The temperature on Mount Washington at 9:30 a.m.: 19.4 degrees. Wind chill: minus-5.4 degrees. Cog Railway in foreground; Northern Presidentials in background. Visit the Mount Washington Observatory, from whose webcam I downloaded this image.
Tom Menino, Boston’s first mensch
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXdKtvXwYeg&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]
After a week of politicians behaving badly, leave it Boston Mayor Tom Menino to remind us of the good side of politics. (Via Universal Hub.)
Candidate pays for radio interview
Too much politics this morning. One final item before I turn to the day job. Yesterday afternoon I received a call from Watertown Tab & Press reporter Jeremy Fox. He asked: What did I think of a candidate for Governor’s Council paying in order to appear on a radio talk show?
What Fox described was so odd that we had to spend some time talking it through. Here is Fox’s story. It seems that an independent candidate named Nick Iannuzzi is paying $490 to be interviewed this Saturday from 8 to 8:25 a.m. on WCAP Radio (AM 980) in Lowell.
The arrangement will be fully disclosed while Iannuzzi is on the air, so I can’t say that anyone’s doing anything unethical. But what I find bizarre about this is that, except for the disclosure, Iannuzzi will appear to be just another guest on Warren Shaw’s talk show.
Station owner Clark Smidt (remember him?) says it’s no big deal. But Shaw admits that in his 15 years of hosting the show, this is the first time the station has asked him to interview a paid guest. Shaw adds: “If someone schedules an interview for me on Saturday morning, I do it.”
You might say that such an arrangement would preclude tough questions, but Shaw makes it clear to Fox that he tosses nothing but softballs anyway. Weird.
More from Richard Howe.
Tierney versus Hudak on Fox 25
U.S. Rep. John Tierney, D-Salem, faced off against his Republican challenger, William Hudak of Boxford, in a nine-minute debate last night on WFXT-TV (Channel 25).
As you will see, Tierney was sharp and focused, but so rude that he may have done himself more harm than good. I know he’s had a bad week, but I’ve seen Tierney behave this way in the past.
If Tierney had kept quiet for a minute or two, viewers might have noticed that Hudak was shooting blanks.
Tim Cahill’s wacky yet serious lawsuit
Tim Cahill’s lawsuit against his former political consultants is the craziest Massachusetts political story since — oh, since U.S. Rep. John Tierney’s wife pled guilty to federal tax-fraud charges involving her rambling, gambling brother who’s holed up in Antigua. Since Suzanne Bump thought she had two principal residences. Since —
Well, you get the idea. It’s been a nutty week. And the temptation is to make fun of Cahill, the state treasurer who’s mounting a hopeless independent campaign for governor. It’s as though he’s trying to outlaw politics as usual.
But let’s let this play out a bit, shall we? There are two competing explanations for what’s behind the suit, and I’m not sure we can say which is more credible at this point. Cahill is claiming dirty tricks on Republican candidate Charlie Baker’s behalf by people who were on his payroll. Cahill wants to stop the turncoats from giving confidential campaign documents to Baker, which is reasonable, even if it adds to his reputation as a figure of fun.
The Republicans, meanwhile, argue that Cahill is trying to stop the disclosure of possible wrongdoing such as the use of state employees on his campaign.
Well, now. Couldn’t both be true? If the ex-Cahill folks have proprietary knowledge of such wrongdoing, they have no business bringing it to Baker. If they think it was actually illegal, then they should take their information to prosecutors. Otherwise, they cashed their checks and they should shut up.
At times like these, I turn to one of my favorite political pundits, the Outraged Liberal, who observes: “The only winner in this bizarre but entertaining tale of political intrigue is Deval Patrick, which is obvious in the silence out of his campaign.”
Indeed, Patrick has proved to be incredibly resilient during this campaign. An unpopular incumbent in a bad year for Democrats, Patrick has run slightly ahead of Baker, long seen as the Republicans’ best hope, all year.
I still think it’s going to be difficult for Patrick actually to win re-election. But he has been surprisingly lucky in his opposition.
Remember, when dog bites man it’s not news
Lede of the day, if not the week:
A man who approached a police cruiser claiming, “I need a bag of dust,” struck an officer and bit a police canine early this morning, police said.
For Democrats, a couple of taxing situations
When the word came down Tuesday night that Patrice Tierney, wife of U.S. Rep. John Tierney, would plead guilty to federal tax-fraud charges, many of us political junkies were dumbstruck. With exotic elements like $7 million in illicit foreign gambling profits and a ne’er-do-well brother holed up in Antigua, it was not your typical political scandal.
Today’s news that Suzanne Bump, the Democratic candidate for state auditor, has tax problems of her own may prove to be more important come Election Day. More about that in a moment. First, back to the Tierneys.
Republicans and the media are both calling on Tierney, a Salem Democrat, to reveal what he knew and when he knew it with regard to his wife’s tax woes. They’re absolutely right. As soon as possible, Tierney should sit down for a wide-ranging news conference and answer any and all questions. And woe be to him if any of those answers turn out to fall short of full disclosure.
But the media have an independent role here, too, and I hope they are working on it even as I write this. For me, the big question is whether the Tierney scandal resulted in any taxes being unpaid. It would appear that it did not.
Based on the stories I’ve seen, it seems that Patrice Tierney’s crime consisted of accurately reporting her brother’s income, but labeling it as legal commissions rather than as ill-gotten gains. Congressman Tierney said in a statement that “there are not any allegations of any income-tax loss to the government.” Nor are federal prosecutors seeking any sort of restitution. Along with the question of the congressman’s involvement, that is the big issue the media should be investigating.
Will this endanger Tierney’s re-election prospects? Put it this way: North Shore Republicans are eating their collective heart out that their candidate isn’t Essex County Sheriff Frank Cousins or former congressman Peter Torkildsen, whom Tierney defeated in 1996.
Instead, Tierney is facing William Hudak, an extremist who has compared President Obama to Osama bin Laden and who has flirted with the birther movement, which believes Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is thus ineligible to serve as president. For good measure, Hudak’s campaign wrongly claimed last winter that U.S. Sen. Scott Brown had endorsed him.
Unless there are more Tierney-related bombshells, it is still difficult to imagine a Hudak victory.
The Bump matter, though it does not involve anything as spectacular as federal charges and foreign intrigue, is likely to have a more deleterious effect on her campaign for state auditor. A veteran political figure who most recently served in Gov. Deval Patrick’s cabinet, she was caught claiming both Great Barrington and Boston as her principal residence, saving more than $6,000 in Boston property taxes.
The story, which appears on the front page of today’s Globe, was reported by my Northeastern colleague Walter Robinson’s students. Bump insists she did nothing wrong, but the state Department of Revenue says otherwise.
The difference between Bump and Tierney is that Bump’s actions, whether legal or not, definitely cost taxpayers. They raise serious questions about her ability to act as a watchdog over how state agencies spend our money.
What’s more, the Republican candidate, Mary Z. Connaughton, is credible and visible. As a former member of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, she was an outspoken advocate for cracking down on runaway spending at the Big Dig. Moreover, if it looks like Democrats are going to do well on Nov. 2 (no sure thing), a lot of voters — even Democrats — may want to elect a Republican to keep an eye on the books.
The paradox of the Tierney and Bump stories is that the more serious matter is less likely to have an effect on the election. More broadly, though, both stories put Democrats on the defensive at a time when they can least afford it.
The Herald is still waiting for digital deliverance
Having devoted a considerable number of pixels recently to writing about digital versions of the Boston Globe (here and here), I figured it was time to check in on the city’s second daily, the Boston Herald.
The good news, which you probably already know, is that the Herald has a vibrant, fast-loading free website that’s clearly differentiated from the print edition. But is there some way of paying for electronic delivery of the full Herald, as there is with the Globe through GlobeReader?
The short answer is yes, but no. The Herald does have an “Electronic Edition” (also known as the “Smart Edition”) that costs $11 every four weeks for seven-day access — $10 if you renew automatically. That’s not a bad deal, as it would cost a bit more than $17 every four weeks for print delivery, not counting tip. But though it would be overly harsh to call the Electronic Edition unusable, it’s certainly not good enough to entice me away from the Herald’s website.
Simply put, the e-edition is a full PDF of the paper with a few add-ons. You can make a page larger and try to read it that way. You can click on a story, and the software will attempt to render a text version — not bad when it works, but it doesn’t always capture the full story. If you diligently page through the entire digital paper, you’re likely to run across a few items that you’d miss if you just scanned the website. But it’s not a satisfying experience.
You can also click to have a story read to you out loud. It’s good for a laugh, but that’s all.
The Electronic Edition offers several other options as well. You can read the paper on your mobile device or an e-reader, save it for offline reading using a program called PressReader, or add an RSS feed to your aggregator. But without going into excruciating detail, let me just say that I’ve given all of those options a try (I’m still attempting to get the paper to download to the BlackBerry version of PressReader) and found that they still fell short of simply reading the Herald on the Web — or in print.
The problem is that reading online is simply a different experience from reading in print. The Herald website respects that difference; the Electronic Edition is the complete opposite, as it represents a kludgy attempt to shoehorn the print edition onto your computer screen. (I do not know whether the e-edition is different from the Herald’s NewsStand edition, another PDF delivery service. It does look like NewsStand costs a bit more.)
When the Globe announced last week that it would move some of its online content behind a pay wall next year, Herald publisher Pat Purcell acknowledged that he’s considering his options as well. I hope one of those options will be to drop the electronic edition and embrace a first-rate digital-delivery system similar to GlobeReader.
Sex, rock-and-roll and the fall of Tribune Co.
We all knew it was bad. Today, New York Times media reporter David Carr tells us how bad in an exhaustive piece on Tribune Co. under real-estate mogul Sam Zell and his nutty co-conspirators, Randy Michaels and Lee Abrams.
There’s plenty of sex and rock-and-roll, though no drugs. The only false note is Carr’s description of the new barbarians desecrating the “shrine” that was the office of longtime Tribune owner Robert McCormick.
Then again, though the Colonel was a piece of work on the order of the foul-mouthed Zell himself, he never would have dreamed off stripping his newspaper and ushering it into bankruptcy.
Tierney troubles may give jolt to Hudak
Incredible political news from the North Shore tonight. Patrice Tierney, the wife of U.S. Rep. John Tierney, D-Salem, will plead guilty to federal tax charges in U.S. District Court tomorrow. According to the Boston Globe, the charges involve her management of $7 million in illicit gambling profits earned by her brother, Robert Eremian.
Could this give a life to the longshot campaign of extremist Republican candidate William Hudak, a Boxford lawyer who has flirted with the birther movement?