CriticalMass

Just In! [Insert Statement of the Obvious]

2012-01-25T17:21:00.000-05:00

I realize that the contortions that the media put themselves through to generate artificial drama in the Republican presidential primaries is becoming something of a hobby horse for me this cycle, but I cannot let today's example pass without remark.

Earlier today the Boston Herald's online breaking news banner blared: "Just In: Romney Tax Returns Reveal Huge Investment Income"!

What next?

Just In: Search of Romney Closet Reveals No Skeletons ?

Just In: Review of Romney Driver's License Reveals Really Good Hair ?

Just In: Examination of Romney Liquor Cabinet Turns Up Six-Pack of Sprite and Three Yoo-Hoos ?

Just In: Gingrich Marriage File Contains Multiple Records ?

Is it really news - breaking or otherwise - that Mitt Romney is a successful, wealthy guy whose investments pay off handsomely (with good hair!) year after year?

Or, having clamored for weeks for public release of Romney's tax returns, does the media just feel obligated to toss out a few breathless "revelations," though the documents yield nothing of particular interest to "reveal"?

Pelosi for President!

2012-01-24T10:36:00.001-05:00

"Gingrich-like approval ratings..."

Proposed: In 2020, the Democratic party will seriously consider nominating Nancy Pelosi for President of the United States. (Set aside the fact that in 2020 Mrs. Pelosi will be eighty years old and humor me, okay?)

Most voters would scoff at that notion. Sure Pelosi has her fans (that shirt to the right is real, and it's for sale) - but to the vast majority of the mainstream American electorate Pelosi is nothing so much as the personification of acerbic, far left political extremism.

So bad were Pelosi's personal approval ratings as she entered what would be the last year of her Speakership, in fact, that CNN's headline writers employed a handy bit of shorthand to describe them - an appellation that even casual political observers would be sure to recognize as describing the worst of the worst, the absolute slime-coated barrel bottom: "Pelosi facing Gingrich-like approval ratings."

Eugene Robinson has a good column in today's Washington Post that starkly illustrates just how deep and durable is the wider public's negative perception of Gingrich, with whom Republican primary voters are once again inexplicably flirting:

Newt Gingrich won a stunning victory in Saturday’s Republican primary, wiping the floor with Mitt Romney and reigniting a nomination battle that seemed to have burned itself out. Amid all the excitement, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that America has known Gingrich for three decades — and really doesn’t like him.

The most recent evidence is found in a Jan. 12-14 Fox News poll of registered voters nationwide — not just Republicans but Democrats and independents as well — showing that 56 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of Gingrich, while only 27 percent viewed him favorably. In other words, his detractors outnumbered his admirers 2 to 1.

By contrast, 51 percent of those surveyed in the Fox poll had a favorable opinion of President Obama, while 46 percent had an unfavorable view. By a roughly similar margin, voters also had a positive opinion of Romney. Views about Ron Paul and Rick Santorum were slightly negative, the survey showed, but only by a few percentage points. No public figure named in the poll was remotely as unpopular as Gingrich.

And it’s not as if people don’t know the man. He has near-universal name recognition, pegged at 92 percent in the Fox poll and even higher in other surveys. Americans seem to be saying, “Yes, we’ve met Mr. Gingrich, and no, we don’t think we like him very much.”

Nearly identical results — 58 percent disapproval, 28 percent approval — were found in a CNN poll earlier this month. And this antipathy toward Gingrich is nothing new. A list of surveys over the past two years, compiled by the TalkingPointsMemoWeb site, shows that the mercurial Gingrich is consistent in at least one thing: his unpopularity.

Yes, I understand: Newt is impressive in debates. And yes, it is sort of fun to watch him rip into self-important moderator journocelebrities. But arrogant condescension and epic self-regard are not going to win Newt any upward progress in those abysmal personal approval ratings.
And while South Carolina Republican primary voters may have reacted to ABC News's election eve forensic autopsy of Newt's second divorce by rallying to his defense against what they perceived as a calculated attack by "the liberal media," out in the wider world the roughly 60 percent of the electorate that already dislikes Gingrich saw yet more evidence that the former Speaker is a hypocrite of the highest order and a man of the lowest character. More confirmation, in other words, of their already solidly-held views.

Set aside your own opinion of Gingrich, and consider this incontrovertible truth (from Robinson, above): "No public figure named in the [Fox!] poll was remotely as unpopular as Gingrich." You may think it unwarranted or unfair, driven by 'media bias' or fear of Newt's superior intellect or whatever. There sits Newt's deep unpopularity - consistent and durable.

Only one major public figure approaches Gingrich's negative numbers: the aforementioned Nancy Pelosi, Newt's ideological mirror image, the woman who represents to the right and the middle precisely what Newt represents to the left and the middle - nothing good.

That is why the Democrats will never nominate Nancy Pelosi for President. Because that would be insane and - more importantly - utterly self-defeating.

Two peas in a deeply unpopular pod

Tim Murray: There Goes The Other Shoe

2012-01-22T04:31:00.000-05:00

Look out below

Been hearing rumors for a while that multiple Globe reporters were still chasing the Tim Murray/Mike McLaughlin/Late Night Car Crash Story. This morning, the other shoe drops hard. Here is the worst of it:

To hear Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray tell it, former Chelsea housing chief Michael E. McLaughlin was just a campaign volunteer. Though phone records show that the two men called each other 193 times over the past two years - including one call on a Sunday at 1:30 a.m. - Murray aides insist that McLaughlin played no special role.

But a Globe investigation shows that the former Chelsea housing chief ran an extensive political operation for the lieutenant governor right up until McLaughlin resigned in November amid an uproar over his $360,000 salary. The FBI is investigating whether McLaughlin broke federal laws, questioning housing authority employees about McLaughlin’s political activities and management of the agency.

More than two dozen politicians, housing authority employees, and Murray campaign workers say that McLaughlin was a key fund-raiser and organizer for the lieutenant governor even though, as a federally funded employee, McLaughlin was barred from most political activity, especially at work.

Housing authority employees portray a workplace that McLaughlin had turned into a political machine, inappropriately pressuring workers to give time or money to Murray’s campaign and others’.

So in other words it is Jack O'Brien part deux, FBI investigation and all.

And about that November crash?

While publicly downplaying his ties to McLaughlin, Murray has told confidants that the scandal over McLaughlin’s extraordinary pay kept him awake the night before his mysterious high-speed crash on Nov. 2. Murray had talked to McLaughlin several times while the Globe was preparing an article about McLaughlin’s salary, phone records show, but Murray said he didn’t know the salary amount until the story was published on Oct. 30. The report triggered multiple investigations.

Murray “felt betrayed. He felt played’’ by McLaughlin, explained one person close to the lieutenant governor. Restless, Murray went out for an early-morning drive to clear his head.
The drive ended abruptly at 5:26 a.m. when his state-owned Crown Victoria slammed into a rock ledge along Interstate 190 at a speed in excess of 90 miles per hour, rolling over twice and triggering the political crisis of his career. Murray’s shifting accounts of how he came to be driving so early in the morning and why he crashed have raised so many questions that he recently hired Ferson, a crisis communications specialist, to handle the fall-out.

Here's what I wrote on Jan 5:

Everyone has a theory. Here's mine - worth what you pay for it:

The LG says he left his house for a pre-dawn drive because he couldn't sleep and wanted to pick up a newspaper and some coffee. I think that's probably true, so far as it goes. Except Murray told reporters he was out in search of a Herald. I think he was actually looking for a Globe (Fox reports that in fact a Globe - not a Herald - was found in the wreckage, though there's no word on the date of publication).

The accident happened on November 2. Just three days earlier, on October 30, the Globe ran its first story about the Chelsea Housing Authority and Murray's phone pal Michael McLaughlin. Although Murray's close relationship with McLaughlin didn't hit the papers until November 18, by the 2nd Murray probably knew reporters were on to the relationship, were seeking his cell phone records, etc. In all likelihood by that point the Globe's and Herald's investigative reporters were pinging Murray and his staff on a regular basis, so Murray would have known there was much more to come. He would not have known when the next shoe was going to drop, or when his name would be tossed into the mix.

Hence the inability to sleep. Hence the impulse rise early and head out in search of the morning headlines. Hence the general fatigue that might well have caused the Lt. Governor to drift off to sleep and drift off the road.

Before you go congratulating me, though, note that in the same post I also wrote, "Personally I think those who are predicting that this episode will kill off Murray's chances to succeed his boss in the corner office are kidding themselves..."

I think I might be wrong about that.

Meanwhile, about that Jack O'Brien thing? The Beacon Hill rumor mill is still in overdrive about a raft of pending indictments in that mess.

Going to be another tough month for the Massachusetts Democratic machine. Forget snow - there's a shoe storm comin'.

Storm's a' comin'

We'll see your $5.2 billion...

2012-01-20T12:50:00.000-05:00

So the Patrick/Murray Administration is rolling out its fiscal 2013 budget next Wednesday. In a preview, this morning Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray told a gathering of the Massachusetts Municipal Association that the proposal will include $5.2 billion in local aid, including a $145 million increase in education funding.

Dutiful as ever, Boston.com promptly displayed the headline: "Patrick administration promises $5.2 billion in local aid."

Well, I am today pleased to announce that we at CriticalMASS are promising 5.2 billion and one dollars in local aid. By Price is Right rules we win. Take that, Patrick/Murray.

For planning purposes in our cash-strapped cities and towns, CM's promise is worth exactly as much as the Administration's.

To say that in recent years the Patrick/Murray Administration's budget plans have been dead letters would be to exaggerate their importance. So dead have those letters been for the last two years that the Administration has felt compelled to interpose a do-over proposal into the legislature's subsequent budget deliberations, just to try and stay tangentially relevant to the process. [Related: Should Massachusetts go to monthly budgeting?]

Sure political schwartz-measuring partly explains the legislature's routinely contemptuous treatment of the Governor's budget, but that isn't all of it. Even Republican governors saw their submissions treated with more respect than Patrick's have received.

No, the Patrick/Murray budgets go straight from the in-box to the circular file not as a political swipe, but because they are wholly political documents and as such are useless as a foundation for actual budgeting. Last year the Governor trotted out the same sort of "record funding" promises (which were just as dutifully pasted into the headlines). He "funded" them with a series of what he used to call "fiscal shell games," including an un-serious non-proposal to shutter 18 prisons and a vague pledge to find a billion dollars (with a B) in "efficiencies" in the health care system. Those assumptions were interpreted as what they were (political), and the cacophony of thumps! that emanated from the State House was the sound of hundreds of copies of the Patrick/Murray budget hitting the bottom of recycling bins throughout the building.

This year, Patrick/Murray have already told us that we are in for another tough budget year, foreshadowing another draw-down from the rainy day fund (why? because of past willingness to rely too heavily on one-time revenues). Today House Ways and Means Chair Brian Dempsey predicted that despite an uptick in tax collections, "mandatory spending" looks to keep outpacing available revenues - meaning we're still in a hole. The MBTA is in the process of implementing drastic service cuts and equally drastic fare hikes to begin to deal with its own massive debt.

But somehow the Governor is able to "promise" a "record" increase in local education funding. Look for his proposals to fund that promise to basically mirror the fictions floated in each of the past two cycles. And look for the legislature to treat his budget accordingly.

Thump!

Taking credit where credit no credit is due [Updated]

2012-01-19T15:09:00.000-05:00

Last week state Rep. Dan Winslow (@danwinslow) tweeted an interesting bit of Massachusetts legal trivia: "Just learned a little known quirk: by MA statute, the state AG's third term in office is uncompensated. Think Martha will stay? #mapoli."

The Patrick Admin's $4B
Ego Trip

My un-tweeted response was "No - but then she's already running for Governor."

That's been my theory for a while now, as the self-rehabilitated AG continues to put herself consistently on the front pages (particularly of the Herald) with a steady stream of establishment-bucking, explicitly consumer friendly initiatives. And I can hardly claim sole ownership of the theory.

Anyhow, AG Coakley provided further fodder for that particular rumor mill at an appearance this morning before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, where she renewed and enhanced her recent broadside against the Patrick Administration's signature environmental legislation.

Recall that in Novemvber the Attorney General made waves when her office released a report estimating that the Green Communities Act, signed into law in 2008 by Governor Patrick, will cost Massachusetts consumers approximately $4 billion dollars over the next four years to implement.

Here's the State House News (via the Herald) on Coakley's speech this morning:

Attorney General Martha Coakley called Wednesday for competitive bidding for energy contracts and an end to "sweetheart deals currently offered to utility companies," which she said were inflating consumers’ energy bills.

"Put another way, I believe the commonwealth can continue to go green, but we can still leave some green in your pockets," she said to business officials at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast at downtown Boston’s Intercontinental Hotel.

Coakley said she hoped to take a fresh look at the state’s Green Communities Act, a 2008 law that requires utility companies to purchase a small percentage of their power from renewable sources. The act includes a provision governing direct negotiations between utility companies and power suppliers, essentially sanctioning no-bid deals. She also reiterated concerns that the law would cost Massachusetts consumers $4 billion over the next four years.

The Patrick Administration's response back in November was rather tepid. This time a veteran operative came out of retirement to "defend" the law more vigorously (and more disingenuously). Again from the SHNS:

Coakley’s remarks drew an immediate rebuke from Ian Bowles, the former state secretary of energy and environmental affairs, who called Coakley’s assessment of the Green Communities Act "shameless grandstanding" intended to mislead about the actual impact of the law, which he said had saved consumers $9 billion. Bowles, who initially took to Twitter to level his critique, also said the assessment of the costs is "remarkably misleading."

"It’s shamelessly misleading to talk about costs without talking about benefits," he said. "Our electricity costs are down by 40 percent. The cost of electricity is down by 40 percent since the act was passed. It’s the biggest energy efficiency program in the country. None of this is in dispute."

Partly true, insofar as it goes. Since the Green Communities Act was signed in 2008, the cost of electricity in Massachusetts has taken a dive. Also, since I tied my shoes this morning the temperature outside has dropped by twelve degrees. Who could dispute the obvious cause and effect?

Just for kicks, ponder something else that happened in Massachusetts (and nationwide) since approximately 2008: the cost of natural gas dropped by two thirds. Oh, and just by the by, more than half of the electricity in Massachusetts is generated using - guess what?! - natural gas. What a coinkeydink.

Supporters of the Green Communities Act (and similar command and control energy legislation) are often heard to argue that the mandates it carries will result in cost savings over the long term (and a greener future too - don't forget a greener future). Few have the gall to suggest there are cost savings in the short term. There aren't. There is not a single feature of the Green Communities Act that saves money in the short term - never mind that could plausibly be credited with the fact that "the cost of electricity is down by 40 percent since the Act was passed." Bowles is deliberately conflating coincidence and causation. Hand it to him though - he does it with panache. "None of this is in dispute" indeed.

Here's another funny part of today's Coakley/Bowles exchange (still from the SHNS):

Bowles, who now runs a clean energy firm called Rhumb Line Energy, also argued that the section of the law that allowed for no-bid utility deals was a "small part" of the 100-section Green Communities Act, which he helped implement as the Patrick administration’s energy chief. Only one contract was ever negotiated under that section, he said - a pact between Cape Wind and National Grid for the purchase of half of the project’s power.

Oh, well, if it was only the Cape Wind deal...! [Related: The SJC's Cape Wind Decision]

So long as I am drawing inspiration from social media today, here's a pertinent status update that Charlie Baker posted on his Facebook feed this afternoon:

Cape Wind. I hate to keep coming back to it, but there's one horror show a week on it. With the collapsing price of natural gas and the growing sense everywhere that we will have tons of supply for years to come, my math now suggests that Cape Wind, all by itself, will cost ratepayers $4 billion in excess electricity charges over the next 20 years. That's a lot dough. What a boondoggle. What a shame. What a disgrace.

Maybe former Secretary Bowles will tweet a response? After all, since the Cape Wind contract was inked, the cost of electricity in Massachusetts has gone down nearly twenty percent! Even though not a single turbine has generated a single Btu, anyone can see that the project is driving the single biggest energy efficiency program in the country.

None of this is in dispute.

UPDATE 1/19/12: Unsurprisingly, the Obama re-elect campaign is essentially pursuing the very same strategy - call it the Bowles Technique - in its first ad of 2012: taking credit for improvements in the overall energy arena that have precisely *nothing* to do with his policies, while pursuing policies that arguably run counter to the positive developments for which he purports to take credit. It is perverse and - like so much of the messaging that emanates from the joint Obama/Patrick media team - it depends for its efficacy on the presumption that you really aren't paying all that much attention.

The way of things

2012-01-18T10:04:00.000-05:00

Three interrelated truths:

1. Absent occasional deliberate and meaningful checks, by their nature bureaucracies grow.

2. Absent occasional deliberate and meaningful checks, by their nature entitlements grow.

3. A government comprised in increasing share of entitlement programs administered by bureaucracies, overseen by politicians who lack the necessary will to implement occasional deliberate and meaningful checks, will inexorably outgrow available resources over time.

Europe, the United States, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts... All sit at different points on the continuum between the point where government bureaucracies and the programs they administer grow beyond the control of their supposed political overseers, and the inevitable subsequent point where the governing system must either resolve to pare back their growth or be consumed by them.

We do not have many more election cycles to squander on poor choices.

Am I wrong? Show me how.

Speaking of a stunning lack of self-awareness...

2012-01-15T23:32:00.001-05:00

Could be that in the wake of that gut-wrenchingly hilarious Daily Show clip that I posted yesterday I am particularly attuned to ostentatious displays of self-righteous obliviousness, but it strikes me that if a national columnist were to set pen to paper with the intention of illustrating the Daily Show's point, he could not do any better than Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times today.

Titled "Why is Europe a Dirty Word," Kristof's column scolds Mitt Romney for the "caricature of Europe as an effete, failed socialist system" that Kristof says "creep[s] into Romney’s speeches."

Here's the thing. To berate Romney for his supposed "caricature" of Europe, Kristof shamelessly deploys an extended caricature of middle America:

It’s a languid morning in Peoria, as a husband and wife are having breakfast. “You’re sure you don’t want eggs and bacon?” the wife asks. “Oh, no, I prefer these croissants,” the husband replies. “They have a lovely je ne sais quoi.”
He dips the croissant into his café au-lait and chews it with zest. “What do you want to do this evening?” he asks. “Now that we’re only working 35 hours a week, we have so much more time. You want to go to the new Bond film?”
“I’d rather go to a subtitled art film,” she suggests. “Or watch a pretentious intellectual television show.”
“I hear Kim Kardashian is launching a reality TV show where she discusses philosophy and global politics with Bernard-Henri Lévy,” he muses. “Oh, chérie, that reminds me, let’s take advantage of the new pétanque channel and host a super-boules party.”
“Parfait! And we must work out our vacation, now that we can take all of August off. Instead of a weekend watching ultimate fighting in Vegas, let’s go on a monthlong wine country tour.”
“How romantic!” he exclaims. “I used to worry about getting sick on the road. But now that we have universal health care, no problem!”
Look out: another term of Obama, and we’ll all greet each other with double pecks on the cheek.

So in Kristof's conception, those of us who agree that President Obama seems intent on adopting for our country an essentially European economic model are nothing more than croissant-fearing, provincial cultural simpletons. Did you catch that bit about Kim Kardashian? Ho ho! Subtle, isn't he?

But then Kristof goes a step further, basically conceding the validity of Romney's core concern:

What is true is that Europe is in an economic mess. Quite aside from the current economic crisis, labor laws are often too rigid, and the effect has been to make companies reluctant to hire in the first place. Unemployment rates therefore are stubbornly high, especially for the young. And Europe’s welfare state has been too generous, creating long-term budget problems as baby boomers retire.
“The dirty little secret of European governments was that we lived in a way we couldn’t afford,” Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director of the newspaper Le Monde, told me. “We lived beyond our means. We can’t live this lie anymore.”

Yeah. So that would be the economic model that Mitt is warning against when he argues, not without evidence, that President Obama is trying to turn the United States into a variation on Europe. The "economic mess." The unaffordable "lie" that gave rise, over time, to the continental melt-down we have watched play out over the past year-plus.

There is a little more to it all than a retrograde aversion to French pastry. The fact that Kristof could write the column that he did with no apparent recognition of its internal contradictions is priceless, especially coming so close on the heels of that Daily Show skit. Kind of makes a guy want to go to the NYT's offices and hang out in the elevator bank until Mr. Kristof comes along. The man could do with an intervention. Not that it would do any good.

News You Can Use (Light Bulb Ban)

2012-01-14T17:03:00.005-05:00

Little known fact: The 100 watt light bulb "ban" that just went into effect isn't actually a ban on the *sale* of the popular incandescent. It's a ban on manufacture. So retailers with inventory still have them on their shelves. BJ's in Franklin, for example has them - 90 fewer of them than they had a little white ago...

Ought to last a while

Quite possibly the funniest thing the Daily Show has ever done

2012-01-14T13:44:00.000-05:00

I love the Daily Show. I don't like it - I LOVE it. Eighty or maybe ninety percent of the time they are lampooning my own views or mocking the people with whom I agree, but I honestly do not care - they do it so brilliantly.

So it is no small thing for me to type that I believe the clip below is the single funniest thing I have ever seen on the Daily Show. We all know people like this woman. Watch it. Please. Then show them and see if they "get it."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Civil Disservice

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Just a little reminder re. Huntsman

2012-01-11T09:54:00.001-05:00

I don't mean to pile onto Governor Huntsman while he is enjoying his third place 'win' in New Hampshire, but since I have seen no mention of it in the coverage today of his seventeen percent total I thought it worth a reminder that on December 18 Huntsman was confidently predicting outright victory in the Granite State. "I'm putting you on early notice that we're going to win the New Hampshire primary," he told CNN.

Last stop: South Carolina

Back then Governor Huntsman sat at third place in the polls - precisely where he finished, despite two weeks of endless talk about a "surge." He put all his eggs in the New Hampshire basket, skipped Iowa entirely, and came away with fewer than a fifth of the voters.

Ordinarily that sort of performance would be labeled a failure to meet expectations.

Obviously Huntsman's people have convinced him to stick it out a little bit longer to see if the current wave of renewed media enthusiasm can do for him in South Carolina what it failed to do for Santorum in New Hampshire, but Governor Huntsman is almost done now. As is Governor Perry, once deemed the strongest candidate in the field, who came out of last night with the ultimate single digit: 1 percent.

One other thing: my post last night was partly off the mark, I am happy to say. With the New York Times referring to Mitt's win as "solid," CNN calling it "big," and even the Boston Globe deeming it a "roll to victory," there is no room for grousing about anti-Mitt bias in the headlines. Mea culpa.

Can't put my finger on exactly why... [UPDATED]

2012-01-10T21:45:00.001-05:00

... but CNN's choice of headline as the New Hampshire primary results roll in strikes me as just HIGH-larious.

Aside: the "Blitzer: A salute to politicians" thing has hilarity potential too, no?

Now look for the "analysis" to determine that Mitt's ~~thirteen~~ seventeen point win was "tepid" or "weak," whereas Huntsman's percentage - significantly less than half of Mitt's total - will be read as evidence of a "surge," giving the media's favorite conservative "momentum" going into a series of primaries where, not to put too fine a point on it, he hasn't the slightest prayer.

In most any political context a double-digit victory is known as a landslide. In 2008 President Obama beat John McCain by 7.2 percent in the popular vote, in what was (correctly) deemed a righteous electoral butt-whupping. In the 2008 New Hampshire primaries, Hillary Clinton topped Barack Obama by a whopping 2.6 points. John McCain beat out Governor Romney by 5.5 points.

Needless to say, neither victory was deemed indecisive by the press back then. But back then the press did not need to slow down either New Hampshire victor's momentum in order to preserve for itself a viable, long-term primary battle (and the ratings that go with it). Things are different this year. There is no primary on the D side. A quick wrap on the Republican side would be a disaster for those who make their livings polling, prognosticating and pontificating about all things political and the networks that depend on primary drama to draw viewers to their cookie-cutter political gab-fests. [UPDATE: Validation!]

So Governor Romney's objectively big win tonight will be subjectively characterized as less meaningful than it is, Jon Huntsman will become the new Rick Santorum (you remember him? He came in ~~fourth - maybe~~ fifth - ~~just barely~~ not even scraping into double digits), and poor Ron Paul will continue to be largely ignored despite routinely wracking up numbers that rival or exceed those attained by each candidate in the shifting progression of media favorites of the week.

Meanwhile, the media will continue its exercise in self-parody.

Bad Green and Good Green

2012-01-10T19:54:00.001-05:00

Bad Green

It happened again. Saturday evening I wandered into our living room, flipped on the light switch - and stopped dead in my tracks. Instantly I knew what had happened. It wasn't just the quality of the light - which was (is) terrible and insufficient on first ignition to illuminate the room. The light was making a sound. And not a pleasant sound. A high-pitched keening, almost a squeal, was emanating from the lamp a few feet to my right. To be sure I flipped the switch to 'off.' The keening immediately stopped. 'On,' and there it was again. I did not really have to look beneath the lampshade, but I did. And there it was. The $#%#$ twisty-bulb.

"You put one of those twisty bulbs in the living room," I said to my wife accusingly.

She smiled. "Yes."

"It makes a sound," I said.

"It doesn't bother me."

"You don't hear it, or you hear it and it doesn't bother you?"

"I hear it, but it doesn't bother me."

"Light bulbs are supposed to make light. They aren't supposed to make noise. And those g**damned things don't even make decent light."

"It doesn't bother me. Are you going to go on a rant?"

My wife knows me really well.

And of course I am going to go on a bit of a rant (again).

Good Green

I have this very good buddy who works in the green industry. He's a professional environmentalist, in other words; which isn't to say he is not genuinely an environmentalist (he is), just that he's paid at least in part to proselytize so I am never 100 percent sure if I'm getting the company line from him or his honest opinion when we discuss this stuff. He insists - emphatically - that my adverse reactions to twisty bulbs are all in my head. The light is not inferior, there is no high-pitched keening, nothing to see here move along. He will be un-fazed by the fact that until the instant I threw the switch on Saturday I had no knowledge whatsoever that my wife had replaced that bulb, or that bare milliseconds after the so-called "light" came so-called "on" I knew without the slightest fraction of a doubt that one of those twisty bastards was newly resident in the lamp socket. This has happened several times over the past year or so, as my wife eases us into a twenty-first century illuminated by inferior light and I stubbornly cling to the superior incandescent that has served us so well and has yet to be adequately replaced. Each time I know before I know, at first sight of the flat, cold, utterly inferior light suddenly emanating from a previously serviceable light fixture.

My buddy thinks me a troglodyte, but as I've tried to explain ad nauseum I have no objection at all - none whatsoever - to the baseline notion of environmental responsibility. Who could? Green fetishism makes me loopy, but being "green"? I'm all for it - when it doesn't require unnecessary sacrifice in service to dubious goals or - worse - to political fashion.

Twisty bulbs are Bad Green. They require us to sacrifice decent light - something to which we and several generations before us have become entirely accustomed - simply because a relatively small group of ideologues who have amassed enough political power to impose their will on the rest of us refuse to wait just a bit longer for the steady and accelerating march of progress to bring us an equal or superior replacement for the incandescent bulb. That is nuts, and it drives me nuts.

Now let's consider an example of what I'd call Good Green. Today at lunch I popped into Boloco for a burrito (classic Mexican, white meat chicken, no cheese, add guac, add habanero sauce, thanks very much). On a seasonally-inappropriate whim I decided to add a smoothie. In the elevator on my way back to my office I drew a sip from the straw and noticed a label embossed on the plastic beverage cup lid: "GREENWARE." Investigating further, I read this legend on the side of the clear 'plastic' cup: "This cup grew up in Blair, Nebraska. It really did. It's made entirely of plants. It's 100% compostable."

That is cool. So far as I could tell from the look and feel of the thing, I was holding a plastic cup. It did exactly what a plastic cup is supposed to do, exactly the way a plastic cup would do it - it contained my drink. But, if the label is to be believed, I could toss it in the woods and some time not too much later it would dissolve into the earth, no harm done. It is, in other words, a perfectly serviceable - and superior - replacement for its plastic predecessor.

Bad Green [Examiner.com illustration]

No doubt there is a price premium on that "GREENWARE," one that shows up somewhere in the price of my occasional Boloco meal. But replacement of a disposable plastic cup with a biodegradable plant-based one - with no sacrifice in quality - is a good thing. More, it is a good thing that I'm willing to pay a little bit more to support. It is Good Green. [UPDATE: see the comment below from the aforementioned buddy. Seems my Greenware cup is only partly Good Green. I feel so used.]

Did you know there are companies out there right now that can break down waste plastic and turn it into perfectly usable fuel - into gas, basically? There are. Good green.

Did you know that GM has quietly effectuated a total recall of the Chevy Volt? Oh, they aren't calling it a "recall." They are calling it a "customer service campaign." Under this "campaign," Volt owners - all approximately 6,000 of them - are being asked to return their Volts for "modifications." Said "modifications" are intended to address a little problem identified by the National Transportation Safety Administration back in November. Said "problem" is that Volts kind of, um, might burst into flame several weeks after an accident. Surely you've heard all about this in the press, right? No? Weird.

Anyhoo, heavily government subsidized electric cars that might burst into flame? Bad Green.

"Energy Star" appliances that do the same job with less energy? Good Green.

"Low flow toilets" that do pretty much nothing at all, using less water (not counting the second, third and sometimes fourth necessary flush)? Bad Green.

Notice a pattern?

"Green" products and initiatives that emanate from the private sector, developed in response to consumer demand or to meet a market need tend to be Good Green.

"Green" forced down our throats by government mandates, or propped up ad infinitum by government subsidies? Nearly always Bad Green (and usually a waste of another kind of good green).

The problem with the modern environmental movement and its enablers in government is that they refuse to distinguish between Good Green and Bad Green. Or more precisely, to them the latter category does not exist. It is enough to say something is "Green." And all "Green" is good.

Good Green Monster

Bad Green Monster

So long, Mr. Speaker

2012-01-09T18:46:00.002-05:00

So long

I received the photo in the mail a few weeks after it was taken, back in 1996 when I was a just-out-of-college staffer at the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego. Out there on the left coast, three hours behind DC time, my colleagues and I sometimes felt a little bit detached from the momentous goings-on under the still new (and still amazing) Republican leadership in Congress. So it was extra-special to us when the architect of the new Republican majority and a hero to most of us, Speaker Newt Gingrich, took the time to swing by and see us during a California trip. I lined up with everyone else, shook his hand and smiled for the camera, and some time later there it was in my in-box: a signed photo of me with the Speaker. "Thanks for all your help, Dan - Newt."

That photo has followed me in the years since, sitting in its cherry wood frame on my desk, or on the wall, or on a book shelf as I moved from San Diego back to DC, then on to law school, to a big law firm, to the Massachusetts State House, and finally to my current office. Except for when I was traveling, hardly a day of my professional life has gone unobserved by Newt's silent, grinning visage, even as the other occupants of my political "ego wall" have mostly fallen to the wayside.

Newt always represented something very particular to me. Asked to defend his photographic presence in my office (and I was, on more than a few occasions), I'd invariably say Newt was the guy who everyone says they want - the politician who knows what he believes and says what he thinks, and does so coherently and with historical perspective. If his ego sometimes seemed out-sized, well, that tends to happen to people who become celebrities, political and otherwise. As to his personal foibles... I didn't defend those. And of course I was never in a position to vote for the man anyhow.

That all ended today. I wrote a post last week about Newt's petulant Iowa hangover. At the time I hoped his sulking and revenge-plotting would dissipate. Instead it has only gotten worse, culminating in a raft of articles like this, this, and this. Gingrich, it seems, has resolved to do everything possible to destroy Mitt Romney, even if he self-immolates in the process, and even it he destroys our chance of relegating the President to one term while he's at it.

What a difference a month makes. Here's what the pundits were writing about Newt way back on December 6:

As Mitt Romney continues to struggle against conservative Republican complaints that his claim to be one of them is no more than an expedient makeover, the latest candidate to emerge as his principal rival for the party's presidential nomination is striving for quite a makeover of his own.

That would be Newt Gingrich, famed for his slashing and often over-the-top attacks on critics and inquisitive members of the news media. Buoyed by his recent televised debate appearances that he has converted into a showcase of how smart he is, Mr. Gingrich has vowed to take the high road, at least against fellow Republicans.

The former House speaker has pledged to supporters in a fund-raising email that "every penny contributed to this campaign will be used to advance an honest campaign that the American people can be proud of." He promises "there will be no 30-second attack ads against my friends who are also seeking the Republican nomination; I will focus my criticism on President Obama."

Seems to me more than a few Gingrich donors might be due a refund.

So it is with a small amount of regret that today I took down my Newt photo from the shelf, said a testy goodbye (and something else), and tossed it in a drawer. I'll use the frame for another photo eventually.

It turns out, you see, that Newt Gingrich is - to paraphrase Bill Parcells - exactly what his record says he is. If the term "Napoleon complex" didn't already exist we'd henceforth be accusing peevish, scorched-earth egomaniacs of having a Newt complex.

None of which is to suggest that Gingrich - or any candidate - does not have the right to stick until the end, fight the good fight, go down swinging, etc. But there is a line, and at some point during the last week or so the former Speaker dashed across it and sped off into the distance.

So long, Mr. Speaker. Good luck with the post-politics thing.

Breaking News From the Schoolyard (New Hampshire)!

2012-01-09T16:31:00.001-05:00

The top two articles on Bostonherald.com right now are: (1) "Mitt Romney ripped over 'pink slip' remark," and (2) "Romney sparks furor with 'fire' remark." Meanwhile, a JUST IN banner across the top of the page screams, "Mitt Romney scrambles after 'fire' comment."

Breaking News

Sure this is the Herald, and the Herald (though I love it dearly) tends toward the dramatic, especially in its headlines. But still. That's an awful lot of ripping, furor and scrambling over a couple of "remarks." Call me old fashioned, but I feel like "furor" ought to be reserved for events more serious than a flurry of political press releases.

Such is the nature of political coverage in the age of competitive 24-hour news coverage. Every utterance from a candidate's mouth holds the potential for a manufactured scandlet. Context is irrelevant (the context of Romney's "fire remark" is about as innocuous as it gets - he was suggesting consumers ought to be able to part ways with an under-performing insurer). Once a phrase with the barest potential for controversy passes the office-seeker's lips the race is on to see whether the press or his/her political opponent(s) will be the first to blow it out of all proportion.

In this the two (the media and the opponent(s)) form a temporary symbiotic relationship: if the opponent(s) manage a press release first, then the media will report on that release. If the media manages a dispatch first, then the opponent(s) will quote that in their release. Around and around it goes. And the public wonders why candidates for public office are so damned scripted in most everything they say and do.

Pull the typical political reporter off of the New Hampshire primary beat and assign him to the school yard at the local elementary, and would the headlines be much different?

"Johnny calls Billy a 'giant doo-doo head,' risks monitor sanction."

"Susie sparks furor with criticism of Polly's hair cut."

"Bobby seen stockpiling mud balls, preparing to 'go nuclear' at afternoon snack."

One cannot really blame the reporters though. Their consumer base is comprised of political junkies. We political junkies (like kids) are excitable. We want to be stimulated. A Romney speech about insurance? Not exciting. A throwaway line about "firing people" that could semi-plausibly be spun into from-the-horse's-mouth confirmation of the worst caricatures of the candidate? Katy bar the door!

While I'm grousing about the coverage of this already-interminable Republican primary, you should check out Jennifer Braceras's column in the Herald today, which points out another of the press corps' more pervasive and irritating tendencies. In their perpetual quest to make interesting what is inherently mundane, they constantly change the rules of the game (another classic schoolyard trick).

Not two weeks ago the CW held that a second place finish in Iowa would constitute a "win" for Romney, who hadn't spent much time in the state and only really started campaigning there toward the end - unlike several of his opponents who sought to make of Iowa the be-all/end-all that it ceased being several cycles ago. When he won, the rules were abruptly changed. A slim victory became tantamount to defeat. Here's Braceras, making the point better than I do:

Consider Romney’s come-from-behind win in the Iowa caucuses last week. Despite his national frontrunner status, Romney’s support was always weaker in the Hawkeye State. Indeed, throughout the campaign Romney trailed no fewer than five different candidates in Iowa, four of whom (at various times) held significant double-digit leads.

Romney spent little time in Iowa, choosing instead to focus on New Hampshire, where his prospects of a first-place finish were better. By contrast, Rick Santorum (the strong second-place finisher) moved his entire family to Iowa and spent the better part of a year making public appearances in all 99 counties.

The fact that Romney pulled off even an eight-vote win, without a significant investment of time or resources in Iowa, is a great political victory — a testament to Romney’s strength as a candidate.

Yet the conventional wisdom (proselytized by Romney opponents from Newt Gingrich to Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) is that Romney’s razor-thin Iowa win is a sign of vulnerability.

Check out this dispatch from the State House News, republished at Red Mass Group. Pre-analyzing tomorrow's New Hampshire primary, which Mitt is expected to win by a healthy margin, the writer proclaims, "A win for Romney will be judged based on its decisiveness". Says who? Says the State House News Service, giving voice to the media's collective 11th hour determination that in New Hampshire, a win for Romney will not be enough. His victory must be "decisive." What is "decisive," you ask? Here's a guess: "decisive" will on Wednesday be declared to be at least two points more than Romney's actual margin of victory. Then we'll move on down to South Carolina, where the rules of the game will be similarly flexible.

Gotta keep it interesting for the kids.

What did Jon Huntsman ever do to the Boston Globe?

2012-01-05T21:18:00.000-05:00

The Boston Globe has endorsed - wait for it! - former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman for the Republican presidential nomination.

In other news, PETA is expected to announce its favorite sandwich meat.

One wonders at the psychology of this move. The Massachusetts primary is in March, so it is a good bet that the Commonwealth's GOP voters aren't the Globe's intended audience. Apparently its editors think someone in New Hampshire - no, strike that - some Republican in New Hampshire - might take its voting advice to heart. I'm not sure I agree with the premise, but kudos for optimism.

It is a well established fact that the Globe pretty much loathes Mitt Romney. Could be the editors couldn't resist the opportunity to devote a chunk of column space to some unabashed Mitt-bashing, and Governor Huntsman (as every liberal's favorite Republican) provided a handy delivery device.

Then again, isn't there an argument to be made that the Globe's endorsement of Huntsman harms nobody so much as Huntsman? I mean, sure the Globe tosses him plenty of laurels. He's "bold." He's "best prepared to be President." He " joined the Western Climate Initiative, which set goals for reducing greenhouse gases." Er, never mind that last one... Anyhoo, he's "bold." Fine. Does the Globe expect Huntsman to put its praise in an ad? Targeted at whom? That secretive and elusive cadre of Dukakis Republicans rumored to be hiding somewhere in the White Mountains?

So now Governor Huntsman can put the Globe's endorsement up on the shelf, right next to Bill Clinton's.

Who's next? Jimmy Carter? Mother Jones?

Steer into the skid

2012-01-05T10:05:00.005-05:00

Good God, just look at these photos (courtesy Fox25).

As a friend quipped recently, it looks like Lt. Governor Murray somehow found his way onto President Obama's top-secret elimination list and was nailed by a predator drone as his Crown Vic sped down I-190 in the wee hours of November 2. Whatever the political fallout of the ongoing scandlet, Murray has to count himself among the luckiest sons of a gun currently walking the earth. He wasn't wearing a seat belt. He drove into a stone ledge at ninety-two miles per hour. One of those photos shows a single air bag deployed from the steering wheel. And he walked away, for all intents and purposes utterly unscathed.

Fox25 Photo

I know what my daughter's first car is going to be - just put a reminder in my calendar to start watching for a police surplus auction in 2024.

As is always the case when a politician gets himself in a bit of dutch and decides in the moment to fudge the truth, each new revelation about Murray's early morning accident raises additional questions. He didn't hit ice, and he didn't brake. He fell asleep, the new story goes. "It's the only reasonable explanation that I have," says Murray. Well, this week anyhow. But Fox cites an accident reconstruction expert who has reviewed the data from Murray's "black box" data recorder who doubts that explanation. “There is no indication that the driver fell asleep.” Seems sleepy drivers let up on the gas, whereas the data indicates that Murray put the pedal to the metal just before leaving the roadway. Maybe he had one of those vertigo-inducing "sleep-falling" episodes. Even self-described Murray apologists are skeptical.

Whatever. Everyone has a theory. Here's mine - worth what you pay for it:

The LG says he left his house for a pre-dawn drive because he couldn't sleep and wanted to pick up a newspaper and some coffee. I think that's probably true, so far as it goes. Except Murray told reporters he was out in search of a Herald. I think he was actually looking for a Globe (Fox reports that in fact a Globe - not a Herald - was found in the wreckage, though there's no word on the date of publication).

The accident happened on November 2. Just three days earlier, on October 30, the Globe ran its first story about the Chelsea Housing Authority and Murray's phone pal Michael McLaughlin. Although Murray's close relationship with McLaughlin didn't hit the papers until November 18, by the 2nd Murray probably knew reporters were on to the relationship, were seeking his cell phone records, etc. In all likelihood by that point the Globe's and Herald's investigative reporters were pinging Murray and his staff on a regular basis, so Murray would have known there was much more to come. He would not have known when the next shoe was going to drop, or when his name would be tossed into the mix.

Hence the inability to sleep. Hence the impulse rise early and head out in search of the morning headlines. Hence the general fatigue that might well have caused the Lt. Governor to drift off to sleep and drift off the road.

The "surveying storm damage" line is likely something that Murray came up with on the spur of the moment, and now is stuck with. It has never made sense. Anyone who is obligated to rise before the sun and hit the roads knows that the only thing one can "survey" in the pre-dawn hours is that which lies directly in the narrow beam of the headlights. All else is darkness. But going out for a paper? That makes sense.

Anyhow, the whys of this whole thing don't much matter. What does matter, for a young politician whose highest aspirations lie ahead of him, is that Tim Murray is headed into month three of a controversy that just keeps getting worse each time he steps to a microphone to try and tamp it down.

Personally I think those who are predicting that this episode will kill off Murray's chances to succeed his boss in the corner office are kidding themselves. Voters in Massachusetts have forgiven much worse transgressions - we build our politicians' metaphorical cars with quality airbags you might say.

And Murray seems to be getting his talking points in order. His new line is the one he should have started with. “[A]ccidents happen in seconds… I must have nodded off, and it happened. I tried to answer questions shortly after. I don't know what else I can say.”

Apparently the LG has remembered the rule of thumb that he forgot on November 2: steer into the skid.

Gingrich post-Iowa -this is silly and petty

2012-01-04T15:55:00.002-05:00

Politico reports today that Newt Gingrich still won't congratulate Mitt Romney for winning the Iowa caucuses," noting by way of explanation that the former Speaker "visibly seethed" at the mention of Romney on caucus night due to the "barrage of attack ads" run by the Romney campaign and its allies against Gingrich in Iowa.

Politics ain't bean bag, Mr. Speaker

Of all of the GOP candidates (as of this afternoon, minus one), Gingrich - veteran of both the ouster of his predecessor, Speaker Jim Wright, and of the Clinton impeachment battles - might be expected to understand best the fundamental truth of the maxim: politics ain't beanbag. And as a perennial candidate through most of his professional career he should know that the graceful concession is a baseline requirement for future viability. Anything less is viewed as petulance. There is no context in which petulance is an admired trait. Worse, the Speaker's comportment is substantiating some of the worst caricatures of him.

It is interesting to note that Governor Rick Perry today defied expectations (even among his own staff) and decided to stay in the race at least through South Carolina. Before Gingrich ever saw the business end of a Romney ad Perry was reportedly infuriated with team Romney's methodical deconstruction of his once lofty prospects. Now I suppose the greatest remaining danger to Governor Romney is that Perry and Gingrich, who together still command significant resources, decide for reasons of personal ego and pride to go hard after Mitt.

They might find some personal, visceral satisfaction in that, but they won't revive their campaigns; and they will be doing a disservice to their party and to the country.

Of Christmas Lights and Government Budgeting

2012-01-02T19:48:00.003-05:00

January 2, 2012
Dear December 2012 Me,

I owe you an apology. I realize that promises were made. But in fairness to me (current Me, that is), those promises were made by December 2011 Me. Things were different back then, and the simple fact of the matter is that I just didn't have the energy today to pack up the Christmas lights in the neat, orderly and tangle-free way that December 2011 Me promised he'd do. I didn't sort out the dead strings from the live ones, never mind finding and replacing the defective bulbs (ha! Does anyone do that?). I didn't separate the strands, didn't coil them neatly, didn't sort, package and label them by bush. Yes yes, I know I promised to do all of those things - December 2011 Me did anyhow, as he fought through the mess left by January 2011 Me. But when it came right down to it today, January 2012 Me just pulled the lights off the bushes, tossed them in a trash bag and stuck them in the basement for you to sort out in roughly 11 months. 11 months is a long time away - far too long for the consequences of my actions, to you, to have much of an impact on my decision-making. See, I'd already spent a good two hours dismantling the Christmas tree and cleaning up the gajillion needles it shed as I dragged it from the house. That process started in orderly fashion, per another pledge by December 2011 Me. The first two dozen or so ornaments were sorted and packaged neatly, ready for rational unpacking next winter. But it all broke down quickly enough, and by the time the tree came out of the base the ornaments were their usual jumble in the box labeled "lights," and the lights were a tangled mess deposited unceremoniously in the box labeled "ornaments." You'll figure it out. I realize that all of this is a betrayal, all the worse for having been consciously done. Truth is, the process of packing up Christmas is decidedly less fun than the unpacking. You're already way ahead of the game in the frame of mind department, believe me. And if my actions reveal a certain lack of concern for your time and frustration, I have no defense. Wait a month and have January 2013 Me explain it to you. He'll understand.

Sincerely,

January 2012 Me

******

Once and Future Me

As I mentally composed this little apology to my future self this afternoon, my mind drew a comparison to how our government functions. The analogy might be stretched a bit, let me put that right up front. But I think it works.

It occurred to me that my decision to abandon promises-to-self not yet a full month old - promises made and intended to reduce my own frustration and annoyance next winter - followed the same basic logic that legislators (whether in Congress or on Beacon Hill) too often deploy to rationalize their constant kicks to the budgetary can. In short, that logic can be summed up thusly: "I know if I don't deal with this now it is only going to be more difficult later, but screw it. I don't feel like dealing with it now, and later is a ways off."

For government officials, particularly elected ones, this inclination to put off problems ("problems" most often coming in the form of "difficult decisions") is particularly tempting, since often they are able to push off those problems to a point beyond their own terms of office. 'Maybe I'll be gone before this thing comes to a head.'

More, they can always convince themselves that budgetary conditions might just improve down the road, lessening or even eliminating the problem without the need for tough decisions that might alienate some constituency or another. 'Who knows? Maybe in time this thing will work itself out.'

Whatever the rationale - or more precisely the rationalization - evidence of this 'tangled Christmas lights' thinking in government is all around us, from the spectacular failure of the "Super Committee" to the payroll tax credit fight just a couple of weeks back.

The only difference is we won't be getting any letters of apology from our elected officials.

The SJC's Cape Wind Decision

2011-12-29T09:22:00.001-05:00

Late last year the Patrick Administration's Department of Public Utilities determined that a power purchase deal between National Grid and Cape Wind was reasonable and in the "public interest," despite a price tag that will force National Grid rate payers to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars above what they would otherwise pay for electricity.

Anti- Cape Wind groups including the Associated Industries of Massachusetts and the New England Power Generators Association brought suit challenging the determination. Earlier this week the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the DPU's determination.

Cape Wind's developers are hailing the ruling as a major victory in their long slog to construction. In truth, however, the court's decision is entirely unremarkable. In finding that "there was clearly sufficient evidence on which the department could base its conclusion that the special benefits of (the Cape Wind power deal) exceeded those of other renewable energy resources," all the court did was confirm that the Department correctly followed its procedures and arrived at a subjective decision that is within its broad statutory authority to regulate energy rates in the Commonwealth.

What is remarkable about all of this is the same thing that has always been remarkable about it: our state government is forcing consumers (us) to pay a huge premium on the cost of our energy - already among the highest costs in the nation, by the way - to buoy a project that is politically popular on the left, but increasingly untenable without government support.

Listen to Richard Sullivan, Governor Patrick's Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs. The DPU ruling upheld by the Court, he said, “assured that ratepayers could get renewable power at a fair price.” The unspoken addendum to that statement? "... a fair price hundreds of millions more expensive than energy from other available sources, including renewable sources."

Read carefully, and buried in the news of the SJC's pro-Cape Wind decision you will also learn that developers have pushed back construction by another year, to 2013. Why? Because more than a year after National Grid agreed to buy half of the project's power output, developers have been unable to find a buyer for the other half.

And why is that?

Because no other utility is yet willing to follow National Grid's example and impose a huge rate hike on its consumers merely to make some politicians feel good about themselves.

Political pundits drive me nuts

2011-12-28T19:47:00.000-05:00

My folks are visiting this week, which has been a lot of fun - especially for my four-year-old who is enjoying every minute of their undivided attention. One side-effect of their presence is that political pundits, especially those in the employ of Fox News, are spouting their opinions and prognostications into our family room with much greater regularity than when my apolitical wife and I are the ones running the remote.

So it is that tonight I learned Rick Santorum has surged 11 points in Iowa, a development to which a fan of the former Senator might reasonably be expected to react with a relieved "It's about TIME!" I doubt Senator Santorum has ever actually deluded himself into thinking he is destined to be the Republican nominee in 2012, but it must have been tough to watch Ron Paul promoted from the also-ran division to temporary media phenom just before Christmas.

Political pundits are drama queens

The pundits on my television are understandably excited. ANOTHER surge! What does it mean? Where will it go? Could there be life for Santorum after Iowa? Could he be the next anti-Mitt? More, could he be the first anti-Mitt with more than two weeks' sticking power? Anything seems possible. It is a Brave New Santorum-surging World. Re-start the cycle.

All of which prompts me finally to type a post that I have had in my head for a while now: Political pundits are drama queens

A lot of the drama is deliberate of course. The 24-hour news beast must be fed, constantly, and for the 18 (20? 24?) months prior to a national election there is no greater source of fodder than the political news division. Unlike, say, reporters who cover the natural disaster beat, political reporters are able to create their own news. Rick Santorum's 11 point surge will be meaningful because the pundits will spend the next 48 hours talking about it relentlessly, and it will thereby become meaningful - self-fulfilling prophecy. Pundits will predict a Santorum surge, observe a Santorum surge, and then report breathlessly on the next poll (which will evidence a media-generated Santorum surge). None of this would be possible without a hefty dose of drama.

Political pundits are kind of like meteorologists.

Meteorologists have been a pet peeve of mine for years, a fact that never ceases to amuse/annoy my sainted bride. Each time the weather press works itself into a lather over the latest impending snowpocalypse I waste untold time and energy ranting first about their collective, contrived hysteria; then about we sheeple's unfailing buy-in to said hysteria; and finally about their universal refusal to own up to / apologize for said hysteria when the weather event in question fails to live up to the hysteria.

Political pundits are exactly the same. Think about the Republican primary season to-date. How many pundits have declared how many different candidates the "likely" or even the "inevitable" nominee? How many times has Mitt Romney been declared dead and buried? And yet when they are wrong - and they are nearly always wrong - 99 percent of the pundits plow confidently on to the next unequivocal prediction, never acknowledging, much less apologizing for, the last.

Perhaps the best anaolgy is to sports analysts. Recall week three of the NFL season, when the Patriots lost to the then-resurgent Buffalo Bills. The analysts were apoplectic. The torch had been passed. The Dynasty (which has already been declared dead more times than Mitt) was dead. Could the Bills be the new kings of the AFC? They could, we were told. They could. They probably were. Bellichick was a boob, a micro-manager who ruined both his reputation and his team by taking on too much responsibility for personnel decisions. The D couldn't play; Tom Brady wasn't enough; a dreaded "rebuilding year" was imminent.

Since then? Well, the Bills have gone back to being the Bills; and the Patriots (weak D and all) have kept on being the Patriots. Each week one dominant team or another is put metaphorically in the earth, only to rise again the next. Just look at the ESPN Power Rankings, which are the football equivalent of the Real Clear Politics poll round-up.

Which brings me back to the drama queen thing. Does anyone thing John Dennis and Gerry Callahan really think all is lost each time the Pats drop one in the L column? Does anyone think those talking heads on Fox really think Rick Santorum stands a chance in Hell of making a viable run for the nomination? No and no. But the actual drama inherent in an outlier poll result or a single defeat on the gridiron is insufficient to drive ratings. The drama must be amped up artificially. Hence the End of Days rhetoric on the sports pages. Hence the utterly pointless speculation about a Gingrich Administration. Come to think of it, the very same thing (ratings) also explains the monthly meteorological melt-downs to which we've all become accustomed over the past decade.

This is why despite my status as a certified political junkie, I spend barely any time at all watching political television or listening to political talk radio. The endless manufactured drama annoys me in the political context (whereas I enjoy it as much as the next guy when it comes to sports) because in politics the drama has consequences. It influences - and in many cases drives - voting behavior. I makes and breaks candidates. And so much of it is totally and completely fake.

If you have read this far thinking I might have a point, I owe you an apology. I don't. This is a rant, not an analysis.

Chevy Volt: It exists!!

2011-12-22T09:01:00.003-05:00

Sitting in traffic this morning, I saw it creeping by to my left. A Chevy Volt.

I felt like I'd just spied a Yeti or a Jackalope. Or the Tooth Fairy. A Chevy Volt, on the same road I was driving! I had to grab my phone and snap a quick picture (traffic was stopped. I swear). Otherwise who would ever believe me?

They Exist!

Just stop to consider the odds. According to the US Bureau of Transit Statistics, in 2008 - four years ago now - there were more than 254 million passenger vehicles registered in the United States. GM estimates that a grand total of 6,000 Volts have been sold to date. That means the chance of sliding up next to a Volt on the Pike - or any other roadway - is approximately one in forty-two thousand.

Coming the very day after I'd read this analysis by the esteemed Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the sighting felt like serendipity at work. Mackinac's James Hohman crunched the numbers and determined that US taxpayers subsidize production of the Volt to the tune of around $250,000 per vehicle. Let that sink in. $250 thousand, per car, to allow a handful of people wealthy enough to shell out $40K on a crank-up version of Chevy's most stripped-down compact sedans to indulge their moral superiority complexes. (Related Post: Pols Preen In Green... and we pay).

I felt compelled to roll down my window and demand that the driver thank me (as a self-designated representative of all taxpayers) for our generous support of his personal green fetish. I didn't, because that would have been - you know - a little too Planter's Cocktail Mix. And besides, with the length of the traffic back-up we were both sitting in the poor guy was probably stressed enough wondering if he'd make it to the nearest EV charging station in time.

I hope he made it. Honest, I do. Can't have "our" investment sputtering out on the Pike.

On payroll tax: Rs right on policy, SO wrong on politics

2011-12-21T19:55:00.000-05:00

Like most Republicans I know who do not live and work in the DC bubble, I am beyond exasperated with how this whole payroll tax holiday mess is playing out on the national stage. This headline from Bloomberg is fairly representative of the media's - and therefore the public's - take: "House GOP rejects 2-month payroll tax cut." Bad enough. This one is even worse: "Obama urges public help pushing payroll tax cuts." Somehow in the space of just over a week, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have managed to put themselves squarely on the side of tax cuts, battling doggedly against REPUBLICAN opposition.

Down is up. Right is left. Hot is cold. And people are buying it. DC has slipped into the Bizzarro World.

Of course the hypothetical headline: "House GOP insists on year-long payroll tax cut" would be equally accurate, and in fact "truer," covering more context. As would "Obama urges public help pushing political delaying tactic." But you aren't going to see those headlines anywhere outside of the conservative media.

I don't think the mainstream press is actually rubbing their hands in glee and giggling, "let's stick it to the Republicans." Not most of them anyhow. They are just constitutionally predisposed to buy into the Democrats' preferred narrative, and to view the Republicans' with suspicion.

This is not a moan about 'media bias.' That predisposition is simple political reality - has been for a long while, looks to be for a long while more. As Bruce Hornsby might sing, "That's Just the Way It Is" (try to get that out of your head now. You're welcome). The gleeful hand rubbing and giddy giggling is emanating from the Reid/Pelosi/Obama press offices, where the staffers doubtless cannot believe they have managed to get to the House GOP's right on tax cuts. Tax cuts. The mind reels. What galls is less the rampant bias evident on this issue than the House Republicans' apparent failure to predict how their intransigence would play in the press.

Yes, earlier this very month the President was insisting on a long-term extension to the payroll tax holiday (it isn't a "cut," no matter how many times the term is mis-applied). Yes, Speaker Boehner is absolutely correct when he argues that a two-month extension is ludicrous on its face, will only add to uncertainty and instability, and represents nothing more than another gentle kick to the can that has been bouncing down the road ever since the Democrat-controlled Senate took the unprecedented step of declining to file a budget plan. Yes, the Democrats took Obamacare right up to midnight on Christmas Eve, giving obvious lie to the notion that Congress has passed the point of no return for a final vote on long term extension of the payroll tax holiday. And yes, there are perfectly coherent arguments to be made against the choice of this particular tax (unique in the specific dedication of its proceeds to fund social security) for reduction.

None of that matters. At all. President Barack Obama is posturing as a tax cutter. Nancy Pelosi is scolding Republicans for turning their backs on middle class tax cuts. And it is working for them. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page got it exactly right today:

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

No doubt the genesis of the House Republicans' colossal blunder can be found in the assumption that this was in fact impossible. In their DC bubble, the Rs forgot two things: the media's preference for D talking points, and the fact that most people just don't pay that much attention.

That last fact might just be the primary source of my/our frustration. Not the mere fact that most people don't pay attention - especially at a time when it seems Congress would take a proposal to order pizza to the brink of a government shutdown in a dispute between pepperoni and veggie, the public can be forgiven for tuning out. The most frustrating - and appalling - thing about all of this is that the Democrats' entire messaging strategy assumes and depends upon the fact that most people aren't paying attention.

An engaged voter base would look at the current dispute and ask the eminently reasonable (and obvious) question: wait a sec... if the Republicans are insisting on a year-long extension, and the Democrats won't move off of two months... how exactly are the Democrats standing up for middle class taxpayers?

But we do not have an engaged voter base, and our media is by and large disinclined to question or criticize the Democrats' narrative. So nobody asks that question. And the DC bubble Republicans are getting beaten to a pulp on taxes.

Culture of Corruption: Dueling Breaking News Banners

2011-12-21T12:47:00.001-05:00

From both BostonHerald.com and Boston.com this afternoon come dueling reminders of the sad fact that Beacon Hill's infamous culture of corruption is alive and well.

First the Herald: Ethics Board Fines Middlesex Deputy Sheriff $5,000.

Another lawman has been slapped with a fine for throwing a political fundraiser for former Middlesex Sheriff James DiPaola, who committed suicide at the height of a burgeoning ethics scandal.

Middlesex Senior Deputy Sheriff Michael Jackson was fined $5,000 for hosting a campaign fundraiser at his house in October 2009 for DiPaola. Jackson admitted soliciting campaign donations during work hours from sheriff’s department employees who worked under him, state ethics officials said today.

A total of $4,800 was raised at the fundraiser, which was attended by 30 people, most of whom were Middlesex Sheriff’s Office employees and their spouses, officials said.

You'll recall the sad, mysterious death of Sheriff DiPaola. He's the one who back in November secretly resigned just before being reelected, so that he could simultaneously collect a pension and a salary. Shortly after the scheme was outed in the press, DiPaola traveled to Maine and committed suicide. A terrible, ugly chain of events that may or may not have anything to do with the fact that today's fine was the fourth such penalty handed down in connection with the late Sheriff's fundraising operation.

Then we have Boston.com: Former probation chief arrested in hiring scandal probe.

That's right, folks. The federal investigation into the rampant patronage in the Commonwealth's probation department is ongoing, and scalps are yet being collected.

A former acting chief probation officer in western Massachusetts was arrested and charged with intimidating and harassing a witness today as part of the federal investigation of the patronage hiring scandal at the state Probation Department.

The arrest of Christopher Hoffman, 39, who ran the probation office in Hampshire Superior Court in Northampton until he was suspended in October, marks the first criminal charges stemming from the federal investigation into the department’s allegedly rigged hiring system that funneled hundreds of jobs to politically and personally connected candidates.

The scandal, initially reported by the Globe’s Spotlight Team, led to the resignation of the entire probation leadership, including former commissioner John J. O’Brien. O’Brien is already facing state criminal charges.

Hoffman is accused of pressuring an underling not to cooperate with federal authorities. He is charged with intimidating a witness and, if convicted, faces up to 20 years in prison.

He allegedly said to a probation officer who was about to be interviewed by the FBI, “I’m going to tell everyone that you are a rat.”

Apparently there are people who actually talk like that in real life.

I tripped over these dueling banners, by the way, when I first saw and read the Boston.com article. Thinking the Herald might have another take, I clicked on over there - only to find that paper preoccupied with a different scandal entirely.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, about to enter into its sixth consecutive year of complete one party rule.

Next they'll be using computers!

2011-12-20T15:30:00.000-05:00

I'm not a huge fan of slippery slope arguments. For one thing they are too easy. Nearly every decision of any consequence carries with it the potential for infinite unintended (or intended) consequences, and some sub-set of those is always a parade of horribles.

So I read this afternoon's dispatch from the State House News - "Lottery Poised to Allow Debit Card Purchases in 2012" - and I consciously sprinkle a few grains of salt over my gut reaction.

The way of the future

Which is: this is just the first of what is likely to be a series of reactions, large and small, to the decision to bring casino gambling to Massachusetts.

Oh there is no reason in the world why lottery tickets - legal for purchase and sale in Massachusetts - should not be available to consumers on precisely the same terms as any other legal product. No reason, in other words, why ticket vendors should not be allowed to accept payment via debit card, or credit card, or check, or whatever (though drawing the line at EBT cards seems a reasonable policy decision).

So it isn't the merits of the decision I'm reacting to. It's more the context. We're barely a month into our new casino era and already the stewards of the lottery - heretofore the Commonwealth's gambling monopolist - are reacting. The move will increase ticket sales by some marginal amount; not nearly enough to cover the impact that casinos will have on the lottery's bottom line, once a couple of them are up and running. So then the Lottery Commission will do something else - broaden their advertising, maybe. Or issue more vendor licenses. And so on.

Meanwhile, once casino revenue projections have been definitively revealed as the pure fantasy that they've always been Massachusetts will follow the path trod by a bunch of casino states that preceded us. We'll loosen restrictions, increase bet limits, reduce budgets for addiction treatment, etc., desperately trying to wring a few more dollars out of a stubbornly finite pool of gamblers.

Call it a slippery slope, call it a race to the bottom. Whatever. We have started down the path, and it leads nowhere good.

A bit of gallows humor in today's announcement (from the SHNS):

Lottery officials said 33 of 42 state lotteries around the country already permit debit card purchases.

"It's the way of the future," said Lottery executive director Paul Sternburg said during the meeting.

Debit cards are "the way of the future?" Sure - maybe in the first term of the Reagan Administration. But I suppose that should provide some small bit of comfort. With this degree of tech lag we won't see the lottery on smart phones until somewhere around 2040.

To Our Armed Forces: Thank You

2011-12-18T09:10:00.000-05:00

How jarring the headline sitting unobtrusively in the middle of the page on Boston.com last week: "US formally ends Iraq war with little fanfare."

I cannot help but wonder what that headline - and the Associated Press article beneath, which emphasized the costs of the war to the virtual exclusion of its results - says about our culture at this particular moment in history.

Thank You.

Eight years, thousands of lives lost, countless acts of bravery and heroism (heralded and not), profound personal, financial and societal sacrifices. And in the end, what? A lot.

The foe our armed forces went overseas to fight in 2003 is no more. The foe that arose in his wake, and that many (including here in this country) thought would out-last us? Defeated also. A country that in very recent memory was home to a brutally repressive dictator with aspirations of regional and even global dominance and all-too-cozy relationships with global terror networks now boasts a fledgling democracy; imperfect for sure, but orders of magnitude more promising than most dared hope as few as four years ago.

And yet now, as the "US formally ends Iraq war," the press coverage (such as it is) seems almost... embarrassed.

On the Today Show recently Vice President Biden had this to say about the end of the Iraq War:

We're not claiming victory... What we're claiming here is we've done our job the administration said it would do. To end a war we did not start, to end it in a responsible way ... and to leave in place the prospect of a trained military, a trained security force under democratic institutions where the disparate parties for the first time are actually working together.

Start with that pregnant "we." There was a time when the Vice President speaking on matters of war and peace spoke by default as a representative of the entire nation. With that "we" he deliberately relegated himself to spokesman for the Obama Administration. Which is fine I suppose, except that in point of fact Biden's was one of the ninety-eight votes in the U.S. Senate that authorized the Bush Administration to go into Iraq in 2003. "We" did start that war, for reasons that became controversial but that at the time were as close to universally agreed-upon as one is likely to see in such a context.

And ultimately we won the Iraq war. "We," as in the United States of America, via our valiant, courageous and eminently praiseworthy armed forces. That the Vice President of the United States was compelled - one imagines by a deliberate policy decision - to expressly disclaim that victory is deeply unsettling.

To his credit, the vice President teared up during the same interview when discussing the sacrifices made by our service members and their families, suggesting that on an individual level he is cognizant and appreciative of the profound debt of gratitude owed to the fallen, the veterans, and their families. I imagine (and hope) the same is true of the President. And to be sure both the President and the Vice President have given speeches in recent days praising our military and its accomplishment in Iraq. Still, underlying it all is an official ambivalence that found its clearest expression in the Vice President's disclaimer on the Today Show. When he says "we" did not win in Iraq, what Biden is saying is they - the members of our Armed Forces who sacrificed so much to defeat first Saddam and then the insurgency - did not win. That they are simply pulling out and going home.

Where Iraq goes from here is up to Iraq, which is of course both as it should and as it must be. In such volatile times and such a volatile region the prospects for stability - much less lasting democracy - are anything but certain. But that fact does exactly nothing to diminish the astounding accomplishment of our armed forces, whose members earned our victory at a human cost that - while tragic in the way that even a single death in war is tragic - was lower by orders of magnitude than in any like-scaled conflict in human history.

Our service members returning from Iraq deserve more than our government and our media are giving them. They deserve our admiration, our deep gratitude, and our profound and heartfelt thanks for their service and their sacrifice. And they deserve to be praised for the victory that they earned.

From the "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished" file...

2011-12-15T14:24:00.000-05:00

... comes this new web video from the Romney campaign, featuring some kind words about Mitt spoken by Newt at last year's CPAC.

I suppose some might think it unfair to use a guy's generic podium flattery against him down the road. But Gingrich opened the door with his ill-advised (and oh-so-Obamaesque) slam on Romney's business record Saturday night.

The DNC is with Newt

2011-12-07T10:52:00.001-05:00

So are the unions.

Not literally, of course. But that is both the motivation behind and the effect of the relentless liberal assault on Mitt Romney that has only increased in intensity as Newt's primary support grows.

Here's Boston.com, an outlet that is all too happy to disseminate anything and everything Romney-critical:

Democrats and their support groups are unrelenting in their criticism of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The labor-backed Americans United for Change is today unleashing a multimedia campaigning linking Romney, a former venture capitalist, with Gordon Gekko, the fictional, greed-crazed titan from the 1987 Oliver Stone film “Wall Street.”

The effort includes a new website, www.RomneyGekko.com, which offers an interactive quiz challenging readers to decide whether Romney or Gekko uttered a phrase; a fake Twitter account, @RomneyGekko; a plan to station “Romney-Gekko” supporters outside the candidate’s big-ticket fund-raisers; and web videos led by one pivoting off Ronald Reagan’s famed “It’s Morning in America” theme....

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee is releasing its own web video pivoting off reporting by the Globe and other news organizations about efforts to purge state computers of electronic records as Romney concluded his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007.

This comes quickly on the heels of a DNC anti-Romney television ad campaign targeted to six primary states, which ran at the end of November.

If there is precedent for this level of intensity - and spending - against a candidate who has not yet even secured his party's nomination, I'm not familiar with it.

So which of these possible explanations seems more likely to you? (A) The unions and the DNC have all the money they could possibly need for the general election; so much, in fact, that they need to spend some of it now and chose their target at random. Or (B) The unions and the DNC have a considered preference among the GOP candidates - either as to the candidate they do not want to see emerge to take on Obama (Romney), the candidate they MOST want to see emerge (Gingrich), or both?

Yeah. B - and both. The Democrats' singular attention to softening up Mitt pre-dated Newt's surge, but it has undoubtedly intensified of late. Why? Two reasons.

First, the White House does not want to face Mitt Romney. He is everything the President is not: a successful businessman who intimately understands the private sector and the economy; a relative moderate with both conservative bona fides and demonstrated appeal to independents and conservative Democrats; a cool, competent manager uniquely suited to take the reins of government at this particular moment in our history.

Second, the White House would love (love love love) to face Newt Gingrich. More even than Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry or even Ron Paul, Newt represents the Obama Administration's best possible draw from the Republican primary field - by a long shot. Each of the others remains undefined to the vast majority of general election voters. Newt comes pre-defined, unfavorably. I like him by the way (he's staring at me from a signed photo on my desk, in fact). Most voters don't. Before he could begin to take on the President Newt would have to dig himself out of a deep (and probably unescapable) negative image hole. Like Obama, Newt is a career politician. Like Obama, he is viewed by the center as an inflexible ideologue. Newt's nomination would instantly neutralize ("Newtralize?") the President's job approval weakness, almost certainly guaranteeing him another term in office. Liberals know this. Independents know it too - and cannot believe the Republican party is flirting with such folly.

And so the left is mobilized - in a very serious, focused way - to kill off Mitt and elevate Newt, and positively giddy at the prospect of a Newt nomination.

Don't believe me? Here's our own beloved Barney Frank, on the day of his retirement announcement:

“I did not think I lived a good enough life to see Newt Gingrich as the Republican nominee," Frank said Monday. "He would be the best thing to happen to Democrats since Barry Goldwater."

And here's left-wing uber-blog the Daily Kos:

From 1994. Fair? No. A durable impression? Yep.
Imagine you are a longtime Republican Party activist just returning to the United States after a year-long vacation abroad. At home you turn on your computer and go to the Drudge Report and see that the Democrats somehow managed to change the constitution and nominated Fidel Castro for President. First, you’d rub your eyes to make sure you hadn’t misread. Second, you‘d jump up and down with glee, as visions of 50 state victory romps dance in your head.

This is how I feel at the prospect of Newt being the GOP nominee in 2012. If you could take every sin, hypocrisy, and evil put out by conservatives during the last 35 years, then add a layer of caricature, a pinch of hyperbole and then finally wrap it in a thick layer of bacon-flavored cookie dough before deep frying it, you would come up with a Newt Gingrich, even if he didn’t already exist.
As an embodiment of everything wrong with Conservatism, Newt is stunningly perfect. That is why I am urging all Democrats and independents in Iowa, New Hampshire and early primary states to quickly register as Republicans so we can “help” the GOP nominate a candidate of historic proportion.

All of this lefty enthusiasm for Newt is not in and of itself an argument against supporting the former Speaker (and I understand the appeal of the fantasy that he could run and win, thereby sticking it to the left from two directions at once). But it is a factor that my friends climbing aboard the Gingrich bandwagon should pause to consider carefully.

Casinos: Not that it matters now...

2011-12-07T09:17:00.001-05:00

Not that it matters now that the Commonwealth's casino bill has passed into law, but the Wall Street Journal is carrying a must-see front page article today on the various measures cash-strapped casino host states are taking to try and boost gaming revenues to cope with persistent budget gaps. Another look into our likely future, now that we've placed our collective bet on casino gaming:

A key vote in Missouri Wednesday will decide whether to relax measures aimed at keeping gambling addicts out of casinos, the latest push by a cash-strapped state to make gambling restrictions less stringent.

The Missouri Gaming Commission is deciding whether to scrap a voluntary lifetime blacklist for problem gamblers and replace it with a five-year suspension. That would allow nearly 11,000 self-banned gamblers back into the state's 12 riverboat casinos. The self-exclusion list, implemented in 1996, has been a centerpiece of Missouri's efforts to manage gambling addiction, and has been emulated in at least eight other states—usually without the lifetime ban.

Several states have sharply increased betting limits since legalizing gambling. Colorado changed its maximum bet in 2009 to $100 from $5, and allowed casinos to operate 24 hours a day. Previously, they were required to close from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. South Dakota raised maximum bets in 2000, and Florida last year eliminated its limit altogether.

Such changes to gambling safeguards are driven in part by a push to boost tax revenue, as state governments balance their efforts to protect gambling addicts with the need to address fiscal woes. In addition, the gambling industry argues that the rules hardly curb gambling addiction.

States including Missouri, Iowa, New York and Nevada have also reduced funding for treatment of gambling addicts. In Florida, officials cut funding for the Council on Compulsive Gambling, a nonprofit group that coordinates treatment programs, to a tenth of the $2.6 million it was to receive this year so they could fill budget gaps elsewhere.

Once again the irony is too rich to be ignored. Just like the gamblers on whom they prey, busted casino states glance about with bleary eyes and decide impulsively to up the ante. If they bet more surely they will win more, and all of the prior losses will be wiped away.

Gaming advocates quoted in the WSJ article claim - correctly, I'd think - that voluntary gambler ban lists are largely symbolic and almost entirely ineffective in curbing problem gambling. But how about those extended hours and increased bet limits? And how about that ninety percent cut in funding for gambling addiction programs that Florida just implemented "so they could fill budget gaps elsewhere." With the claims and promises of the Commonwealth's casino pushers still ringing fresh in our ears, those developments in more seasoned gaming states hit kind of close to home, no?

What's a busted state to do? Why, up the ante of course!

There are two main points to be taken away here: First, casinos do not solve state budget problems. The states that have them spend the additional revenue... then go looking for more. This will happen here, sure as the sun rises. And second, all of the blather about programs and curbs and safeguards deployed to sell gaming to a naturally skeptical public is just that: blather. It all goes quickly by the wayside when the state's pile of chips shrinks too small.

Casino backers will brush all of this aside if they notice it at all. It won't happen here, they'll insist. We've learned from other states' mistakes. We've adopted "best practices." We - Massachusetts - are going to be the first to do it right.

And that assumption is easy to make - so long as one ignores our propensity for spending. And the huge future budget gaps created by over-reliance on one-time revenues in each of the Patrick/Murray budgets. And the wholly unrealistic revenue and jobs projections used to sell casinos to Massachusetts. And our deep and ingrained culture of political corruption.

But yes, if one ignores all of those things I suppose it is fair to assume that what is currently happening in Missouri, and Colorado, and South Dakota, and New York, and Iowa, and Nevada, and Floria is not likely to happen here in Massachusetts.

Tim Murray: The Godfather

2011-12-01T17:14:00.001-05:00

One can almost hear the words:

Some day, and that day may not come for a coupl'a weeks, I'll call upon you to throw a fundraiser for me. Until that day, accept this job for your son as gift on my boss's inauguration day...

I am typing, of course, about young(ish) Matthew McLaughlin, son of former Chelsea Housing Authority head / current target of a federal investigation Michael McLaughlin, a/k/a button number three on Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray's speed dial.

Folks paying attention to this latest installment in the Massachusetts Patronage Chronicles will recall that the Lieutenant Governor arranged for the younger McLaughlin to secure gainful employment with the Commonwealth's Registry of Motor Vehicles, specifically with the Board of Appeals, despite McLaughlin's own shall we say spotty record of compliance with the rules of the road. So grateful was young McLaughlin that he reportedly took to referring to the Lieutenant Governor as his "Godfather."

Alas, it seems Matthew was a chip off the ol' McLaughlin block. Here's Boston.com:

The son of embattled former Chelsea Housing Authority executive director Michael McLaughlin was fired today from his $60,000-a-year job on the state Board of Appeals, according to sources with firsthand knowledge.

Matthew McLaughlin, who was recommended for the position in 2008 by Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray, was found to have falsified at least one timesheet, claiming he was working when he was actually away, said a source briefed on McLaughlin’s firing. In addition, McLaughlin sometimes claimed he was out of the office on “flex-time,” but the agency does not allow employees to work flexible hours, the source said.

Transportation Secretary Richard Davey launched an investigation a day after the Globe reported last month that McLaughlin had a poor attendance record at the board, a panel that hears thousands of appeals each year from drunk drivers who have lost their licenses.

Matthew, 41, who was fired today by Registrar of Motor Vehicles Rachel Kaprelian, was originally appointed to the board despite the concerns of Kaprelian’s predecessor, Anne Collins.

Collins was wary because McLaughlin had a lengthy driving record that included a license suspension for refusing to take a breathalyzer test, six speeding tickets and a citation for refusing to obey a police officer.

Doubtless Don Murraleone is heartbroken by this latest betrayal of his trust by the Clan McLaughlin.

I know it was you Matthew. You broke my heart. You broke my he-- Hang on. Your dad's calling. I gotta take this.

Murray has of course steadfastly denied that he pulled any strings for the younger McLaughlin. Or - more precisely - Murray has steadfastly refused to confirm that he pulled strings for the younger McLaughlin. Again Boston.com:

Murray would not say whether he helped Matthew McLaughlin get his job, but acknowledged frequently making recommendations for such positions.

“We make referrals on a day-to-day basis,” said Murray, referring to the practice of recommending job candidates to other government agencies. “I never tell anyone to put a square peg in a round hole. It’s up to the people making decisions to decide whether someone is qualified or not, and then, from there, are they doing their job?”

He said he had never heard that McLaughlin had referred to him as his “godfather.”

I'd be willing to concede that in fact Tim Murray never dialed up the Registry and said, "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse: give my God Son Matthew a job." But the LG has been around the Massachusetts political block enough times to know that when a "referral" comes down from the executive suite, the do-bees at the agencies tend to pick up on the subtext. Matthew's little run-in with the OUI laws apparently wasn't the insurmountable hurdle that it would have been for an applicant without a "Godfather."

Oh and P.S., Governor Patrick also appointed young Matthew to the Tewksbury Housing Authority (Dad must have been so proud!). Any bets on whether God-Pop pushed that particular appointment through? I'll take them odds.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Tim Murray is an utterly ordinary Massachusetts pol, part and parcel of the Democratic patronage machine that has been churning out scandals and scandlets with remarkable regularity lo these past two or three years. Remember Jennifer Murphy?

The good news for the LG, of course, is that to date being part of that machine hasn't impeded any other elected official's progress up the ladder - we Bay State voters having a seemingly infinite capacity for forgiveness and all.

"Finish the Job" - is that a threat?

2011-12-01T11:27:00.001-05:00

President Obama has started telling campaign rallies that he needs a second term to "finish the job" that he started in his first. Deval Patrick used the same line in his successful reelection effort (as has just about every candidate running for reelection in history, I imagine - I'm not claiming we have another "just words?" situation here).

Somewhat more compelling use

When Patrick said it I remember thinking, "what is that, a threat?" At the time the Gov had pretty abysmally low job approval numbers. It seemed to me that a promise to "finish the job" that a majority of voters seemed to think he'd botched in the first place was an unconvincing exhortation to support.

Of course Patrick went on to win reelection. Looking back, the fact that Patrick's personal approval ratings remained consistently high throughout his first term takes on new importance. Voters thought he was a lousy Governor, but they liked Patrick personally - and they loved him as a candidate. That was enough.

President Obama, too, is mired in dangerously low job approval numbers. But as CNN pointed out last month "his personal approval rating remains high - nearly 70%."

So I suppose in a sense "finish the job" is a threat - to Republicans tempted to think a lousy economy and majority disapproval on job performance will trump the fact that a much larger majority of voters continue to like the president 'personally.'

Menino and Occupy Boston: Defininng Deviancy Down

2011-12-01T11:22:00.001-05:00

So after weeks of essentially shrugging his shoulders at the ongoing, multiple violations of city law represented by the Occupy Boston "tent city" (talk about artificial grandiosity), after ignoring a formal request from the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy that he simply enforce the law, suddenly Mayor Menino is going to court to make sure he has the authority to evict the urban campers. Not that he has any immediate plan to do so, mind you. Boston.com:

Mayor Thomas M. Menino has said he has no immediate plans to evict the protesters, but city officials are looking to retain the right to remove them if they deem the encampment a health or safety risk.

And the very next paragraph?

A filing submitted to the court by the city makes a strong case for eviction, painting a picture of putrid, perilous enclave riddled with fire hazards, health code violations, and crime.

So Menino "has no immediate plans to evict the protesters," but wants to make sure he has the right to do so "if" city officials "deem the encampment a health or safety risk." Oh, and just by the way, said encampment is currently a "putrid, perilous enclave riddled with fire hazards, health code violations, and crime."

Just so long as it isn't a "health or safety risk"...

I hear it's Chile in Miami this time of year

2011-12-01T11:19:00.001-05:00

When Governor Patrick jetted off to the Middle East and Europe earlier this year, the junket-masked-as-trade-mission caused a significant uproar here at home (especially when Fidelity announced far more jobs leaving Massachusetts than Patrick was able to rustle up on foreign shores).

This week Patrick headed for Chile and Brazil, eliciting little more than bored yawns outside of the professional Patrick critic class. Why the difference? I think it's because barely ten months down the road, Massachusetts is pretty well reconciled to the notion that Deval Patrick has checked out, set his sights elsewhere, moved on down the road as they say.

Nobody really buys the argument that in order to bring jobs to Massachusetts he needs to personally fly hither and yon to make a sales pitch. There's a reason the door-to-door salesman went the way of the dodo. But we no longer much care. He's half way out the door anyhow.

Meanwhile, Patrick's successor-in-waiting is also out of state today, leaving Secretary of State Galvin as acting governor. No decent person could begrudge the Lieutenant Governor a little Miami vacation. He's had a tough month. And besides, things tend to go a little flooey when Patrick leaves Murray in charge.

The Globe's selective eye for negativity

2011-11-27T15:26:00.001-05:00

I am not sure which is worse: the inevitable onslaught of political advertising that is already ramping up over a year before the 2012 election, or the endless media tut-tutting about "negative" ads that has already started.

Boston Globe headline this morning: "Deceptive campaign ads hint at year of mudslinging." Regular television viewers in the Globe's market could be forgiven the assumption that they were about to read about the ongoing saturation smear campaign by the League of Conservation voters against Senator Scott Brown. But no. This is the Globe, sillies. The LCV's unprecedented multi-million dollar out-year pummeling of our incumbent Senator, featuring a barn coat clad actor tooling around DC in a smog-belching pick up truck, casually tossing litter out the windows, smearing oily hand prints across the face of our pristine Capitol city - those ads raised nary a hackle at the Globe. It is the comparatively gentle Romney ad - his first of the cycle - that naturally has our local adjunct of the DNC's communications shop all in a dither:

Romney’s ad, his first of the campaign, shows a clip of Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’’ What the ad fails to mention is that the clip is from Obama in 2008, quoting an aide to his GOP rival, John McCain.

“The fact that you could completely undercut somebody’s meaning in order to serve your own ends is, frankly, in my mind, borderline criminality,’’ Totten said. “The problem is there is no one there to be the official referee. There is no umpire in the game.’’

Here's the ad:

Pretty much the whole left of center world agrees the ad is "deceptive." Google "Romney ad" and "deceptive" and you'll get just north of 8,000 hits.Why? Well, because in 2008 when candidate Obama said "If we keep talking about the economy, we're gonna lose," he was quoting John McCain!!!

Okay... So? Think about why candidate Obama felt it worth his campaign's while to repeat that McCain quote back in '08. McCain was running as the candidate of the incumbent party. A big part of Obama's core argument was that the incumbent party had made a hash of things, and needed to be replaced. When Obama repeated that McCain quote he was saying to his audience, 'the Republicans know they have made a mess of the economy. They know they have to make this election about something other than their economic record, or they will lose.' Which, as it happened, was absolutely correct.

It is also precisely the Romney ad's message, pointedly criticizing the Obama Administration as the incumbents who have made a hash of the economy, and who as a result are desperate for next year's election to be about anything else.

Sure the Romney team's use of the quote is a little cute, but it is hardly worth the uproar it has caused. Take out the quote and substitute on-screen text or a voice-over saying "if he keeps talking about the economy, he's gonna lose" and the message remains precisely the same. The "deceptive" quote isn't the message itself - it is at most the audiovisual equivalent of a highlighter stroke, intended to draw attention and give the message some added punch.

A couple of days ago Boston.com ran a related article that practically hyperventilated right off the screen, so offended was the reporter by the proposition that, as the headline put it with an increasingly common lack of subtlety, "Romney aides pleased with reaction to deceptive ad."

“It’s all deliberate. It was all very intentional,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney senior adviser, said after last night’s debate in Washington. “We want to engage him on the subject he wants to avoid, which is his failure to create jobs and get this economy moving again.”

“They should probably order some more defibrillators for the Obama reelection committee, because their reaction was quite hysterical,” he added. “But that was the point.”

Romney’s 60-second ad, which started being broadcast yesterday in New Hampshire, shows a video clip of Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” What the ad fails to mention is that the clip is from Obama in 2008 quoting from an aide of his GOP rival, John McCain.

Fehrnstrom was exactly right. The intention of the ad, and its effect, dovetails beautifully with the quote that has caused all of the sturm und drang on the left: it has team Obama "talking about the economy," and if he keeps doing that he's "gonna lose." No wonder the Globe finds it all so upsetting.

For all its misplaced indignation, the Globe didn't neglect the opportunity to lay some groundwork for the coming months:

Some have predicted that Obama will have to be just as ruthless as his rivals to overcome voter anger over the limping economy and disappointment in the message of hope and change that carried him into the White House in 2008.

Ah yes. "Some have predicted" that poor, beleaguered President Obama, the bright-eyed disciple of Hope and Change who would love nothing better than to have a 'conversation about the issues,' might just be dragged kicking and screaming into a "negative" campaign. Never mind that months ago Obama's top media aides deliberately leaked their strategy to "destroy Romney" by labeling Romney "weird" and establishing him as the political equivalent of the eccentric neighbor with whom nobody wants to make eye contact.

Please.

To re-cap: Several million dollars in pure attack ads against Senator Brown funded by anonymous donations to a national environmental group raise barely a Globe eyebrow. Misappropriation of an Obama criticism of a former opponent, turned around to make precisely the same criticism of the president? Clear "evidence... that the presidential race is going to feature a rough, negative, and confusing advertising onslaught."

Which brings me (finally!) to the point I intended initially to make: "negative" is largely in the eye of the beholder. The Romney ad hits the president pretty hard on his economic record for thirty seconds, and then spends precisely the same amount of time on Romney's own vision for how to turn the country around. "Negative"? Sure. Half of it anyhow. But isn't all criticism "negative"? And isn't a challenger seeking to convince the electorate that the incumbent does not deserve a second term in office obliged - obligated even - to criticize the incumbent? Of course he is. Governor Romney (and a lot of other people) thinks President Obama has done a craptastic job on the economy. Governor Romney thinks he could do a sight better. Expect his ads to keep saying so.

The public can tell the difference between criticism - pointed and even biting though it may be - and slander. We know there is a line, and we're pretty good at noticing when that line has been crossed. We don't need the press and their "experts" constantly scolding the campaigns for lodging those criticisms (and by extension us for reacting to them).

As for the Globe? It is struggling for survival in a changing marketplace, and it knows its audience. If its political news coverage bears more resemblance these days to the Huffington Post than to the Gray Lady of old, well, it isn't difficult to understand why.

The Governor on LG Murray: Calling B.S.

2011-11-23T15:47:00.001-05:00

Governor Patrick went on Fox Boston this morning for a wide-ranging interview. Of course he got questions about Michael McLaughlin, the Chelsea housing authority mess, and especially Lt. Governor Tim Murray's suspicious relationship with McLaughlin. I was at the gym on a treadmill at the time. On the off-chance that any of my gym-mates read this, I apologize. I know my frequent heavy sighs, grunts, gasps and just-under-the-breath cursing must have been more than a little bit disconcerting.

Here's the entire interview.

Deval Patrick discussses happenings in Massachusetts: MyFoxBOSTON.com

Secure Communities / Matthew Denice? He "wishes he'd known" he was going to be asked about that, because he's forgotten some of the details. Here is a refresher on those details, which are are horrible/horrifying today as the day they were first reported. And here's why everything the Governor said today on the topic is B.S. Every. Single. Thing. Governor Patrick is a smart guy. Even if he's forgotten some of the details of the Denice case, surely he spent enough time honing his talking points a couple of months ago when it was leading the news to know that they are B.S. But there he sits and repeats them.

On the Murray/McLaughlin connection the B.S. was spread even thicker.

How can the Governor possibly defend an average of three calls a week with a guy who is very evidently corrupt (and apparently has had a less than stellar reputation for quite some time)? Here's his response:

The lieutenant governor is in touch with local authorities all the time and thank goodness that he is because that’s a very important function of our office in general... People know at housing authorities, at veterans’ services organizations, in homelessness organizations, that if they need some help from state government they can go right to the lieutenant governor.

That's awesome. "People know... that if they need some help from state government they can go right to the lieutenant governor."

"Help!! My son has an OUI record but he wants to work at the Registry!!" or

"Help!! The Globe is calling about the hundreds of thousands of public dollars I've been secretly socking away!"

Yes, the LG is a helpful guy, no doubt. "And thank goodness that he is..."

Pressed on the sheer volume of calls - interviewer Kim Kerrigan observed that she cannot think of anyone with whom she speaks with that kind of frequency other than maybe her husband - Patrick fell back on the completely bogus "phone tag" line that he used a few days ago. "You should see the games of phone tag that we play."

B.S. Total B.S. Neither the Governor nor the Lt. Governor plays "phone tag" with local officials. A local official who wants to speak with either of them calls his office, speaks to his scheduler, and schedules a call. Simple. No "tag" necessary.

It's piling up.

Look at the premise the Governor wants us to buy here. He'd have us believe that there is nothing unusual about multiple weekly cell phone conversations between the LG and a municipal housing official. Par for the course - just the LG doing his job, responding to calls for "help." And he'd likewise have us believe that for each such conversation, multiple rounds of "phone tag" are standard OP. Hundreds - maybe thousands - of town and city officials across the Commonwealth, all free to "go right to the lieutenant governor," all playing "phone tag." Golly. No wonder Tim Murray has to go driving at 4:00 in the morning to decompress. He must never get off the phone.

The best possible explanation here is that in fact LG Murray had an unusually close relationship with a guy who it turns out was a pretty serious crook, and he (Murray) knew nothing about McLaughlin's systematic theft of public money. That's not a great story for the Administration, but it is at least a plausible and straightforward one.

The Governor's insistence on spinning completely nonsensical fairy tales only gives rise to wholly justified suspicions that there is more to the relationship than is currently known.

"Predictable as the tides"

2011-11-23T09:56:00.001-05:00

Here's something I wrote a week ago yesterday, in a post about the volatile (yet entirely predictable) Republican primary:

Sometime in the next week or so media leading lights will start to wonder out loud when Jon Huntsman is going to get his turn to surge. Shortly thereafter, Jon Huntsman will get his turn to surge. Predictable as the tides.

And here's a Boston.com headline this morning, over an article about last night's GOP debate:

Jon Huntsman excels in foreign policy debate; Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney clash on immigration

Hilarious. At this point the only reason Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are hanging in is the sure and certain knowledge that if they just stick around long enough, eventually each will get his turn as the media's flavor of the week.

Patiently waiting their turns

Never let it be said Governor Patrick doesn't have a sense of poetry

2011-11-22T14:22:00.001-05:00

Fresh off his signing of the casino bill, Governor Patrick headed this afternoon to historic Plimouth Plantation - intentionally or unintentionally highlighting the stark contrast between the Massachusetts he inherited and the one he is helping to create.

The gov's deputy press secretary is tweeting photos, one of which has the Gov huddling inside a replica Wampanoag Wetu house. I took the liberty of assuming a little bit of topical dialogue.

WBZ radio needs an editorial reboot

2011-11-22T09:39:00.000-05:00

I listen to WBZ radio nearly every weekday morning during my commute. There is something comforting about its unvarying routine: weather on the tens, traffic on the threes, and in between a pretty good overview of the headlines of the day. After a couple of cycles it gets repetitive and I flip to WRKO or Dennis & Callahan, but 'BZ is a pretty good early morning substitute for trying to read the paper while driving (which I'm told is contraindicated).

The 'straight news' that WBZ provides has always been a little bit biased to my Massachusetts Republican ears. For the last six years their news readers have fawned over Governor Patrick with as much ardor as anyone else in the Boston press corps. But in context, with the morning 'news' (as opposed to 'news talk') alternative being WBUR, 'BZ has usually been palatable.

Lately though I am more and more frequently exclaiming aloud in my lonely car at some of the things that emanate from my radio. Two examples from just this morning:

First, like everyone else in the Boston media it seems, WBZ has a burr in its collective saddle about Mitt Romney. I don't honestly know from where comes this uniformly high degree of simmering hostility. Mike Dukakis ran for President too, after all, but the Duke (when he pops up) doesn't get the audible sneer that characterizes most any coverage of Mitt. This little bit this morning, though, went beyond the norm and into self-parody.

Reporting on the Suffolk University poll of New Hampshire Republican primary voters that was released last night, WBZ's news reader said (I'm paraphrasing): 'New evidence that Newt Gingrich continues to surge in the GOP primaries, as the latest poll out from Suffolk University shows the former Speaker pulling into a tie with Ron Paul for second place. Mitt Romney continues to lead the pack.'

That's it. I hadn't seen the poll, but immediately I knew by the (obviously deliberate) omission of what would ordinarily be the key component of a report on a poll - the numbers - that Mitt's lead probably hadn't deteriorated the way some local pundits expected/hoped it would.

Sure enough, when I reached my desk I pulled up the story from Boston.com and Newt Gingrich has in fact pulled into a tie for second place with Ron Paul in the Granite State - with 14 percent. And yes, Mitt Romney continues to lead the pack - with forty-one percent. Some surge. Nobody without an agenda could look at those figures and decide that the headline is 'more evidence of a Gingrich surge.'

Not ten minutes later (I know, because there wasn't an intervening weather report), I was treated to WBZ's coverage of the 'super committee' failure - which consisted in its entirety of an extended soliloquy by Senator John Kerry excoriating Republicans for their intractability on "taxes for the super rich," followed by "this is Carl Stevens, reporting." Is there another side to the story? A Republican with an alternate view perhaps? Apparently not. Now I'm no journalism major, but isn't there some kind of baseline standard having to do with the obligation to at least acknowledge the existence of 'the other side of the story' when a story in fact has two sides?

Tangent: John Podhoretz has pretty much the most spot-on analysis of the whole 'super-committee' farce that I've seen, in today's NY Post.

My point is this: most conservatives I know are willing to put up with a certain expected amount of liberal bias in the mainstream media, so long as the 'news' is in there somewhere, not too deeply buried. That's why most of us continued to read the Globe, at least until recently, despite the frequent grinding of teeth it tends to induce. Underneath the judgements and the insinuations, the 'news' was usually there to be found. But there is a point at which it becomes too much, and baseline credibility is lost.

I don't spend much time watching Fox News for basically the same reasons. What I want from the news is 'the news,' not an ideological back rub. Much as I find Fox's sympathetic conservative bias comforting, I am never quite sure I'm getting the whole story. So I tend not to watch. A lot of other people do, which is more than fine. I get my editorial fix from written sources; others get it from Fox (or from MSNBC, or that tiny little cable channel I'm told Al Gore runs). All good. And the degree to which Fox News's mere existence - never mind its popularity - drives my liberal friends to distraction is a reliable source of amusement. But the channel isn't my thing.

Anyhoo. With the marked exception of my friend Dan Rea, who takes over the WBZ airwaves every weekday evening at 8 pm and is absolutely fastidious about covering all sides of the issues he takes on, I am losing faith in the proposition that what WBZ presents is 'the news,' rather than subtle editorial content masked as news.

After that super-committee story this morning I flipped the dial - even before hearing the traffic on the threes.

Looking Into the Casino Crystal Ball: Predictions

2011-11-20T09:32:00.000-05:00

So now that the casino bill is done, destined for a quick signature (strike that, replace with 'signed') by the Governor after a perfunctory review, it makes sense to take stock of the various predictions and promises offered up by gaming proponents in their successful drive to bring a little bit of scenic Atlantic City to our doorsteps, and to offer some predictions about how all of this is likely to play out.

1. Licensing Fees: Proponents - including the casino champs Governor and Speaker DeLeo - estimate that each of the three regional casinos authorized by the bill that passed this week will garner an initial licensing fee of at least $85 million. This is already a steep discount from the $200 million per license floor that was promised during the first Patrick Administration go-round on casinos. Why? Simple: because the economy stinks, and even though it will improve eventually, more and more states keep legalizing casino gaming. With each new potential market, the amount a developer will be willing to pay to break into any one of them will drift inexorably lower.

2. Revenues: We're promised anywhere from $300 to $500 million per year in casino revenues. One word: Ha! Not likely. Same reason as above, only this time it won't be the developers who are stretched thin across the suddenly casino-studded landscape. There are only so many people out there who are inclined to spend their time losing money in casinos. If the market is not already saturated (and the sagging fortunes of Connecticut's casinos and Rhode Island's gaming facilities suggest it may be), then it will be soon.

3. Jobs: Casino proponents, including the Governor, the Senate President and the Speaker, have promised 15,000 permanent jobs. Recently the Globe reported that in Pennsylvania, ten full-scale casinos employ exactly that number of people. We're planning three. Math. Look for pols to start referring to jobs "saved or created," and shortly thereafter to use the jobs shortfall as a rationale for more casinos (see next prediction).

This box can't open just a crack

4. Before Long There Will Be More Than Three: A big selling point in Governor Patrick's early pitch was that casino licenses in Massachusetts will be limited to three (plus one "slots parlor"). We won't end up like California, with a sad, tacky little casino storefront at every interstate rest stop. Pandora's Box can be opened but a crack. Nonsense. According to the Globe, there are already at least ten casino developers eying various locations across the Commonwealth, with more expected to jump into the fray as the highly-political and contentious local battles over the license bidding process heat up next year. Three of these will get their licenses, and their casinos. The others will sue, and eventually they will win. Even if they don't (or perhaps before they get a chance), politicians disappointed by the failure of revenue and jobs projections for three casinos to live up to expectations (see points 1-3 above) will quickly decide to double down - and will repeat their fanciful predictions in justification of the next round of licenses.

4. Some of the dire predictions about increased drunk driving deaths, political corruption, crime, graft, addiction and bankruptcy won't come true. Some, on the other hand, will.

5. We'll see our first major gaming-related scandal within six months. It might have to do with the license bidding process, or it might be retroactive to this year's backroom assemblage of the legislation passed this week. But Massachusetts being Massachusetts and our ruling machine being what it is, investigative reporters are going to have a lot to work with going forward.

6. During the next budget crisis after casinos revenues start coming in, we'll be no better off than we were during the last. As has occurred in each and every state that legalized gaming before us, the revenues that are generated - whatever they end up being - will be eagerly spent. Our pols will dig the next hole just as deep as the last one.

7. Despite all of this, Governor Patrick, Speaker DeLeo and their allies will count the casino initiative as a success. Whatever the revenues from licensing fees and operations, and whatever the jobs total, the pro-casino caucus will continue to use their own numbers: $300-$500 million in revenues, 15,000 permanent jobs. Occasionally a reporter will call them on it; more often the press will dutifully parrot the claims.

***

Although I realize that I could easily be mistaken for a puritan on the gaming issue, in truth my personal opposition to the notion has never stemmed primarily from fears about the social impacts that these gaming megaplexes are bound to have on our communities. What has bothered me all along is the patent nonsense that has passed for pro-casino argument, ever since Governor Patrick in his first year in office suddenly designated gaming the sum total of his plans for economic development in the Commonwealth. That, and the fact that one of the aforementioned developers wants to put a casino in my back yard.

What our legislature (on a bipartisan basis) has just done is deliberately create a whole host of new problems, for very little in return. We've been sold a bill of goods - much the same one, ironically, that casino operators sell to the patrons who come through their doors, desperately hoping to solve their financial problems with a roll of the dice or a pull of the lever.

Know what WE don't appreciate, Governor?

2011-11-19T08:45:00.001-05:00

So it turns out that Lt. Governor Tim Murray was pretty tight with Michael McLaughlin, the Chelsea housing official currently under federal investigation for finagling (and failing to report) a whopping $360,000 salary, and then snatching another $200K on his way out the door. If you don't know what I'm typing about, read this and this before you continue.

Specifically, Murray and McLaughlin were apparently phone buddies. McLaughlin's cell phone records show more than eighty calls between the two over the past seven months (and that's just the cell phone).

Yesterday Murray, joined by a testy Governor Patrick, argued that there is nothing inappropriate or even unusual about Murray's relationship with a crook. Let's unpack their defense.

First, there's the "just doing my job" line. McLaughlin was a housing official. Housing policy is in Murray's issue portfolio. What's the issue? From Boston.com:

“Part of my portfolio is working with local officials - elected and appointed and others. I have dozens of phone calls on a day-to-day basis with lots of officials across the state including Mr. McLaughlin,” Murray explained.

Murray said he was outraged to learn McLaughlin’s true salary, which may be the highest for any public housing official in the United States.

McLaughlin “was a political supporter. As I said, he’s someone on housing issues that I would talk to from time to time, but I was not aware of the full extent of his contract, like everyone else, until that Globe article appeared on” Oct. 30, Murray told reporters. “He misled me. He misled other people. I’m disappointed. I’m frustrated, and I’m angry.”

This defense relies on the (safe and reasonable) assumption that 99.9% of the voting population has no idea whatsoever what the Lt. Governor does, and therefore no basis to question the proposition that it is perfectly normal for him to chat an average of three times a week with a single local official.

As it happens, I do know exactly what the Lt. Governor does, and this assertion that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on here is complete nonsense. There are 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts, many with dozens of local elected officials. It is conceivable that there was nothing inappropriate about the frequency of Murray's contacts with McLaughlin, but the claim that there was nothing unusual about their volume is laughable.

Next there's the "he was a political supporter" defense. Again from Boston.com: "Several Merrimack Valley politicians said the frequency of the calls reflect the fact that McLaughlin is one of Murray’s main political operatives north of Boston." That's not part of the defense we'll hear from Murray or Governor Patrick directly - claiming a guy who finagled hundreds of thousands of public dollars into his personal accounts as a "main political operative" doesn't exactly help the LG's case.

It doesn't help explain the volume of calls either. In a non-election year, the Lieutenant Governor's political machine isn't exactly a 24/7 operation. Three calls a week with a regional political operative? Sorry - still doesn't pass the smell test.

That stench gets worse as we learn that McLaughlin called Murray "within hours" of learning that the Globe was on to his exorbitant salary. And worse yet when we find out that Murray arranged a job for McLaughlin's son (who has a "lengthy driving record, which included a license suspension for refusing to take a breathalyzer test") with the Registry of Motor Vehicles' board of appeals ("which hears appeals from drunk drivers who have lost their licenses.") Honestly aren't there any standards at all in the Massachusetts Democratic patronage machine? The kid apparently referred openly to Murray as his "godfather," an appellation that is a term of art within state government, meaning 'the VIP who has my back.' Common usage might be, for example, 'We can't fire that kid - the LG is his godfather.'

So then Patrick and Murray go where Patrick at least always goes when pressed - to self-righteous indignation at the fact that anyone would dare to question his motives or actions. Here's the Herald:

“[There is] nothing indicating there was something inappropriate about those phone calls. I do not believe in guilt by association. This is a fabulous lieutenant governor who runs to works every day to do the best he can by the people of the Commonwealth. I am proud of him and I am proud to serve with him and the Chelsea housing authority executive director who breached the public’s trust has some consequences,” Patrick said.

I don't believe in "guilt by association" either. Suspicion by association, though? Legitimate questions prompted by association? Judging a person by the company he chooses to keep? That's all pretty rational stuff. And there is plenty "indicating there was something inappropriate about those phone calls" - starting with their sheer volume. Here's a little more Patrick, from Boston.com:

Patrick stoutly defended his second in command, bristling when a reporter asked why the lieutenant governor would need to call a Chelsea housing official so frequently.

“Do you know how much phone tag we play around here?” Patrick asked. “We and in particular the lieutenant governor is in constant contact with local elected officials all around the Commonwealth. And let me tell you what I don’t like, what I don’t appreciate, is insinuation when there is nothing.”

How obnoxious. Know what we don't like, Governor? What we don't "appreciate"? Public officials who look at plumes of billowing smoke and get all pissy at the suggestion that there just might be a fire.

Something is going on with Tim Murray lately. I have no idea whether it is a series of unfortunate coincidences that have transformed him from a non-entity to a total political train-wreck over the past few weeks, or if all of these strange occurrences are somehow connected. But he's a mess.

That said, he's a mess at the best possible time, with the last election safely in the rear-view and the next (in which it is no secret Murray wants to play the leading role) still a long ways off.

Speaking of that election, while Tim Murray spends a good chunk of his time on the phone with a crook, or surveying storm damage in the dead of night, more than a few political observers lately have noted that just about every week the Attorney General manages to get herself on the front page with smart, consumer-friendly initiatives that fairly scream "I'm thinking hard about running for governor"...

UPDATE 11/20: Seems the LG's explanation didn't exactly lay all questions comfortably to rest...

This wacky, crazy, zany Republican primary

2011-11-17T13:48:00.001-05:00

Most of us live primarily in the moment. It is hard to bring historical perspective to bear on the day-to-day. That's why even President Obama is able to say with a straight face, as he frequently does, that his Administration has faced 'unprecedented' challenges. Some (Lincoln, FDR, Grant, Truman, Ford...) might quibble, but whatever - the president is entitled to his perceptions.

I keep hearing that the ongoing Republican primary is like nothing we've ever seen before. The word "crazy" is used a lot, to describe both the electorate's volatility and some of the candidates. People who say this, it seems to me, forget that within the past decade John Kerry shared a stage with both Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton. They forget that in a pre-DVR age, a Saturday Night Live writer who missed a general election debate involving Ross Perot might as well have hung up his satirist's pen.

Part of the problem is that there are too many debates this year - too many by orders of magnitude. At the rate they are proliferating can two-a-days be far off? They are working for my guy, generally speaking, both because he is doing a great job and because his opponents keep using the debates as opportunities to self-immolate in public. But it's still too much. If anyone were watching beyond the most hard core Republicans and slightly unhinged political junkies I'd worry about a 'pox on all their houses' effect, but hardly anyone is watching. Except those satirists. They love this year's debate schedule.

Most people - even most Republicans, I think - are aware of the debates only by proxy. We see clips on the news and read the headlines. '[Candidate X] Wins!' or '[Candidate Y] collapses!' Occasionally '[Candidate Z] commits worst gaffe in debate history!' and we all run to YouTube and giggle at the carnage. The point is that for most of us, "our" impressions of how the debates - and therefore the primary - are going aren't really "ours" at all. They are a distillation of the impressions of the media figures to whom we pay attention, who we trust to sit through the damned things on our behalf.

That might explain both the polling volatility and the utter and complete predictability of that volatility. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the Republicans responding to these polls, whoever they are, are consciously or unconsciously asking themselves a question before stating a candidate preference: "Let's see... who have I heard the most about this week?"

There was a time - way, way back in July - when it seemed that Michelle Bachmann might have some mo'. Rick Perry's rise and fall were both so steep that his graph is just a straight line, with the up and down overlapping.

Right about the time that Herman Cain's trajectory turned from North to South, various pundits started to speculate about a Gingrich resurgence. Commentary on the subsequent debates shifted from Cain's affability to Newt's intellect - which in truth has been on display to precisely the same high degree since the debates started, with little notice. Sure enough, within a week "the buzz" had shifted to Newt. Shortly thereafter that buzz showed up in the polls. And today we have this.

But no. Newt Gingrich is not going to be president, or even the Republican nominee for president - much as many on the left ardently hope he will be.

Not going to be POTUS

For one thing, I don't think the United States of American can have a president called "Newt," any more than we can have one called "Tiny" or "Junior" or "Scooter." I type that partly in jest, but only partly. Plenty of people vote based on lesser considerations.

More to the point, while nobody doubts Gingrich's intellect, lots and lots of people legitimately doubt his ability to play nice with others. Like it or not, government is politics and politics are at some level the art of dealing with other human beings with sufficient tact that 90% of them aren't rubbed the wrong way. There are two kinds of people in this country: a relatively small group that loves Newt, and a much larger one - including plenty of Rs - that he rubs the wrong way. Nobody is ambivalent about Newt.

Always has it been this way, since before Newt was Speaker. When he was Speaker, Newt was to the left precisely what Nancy Pelosi became to the right: the embodiment of everything wrong and mean and insane about the other side. This is not the person we want standing at the front of the Republican parade. There is a not-insignificant portion of the primary electorate in both parties that refuses to be satisfied with a candidate who is not completely and wholly unpalatable to the vast majority of the country. Gingrich fits that bill. Happily for both parties, those candidates rarely secure the nominations.

Already the chattering class is turning on their latest favorite/next doormat. There has been a lot written in the past couple of days about Newt's role with Fannie and Freddie. More will be written about his, um, personal issues. Sometime in the next week or so media leading lights will start to wonder out loud when Jon Huntsman is going to get his turn to surge. Shortly thereafter, Jon Huntsman will get his turn to surge. Predictable as the tides.

Which brings me to the main question: why this steady stream of boom and bust "Mitt alternatives," while the man himself stays slow and steady at roughly 25%? The most interesting/convincing answer I've seen is in this blurb from Politico, which notes that while Mitt's share of the primary vote - at least in polls - has remained static and his ranking has bounced around between first and third place, his favorability ratings consistently lead the primary field. Noting that some have wondered if Mitt has hit his "ceiling," the writer speculates that perhaps, "as Gallup would suggest and as pollsters like the Tarrance Group's Ed Goeas noted to Lawrence O'Donnell yesterday, that the mid-20s number is actually a floor for Romney, who will attract more support when it comes time to vote."

I think that's right for a couple of reasons. First and most importantly, Mitt is undoubtedly the 'establishment' candidate. And really who wants to fess up to supporting 'the establishment,' especially this early in the game? Primary voters are tired of seeing headlines like this one, that make them instinctively indignant. 'Screw you, media,' is the understandable reaction. 'We haven't voted yet.' This isn't Mitt's fault - in fact it is a function of the excellent campaign he is running. But it helps explain those numbers.

Second, while he is hardly the robot his media detractors portray him to be, in comparison to some of the other personalities sharing those debate stages with him Mitt is undeniably milquetoast. He is calm, steady, competent, methodical - boring. The primaries aren't supposed to be boring. There is supposed to be an element of unexpected wackiness. The 'roots kind of resent boring. For now anyhow.

The key to Mitt's success so far has been his ability to ride out the volatility (and the crazy) without succumbing to it. From day one his focus has been on President Obama, and that focus has remained steady even as the flavors of the week rise and fall in steady cadence. All the while he has gathered the (establishment) support that he will need for the general, without gratuitously alienating the people who are neither enamored of nor put off by him right now.

If I'm right and that Politico blurb is onto something, then all of this will serve Mitt well in a general election match-up with President Obama. By that time I'm guessing a whole lot of people who currently judge Mitt "boring" by comparison to his constant debate companions will have found plenty in his candidacy to be excited about.

No more years of President Obama, instead of four more? A President who actually understands how the economy works, who knows what it is like to cut spending and balance a budget, and who proceeds from the assumption that the United States is intrinsically a force for good in the world?

What could be more exciting than that?

Casinos: that's gotta be some kind of record

2011-11-15T15:40:00.001-05:00

Take a look at this screen capture from Boston.com:

3:01 p.m.: Mass. House passes casino bill... The Senate is expected to vote on the proposal as early as today."

3:30 p.m.: Mass. Senate votes to debate casino gambling bill.

That's gotta be some kind of legislative speed record, even in a state legislature famous for the last minute lawmaking luge. The only real question is: how ever did they herd the Senators into the chamber so fast? My bet is on a well-timed rumor of free muffins.

Both chambers still have to take one more procedural vote each, to "enact" the final bill and send it on to the Governor. But this thing is done.

Anyone inclined to agitation over the half-day turnaround between conference bill and tying the thing with a bow should note that our esteemed legislature had no choice. They had to ram this thing through to passage, you see, because they are up against their "mid-week deadline" to wrap things up before their two month "holiday recess" begins. And it isn't just the casino bill accelerating to warp speed, mind you. They also have "pension reform" and redistricting to get through. Oh, and human trafficking/parole. And a bill that is vastly important to the infinitesimally small percentage of the population with gender identity issues. So it's a tough, tough week. Lots to do before recess, and of course they have to squeeze in snack time too (union rules).

They are smack up against this hard deadline with so much to do because, well, because.... um... Because they couldn't do any of this at any point in the past six months because of the, uh... [cough]. I'm sorry. I've just got all this stuff twirling around in my head. What were we talking about?

A cynic might assume that leadership does this - holds complex legislation in secret until the very last minute - to provide a ready excuse for a sprint to roll call that conveniently deprives opponents of any possible chance to impact the final vote. There's no time to release the bill for public review, you see. They have a deadline. They have to get it done now. So sorry. But that would be cynical. I prefer to think our legislative leadership are just congenitally poor managers of time. No fault of their own.

I suppose congratulations are in order. Looks like Governor Patrick has his legacy item. After eight years in the big chair, his most significant, indelible mark upon the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts will be three craptastic, blinking, dinging and pinging, 24-hour gaming megaplexes, sited in three yet-to-be-determined communities (whether they and their neighbors like it or not) that will be forever altered by their presence. Well done. Hope n' Change. Together We Can (budget tens of millions annually to ameliorate the personal and societal impacts of gambling addiction).

Sorry. I've been in a foul mood since this morning.

Remember the casino bill?

2011-11-14T22:38:00.001-05:00

You know, the one taken by a conference committee behind closed doors a couple of weeks back? Well, it is done. From the State House News:

House and Senate negotiators agreed to a pact Monday that sets the stage for final approval of legislation to bring three casinos and a slots-only facility to Massachusetts.
The bill, which is expected to easily clear both branches of the Legislature, could reach Gov. Deval Patrick’s desk as early as Tuesday afternoon, and Patrick has indicated he supports the broad framework of the bill. If lawmakers pass the plan this week, Patrick would then have 10 days to sign, amend or veto it.

So. A piece of legislation concerning a matter of great public interest and no small amount of public controversy was released late Monday night and will likely be voted on and passed to the Governor's desk... by Tuesday afternoon.

Legislature to public: Another flip of the bird

This schedule reflects, of course, the legislature's rational and considered expectation that the many thousands of citizens interested in the issue will stay up late into the night reviewing the (as yet unavailable) legislation, and will present themselves bright and early at the State House, ready to share their views with their elected representatives - who will of course be eager to take those views appropriately into account when casting their final votes.

Or maybe it just reflects the same arrogant contempt for the public with which our one-party state government approaches most everything it does.

See you at the slots, folks.

Professor Michael Avery - Frontrunner for Dingbat of the Year

2011-11-14T09:19:00.001-05:00

You've probably heard about this Professor Michael Avery at Suffolk Law School who decided to one-up Paul Krugman's despicable 9/11 rant by disparaging U.S. Servicemen and women, and those who support them, in reaction to a campus Veterans Day care package drive.

Suffolk Univ. professor will not collect care packages for troops: MyFoxBOSTON.com

I couldn't agree more, of course, with those who insist that this country's greatness stems in part from our societal willingness to countenance such nonsense in the name of Free Speech, one of our most cherished liberties. Absolutely correct.

Here are some other things that are absolutely correct: Suffolk students have the right to consider Professor Avery's comments in deciding whether to enroll in his classes. Donors to Suffolk University have the right to consider them in budgeting their annual giving - and to make their thoughts known to the school's administrators. And everyone writing and saying that this guy is a dingbat have the right to point out that he is, in point of fairly objective fact, a dingbat.

More, though, we should take careful note of the comments, and understand that Professor Avery occupies a position of influence over hundreds of kids whose "job" it is, when in his presence, to internalize his words. And unfortunately he is hardly alone.