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…)

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: The mayor fattens his war chest, and Sen. Dianne Wilkerson continues to sweat.

Let’s start by picking on Hizzoner. Nothing gets the natives riled up like parking tickets, so Mayor Tom Menino’s $2.42 billion FY09 budget, which includes $13 million in new parking fines, is sure to be the only thing anybody in Boston ever talks about for the rest of time. Let the schools close; we demand parking amnesty now! (more…)