Each Friday Thursday, 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 the Hall’s Half-year in Review.

There’s still a couple weeks left in the current legislative session, but since we’ve just passed the year’s halfway point – and since some of us are going to the beach a few days early – now seems as good a time as any to tally up the winners and losers from politicking in 2008. Here’s who did well, who did terribly, and who just got done on Beacon Hill and in City Hall.

Governor Deval Patrick

The good news first. The noise on Beacon Hill this half-year revolved around the governor’s legislative successes and failures – a dramatic departure from last year, what with talk of Cadillacs, drapes, and political incompetence. He’s suddenly able to walk the State House halls without tripping over his own feet (on most days, anyway), and it’s his policy proposals, not his relationship with the House Speaker, or a string of embarrassing staff shakeups, that dominate the headlines.

In this sense alone, the governor enjoyed the first six months of 2008 much, much more than he did the first half of 2007. And that’s saying something, considering that Patrick spent much of the half-year fighting for a doomed casino bill, and then, on the eve of the bill’s ceremonial slaughter, abandoning the few Reps who were actually willing to invite the Speaker’s wrath by standing with him when he bolted town to look for a book deal.

It was an appropriate end to a maddening six-month saga. (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: Trav’s bash gets funny; rumors abound involving Deval’s inner circle, but we set them straight; and Bill Weld scares the hell out of us.

A whole mess of pols in expensive suits showed up at the State House on Wednesday to witness the unveiling of a portrait of former Senate President Robert Travaglini. Headliners included former Governor Paul Cellucci, former Pike official and son of Eastie James Aloisi, Boston Mayor Tom Menino, former House Speakers Tom Finneran and Charlie Flaherty, and Travaglini’s first political boss, former AG Francis Bellotti.

The event–seemingly lightened by the unexpected absence of former Gov. Mitt Romney–provided the assembled politicians the forum for what they do best. They cracked wise and busted balls. (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: While the parents are away, the kids will play; John Kerry may not have the people, but he’s got the cash; and Michael Flaherty continues to antagonize the mayor.

Between the Bunker Hill Day holiday, the Green’s run for 17, and the hazy celebration that followed, absolutely nothing got done on Beacon Hill this week. It didn’t hurt that the three people who make the State House halfway functional were in California, courting biotech bigwigs and learning the virtues of gifts from big pharma, while whooping it up for the C’s and delivering speeches on victoorrrryyyyyyy.

(That last one only applies to Gov. Deval Patrick. And we’re totally serious here – fourth item!) Without supervision from the governor, the Senate President and the Speaker, it was House Party on the Hill. Except, instead of staging a crazy-ass dance-off and finding an MC to rock the house, most pols just shuffled through a grueling 15-hour work week. Still, a little bit of news managed to get made.

Mike Widmer tweaked the legislature for sucking at life and budgets, while state officials announced that they wouldn’t be paying hospitals to screw up anymore. And there wasn’t much else – not with mom and dad and dad out of town, and the legislature’s last real bit of work for the year, the budget, tied up in conference committee.

So, in the absence of real news, what are we left with? Polls and idle speculation. So, on with that we go. (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: Dismissing the Deval Will Leave talk; the lumbering casino giant rumbles; while Brad Jones tries to wake the slumbering legislature.

This week, bizarre sexcapades yielded to the palace intrigue, paranoia, denunciations of the plebiscite, and scrambling to cram in work before vacation that normally dominates Beacon Hill. It was just as well. Journalists and political gossips had more than enough material to work with, and nobody had to stoop to make off-color jokes about shaving. On with the spectacle!

Governor Deval Patrick, who, thanks to Sal DiMasi’s well-documented problems with everything, has been enjoying a nice respite from notebook-wielding vampires, found himself back on the cover of the Herald this week. And it wasn’t because of the twenty best ways he’s saved Massachusetts, either.

The paper reported that, even though the governor has repeatedly said he won’t follow Barack Obama to Washington, Tim Murray has been raising a butt-load of money recently, and “and other top Democrats who could succeed him - including Attorney General Martha Coakley and Treasurer Tim Cahill - have been building their war chests with an eye toward a potentially bruising and wide-open 2010 race.” The next day, Patrick advisor Michael Goldman reiterated that, no, the governor isn’t going anywhere. (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: Jim Marzilli’s epic breakdown; Michael Flaherty  pounds his chest; and birthday wishes for Tim Murray. 

Congratulations, State Senator Jim Marzilli: You are officially the best thing to happen to the Beacon Hill press corps since Marie St. Fleur. Topping the St. Fleur implosion is a chore and a half, for sure – but it’s nothing a crazed, weepy, marathon grope-and-run spree that ends your political career can’t top.

Exclaiming, “Oh baby. You’re so beautiful. Your body is so perfect,” then running the wrong way up a one-way street, disrupting traffic, terrorizing a hot dog stand, weaving in and out of cars parked in a Lowell garage, being threatened with pepper spray by law enforcement officers, then sobbing to those very same officers that, “his life was over, that they were destroying him,” and adding, “I can’t believe this is happening. She was flirting with me, I was flirting with her” … that’s the stuff of legends right there.

As is propositioning a woman only to be told, “Take 20 dollars and go get a hooker.” (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: How hard is it to get signatures, really?; and Michael Flaherty’s war chest gets a little bigger. Plus: Falling asleep during a hearing on drowsy driving, and more campaign finance data.

You’re a state legislator. All you have to do to keep your job is get a couple hundred people to write their names on a piece of paper. Lately, that’s been an astoundingly tall task.

State Senator Dianne Wilkerson was last year’s cautionary tale. She failed to wring 300 good signatures out of a district that sprawls from Beacon Hill, through the South End, to JP and Roxbury. Suffice it to say, there are well more than 300 registered voters living in this district, and Wilkerson’s failure to successfully navigate this routine task brought several rounds of mockery and head-shaking – not to mention a brutal write-in campaign – upon the senator’s head.

So, it’s more than a little staggering that in the election immediately following Wilkerson’s debacle, another legislator has failed to navigate the chore of ensuring continued service in one of the nation’s least competitive legislatures. Rep. Carl Sciortino is now scrambling to keep his job because he didn’t learn from Wilkerson’s mistakes. (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: Gov. Patrick’s special photo-op; Mayor Menino’s charm; and about the budget: We’re still screwed.

Under normal circumstances, any press aides who allowed their boss to be photographed – and videoed! – participating in a humiliating stunt like the one Gov. Deval Patrick engaged in this week would have their asses handed to them. Hard.

Yeah, we get it, Google is fun and quirky and the web bubble’s champagne and caviar days are here to stay. And all of that means that MIT grads are now building Massachusetts’s high-tech economy, one ping-pong ball at a time. But this is not a photo that conveys the dignity and gravitas governors usually strive to project. The super-sized photo that ran in Wednesday’s Globe made Patrick look downright, uh, special.

And looking at the nonexistent blowback from these photos, all of that’s just fine. That fact, more than any other, shows how radically the balance of power has shifted on Beacon Hill recently. These circumstances aren’t the least bit normal – not to the formerly beleaguered governor, anyway. (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: The fight for the soul of Somerville.

Somerville does few things better than eat its young. It has to. The city is so solidly Democratic that if its politicians didn’t cannibalize each other, there would be nothing for anybody to do—no scheming, no name-calling, no axes cleaving the backsides of inattentive bystanders. No savagery at all. The boredom would become insufferable. The city would become Arlington, or something.

There’s no danger of that happening, thankfully. (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: Palace intrigue in the House of King Sal leads to a surprising conspirator. Et tu, Petrolati?

If Gov. Deval Patrick has learned anything from his time in the corner office, it’s that reporters love scandal and whiffs of impropriety. Backstabbing? Ego politics? Personal humiliation? Yes, please!

Patrick seemed to have a hard time adjusting to this scavenger mentality last year. He appeared bewildered at the media’s willingness to subject him to endless rounds of questions about the beatings he was taking from House Speaker Sal DiMasi. He clearly thought there were more important things happening in the building, and couldn’t fathom why we didn’t get that, too. Doesn’t the Beacon Hill press corps - or, for that matter, the suits they write about - do anything other than bleed their idols and leave them for dead?

Not really. (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: Brad Jones takes on everybody, fun with urls, and the most popular man in Boston: Thomas M. Menino.

We already know that next week’s budget debate won’t see a whole lot of actual debate. The days of the House pulling weeks worth of all-nighters and clawing over a couple thousand amendments, one after the other, are long gone. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be fireworks when Reps slog through this year’s glut of cash-money add-ons.

The latest phantom voting scandal is already more than a week old, but it doesn’t show signs of going away any time soon. With any luck, it’ll be one of the stars of the budget debate. Minority Leader Brad Jones is making sure of that.

House Republicans have filed an amendment “restoring a level of integrity to the [voting] process,” setting aside money to overhaul the chamber’s voting system. The system is antiquated and “on its last legs” anyway, Jones says. If it broke down next week, nobody would be around to fix it, because the technology that makes it run doesn’t exist anymore. So, the GOP figures, if the state’s going to have to spend money to replace the thing, it might as well do so while Charles Murphy’s St. Croix to Boston vote still has legs on talk radio. (more…)