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  • July 30, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    I've long said that there's no way in this world that the Republican Party will nominate Rudy Giuliani -- one by one, every Republican will have that moment of epiphany when they stop associating Giuliani with "9-11 New York," which they love, and start associating him with "Moral Sewer New York," which they loathe.

    According to the Post's Page 6 gossip column, we can get ready for a few more of those epiphanies.

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  • July 27, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein

    Our fearless former leader, Mitt Romney, tells the great John DiStaso that he might skip the GOP's CNN/YouTube debate in September, because he's "no fan of the format."

    Why would Romney duck a nationally televised debate, in which his staff can review all the potential questions beforehand? Any guesses?

  • July 26, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    That's pretty much what the four wrongfully convicted "gangland murder" men and their families got in Judge Nancy Gertner's award against the federal government for, to put it as politely as I can, dicking them over. According to the Globe, which broke the story online this morning, Gertner told the government to pay $101.4 million to compensate for the combined 108 years or so the four sent in jail.

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  • July 25, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein

    Mitt Romney fought hard to introduce rate competition to Massachusetts's auto insurance industry, and failed. So when Deval Patrick's insurance commissioner decided to implement auto-insurance reform, it caught a lot of liberals by surprise. Some are turning sour on Patrick, painting him as a pro-business shill. Is it true -- or are they just shilling for the status quo? I look at the politics behind the policy in this week's Phoenix, out tomorrow but online now.

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  • July 24, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein

    CNN "vetted" the 3000 submitted questions for last night's CNN/YouTube debate, meaning that it chose which ones (and how many) to air, meaning that it pretty much created a TV show out of the free raw video materials, not entirely unlike an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos. Then the network's analysts fell over themselves praising the show, and the great questions.

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  • July 18, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    According to both The Hill and Marc Ambinder, Fred Thompson will hold a fundraiser in North Chatham this Saturday. All Romney-loathing Republicans in the state are presumably invited. At $1000 a head, of course.



  • July 18, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    This is exactly the sort of thing that drives me crazy about the Boston Police Department -- not the part about arresting the wrong guy, which is going to happen sometimes, but claiming to have done a great job, rather than admitting when they didn't. And they wonder why the credibility of the force is so low?

    To recap: in the rare (less than one in ten) instance that they made an arrest in a shooting, they nabbed an innocent guy whose alibi could have been checked with a simple phone call within the department.

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  • July 15, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein

    When I learned that Commissioner Ed Davis had removed Dan Coleman as the head of the BPD homicide unit, I knew that some folks at the District Attorney's office would be miffed. It's no secret that Coleman is a big favorite of Dave Meier, who heads the DA's homicide group, and that the office had lobbied hard to get Katherine O'Toole to put Coleman in charge.

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  • July 12, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    Here's a surprise: politicians who set up Friendster pages during their campaigns ignore them once the election's over.

    No Massachusetts pol, to my knowledge, has a pop tune in their honor to equal North Carolina Labor Commissioner Cherie K. Berry.

    Boston's dailies are bitching about the public fountains, but it's better than lining the streets with concrete penises



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  • July 12, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    Rajan Zed gave the daily opening prayer in the US Senate today, becoming the first Hindu to do so. That didn't sit well with a segment of the monotheistic citizenry. The American Family Association urged protest, and the President of Faith2Action was quoted in the Christian press saying that "U.S. Government-sanctioned Hindu prayers are an abomination."

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  • July 12, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    Deval Patrick has just announced his budget line-item vetoes and guess what? He whacked a whole bunch of travel and tourism earmarks, for projects that "are not sufficiently related" to travel and tourism. Didn't I just write that?

    He took an even heavier hammer to the workforce-training earmarks, a pork-laden area which I was planning to mention but cut from the article for space.

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  • July 11, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    DA Dan Conley takes issue with my recent article about him, voicing his complaints in a letter to the editor in this week's Phoenix -- you can read it online here, along with another critical letter, followed by my response to Conley.

  • July 11, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    The mutual admiration society that Deval Patrick, Sal DiMasi, and Therese Murray have engaged in since the gay-marriage fight can't last forever. It might not last until the end of this week -- depending on how Patrick wields his veto pen on the state budget. I write about it in this week's Phoenix, out tomorrow but online now:

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  • July 10, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    Last week in this space, I ridiculed the suggestion that one of the nine at-large city council candidates should remove himself from the race, to save the city from a preliminary election required to trim the field to eight. Thankfully, the city council has come up with a more egalitarian solution. A home-rule petition being introduced by at-large councilor Steve Murphy, along with council president Maureen Feeney and outgoing district councilor Jerry McDermott, would allow the city to skip the prelim altogether this year, and place all nine candidates on the final November ballot.

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  • July 09, 2007
    By David S. Bernstein
    I think Donovan Slack has it right in her article today about Boston's mayoral hopefuls: Menino intends to run again, under the self-justification that nobody in the field can do the job the way it needs doing; and several in that field feel they have to run anyway, because they can't wait around forever for the opportunity.

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