My latest for the Globe looks at the recent noise emanating from City Hall about using a Suffolk Downs casino to pressure Vornado into filling its Filene’s pit. The problem with these threats coming from City Hall is, there’s no way Hizzoner will actually throw the brakes on Suffolk Downs as payback for Filene’s. The mayor can’t credibly threaten Vornado when he’s been in the tank for Suffolk Downs for yeas.

Which is not to say those threats can’t or shouldn’t be made. The solution: Take the casino question out of the mayor’s hands, put it to a citywide vote, and unleash an angry electorate on the developers.

Read the whole thing here.

[Creative Commons image via]

(Cross-posted from the mighty mighty Boston Daily)

It’s budget season on Beacon Hill again. And it’s apt that it should coincide, roughly, with the run-up to area colleges’ final exams. After a semester of lying around and drinking, the legislature now has to pull a week of harried all-nighters before it can knock off work for the summer.

In broad strokes, this year’s House budget is big but not unduly wicked big, is unkind to out of state corporations, hates smokers, and offers, in Speaker Sal DiMasi’s own estimation, “nothing spectacular about any new initiative.” But you already knew that already.

So, in the interest of wrapping up the week with some semi-original reporting, here’s a few of the more interesting budget skirmishes to keep an eye on in the upcoming weeks.

First, does anybody remember how badly Gov. Deval Patrick caught hell last year for cutting Shannon grant money to pay for his 1,000 new cops campaign pledge? He couldn’t have done worse if he’d gunned down Chiara Levin himself. Luckily, the House rode to the rescue and restored the critical funds in its own budget.

So this year, Patrick, being a good governor and wanting to learn from his mistakes, not only ensured that the grants are in his budget, but he crows about “bringing funding for the program to its highest level ever.” And what does the House do? It tosses those increases in the garbage. Thanks for playing. Try again next year.

Open government advocates and reporters who like to see legislators’ fingerprints on budget amendments will have to wait ’til next year, too. The House has approved its normal measures for railroading the budget through to completion from behind closed doors. As usual, a motley coalition of Republicans and cranks tried to open budget debate procedures to sunshine, and, as usual, they were overwhelmingly defeated.

When Reps begin debating the budget next week, they won’t be doing it from the floor. Rather, when they cast votes, they’ll be voting on a raft of consolidated amendments that will be pre-screened and bundled by leadership, and that members will have had a half hour to review.

The closed-door process, Brian Wallace told us, “doesn’t shine with the lobbyists or the media,” but it keeps the bottom line from ballooning out of control.

Still, on Tuesday, Minority Leader Brad Jones warned that this year’s rules have been constructed “to take a little more power from members,” because, “You will have two days to get the budget and file amendments and Ways and Means will have nine days to figure out how to tell you ‘No.’” He also suggested that the tightly-controlled process was an effort, “to protect the members from themselves.”

The Republican leader’s criticism sparked one of the year’s most excellent floor exchanges. Angelo Scaccia, chair of the House rules committee, shot over Jones, “Mr. Speaker, that’s what the order did last year. But we have some of the most creative minds that this Commonwealth has ever seen in the Legislature.”

“So the gentleman is saying the mission of the order is to stifle creativity among the members?” Jones asked. “I’m shocked that the gentleman would want to stifle creativity.”

“Oh how he twists my words,” Scaccia replied. “Oh, what a twister. Never would I want to stifle creativity in this body. Mr. Speaker, does it say ’stupid’ across my forehead? … Maybe subterfuge is a better word than creativity.”

Later in the debate, Paul Casey landed one of the nastier (not to mention unprovoked) shots at Mayor Menino we’ve seen in a while, when he seemed to suggest that Scaccia’s desire to limit debate stemmed from his habit of breakfasting with Hizzoner:

“The gentleman would like to leave the discretion up to the leadership. What about the membership? The power of the chair, the power of the speaker is in the collective body. I understand the good gentleman from Readville understands a certain power in Boston that is unilateral. [But] we are a collective body.”

Good times.

The House also extinguished any lingering hopes that casino proponents had of sneaking expanded gambling through the back door when it barred all gaming-related amendments from the budget. So David Flynn will have to wait just a little while for that racino vote he’s been promised. It’ll be coming later. As will Christmas.

It’s been interesting to watch the official reaction from the governor’s office to the House’s proposals. Back in February, DiMasi took to Boston’s pages and scolded Patrick for finding defeat in partial legislative victories. “He needs to understand that when he wants 200 police officers and he gets 100, that’s a success,” the speaker told me. “That’s not a failure. That’s government. It’s all compromise. I didn’t get everything I wanted in the energy bill, but we accomplished a great energy bill. I worked with him on that bill for 11 months to change the things that he wanted. I didn’t go around saying, ‘How come you didn’t agree with my energy bill six months ago?’ I claimed victory, didn’t I? That’s it. That’s a learning process.”

Fast-forward a few months. The governor’s signature public safety and education initiatives have been slashed, victims of competing ambitions and austerity. Yet Patrick’s chief budget writer, Leslie Kirwan, is telling the Globe that the administration sees “a lot to like in this budget” because “They’ve adopted many of the reforms that the governor initiated.” And then House leadership turns around and thanks Patrick for his magnanimity.

Clearly, this cannot stand. WE DEMAND THAT YOU BATTLE FOR OUR AMUSEMENT. Thank you.

Finally, the Hill and the Hall would like to congratulate our governor – a man who ran against government by photo-op and press release – on surviving the hairiest photo-op of his young administration.

Dressed in a green jacket, hat, jeans and waders, Patrick ventured into the waters of Jamaica Pond, a sizable fish (described by one onlooker as “a big [f’er]”) in his arms. “Say goodbye!” he chirped, and the fish did, struggling to leap out of the governor’s clutches and, in all likelihood, devour a nearby child. It was, thankfully, unsuccessful, as Patrick applied some sort of kung-fu death grip that subdued the creature. “That’s me hugging a fish,” Patrick joked, before setting the monster loose.

City Councilor John Tobin, who was on the scene but not outfitted in traditional park ranger’s wardrobe, had this advice for any other politicians looking to dump fish into the Commonwealth’s waterways this spring: “Be prepared,” the always-dapper politician suggested. “When touching nature and stocking a pond, always come in leather dress shoes, and a suit and tie.”

Wire services contributed to this report.

We may be watching the balance of power tip on Beacon Hill. While Gov. Deval Patrick and House Speaker Sal DiMasi go back and forth about casinos and taxes—and whether or not they’re going back and forth at all—Senate President Therese Murray is showing herself to be both smart enough to recognize the power vacuum brought on by the bickering, and strong enough to fill that vacuum with substantive policy proposals.

The death of the governor’s casino bill should shine a spotlight on Murray’s health care reform-reform bill. That’s for the best since it does what magical slots leprechauns doesn’t, that is address the real reason cities and towns are going broke. Murray should also get serious credit for leading the effort to implement the now one-year-old Transportation Finance Commission report, especially by harpooning politically thorny MBTA health care benefits and police details.

These are weighty and decidedly un-flashy issues, but it’s going to take heavy lifting on boring issues to raise the state out of the hellward fiscal death-spiral it’s currently locked in. Interesting that it’s Murray, who just celebrated a year on the job, and not her two counterparts, who is leading the way.

A side note: This is the second time in recent months Murray has refused to leak a major policy proposal to the press before formally unveiling it. At least one major paper (blind item!) responded to this tactic by boycotting her Worcester health care presser. It was good to see everybody on board – and on a level playing field – this time around.

Ralph Martin isn’t running for mayor. Attention now turns to his maybe I will dance partner. Mike Flaherty’s got the campaign slogan: “Change is in your hands,” but does he have a campaign to match?

Well, which is it? On the same day that Patrick spiced up his “Together We Can” attitude by telling the New York Times that DiMasi’s leadership style is “part of what we ran against, and it needs to be called out,” the governor told the State House News Service, “There’s a bigger record, a vastly bigger record than the difference over casinos, and the sooner that the people and the media appreciate that, the better off we will all be.” Huh?

Idle, totally unfounded speculation: What are the chances that John Hynes’s massive, $3 billion Seaport Square development, combined with the possibly-successful mixed-use redevelopment of Fort Point, will wind up killing the Silver Line?

For anyone who has anywhere to be, at any time, the branch is a disaster. Can you imagine how slow those shiny buses masquerading as subway cars will run when there are actual people living in the neighborhood who’ll need to get around on the things?

And more to the point, can you really imagine all those international CEOs Hynes wants to bring to the neighborhood actually riding it when the T could just slap down light rail tracks and make the whole thing run three times as efficiently?

The casino game may have limped to a bloody stalemate on Beacon Hill, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we can rid ourselves of these awesome slots-r-iffic good times. They’re just shifting south, where the Mashpee Wampanoag are making the long slog towards taking their land into trust.

The feds held a couple hearings on the Mashpee’s Middleboro land grab this week. They were notable for a few reasons.

First, the Mashpee appear to be either wicked hardball players with an already-in fix nobody knows about, or they’re Cubs-fan-level delusional.

The Cape Cod Times noted that the first phase of the not-yet in existence Middleboro casino would include a “600,000-square-foot casino building on two levels, with 4,000 slot machines and 200 table games, restaurants, retail shops, and an event center.” Which is hilarious (or, alternately, terrifying), because neither slots nor table games are legal in Massachusetts yet. Nor, in the aftermath of last week’s vote, do they look to be legal any time soon.

Are the Mashpee just pushing ahead and blowing all their investors’ money for whatev’s sake, or do they know something none of the rest of us do?

Second, reservation shopping will absolutely be a prime factor in whether or not the tribe gets to do anything with that pricey piece of land they’re sitting on. Consider the comments the Massachuseuk lobbed at the Mashpee this week: “There were several groups of native people that were in Middleboro, but none of them were Mashpee. It is disturbing that the Mashpee would come to the Massachuseuk territory and try to establish this as their homeland, which it is not, it has never been and, if we have something to say, it never will be.”

This one will be fun.

One other casinorama loose end to tie up: It looks like the Patrick administration handled something right during this month’s gambling debacle. The Globe recently dropped a quiet bombshell when it reported that in the run-up to last week’s vote, the Mashpee tried to cut a deal that would’ve given them a federally-recognized casino in Middleboro in exchange for 20 percent of the casino’s slot machine revenue. That deal is the same kind of stinker that Connecticut has been laboring under for decades, and the administration’s decision to say no to it shows the kind of clear, rational thinking they’ve rarely displayed during this whole saga. So, cheers!

Most people wouldn’t normally associate the City Council chamber’s glaring fluorescent lights with mood lighting. But that didn’t stop one mystery couple from whispering to each other, giggling, and canoodling through the entirety of this week’s council meeting. Flabbergasted pols’ reactions ranged from “Who are they?” to, “What are they doing?”

Backhanded comment of the week: Charles Yancey, in the most gracious terms possible, rising to “Thank the administration for providing us with the information that’s required by law.”

And a close runner-up: A councilor complimenting Mike Ross’s decision to pair a blazer and tie with a charcoal sweater with, “You look like a modern-day Mr. Rogers. Tell Mr. McFeely I say hello!”

Deval Patrick has got to hate St. Patrick’s week. This time a year ago, House Speaker Sal DiMasi appeared before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and absolutely brutalized the governor – much to the delight of the assemblage of reporters and rich people in nice suits.

And now, no sooner had the vomit dried on Broadway than the speaker was back before the Chamber, telling everybody that casino gambling “will absolutely cause damage on a grand scale” and ruin lives and everything. If it’s not the end of civilization as we know it, it sounded pretty damn close.

And with that, the great casino death train of 2008 pulled back into the station. In celebration of the occasion, some people jibbered. Others jabbered. Facts, figures, reports and the like were bandied about, and somewhere along the line, the governor’s casino proposal flatlined. It was all rather dizzying, and you’ve read it all before.

So, in the interest of keeping everybody awake, this week’s Hill and the Hall will forgo any and all analysis of this week’s casino debate in favor of a recap devoted exclusively to the overblown rhetoric contained therein. It was more than just words, you know.

Gov. Patrick began the day addressing a small throng of hard-hatted laborers. We think he challenged DiMasi to a fight: “Put up! Put up … you know how the rest of that goes.”

Patrick’s pugilistic bent was no match for AFL-CIO president Bobby Haynes, though. The union head demanded that his members demand jobs or else … you know how the rest of that goes. “It’s not gonna happen because we threaten anybody,” Haynes shouted. “Don’t call them up – march into that goddamn building up there, and you get into their office! … 20,000 construction jobs is not important enough to debate? 20,000 permanent jobs are not important enough to debate? Bullshit! Bullshit!” Haynes added, rather improbably, “I will be respectful when I’m in that building.”

The best moment from the legislature’s seemingly endless casino hearing: Around 7 p.m., DiMasi moved to retreat from the surprise appearance he’d made to the marathon session’s evening edition, and was immediately ambushed by a scrum of scribes. He indulged their questions, threw a few wild elbows at his counterpart in the Corner Office (“I guess if he thinks that his bill isn’t in the best form possible, he should’ve said that a little while ago”), and then tried to back into an elevator.

The reportorial scrum followed, and the speaker was asked when the last time was that he’d spent such a long time at a hearing. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the building, as you know. So by the time you leave, I’m there at least another couple hours,” he shot back.

And with that, he was gone.

And with that, a bill the governor had staked enormous political capital (not to mention a few campaign promises) on went down to defeat. Sorry. That was almost slightly analytical. On to more tongue-wagging!

The runner-up for speechifying while killing a casino bill is Angelo Scaccia. “I want to congratulate whomever the lobbyists were on this issue,” he cracked. “I have received more information on this issue than any other issue that I have seen before 35 years in this Legislature. They have done a remarkable job and earned every single penny that folks on the outside paid them.”

Which leaves Brian Wallace, unsurprisingly, as the winner: “Some people in this House think debate is something you put on the end of a fish hook. On this Holy Thursday, let he who has filed the perfect bill cast the first stone… If God walked in right now and told us casinos would be beneficial, he would be accused of being on the payroll of Suffolk Downs… Leadership should be about protecting their membership, and not costing them their seats, and that is exactly what today’s vote is going to do.”

It may not seem like it, but there was actually more than just fighting about gambling happening on the Hill this week. The governor pulled a double-header Tuesday, following his gambling testimony with a push to get his CORI reform bill passed.

Judiciary Committee co-chair Robert Creedon introduced the governor to the committee as the “first working governor in many years,” and though Patrick delivered one of his better policy speeches in some time in defense of the bill, he would have no luck this day. “I hate to see this championed as a CORI reform bill,” Senator Dianne Wilkerson testified. “It’s the story about the pig. When you dress it up, it’s still a pig.” Luckily, the governor had already left the room.

Still, the Soaring Rhetoric of the Week Award (non-casino category) goes to Taunton Rep. James Fagan, who pushed this week for the passage of a bill lowering the legal blood alcohol limit for drunk driving from .08 to .02. It was an exhibition and a half – eight minutes of uninterrupted vitriol, during which Fagan remained standing, glancing around wildly, shouting and denouncing “the geniuses that write in the press on this.” While staring right at press row, obviously. Some of the Rep’s greatest hits:

“What we have done with that law is encourage the second type of legal gambling in Massachusetts. You can bet in the state lottery, and you can bet when you’re out as you have a second cocktail or a third, whether your breathalyzer is going to be a .07 or a .08…

“For those people that say – what about me, I go out and have one beer, I have one glass of wine? Let me tell you something – if somebody tells you they went out and had one beer, that’s somebody that has no money or no friends, or you’re lying…

“Whether it’s popular or not, I don’t care. I’m happy enough that it gains the attention it gains so that people will talk about it and think about it and be forced to confront it. And for those people in the media that say I’m a defense lawyer and I’m gonna make money off this, I had an answer for them, it was short and it was blunt and it was impolite so I’m not gonna say it again. But my opinion on them, they are the vultures that prey off the bones of these tragedies and offer no solutions of their own.”

Yes, “vultures” was his closing line. Yes, he did earn himself a round of applause.

Politics as usual: Former state senator and Human Rights Campaign president Cheryl Jacques had her surprise judicial appointment held up this week. This development was entirely unrelated to Jacques’s apparent lack of qualifications for the position.

Wire services sat through hours of testimony and contributed to this report.

Word broke early this week that Governor Deval Patrick’s casino bill was dead. House Dean David Flynn told the Taunton Gazette, “The casino bill isn’t going anywhere. I find very little support for it from members of the house,” adding that he expects a roll call vote on his racino bill, while “the casinos won’t,” because Dan Bosley’s committee “will issue an adverse report, preventing the house from voting on the casino bill.”

It’s not how things work – the Speaker’s office has repeatedly said that Patrick’s bill will receive a vote on the House floor before it wraps its budget bill in April, regardless of whether or not it gets a favorable committee report. (PS – it won’t.) But that doesn’t mean that casinos still aren’t headed for a messy demise.

Last week was not kind to Patrick’s bizarre pet cause, and this week, the bill abandoned its slow grave-ward lurch in favor of a full-on sprint. The Globe finally buried the Chamber of Commerce’s well-intentioned but ham-handed casino report, while Bosley issued a position paper that blasts yawning holes in Patrick’s economic projections. And then things got messy.

Bosley has repeatedly said that the fate of casinos, long sold as an economic development package and not a revenue-generation scheme, will rest on two questions: Where does casino revenue come from, and how much does it cost to get at it? Reps appear to be responding to those questions by rapidly coming to the conclusion that the money behind Patrick’s plan isn’t really there. Either that, or budget season’s around the corner. Whichever it is, the casino hearing the administration has demanded won’t even happen until next week, but already, the bill’s most ardent backers are declaring it all but dead.

We’ve seen a major – and stunningly quick – reversal of fortunes for a plan that, a few months ago, was building plenty of momentum, and threatening the Speaker’s hold on his own chamber. It may be that last bit – DiMasi, not Patrick, controlling the House’s fortunes – that accounts for the astounding display of rancor erupting over the past few days.

After those persistent, widespread rumors, it turns out that Senator Marian Walsh won’t be taking a job on the bench after all. All those would-be successors are, as they say, SOL.

It’s not as devastating to the collective ambitions of the state’s political establishment as John Kerry’s inexcusable failure to move his ass out of his Senate seat in 2004 was, but it’s still not good news for any pol who might think of himself as being destined for bigger and better things. (That’s no short list, either.)

Best legislative literary allusion of the week: At a Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Senator Robert O’Leary took the microphone to testify. But first, he apologized if he looked or sounded weary. “I spent last night tilting at windmills,” he joked. Senator Robert Creedon consoled O’Leary, saying that, if he didn’t succeed in halting Cape Wind, then at least he landed himself “a nice picture in the Globe.” “Very Kennedy-esque,” Creedon nodded, admiringly.

Rookie councilor John Connolly livened up an otherwise sleepy City Council meeting on Wednesday by peppering his speech with ten-cent words like “quibble” and “quagmire.” If we didn’t know better, we’d think Connolly had already tired of the whole “public servant” gig, and was now honing his vocabulary in the hopes of becoming a sesquipedalian New York Times obit writer. Hope our normally-razor-sharp instincts are wrong on that one.

It’s time for the Hill and the Hall Rumor Control!

Item: Is the Council in for a major post-St. Paddy’s bender?

Turns out, no. Council President Maureen Feeney seemed to leave the door open to government-sanctioned revelry and debauchery when she closed this week’s meeting with a vague promise to keep the celebration rolling the next time the Council meets, “At which time I will bring you some refreshments to keep you going.” And at least one councilor was overheard asking Feeney if she was planning on distributing pints of Guinness on the Council floor. Unfortunately, Feeney was just alluding to a batch of Irish scones she’d forgotten to bring to work this week.

Wire services contributed to this report.

But, for a better summary of what the Chamber’s much-discussed report actually says, you’d have better luck looking to Dan Kennedy – “Casino Supporters Support Casinos.”

I understand that some of the issues we’re dealing with here are tricky. And I’m a reporter, so math does scare me, too. But you can’t write off the costs just because the Globe editorial board does.

If you chase down half the “opponents say” caveats in today’s front page story, you’ll find a much different scenario at play than all the governor’s promises being fulfilled. You’re left with, as I termed it earlier today, a cost-benefit analysis without the costs. A benefit analysis.

And that doesn’t do much good when the argument against Deval Patrick’s casino plan hinges on the fact that the costs aren’t immediately obvious, but they’re very real, and they erode the benefits remarkably quickly.

First off: Rate of return. For every dollar residents pump into the Lottery, towns immediately get $0.24 back in local aid. Of every dollar residents would drop into a casino, they’d recoup $0.03 or $0.04. So casinos aren’t just inefficient as a means of delivering local aid (or property tax relief and transportation funding) – they’re, at best, eight times less efficient than the Lottery. And if you want to make up that difference, you’d better open up those wallets wide.

Dan Bosley, who co-chairs the committee examining Patrick’s casino bill, sent a letter to his colleagues this afternoon in which he called the Chamber’s study “flawed” for relying on research from the casino industry and Clyde Barrow. “While I question their conclusions,” Bosley wrote, “there has never been a question over the creation of a revenue stream from casinos. If you build them, people will spend money. However, there is a vast difference between revenue and economic development and the administration fails to realize this.”

What the administration has never admitted, and what the Chamber report and the stories regarding it ignore, is the fact that the money going into casinos is not new to the economy. It’s transferred from within the economy – as if in a shell game, if you will. The greater the share of money coming from areas close to the casino, the greater the shift away from local businesses and towards the casino will be. That’s why Patrick favors destination casinos over slots – to minimize economic cannibalization.

The number in the Chamber report that should terrify casino proponents – a number that’s been ignored in the press so far – is the study’s contention that, of the $2 billion – $2.3 billion in annual gross gaming revenue that three local casinos would generate, only $500 million to $550 million would be coming from out of state.

So, if three-quarters of casino revenue would be coming from in-state, and, as the Boston Federal Reserve has said, up to three-quarters of money spent in a casino is already spent inside the economy … uh, that’s not good.

Hey, guess what, everybody? Governor Deval Patrick wants to build three casinos in Massachusetts. He’s been saying that they’ll bring 30,000 jobs in tow. Turns out, they won’t. Shocking, we know. But it’s this revelation that gripped Beacon Hill this week. All other concerns were crowded out.

Most close observers (depending on whom you read) have known for several months now that the governor’s casino research is compromised and his economic assumptions shaky. And now that the town’s paper of record has spoken on the subject, the fan is really covered in it.

The administration has even stopped citing its 30,000 jobs figure, and taken to speaking of “tens of thousands” of jobs instead.

That’s a significant fact, because it marks the first time in this whole gambling debate that reporting has been able to knock the administration off its talking points. A similarly damning Mass Taxpayers Foundation report was reportedly met with anger, profanity and the like behind closed doors, but the pessimistic data laid out therein hasn’t stopped the administration from using gambling revenues as a panacea for everything from property taxes to transportation funding to addiction treatment to Tim Cahill’s sick man. But now, with a high stakes legislative hearing on the horizon, Patrick has been shoved off his mark. The Globe having done its damage, Dan Bosley’s recent statement to us that, “The governor’s going to come down and say, ‘We’re going to have 30,000 jobs,’ and I’ll say, ‘No, you’re not,’” suddenly takes on a whole new layer of meaning.

The governor initially responded to the Globe report by trying to argue, “There are going to be all kinds of claims about whether it’s 30,000 construction jobs or 20,000 construction jobs or 5,000 construction jobs. I can tell you that whatever that number is, it beats the opposition, which is at zero.” Yes. Exactly. And given the choice between being punched or kicked in the face, being punched beats the opposition. Fantastic.

As if all this weren’t enough, Patrick insisted on pressing his case, rather than laying low for a little while, by sending a sharply worded pro-gambling letter to each of the state’s legislators. Getting mad and hitting “reply to all” – that’s the way to stay out of the papers, and to keep your critics off your back. Sure it is.

So, with Patrick locked in a spiraling back and forth with House casino critics, this letter was then followed up with what initially appeared to be a third grader’s book report, but was later revealed to be a brochure from the governor and his economic development secretary, Dan O’Connell.

Loaded with incongruous clip art, impressive leaps of logic, half-truths and downright sloppy research, the brochure is one of the most dubious – not to mention unintentionally hilarious – public documents to see the light of day in quite some time. Print this thing out, take it on your lunch break, and try to read it without having milk squirt out your nose. We dare you. And forget about all this transparent desperation opening up the governor to attacks from the speaker. If whatever you’re doing allows the state GOP – the political equivalent of the ’62 Mets – to land potshots on you about slick “phony economics,” things are not going well.

The administration pamphlet’s argument that the legislature must act now (punctuated by a comically large clock, natch) because of the inevitability of a Mashpee Wampanoag casino in Middleborough is especially, uh, interesting, given that, in the days before the pamphlet’s distribution, O’Connell had a rather eventful meeting with the Mashpee. They told him that they would not be abandoning federal channels to a casino for the state’s proposed casino licensing auction. Tribe spokesman Scott Ferson has previously said the tribe will not bid on one of Patrick’s casino licenses.

What does this mean? Rather than hamstringing the Mashpee, rapid legislative approval of Patrick’s casino bill would actually ease the tribe’s path to a federal, tax-free casino, because the legalization of Class III gambling would give the tribe the sovereign right to run all sorts of Vegas-style games. As things stand now, the Mashpee are in the position of threatening to round up $1 billion in financing for a bingo slots complex with a highly uncertain future: It might very well revert to a normal bingo hall if the feds follow through on recent threats to make bingo slots illegal. Nothing like negotiating from a position of strength.

As if all that’s not enough, on Thursday, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce unveiled a casino report that, by in large, confirmed the governor’s arguments on the revenue side, but that categorically declined to quantify any negative economic impacts from expanded gambling. What we’re left with is a cost-benefit analysis with no costs. Which is totally useful.

It’s also notable that the report’s authors do rely on research from less-than-uninterested sources, including Harrah’s and Clyde Barrow, but if those sources are good enough for the governor, they’re certainly good enough for the Chamber. Expect both sides to hug the report and claim victory.

Ugh. That’s enough for now. Other stuff happened this week on the Hill, too – Senate President Therese Murray unveiled a sweeping health care reform-reform proposal, the T put its budget on its credit card, and the highway department ran over a scrum of weeping veterans. None of those things have anything to do with craps, so this week, they don’t matter much. Maybe next week. Maybe.

Wire services contributed to this report.

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?

Legislators returned from their mid-winter jaunts to Orlando this week, and immediately got back to doing the people’s business. Which is to say, they threw themselves neck-deep into pervs. Pervs, pervs, pervs, pervs, pervs. A question nobody else has asked yet: Have any of these pervs ever gone golfing with Donald Trump? Somebody get Peter Torkildsen on the phone, quick!

Chuck Turner is one of the few city councilors who actually hasn’t been mentioned as a mayoral wannabe, but perhaps he should throw his hat in the race. Soaring rhetoric is king lately, and during an otherwise excruciatingly drawn out debate on whether or not to accept piles of rare public housing money from the feds, Turner uncorked what may turn out to be the non-election election year slogan of the year: “This is America. Some benefit, while others move backwards. Isn’t it time we had a policy where we all move forward?”

If David Axelrod is reading this, no, you guys can’t borrow that one, too.

Turner’s paean came after one of the young session’s most bizarrely contentious debates. He and Charles Yancey had railed against the demolition and reconstruction of Roslindale’s Washington-Beech public housing development because the new housing complex, while not built in the cheap, failed, rotting mid-century style, would push residents towards home ownership, and thus reduce the stock of public housing units, and thus totally hate on poor people. As Yancey put great wind behind this viewpoint, Council President Maureen Feeney (a self-described “project kid” who grew up in Dorchester’s Franklin Field development) shook her head and shot the Mattapan councilor one of the icier looks we’ve seen inside City Hall in a while.

How wicked excited is Mayor Menino that, thanks to councilor John Tobin, the city council will be debating term limits just as election season heats up? More than anything, the term limits proposal will be a vehicle for mayoral critics to paint Menino as this generation’s Kevin White – a tenacious mayor who remains in office, past his time, for tenacity’s sake. What remains to be seen is whether this little trick can work better than it did when Maura Hennigan pulled it three years ago.

Hey, have you heard about this casino thing? Yeah. It’s kind of a big deal. And after last week’s abrupt cancellation, the stakes for the legislature’s upcoming gambling hearing (set for a to-be-determined date in March when committee co-chairs Dan Bosley and Jack Hart can align their schedules) are growing by the day. House members are already being polled for the big vote, even though a full third of the House is said to remain undecided. Meanwhile, reports had Governor Deval Patrick also taking a number of casino-related meetings with lawmakers this week.

And while the pro-casino side has already lined up labor and municipal leaders to lobby fence-sitters, Bosley is, in some sense, expecting the hearing to give him the ammunition he needs to show his colleagues that Patrick’s rosy predictions don’t hold water.

“We’ll ask the administration what made them come to these conclusions, we’ll look at what’s happened in other states, we’ll try to collect a lot of data,” Bosley says. “We’re looking at this from an economic perspective. My two basic questions are, what does it cost to bring that money back from Connecticut, and where does that money come from?”

Bosley’s looking forward to the hearing, he says, because it’ll finally be a chance to have a “wider discussion about costs and ramifications. That hasn’t happened publicly. The public discussion has been very baseline – it’s been, ‘We’re losing money to Connecticut, and people want to gamble anyway.’”

At the same time, while the hearing should be quite constructive to anybody actually willing to sit through it – the showdown over the governor’s background research should be especially contentious – Bosley doesn’t expect many of the gambling advocates who’ll testify to stray far off message, because they’ll be playing to the press, not the committee.

“It’s not a good issue for the press,” he says, matter-of-factly. “The good issues are, there’s friction between the governor and the speaker. We’ll take testimony all day, and maybe six lines of testimony will show up the next day. The governor’s going to come down and say, ‘We’re going to have 30,000 jobs,’ and I’ll say, ‘No, you’re not.’ And we’ll go back and forth and have a wider discussion, but that’s what shows up in the paper. And the proponents know this. So they never have to go deeper.”

Wire services contributed to this report.

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.”

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.

“It’s not much of an oceans bill,” O’Leary told us. “It doesn’t set up a meaningful planning process that has any teeth, and without that, it’s just an exercise, something that ends up on a shelf. I’m disappointed.”

O’Leary did pronounce himself “optimistic” that he’ll be able to bring the House around in conference committee. But until he does, don’t expect to see too much action coming out of the energy conference committee; the Senate can’t be too happy about the stunt that was just pulled on them.

The House’s coastal delegation feels even less sanguine about the whole exercise. They’d begged and pleaded to get an audience with the speaker after the energy bill fiasco. When the group finally did meet, they were told that they could expect a full debate on the turbine amendment. Instead, what they got was a chance to vote yes or no on a bid by Dartmouth Rep. John Quinn to strike the turbine language from the House version.

“The coastal reps are not happy at all,” says a House source. “There’s outrage. There was tremendous pressure brought to bear on people over this.”

“The whispers on the floor were, ‘Quinn is right, but I’m not crossing the Speaker on this one,’” another House source adds.

The wild card in all this outrage soup: With energy and oceans both in conference committee, there’s been speculation that the House could be playing ball on the Buzzard’s Bay turbines on two fields at once. We’ve also heard speculation that, if a logjam develops, the Senate might be willing to trade its more robust oceans bill for the House’s wind amendment – provided that the House takes clear ownership of the thing by reinserting it into its signature energy initiative.

Just when state government started to look like it was ready to get working, it up and quit on us. The February school vacation week brought much of the normal activity in the State House to a screeching halt. Schedules were light, meetings were canceled, reporters were bored stupid, and elected leaders were, largely, absent from Beacon Hill.

The week would’ve been a whole lot more exciting, had a casino hearing that had been scheduled for Thursday gone off as planned. It too was canceled, and rumors are that, now, we won’t see any gambling action until the latter part of next month.

The State House News Service reported that the mid-school-vacation hearing had fallen victim to the legislature’s notoriously slow, deliberative pace. Reportedly, members of the Senate – the body that actually favors Governor Deval Patrick‘s proposal – “balked at holding such a big-ticket hearing during school vacation week.”

The legislature rarely does any business during vacation weeks (many members avoid the building altogether), so the cancellation shouldn’t come as a great surprise. That hasn’t staunched the flow of conspiracy theories, though. Senator Michael Morrissey, a vocal casino proponent, told State House News that the cancellation owed less to legislators’ own penchant for relaxation than it did to anti-casino forces’ fear of the governor’s sudden, staggering succeses. “I think that was the attempt, was to undercut the support that’s been building,” he theorized. “That’s how I view it. Good deal if you can get away with it.”

In conversations in the building this week, Morrissey’s theory found more than a few believers.

“It didn’t pass the smell test,” Rep. Brian Wallace tells us about the schedule maneuvering. “I was shocked” with the hearing being scheduled for school vacation week. “A lot of people had already left. Marty Walsh was on an airplane when he found out about it. People assume there isn’t a lot that happens this week.”

Wallace, the legislature’s go-to guy for casino head-counting, pronounced the 160-member body largely up for grabs – a fact that only heightens the stakes (and the likely circus-like atmosphere) for next month’s casino hearing. It’ll likely be one and done – one hearing, an unfavorable committee report, and then a floor vote in April or May.

“The majority are undecided at this point,” Wallace says. “There are 40 on one side, 40 on the other, and a whole lot of undecideds.”

Nearly lost in the morass of midwinter vacation was new Pike director Alan LeBovidge’s hilarious, impossibly bleak, and highly quotable appearance before the authority’s board on Tuesday.

LeBovidge compared the Pike’s bureaucrats to psychologically damaged citizens living under “dictatorship” and “absolute monarchy,” and said, “When I came here, I felt like a little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke.”

His best, and most depressing, one-liner? “Unfortunately, when I took this job, I had a sense that there was a simple solution.” Zing!

Wire services contributed to this report.