Since Mugro is a shirker who is too busy basking in some warm foreign climate instead of being where he belongs ready to suffer through another New England winter with his fellow Bay Staters, I guess I'd better sub for him in posting news from Taxachusetts.

AG Martha Coakley sues major US banks over foreclosures

 bokey wrote: 
Oh I can beat that with an inside straight. We just had another illegal Obama relative arrested for drunk driving. Yes that's right they're coming out of the woodwork over here. His uncle Onyango Obama also had a MA drivers license and a social security card. He lives in public housing and collects $700 monthly disability.

When his was being booked for blowing twice the limit, he replied that his only phone call was going to be to the White House. How's those stones for you?

His sister, Zeituni, also an illegal here in our fair state has been living here illegally for years in public housing and collecting social security. In an interview she had bigger stones than her brother saying it was our fault and that she was owed it for being allowed to come here. The United States has an “obligation” to grant her citizenship. YOU OWE ME?  WTF!

Do you think I'm not pissed?

 LordBaltimore wrote: 
Damn right I am, TYVM.

 GeneP59 wrote: 
You should move to Maryland. The Democrats have allowed it to be overrun by illegal aliens, and are now trying to give these criminals amnesty to become Democratic voters.

 Kind of a tradeoff between thieves.

 FWIW, I am a registered Dem at this point, soon to change though.

 romeotuma wrote:
 
Welcome to my State of imbalanced corruption.

THIS IS BIG NEWS!!!!
Whitey Bulger Arrested in California

 aflanigan wrote:
 
This will never fly. They split up our district so there will never be a Republican Rep again. Just look at the Mayor of Boston doing Union commercials while getting Union money for election.

Ever ask why the Big Dig cost $14 Billion?

Taxachusettes, home of the Democratic retaaaded politicians coalition.

 aflanigan wrote: 

 Mugro wrote: 

They should mandate that the House Speaker has to be a Republican.  That will guarantee them to be honorable and free of corruption, right?

 Mugro wrote: 
Kinda reminds me of Louisiana's colorful political history. What a bunch of crooks.

The THIRD consecutive Massachusetts Democrat Speaker of the House to be convicted of a felony. Where does it end?


Pols: What, us change?
By Chris Cassidy, Hillary Chabot and Dave Wedge | Thursday, June 16, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Politics
Photo by Matthew West

Defiant Bay State lawmakers saw no need to change their Beacon Hill ways yesterday, despite the stunning news that their erstwhile leader, disgraced ex-House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, had been found guilty of extortion, fraud and corruption - the third speaker in a row to be convicted on federal charges.

One indignant pol even took personal offense when a Herald reporter asked if the guilty verdict would change the culture at the State House.

"What has to be changed on Beacon Hill? Why would you say something like that?" snapped state Sen. Steven Tolman (D-Brighton).

"That's outrageous. Come on. There are 199 people up here that work their hearts out - 200 people - every single day. I'm insulted," Tolman said, correcting himself on the total number of legislators.

Though reeling from the corruption conviction of the speaker whose bidding they once did, many legislators continued to defend him.

"I've never seen a better speaker," said Rep. Frank Smizik (D-Brookline). "It's a shame when somebody who did a good job gets caught up in a mess like this."

But House Speaker Robert DeLeo, who said the DiMasi revelations at first felt like a "kick in the stomach," told reporters it's his job to change the public's perception.

"This is not business as usual," DeLeo insisted. "Your House of Representatives, they're working for you each and every day."

Meanwhile, Gov. Deval Patrick, who testified during DiMasi's trial on how he ceded to the pol's hard sell on a low-priority item, yesterday described the fallen speaker's case as an "outlier."

"I hope what it means is the end of a long, sad chapter," Patrick said.

House Assistant Majority Leader Charley Murphy (D-Burlington) said he's "disappointed," but when asked if legislators will change how they conduct business in the State House, he said, "This is not something that's pervasive, this is not something that's day to day, and I hope people realize that."

One pundit, however, said legislators will start feeling the pressure.

"Three convicted speakers in a row doesn't look good, and they're going to have to do something," said John C. Berg, political professor at Suffolk University.

"You'd like to think it would, but I tend to doubt it," Republican strategist Rob Gray said. "People thought (former Speaker) Charlie Flaherty's legal issues would change things, but it didn't. We've had state representatives, senators, speakers of the House convicted of various crimes multiple times in the last decade. So I'm not sure they'll get the message even though they should have a long time ago."

Rich Economy/Poor Economy

The first in a two-part look at how the income gap between has impacted local businesses

Massachusetts has a longstanding reputation as a liberal state, the sort of place where you might expect the old adage that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer not to apply. But between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s, the income gaps between the rich and the poor, and, to a lesser extent, between the rich and the middle class, grew enormously.

In fact, according to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, the rich-poor disparity grew faster here than in any other state except Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The good news is that the gap grew only thanks to the rich getting richer. The bottom 20 percent of families saw their incomes remain essentially flat in inflation-adjusted terms, while the top 20 percent grew by 44.4 percent, and the top 5 percent gained 89.5 percent. The incomes of the middle 20 percent rose a relatively modest 16.2 percent.

Since the recession, everyone has lost ground but there's no doubt the income gap remains much bigger than it was when Reagan left office.

Hacks on war path in Probation scandal
By Howie Carr  |   Friday, December 10, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Columnists
Photo by Herald files

This Probation scandal is looking more and more like a hack version of a gang war. What starts with a minor affront - one mob, the Legislature, not paying enough respect (i.e. jobs) to a rival crew, the judiciary - quickly spirals out of control.

Now, every morning another payroll patriot or two is dropped in a hail of headlines. Yesterday, it was the governor, the day before, a top judge.

The city's various hacked-up crews, outfits and families all had a beautiful racket going - Probation. Everybody had a piece of the action. Everybody's drunken nephew got a lifetime, no-heavy-lifting sinecure. But as always, the lowlifes got greedy. Nobody wanted to whack up the pot no more.

And now we have the biggest hack shootout in years.

Consider the case of Mary- Ellen Manning, a governor's councilor, a nominal Democrat but a real thorn in the side of both the governor and the judiciary.

A week ago, Mary-Ellen Manning broke all the rules of the hackerama. At a council hearing, Margaret Marshall, the outgoing chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, the mama of gay marriage, was testifying under oath.

So Mary-Ellen hit St. Margaret of Marshall with a stream of embarrassing questions. Such as, how come the SJC justices get to collect fat state pensions, but don't have to pay a dime into the system?

It was only a matter of time until somebody put a rocket in her pocket.

Now, in a gang war, you need hit men. The black-robe mob farms out its wet work to an effete band of carpetbaggers known as the Globe. A couple of days ago, Manning gets a call from the Globe asking her whether she made a call in 2005 on behalf of her brother, who is now a probation officer.

Yes, she said, she called John O'Brien, the now-suspended probation commissioner. O'Brien was the street boss of Felon Finneran's legislative crew. He was the kingpin of Probation, although he always made sure to cut the Deval, Cahill and black-robe gangs in on every score.

Manning says she was just trying to make sure it wasn't held against her brother that she is an "independent," unaffiliated with any of the local political wiseguys. Should she have made the call? Of course not. But the larger question remains, who exactly handed the Globe this huge list of Probation hacks and their "sponsors"?

Wasn't that "sponsor list" impounded? Wouldn't releasing it to anyone be illegal, although as Marsha Coakley says, "Technically, it is not illegal to be illegal in Massachusetts."

But isn't it odd that one of the first pols to get outed as being on the Probation sponsor list is somebody who had just embarrassed the godmother of the black-robe crew just a week earlier?

When will the Globe's next "scoop" appear, and why do I have this feeling that most of those who are going to be clipped will be, oh I don't know, conservative, or Catholic and

or born in Massachusetts?

It's not O'Brien who's leaked the sponsor list. Man, I wish he could get back into his padlocked office for a couple of hours. But it appears all he took with him were those 100 thank-you notes from assorted hacks.

So O'Brien, do I have to paint you a picture? They're fitting you for cement shoes, you're "embattled" - start leaking those thank-you notes, two a day.

Let's just hope the hacks keep whacking one another out as they nervously await the subpoenas from the grand jury. You know, even more than a gang war, this is like the Iran-Iraq war.

Isn't there some way they can all lose?

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1302163

"Yes, We Can!"

Governor Hope & Change is in on the patronage corruption scandal too, just as we knew he would be...

Probation lawyer: Gov aides pushed for jobs

 cookinlover wrote: 
What I thought you were doing is using sly irony to point out that I was painting with an overly broad brush - if I say "arrogant Northerners", then you say "redneck Southerners".   OK, fair enough.

To tell the truth, my political views are far more in keeping with the Northerners...that should be completely obvious.

But if you ask me to ignore a distinct trend in Northern attitudes towards the South, you're asking me to be willfully deaf, dumb, and blind.  I had personal experience with it when I lived in Greensboro, NC, and worked in a facility that had relocated from a Northern state.   To this day I regret how it colored my view of the place, in retrospect a very desirable and pleasant one with decent, levelheaded people.  But those levelheaded people did put Jesse Helms into Congress.  Who can figure??

But the problem with Greensboro, NC was that one had to be satisfied with Greensboro, because everything else was 60-90 miles away, especially Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill.

As for the Civil War, the widespread US notion of cherishing it as The Good Old Blue and Gray is completely ludicrous.  It was a massive murderous bloodletting.  Over 600,000 Americans killed, in a smallish population.  Do an exercise, and scale it up to the populations of Europe in WW I.  It will scale up to a million or two.

In other words, American (Union + Confederate) losses, as percent of population, were on the order of WW I in Europe.

It left scars that persist to this day. 

EDIT: And, BTW, I think that if the North had just bought all the Southern slaves and given them their freedom, it would have been less costly than the Civil War.  Because it ultimately was about slavery - ignore the States' Rights figleaf - and the buying and selling of human beings like animals was an abomination. Chaw on that.

And, in my day "redneck" was a pejorative applied to the white rural working class...with approximate hurtful intent as the offensive N-word.  Nowadays, it's almost cool...just the latest manifestation of the Bohemian,  sort of the successor to the hippie.

Judges struggled to limit O'Brien

Record examined as Patrick seeks sway over probation

By Marcella Bombardieri Globe Staff / December 5, 2010< src="http://cache.boston.com/universal/js/bcom_etaf_scripts.js" type="text/javascript"><>

Robert A. Mulligan, the state's chief administrative judge, did nothing to veil the contempt he felt for Probation Commissioner John J. O'Brien's patronage machine

In letters to O'Brien over the years, the judge used words like "astounded'' and "incomprehensible'' to describe some the commissioner's actions. He raised questions about the candidate hired after being ranked 18th - out of 18 applicants - by the interviewer who would be his boss. About the person tacked on to a list of finalists after "an error in calculations.'' And about the hire whose lack of an associate's degree was excused because he had been a supervisor at Sparkle Spot Car Wash.

And yet Mulligan, like his predecessor, failed to stanch the flow of politically connected candidates who won jobs that should have gone to more deserving applicants.

The state's top judges are now facing tough questions about whether they fulfilled their responsibilities to monitor the department and rein in O'Brien, after independent counsel Paul F. Ware Jr.'s devastating finding of corrupt hiring practices within the Probation Department and Governor Deval Patrick's bid to wrest control of the agency from the judiciary.

Indeed, O'Brien's public defense has been to point to the fact that Mulligan, his nominal supervisor, ultimately signed off on every hire.

Ware, in his report, found that Mulligan "did not shrink from confronting'' a "gargantuan task'' dealing with a hostile and dishonest O'Brien, but that the judge's efforts "appear to have been mostly indirect and around the edges of the problem.'' Mulligan, Ware wrote, "did not typically question whether candidates were the most qualified, and he generally relented once provided some explanation by the Commissioner.''

Similarly, Ware concluded that Mulligan's predecessor, Judge Barbara A. Dortch-Okara, acted with integrity in the face of a system she had realized was "fixed.'' She had considered imposing some safeguards against patronage, but the effort fell to the wayside apparently because a hiring freeze went into effect, Ware found.

The failure of judicial administrators to limit O'Brien's activity has come in for criticism by some in the legal community. A sharply worded editorial in the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly last week said that if Ware's allegations are true, then Mulligan and his boss, Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, "have neglected their duties by allowing the corruption to continue.'' The courts, the editorial added, "have hid too long behind the fiction that they lacked the necessary statutory power to confront and fire O'Brien.''

Marshall, who did not respond to requests for comment, is retiring. Mulligan's term runs through 2013, but his standing in the job, as a new chief justice takes office, is unclear. Even before the probation scandal, Mulligan's support was seen as tenuous - the Supreme Judicial Court was divided in 2008 when it reappointed him to a second five-year term as chief justice for administration and management.

Several retired judges and lawyers said last week that Mulligan was handcuffed by the Legislature, which has had the upper hand in a decades-long power struggle with the courts. In 2001, as Dortch-Okara was showing some resistance to patronage hiring, Speaker Thomas M. Finneran spearheaded a law that gave O'Brien "exclusive'' hiring authority.

Through its budget control, the Massachusetts Legislature wields a level of influence over the state judiciary unique or nearly unique among states, according to several experts on the court system. That can spell retribution when senior judges displease politicians, especially at a time when layoffs and court closings have been a constant threat.

This year, House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo backed an unsuccessful effort to move Mulligan's office from downtown to a cramped, undesirable space atop Charlestown District Court. It was seen as payback to Mulligan after an internal court inquiry found merit to sexism allegations against a state representative's father, a chief probation officer sponsored by Finneran.

"Chief Justice Mulligan was caught between Scylla and Charybdis,'' Ware said in an interview, referring to the menacing sea monsters of Greek mythology. "It was essential for him to maintain a constructive relationship with the Legislature while trying to bring some discipline to Commissioner O'Brien and his hiring practices.''

Ware also defended Marshall, who he said was, like Mulligan, "a victim of overt dishonesty in terms of the both the Legislature's candor with her regarding Probation, and the conduct of Commissioner O'Brien.''

Mulligan, 67, an Army lieutenant in Vietnam who has served three decades on the bench, acknowledged in an interview that he had the power to reject hires not based on merit. He said he did so when he had evidence, and that he did not fear punishment from Beacon Hill. But the elaborate, sophisticated nature of the fraud made the wrongdoing very difficult to catch and prove in specific cases, he said.

For example, Mulligan would review notes taken during interviews, but they always purported to show the winning candidate giving the most thoughtful answers. He sometimes interrogated probation officials about whether the process was rigged, but they swore it wasn't.

"I think the history will show I tried my very best to deal with the situation that I was facing, with really a hostile commissioner,'' Mulligan said. "We had suspicions about the process, but it was impossible to penetrate that organization.''

When O'Brien and the judge had earlier worked together in Suffolk Superior Court, Mulligan found O'Brien a genial, "well-met fellow,'' he said, an impression that didn't last. Mulligan admitted to Ware that the "distastefulness'' of dealing with O'Brien might have led him to avoid face-to-face meetings.

Once the hiring freeze ended in 2004, Mulligan imposed some limits on O'Brien. For example, he refused to fill assistant chief probation officer positions that weren't yet vacant, which O'Brien wanted to do on the assumption that current assistant chiefs were about to be promoted to chiefs.

But by March 2005, Mulligan "seemingly relented'' in his attempt to limit probation's power, Ware wrote, when O'Brien scheduled 3,800 interviews to fill 52 positions. That's 73 interviews per job.

"I can only conclude that you have decided on 3,800 interviews so that you can fulfill your own prophecy that judges would not want to be involved,'' Mulligan wrote to O'Brien.

Mulligan decided then to involve judges in interviewing only eight finalists for each position.

Still, Mulligan sat on some appointments he didn't agree with and vetoed a number of others. In 2005, he refused to promote Lucia M. Ligotti - daughter-in-law of a clerk magistrate - to assistant chief probation officer in Fall River because her name had been added to the list of finalists after "an error in calculations.''

O'Brien seemed to give the chief justice no quarter, writing that he was unsettled by Mulligan's tone, or "gravely concerned'' that Mulligan was overstepping his authority. The Globe obtained some two-dozen letters between the two men, all exhibits in Ware's report.

In 2006 and 2007, Mulligan tried in vain to insist that the final interview panels - made up of O'Brien's deputies - explain their decisions in cases where they were at odds with the local interviewers, more likely to be people who had worked with the candidates.

The process "seems designed to ignore the assessments of the local panel and gives short shrift to important background characteristics of the candidates,'' he wrote.

O'Brien countered that it was natural for the second, "more challenging,'' round of interviews to turn out different from the first.

Perhaps Mulligan's most hopeless move came in 2008, when he banned O'Brien and his staff from contact with "any and every member of the Legislature'' without coordinating first with a Trial Court staff member. Given Ware's finding that almost every hire at the Probation Department was politically influenced, it's hard to imagine that O'Brien complied.

"I thought,'' Mulligan wrote, "that I had made that quite clear at our meeting.''

Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.

 BasmntMadman wrote: 
Hey, wasn't being a smartass, just being honest. I've lived north, south, and even other countries and recognize redneck when I see it, wherever it exists. Chomp on that for a while. While you're at it you might want to consider living in the 20th century, not in a war that once existed, but ended 100 years before you and I were born. 

 Mugro wrote: 
As a kid, I constantly heard about the slave state tyrannies of eastern Europe. 

And MA just may be a slave state itself.  But a traditional slave can revolt or run away to freedom.  No, this type of slavery has the most inescapable chains of all:  it's the slavery to our crude desires, and to the worse demons of our natures. 

Fitchburg vs. Boston may well explain a lot.  It's basically concentration of wealth.  The corrupt pols are simply trying to scramble in a dishonorable fashion for some scraps. 

Of course, people want jobs without interviews.  I've found over the years that fewer and fewer people don't have something to hide that technically would make them unemployable. 

And, more on Fitchburg vs. Boston.  Here's a pie chart of Boston's economy:



The service economy!   I picture either high-dollar professionals or clerical staff making minimum wage.
Boston was big enough to make the conversion.  It's the place where the banks, insurance companies, legal firms and consulting firms wanted to locate. 

 BasmntMadman wrote: 
The point of the thread is that Massachusetts is a ONE PARTY STATE. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Several people have posted to this thread that they come from states where Republicans are in charge and they feel like the system is broken in their state too. I would argue that New Orleans and Chicago are the only places in America that could even come close to the inbred corruption in Massachusetts, but I understand their point because I am making it too — one party systems promote corruption because there is no democratic check on the party in power's power. So yes, if you replaced each and every Democrat in Boston with a Republican, after a bit of time you would probably find the Republicans stealing money and freedom from the citizens just as the Democrats have done for several generations.

The point is that Democracy only works when there are viable alternatives. It only works if the voters have a real chance at voting for their choice of candidates, not just what the one party in charge decides that they can vote for.

I wail and rail against the horrible political conditions in Massachusetts because it IS the land that I am from and the land that I love. I still own a house there, vote there, and have many friends and family who live there. It breaks my heart to see what is happening there, and I had a front row seat for many years and could see close up how the corrupt politicians perpetuated themselves. I was not just reading about it in the newspaper or on blogs. I was seeing it and feeling the effects of it. For example, I KNEW the people in the Probation Department because I worked with them every day as a lawyer. I HEARD their stories about how they sucked up to some Dem power broker who got them their job without an interview. This isn't some conspiracy theory fantasy that the Republican party is making up in order to gain advantages. It is REAL LIFE. There was nothing that could be done about it either, because it was an open secret and everyone in power was in on it.

I think that a lot of us here (and out there in America too) can see the malaise that is settling down around us in America. We see democracy being choked by the weeds of corruption, money and greed. Yes, we can debate the sources of this malaise, but we all see it. Don't pretend that just because Harvard University was part of that "City on a Hill" ethos way back when that everything is fine throughout the state and throughout the Union.

Come to the streets of Fitchburg, Massachusetts (during the daytime only if you value your life and your wallet) and see a Main Street that is all boarded up. Not many people there are "high-toned" and "noblesse oblige". They are scrambling to survive and are suffering the consequences of the many negligent decisions of their leaders over the past 60 years. Their future was stolen by the corrupt power brokers 50 miles and a world away down there on that City on a HIll.

 Mugro wrote: 
No, I failed to notice the Boston Globe piece...because my eyes had glazed over from examining all the stuff from the Herald.

We're at a strange liberal-conservative nexus here.  Conservatives, after all, harp on patriotism.  You seem to be going out of your way to prove just what a hellhole your native land, the state of Massachusetts, really is.  If you'd have substituted "United States" in for "Massachusetts", you'd have had Ann Coulter all over you, as a self-loathing America-hating degenerate.

Does anyone, anyone seriously believe that if Massachusetts replaced every last Democrat with a Republican, that act would moderate the corruption? 

So that leaves the basic characteristics of Massachusettsians in general as the cause. 

Harvard and MIT are relevant, because the same culture that built them also selects the people to run state government.  And, of course, a culture comprises people.  So, the same culture that values education so is dumb enough to believe the claims of innocence of all the crooks they select to run it?

Or maybe the entire culture itself tends towards corruption -  really, a byproduct of an excessive competitive zeal to grub money. MA is still a pretty big corporate center, with Boston as its hub.  Even New Yorkers view Boston as the suburbs, compared to the wilderness of the rest of the country.  If I had a position in the corporate aristocracy, Boston would be an absolutely great place to locate myself. 

So I think the various public flunkies and operatives want a piece of it, too.  And the corporate bigdeals sure didn't get to where they were by self-abnegation and George Washington-style honesty, so why should the flunkies and operatives? 

You're describing a corrupt land where you've lived, a nasty, hard-nosed place where people forget the basic decencies of life in order to agglomerate enough wealth to keep the shopping going on Newbury Street.

And here I'd always thought of it as a sort of high-toned, noblesse oblige sort of place.