My latest for the Globe checks in on the least-famous pit in Boston’s cityscape – the hole in the ground in back of Ferdinand’s blue store in Dudley Square.

Ferdinand’s, and the pit behind it, were supposed to transformed into a gleaming new $80 million municipal building.

And as you an see by clicking this link right here, that didn’t happen.

Mitt Romney (who has not recently been to Argentina, and thus is having himself a pretty good month) breezed into the State House last night to unveil a portrait of what appears to be an old-ass version of himself. Haha, at least they got the hair right.

Romney’s gubernatorial portrait boasts two props, and neither of them is an armadillo. One is his wife, because hooray for family. The other, the Globe tells us, is “a leather binder that has a medical seal representing the state’s landmark healthcare legislation, approved during Romney’s tenure.”

Tim Cahill be damned, health care is key to Romney’s continued kinda-relevance on the national stage. (So is monogamy!) The fluffing he received on the subject last night helps things immeasurably.

Except that, not too long ago, Romney’s legislative counterparts weren’t so keen on letting him take credit for the state’s health care reform law. When I was researching last winter’s Boston magazine profile of then-speaker Sal DiMasi (not to be confused with this excellent post-indictment version), both Sal and Robert Travaglini were eager to say that they, not Romney, did the heavy lifting on that legislation.

Sal was particularly uncharitable. I asked him about a then-recent Time article that called health care reform Romney’s “defining moment.” The article “gave Romney an awful lot of credit,” he said, bitterly. “It’s easy to make PowerPoint presentations without specifics.”

[State House News photo]

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

Democracy happened on Tuesday, and what a mess it left behind. John Kerry beat back some RFK lookalike. Longtime Senate fixture Dianne Wilkerson was overthrown by an astronaut’s daughter in a low-turnout race that broke largely along racial and neighborhood lines.

A machine boss’s daughter brought gubernatorial hellfire upon her head in a race she already had sewn up. And Carl Sciortino, the kid Rep who lost his nomination papers and couldn’t find anybody in Somerville to give him money, won on stickers over a guy who actually had his name on the ballot. Wicked drama all around.

But the day’s biggest winner might be anybody willing to take on the city’s most powerful man.

Way back in January, this column compared Mayor Menino’s field ops to a rusty Datsun. The results of the New Hampshire primary, where Hizzoner went all-in for Hillary Clinton, certainly belied that analysis. Wilkerson’s loss is another story. It’s the latest in a string of local races (Tom Reilly, Jeff Drago, Boston’s presidential primary) that the mayor has put his shoulder into, and still lost.

“The urban mechanic needs a tune-up,” a source inside City Hall quips. “City Hall was a ghost town on Tuesday. The lights were on but nobody was home. Michael Kineavy dispatched City Hall staff to work the polls, man the phone banks, and get out the vote, and Wilkerson still lost. The mayor’s machine is rusty, and while he may have high favorability in the polls, it’s certainly not translating into votes.”

Last week we detailed Majority Leader John Rogers’ latest campaign filings ($56,000 spent on cars, food, phones and golf). There’s another sizable withdrawal coming out of that account soon: A $30,000 settlement with state campaign finance regulators.

OCPF announced the settlement—not a fine, mind you—yesterday. OCPF’s investigation into a June, 2007 Globe story about the Majority Leader’s questionable use of campaign funds (he’d funneled nearly $200,000 into a consulting business his former law partner had set up for the apparent sole purpose of consulting for him) revealed that some of that money ultimately paid mortgage bills on a Falmouth vacation home one of the consultants jointly owned with the Norwood Democrat.

The way it works is: Rogers sends money to a friend, who pays another friend a salary, and right after getting paid every month, that other friend makes a payment on the Cape house. A house which Rogers co-owned. Nice system, that.

Some people will doubtlessly react to this news by saying that the settlement effectively kills any chance Rogers has of beating back the DeLeo/Petrolati forces and becoming the House’s next speaker. (After a long, long, long, long, long, long time, obvs.) Others might say that it’s proof that Rogers is ready to lead from Day One.

The Hill and the Hall has different concerns. It’s not so much how Rogers’ vacation home gets paid for, but the fact that he’s apparently funneling campaign cash into the real estate market. Real estate? In this market, Mr. Majority Leader?

There are so many better ways to get rich off sketchy 75 State Street schemes these days. Think inelastic demand. Card games, stolen cigarettes, what about bankrolling dog fighting, maybe?

This is the (alleged) thievery portion of our weekly report, apparently. So let’s point out that (alleged!) thief John Buonomo rolled to victory on Tuesday, despite having quit his post the week before. Let’s also point out that, while Buonomo is widely expected to take his name off November’s ballot, he has yet to do so, and that, when given the chance to rule his client out of the race, Buonomo’s lawyer refused and deferred comment to the Secretary of State’s office.

And this is what Bill Galvin’s office had to say: “We can’t say yes or no until we get something from them.”

(Please, please Lord, let this guy think he has a shot of getting re-elected in November. Please let him run. It would be a truly spectacular spectacle. Truly.)

And besides, Buonomo’s sitting on top of nearly $135,000 in campaign funds. What’s he going to do with that if he skulks off the ballot and out of office? Buy a house?

Final numbers aren’t in yet, but let’s assume that right now, Ed O’Reilly is still on the hook for $400,000 in loans to his campaign. (He was in for upwards of $600,000 of his own money, but at last report, had been able to reimburse himself for something like $200,000.) Now, according to our dreadful math skills, O’Reilly’s 153,636 votes cost him $2.60 apiece. Of his own cash. That’s one hell of a vanity run.

But take heart, Ed. Your own personal financial disaster is nothing compared to Mitt Romney. The former governor spent $1.16 million per delegate for the privilege of failing in front of the whole country. Mitt’s $40 million in personal funds shook out to $147,601 per delegate.

So, Ed, next time somebody comes up to you and tries to say that challenging John Kerry was a fantastically dumb thing to do, remember this: It wasn’t as dumb as it could’ve been.

We neglected to mention one big name missing from last week’s orgy of OCPF data: House Speaker Sal DiMasi. Here’s what the big guy’s money has been up to these past eight months.

DiMasi raised $234,000, spent $209,000 of it, and ended August with $416,491 in hand. He dropped $12,534 on lawyerly stuff with Tom Kiley’s firm, nearly $10,000 on printing and mailings, over $1,000 in “gifts” from a Newton liquor store, and roughly $900 for rounds at the Ipswich Country Club.

And while much has been made about the $30,000 DiMasi spent on feeding himself and others, there are other line items that pop out. Like the two $1,000 expenditures for “professional services” with Vitale, Caturano & Co. in February.

Beyond that, there’s the torrent of money flowing towards Sage Systems, the controversial consulting firm headed by a DiMasi associate, Bill Carito. DiMasi’s own campaign account sent over $58,000 Sage’s way; his Committee for a Democratic House PAC added $42,872 this year. The PAC sent over $48,000 to Sage in 2007.

Sage has long been the subject of grumbling among backbenchers and old Finneran loyalists, who have claimed the Democratic House PAC is being used as a sop for the Speaker’s friends. The PAC funds the maintenance of voter analysis software, and House members have to pay to access the data; Finneran’s PAC, by contrast, made direct payments to Reps facing re-election fights. (This year, the Mass. Republican House PAC made $500 maximum contributions to 12 candidates. When the issue was raised earlier this year, the Speaker’s political aides argued that the firm’s work has a much greater impact on local races than $500 contributions would.)

But Sage is also doing quite well for itself. From January, 2007 to August, 2008, it pulled in over $855,000 worth of business. The Speaker’s campaign account, his PAC, and the Democratic State Committee paced that business.

Still, in this election cycle, just 38 House Democrats took advantage of Sage’s services. Tony Verga did, to the tune of $21,500. He lost on Tuesday. Paul Donato, one of the speaker’s close confidants, dropped $13,000 with the firm and easily won his re-election fight. Charlie Murphy spent well over $66,000 with the firm. For that kind of money, Sage should throw in free tickets to St. Croix. Or not.

Wire services contributed to this report.

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney didn’t get a ton of national play during this past week’s exercise in Republican media baiting democracy, mostly because his teenage sons have, thus far, avoided becoming impregnated by finger-tatted hockey players. But that doesn’t mean the state’s onetime one-term chief executive wasn’t making moves in Minneapolis. Aside from decrying “eastern elites,” “radical violent Islam,” porno, unions, promiscuity, government, liberals, liberals serving their government, Al Gore and/or air travel, China (and, we think, capitalism?), and newspapers and the lying liars who write them, Romney was busy laying the groundwork for a second, assumedly less-disastrous, run at the White House.

Assuming that hectoring the nation about taxes and Paris Hilton proves insufficient, and assuming that John McCain follows other people’s worst instincts into horrible, ass-freckly defeat, the Republicans will need somebody to swoop in in 2012 and stop surrendering to terror already. By all indications, that person will be Romney. The National Journal polled a number of party insiders this week, and a full 55 percent believe that, in 2012, Romney will be hitting Jack Abramoff’s leftovers as the GOP’s standard bearer. He blew everybody else away – placing a distant second to Romney, and pulling 15 percent to his 55, was “Nobody.” (A delightful prospect, to be sure.) Jeb Bush trailed “Nobody” by seven full points.

Romney’s already talking the part, assailing the government that, for all practical purposes, his own party controls. “We need change all right,” he thundered Wednesday night, “change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington – throw out big government liberals and elect John McCain.” These days, nothing says “ready for primetime” like the ability to whip up stinging feelings of victimhood in the poor, abused majority without betraying a shred of irony.

Locally, Romney’s tenure in the State House generated near-universal derision for its ruthless, naked, utterly transparent ambition. And it looks like that ambition just might pay off. The guy has money and has built a national organization. He spent the week shoring up the latter, holding daily receptions with supporters.

Safe to say that Jane Swift wasn’t first in line to mingle with Mitt. State House News reported that the former governor, whom Romney elbowed out of the Corner Office in 2002, skipped her successor’s big speech. “I was unfortunately doing another press interview,” she confessed, adding “I’m sure he did a great job.” So irony’s not dead after all!

Speaking of Swift, John McCain’s vice presidential pick, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, has begun attracting comparisons to the high-flying former acting governor. For those of you reading this from the great frozen north, that’s not a good thing.

The Hill and the Hall spied Brad Jones on CNN during Palin’s speech the other night. He appeared to be listening intently, and was not wearing a cowboy hat. Well done on both counts, sir.

Move over, Cinco DiMasi: Tim Murray will lead a trade mission to Ireland next month. One can only imagine the intense, uh, preparation that goes into a trip like that.

The Boston Public Health Commission’s efforts to ban restaurant patio smoking should generate significant public outcry, but it’s another of the commission’s proposed regulations – the one that would bar pharmacies from selling cigarettes – that is sure to get the city’s political class talking.

While researching his Power profile, we were told by one mayor observer that the unrestrained vehemence he exhibited towards CVS’s in-store clinics (they “seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene,” take advantage of poor sick people in a way that’s “wrong,” and “jeopardize” public safety, Hizzoner said) didn’t just have its roots in the mayor’s fierce allegiance to Boston’s community health centers. It also stemmed, we heard, from a decades-old grudge the mayor nurses against CVS – one that dates to his days as a lowly city councilor.

So is it possible that, having lost the battle to derail the pharmacy’s clinics, City Hall turns around and decides to take a significant chunk out of the store’s bottom line? It certainly puts the explanation in yesterday’s Globe – “Why, in a place where people go to get healthy and get information about staying healthy, would you want to sell something that has absolutely no redeeming value and ends up killing a lot of people?” – in a different light.

(The Hill and the Hall had a dentist appointment this morning, and thus we didn’t get around to calling City Hall for comment on this one. But we’re sure they’d issue a Complete Categorical Denial of everything we just said. So just go ahead and throw one of those at the end of this whole thing.)

News from the suburbs: Somerville isn’t the only city whose residents are being asked to vote in a prospective State Rep specifically because of how little pull that Rep will have with legislative leadership. Framingham’s in on the act, too! At a forum this week, the town’s incumbent Rep, Pam Richardson, came under fire for staying on Speaker Sal DiMasi’s good side. “I’m not counting on Sal DiMasi looking out for Framingham’s best interest,” one of Richardson’s opponents blasted. Future back-benchers of the world, unite! (Unite, that is, in the cause of not getting any earmarks passed ever.)

Wire services flew to Minneapolis to contribute to this report.

[RNC poto]

(Cross-posted from the red-eyed Boston Daily)

World traveler/embattled ex-public servant Matt Amorello was not in India last week. That’s because he was stuck on Beacon Hill, very nearly weeping while angrily insisting that he’s not a crook. Don’t laugh yet. Amorello isn’t just a not-crook; he’s also a sound manager who has the state’s best financial interests at heart.

That was the line the former Turnpike head fed to the state Ethics Commission this week. In his final days at the agency, you see, other people wanted to allow Pike employees to cash out 100% of their unused sick time. They knew Mitt Romney was about to clean house, and they wanted to pork the system for as much as they could, while they could. Not Amorello. Because he only raised the buyback ceiling to 50%, and because he acted all angry as he did it, Amorello should be the hero here, not the victim. So says Amorello.

The bureaucrat makes a less than convincing case for himself. While his altruism (he totally cursed out the patsy who changed the buyback policy – it was so blue that “I can’t use the words I said in this setting,” he testified) and restraint (he “did nothing … to enhance my position at all” because he passed up the chance to trade in his unused sick time for $73,000, and instead settled for a miserable $110,000-plus severance package) are both commendable, they might not be enough to stave off a guilty verdict before the Ethics Commission.

That’s because, while Amorello has proven himself to be more than adept at things like not supervising massive public works projects, he appears to be less skilled at reading. The ethics complaint against him says the buyback policy change represented an “unwarranted privilege of substantial value” for himself and for “his senior staff.” And since five of his top aides used the altered policy to net $130,000 – his chief of staff, for one, enjoyed a nearly $59,000 payday – well, let’s just say that we may not have seen the last time the former Pike boss get teary-eyed for the cameras.

House Minority Leader Brad Jones issued a press release Monday announcing that, during last week’s marathon sessions, the North Reading rep had cast his 4500th consecutive roll call vote. By the time all his “Nay” votes were swatted away, he’d topped 4600 straight votes. The lesson here, it appears, is that Republicans are better at timing their jaunts to St. Croix than Democrats are.

Turns out that the talents wielded by Worcester County Sheriff Guy Glodis extend far beyond making penis jokes on TV. The guy can be a total bastard during election season, too.

Glodis didn’t endorse Democratic Senate hopeful Ed O’Reilly this week. And that’s about all he didn’t do. In a flame-throwing interview with State House News, Glodis (he works for the state, you know) explained his decision to invite O’Reilly to a Shrewsbury senior citizen picnic thusly: “I’ve invited John Kerry numerous times in the past, which he has never showed up at.” That wasn’t gratuitous enough, so Glodis added that the “seven or eight times” he’s bumped into O’Reilly in the past month have been “more than I’ve met John Kerry in the entire 20-plus years he’s represented the Commonwealth.”

Even though weather on the Cape hasn’t been great lately, City Hall has been relatively quiet. Look for that to change in the coming weeks. Michael Flaherty, who is said by some people (and by some people, we mean every person ever) to be interested in the din-filled mayor’s office, has begun putting his newly acquired wealth to work.

Flaherty recently dropped a sizable chunk ($36,000) of his epic $132,000 June fundraising haul with Cambridge-based Web 2.0 consultants SocialSphere. John Della Volpe, the firm’s founder, also runs polling for Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Della Volpe did some consulting and polling work for Flaherty last year, but this current job looks to be heavier lifting: It cost more than twice what last year’s jobs did. OCPF filings bill the expenditure as “research.”

And while the Southie councilor takes the temperature of the electorate, or the internet, or Facebooking Menino-hating young voters who remain ungrateful for their new bicycle lanes, or whatever else he’s polling, he’s also laying plans to have Hizzoner’s good name dragged through the gutter this fall. Flaherty’s special City Council committee on moving City Hall has finally scheduled a hearing – for mid-September. It’ll be the encore to last year’s red-raced, book-throwing spectacular, and it’s sure to throw several dozen embarrassing questions in the administration’s face. Naturally, the television cameras will be there to soak it all in.

And don’t forget about last week – Flaherty issued an email accusing Hizzoner of enabling the Fire Department abuses it’s now railing against. Calls for internal documents and justice and the like can’t be far behind. We’ll whittle down that 72 percent approval rating yet…

The Hill and the Hall is putting on its unregistered lobbyist hat and demanding action on Beacon Hill. Lots of bills died unnecessary deaths in the session’s final days. One of them is hurting America right now. Here’s how. The legislature could have passed a bill trading looser caps on campaign contributions for more frequent campaign finance reporting. There was support for the idea in committee. And if such a trade had taken place, journalists reporting on the few competitive races that are heating up right now wouldn’t be doing so while flying blind. As things stand, nobody running for the legislature has to disclose pre-primary fundraising and expenditure data until the week before the vote. Somebody could be up to nothing good, and nobody would know! And that, dear friends, makes the Statue of Liberty cry blood.

(Cross-posted from the slick new Boston Daily)

How hard has the legislature been working? On Thursday, the thirstiest day of the week, the House and the Senate both missed last call. Now that’s public service. As Governor Deval Patrick told a group of kids who were regaling him with birthday wishes, “It’s insane down there right now.”

In racing towards the end of the legislative session, legislators passed bills on global warming and health care costs, establishing universal pre-K education, securing Greenway funding, bailing out the debt-addled Pike, and approving several billion in new bonding expenditures. Additionally, they overrode nearly half of the Governor’s budget vetoes.

Most will need several uninterrupted days on the golf course to recover from such exertion. And, as luck would have it, they’ll be able to enjoy a cold one or ten on the links. That’s because, just before checking out until next January, the pols legalized booze on golf courses. Fore!

The House also struck a blow for freedom and soaring eagles and such, advancing a bill that would order the state pension system to divest from Iran. That bill wasn’t without some controversy, though. Byron Rushing announced that he’d be voting against the measure, complaining that the bill was “only about terrorism.” In that case…

The clock did run out on two high-profile bills – Patrick’s bid at criminal records reform, and same-day voter registration. Oh well. Maybe somebody’ll get around to that by 2010. Maybe not.

Though distinguished by remarkable productivity, the session’s end resembled the weeks that followed it, in that it was often overshadowed by House Speaker Sal DiMasi’s ongoing quest to retain control over his restless Democratic supermajority. It seems that when legislators gather to vote along party lines, they also tend to plot and scheme and spread disinformation about their boss’s future, and each other’s ambitions. There had been whispers that the faction lining up behind Ways and Means Chair Bob DeLeo might be using budget veto overrides to reward supporters and punish enemies. The chairman was busy working his cell phone, but the override process largely consisted of reps shuffling into the chamber, voting with leadership (Dems yes, GOP no), and then ambling back out of the room. At one point, Speaker Pro-Tempore Thomas Petrolati had to urge his charges to remain in the room, so that they might dispense with the business ahead of them in a more expeditious manner. Some allowed themselves to be herded; others did not.

In one interesting development, the House advanced a popular bill that had been stagnant since January. According to the Herald, leadership had “put a hold” on the bill after pocketing $42,000 from an interest group opposing the legislation. And then, after being held for months upon months, the bill moved. It was Wednesday, after 5pm, and over at Herald Square, the paper was preparing to ship a story about the bill’s curious death. By the time the story ran, on Thursday, the bill wasn’t dead; it was undead and on the move!

Still, from the ceremony celebrating the death of the last bit of law Kris Mineau could cling to, you’d never know that there was angst and scandal swirling through the State House. Patrick and DiMasi laughed and embraced and delivered speeches that made onlookers weep. Senator Dianne Wilkerson cheered the end of “a very dark, evil chapter in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Everybody cheered the fact that Mitt Romney is no longer governor. And then the crowd sang happy birthday to Patrick.

The Senate joined little kids and gay marriage advocates in celebrating the governor’s aging. The body took a break from overriding his budget vetoes to enjoy a bite of Modern Pastry rum cake with the birthday man. Afterwards, Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei warned his colleagues, “I might be a little unstable on my feet because that rum cake was very strong.” He confirmed that he’d marked the occasion by posing for a photo with Patrick, and then attempted to get his colleagues to begin their upcoming five-month vacation on a responsible note.

“When we come back in January, chances are, we’re going to come back to a real mess. We should do what we can right now to contain spending as best as we can. These agencies aren’t going to fall apart. They can certainly afford a little belt-tightening. I don’t agree with the governor on a lot of policy issues. But he is correct on sounding the alarm.”

The speech, unlike that killer midday drunk joke, went unnoticed. Looming economic disaster? Sounds like something that can wait until January. Until then, most legislators have uncontested reelection contests to worry about. Have a nice summer, fall and Christmas, everybody!

Wire services contributed to this report.

]]> http://www.paulmcmorrow.com/2008/08/01/the-hill-and-the-hall-week-in-review-22/feed/ 0 http://www.paulmcmorrow.com/2008/06/27/the-hill-and-the-hall-week-in-review-19/ http://www.paulmcmorrow.com/2008/06/27/the-hill-and-the-hall-week-in-review-19/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:14:41 +0000 admin http://www.paulmcmorrow.com/?p=214 Continue reading →]]>

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

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.

Gov. Deval Patrick emotionally recalled that Travaglini was the man who administered his oath of office, saying, “I’ll never forget that day.” He also recalled huddling up with Trav and Sal DiMasi after the election; Trav flatly told Patrick, “I’m out of practice cooperating with the governor.”

Menino took the podium promising to “bury” the guest of honor, “not praise him.”

“You’re finally funny!” the former president shot back. The mayor appeared ready to follow through on his vow, then spied a Senate aide clutching a tape recorder. “Awww,” he moaned, before launching into a grudging, but florid, recitation of Trav’s greatness. Then he paused, staring at the aide, a wide, open-mouthed grin on his face.

And the yuks kept on coming. Finneran speculated, “I’m the only member of the media who has ever been, or will be applauded in this room.” He added, “The mayor told me to be careful of that recorder. I have to be cautious for other reasons – I’m still on probation!” Then he expounded on the profound cultural differences between the Italian-American Senate leader and himself: Trav plied legislators with Pope Juice, while Finneran preferred Johnny Walker Blue.

It was just one of several references to getting tanked. DiMasi ventured to say that the wine they drank in the legislature was much better, “than what you and the mayor used to drink.” Trav claimed that anybody who was thinking about leaving the old neighborhoods had second thoughts once DiMasi succeeded Finneran: “East Boston and the North End? The party goes on all night!”

And Senate President Therese Murray, recalling the meticulous manner in which her predecessor arranged the knickknacks in his office, told a story about breaking into the president’s office one night and rearranging everything in sight. “We climbed out one window and then in yours,” she revealed, adding, “We put all our leftovers in there, too.” Murray also gleefully recounted Trav’s skill at “filling every open clerk and court officer position. He had a full employment office coming out of there.”

The current House Speaker had attendees roaring when he contrasted the continuity between Trav’s time in leadership and Murray’s with the recent transition in the House. Finneran, he said, had told him, “Just try not to do what I did.” DiMasi paused, then confessed, “It hasn’t been easy. You’re rubbing off on me a little too much!”

DiMasi also chided his predecessor’s verbosity. “Tom Finneran took most of my two minutes. Were you speaking for Romney, too?” He paused, setting up the punchline: “You did that during your whole tenure as speaker.”

Trav refused to be upstaged. After being regaled by several rounds of the legislature’s customary greeting for Italian-Americans – a resounding chorus of “Heyyyy! Heyyyyyyy!,” interspersed with the occasional “Woo!” – he began with, “Governor, none of those toll-takers were my guys.”

He paused for applause, then added, “But if you’re looking for an apology from me for providing employment opportunities for qualified residents from impacted communities … I offer no apology.” Then he talked about public service. Then he pulled the curtain off his portrait. It’s a rather massive thing – smaller than the monstrosities belonging to Calvin Coolidge and Horace Mann, but still large enough to put Billy Bulger’s to shame. (There are no gratuitous Abe Lincoln busts or creepy mystery hands in Trav’s portrait, either.)

In the press scrum that followed the ceremony, Trav brushed aside suggestions that, now that he’s legally allowed to lobby his former colleagues, he’ll be roaming the halls frequently. “I don’t have to come up here,” he said. “Yeah,” a reporter shot back. “You just pick up the phone.”

“That’s right!” The former president brushed aside a reporter’s suggestions that his portrait, styled after the classic Brahmin portraits hanging in the Athenaeum, was incongruous with his standing as the chamber’s first Italian-American leader. He did, however, concede one point: The artist, Tom Ouellette, “Could’ve given me a little more hair.”

Suffolk County DA Dan Conley has won a string of murder convictions recently. Does this mean he’s not the devil in a nice suit – and that he’s no longer easy prey for upwardly mobile Boston pols?

A hot rumor hit the internets this week: Governor Patrick’s chief of staff, Doug Rubin, will soon dump the administration for the Obama campaign. Hub Politics cited “unconfirmed rumors afloat” concerning Rubin’s imminent departure, and then speculated about all the great palace intrigue that will follow the resignation.

One problem, though. Rubin said Wednesday that he’s not leaving. Which just goes to show you: When trading in unsourced, unconfirmed rumors, stick to the rumor-mongers you trust. The Hill and the Hall: Your finest source for baseless speculation since, like, seven months ago.

From the Department of How Can We Miss You if You Won’t Go Away?: Mitt Romney may have skipped the ceremony honoring Travaglini, but the preceding night, he was back in Boston and in rare form. The failed presidential candidate headlined a Republican fundraiser, played to the crowd and beat up on his successor for trying to fix education by leading with his heart, not his calculator: “I’d say how much can I spend first, and then I’d design it,” Romney said.

Perennially bored rich guy William Weld was in the house too, and for some reason he called Romney “someone who is inevitably going to be, soon or late, the president of the United States of America.” Halloween’s still months away, Bill. Why try to sew terror now?

Wire services contributed to this report.

This is the same man, of course, who helped label a triple amputee as soft on defense, and who orchestrated a whisper campaign that a judge’s concern for abused children stemmed from the fact that he was secretly a pedophile. And hey, didn’t John McCain sire a black baby or something?

What a difference two years out of power makes.

Related: If Ryan Lizza’s recent piece on the inner workings of John McCain’s Straight Talk Express doesn’t make you wish you were sitting on that horseshoe couch right now, you’re probably an accountant. Ink-stained wretches everywhere dream about having that kind of freewheeling access. It makes our jobs easier, and as Liza shows, when our jobs are easier, everybody – us, the people we cover, and the people who have to read our copy – wind up better off.

It also makes me feel really, really bad for the poor bastards who were stuck following Mitt Romney around for months on end.

Mitt Romney‘s campaign for president has ended. Who’ll we make fun of now?

It was, by all accounts, a bizarre scene at City Hall on Wednesday when the Boston firefighters union met with members of the City Council.

“What they really should’ve done is convene the Council psychologist,” says a source. “They seem crazed, like they’re living in denial. I get it – they’re feeling pressure, the leaks are pissing them off, they feel like they’re being dragged through the mud. But nothing good can be coming from them fighting drug testing. Fifty minutes of that one hour meeting was just them venting. There were no talking points. It was just stream of consciousness emotion.”

As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, the union’s vaunted PR firm was not in attendance.

Word surfaced this week that C. Stanley McGee, the Rhodes scholar, eminently stylish Bostonian, and chief grunt behind Governor Deval Patrick’s casino gambling proposal, has been placed on unpaid leave after being arrested for allegedly performing oral sex on a 15-year old boy in Florida. File this one under “not helping your own cause.”

The MBTA is broke. So says the T’s general manager, Dan Grabauskas. The agency is facing a $75 million deficit next year, even in the face of massive fare hikes and a wicked successful crackdown on fare evasion. It’s struggling with a massive debt load, and Grabauskas’s broke-as-a-joke statements were clearly designed to goad the state into bailing out the struggling bureaucracy. (We’ve seen this strategy before, of course.)

Grabauskas isn’t lying when he says the T is drowning in debt (accounting for an unheard-of 27 cents of every dollar it blows). But when Beacon Hill observers read Grabauskas’s woe-is-us comments in the Globe, they didn’t see the key word mentioned a single time—by the GM, the CFO, or anybody else. It’s as if the T’s brass is praying they can create a panic and sneak one by the whole of Beacon Hill.

“Before you say, ‘We need more revenue,’ you have to look at costs,” says House Minority Leader Brad Jones.

Those costs are frightening. Consider this passage from last year’s scathing Transportation Finance Commission Report:

The MBTA has long been known as having among the nation’s highest operating costs, and cost control was a key element of Forward Funding. The MBTA has not come close to meeting the objectives … that growth in operating costs would be only 2.5 percent per year for the period between FY 2000 and FY 2007. In actuality, the rate of growth over that period has been 5.0 percent per year. By FY 2007, the difference between planned and actual operating expenses was $143 million per year.

In other words, if the T had controlled its costs like it was supposed to this decade, its $75 million deficit would be a healthy surplus. Instead, it has continued to offer one of the nation’s most generous benefits packages – early retirement with a full pension and free health care.

Grabauskas “Hasn’t talked about” benefits, says Mike Widmer, president of the Mass Taxpayers Foundation and a member of the TFC. “Health care costs need to be addressed aggressively.” According to the commission’s report, health care eats up 44 percent of all fare revenue; by 2026, that figure is forecast to be 94 percent, assuming fares grow with inflation.

As the T’s management ratchets up its campaign to alter, or even end, Forward Funding, the discussion should digress into a nasty fight over the T’s benefits. Management certainly isn’t blind to the costs of their benefits; their silence on the issue suggests either intransigence on the issue, or cowardice, hoping that the legislature will do their union-busting dirty work for them.

And while there are those in the legislature who want nothing more than to put the T on a severe austerity diet (Republican leadership has bills pending that would fold the agency into the state’s insurance and pension systems, moves that could cover the bulk of next year’s deficit), they can’t, because they’re awaiting Patrick’s much-talked about MassTrans proposal. And even if MassTrans does get filed soon, it likely wouldn’t see action until late 2008, at the earliest.

And in the meantime, the wheels continue to fall off the bus.

“If anything, the Transportation Finance Commission understated the problems,” Widmer says. “The situation is compounding by the month, by the week. They’re coming unglued even faster than we thought would happen.”

Meanwhile, as the legislature waits on the governor’s transportation reform package, discontent seems to be bubbling up from the right side of the aisle. Jones, the House Minority Leader, is frustrated that his T reform bills haven’t gone anywhere – and that nothing else has, either.

“I recognize that [Patrick] has to come in, put his oar in the water and row, but we filed these bills to get the ball started, and it would’ve been a good first step. The legislature’s reluctant to act. We haven’t been doing much. We meet one day a week. It’s frustrating. You’ve got school vacation coming up, and after that, it’s March and it’s the budget, and the next thing you know, we’re in July. This is shaping up to be a pretty sparse year.

“And for all the promises of one-party government, the record doesn’t match that rhetoric. When there’s two parties, both sides have to justify their successes; they need to get things done. We’re going to get to the point in the calendar where we have to say, what can we get done?”

Asked whether the governor’s biotech initiative will emerge next week, as scheduled, Jones responded, “We’re not very good at hitting deadlines.”

What are they good at? Running for office, for one. Which is convenient, because with two Senate seats opening up in a single night last week, the special election train hasn’t slowed down one bit. An early, obvious choice to succeed outgoing Senator Pam Resor is Jamie Eldridge – provided he can put some cash into that meager-looking bank account of his.