Blue Mass Group

To those that can attend ,a small fundraiser will be held on Thursday, October 12th from 7pm-9pm at the East Side Improvement Club, 170 Shrewsbury St, Worcester. Please try to help in any way that you can. We are told the Healey/Hillman plan on spending 1.8 million dollars a week on media alone!! Every little donation will help. Tell a friend and show the ticket that we can be competitive.

Well, mostly more of the same this time, with a lot more Hello Springfield! Grace Ross makes a terrific case for progressive taxation and dealing with global warming. Hey Grace — if you’re not hearing this from anywhere else, let me invite you to be a Democrat. Seriously. We need folks like you. Check back in. Don’t just say that “the Dems are too this/too that”; the Dems are us — ordinary people, whoever we decide to be. John Carroll remarked that Mihos made Ross sound sane and measured (or some such words); John, Ross is sane and measured in everything except her self-marginalizing choice of party. Healey sounds more and more snippy and snide — not gubernatorial. “I can tell you that we can do the tax rollback.” Well! I can tell you that we can’t. Saying so don’t make it so. Healey on one-party rule: “There will never be another public meeting again”. Riiight — there are only meetings now because of the massive pull of Romney and Healey? Hooey. What’s her vision? What kind of place *ought* Massachusetts be after four years of Healey as Governor? Does she know? Does anyone care? She seems to imagine that [...]

I thought Healey had a victory of sorts tonight, because she exceeded the very low expectations that came after last week’s performance. She was less scripted, less robotic, and less defensive. She didn’t seem personable, however. Mihos was notably less energetic, though he did get in some digs at Romney’s penchant for secrecy. Grace Ross was articulate, and covered Deval’s left flank. I thought Deval was very strong on substance, and he scored a home run by noting that it was not effective in bringing in jobs for the Governor to be making Massachusetts the butt of his jokes. Deval’s just a more likeable guy, and he cleverly poked fun at the feud between Mihos and Healey. I doubt this debate influenced swing voters, but it may convince Republican true believers that Healey isn’t imploding. She is still stalked by the specter of Mitt Romney in everything she does.

I got back from the debate and am finally getting the audio encoded. Here’s the full debate audio I will have closing comments from each candidate broken out next.

Thanks to Joe Heisler for having me on his show “Talk of the Neighborhoods”, tonight on Boston Neighborhood Network TV. Great fun. One thought coming out of it: It occurs to me that when we get interviewed, everyone wants to know, “How much influence do you guys actually have?” And our answer is always this: We’re in no position to know. The folks who are watching us — the pro journalists, the campaigns, the readers — are in a much better position to assess that than we are. We just crank this stuff out and hope for the best, honestly. Anyway, I’ll have something to say about the debate soon; thankfully, it didn’t look like the cringe-fest of last week.

In the debate Kerry Healey just announced that her running mate, Reed Hillman, visited all 361 cities and towns in the state. She went on to say how remarkable a feat it was. Remarkable indeed. There are only 351 cities and towns in the state. The Healey/Hillman ticket – bringing Massachusetts into a dimension beyond sight and sound.

With regard to Deval Patrick’s shocking, shocking recent meeting with legislators, Adam Reilly quotes the State House News Service quoting Speaker Sal DiMasi’s spokesman thusly: Asked for comment, DiMasi spokesman Kyle Sullivan said, ‘The lieutenant governor’s recent statements are curious since she has met privately with Speaker DiMasi herself on a number of occasions when it was politically convenient for her to do so. Also, Governor Romney has met with House and Senate leadership on a regular basis without complaint, though Kerry Healey was not usually present for those senior leadership meetings.’ Well OK, so maybe she’s still got some outsiderishness. Gotta give her credit there. If she’d been there at those senior leadership meetings, you know she would have shaken up things, due to her totally independent profile and mad leadership skillz.

Yesterday I wrote up a list of substantive issues that I hoped would get addressed in tonight’s debate. One of them is Gov. Romney’s precipitous pullout of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a consortium of northeastern states that have banded together to combat their own greenhouse gas emissions. This was led by Republican Governor Pataki of New York. Romney himself did a big ol’ flip-flop on the issue, since romancing oil plutocrats trumps global warming, if you’re running for the GOP Prez nomination. But still, I couldn’t recall if Healey had put any daylight between her and Mitt. I shouldn’t have bothered to ask: Of course, Healey folded like an origami master. Like Romney, she was for it until she was against it. It must be midnight in Massachusetts, ’cause there’s no daylight between the two of ‘em.

Ms. Buckingham has this flaming nonsense at the end of her flaming nonsense column today.   No doubt there are plenty of arrows still in each candidate’s quiver and despite the maw-mawing about negative ads, voters will see plenty of critiques from both sides that will inform their decisions. Here’s one I predict will shake up the race: Both Deval Patrick and Christy Mihos will be labeled by Healey as tax scofflaws – Patrick for getting a lien on his house for not paying federal taxes and Mihos for avoiding Massachusetts excise tax on his boat. Do voters want to trust the corner office and decisions about state tax policy to tax scofflaws? FYI Ms Buckingham,  The definition of scofflaw is : One who habitually violates the law or fails to answer court summonses. As for “Patrick for getting a lien on his house”, there is really no way you can twist this into “scofflawness”.  (Damn, I can’t even make up a word.)  Here is what your friends over at the Globe  (March 8, 2005) had to write about it: The Patricks have always met their obligations, public records show, with the exception of a period in 1996, when Patrick [...]

I’ll be on TV tonight on another channel, David and Bob are away, so it’s up to the BMG denizens to tend the hearth. Anyway, I’d rather hear what you have to say about it rather than actually see it myself. Is that so wrong? Spill it out here.