Federal prosecutors are asking a US grand jury to weigh charges, including fraud, extortion, and conspiracy, in the widening patronage scandal that has staggered the state Probation Department.
US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz has ordered probation officials to preserve all documents that could be used as evidence in the criminal probe, including e-mails, laptop files, BlackBerry text messages, and all of the agency’s paper records.
I would guess the feeling of “cover” may have just evaporated since we may get an “objective” investigation of the entire Probation Department situation by the Feds. I would imagine there will be many State House politicians and Departmental Managers/Supervisors subpoenaed with threats of perjury so the truth should come out.
Let’s hope the investigation will result in the following…
– The public starting to “believe in” the integrity of the government… starting.
– Our leaders stop the “business as usual” attitude about these state jobs.
– A return of fairness and openness when it comes to hiring state workers.
– Public officials and employees stop “looking the other way” when they witness improper activities. They need protection for their “whistle blowing”.
– Better performance by State Government since workers will be hired for “what” they know and not “who” they know.
Naive, maybe. But it wouldn’t be the first time I wished for something to happen… and it does!
Is that this finally goes under the Executive Branch, like Patrick had wanted prior to the lid blowing off. This is not time for Tarr and the rest of him minions to start their political baloney, if he hasn’t noticed, he’s part of the problem. There was a reason Patrick won, he’s the only one people trust.
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p>Can you say Marian Walsh? Ameriquest?
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p>Gov Patrick won for sure, fair and square, but I think there are many reasons and people “trusting” him was not the big one anymore than people “trusted” the incoming Republican House Majority.
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p>Bring back Civil Service exams for starters.
Killer Coke.
Such as?
“Independent” Treasurer Tim Cahill.
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p>It will be interesting to see where Tim 4 Treasurer ends up.
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p>My guess is one of Rubin’s pals has a nice lucrative private sector gig set up for him.
Suffolk had Cahill voters as a non-factor, no impact in the final result. This is getting sad.
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p>At the end of the day voters made a value judgement and picked Deval Patrick. You need to understand that simple fact and learn from it. It’s highly likely that Keating got votes to put him over the top from Patrick’s coattails, something you didn’t think would happen at the beginning of the year.
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p>Now that I think about it, you’re right it was Cahill. Keep on doing what you are doing.
We don’t like Democrats. We certainly don’t “trust” them. (Using this word in the wake of the thieving legislators proclaiming the un-importance of the probation scandal requires some thickly tinted glasses indeed.) We think that your elected politicians are corrupt liars, constrained only by whatever flimsy checks are placed upon them.
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p>They are, however, preferable to the other side, who are worse.
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p>So, on a scale of 1-10, your score is not negative. Congratulations on your stirring victory.
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p>FWIW, the campaign spent a HUGE amount of time on Cahill, notwithstanding his nonexistent chances from Day 1. Much of that time came at Baker’s dear cost, sometimes because of Baker’s unforced errors.
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p>So, maybe we could say that the voters love and trust your guy, but only if the other guy’s campaign is mostly notable for scoring own goals, AND has a spoiler in there to help your guy out. Nice mandate you have there; hope it lasts to MLK day.
Even after your public apology to David Paleologos, you still don’t believe what his polls consistently said. Do you have to send him another open letter now?
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p>Deval would have won regardless of Tim Cahill. Sure, Cahill goaded Team Baker into some strategic blunders. But do you really think that the awesome brain trust of O’Brien, Gorka & Gray couldn’t have found a few other ways to completely screw things up? Further, Baker never learned how to campaign, which had nothing to do with Cahill. And it’s hard to win an election if you can’t campaign.
Because EaBo’s mind doesn’t want to hear it, even though he’s already publicly admitted, as you note, that this dog don’t hunt.
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p>Oh, the hands, Charlie Baker and his hands. I impress myself with my wittiness.
Would have allowed Baker to focus on Patrick. 50%+1 would have voted against Deval with or without Cahill in the race. Indeed that is what happened on election day.
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p>I will go to my grave believing that Cahill was promised something by Doug Rubin to get into this race, as Rubin knew that Patrick couldn’t have won without a third party candidate.
There is no evidence of this.
It could have broken the other way. Baker just never caught fire.
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p>My theory is on record, but I’ll repeat it. The contested Congressional races helped the statewide races, and the contested governor’s, treasurer’s, and auditor’s races helped the Congressional races. A number of boats riding over the same wave.
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p>
but it was because people “trusted” the Governor.
Per the GOP, when Democrats win — no matter how decisively, it’s because they cheated or fooled the voters. When Republicans win, no matter how narrow the victory (e.g., Bush in 2000), it’s a thumping mandate.
Do you agree that the Republican win in November was a mandate?
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
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p>Someone needs to remind Mitch McConnell that his party did not win a majority in his chamber, though I suppose one could hardly fault his confusion since they were allowed to dictate terms in the current Congress with even fewer members than they will have in the next one.
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p>Yes, it does cause me to question some people’s political intelligence when they vote back in the party whose poilicies largely contributed to the economic situation they are rightfully upset about.
and got the Senate and the Oval Office in 2008. What did you do… Obamacare… huge deficits and a much larger National Debt… largely a poor performance and the people showed their disfavor in November.
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p>The Democrats had two years to do something about the Bush tax cuts but they didn’t. When challenged with doing something this summer before the recess, they choose to “run out of Dodge” before the November elections. I posted here how irresponsible it was to not have a vote before the elections. Now it’s December 2nd and time is running out.
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p>I think you and many other Democrats are making a mistake by thinking the Democrats can have a mock vote on the Obama Tax Increases today. The American people do not want them. Obama has already indicated he’s going to sign whatever comes across his desk.
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p>You took too long…
You cite the people again without backup. I’ve seen polls showing overwhelming support for the plan to let them expire on the rich, but not for the middle class. Democrats COULD have done better, but they wanted bipartisanship and were stymied in the Senate. Obamacare generally polled decently, but even better with the public option. Democrats did horribly tacticly the last two years, but that’s still no excuse to hand our country back to those who have admitted they want the same policies that caused the problem.
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p>The incoming house majority leader was voted on by a majority of (approximately) 1/500th of the people voting (0.2 percent, in case you were wondering) none of whom were certain, at all, that he would be the majority leader. Deval Patrick was running for a certainty and 100 percent of the people voting were certain that it would be either him, or the other guy…
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p>So, to recap, 99.8 percent of those voting in house races voted for someone other than John Boehner and it can not be ascertained if they even considered Boehner in their calculus… whereas 0 percent of voting Massachusetts had no opinion on Deval…
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p>.. So, um, what’s your point?
Excellent political BS right there, well done
He took probation money too. He just didn’t take enough to be mentioned in the report or in the Spotlight article. But, according to the standard the Spotlight article used, he should have been named:
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p>http://www.commonwealthmagazin…