Patrick’s October surprise

If you’re the governor of Massachusetts, and you think it would be a good idea to put the state treasurer on the casino-gambling board that you propose to create, wouldn’t you let him know before you file legislation to that effect?

Not if you’re Deval Patrick, who apparently didn’t tell State Treasurer Tim Cahill about his plans. Despite being a casino supporter, Cahill immediately walked away from the offer. “I don’t think it’s a good business model to have elected officials as part of the oversight process,” he told the Boston Globe’s Andrea Estes.

Patrick also didn’t tell State Auditor Joe DeNucci that he wants him to serve on the board. But apparently that’s OK with DeNooch.

My standard disclosure.

Probing the Abramoff connection

Peter Kenney of Cape Cod Today reports tonight that the U.S. attorney’s office is very, very interested in possible ties between imprisoned former superlobbyist Jack Abramoff and the leadership of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, which seeks to build a casino in Middleborough. Kenney writes:

The letter from the U.S. Attorney’s office is eight pages long and lists specific documents to be delivered as well as specific areas of inquiry. One such area of inquiry, according to a source within the tribe, is correspondence to, from or about Jack Abramoff. Abramoff, who was convicted of defrauding clients of his Washington lobbying firm, is now serving a federal prison sentence. He has been linked to the lobbying efforts mounted by the Mashpee to gain federal recognition. Specifically, while he was employed by the Washington law firm Greenberg Traurig, two of his protégés — Kevin Ring and Michael Smith — worked directly with the tribe in their lobbying efforts before Congress and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Abramoff connection has not struck me as particularly strong, but it’s interesting to see that federal authorities are trying to get to the bottom of it. There’s much that we don’t know.

Abramoff illustration (cc) by swaters. Some rights reserved.

My standard disclosure.

Give it your worst, George

Go ahead, George. Be stupid. Fire Joe Torre — please. The great Yankees manager is now 67 years old, so he probably would like to escape the day-to-day grind. But he’d make a terrific special assistant to Theo Epstein, wouldn’t he?

Torre may have lost a couple of feet off his fastball, but having to rely on Alex Rodriguez in clutch situations can make any manager look bad. The fact is that Torre compiled the best second half of his managing career without a single consistently reliable starting pitcher. Wang for Cy Young? Uh, I don’t think so.

As for Cleveland, I think we all know this isn’t going to be like playing the Angels, who were pretty much a Triple A team by the time the playoffs began, and who continued losing players right through the sweep.

From a Red Sox fan’s point of view, the best thing to like about the Indians is the prospect of Joe Borowski trying to nail down a close game in the ninth. The man’s got 45 saves, but he’s hittable, and he showed it again last night.

Putting Hopkins in her place

As I had hoped, Massachusetts Appeals Court Judge Andrew Grainger used some pretty strong language in explaining why he overturned Superior Court Judge Merita Hopkins’ prior-restraint order against WHDH-TV (Channel 7). The Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam quotes from Grainger’s opinion:

As the judge noted in her order, the injunction is without doubt a prior restraint on speech.

[Channel 7] does not argue that it should be granted official access to the autopsy records; rather, it seeks to broadcast information already in its possession.

Simply put, the inability of the press to require the government to disclose information that is not part of the public record does not support a restraint on speech with respect to information already known to the press.

Indeed and famously, the presumption against prior restraints on free speech has prevailed even when the materials at issue are stolen and deal with issues of national security.

Grainger goes on to observe that, in this particular case, Hopkins’ error was compounded by the fact that her order didn’t even accomplish its objective — as it turned out, Channel 7, which had an exclusive, wound up being the only news organization not to report on the autopsy results.

Grainger’s tough words should stand as a warning to any judge who’s thinking of emulating Hopkins. It’s not enough that she has been overturned. It’s crucial that judges not abuse their power to hold up a story for a day or so and then punt to a higher court. If Hopkins isn’t embarrassed, she ought to be.

In the Boston Globe, columnists Joan Vennochi and Kevin Cullen weigh in. Cullen, joining those of us who believe Hopkins should have recused herself, observes that Hopkins hasn’t always been as solicitous of privacy rights as she was with respect to the fallen firefighters.

And, believe it or not, he brings it all back to Whitey Bulger. Boston is indeed a small town.

Middleborough update

The mess in Middleborough keeps spreading, and, as always, you just can’t make this stuff up. We begin this morning at Cape Cod Today, which flogs a story in the New York Times (CCT links to a Times sister paper, the International Herald Tribune), and observes that the land purchased by the Mashpee Wampanoags on which they plan to build a casino is near a contaminated toxic-waste site. The story is preceded by a CCT “Editor’s Note” that says:

This grim discovery of two Super Fund sites in Middleborough which is the town chosen for the Mashpee Wampanoag casino by their South African investors and former tribal leader Glenn Marshall, immediately raises the specter of past injuries to the tribe by others. Lord Jeffrey Amherst is remembered as the European who wiped out tribes by encouraging his soldiers to distribute blankets contaminated with Smallpox to Native Americans in 1763.

The toxic-waste sites, linked to an improbably high rate of Lou Gehrig’s disease (see this New Bedford Standard-Times story by Phil Devitt), are near Everett Square, a densely settled neighborhood in the downtown. The proposed casino site is out in the sticks, several miles away. Though the New York Times story, by Michele Morgan Bolton, juxtaposes the tale of the Superfund sites with the casino in ways that are at times confusing, she does not allege a direct link between the two. Still, as CCT points out, this is pretty interesting.*

Elsewhere at Cape Cod Today, the indefatigable Peter Kenney tells the exceedingly weird story of Desiré Hendricks Moreno, secretary of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council and sister of Shawn Hendricks, who took over as chairman of the council following the resignation of disgraced tribal leader Glenn Marshall. According to Kenney:

Reliable sources say that Desire Hendricks Moreno provided sanctuary for her cousin, Sharon Fitzpatrick, after Fitzpatrick’s husband was stabbed to death in Boston. Fitzpatrick has been charged with the murder and is free on $250,000 cash bail. According to one source in Mashpee, “Everyone in town knew she was at her cousin’s house over the weekend. And she was bragging about it afterwards.”

Kenney appears to be out there on the edge here, but his previous reporting on this story has not been successfully challenged. As Kenney also notes, the tribal council’s financial affairs are already being investigated by various government agencies, although it appears that Marshall, rather than Hendricks and Moreno, is the target of those investigations.

Meanwhile, the man who has most publicly associated himself with the mess that Middleborough stumbled into, Selectman Adam Bond, is trying to get himself hired as the $130,000-a-year town manager, even though he doesn’t meet even the minimal requirements that have been posted for the position.

The Boston Globe’s Christine Wallgren reports that Bond, who lacks a master’s degree in public administration, one of the prerequisites, thinks his law degree ought to suffice. How badly does Bond want the job? He tells Wallgren: “Why don’t they just offer me less money for the job, and tell me I have to go back to school to get a master’s in public administration?” I guess practicing law isn’t as lucrative as it used to be. Maybe that explains why he’s never bothered to do anything with his Web site.

By the way, one of Bond’s main backers, Tony Lawrence, is associated with Casino-friend.com, whose editor and publisher, Hal Brown, has compared casino opponents to the Ku Klux Klan.

In the Brockton Enterprise, Alice Elwell writes that Middleborough officials were silenced at a recent meeting of representatives from nearby communities. The reason given was the lack of consideration Middleborough reportedly showed those communities in approving a casino deal with the tribe last summer.

And, finally, the Cape Cod Times fronts a long report by Stephanie Vosk and George Brennan on Sol Kerzner and Len Wolman, the South African investors behind the Mashpee Wampanoags.

Vosk and Brennan write: “Most members of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe can only wonder how much of their sovereignty has been signed away to help Kerzner and Wolman continue their dominance of New England’s gambling industry.”

*Update: I have revised this item to reflect changes in Cape Cod Today’s presentation of the New York Times story.

Disclosure #1: Cape Cod Today has begun serializing my book, “Little People,” today. I am not getting paid.

Disclosure #2: Just click here.

Take your Sox off

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We can watch every minute of all 162 regular-season games, not to mention spring training. But once the playoffs hit, we can’t see Game 2 of the Red Sox-Angels series until the extra-inning contest between the Yankees and Cleveland is over. Did no one at TBS anticipate this might happen? Unbelievable.

Put your Sox back on. Whoops. No sooner did I post this than I realized the Sox are on TNT. So never mind.

The corporate Internet

I have an essay up on ThePhoenix.com on how the democratic, grassroots, participatory media that the Internet has enabled is threatened by efforts by giant telecommunications companies to control the next-generation Net for their own, profit-driven purposes. An excerpt:

The Internet is the single greatest threat to corporate dominance of the media since the industrial model was established a century and a half ago. It would be naïve to think that these corporations wouldn’t fight back. In so doing, they are embracing (as Neil Postman predicted they would) not the strategy of Orwell’s 1984, but of Huxley’s Brave New World. By ensuring that all the latest, richest, coolest content is on the new, high-speed, corporate-controlled Net, they’ll deprive the independent sites of the oxygen they need to survive. And we’ll be so overloaded with entertainment that we won’t care.

Severin versus Rooney

This is pretty amusing. Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey reports that WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Jay Severin is pouting because he didn’t get an invitation to the recent “Greater Boston” 10th-anniversary party at the new WGBH-TV (Channel 2) headquarters.

The upshot: “Greater Boston” host Emily Rooney has been disinvited from her regular Friday chit-chats with Severin. Hey, ‘TKK listeners’ loss is Rooney’s gain. The foul-mouthed Severin is the most self-referential of talk-show hosts, so I’m guessing he’ll spend most of the afternoon whining about this. We’ll see.

Disclosure: I’m a regular paid panelist on the “Greater Boston” Friday “Beat the Press” edition.