It has just got to hurt when

you get dope-slapped by the Supreme Court...like being smacked in the pie hole with the business end of a shovel.
It is a BIG wake up call, trust Humble Elias on this.

Yup the SC has ruled that the President doesn't have the Tudor-like power to lock us all up for trial under the rules of Jus Gladii. This has immediate and obvious implications for the Guantanamo detainees and some long term impact on the whole warrantless wiretapping program.
Bush had his day in court and he lost bigtime.
Now no doubt the today and the holiday weekend to come will be full of sad yelpings from the Praetorian Class and it's numerous paid apologists in the media. Authoritarian Government always has its supporters after all. The cry will go up for even more rightical chic Justices...but with the President's approval rating mired at 29% and an election looming it is hard to see how he gets another Alito or Scalia on the Court without sending in the Marines.

Reed Hillman: Demagogue

In today's Globe, Kerry Healey's handpicked candidate for Lt. Governor added this bon mot to the current debate about a needle exchange program:

"Imagine your children not only coming upon dirty needles in the park, but standing in line next to a heroin or crack addict in a drugstore,"

Well, I guess the Commandant is agin' it.

Humble Elias could rant ad nauseum about Hillman's clever use of fundamentally despised strawmen (addicts) to whip up the usual tedious hysteria about crime and anarchy.
However...Look at it this way; suppose we follow the line of Hillman's rant to it's logical conclusion and lock up every addict in the Commonwealth without fear or favor and especially sans any provision for AIDs prevention?
What we would have then, is thousands of junkie behind bars with HIV all of whom would be costing the public coffers bigtime to usher them out of life even in a minimally humane fashion.
Reed Hillman would rather spend that money than swallow his pride and do something unpleasant now to prevent a costly epidemic later.
Ah but Reed wants to win and sound like a big tough guy in the bargain...Well we've had sixteen years of this kind of pseudo leadership and look where it has landed us?

Sick
Demented
Typical...

Florida's unique "Catch -n- Release" program for rich dope fiends briefly netted one

Rush Limbaugh last week who upon returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic was detained at the airport for three hours for possession of a viagra prescription.
Cynics out there have already noted that viagra apparently comes in the form of a little blue pill as does any one of a number of prescription pain killers...Possession of which would violate Limbaugh's light-as-ashes drug conviction.
What Humble Elias wants to know is, who the hell VACATIONS in the Dominican Republic? Especially a famously narrow minded praetorian jerk-off like Rush Limbaugh. So far as I know the country's main attraction other than the steaming heat is grinding poverty and famously lax rules governing the sale & distribution of pharmaceuticals.
The Chimes at Midnight is sure Limbaugh went there to giggle at the peonage, surely his trip had nothing to do with scrip shopping in the Caribbean's most wide open drug bazaar? No not a chance.

Cash-n-Carry Congress

Last week, the U.S. House quietly passed themselves a 2% Cost of Living increase in their take home wages...this brings their yearly above the counter haul to $168K or so.
These would be the same GOP congressional dickwads who refuse to increase the now stagnant minimum wage because it would somehow hurt job growth here in Plantation USA.
Humble Elias can see why they need the money though, the cost of blow and quality hookers has gone sky frickin' high and with Jack Abramoff behind bars, one of the House GOP's main sources of revenue has dried up. So you see, they HAD to raid the US Treasury or else the whore houses of Georgetown and beyond might've suffered!

That is Denny Hastert's congress always tryin' to create jobs.

Meanwhile, the senate mindful of it's constitutionally mandated role as a second rate circus sideshow is debating a "flag burning amendment" to the US Constitution spitefully sure that if they carry one long and loud enough, no one will notice they've voted themselves another undeserved pay-raise.

This congress has (in the words of Oliver Cromwell) "tarried too long for the good they hath done"...

Last week, John Kerry offered a Senate Resolution

Setting modest timetable for the withdrawal of US Troops from Iraq. It garnered thirteen votes in the US Senate, and the usual tidal wave of bitter denunciation from the usual ass-holes in the punditariat.
On Friday though, it was revealed that General Casey, the CO of US Forces in Iraq had presented to the Pentagon a plan to withdrawal something like HALF our troops by January 2007!
Now...Humble Elias isn't what you'd call a military man, but even he knows that US Theater Commanders DON'T compose detailed plans for a military withdrawal (what was jocosely called "cutting and running" just last week) unless they've been ordered to do so by the appropriate chain of command. Given the fact that the Department of Defense is run like a plantation these days there can be no doubt this plan was solicited either by Donald Rumsfeld or one of his henchmen.
The question is, are THEY planning to cut and run? Or is this plan of Casey's something deliberately leaked to give the GOP congressional candidates some cover this fall?
Humble Elias wonders if Kerry knew about Casey's withdrawal scenario and perhaps timed the resolution thusly?

Fearful Things

Jeff Jacoby is worried, he has been reading Robert Ferrigno's dystopian thriller "Prayer for the Assassins" and as such is scared Al Qaeda could take over the USA and impose Sha'aria law.
Frankly, I think the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Boy Scouts of America have a better shot at it, but why quibble with the frightened?
Now I've seen Ferrigno's book and it sounds mighty contrived as to how Al Qaeda etc actually pull off the conquest of the USA.
Contrivance is deadly when writing political fantasies, its what killed Allen Drury's ponderous "Advise and Consent" series.
Note to Jacoby and Ferrigno, always keep your near future dystopia's vague and simple, in this respect take George Orwell's "1984" or Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" as your models.
For that fact, if you are really in the market for a good book that beats the tocsin about the "Islamic Threat" just pick up a copy of the late Anthony Burgess' "1985" and excellent and utterly paranoid work in every respect.
On the other hand there is a bit of an intellectual disconnect here in Jacoby's thinking. It seems to me, that one of the reasons that US Movement Conservatism and it's Praetorian Apologists have been a bust a fighting Al Qaeda is that in the main, they have the same policy goals. They both lust after a primitive patriarchic society dominated and controlled by revealed religion as interpreted by a elite priestly caste.
Jeff therefore isn't railing against the coming hordes of Islam and their anti-rational rule so much as he wants to make sure the Next Society is one controlled by the right set of believers.
So between Jeff and his wowsers and Al Qaeda and their suicide bombers mere secular society has come in for some hard knocks since September 11th 2001.
Think about that for a while.

Now mind you, I'm not drawing a line of moral equivalence between Jeff and the suicide bomber class. Jeff lives in a civil secular society and wishes to peacefully transform it into a sort of Christian Theme Park with hot and cold running holy water at the Sheraton and witchburnings on cable TV. His ambitions are silly and retrograde but no one getting killed on their behalf.
The suicide bombers live in a society already overburdened by religion and are looking to solve all those problems with more sectarian violence.
So its a difference of means and milieu don'cha know.

Kerry Healey had better watch her mouth...

She now proposes to go screaming into the streets to demonstrate her freeper bona-fides as an anti-illegal immigration zealot.
Fine, she had to tack to the right at some point, it is entirely predictable that she'd do it in respect of an issue properly vetted by the Washington DC Praetorian Class.
But...Remember this me hearties...

It is IMPOSSIBLE to be truly rich in Massachusetts and NOT have hired an illegal immigrant to do something somewheres for your well-heeled ass. It might've been the crew that built your pre-gubernatorial palace by the sea on the North Shore or the crew that comes along and does the yardwork once a week. Sooner or later, someone without green-card one, has done the heavy lifting for you.
If I was Kerry Healey I'd lower my shrill little voice and start checking those invoices and go back a lot further than the year 2000 if she knows what is good for her.
Could be the old au pair with that charming Wexford accent, the Cape Verdean brothers who come to trim the hedges...But they are there count on it.

Kultur Note for a Friday Morning...

Honestly, Don Imus looks like he should be feasting happily on a severed human arm for breakfast. Tom Savini's genius for special effects and horror film ake-up has nothing on the sheer decay and abuse that characterizes the I-Man's face.

A Fluffernutter Ban?

Ummmm...I think State Senator Jared Barrios is perhaps still feeling the sting of his withdrawl from the Middlesex County District Attorney's race.
I mean...they are discussing marshmallow "fluff" on the floor of the state legislature?
That stuff is pretty awful though, so thick and gooey Romney could potentially use it as a cheap asphalt substitute to fill all the pot-holes that as yet persist in his alleged hometown of Belmont.

A lot of things in today's paper could potentially...

set Humble Elias off...he has a famously short political fuse after all.
But there was a teensy weensy little quote in Eileen McNamara's column today that won out over all others. In it, Eileen accuses the AG of flip-flopping on illegal immigration when he asserts that his office has limited authority over the issue.
McNamara then goes on to make this observation:

"It will prove to be a more uncomfortable place if Reilly makes it to the general election, when he will face voters who have been whipped into an anti-immigrant frenzy by the Republican right and its handmaidens on talk radio. They do not want to hear that immigration is not his job."

DUUHHHHHHH NO SHIT SHERLOCK!

So if Reilly is somehow nominated, he won't have friend one on the airwaves and elsewhere??? I'm SHOCKED SHOCKED SHOCKED to discover this!!!???
And just when was the last time any Boston Globe columnista went to bat for an embattled democratic candidate for statewide office anyway?
Nope, McNamara, Lehigh, Vennochi & McGrory are absolute masters of the art of sitting on the sidelines tsk-tsking as our nominees are hacked to pieces without hope of assistance. They then write some of the best political obituaries in the country full of vulgar self satisfaction and all the usual death-of-liberalism imagery.

My Ghod these people are useless and malevolent!

If Eileen McNamara is so god-damned worried about talk radio's rightward slatn why doesn't she devote a few columns to the advertising that keeps shit-house stations like 96.9 FM talk afloat? Or the flagrantly corrupt guest booking practices that keep brainless hags like Nancy Grace in perpetual rotation? Or Bill O'Reilly's casual use of the airwaves to issue what amount to personal threats to specific individuals?
Any one of a number of vile and reprehensible mores are countenanced on rightical chic talk radio, but all Eileen can do is "warn" Tom Reilly about the impending shitstorm and then sit back licking her chops with relish.
Well, thank you, Eileen I've seen this one before, its the usual cut and run tactics so beloved by the Boston Globe's columnists. I wouldn't mind so much, but when the gong sounds, even a nattering twit like Kerry Healey and a certifiable nut like Christy Mihos will have their apologists...but Reilly or Patrick or Gabrieli...they'll get bupkiss from the Globe's punditariat.
So spare us all your "helpful" warnings.

Kerry Healey is simply livid

Because Attorney General Reilly declines to snitch out illegal immigrants to the Federales.
Indeed...Why the hell should he?
It is not the responsibility of the Commonwealth's Attorney General to slavishly ape the temporary fetishes of a bunch of corrupt political faddists in Washington DC.
In the absence of a single rational policy debated and duly enacted by congress and the executive department Reilly's attitude makes sense.
However, don't hold your breath for any sane immigration reform from off the banks of the Potomac this year. The praetorian class has hit on illegal aliens as a prime means to whip up the wowsers into a frothing fury, nothing more. If they retain control of congress the matter will be quietly dropped on the first Wednesday in November 2006.
Meanwhile, Kerry Healey who til now has been running as a sort of reluctant Shannon O'Brien, seems to have decided that illegal immigrants are her ticket to ride or at least they are a way to keep Massachusetts' freepers in her corner.
For all the good they will do her...

No Blogging Today...

went to Horseneck Beach and tried my luck against the rip tides.

Thank Ghod for Jeff Jacoby...

I couldn't be a blogger without him.
No sooner do the dog days of summer roll in than Jeff puts on his best ideological binders and starts hammering away desperate to force a quicksilver world into his harsh little conservative mold.
Today he made the astonishing assertion that FEMA's statist big gummint' approach to post Katrina hurricane relief was a failure (true enuff) and that private charities did the whole job better, quicker-n-cheaper yadda yadda yadda.
Nowhere in this hymn of praise to rugged individualism did Jacoby mention that his President as a debased sort libertarian ideologue has a vested interest in making sure the bureaucracy runs with catastrophic inefficiency. How else to wean that seemingly greedy infant the American public off the Federal teat?
Jeff also managed to ignore the appointment of former horse pimp Michael Brown as the head of FEAM and the ongoing craven ineptitude of DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff a man who hasn't the sense ghod gave a professional wrestler.
Nope somehow it is the very existence of FEMA that let New Orleans down sez Jeff, therefore ALL such goverment functions should be privatized or sold off to People's Temple.
However, the question remains, does Jeff Jacoby really believe any of this nonsense?
Because in order for Jeff to believe his own thesis he has to ignore the reams of evidence pointing to malfeasance at the top of the decision chain.
Or is Jeff simply spinning the evidence in order to build up the case against "big gummint" in the sneaky fashion of the true blue praetorian?
What is he?
A true believer or a hack?

Chiseling Our Way to Utopia

The Globe reports that Crazy Christy Mihos formed a corporation in Rhode Island to avoid paying the local excise tax and state sales tax on his yacht.
This is small beans I know even for a yacht that sold for $475K, nevertheless is is chiseling even petty ciseling by the standards of a millionaire like Christy.
No doubt this will be cast as a sort of populist anti-tax bona fide by the Mihos campaign and will be linked however tenuously to his longtime opposition to the tollbooths on the Mass Pike.
But...
However, let Humble Elias remind all and sundry that the rest of us, the Lincoln's legendary "plain people" DO NO HAVE and WILL NEVER HAVE the option to form a spurious out-of-state corporation to evade the state sales tax on home appliances or your kid's new shoes.
That is a key difference between Christy Mihos and the rest of us, he is a member of the elite and has the capacity to bend the rules so save himself a few thousand dollars.
It is perfectly legal if a bit ethically gamey for him to do so, but lets remember this when he starts prancing around pretending to be the average guy's best pal ever.

The Supreme Soviet of the Southern Baptist Convention...

has declined for the moment to formulate an "exit strategy" from the public school system.
Instead they have resolved to "engage the culture of our public school systems" by exerting godly influence,"

Whew...for a moment there I was worried that the Baptists were about to start their own chain of Madrassahs with the concurrent demand that they get lavish public funding for said project and the civilian militias needed to protect their investment.


***
Frankly though, facts are facts, what you do with them is your own business...debating a "exit strategy" from rationality doesn't necessarily abolish rationality. What it does create though, is create new opportunities for pandering from wowser beholden political hacks in Washington. So look for Dennyt Hastert to start pushing a new education initiative that highlights "core American values" like snake handling and faith healing.

Rove dodges a bullet...

as Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald declines to indict the Deputy White House Chief of Staff.
Of course, the laugh here is, that Rove owes his freedom to a freeper reporter at Time Magazine one Viveca Novak (sp) who warned Rove's legal team at the last minute that Karl was a person of interest to the Special Prosecutor. The GOP's long investment in counter media resources seems to have finally paid...at least in the case of one prideful arrogant little weasel. Thus the White House Chief of Staff is now free to practice special brand electoral necromancy this fall.

Ah well...what can I tell you? Bonaparte looked like he was ready and willing to torch all of Europe after he escaped Elba. He had his own hairbreadth cliffhanger and was ready for some serious payback...then came Waterloo.
Ah...Waterloo in 1815...in that summer of catastrophe.
Bonaparte lost that day, not because he was up against superior military wits (indeed Wellington while brave was no genius and Marshal Blucher was a distinctly second rate man) but because his enemies had learned his tactics.
Rove's tactics will be pretty clear this fall...divide conquer, cheat, spend, and scandalize long and loud.
Like Wellington off in the low countries, we know where Rove must go and what he will do. The only question is, can we effectively interdict?
Who knows?
Gas is up to $3 a gallon in Menotom, Bush can off a hundred like Al Zarqawi and never bring it down.
Maybe we should start there.
Meanwhile remember this, No one can escape history not even Karl Rove.

According to the latest USA Today-Gallup poll

some 53% of respondents think terrorist leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi's assassination in Iraq marks a positive turning point for our war in Iraq.
Of course, last time Humble Elias checked, 53% of the country was convinced that Osama Bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots pure-n-simple.
All those numbers seem to say is that a very slight majority of Americans are still willing to look on the sunny side of things in Iraq.
Nonetheless, Zarqawi is dead, he was a killer and ideologue and he suffered the fate of the bloodthirsty and the self-righteous.

Anyway just how big a player is Al Qaeda in Iraq anyway?
Seems to me when the dust settles and the smoke clears that the future of Iraq will be determined by a bunch of warring ethnic militias. Osama Bin Laden will be naught but a sideshow when that day of wrath comes.
Thus in the end, it is not a question of IF shaaria law will be introduced in Iraq but WHEN and by WHO?

Karl Rove is flying to Manchester N.H. today...

to speak at the New Hampshire GOP's annual dinner.
A joyous occasion to be sure...

The only thing that guy needs to say is which laws he and his gang are prepared to break in order to retain power this year.

Brian McGrory jumps off the Romney bandwagon with a loud Hrrumph!

It took him a year after the damn thing ground to halt for Brian to bail...but he did climb down finally.
Apparently McGrory broke at long last with Mitt this week after the governor was a churlish no-show at the dedication of the Tip O'Neill tunnel.
The value structure here is interesting, four years of detached, inept and amateurish governance can be tolerated...but cut one serious & departed bigfoot dead and suddenly Brian is all up in arms?
It is nice and good to honor Tip O'Neill's memory...it would be even finer and better if at the same time the Commonwealth was honestly and ably governed at some point in the last sixteen years.
others are impressed with Brian's righteous dudgeon I'm just wondering which two bit shit-heel hack with the right moderate republican coloration will McGrory mark out for this time around?

Friday Adlai Stevenson Blogging...

Adlai Ewing Stevenson on the so-called independent:


"An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics."

Who the hell is John J. Sullivan?

Because according to Boston.com, Crazy Christy Mihos has plucked him out of obscurity to be his running mate on an independent gubernatorial ticket this fall.
Now, the article mentioned that Sullivan was town moderator in Winchester and a local banker...also a former democrat.

Yeah, but at least Sullivan got elected to something even if its a minor town meeting based sinecure, that is way more than Kerry Healey could say prior to 2002.

Beyond that, Humble Elias has nuthin' on th' guy.

Truth be told, Sullivan is both unknown and inevitable...the rules are that one must be a registered independent prior to January of an election year to qualify for a third party ballot in Massachusetts. So right away the pool of potential candidates was pretty thin.

I guess Krypto the Superdog is a democrat or an out of state resident after all...oh well maybe Christy can still whistle stop the Commonwealth this fall in his personal Flash Gordon style rocketship.

The Decline and Fall of William Weld

Word has now reached the Chimes at Midnight, that Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, improbably a candidate for the New York GOP gubernatorial nomination has thrown in the towel leaving an open field for movement conservative John Faso.
Alas, where is the Bill Weld of 1990?
You can hear Scot Lehigh sighing from the top of Robbins' Hill in Menotomy.
What happened to that red headed galahad who fought glum movement conservative Steve Pierce to the last ballot and prevailed?
All that was one wife ago, and a lot of whiskey has surged under the bridge since then...poor Bill just couldn't stand the pace anymore. Its a little sad but also inevitable.
In his day, Bill Weld was nothing sort of amazing. Long before Dick Morris or Bill Clinton he perfected the art of triangulation and alternately sneered at or compromised with a legislature dominated by democrats. Soccer moms and viritually the entire local punditariat swooned at his feet.
He cut taxes, ignored the poor and lame, listened to almost every lame brained poll tested idea in christendom, lied about cost over-runs on the Big Dig and cut out of the office before 4pm almost every day.
And what the hell, people loved him for it...for a while anyway.
To me, he created the viceregal governing style and brought an insolence to the corner office that still conditions the governorship some sixteen years later.
Ah but the Lehighs and Barnicle's all loved him...he catered to their darkest desire to meet the problems of the hour with a flippant adolescent smirk.
He was re-elected easily and then it all went to smash in his 1996 race against John Kerry...Weld forgot that you can campaign and govern like a neighborhood happy drunk but the US Senate is still held to be a serious place by the Massachusetts electorate.
And then, fatally he got bored.
Sheer ennui led Weld to a quixotic and doomed fight for the Ambassadorship to Mexico. The very wowsers he'd dissed in 1990 rose up in the vengeful bloated form of Senator Jesse Helms to send Bill reeling back to the minors.
It was in retrospect, a cringeworthy performance.
In the meantime Weld had resigned as governor thus setting in motion the relentless trivialization of that office that plagues us to this day.

The problem with Bill Weld was, he claimed his ruling passion was "a horror of boredom"...that is an immensely honest and selfish admission from a supposed public servant. Others want social justice, a respect for the law, a revolution or some other dubious eschaton...all Bill Weld ever asked of his constituents is that they not bore him.
In the end, Massachusetts could not deliver..and so Bill wandered off to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he wrote novels or tested the seals on his famed hollow leg. And then, driven by demons one cannot begin to describe, Bill attempted one last doomed non-rendezvous with destiny.
Sad.
But at least the GOP and New York State are spared the spectacle of just how wrong and embarrassing things get when Bill Weld gets bored.

86 million bucks in the hole...

According to yesterday's Globe, the Commonwealth owes the feds 86 million large for a variety of medicaid overcharges.

Jesus Mary and Joseph!

How often does that happen!??

Normally, the Chimes at Midnight would mark this down as an example of the Governor's sheer lack of ability to execute his job despite his props as a private sector managerial genius.
However something a bit subtler might be going on.
Humble Elias thinks it more important to question whether there is any aspect of Romney's movement conservative values that makes him predisposed to efficient governance?
Stop and think, Mitt is a praetorian wannabe and a servile toady to American Wowserdom. IF he could, he'd happily turn the medicaid, medicare, social security, the FDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services over to the Southern Baptist Convention.
However, a little thing called polls and popularity restrain him from enacting any of this nonsense on the state level.
Yet as well know, wowserdom is a hungry beast always bellowing for fresh meat.
So the solution for the Mitt Romney's of America is to make sure the bureaucracy especially anything dedicated to maintaining the health and purchasing power of the poorer classes runs as inefficiently and scandalously as possible.
This way, someday when we are all living in condos in Cloud Cuckoo Land...he and his ilk will have set up the great social welfare yard sale that'll give some snake handling sect power over welfare checks.
See how Mitt does it?
He runs as a managerial genius who will make the bureaucracy run a lean quarter mile...but his screwed up conservative ideology calls for a public sector that runs as poorly as possible.
Which is why there is just no point to voting for one of these rich managerial genius types...especially if they are conservative republicans...they will screw us all every time.

Meanwhile...

Former Vice President Al Gore has apparently taken himself out of Presidential consideration in 2008.
Frankly who can blame him? It is hard enough for any candidate whose views are vaguely more humane than that of Alaric the Visigoth to get a fair hearing...doubly so for Al Gore.
Maybe this is for the best, the very people who dismissed Gore as "flawed" and "a poor campaigner" were pretty much the same bunch opportunistically hyping him for 2008.

So the anti-Clintonistas must now return to the well to dredge up another candidate.
Humble Elias own theory is, the Deaniacs are lying in wait.
If the dems do well this fall the Dean faction will come surging from out their redoubts with the credible claim that their boy's chairmanship of the DNC brought the democrats back to power...hence he ought to be President. By then, the anti Hilary Clinton faction (having shuffled the deck a more than a few times) may well be receptive to an appeal from the former Vermont Governor.
So we shall see.
failing another run from our own John Kerry, Humble Elias thinks there is a palpable need out there for a new face, preferably a governor someone with a strong record outside DC.

Cultural Note for a Monday Morning...

Honestly, Don Imus has never looked worse, MSNBC should seriously rethink its daily simulcast of his radio talk show.
The I-Zombie slouches there with a flushed pustulent face reflexively hyping Tim Russert's new book with all the enthusiasm of a bankrupt undertaker.
Yeah, count on it...Phat Tim has a new book out "Wisdom of Our Fathers" yet another hymn of praise to paternalism or musket over the fireplace or some damn thing.
One doubts Tim (otherwise a perfectly useless celebrity journalist) actually writes any of this tripe...For epistolary projects like this a crack team of NBC interns can do most of the work supervised on the quiet by a good book editor.

Meanwhile Humble Elias sits there honestly wondering why Imus has what looks like a women's wig on under that prop ten gallon hat?

Spiteful Joanie wraps it all up with a beautiful centrist bow:

In her current column in the Boston Sunday Globe, Joan Vennochi is quoted as noting the following:
"Voters are starved for less-partisan, more results-oriented government. It is what Mitt Romney promised but abandoned after winning the governor's race in 2002. Romney veered right when he chose to go national, disappointing centrist voters."

Isn't it more accurate to note, that Joan Vennochi, Scot Lehigh & Brian McGrory all BELIEVED Mitt Romney's "centrist" promises and actively projected their neurotic need for a moderate republican executive onto the Viceroy?
The above quote beautifully summarizes the "columnist ideology", they want a chimera called "results oriented government".
Humble Elias though must ask "Whose results for whose benefit Joanie?"
The notion that you can expunge ideology from governance is an oft repeated fallacy on the Globe's Op Ed page and elsewhere. Quite frankly, without ideology there is no politics to speak of, either you have it or else you must negotiate with it but you cannot get rid of it.
Moreover ideology and partisanship do not cease to exist because they are of marginal saliency to an ill defined cohort called "centrist voters".

Joanie doesn't get that, like a lot of people she thinks government ought to run like an ATM machine, input=results game over. She just doesn't get that law and good governance filters thru a lot of sublime and malign layers before it is done. We don't need a better mechanic or technician in the corner office we need honesty, leadership and a little self confidence.
After that, Humble Elias will take his chances.

Fifteen Percent...et al

Yesterday Scot Lehigh made an "impassioned" pleas for the democrats to set aside their fifteen percent rule to permit gubernatorial candidate Chris Gabrieli access to the primary ballot. Scot blathers about on about democracy and fairness but as usual his motivations are suspect.
He, Brian McGrory and Spiteful Joanie Vennochi among others have a vested interest in a bloody fight in the September primary so that in turn they will have an excuse to annoint Kerry Healey as the moderate messiah of the GOP.

Otherwise it seems to me that the fifteen percent rule was enacted as a minimal deterrent to the likes of Lyndon Larouche, Jill Stein or the Reverend Gerald L.K. Smith to prevent them from parachuting in and embarrassing the party at a critical juncture.
Humble Elias regrets that Chris Gabrieli may not make the final cut today, but he knew the risks when he got in late. Changing the rules after the fact sort of defeats the core reasoning behind the statute.

Nevertheless we will see, Humble Elias still thinks it difficult for Patrick to pull in 70% of the delegate votes in order to squeeze Gabrieli out.

James V. Hart

is NOT a name to conjure with in respect of the Chimes at Midnight's normal bailiwick. Hart is a Hollywood scriptwriter chiefly noted for the screen play to "The Muppets Treasure Island" among other sundry works. Allegedly he has written a screenplay for Ayn Rand's cartoonish libertarian opus "Atlas Shrugged".
From the muppets to Ayn Rand's ponderous comic-book characters...nope no leap there by any means.
In keeping with that notion, negotiations are allegedly being pursued with the equally cartoonish Angelina "Lara Croft" Jolie and her slaphappy horndawg husband Brad Pitt.

Assuming the project goes forward with this casting, we can then look forward to a lovely 100 megaton box office H-Bomb called "Atlas Shrugged".

Playing the Percentages...

Dan Payne in a gonzo style column in today's Globe plays with the notion that Patrick may well garner the convention endorsement this weekend and knock one or perhaps both of his rivals out of the race.
"Talking Politics" in the Boston Phoenix conjured with the same idea in last week's issue.
Seems a bit far fetched to Humble Elias, to finish off Reilly and Gabrieli Deval Patrick would have to have slightly over 80% of the delegates willing to vote for him down the line and even then the remaining 20% has to break evenly to bury the opposition.
On the other hand, Reilly has bungled things in tight spots before and he has to finesse this thing just right the first time.
As for Chris Gabrieli, Humble Elias wonders if he got in just too damn late no matter how much he spends on advertising?

The Chimes at Midnight suspects Patrick will get the endorsement, Reilly will hang tough to get on the September ballot and Gabrieli will finish out of the money unless someone somewhere is dickering hard on his behalf.

Well whatever, a lot of airy speculation is about to come down to some cold hard numbers.

Meanwhile anyone have a good line on the Belmont Stakes this weekend?