Chats we’re unlikely to have with gov
By Howie Carr | Wednesday, July 27, 2011 |
http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
So Gov. Deval Patrick is deigning to have “summer conversations” with the hoi polloi.
If you live in Beautiful People Land, you might even run into him. Martha’s Vineyard, Lenox, Jamaica Plain — not going to be a lot of blowback in any of those la-de-da precincts about raising the gasoline tax. Of course, if the hacks at the State House were considering an excise tax on bicycles, or backpacks ...
I wonder if Deval will run into Elizabeth Warren on her not-so-much-listening-as-lecturing-the-riff- raff tour.
Do you think he’s selling many of his tomes in the assorted people’s republics he’s visiting? Last time I checked, “An Improbable Life” was doing improbably bad.
Did you catch what Deval said as he signed off on next month’s sales tax holiday?
“We do it, frankly, not because it’s particularly fiscally prudent, but because it’s popular.”
In other words, let them eat cake. You know those little people, they care about those crumbs like a 6.25 percent discount, and not having to pick up the tuition tab for illegal aliens. Bitter clingers. No summer conversations with the governor for them.
Then there were the stories over the weekend about the Big Dig, the bottom line of which seemed to be, it’s not if there’s going to be a disaster down there, but when. In the first draft of an official report, the word “leak” was used 34 times. In the final draft, the leaks, er, drips became nothing more than the water from “three garden hoses.”
And this was Deval’s response:
“The supervision and oversight of the contractor to whom this project was assigned was sloppy and lacking and some — not all — of the work was shoddy. None of that is news. None of that is news.”
Once again, paging Marie Antoinette. I’m going to guess the Tip O’Neill tunnel is another place that’s going to be passed over for a “summer conversation.” Ditto, any of the commuter rail stations. Or at State Street Bank, where they just laid off a few hundred people.
So much for “growing” all those jobs that Deval keeps talking about.
I’d like to ask Deval what’s the over-under on how many more transportation secretaries he’s going to go through in the last three years of his term.
Maybe they can send the lieutenant governor, Tim Murray, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, out to some of the grittier precincts when he returns from his special mission to Puerto Rico. Right now he’s at a “policy conference” of the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association ... in San Juan. Funny, I thought you went to San Juan for the winter policy conference, but what does Tiny Tim care? The reception started at 6 last night.
See you at the candlelight vigil, Deval.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1354350
Fri column ping; btw Herald site makes it look like Howie has 2 columns; there’s a small banner that says “Howie Carr” and Howie’s pic but that second one is actually a Peter Gelzinis column
Hey gov, I bet it’s corrupt
By Howie Carr | Friday, July 29, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
Photo
Photo by Nancy Lane
“If we populated the new (gambling) commission with the disciples and Jesus Himself, Howie Carr would still write something about it.”
— Gov. Deval Patrick, yesterday
You’re damn right I’d write about it, governor. Because in any scurvy crew of 13 people you’d appoint, there’d be more than one Judas Iscariot, or at least somebody who flunked the bar exam seven times, or liked to launder money for hacks, or at the very least guzzle chocolate martinis in the bathtub instead of watching her kid.
And any “disciple” you appointed wouldn’t have accepted any 30 pieces of silver either. No, they’d have ponied up 30 pieces, and probably considerably more, to both you and your little lieutenant governor, Tiny Tim Murray.
And while we’re on the subject, Deval, I don’t know if the Governor’s Council will have the power to confirm the members of the proposed new gambling oversight commission. But if the Council does get confirmation power, you could get at least four of the eight votes for anybody you nominated — up to and including Whitey Bulger.
And when the vote was 4-4, you’d tiptoe into the chambers, take the gavel from Tiny Tim and let him cast the deciding vote for Whitey.
Deval was on the radio yesterday yapping about his latest gambling proposal — with one (but only one, wink, wink) slots parlor. Don’t like that idea? No problem, just wait five minutes and Deval will have a different one.
So he started talking about this new gambling oversight commission. Of course you don’t get much “oversight” from oversight commissions, just like the only blue-ribbon you get from blue-ribbon commissions comes from Pabst.
“We need appointees,” the governor told my fellow columnist Margery Eagan on her 96.9 WTKK-FM radio show, “who are above politics, whose ethics rules are even more rigorous than the ones we put in place a couple of years ago.”
Can’t you feel the higher ethics? Only one ex-speaker convicted so far this year. No ex-state reps indicted since last week.
“I think they need to be adequately compensated.”
Ah, he gives the game away. In Deval-speak, the synonym for adequately compensated is $125,000. A mere six-figure salary doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s gotta be at least $125,000, so your 80 percent pension comes in at an even $100,000.
First member of the Gambling Oversight Commission: Tim Cahill, for obvious reasons. You’ll need an anti-former state Sen. Sue Tucker. She could handle the adequate compensation. Then maybe somebody from Chelsea. You could pay him in scratch tickets. And finally, to show how the governor celebrates diversity, an illegal alien, I mean undocumented worker.
Commissioner X, to make it harder for ICE to round him up.
Hey, Deval, you bet I’ll keep vetting your sticky-fingered hack appointees. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1354841