Romney, Aspiring National GOP Figure

Mitt, in an attempt to complete his remodeling as a DeLay-Brownback type GOP wingnut, killed two birds with one stone yesterday by creating an office for faith-based initiatives and installing his wife as the head, the Boston Globe reports. The dissolution of separation of church and state and corrupt nepotism, all in one! Romney really is ready for the big time. Now all he has to do to be qualified for the GOP nomination is to use weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invasion. I hear Rhode Island is nervously eyeing its border...

Our Anti-Freedom Congressmen

As .08 Acres (and a Donkey) notes, the Boston Herald reports on the four Massachusetts congressmen who voted for the anti-flag-burning Constitutional amendment. Congressmen Lynch, Delahunt, Neal and McGovern should be ashamed.

One of the things that makes me proud of this country, is that even in this mad age of radical right-wing partisanship, the Constitution has remained unedited. Sure, the courts are being packed with judges whose interpretation of the Constitution's words is nigh unrecognizable, and the fundamental precepts of the Constitution are violated daily by the presidential administration, but at least the document itself hasn't been graffitied.

But the floodgates are opening with this, an attempt to for the first time amend the Constitution to take away freedoms.

Ward 5 Dem Committee Endorses Arroyo

Following an interestingly fast-paced candidates forum in the tightly packed, narrow second floor room in Copley Square inhabited by the Community Church of Boston, the Ward 5 Democratic Committee (representing the Back Bay plus bits of the South End, Fenway, and Beacon Hill) voted overwhelmingly to endorse Felix Arroyo for City Council at-large (picking up votes from those who vote for incumbents and those who vote for liberals), and then voted to endorse Susan Passoni in her race against 2nd District Councillor Jim Kelly. Trailing Felix with majority support but less than the 2/3 necessary for endorsement were newcomer Sam Yoon and Council president Michael Flaherty, who differ on pretty much every issue, as far as I can tell.

I discussed the DFA Boston questionnaire, to which responses are coming in, with some of the candidates. They had that look like they were taking a tough final. but I'm really glad and grateful they're taking it on.

GOP Corruption Beyond Astonishment

Senate hearings are detailing the unbelievable corruption of DeLay backers Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, who bilked Indian tribes and others out of tens of millions of dollars for kickbacks and personal use, set up a phony corporation headed by a yoga instructor and a lifeguard, and more in a mindblowing string of venality.

Talking Points Memo is covering the unfolding scandal of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-San Diego) and his kickback deals with defense contractor Mitchell Wade, who just resigned as CEO and president of the shady company MZM, who gave large sums to Cunningham, Virgil Goode of Virginia and Katherine Harris of Florida.

Meanwhile, practically every GOP official in Ohio is being exposed as foolishly, selfishly corrupt, tied to a crooked rare-coin dealer named Tom Noe who funneled millions of dollars around playing with an Ohio pension fund: Gov. Bob Taft, Auditor Betty Montgomery and Attorney General Jim Petro, Bureau of Workers Compensation head James Conrad, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, five Ohio Supreme Court justices... (not to mention others who have received Noe contributions from Schwarzenegger to Bush). The Toledo Blade has been leading on this story--read their Coingate series.

My City Councillor, the Bigot

As reported in the Globe, a group gathered at Farragut House on P Street to celebrate the tenth anniversary of US Supreme Court's decision to allow the South Boston St. Patrick's Day Parade organizers to block an Irish-American gay and lesbian group from marching.

The celebration was led by Joseph R. Nolan, the retired Supreme Judicial Court justice who cast the lone dissenting vote when the Massachusetts court ruled against the parade organizers; John ''Wacko" Hurley, the parade's organizer, who had 9-0, signifying the US Supreme Court's unanimous ruling, imprinted on his business cards; Councilor James M. Kelly of South Boston; Chester Darling, the lawyer who fought the case; and Eleanor Hulak, the grand marshal of the 1993 parade, the second year the gay group was banned. As Donovan Slack writes:

Several members of the group said that if another gay rights group wanted to march in next year's parade, they would still fight all the way to the Supreme Court to keep it out. ''The principles that held true then still hold true today," Kelly said. ''I have such tremendous admiration for the people sitting at this table."

It's one thing to have the constitutional right to be a bigot--it's another thing to admire them. I for one am glad Councillor Kelly has a challenger this fall.

Beantown is Deantown!

People-powered Howard came to Boston for a rally-cum-fundraiser to keep the energy going on the DNC's new drive to support the local Democratic parties in all fifty states, and he followed Blog for Boston's lead in calling out Romney's tacking in the wind to glean conservative votes. Okay, Blog for Boston had nothing to do with it, but here's what Dean said, as quoted by the AP:

Dean, former governor of neighboring Vermont and a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, said Romney has "changed his position two or three times on fundamental issues, like a woman's right to make up her own mind on her health care; fundamental issues like whether we respect all citizens or only some of them.
"That is not courage," Dean said to a group of about 300 supporters gathered in the Park Plaza Hotel for a fundraiser. "It's important to win elections, incredibly important. It's more important to do the right thing."
Dean's comments echoed criticisms from Romney's political foes that he is trying to tailor a more conservative message on social issues as he weighs a possible run for the Republican presidential nomination for 2008.
Republican governors "all toe the party line whether it's good for the state or not," Dean said.
"The most important thing in this country is not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party," Dean said. "It's the people of this country. That's what the Republicans have forgotten."

In a brilliant comeback, Mass GOP top dog Tim O'Brien said, "The citizens of Massachusetts don't need Howard Dean's evil rhetoric to know the governor has been a good governor who shares their priorities."

I guess Dean has replaced Iraq in the GOP Axis of Evil. What next, Tim, claims that he's hiding WMDs in his trousers?

Mr. Pothole Really Is

Menino has gained a reputation as a mayor who gets the things like filling potholes done, but a deeply researched piece from the Boston Globe by Donovan Slack, Gone to Pot in Boston, argues that Menino has done the exact opposite. Menino's policies lead to potholes which never should have come into being.

[Pavement specialists] say the city ignores nationally recognized paving standards and that Boston's proliferation of potholes could be reduced with a few simple steps.
The city allows utility companies and others who cut into roads some 10,000 times a year to make flimsy temporary patches. Instead of making solid repairs immediately, the city often waits years while heavy city traffic and brutal winters wrench the patches apart, creating moonscapes of craters on some streets.

This is city policy for one simple reason: greed. Utilities pay into a fund run by Public Works Commissioner Joseph Casazza to make permanent road repairs. Casazza gets around to the repairs when he pleases.

Councilor at Large Maura A. Hennigan, who is running for mayor and has spent the last two years harping on Mayor Thomas M. Menino's pothole policies, said the city is addicted to the money it collects from utility companies and others. The city is reluctant to give up the millions it brings in each year in order to force the companies to make better repairs, she said.
''They collect this money and then they hoard it," she said. ''It's an ongoing revenue stream for them. How can they go out and yell at them, because they'll just say, 'Well, what are we paying the city for?' "

An accompanying graphic details that one newly repaved 9-block stretch of Boylston St. already has 37 new roadcuts permitted. Despite a 5-year moratorium on non-emergency cuts after the repaving, permits for 24 such cuts were issued.

It's Getting Hot

The Washington Post reports that Bush officials worked behind the scenes to gut the G8 global-warming plan, just as the New York Times reported last week that White House Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Phillip Cooney had gutted US global warming policy. Cooney, by the way, left the White House last Friday to take a PR job with ExxonMobil.

U.S. officials pressed negotiators to drop sections of the report that highlight some problems tied to global warming, warn of more frequent droughts and floods, and commit a specific dollar amount to promoting carbon sequestration in developing countries.

One deleted section, for example, initially cited "increasingly compelling evidence of climate change, including rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures, retreating ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and changes to ecosystems." It added: "Inertia in the climate system means that further warming is inevitable. Unless urgent action is taken, there will be a growing risk of adverse effects on economic development, human health and the natural environment, and of irreversible long-term changes to our climate and oceans."

Instead, U.S. negotiators substituted a sentence that reads, "Climate change is a serious long term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the globe."

What can you do? One action is to take part in the Union of Concerned Scientists action to get Congress to support emissions caps in the forthcoming energy bill.

The Plight of the Parks

The Globe covers the plight of Boston's parks as the community tries to fill in for declining city support. Since 2002, the parks maintenance staff has declined from 173 to 152. A parks budget that had increased by a third between 1999 and 2003, was slashed 9 percent the following year.

When Menino announced this year he would give away $250,000 in money left over from the Democratic National Convention for small grants to parks groups this year, 169 applications requesting $475,000 arrived in a matter of weeks.
''That just reflects the fact that there is such an unmet need for capital repairs," said Betsy Johnson, a board member of the Boston GreenSpace Alliance.
Johnson said that even if public funds are short, Menino should use the power of the bully pulpit to solicit large contributions from big donors.
''When he wanted to make sure he defeated the elected school committee, he had no trouble raising over $100,000. When he wanted to have the DNC here, he had no trouble raising from the private sector the $1 million he's now giving away."
Johnson, Boyden, and other park advocates praised the parks department, and its commissioner, Antonia Pollak, for regularly meeting with park groups, helping them apply for grants and responding to their concerns as quickly as they could.

A telling quote comes from Christine Poff, the director of the Franklin Park Coalition:

''It can't all be done by volunteers," she said. ''We don't have a water truck, and we can't drive one. We can't use heavy power equipment. Last year our teenagers moved piles of woodchips that had been sitting there for years -- it took them three six-hour days, with 10 to 12 kids. With equipment, you could come in and do it in an hour, and that's a huge difference. We've experienced the limits of manual labor."

(Betsy Johnson, by the way, is my mom, not the designer.)

Mitt Romney, Panderbunny

Romney '08 is gearing up, as he remakes himself from a sexy liberal Republican to a sexy hard-core evangelical conservative. He's obviously given up on running for governor in '06. It's our job now to make sure to kill his political career now. He's going to spend the rest of his time in office denigrating and besmirching the reputation of Massachusetts for political points.

The Globe reports on the two latest developments. First, his campaign committee is sending out an intro-to-Mitt letter to GOP honchos showing off his newly packaged right-wing zealotry:

The letter offers carefully worded descriptions of some of Romney's positions to play up his conservatism. For example, it highlights his opposition to the ''human cloning" provision of the stem cell bill the Legislature recently approved, without noting that Romney himself supports research on surplus embryos from fertility clinics, which antiabortion groups oppose.
''Over the objections of Harvard University, Senator Ted Kennedy, and the Democrats in the Massachusetts Legislature, Governor Romney announced that he would veto any stem cell research legislation that authorizes human cloning," the letter states. The Legislature overturned Romney's veto, approving a law that bans reproductive cloning, or the creation of babies, but allows scientists to produce embryos for research.
The letter says Romney is pushing the Legislature to adopt tougher welfare rules, without saying that Massachusetts probably will be forced to make some changes once its federal waiver expires in October. It also cites Romney's support for an income tax cut, charter schools, the death penalty, and sex education that emphasizes abstinence.

Second, Romney dropped his support for the Travaligni compromise against same-sex marriage but for civil unions, jumping on the right-wing Massachusetts Family Institute all civil-rights-for-gays-is-wrong bandwagon:

Governor Mitt Romney yesterday endorsed a grass-roots effort to pass a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2008, abandoning his support for what he called a ''muddied" compromise measure that would also ban gay marriages but allow gays to enter into civil unions.

Romney, who is courting conservative voters for a possible presidential run in 2008, said the newly proposed ban would give voters a chance to consider a ''clean, straightforward, unambiguous amendment" that does not include civil unions.
''I'm concerned that the amendment currently under consideration by the Legislature is somewhat confused or muddied by the combination of two things: One is the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, which I support, and the other is the requirement that there be civil unions in the Commonwealth, which is a provision I do not support," Romney told reporters after a group of same-sex marriage opponents unveiled the new proposed amendment in a separate press conference.

Masked Crusaders for Maura

The Maura Hennigan campaign is playfully engaging the reality that there are a lot of people who would support her if not for the guarantee of retribution from Mayor Menino by holding a "Masked Crusaders" fundraiser this Friday. They'll be supplying masks to attendees so that identities don't have to be revealed. Door prizes include tickets to Batman Begins.

It's at 7 PM at the Midway Cafe in JP--more info here.

I love it.

Howard Dean Speaks For Me

To: Democrats in U.S. Congress
Recently some Democrats in Congress have chastised Governor Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, saying that he does not speak for the party.

We the undersigned have a simple message we would like to convey to you:

Howard Dean Speaks For Me

And, we respectfully request that you refrain from public criticism of your fellow Democrats and that you begin to speak for us as well

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Hit the bat to raise $125,000 in support of Howard by tomorrow!

Also: After Gov. Dean attends DemocracyFest in Austin this weekend, he'll be attending a fundraiser and leading a rally to Paint the Nation Blue in Boston on Monday, June 20!

Dean's Right

From William Rivers Pitt at Truthout on being a fearless Democrat:

And then along comes Howard Dean, chairman of the DNC, outspoken and uncompromising, swinging Willie Stark’s meat ax with a will and a purpose. He dared to say that he hates Republicans, that the leadership of that party hasn’t worked a day in their lives, that the GOP has become a radical hothouse of right-wing Christians, almost all of whom are white, and that House majority leader Tom DeLay should go back to Texas and get his looming prison sentence over with. Insert palpitations. Suddenly, Democrats like Joe Biden and Bill Richardson start knocking over furniture and old ladies in their rush to get to a microphone so they can distance themselves from the wild man.

Yes, yes, lather and rinse and repeat. The problem with all the equivocation is that it obscures a simple fact that requires exposure and discussion in this country: Dean was right. Ninety nine percent of Republicans in the state legislatures in all 50 states, and in Congress in Washington DC, are white. Even in states and districts with large minority populations, the Republican representatives for those places are almost uniformly white Christians.

Of 3,643 Republicans serving in state legislatures across the country, only 44 of them are minorities, amounting to 1.2%. Texas, with a minority population of 47%, has 106 Republicans in the state legislature. There are exactly zero African Americans and exactly zero Hispanics serving in that body as Republicans. In Washington, 274 of the 535 elected Senators and Representatives are Republican. Exactly five are minorities.

Read on for the full piece, which expresses my sentiments exactly.

Dorchester Day Signs

This Sunday I was down at the beginning of the Dorchester Day Parade, with floats from all of Boston's communities, from lion dancers to ragtime bands. Along the parade route I noticed tons of Michael Flaherty and Mayor Menino signs, but none from any of the other candidates. That's strange, because on Friday night into Saturday there was a broad array of signs up. Could it be that supporters of Flaherty and Menino went around tearing down signs? Would they do such a thing?

Maybe the signs just walked away on their own.

The Life and Times of the Mass Dems Blog

Blue Mass Group notes that the Mass Dems blog isn't doing so well lately, and postulates it may have something to the discontent about the convention, wondering about the cryptic last post on the blog.

I believe that there is a bit of confusion and disorder about what to do with bloggery and this wild two-way communication phenomenon, but another large element is that Charles Fisher, the tech guru they hired and who set up the blog, has taken a leave of absence from the MDP. Don't worry--he's staying involved in Massachusetts Democratic politics.

More later....

Menino, Mayor of Miami?

I'm starting to detect a trend here in the election-year initiatives Menino is latching onto as he trundles toward yet another term: an obsession with sun, sand, and sea. As the Globe reported today,

In a move his election rival described as a bid for the ''poolside vote," Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced yesterday that the city will dramatically speed up the approval process for residents who want to add swimming pools, patio decks, or garden sheds to their properties this summer.

I see this connected to another one of Menino's one-time-only city improvement iniatives, his hiring of 55 sweepers in April to clear out the sand deposited on the city during the snow season. Where did all that sand go?

Methinks Tom is planning to announce the formation of the Seascape Urban Renewal Force (SURF), to which any homeowner can apply for the rapid installation of pool, wave machine, and beach-like landscaping.

DFA Boston rocks the house

The meetup on Wednesday was great--the trailer for Wal-Mart: The Movie spurred a lot of great discussion and Susan Passoni, District 2 City Council candidate, was well received. Lee Mintz talked about the history of tribulations at Democratic State Conventions past, Cos presented the Civil Liberties resolution effort organized by the ACLU, and Jennifer previewed DemocracyFest in Austin, TX.

Then, tomorrow Jim Dean will be in town for what will certainly be a great party and Saturday will be the statewide organizing conference for DFA-Massachusetts. Whew!

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

Robert Greenwald, the director of the 2004 guerilla documentaries Outfoxed (about FOX News) and Uncovered (about the Iraq war) is setting his sights on what might be the biggest target: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price looks at the company with 1.5 million workers, 3500 stores, and $10 billion in net profits.

Greenwald is profiled in the New York Times in Taking on a Giant (Whistleblowers Welcome). The making and distribution of this film is unusual, if not unique; it's being shown in November in homes, churches, and local businesses across the country on DVD, organized by a coalition of groups including CLUE, AAMIA, Interfaith Worker Justice, Sojourners, MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, Democracy for America, Progressive Democrats of America, Campaign for America's Future, the National Education Association, the Sierra Club, Business Ethics Network, Americans for Health Care, Global Exchange, SEIU, UFCW (with the Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign), ACORN, LAANE, the Petroleum Manufacturers Association of America, and the American Independent Business Association.

Mumbling Along

The Boston Phoenix points us to The Official Mumbles Menino Website, the meanspirited Howie Carr's online paean to Boston's famously mealy-mouthed mayor. The Menino campaign registered a number of variants of "mumblemenino.com" but failed to register http://www.mumblesmenino.us, so Howie stepped in with his collection of Menino mumblings.