Someone in Romney's allegedly defunct campaign office

is tasked with sending out blast faxes and press releases touting the former Viceroy's availability for the GOP Vice Presidential nomination.
How else to account for folderol like this?

In truth, Mitt would make a lousy VP nominee because it seems pretty certain that the Republicans will still do well this year among Mormons and greedy CEOs...and since Romney can't deliver Massachusetts ten electoral votes there is no logical reason to put him on the ticket.
But there is the edifying spectacle of watching Mitt endlessly and shamelessly toady up to John McCain in his own particularly revolting fashion...next to watching Romney get his bony ass kicked in N.H. it is the most fun we have had this presidential season.

Conservatively Correct Politics

Rachel Ray's "Dunkin Donuts" commercial gets pulled because Michelle Malkin (who is dumber than a bag of hammers and meaner than a rattlesnake) thinks she is wearing a an Arab Keffiyeh.

One would laugh at dumb-ass posturing like this except it is all in deadly earnest. Worse it is nothing new, after all back at the height of the Korean War, the Cincinnati Reds very seriously debated changing the team name to something less provocative".
It also exposes the conservative right's own native ability to clog thr debate with useless blather about cultural signifiers and "speech codes".

Oh and this is just hilarious...

Jeff Jacoby thinks President Bush isn't war-like enough!
MiGhod but how the wheel of destiny has turned! This is the same Jeff Jacoby who once whooped for war like a backyard Apache and despite all reversals and failures and stalemates he is still screeching for blood and dynamite from the comfort of his cubicle on Morrissey Boulevard.
Except now after four years of war not even the Bush Administration can satisfy Jeff's desire to settle accounts with the whole wide world.

Sad...th' boy is clearly a addict of some kind.

Oh and this line is a gut buster:
Washington continues to send $1.8 billion in aid each year to the brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak
That 1.8 billion is the outright bribe money we pay Egypt to keep it's Camp David agreements with Israel. The cold peace that exists between those two nations is mute testimony to the power of payola to transform the region's politics.
Think on that for a moment.

A Fire on the Red Line last night

leads to a sort of exodus thru the city...details can be found hyar:

Former President Carter spills the beans (finally)

tells an audience in the U.K. that Israel has an arsenal of some 150 nuclear weapons.
Well that is nothing for Jimmy, I believe he ordered up a secret CIA report in 1977 or on Israel's nuclear weapon's potential. More than likely that report told him the State of Israel had already crossed the threshold with respect to deliverable nuclear warheads. That in turn prompted Carter to kibbutz Moshe Dayan on the subject after he became Begin's foreign minister...to be sure Carter received no satisfaction on the matter.
To be sure, Israel got the bomb in the 1968 thru 1972 period a time when their opponents were being heavily armed and patronized by the USSR. In turn the USSR's diplomatic and military presence in the region dictated a policy of "nuclear ambiguity" for Israel Summarized as "we might have em' but if we did we wouldn't talk about em'...so let us not discuss it shall we?"
It seems strange to modern audiences but quite clearly the Labor and Likud Governments of 1970's all feared that if Israel came clean about the bomb the Arabs would repudiate their commitments under the Non Proliferation Agreement and seek protection under the Soviet Nuclear "Umbrella".
Humble Elias wrote a lot about this topic back in graduate school y'unnerstan'.
Personally I think ambiguity has "tarried too long for the good it hath done", everyone knows Israel has the bomb, they keep the lid on because of bureaucratic inertia and fears that if they come clean the US Non Proliferation Act could be applied against them.
As if that law wouldn't be modified toot-sweet by congress to exempt Israel if it came down to it....
Of course, Israel could "come clean" and sign the Non Proliferation Treaty as a "nuclear weapons state", the USA and the USSR did so in 1968 there is reason why Israel can't do the same. It isn't a perfect solution but it is a first step in a region with few arms control safeguards.
It also might put some diplomatic pressure on Iran whose veracity on this subject ought to treated with reasonable skepticism.

Jeff Jacoby sez...

That "Michelle Obama IS fair game".
If she is then so is Cindy McCain the ultimate trophy wife and a heiress to a vast fortune based on marketing liver failure and alcoholism to insecure male consumers.


Happy Memorial Day and Bottoms Up.

Totally Joanie

Inadvertently, Joanie Vennochi betrayed herself today.
In the midst of a lugubrious "farewell Hillary" exercise (as IF Joan Vennochi ever gave two hoots in hell about Hillary Clinton) the Globe's resident sourpuss revealed she wrote Clinton's "political obituary" back before the Ohio primary.
Honestly, is THAT all Joan Vennochi does? Write and update political obits just waiting like an old magpie for the moment to swoop down and pour false sympathy over the departed?
Humble Elias cannot imagine what she has tucked away on her hard drive with the name "John Kerry" on it.
This is a mentality that has co-opted and internalized defeat to an astonishing degree, losing is forever, liberals always lose yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah.
Pa-thetic sez the old Misanthrope.
Losing is bad but there is only one sure way to lose and a million different paths to to all kinds of triumphs.
Hubert H. Humphrey wasn't elected in 1968...but given his ardor for the cause of justice....can anyone say he really lost?
Joanie doesn't get that, the only story she knows how to tell is one of liberal emasculation and humiliation.
I say we will start winning the day we stop letting the Joanie Vennochi's of the world keep score.

A Great Article can be found...

here noting Mitt Romney's rapid and shameless transformation from John McCain's most relentless foe into John McCain's most obsequious toady.
Indeed there is something nigh Petainist about the way Mitt Romney now fawns over John McCain in hopes perhaps of gaining the Vice Presidential nomination.
Indeed Willard seems locks in a sort of "Lackey-dom" struggle with Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman who like a Grand Chamberlain in the Court of Siam seems incapable of looking John McCain in the eye.

Is John McCain high or something?

In the midst of decrying a veteran's benefits bill in the US Senate (Of all things) John McCain snarled the following defiance at the world:
"I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did," McCain said in a statement.

So does that mean McCain doesn't accept any communication at all with those who did not serve in the armed forces?
How does he then talk to that notorious draft evader the Vice President of the United States and the Senate's Presiding Officer?
For that fact why is McCain inviting a trio of drafter dodgers and shirkers like Mitt Romney, Charlie "Pegboy" Christ and Bobby Jindal to a Vice Presidential barbeque over the Holiday Weekend?
I mean does McCain ever stop to listen to himself? Whatever he proclaims after breaskfast is completely contradicted before dinnertime a bigger more laughable windbag hasn't hit the campaign trail since the Imperial High Noon of Wendell Willkie.

Y'know...

Good politicians, the ones who do their jobs right, inevitably always have friends they don't even know about.

Such is the case with Edward Maxiumus...

Get well soon Teddy, the Commonwealth is behind you all the way.

Oh and Joanie Vennochi

because I guess to her jaded sensibilities it has been a slow news week is trying to pump up John Kerry as a potential Secretary of State for a notional Obama administration.
Why the hell should John Kerry give up the US Senate now, potentially when Massachusetts needs him the most and when the political calculus in the Upper House favors the democrats going forward?
Moreover, if things break our way this fall it'll be very good indeed for John Kerry to have a friend in the White House, lists of appointments are drawn up, judges made, fundraising potential is spread around...why a Senator with a clear head, seniority and a good staff could accomplish all sorts of good things under those circumstances.
Anyway, Secretary of State ain't the sinecure it used to be there is a lot of oppressive prestige and responsibility, but in terms of power he or she rates no higher than the National Security Advisor to the President.
Nope my advise to Senator Kerry is simply stay put, "Power Is, Where Power Goes" said Lyndon Johnson.

Bear with me today...

Humble Elias has a lot of ground to cover:

Firstly John McCain is inviting over prospective Vice Presidential Candidates for some simple down home countrified eatin'.
The three men cited in the above link all have their quirks and deficiencies.
Florida Governor Charles Christ represents important electoral real estate to the GOP, but he has been dogged for years by rumors that allege he is gay.
I just don't see the GOP taking the chance...Romney's old supporter Jeb Bush might be a better bet if the name alone wasn't a synonym for a certain greedy ruthless ineptitude.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is a fresh face with no enemies and some reformer props...but the GOP has Louisiana in it's back pocket and McCain need someone to fetch the slumbering GOP conservative base. Jindal was only elected in'06 he may also be a tad too fresh to the Powers that Be.
And then there is Willard Mitt Romney, duly puffed up by the Boston Globe by this howler:
Romney would bring management experience to a McCain presidency. Whereas McCain's specialty is foreign policy, Romney has domestic policy expertise

Mitt Romney wouldn't know domestic policy expertise if it blew up in his face! He did nothing for four years as Governor of Massachusetts except go strolling before the TV cameras during snow storm, sign a health care bill that was written by others and ineffectually attempted to veto various items personally offensive to him.
The man is no John Kenneth Galbraith, he is hardly on a par with Arthur Laffer!
A political dilettante is what Romney is, pure and simple...craven and more nakedly opportunistic than most. He can't deliver Massachusetts and if the GOP can't fetch Utah then the depths of the Earth have opened up and poured forth the righteousness of the Lord.
Oh and one other thing, Mitt Romney chickened out of the Viet Nam war by the usual bureaucratic mumbo jumbo common to boys of his class and station. While McCain rotted in a Hanoi prison, Mitt was doing Mormon missionary work in Paris France.
Given all that, I wouldn't put it past Romney to be conjuring with another run for the US Senate here in Massachusetts...all his wingnuttery forgotten by him and Scot LeHigh at the very least.

Oh and there are also rumors that Joe Lieberman wants it as well, however last time I checked Joe was pro-choice and I firmly believe someone so disposed cannot be nominated for national office by the GOP. But then he could change his mind, but the season is late so he'd have to be extra special craven about it.

Well folks, the news is bad

what more can Humble Elias tell you that you haven't already heard?

Our friend, our wise counselor Edward Maximus faces a uncertain future. It had to happen sooner or later though...one last challenge. However you don't last forty six years in state and national politics without serious guts in extremis, this Our Senior Senator has in abundance.

There are a lot of eulogies out there already, some sincere some from crude gloating scumbags.All I can say is, it isn't over yet, there is still a grand fight to be made and there is time enough to lose all hope at the wake.

"Ryan's Take" now links to this,

The Little Blog that Cried....go here for the latest from his blog.

Oh No Ogo!

He hasn't yet collected enoguh signatures to get on the GOP senatorial primary ballot this fall.
This quote seems significant and may prove a harbinger of future events:
An attorney representing Beatty's campaign has already notified the state's election office that it will challenge Ogonowski's candidacy based on irregularities in the nomination papers. When contacted yesterday, a spokesman for Beatty's campaign said the staff would "cross that bridge when we come to it."

So we have that spectacle to look forward as well.

Y'know collecting signatures is just a basic political skill, you get a few volunteers to stake out the local Stop-n-Shop and in a few weeks yer on the ballot as a bona fide candidate, it is a no brainer. So if Ogonowski can't coerce or simply pay for the foot soldiery to get his signatures free and clear, it is a damning indictment of basic competence as an aspirant for public office.

Just a quick Shout Out to Edward Maximus over at

MGH, Humble Elias hopes he is feeling better and back on the job real soon.

Jeff Jacoby

abruptly drops his "guilt by association" meme against Barack Obama in yesterday's column. No...Jeff immediatetely formed up ranks with the rest of the praetorians and brayed long and loud to the effect that "negotiation is appeasement", the very halfwitted notion their dingbatted President advanced before the Israeli Knesset last week.
Yup the whole of conservative civilization was in full cry last week, all except John McCain who has gone on record back in 2006 as advocating negotiations with Hamas.
It is all there on video kids, and by the way McCain looks terrible and that clip is two years old!
As for Jeff I wonder how he feels to be cut down by his own candidate like that? For that fact his Dear Leader can't find an audience that'll listen to him anywhere inside the continental USA, maybe it really is time for the Globe's Laughing Young Senescence to pack up and decamp for the caves.

John McCain and the fabulous futuristic world of 2013....

Senator McCain has rather clumsily flip flopped this week...did anyone notice? A few short months ago he was bellowing that we'd stay in Iraq for "one hundred years" if that is what it took. Now he sez we can wrap up our job in Iraq by 2013...a reduction in task-time of ninety-five years!
Wow!
At this rate McCain will have us out by December!
Of course that "one hundred years" bushwah was blood-curdling nonsense served up for the delectation of the GOP's praetorians during the primaries...so does that now mean the closer we get to November the more McCain coos like a old wrinkly dove?
Probably not, 2108 or 2013, the dates don't really matter anymore, the army is already broken from the stress of an unpopular occupation, falling enlistments and indifferent tactics dreamed up by a bunch of giddy wowsers in the White House Situation Room.
Anyone unwilling to face those facts, is naught but a fantasist thus John McCain can bellow and snarl all he likes about war and honor and victory but he is still chasing a will o' th' wisp.
Let us hope people wake up to that soonest.

For the past eight years

citizens of good will have looked to Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter to protect their constitutional rights in this age of terrorism and extreme rendition. The results of his lonely watch on the battlements of freedom are clear and obvious; the American people now totter on the brink of becoming Czarist peonage.
On almost any critical issue of civil liberties you care to name, Arlen Specter roared his defiance in front of the press corps and proceeded to get beaten like a red headed step child by the Bush White House.
With both eyes blackened, his nose broken and two big boot prints on the seat of his pants, Specter would go whimpering and snarling back into the senate cloak room like a local jobber who just got whipped by a WWE headliner.
And this went on for years, Guantanamo Bay, secret CIA torture facilities overseas, extensive Federal use of wire-tapping, the de factor suspension of the right of habeas corpus, the right of counsel to those accused of terrorism, military tribunals...and every time Arlen got jacked up and beat down.
So the notion that somehow now, Arlen Specter is gonna investigate the Patriots' alleged spying on a rival team's signals, is nothing short of grimly hilarious.
With Arlen Specter on the job we can look forward to the Patriots to the use of clubs and bicycle chains out on the field sans reproof.
Honestly, the NFL can breath a sigh of relief and look forward to fresh outrages, Arlen Specter could quite simply screw up a two car funeral....they have nothing to fear from him.

Pastor John Hagee sez he is sorry

for calling the Roman Church the biblical whore of Babylon and asserting therefore all good catholics are roasting on a barbeque in hell.
Well, frankly it is a stilted mealy-mouthed apology clearly written by some frantic publicist in the McCain campaign desperate to prevent word getting out to the parishes that Old John needs heavy catholic-hating parsons to win the election.
Predicatably, William Donohue the bellicose President of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights flopped over and his back and cried out "All is Well!"
Trust me, if Hagee was a democrat, Donohue would be screaming for blood and dynamite. Now however Donohue is free to concentrate his fire on the impieties of democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular.
Well, Donohue was always the type to sell out for short money...
My thought is, if Hagee is willing to apologize in admittedly surly tones to catholics, when is he gonna fly to New Orleans and take back the nasty stuff he said about NoLa deserving Hurricane Katrina's destruction? I mean if you think about it, literally dozens of apologies ought to be forthcoming from Hagee.
Don't hold your breath on any of it though.

Sick
Demented
Typical

I like John McCain better when he was a battler for tolerance...

putting the big hurt on narrow minded jerks like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. Up back in 2000 he was the closest thing the GOP had to a scourge for political prelates.
Now look at him! Pastor John Hagee a television minister who thinks God is his own personal assassin trails behind the GOP candidate, introduces the guy and probably dreams of a christianized Supreme Court or some other rubbish. And McCain he just nods his head to all this like a whipped government mule.

Sad...the guy had some class once, but Potomac Fever is potent pathogen.

I think I liked John McCain better when he was a liberal...

instead of the dishonest conservative shill he has become nigh this election year.
Where is the stern Arizona progressive who once railed against phony tax cuts, low congressional ethics and the government's ominous "torture policy"?
Where is that straight-talkin' liberal who fought a lonely fight for campaign finance reform?
I mean who let this panderer into the room?
Now, the closer we get to November, the more John McCain's pedulous jowls quiver with fear as he sags into an embarrassing state of wingnut dotage. Torture fine...tax cuts great, a hundred years in Iraq - Great!
Well, it is sort of sad to watch but it also been inevitable, the man has always been an ubiquitous mess. Hell Arianna Huffington claims McCain voted for Al Gore in 2000, certainly he negotiated all thru the summer of '01 to switch political parties and even after 9-11 considered joining the democratic ticket in '04.
Anyone else sensing a pattern here? Like maybe all this is John McCain's cry for help?

Sean Wilentz has a new book out "The Age of Reagan"

in which he argues that Reaganism is a sort of bastard offshoot of American Liberalism. He further asserts that liberal social engineering initiatives (busing in other words) impelled Saint Ronald to desert his youthful liberalism and gave hm his big chance to fetch the proverbial blue collar "Reagan Democrats" for the GOP.
Yeah that is an interesting thesis, but let the record show, that Ronald Reagan deserted the democrats in the 1950's when General Electric started paying him 100K a year to act as a corporate shill. Sheer economic royalism induced Reagan to switch sides and that was long before Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King started musing about racial and society. A top rate that ran well over fifty percent was all Ronald Reagan needed to become a standpat republican, race didn't have anything to do with it.
As a politician though, Reagan was a master of exploiting racial fears and divisions in the USA in a genial personally unthreatening way that is how he became Governor of California by smiling like a teachable and braying long and loud about crime in the streets or dirty stinking peaceniks on campus etc etc.
People forget that by 1966 a lot of the civil rights crusader impetus was already spent with the issue of crime (by that I mean black on white crime especially) coming to the fore. He rode this hobby-horse right into the US Presidency, I mean I'm not sure the man ever gave a speech in public where he didn't discuss in some fashion the sheer Frightfulness of the High Crime Rate.
Reagan's other great skill was in peaceably ingathering disparate and divisive conservative factions into his coalition Ayn Rand's utopians and William F. Buckley's catholic toryism among many others all had a friend in Saint Ronald.
To me, Reaganism is naught but a unique set of power-acquisition skills brought to bear on behalf of an ubiquitous conservative movement...it is no wonder that replicating Reagan's political DNA has always been impossible for the GOP let alone curious democrats.
Ronald was too much a man of his time to survive as a movement there is a touch of free silver's fast fading lustre to him. Resignifying him as closet liberal or worse as an example to liberals is futile in extremis. As for his "Reagan Democrats" they must be fetched and just possibly fetched by listening to them and not filling them up with nameless terrors and deluded with shameless lies.
That might be a start.

Peter the Hermit soldiers on...

Nice to see that Rep. Ron Paul is still in there trying to throw haymakers against Senator John McCain. His followers are a funny lot, whirling derverishes, consecrated saints, rag-sale holy-men and college students, college students and more college students as far as the eye can see.
Gideon's Army indeed...all seemingly unaware of the gruesome racist sentiments he has flung at American black men. After all this is a US Congressman who once opined in his own newsletter "I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city (Washington DC) are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
Yipes and what Ron thinks of Israel can't really be printed either.
Congressman Paul is also a huge hypocrite on the subject of abortion, policing a woman's womb will still be the state's responsibility if he is elected President.
Ah but his supporters all have that blissed out look you get from the twice-born or persons who have just gone thru a strenuous work out at the gym.
Their leader's many dark ideological kinks don't bother them one whit, they are after all, crusaders.
Forget about any sort of debate with them, trust me they ain't listening as they yammer on and on and on about Zionism, small gummint, the Trilateral Commission, Henry Kissinger etc etc etc.
It is all very funny to watch, but ghod almighty help us all if they ever achieve so much as the smallest toe-hold on power.

Ogo on the Offensive

Jim Ogonowski, a potential GOP candidate for the US Senate this fall jumps the gun a bit with a commercial decrying John Kerry's "lack of local roots".

Waaa-al ah swan...but up in Arlington we can't seem to get away from Senator Kerry, I swear he has a crash pad on the DL up on Mount Gilboa.

Citizen Ogonowski's website also makes the following claim: He (JK) has passed "no bills of his own that became law."
Hum!
Strange statement...in the past seven days Senator Kerry has leaned on the VA to allow hospitalized veterans to vote, sponsored legislation to get Nelson Mandela off the terrorism watch list, called for Robert Mugabe to step down and introduced a bill extending industrial development bonds to high tech industries. And that is just a cursory reading of all Kerry's activities legislative and otherwise since April 29th or so.
A full reading thereof would be overkill and like Dr. Kissinger, I'm a fervent believer in proportional response.

Howie Carr can yet dwell in hope...

because from what I can tell, Don Imus' new show is the dullest most inane radio offering since the glory days of Cardinal O'Connell groaning the rosary into the mike down at the old WHDH.
The I-Man has a real life African American in his crew to help ward off any of his racist tendencies and if that isn't bulwark enough against controversy there is Don's predilection for fawning over "daddy memoirs" from TV sportscasters. In all it's a snooze-fest in extremis...I can't believe WTKK gets any ratings off this dross at all.
So maybe Howie Carr can hope anew to crack morning drive time...unless of course the internet, satellite radio and I-Pods don't beat talk radio once and for all like the proverbial red-headed step-child.

Well...

this is good news.
I mean just how much more do the rest of us have to pay at the pump til Jeff Jacoby and Jonah Goldberg and all the rest finally feel all tuff and studly inside?

For that fact $120 a barrel is just a drop in the proverbial crude oil bucket, imagine the price spike when the USA starts bombing suspected Iranian nuclear sites.
Booo-oy yer gonna wanna own stock in Exxon on that day and yer gonna wanna get the dividends in Euros as well.
All this just so John McCain can preside over the wreckage of the American Experiment....sort of embarrassing really.

Remember "The Titicut Follies"?

Frederick Wiseman's controversial documentary about the doin's at the Bridgewater State Mental Hospital circa 1966?

Well the gag order was rescinded in 1990 so the coast was clear to screen it this weekend at the MFA.
A brief review can be seen here.

Stark Raving...

Last week we were treated t a perfect example of "guilt by association" from Boston Globe columnist, Jeff Jacoby.
This week we are blessed with a text book case of "guilt via fantasization"from the Boston Phoenix' political columnist Steve Stark.
This week's issue contains the following gem:
"...Obama may be the harbinger not only of a biracial but a "feminizing" trend brought on by the huge gender shifts in American life"

To quote the olde Misanthrope "What Rubbish!"
If Steve Stark wants to call Senator Obama a pussy he should just come out and say it and skip all the tedious halfwitted psycho-babble. Never mind the fact that Stark offers no evidence to support his thesis other that the vague notion that us Americans like our presidents to be tuff -n- manly acting.
Nope...a cartoonish fixation on manliness politics seems to be a regular Steve Starkian theme, one he loves to project onto the electorate with the least provocation.
However it is as with so many other aspects of his writing, nothing new. I can recall with the simplest nostalgia that Steve was writing the same dross about the feminizing trend fostered by Bill Clinton way back in 1993.
With Steve Stark, the names change but the obsessions remain the same.

Eighteen Years Ago...

the Massachusetts GOP bestrode this Commonwealth like a Colossus....now look at them!

Permit me to indulge some Friday morning quarterbacking and note the Massachusetts GOP's main problem can be summarized in two words, "Mitt Romney".
Yup, desperate to hold onto office they made a bad bargain with a outside contractor who admittedly won in '02 and then with the assurance of a rank amateur spent four years alienating the very suburban independents who once defected to him in droves.
In retrospect, a defection to the democrats was inevitable given Romney's foolish move to the right during and after the '04 election.
Romney's inability to attract new blood at the local level or hold onto the independents meant the base shrank without electoral compensation from other cohorts.
And in fact, Romney himself as a politician was a bad recruitment tool, cold aloof opportunistic he was everyone's hated boss. Mitt's idea of a fresh new candidate for state senate involved importing some yap from Wall Street.

The fact that the independent rolls keep expanding out in suburbia doesn't necessary foreshadow good news for the state GOP either, it just raises the electoral bar at the time when candidate recruitment and fundraising are both difficult. It shrinks the base and imperils what few safe seats they have in the state legislature.
The state GOP can still fundraise and they can bang the tocsin on the subject of public spending...so the potential is there...I was them I'd set my sights on grabbing off the state auditor's sinecure or some lesser statewide office. DeNucci has been in a long time and supplanting him with a republican would highlight their traditional self image as the watchdog for the predominant state democrats.
baring any accidents though, the are faced with some lean years...ah but the trouble is of their own invention.

The Rest of the Nation Wallows in Recession...

Massachusetts however, soldier's on.

Part of this is the fact we now have active leadership in the State House. Perhaps Governor Patrick hasn't yet ushered in a new golden age, but at least he has an active cortex and declines to treat the Commonwealth with the disdain associated with an absentee landlord.

***

Meanwhile, I jump ugly on the Boston Globe two or three times a week, but in the area of investigative reporting, they still have good chops.

***
I think there must be more to the DiMasi story than we are getting because Joanie Vennochi has abruptly dropped the House Speaker like a hot potato.

Hell I wonder who will take her calls now?