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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We love when newspapers try to one-up each other for video/pictures of pols doing ridiculous things.

Earlier today, the Herald gave us video of Mayor Tom Menino biking around Boston in a totally fetch blue tracksuit. Not to be outdone, our friends at the Cambridge Chronicle deliver a clip of Gov. Deval Patrick playing ping-pong at the new Google offices this afternoon.

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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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Things haven’t been going so well for Barack Obama lately. The Illinois Senator was once the golden boy of the Democratic nomination race, getting softball questions and making ladies swoon. Fast forward a few months and he’s been called an elitist by Mitt Romney (!), had to disavow his minister, and is under fire for the gas tax holiday thing.

In trying times, people tend to rely on their friends for support. But Obama BFF Gov. Deval Patrick is only making life harder for his beleaguered friend. The Associated Press checked up on a claim the Governor made about donating to Obama’s senatorial campaign in 1995 and can’t find any proof Patrick made the donation.

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The last time former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove tangled with a local institution, he was threatening to send a Harvard student off to Gitmo. (Seriously, has anybody heard from this kid since? We’re starting to worry about him.)

Now the FOX talking head is taking on someone named Patrick Deval.

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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…)

Despite his high-profile campaigning for Barack Obama, Gov. Deval Patrick maintained that he wasn’t going to bail on Massachusetts, unlike one recent, orange-toned governor who jumped to the national stage.

But after news broke that he was in New York signing a book deal on the day his casino proposal was officially defeated, we had cause to wonder if Patrick was poised to pull a Romney and flee the Commonwealth after only one term in the corner office.

Several Patrick aides have assured voters that Patrick plans to run for reelection. But today the governor himself finally went on the record about what he’ll be up to in 2010.

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Yesterday, we expressed skepticism about Gov. Deval Patrick’s plan to borrow $3.8 billion to repair 411 bridges around the state. We thought House Speaker Sal DiMasi sounded hesitant to embrace the big loan during a recession, and we braced for another fight between the two. But it was all sunshine and cuddles between the Speaker and the Governor during yesterday’s formal announcement of the bridge plan.

That doesn’t mean the path ahead will be entirely smooth for Patrick, however. State Treasurer Tim Cahill says Beacon Hill can’t afford champagne bridges on the state’s beer budget.

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Ok, someone has to explain this to me. I spent part of the morning talking with friends who cover the State House, and they’re as confused as I am: How, exactly, will Gov. Deval Patrick justify spending $3.8 billion to fix some 411 bridges in the Commonwealth?

Oh, you haven’t heard? Well settle in, friends. The governor, god bless him, wants to repair our deteriorating bridges — a plan he’s announcing today during a speech at MIT. And anyone who regularly travels over the Longfellow probably won’t argue. But good intentions don’t always make for good government, especially when Massachusetts is running a $1 billion-plus deficit.

Put another way, when you look in your wallet and realize you’re not only flat broke, but that you also owe a lot of people a lot of money, how do you talk yourself into a spending spree? The answer is simple, of course: you find new lenders.

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