-TV, Governor Charlie Baker was asked by co-host Ed Harding to identify the first Republican governor of Massachusetts: "Was it John Andrew, was it Alexander Bullock, or was it Nathaniel Banks?"

Baker didn't hesitate. "It was Alexander Bullock," he confidently replied.

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PRO-TRUMP REPUBLICANS have been deploying the F-word to convey their dislike for the president of the United States, and The Washington Post is appalled.

I'm appalled too, but with a difference.

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Remember "soccer moms?" During the 1996 election season, they were the married, middle-class, politically independent suburban voters who were widely regarded as the swing demographic on whom that year's election would turn.

Remember "values voters?" That was the term coined in 2004 for religious conservatives, the critical bloc whose support, it was said, put George W. Bush over the top in his reelection bid against John Kerry.

Six years later, the political momentum was with the libertarian/populist Tea Party voters — you surely remember them — who administered what President Barack Obama ruefully called a "shellacking" in the 2010 midterms, flipping the House of Representatives from blue to red.

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