Here’s what “not very much” money looks like: If Romney only made speeches, and wasn’t mostly living off his low-tax investments, he would be well within the top five percent of earners in the country. On speeches alone.

The haul from a single speech would put him in the middle of the pack, nationally, although it would place him at the upper end of the lower middle class if you’re just looking at Massachusetts households.

What you see above is the average household income in 2010, sorted by quintile, and with the top five percent of the top quintile thrown in for perspective. By any reasonable measure, “not very much” money is a great deal of money to 95 percent of the country.

Then again, the Census Bureau and I might just be envious.

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.

Mitt Romney‘s campaign for president has ended. Who’ll we make fun of now?

It was, by all accounts, a bizarre scene at City Hall on Wednesday when the Boston firefighters union met with members of the City Council.

“What they really should’ve done is convene the Council psychologist,” says a source. “They seem crazed, like they’re living in denial. I get it – they’re feeling pressure, the leaks are pissing them off, they feel like they’re being dragged through the mud. But nothing good can be coming from them fighting drug testing. Fifty minutes of that one hour meeting was just them venting. There were no talking points. It was just stream of consciousness emotion.”

As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, the union’s vaunted PR firm was not in attendance.

Word surfaced this week that C. Stanley McGee, the Rhodes scholar, eminently stylish Bostonian, and chief grunt behind Governor Deval Patrick’s casino gambling proposal, has been placed on unpaid leave after being arrested for allegedly performing oral sex on a 15-year old boy in Florida. File this one under “not helping your own cause.”

The MBTA is broke. So says the T’s general manager, Dan Grabauskas. The agency is facing a $75 million deficit next year, even in the face of massive fare hikes and a wicked successful crackdown on fare evasion. It’s struggling with a massive debt load, and Grabauskas’s broke-as-a-joke statements were clearly designed to goad the state into bailing out the struggling bureaucracy. (We’ve seen this strategy before, of course.)

Grabauskas isn’t lying when he says the T is drowning in debt (accounting for an unheard-of 27 cents of every dollar it blows). But when Beacon Hill observers read Grabauskas’s woe-is-us comments in the Globe, they didn’t see the key word mentioned a single time—by the GM, the CFO, or anybody else. It’s as if the T’s brass is praying they can create a panic and sneak one by the whole of Beacon Hill.

“Before you say, ‘We need more revenue,’ you have to look at costs,” says House Minority Leader Brad Jones.

Those costs are frightening. Consider this passage from last year’s scathing Transportation Finance Commission Report:

The MBTA has long been known as having among the nation’s highest operating costs, and cost control was a key element of Forward Funding. The MBTA has not come close to meeting the objectives … that growth in operating costs would be only 2.5 percent per year for the period between FY 2000 and FY 2007. In actuality, the rate of growth over that period has been 5.0 percent per year. By FY 2007, the difference between planned and actual operating expenses was $143 million per year.

In other words, if the T had controlled its costs like it was supposed to this decade, its $75 million deficit would be a healthy surplus. Instead, it has continued to offer one of the nation’s most generous benefits packages – early retirement with a full pension and free health care.

Grabauskas “Hasn’t talked about” benefits, says Mike Widmer, president of the Mass Taxpayers Foundation and a member of the TFC. “Health care costs need to be addressed aggressively.” According to the commission’s report, health care eats up 44 percent of all fare revenue; by 2026, that figure is forecast to be 94 percent, assuming fares grow with inflation.

As the T’s management ratchets up its campaign to alter, or even end, Forward Funding, the discussion should digress into a nasty fight over the T’s benefits. Management certainly isn’t blind to the costs of their benefits; their silence on the issue suggests either intransigence on the issue, or cowardice, hoping that the legislature will do their union-busting dirty work for them.

And while there are those in the legislature who want nothing more than to put the T on a severe austerity diet (Republican leadership has bills pending that would fold the agency into the state’s insurance and pension systems, moves that could cover the bulk of next year’s deficit), they can’t, because they’re awaiting Patrick’s much-talked about MassTrans proposal. And even if MassTrans does get filed soon, it likely wouldn’t see action until late 2008, at the earliest.

And in the meantime, the wheels continue to fall off the bus.

“If anything, the Transportation Finance Commission understated the problems,” Widmer says. “The situation is compounding by the month, by the week. They’re coming unglued even faster than we thought would happen.”

Meanwhile, as the legislature waits on the governor’s transportation reform package, discontent seems to be bubbling up from the right side of the aisle. Jones, the House Minority Leader, is frustrated that his T reform bills haven’t gone anywhere – and that nothing else has, either.

“I recognize that [Patrick] has to come in, put his oar in the water and row, but we filed these bills to get the ball started, and it would’ve been a good first step. The legislature’s reluctant to act. We haven’t been doing much. We meet one day a week. It’s frustrating. You’ve got school vacation coming up, and after that, it’s March and it’s the budget, and the next thing you know, we’re in July. This is shaping up to be a pretty sparse year.

“And for all the promises of one-party government, the record doesn’t match that rhetoric. When there’s two parties, both sides have to justify their successes; they need to get things done. We’re going to get to the point in the calendar where we have to say, what can we get done?”

Asked whether the governor’s biotech initiative will emerge next week, as scheduled, Jones responded, “We’re not very good at hitting deadlines.”

What are they good at? Running for office, for one. Which is convenient, because with two Senate seats opening up in a single night last week, the special election train hasn’t slowed down one bit. An early, obvious choice to succeed outgoing Senator Pam Resor is Jamie Eldridge – provided he can put some cash into that meager-looking bank account of his.

And what of the reaction from Massachusetts Democrats – people who have, more or less, spent the past six years battling Romney, cursing him, serving as the punchlines in his rightward-pandering jokes, and lobbing one nasty quote after another towards reporters? What do they say when this man fails?

Nothing.

The rules of this game are funny. When somebody’s up, it’s fine, if not expected, to throw unsparingly wicked elbows at your enemies (cf. Sal DiMasi to Romney at St. Patrick’s Day, 2006 – “You being president of the United States? That’s a joke!”) But when you spend half a decade calling somebody a fraud, and the rest of the country suddenly decides that you’re right and deals this fraud a humiliating $35 million rebuke, you don’t gloat. You don’t say anything at all.

Politics and gang life share this kind of unspoken code. You can pop off at whoever, but you don’t snitch on your own. Whatever happens, happens within and amongst your own, and it doesn’t involve outsiders. The Dems and the GOP may be rival gangs, but they’re the same breed, and when the vultures come to prey on the fallen, they close ranks protect their own; if it were them on the ground getting stomped on, they’d expect the same.

With 499 total delegates up for grabs through March 4, Romney would have to win more than 80 percent of them to catch McCain, assuming the Arizona senator won none. And, even if Huckabee won them all, he would still trail McCain. Dividing the total among the three candidates makes over taking the front-runner more difficult still.

Awww. Looks like woobums needs a hug. Or a good laugh. Hey, that Sal DiMasi’s a funny guy. He’s always good for a laugh.In fact, there was once a time way back in the spring of 2006 when Romney and DiMasi shared a great, full laugh together. What fun they had. In times like these, it’s best to go to one’s happy place – and for Mitt Romney, there can be no happier memory than the day he put on a massive show and signed the state’s landmark health care reform law. Let’s revisit that day, Mitt, and hopefully brighten your day a little bit.

Mitt was on top of the world back then. Even for a governor who ruled mostly by keeping his good angles towards the cameras, this was a coup and a half. He was taking credit for a major issue that would, hopefully, catapult him to the fore of the GOP presidential field and position him as the campaign’s most capable – and hirsute! – technocrat. Even better, he, a vile Republican, was surrounded by Massachusetts’s Democratic elite, and the way they looked at him… fawning even seems a little weak.

That photo was surely designed to outlast Romney’s term as governor, and now, it seems, it may outlive the campaign it was supposed to serve. The funny part is, even for an empty suit like Romney, this good-times photo-op was staggeringly fraudulent.

I got the real story on the famous health care photo from Sal DiMasi when I interviewed him for his feature in this month’s issue. Turns out, it was DiMasi, not Romney, driving the scene in that picture, just as it was the Speaker, not the Governor, who should’ve been claiming credit for health care reform. An excerpt from my interview with DiMasi:

The picture where we’re laughing – during the ceremony, there was a big platform that you had to stand on, and I said to myself, Holy shit, this is really orchestrated, what the hell’s going on here? This guy’s all pomp and circumstance. No substance, but that’s besides the point. I started my speech by saying – well, because he was always talking about the employer assessment as a tax, I said, think of it as a fee or an assessment. Just like you had your fees and assessments, you didn’t raise taxes, right?. I got up there and I said, Well, thank you very much, it’s always difficult going last because a lot of the time has been used up. So if I go over my time [speaking], governor, I’ll be glad to pay the $295 fee, assessment, tax, whatever you want to call it, governor.

At the end, when he goes to sign the bill, he goes, OK, where’s your $295? You went over. I went like this to pay him. [Mimes reaching into his pocket.] I said, well, I’ll pay if you tell me what it is. Is it a tax or a fee? Can I deduct this as a tax? That’s what we’re laughing at. Fee, assessment, tax, I said, whatever you want to call it.