Monthly Archives: February 2008

The Times: Worse Than Bush

Here are some staggeringly frightening numbers about you, America, via Portfolio.com‘s Jeff Bercovici: The nation’s preeminent newspaper, the New York Times, has a lower approval rating than the president. Even with the awful war, stagflation, spying and the rest of it.

Just 24% of respondents to a recent Rasmussen study expressed a favorable opinion of the paper, compared with 44% unfavorable, and 31% “not sure.”

Not sure? Why not? That’s logical. The paper might be a collective of people with notebooks chasing down quotes and calling sources and writing down what they hear. Or Bill Keller might run around his office all day in Muslim garb. Not sure.

And you know, Vladimir Putin doesn’t look like such a horrible tyrant. If it’s Putin’s word against the Times‘s, how can we ever know for sure???

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The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

The most talked-about man on Beacon Hill continued to be widely talked about this week, as news that Speaker Sal DiMasi has been playing golf with a decades-old friend while not playing golf with a guy with a horrific haircut sparked an ethics uproar. It’s the surest sign yet that the state GOP has given up trying to win elections altogether, and will now focus solely on lobbing wobbly ethics complaints at its Democratic foes. And that Scot Lehigh hasn’t met a bad golf metaphor he doesn’t like.

The threat golf poses to democracy extends far beyond the current casino debate, though. Boston minorities who enjoy voting had better watch their backs: DiMasi occasionally hits the links with former Speaker Tom Finneran. Can federal voting rights violations, disgrace, and tears be far behind? Continue reading

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Turd Blossoms

Perhaps the only news more surprising than the RNC’s sudden denunciation of the “Hussein” in Barack Hussein Obama is identity of the man who helped push it through: Karl Rove. According to the Atlantic, Rove has been telling his party that the repetitive use of Obama’s middle name would “perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party.”

This is the same man, of course, who helped label a triple amputee as soft on defense, and who orchestrated a whisper campaign that a judge’s concern for abused children stemmed from the fact that he was secretly a pedophile. And hey, didn’t John McCain sire a black baby or something?

What a difference two years out of power makes.

Related: If Ryan Lizza’s recent piece on the inner workings of John McCain’s Straight Talk Express doesn’t make you wish you were sitting on that horseshoe couch right now, you’re probably an accountant. Ink-stained wretches everywhere dream about having that kind of freewheeling access. It makes our jobs easier, and as Liza shows, when our jobs are easier, everybody – us, the people we cover, and the people who have to read our copy – wind up better off.

It also makes me feel really, really bad for the poor bastards who were stuck following Mitt Romney around for months on end.

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Blue Grbutt Revolution

This wormed its way into my inbox this morning, courtesy of a friend who’s a lot more in tune with the unique rhythms of the tubes than I.

It appears to be a discussion of bluegrass music written by someone for whom saying the word “ass” – even within the context of larger words that have nothing to do with the anatomical posterior, but merely contain the letters A-S-S within some larger syntactical sequence – is immoral and therefore forbidden. Continue reading

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Rockingest Internet Ever???

I found myself at the BPL yesterday, and was in need of some communist wi-fi. The library was happy to oblige.

But not so fast! The city doesn’t give away the privilege of blazing through the internet at 11mbps and waiting for half an hour for Google Maps to load to just anybody. You’ve got to be in the club, fool. You’ve got to have a card.

And trust the trustees of the Boston Public Library – having a library card is the coolest, rockingest thing ever. Continue reading

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Outside Job

Deval Patrick’s administration has finally hired an outside firm to evaluate the basic assumptions behind its casino gambling proposal, four months after filing legislation to legalize casino gambling, five months after initially backing the legalization of Class III gambling, and a mere seven months after the governor first disappeared into the Berkshires with an armful of industry-authored research to decide whether or not casinos made good fiscal sense.

Patrick’s people see no problem with the timeline at work here, nor with the credentials of the firm looking over the gov’s numbers; Sue Tucker begs to disagree.

But for my money, all you need to know about Spectrum is that Clyde Barrow likes their resume – they’re “one of the most notable private sector gaming analysts in the Northeast,” the guy who virtually made the Patrick administration’s pro-gaming case for them tells the Herald.

Something tells me Dan Bosley won’t be happy with these guys.

UPDATE: From Bosley: “I don’t know how anyone could call [theirs] an unbiased viewpoint. I don’t think they’ve ever done a report that says you shouldn’t do gambling. But we’ll take a look at it.”

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Two Things

Two observations: One day later, the Times‘s John McCain maybe straight-talked his way into my pants story is the most blogged item on the paper’s website.

And for all the endless kvetching about the whole thing, this is the paper’s most emailed story right now. Sexy Johnny hasn’t even cracked the top ten.

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The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

These are strange times for the state’s coastal legislators.

First, in November, they were subjected to an energy bill sneak attack that, unbeknownst to them, opened up their coastlines to unfettered wind farm development. They balked, as did the Senate, which had been pushing an oceans management bill authored by Senator Robert O’Leary as a way to set up a framework for plopping turbines down in the water. The senate had threatened to hold Sal DiMasi’s energy bill hostage if the House didn’t act on their oceans bill, and so, last week, House leadership pushed a gutted bizzaro version of the senate’s bill to the floor.

Turns out, it wasn’t a whole lot more than a reworded version of amendment leadership tried to cram through in November – reportedly at the behest of prospective developer Jay Cashman. Continue reading

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All the Attendant Evils of a Bad Slum

I spent most of yesterday in the BPL, dodging sleepy homeless people and researching a BoMag piece on Boylston Street‘s weird place in the city’s architectural bureaucracy. Half of it is part of the Back Bay Architectural District, and subject to a litany of design and zoning structures; half isn’t. Unsightly newspaper boxes are banned from half the street, but allowed to pollute the other. The question is, logically enough, what the F?

The answer goes back to urban renewal, when Mayor Collins and the BRA were tearing down and encasing in concrete as much of the city as they could. Collins even proposed saving Old Boston from itself by placing up to eight high-rise condo towers along the A, B, C and D blocks of the Comm. Ave. Mall. Continue reading

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The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

Governor Deval Patrick found out what it feels like to be governor last week, as Sal DiMasi’s House finally – finally – got to work advancing the governor’s agenda. It’s only been, what, thirteen months since the inauguration?

Patrick got to see his beloved $1 billion biotech bill emerge from committee. Here’s hoping the cost of inaction isn’t more than a billion large.

More importantly, at least politically, this week saw the speaker reverse course and fall in line with the governor’s long-stalled plan to change the state’s corporate tax code.

For the past year, Patrick’s tax plan has been panned as a burden on business and a recipe for economic disaster. Now, suddenly, the speaker is not only acceding to the governor’s plan, but using the word “reform” to refer to the new taxes. What gives? Continue reading

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