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The Boston Globe has picked up on a trend: Senate Republicans keeping rejecting Cambridge academics. They've blocked the nomination of Harvard faculty member Donald Berwick to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Berwick's not alone in being left out in the cold: 

This isn't the first scapegoating of a highly qualified New England academic. Berwick's plight is reminiscent of that of another accomplished local notable, MIT economist Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate whose appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was blocked by Senate conservatives. And, of course, there was the furor over President Obama's choice of Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she created. The rejection of these highly intelligent, eminently qualified scholars says little about them. But it is a sad commentary on today's US Senate. 

Those poor dears, trudging their ways back to campus without all the massive power they deserve. Good thing the hometown paper is looking out for them.