I didn’t vote for Deval Patrick four years ago.  I kinda liked the guy, but I expected four more years of standard Beacon Hill special interest protection, waste, and corruption.  I have been delighted and surprised by the kind of governor that he’s turned out to be.

• Do you own a car?  Have you noticed that your insurance rates are competitive? Have you noticed how they went down?  Thank Deval Patrick.  He did something that his predecessors, Democratic and Republican, did not.  He opened the insurance market.
• Did you hear about the pension reform?  About how the qualification for pensions are much more strict, and no more sweetheart deals for part-time political hacks?  Deval Patrick.
• For a long time there were 49 states that permitted the option of flagmen at construction sites rather than the more expensive full-time police officers.  Now there are 50.  Guess who, again.
• He was a fierce supporter of gay marriage, and his influence is one of the reasons that the Constitutional Convention declined to put the question of gay marriage on the ballot.  He helped deliver the 75% of the legislature that kept gay marriage legal in Massachusetts.

I’ve lived in Massachusetts for almost 20 years now, and he has far exceeded his predecessors.  I want him to continue his work.

There are plenty of other reasons why you should vote for him, too.  Check out his list of accomplishments.  I’m sure you’ll find more reasons why he’s the right choice.

Please vote for Deval Patrick!

So on Tuesday Massachusetts will have its first open Senate election since 1984.  A 26 year wait, and this is the best crop of candidates we can come up with? Kinda depressing, if you ask me.

The candidate I’m most passionate about is Scott Brown – and why he should never be a US senator.

First and most is what he thinks about gays.  He thinks that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, and he thinks that the states should vote on the question.  Vote on it? I’ll let him vote on my marriage as soon as he lets me vote on his.

I’m equally inflamed by his preferred policy regarding high school gay support groups.  He thinks that students should get parental permission before attending the groups!  Whatever your position on gay marriage, just think about some poor scared teenager who doesn’t know what the heck is going on – and Scott Brown thinks that poor kid needs parental permission before getting help from a peer group.  Brown might as well give the kid a teen suicide how-to guide with the permission slip.

I know there are a lot of conservative voters out there who don’t care about the social issues but see Brown as a voice of fiscal sanity.  The thing is, Brown isn’t a fiscal conservative.  He’s a big-government, big-regulation, tax raiser.  He may even be more dangerous because he claims to be fiscally conservative.

If you’re thinking about voting for Brown because of his fiscal chops, please consider the following:

• He urged people to vote against Q1 to end the income tax.
• He doesn’t support this year’s question to roll the sales tax back from 6.25% to 3%
• Repeatedly voted to override Romney’s (rare) spending vetoes
• He lists the MA health care plan as a major accomplishment, but the average Massachusetts family’s health care insurance premium rose from $9,867 to $13,788. A 40% increase! 21% higher increase than the national average.
• He joined the Democrats and passed legislation requiring Massachusetts to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in a cap-and-trade pact among Northeastern states requiring power plants to reduce emissions or to buy credits from cleaner industries. “Reducing carbon dioxide emission in Massachusetts has long been a priority of mine,” Brown said in a news release in 2008. “Passing this legislation is an important step . . . towards improving our environment.”

I am deeply sympathetic to the statement that one-party rule isn’t healthy for Massachusetts.  But is this really the kind of Republican you want to encourage?

I was watching state Senator Galluccio’s legal problems as 2009 drew to a close, and I cynically was thinking to myself about how my post would be different if he made it to 2010 before he resigned.  And he did make it to 2010, making half of my lines obsolete.  Multiple arrests, multiple innocent victims in the hospital, and he finally went to jail and resigned today.  He made the new year, the new decade, but I still think he’s a new year story.

The story by itself is just sad.  It’s the story of one man’s addiction and poor judgement and how he hurt himself, his family, and a collection of random people who had the misfortune of being on the road at the same time as his drunken self.  But when you put his story into a larger narrative, it becomes a statistic, the latest chapter in a book about Massachusetts legislators who couldn’t figure out how to follow the laws that they wrote and swore to uphold:

• 2008: Senators Wilkerson and Marzilli resign under indictment, a full 5% of the senate down in one year.
• 2009: Speaker DiMasi resigns and is indicted, the third consecutive house speaker to fall to a felony.
• 2010, day 5: Senator Gallucio resigns with a letter written from jail.

Am I saying that all of our legislators are criminals?  Of course not.  But I can’t help but notice that they’re going to jail at a higher rate than the general population.

It’s an election year.  Let’s hope the voters remember it in November.  Otherwise, we risk being like my buddy Loopus: “How am I supposed to repeat my mistakes if I can’t remember what they are?”

chippy and loopus

Ted Kennedy is dead, and that is all I have to say on the topic of Ted Kennedy.  But the questions of who will succeed him and how that person will be selected – now those are things I can write about.

The last time the Republicans won a Senate seat in Massachusetts was 1972: Edward Brooke, the first popularly elected black Senator.  When Paul Tsongas unseated him in 1978, the Democrats spent the next 25+ years with two “safe” seats from Massachusetts.  In the summer of 2004, they were horrified to realize that their success might mean failure: Sen. John Kerry was running away with the presidential race, and Mitt Romney, Republican, was governor.  When Kerry won the presidency, Romney would get to appoint an interim replacement.  Failure.

In 2004, as today, the Democrats held more than 80% of the seats in the legislature.  They were losing the game, but they had the power to re-write the rules, so they did.  They proposed a law that would strip Romney of his power to appoint a Senator.  The Republicans offered an amendment to permit an interim appointment.  The amendment was shot down, the bill was approved, Romney vetoed, the veto was overridden, and on July 30, 2004, the law was passed.  Read some of the quotes from the debate, and keep the window open for re-reading in a couple paragraphs.  They’re funny, in a sad kind of way.

Fast forward to today.  The national Democrats desperately want another (D) in Washington, but the state legislature is hogtied by its past actions.  They could change the law again and let Gov. Patrick appoint an interim Senator, but that would expose them as partisan hacks.  Or, they could do nothing and watch health care reform founder – the signature priority of their party’s new President.  It’s really a no-win situation for them; no matter what they look like unprincipled partisan whores.  I think this conclusion is an accurate one. It’s nice to see it in black and white without much room for spinning, dodging, or blaming.

There are a couple winners here:

• Congratulations to the unnamed adviser to Gov. Patrick who convinced him to make a full-throated endorsement of interim appointments.  Patrick is one of the few statehouse figures that can distance himself from the 2004 power grab.  Everyone knows he wasn’t governor in 2004.  Either he gets to appoint the 60th vote in the health care cloture vote, or he gets to tell the legislature “I told you so.”  And with almost no political downside!
• Potentially, congratulations to the Republicans.  They made the right arguments in 2004.  It’s impossible to prove whether that was principle or luck, but they get to bask in it now.  If they’re smart, they’ll stick to the same tune, but quietly at first.  If the leaders on Beacon Hill bring the issue to a vote, they should support the vote, and then congratulate the Dems on correcting their error in 2004.  If the Dems don’t bring it to a vote, they get to make hay for each day the seat goes empty.  Every vote, health care and all, they issue a press release bemoaning the short-sightedness of the leadership.  Of course, they can still screw this up -  if they oppose the vote, they also look like partisan whores.  Think red clothing instead of blue.

I’m not a fan of appointments.  Senators should be elected, not appointed.  The counter-argument is that for 100+ days, the state will only have one Senator, that we’re under-represented.  I just don’t think that matters in a 3-4 month timeframe.  I just don’t feel shortchanged.

So here’s what I’d do:  Make the time frame shorter, and hold the election in Oct/Nov rather than Dec/Jan.  Change the electoral calendar from 145-160 days to something like 105-120 days.  Hold the elections in November, at the same time as many cities, and save them some money.  Seat the new guy (or gal) in time for the New Year.  This blunts the “under-represented” argument.  And for the people who want a longer campaign – do you think anyone’s going to vote during the holiday season?  Not too likely.

It’s a change based on calendar, not party.

My friends and I play a silly game online.  We send each other news headlines on instant messenger under the headline of “Real or Onion.”  To win, you have to fool your opponent into mis-classifying the headline.  “Congressman Wants to Talk with Rodriguez” – it’s real, on nytimes.com right now.  “Genetic  Experiment Goes Horribly Right” – that’s Onion.

So, here’s today’s winning contestant: “Governor Appoints Spending Czar.” You and everyone else guessed Onion, right?  Sorry, it’s real.

The writers at Blue Mass Group, generally defenders of the governor, are as baffled as I am.  You can read the back and forth yourself – from “what the heck” to “it’s good project management” to “don’t we already have that?” and back.

The state has what, 100,000 employees and spends more than $50 billion dollars a year.  There are countless methods the state already uses to spend money.  I do not understand why we’d need a new, special person to spend more money.  It begs the question – what do the other state employees do?

This obviously isn’t the end of the world.  In the grand scheme of thing, this guy isn’t going to break the bank.  But it strikes me as tone deaf on the governor’s part.  Thousands of people are being laid off in Massachusetts this year, and the correct response is to hire someone with skill in spending money?

Real, not Onion.