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]

Wondering what to do with all that free money the government is tossing at you? Keep your coinage away from Sears (no, seriously, stay the f away from that place). Instead, stimulate the economy of your nearest newsstand and grab yourself a copy of the newest Boston magazine. It features a wicked comprehensive look at how power in Boston functions, including up-close looks at Mayor Tom Menino’s fearsome machine, power-schmoozers Jan Saragoni and Michael Goldman, and the university-slaying Beacon Hill Civic Association, along with some other stories by some other people. You also get a shakily-democratic approach to ranking the comparative powerfulness of Boston’s many power mongers. Pale journalists everywhere are absolutely in love with the thing. Maybe that’s because it’s an awesome read and way cheaper than this awful shirt. Get yours today!

Let’s start by picking on Hizzoner. Nothing gets the natives riled up like parking tickets, so Mayor Tom Menino’s $2.42 billion FY09 budget, which includes $13 million in new parking fines, is sure to be the only thing anybody in Boston ever talks about for the rest of time. Let the schools close; we demand parking amnesty now!

But seriously, the notion that the mayor is sewing great harm by balancing Boston’s budget on the backs of people who can’t manage to avoid parking in front of fire hydrants, rather than slogging through a nasty override fight, is about as dumb as the notion that kids wouldn’t be killing each other if it weren’t for these infernal T-shirts and video games. Gotta love this town.

In other City Hall news, the people who work inside City Hall still suck, just like they always have.

Are your civic outrage juices flowing? If so, please send some money to Michael Flaherty. The guy is really gonna need it. He’s not even officially in the mayor’s race yet, and it already appears that his fundraising base might be in danger of drying up.

Flaherty took in a little over $60,000 during the year’s first three months. Pocket change. He spent nearly $43,000 of it, and has around $450,000 in cash-on-hand. That’s in keeping with his 2007 fundraising patterns, when he didn’t really start raising money until May, taking in the bulk in the fall.

A look at Mayor Menino’s finances should throw a wicked scare into the Southie city councilor. The mayor has been raising money at a furious pace this year. He ended 2007 with over $973,000 in the bank, and through the end of March, had added $282,569 to that total. He has spent twice what Flaherty has – $86,000 – but has also socked away $650,000 in savings, investing in CDs and money market accounts.

Flaherty pounced on the 311 and parking ticket stories in this week’s papers, issuing a pair of press releases blasting the administration’s ineffectiveness. He has also been an outspoken (occasionally shouting and red-faced) opponent of towing. This suggests he may try to run a populist, nuts and bolts campaign, and try to out-mechanic the urban mechanic.

There’s no way Flaherty outspends Menino in this race. The mayor out-gunned him three to one last year, and that was during a City Council election. But it’s critical that he get whatever receipts he can this year, because once he is officially in this race, the pool of saps willing to cross the mayor and give money to him will only get smaller. (This is also one reason why observers believe Flaherty won’t, and can’t, declare his candidacy until after Labor Day.)

It seemed that if Dianne Wilkerson couldn’t lose last year – a year in which the powerful but embattled state senator couldn’t manage to wring 300 good signatures out of her sprawling district, and had to wage a high-wire write-in campaign against a two-headed Diaz monster and an old cop. All that self-destruction, the money troubles, the staggering sense of entitlement conveyed by the signature fiasco – and none of it seemed to matter. The woman was invincible.

Invincibility isn’t protecting her, though. Wilkerson looks to have two challengers this fall. JP’s Sonia Chang-Diaz is once again gunning for Wilkerson in September’s Democratic primary. An independent candidate, William Theodore Leonard, will sail into November’s election. That’s assuming, of course, that everyone involved can get signatures in by the end of this month. It shouldn’t be a significant hurdle, but for some reason, it is.

A third would-be challenger, Robert Patton-Spruill, pulled nomination papers for the seat but recently decided to shut down his nascent campaign and go to work for Chang-Diaz.

The Roxbury filmmaker (he shot Tim Murray’s campaign commercials, and his Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome debuts this month at the Independent Film Fest) began gathering signatures and says his campaign could’ve been competitive, but backed out when he decided he’d be “better off using my skills behind the scenes.” And he maintains that, with more time to organize this time around, the Chang-Diaz campaign can do more than just throw a scare into the eight-term senator.

In Jamaica Plain, Patton-Spruill says Wilkerson “has issues.” He also insists that “We can be strongly competitive in Roxbury.” They’ll have to be; Chang-Diaz got rolled on Wilkerson’s turf two years ago, and it cost her the race. “African-Americans of my generation are looking for change,” Patton-Spruill says. “They’re upset at the current black leadership on Beacon Hill. The whole country is looking for new youthful voices.”

That’s some Deval Patrick Just Words stuff right there, and it’ll be fascinating to see if a netroots organizational machine can be deployed with any success at the ward level. Patton-Spruill will be building an online broadband channel for Chang-Diaz, and loading it with long-form videos – “on demand” campaigning to “show the real Sonia” and help fuel shoeleather politics.

For this campaign to work, Chang-Diaz has to make the conversation about youth, hope, change and the like. Because, otherwise, commentators will look to the 2006 results and frame the election as a race about skin color, class, and neighborhood division. And that’s certainly not a conversation many people are eager to have anytime soon.

Neither woman has to file paperwork with OCPF until the fall, so until then, we’ll all have to be content with trolling through their 2007 off-year campaign finance reports.

One big difference: Wilkerson blew through nearly $34,000 in a non-election year by spending on staffing, fundraising, phones, food, and airfare. Chang-Diaz spent $618.

The off-year donor lists are interesting as well. Chang-Diaz got money from big names like Barbara Lee, former Menino aide Howard Leibowitz, and Micho Spring in 2007. Wilkerson received support from a buttload of labor unions, as well as Bruce Bolling, John Nucci, Maura Hennigan, lobbyist and former House Speaker Charlie Flaherty, Angela Menino, Susan Passoni, BRA planner Muhammad Ali-Salaam, Jerry Rappaport, Jr., Chris Iannella, and two members of the troubled Winn clan.

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.