Last week, Gov. Deval Patrick hinted that his casino legislation may make like Lazarus and rise from the dead. We applauded him for suddenly having the courage to kick House Speaker Sal DiMasi while he’s down (politics, hooray!).

But an unlikely party is pledging to tack the casino proposal onto the Senate’s budget as an amendment.

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You know you’re going to have a rough day when the Globe has so much coverage about you that they can run it under one headline. House Speaker Sal DiMasi gets the treatment this morning as the broadsheet reports on the continuing saga of Richard Vitale’s lobbying work and reveals that the Speaker was receiving death threats during the heated casino debate.

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Allowing a casino plan to gain any sort of support is like inviting a vampire in to your home—once you allow it in, it’s difficult to get it to leave. When House Speaker Sal DiMasi crushed Gov. Deval Patrick’s plan for three casinos in Massachusetts, we figured it was still far from over.

Now that the Speaker is looking especially vulnerable, Gov. Patrick is floating the idea of bringing his casino plan back to life.

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As the fickle creatures that we are, we often regret letting things pass out of our lives. Whether it’s a dress at H&M or a significant other that didn’t quite work out, we find ourselves wondering how our lives would be different if the object of our affection was still in them.

The one thing we don’t miss is the idea of three resort casinos in Massachusetts. But the Herald seems to have a case of the what-ifs.

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Each Friday, Paul McMorrow will take you inside the smoke-filled rooms and darkly-lit corridors of government to bring you the hottest and juiciest political tidbits. This week: It’s budget season (yay!), the governor and the speaker play nice (boo!), and lessons in trout stocking from John Tobin.

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. (more…)

Each Friday, Paul McMorrow will take you inside the smoke-filled rooms and darkly-lit corridors of government to bring you the hottest and juiciest political tidbits. This Week: Therese Murray slips into a power vacuum, the Mashpee won’t give up the ghost, canoodling at City Council, and sartorial help for Mike Ross.

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. (more…)

You may have heard this already, but Massachusetts is hurting for money. Now that we won’t have casinos anytime soon, the Legislature is left to scramble for ways to balance the budget because if it doesn’t, cities and towns won’t get the aid they need to keep services running.

Cities and towns will be delighted to hear that the Massachusetts State Lottery is on its way to a record-setting year, since much of their aid comes from revenues. But it may spell more trouble than relief.

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Last week was a good one for House Speaker Sal DiMasi. After some intense political maneuvering, he killed Gov. Deval Patrick’s casino legislation, and took the opportunity to crow about his victory. But now that DiMasi’s end zone dance is finished, he’s got some problems.

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Each Friday, Paul McMorrow will take you inside the smoke-filled rooms and darkly-lit corridors of government to bring you the hottest and juiciest political tidbits. This Week: Casinos (what, you thought we’d talk about CORI reform, lowering the blood-alcohol level or judicial appointments?) Why yes, we do.

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. (more…)

At long last, Gov. Deval Patrick’s casino bill has been put out to pasture. The House voted 108 to 46 to put the bill in a study commission, which is a kind of purgatory for legislation that nobody wants. Speaker Sal DiMasi declared victory, while Patrick slunk off to New York, the land of the losers.

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