Shut the Front Door

The Horde returns...

The Boz

Four years ago when I scrambled to find some information on what casinos could mean for me, my town, and for Massachusetts, some of the first words I read were those of Former Rep. Dan Bosley of North Adams.

The Boz researched the subject of expanded gambling since 1996, always trying to look at things from a financial standpoint, as well as from a long-term vs. short-term perspective. And not surprisingly, he always found that it was bad economic policy.

When the issue ignited in 2007, starting down the street from where I sit right now, Dan became a champion to those of us fighting casinos and slot parlors, flying monkeys and the myth of inevitability from our home computers, in library meeting rooms, at town hall podiums and on sidewalks.

Unlike any of the others in this debate with his or her hands on a gavel, when Dan chaired the 2008 public hearing on Deval Patrick's 3 casino plan, he sat through 16 hours of testimony, allowing everyone as long as they needed to speak, and making gambling lobbyists wait as long as anti-casino activists.

The Boz was also one of the issue's greatest debaters, and in 2010 he debated it again on the floor of the House for the last time. His last speech on the issue, taken right before the House voted to expand gambling, is here. I hope you'll take the time to watch.

Thanks for everything, Boz. Thanks for never giving up the good fight.

You'll be missed.

Must See TV

As you may have heard, the CBS program 60 Minutes will be airing a segment this Sunday, January 9th, on the subject of predatory gambling - specifically slot machines.

I've known about this for some time, but the cynic in me has refused to believe it was going to actually happen until I saw it for myself.  Because, first there was the build up, the buzz, the speculation.  I counted the hits on the web site, then Kathleen Norbut had a phone interview. But it all seemed to go nowhere.

Then, we got word that it was going to air in June.  Then it was postponed to October.  Then, it would happen sometime before the end of the year.  So I guess I just started to assume it would never air, or perhaps, it just was a figment of my imagination that an investigative news program as outstanding as 60 Minutes would take on this subject when so many others have managed to ignore.

Then, yesterday, I got confirmation that the show will, in fact, be airing this Sunday.

Still, I don't know what they're going to cover in the segment, and having watched how the media has covered this topic for the last years, I have full reason to expect a softball fluff piece that comes down easy on the predatory gambling industry and the politicians who love them.  As an added bonus, they could rub some salt in the wound by painting predatory gambling opponents as preachy moralists hell-bent on screwing our fellow Americans out of casino jobs and tax revenue.

But, since 60 Minutes has devoted a great deal of it's air time these past 43 years to interviewing whistle blowers, exposing frauds and uncovering shady boiler room operations, I've decided to be something I'm usually not when it comes to gambling coverage - I'm hopeful.

I've watched 60 Minutes all my life.  I know that Morely Safer has always worn checkered shirts and what Mike Wallace looked like with eyebrows.  I remember when a young Meredith Vieira started as a correspondent alongside and equally young Steve Kroft, and how she was fired over a controversy involving the need to breast feed her baby on set.  I remember that, before Andy Rooney, 60 Minutes featured a fun two-person debate at the end of each program called Point CounterPoint, which became the basis for the infamous SNL sketch where Dan Akroyd would preface every argument by calling Jane Curtain an "ignorant slut".  I was there, a sixth grader on the playground trying to drum up some concern over the crisis in Cambodia at recess because of a 60 Minutes episode.

Then there were those dark days in the mid-90's when pressure from their parent company forced 60 Minutes to put the kibosh on an important upcoming segment revealing how the Tobacco industry was attempting to make cigarettes more addictive.  And perhaps that is where my trepidation comes from.  Because certainly, slot machines and cigarettes share a similar business model.

At the State House hearing on expanded gambling last summer, a crew from 60 Minutes was there.  In fact, some of them were sitting behind a group of us from the anti-predatory gambling organization USS-Mass.  At several points during the day, State Senator Marc Pacheco made glowing comments about what he felt was the fine and impartial work of New England's own infamous gambling industry evangelist, UMass Dartmouth Prof. Clyde Barrow - followed invariably by the audible sarcasm of Team USS-Mass.

One of the Senator's misinformed comments in particular was so comically inaccurate that it produced an impromptu burst of laughter from our row.  And while the Senator looked down at us, typically perplexed as to what was so funny, a member of the 60 Minutes crew sensed a potential lead, scribbling the professor's name in his notebook.  I know this because I turned around to witness it, and noticed he'd misspelled Barrow's name.  For a moment, I thought to whisper the correct spelling to the young man behind me.  Then I came to my senses.

The 60 Minutes crew left immediately after the testimony of MIT professor Natasha Schull and Harvard/Mass General Researcher Dr. Hans Brieter, both of whom did an incredible job that day - their fourth time testifying and answering the questions for the Mass. legislature regarding the addictive and deceptive features of the modern slot machine, and it's dramatic effects on human brain chemistry.

I have no real idea what the 60 Minutes segment is going to cover, but I hope they include some video of our Mass. senators and congressmen in action, lapping up the promises of the industry while paying halfhearted lip service to those who offered up figures on crime and addiction and quality of life.  I hope they mention the babies and children left to fend for themselves at home, or on in casino parking lots or on side streets while their  parents are lost in time, succumbing to a device purposely designed to play them to extinction.

I hope they will include interviews with both Schull and Brieter, and others, like Les Bernal who formed StopPredatoryGambling.org and who brought together a committed, nationwide network of expanded gambling opponents.  And I hope they take a few moments to talk to Professor  Sandra Adell of the University of Wisconsin, who wrote the compelling Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen.  I hope they make the point that our state governments are partnering with an industry that plays it's citizens for suckers.

I know they'll tell us how many billions the industry rakes in each year, and how much it creates in revenue.  But I hope they'll be fair and show the other side.  The side which the media has neglected to mention for over 30 years - until a majority have come to see the gambling industry as some sort of harmless adult Disney World and a welcome purveyor of job creation and economic stimulus. (As long as it's  not in their town.)

And then I remember the member of the Town Democratic Committee who admitted to me one sunny day as I tried to get her to read a pamphlet, that she didn't care if slot machines caused a new type of addiction.  "We need the money", she said.

We need the money.

So, I wonder if the 60 Minutes interview will be able to change minds, or even alter the debate. Because when it comes to greed, even the greed for funding to support the good things, for the causes we care about, we can all easily develop a blind spot.

And that's the wall that keeps hitting us in the face.

I don't know how some people have lasted as long as they have in this fight.  I'm am personally so fried after only three and a half years that I'm crisp on the edges and dust in the middle.  After some of the things I've heard and seen, after the experience of being an activist in a cause a lot of people either think is either lost or don't believe in at all, after all the time spent, seemingly for nothing... after all the research, the writing, the anxiety, the personalities, the juggling, the traveling, the urgency, the fighting, all the beating my head against that wall... after all the believing that my country, my state wouldn't allow something so wrong... after all that time being on edge, being ignored, being so emotionally invested, so determined and yet so repeatedly disappointed in ways I never could have imagined as I watched a Cape Cod Indian Tribe celebrating something called 'federal recognition' on the news one late night in February of 2007. 

It was a long time ago that I could count on being recharged by the electricity of my new circle, my new colleagues, new adventures, new trials, all working, laughing, planning, all on the same course.  Those were days when the time flew, that effort could resemble pleasure, when words trickled effortlessly from my fingertips, expectations were few and rewards were plentiful.  And yes, there were bad times as well, but there was also support.  There was always a willing shoulder or open ear.  The book was open to just one page - and we all were on it.

That time didn't last long, but the longing for it did and kept me going for longer than it should.

I have a friend who often reminds me that Martin Luther King would take an entire month off every year to rest and re-charge.  Since he was the head of a activist movement that changed the world, I took that to mean that I should only need the odd afternoon off, maybe to catch a movie or treat myself to something nice.  But I've learned it doesn't work that way.  Greetings from Burnoutville.

So like I said, this time, I'm hopeful.  Hopeful that 60 Minutes can, with this story, make a difference in the way the industry operates, and the way the media presents it.  And the way we've begun to perceive it.  And I'm thankful, desperately thankful, that they took on this complex, neglected subject.  Thankful it was 60 Minutes above all other news programs, because nobody does it better.  And hopeful that fifteen minutes on National TV can do more than I have personally accomplished in all these sometimes exhilarating, mostly exhausting years.

But I'm thankful mostly that this Sunday night, after more than 30 years, the opponents and victims of predatory gambling are finally getting a shot at a real soapbox.

Because we have one hell of a story to tell...

Lassoing the Moon

This summer, despite every tea leaf in it's favor, legislation to bring predatory gambling to Massachusetts went down in an eleventh hour defeat.

And in just the past few days, Congress chose not to pass a "Carcieri Fix" into law, a Massachusetts Appeals Court judge denied the city of Fall River's request to overturn a preliminary injunction stopping the casino land deal, and the CBS program 60 Minutes is preparing to air a segment on slot machines at the very moment the Mass Legislature will begin drooling once again over the prospect of gambling legislation.

It's a wonderful life.

Happiest of Holiday's to all the angel activists out there who've earned their wings.

Love, Gladys

Can you imagine...

This is the Fourth Thanksgiving I've posted this picture, and I'm wondering if it's been a good luck charm.

Because on a warm night in May of 2007, I was told a casino was inevitable, a "done deal" and given a conservative date of only 18 months from shovel to slot machine.

And yet, here we are, on the brink of 2011, and there are still no slot machines, no casinos, and no Indian land in trust in Massachusetts.

You may believe that this been due to fortune, fluke or fate, or merely the unpredictable path of politics.

But rest assured, at it's heart, at it's center, has been the constant efforts of activists, experts, senators, representatives and concerned citizens providing the Commonwealth with a conscience and a reality check these past three and a half years.  Chipping away at myths and lies and the damage done by millions of dollars in influence.  Making differences in ways even they might find hard to imagine.

Because real success in America comes from hard work, not a roll of the dice.

And so, for all those who've done so much to keep Massachusetts slot machine and casino free, let's give thanks.

---

And if three people do it - three - can you imagine - three people walking in,

singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out...  They may think it's an

organization.  And can you... can you imagine fifty people a day - I said

fifty people a day - walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and

walking out. And friends... they may think it's a movement.

- Arlo Guthrie

A Night on the Towne

I've often longed to be a restaurant critic. Quietly occupying at a new table every night, anonymously sampling food and drink and service - then sharing my findings with the world without so much as a single dish to wash in the morning.

Of course, being a restaurant critic on the South Shore is sort of like being the bolt inspector at a bolt factory. I mean, there are just so many ways you can go with it. Eventually you will run out of ways to describe the deep fried, carb-heavy, creatively-challenged sameness of the cuisine here in God's country.

And so last night's dinner at Towne Boston, a trendy new eatery on Boylston Street was a treat and a half for this weary palate.

It was a special occasion for the family, and I decided it was high time we celebrated in style. A few weeks earlier we'd been entranced by a restaurant segment on Chronicle, which featured Towne Boston, and highlighted it's unique fifteen-item Lobster menu - in addition to it's equally mouthwatering main menu. Sealing the deal, Towne was a collaboration between two local food icons who'd helped lift Boston out of the Bad Food Age - Jasper White and Lydia Shire. How could anyone go wrong with that?

And the experience was probably as close to I'll ever come to feeling like a guest judge on Top Chef. Even the three delicious tiny spreads that came with the bread basket required copious explanation from our heavily-accented server. But it was dessert, in the form of a sparkling foot-high beehive of brown sugar cotton candy that wafted onto our table like a fantasy ballet, which elevated our experience to another gastronomic level all together.

Because let's face it. You're never going to see that sort of thing at the Fireside.

And then, as if things couldn't get cooler for our swank-deprived family, a serious faced food magazine crew set up shop on the table next to us, aiming the most complicated looking camera lenses I've ever seen at bottles of wine and bowls of bisque and plates wood-fired crispy duck.

And that's when I saw it. The dapper elder statesman of the food crew was closely studying what looked like a little paper fan - with a picture of a lobster claw on it. The special fifteen-item lobster menu!

And I wondered why we hadn't been offered this menu. It was a special night for us after all, and I'd gone to the effort to inform the restaurant about it - hence the great table we were sitting at.

Then I remembered a review of Towne Boston I'd read - which mentioned that the restaurant staff had oddly neglected to provide the reviewer's table with the same, much-ballyhooed lobster-only menu.

Immediately, my well-honed sense of injustice kicked into gear.

Hey, what gives? Does Towne only provide the special menu to reviewers who show up with fancy cameras or TV crews, perhaps for the purpose of luring unsuspecting choice-deprived restaurant-goers from Hicksville like me to fill their expensive tables?

Yeah, it looked like it.

Since we were, at the time, finishing up with dessert, I attempted to suppress my disappointment, focusing instead on the fine food, good drink, fun time and otherwise great service we'd experienced. But still... it's not like we're going to go back to Towne next week. If you saw the prices, you'd understand. This was a particularly special occasion, after all, and we'd chosen to share it with Towne, only to learn that we and our special occasion were not special enough, apparently, to warrant a crack at the elusive lobster menu.

I contemplated interrupting the reviewer to ask if I might borrow the menu to take a look, if for no other reason than the hope that nothing on it would even appeal to me anyway. But alas, social anxiety got the better of me. I resigned myself to the fact that I may never solve the 15 item lobster mystery.

Back in Bridgewater, shortly after the polls had closed, the lobster menu was quickly forgotten as we found ourselves confronted with the depressing news that Deval Patrick had seemingly won another term.

A few hours later, I couldn't locate the TV remote and found myself unhappily forced to listen to Deval's victory speech.

Here was the same man who had famously striven to build three mega casinos across the Commonwealth, thus opening the door to a predatory vampire of an industry in the same State that had not only given birth to American Democracy, but could also still count itself among the precious few with the smarts and backbone to stand tall against the easy, sleezy lure of expanded gambling, and yet there he was - proudly, emphatically and without so much as a lick of conscious irony, contradicting all of it.

"To paraphrase President Clinton, there is nothing wrong about Massachusetts that can't be fixed with what's right about Massachusetts."

"Tonight Massachusetts chose to look up and forward and not down and to the past."

"We work to lift every corner, every community of this Commonwealth..."

"Now as always, I ask everyone in the Commonwealth to turn to each other, not on each other..."

"I'm not interested in what's easy, I'm interested in what's right. I'm interested in bearing our generational responsibility to leave a better Commonwealth than we found."

"We must be, all of us, about lifting the whole Commonwealth up, not tearing anyone down, and modeling for a nation hungry for something positive to believe in that we are once again the center, the leader for this country."

As I dug the remote out from between the couch cushions, I felt in real danger of losing the wood grilled portabello mushrooms with robiola crema and & sage crisps that I'd enjoyed earlier that evening.

Slamming the mute button, I decompressed in simmering silence, eventually realizing wearily that Patrick, like Towne Boston for that matter, was merely reciting a well-worn page from the politician's playbook.

The sweet nothing. The promise of something extraordinary that's only really real for the cameras.

So why wouldn't Towne think nothing of whispering it's own sugar-spun lobster nothings to get us in the door? Just one look at all those full tables... or at Deval's dewey-eyed victory night disciples - almost none of whom, I'd be willing to bet, live in a casino hot-zone or have an inkling of what those of us who do had to learn the hard way - and you'd know how insanely well it works.

But why do some of us fall for it so easily? Are we all so bored, so choice-deprived that we get stars in our eyes over something that just sounds different? Are we ultimately more satisfied with a tantalizing empty promise than an unfulfilling gritty reality?

At the same time, there are those of us who will just as inexplicably bypass the promising cutting edge for the disappointingly predictable.

I passed the house of an old friend the other day, spotting a lawn sign for a candidate who, two years earlier had grossly insulted him and others like him in return for a minor political gain.

And while there are people who'd never eat at the same restaurant where they'd once picked up a case of food poisoning, there are multitudes who will go back to the trough, time and time again, of the political candidate who only made them sick once or twice.

Fact is, in every town in Massachusetts, there are lots of places to eat - the good, bad and the ugly. But stellar political choices are as rare as a blue moon.

We can choose to eat at home - even learn to cook like a Top Chef - but unless we are willing to run for office - we are condemned to depend on others for governance.

And yet, ours has become a system that forces our candidates to pay to play, where an altruistic unknown is required to duke it out with millionaires and corporate-backed franchisees. The media and her pundits accept and enforce the system, while the rest of us, unless we have been painfully gifted by the reality that the media isn't, in fact, working for us, or even bothering to keep us all that well informed, fall in line.

And so, out of fear of the unknown or for the shiny sparkle of a continually broken promise, we check a box on a ballot next to something old or something new or something we hope just won't make us sick, coming to terms with our choices sooner rather than later.

Afterward, and without a lick of conscious irony, we'll lean back at our tables with cynical grins, longing for a white knight of change, of democratic salvation, clinging to a fading hope of term limits, deciding that OK has become good enough, accepting the notion that we are individually powerless, and probably never wondering when it was that the unthinkable became the inevitable.

Food for thought.

Vote Your Voice.

No matter who you vote for Tuesday, please don't lose your voice.

Four years ago, I listened to all the debates and ended up voting for a candidate named Grace Ross, who was a member of the Green-Rainbow party.  I didn't know what the hell the Green-Rainbow party was, I'd never heard of it and frankly it sounded like something I would have eagerly jumped right into with both feet when I was 19. 

But in reality, and despite their name, the Green-Rainbow party turned out not to be the Birkenstock-wearing tree-hugging granola-loving solar-powered vegans their name might suggest (not that there's anything wrong with that) In fact, they turned out be sound a lot like, well, me.  Like a lot of us.

The candidate didn't just sound like she cared about me and my interests, but about the whole state. Not just about it's present, but also about it's past, it's future and it's lasting legacy.

The Green-Rainbows weren't fear mongers, finger pointers, a collection of sound bytes, partisan, or puppets of the special interests.  And in the next few years, we'd learn that these were the conventionally requisite political qualities we could all better do without.

Unfortunately, a lot of people, including some people I really like and respect, are telling me a vote for Jill Stein, the current Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, the only candidate to oppose expanded gambling, and to testify to that effect at this summer's State House hearings, will be a spoiler. 

Well, good.

Deval Patrick's spoiled the last three years of my life so the least I can do is return the favor. And besides, I'm sick of being warned that I have to vote for one evil over a lesser one for the strategic benefit of the greater good.

Case in point - a few months after Deval Patrick won the 2006 election, the casino circus came to town, and I was never so pleased to realize that, even without knowing a darn thing about the casino issue when I'd cast my vote for governor, I'd cast it for Grass Ross, the single 2006 gubernatorial candidate who showed up at a Faneuil Hall anti-slot protest rally last December.

If I were to teach a class on civics in 2010 I'd have to say, "Well boys and girls, a politician is someone we vote for who goes to work to work for us, but who eventually ends up really working for the professional lobbyists and special interests who line up at their door every day and who write them big checks so that they can run for office again. 

Those politicians who stand up to this pressure eventually get burnt out, leave office and never look back.  As you can see, it's very hard."
 
Fortunately, in Jill Stein, the Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, we have a gubernatorial candidate - in fact the only one - who, in practice and not just in word, has refused to take any money from special interests and lobbyists, making her the only candidate who is even remotely trying to avoid them right out of the gate.

Which is why I'll cast my vote for Jill Stein.

And my vote, just like my voice these last 3 and a half years, will once again be considered negligible.

Except by the one person for whom it matters most.

Me.

You see a tomato...

 TIM CAHILL

 At least he's honest.

---

 This advertisement paid for by the 

Committee to Elect a Big Blonde Doofus for Governor.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper

In the months and years to come, whenever the issue of expanded gambling heats up anew, newspapers, pundits, bloggers and columnists will invariably point to the fact that the 2010 round was won or lost (depending on what side you're on) by a nose.

And that the photo finish came down to the blurry lack of a no-bid contract for the State's racetracks.

Blurry, because, on the surface, it looked like the State's 4 racetracks would have to bid for the 2 racino licenses provided for in the legislature's final gambling legislation.

That's right.  Despite headlines and finger-pointing following the closing of Wonderland Dog Track, it turns out that Suffolk Downs and Wonderland have had plans to combine into one big fat 'destination resort casino' all along.

Which left two racetracks, Raynham and Plainridge, to “bid” over those 2 racino licences.

And that, my friends, is how we beat what many considered to be a sure thing.

Because in 2010, her Highness, Lady Luck dealt to the gambling industry a legislative Royal Flush - from Speaker to Senate to Governor.

And by the end of July and the legislative session, only the truly hard-core among us held out dwindling hope for a win. We prayed the Governor would veto, though it seemed unlikely - especially after he met gambling-nation half-way with one racino.

And then the clock simply ran out. The House and Senate fled the scene and weren't coming back.

The moral of our story?

That in the end, the battle was won, not over the growing realization that expanded gambling has failed to solve the fiscal problems of any state in the nation, or due to the lack of an independent cost/benefit analysis, or over the deep involvement of special interests, or because the public was excluded from the vetting process, or in fear of creating a regional gambling arms race, or from concerns that consumers would be exposed to a deceptively dangerous product, or because it would cut into the lottery, or could result in the creation of new Tribal sovereign nations and land acquisitions, or the introduction, in a state founded on high ideals, of an industry that harms families, hurts small business, disproportionally targets the poor, creates expanded government, brings increases in crime and addiction, and, not for nothing, comes with a suicide rate.

Nope. In the end, the battle was “officially” won because a.) the Governor didn't want want the citizens of the Commonwealth to lose out on the incremental cost of a competitive license fee, and b.) he didn't to be unfair to potential racetrack investors.

My hero.

But it doesn't matter.  While it may be the 'official' reason, it's not the real reason.

One perceptive article recently observed that, for the Governor, the expanded gambling issue "has become an albatross that will flap alongside him to the end of his term."

True.  Just look at the important things that didn't get done this session because of it.  Still, the article suggests that

The best explanation for why gambling failed despite all the votes in favor of it, is that the Democrats in the state house needed gambling to fail and they needed to vote in favor of it.

Sure they needed it to fail for all the reasons I mention above - though to suggest the majority of the Massachusetts Legislature actually staged it's failure is giving them way too much credit.

Which is not to say there weren't a few consciences twitching under the golden dome, but let's face it, if you really want something to fail, you're not going to overload the deck so completely in it's favor.  I also know for a fact that the anti-predatory forces on Beacon Hill were working their legislative butts off to the last minute to achieve even the votes that they got.

But the article does allude to something I've pointed out in the past - that legislators who are so quick to hop on the gambling bandwagon were doing their own campaign war chests a disservice – and posits that a lot of them

needed to be on-record as supporting mega-casinos because Patrick has turned the gambling industry into a lifeline of campaign funding for his allies. Slot machine companies, scratch card companies, racetrack developers, and others are among the biggest contributors to Massachusetts politicians. The companies contribute themselves, they hire lobbyists who contribute, and their employees contribute as individuals. In April the Boston Globe reported that the New Jersey-based consulting firm that the state paid to come up with the financial estimates for gambling also was being paid by DeLeo’s campaign

No kidding.  Pennsylvania lawmakers held out for $60 M in lobbying funds before approving gambling, whereas Massachusetts capitulated for a paltry $20M.

And then, there was the constant pressure from ever-present, loudly clamoring organized labor, which has

been kept on life support by the Big Dig, the largest highway project in the history of the country, at least if you measure it in dollars. Ted Kennedy won the Big Dig for metropolitan Boston in the late 1980s, and the money is only now running out. The leaders of the AFL-CIO and the Building Trades are clamoring for the jobs spigot to be turned back on. They are the loudest supporters of racinos, because DeLeo has convinced them that racinos are all the spigot they’re going to get.

Speaking of Labor, during it's interviews of departing Wonderland employees, NECN aired video of one woman stating that “if he were maybe a nicer governor” Patrick would have signed the gambling bill.

Now, this woman and I are probably polar opposites on the issue of expanded gambling in Massachusetts, but I tend to agree. Deval could be a 'nicer' governor. And better one, too.

For instance, I wonder if it might have made it just a little bit easier for this woman to lose her job knowing the governor didn't allow it to happen all over single no-bid contract -  but for all the other reasons myself and others have pointed out.

And wouldn't it have been 'nicer' for the rest of us to know that too?  To know that our lives and tax dollars were a little more important to those in charge than higher licensing fees and ensuring that racino investors got a level playing field?

Or that our potential addictions and suicides were considered unacceptable collateral damage even if they do come with construction jobs, a 10,000 seat auditorium, five star restaurants, upscale shops and table games.

But in the vacuum of special interests and campaign imperatives, we're left to scratch our heads or divine the tea leaves for our leadership's motivations.  And apparently, on Beacon Hill, we're all just standing on one side or the other on the scales of avarice. 

While the Massachusetts economy is doing better than most states, and has added over 60,000 private sector jobs since December, her leadership is populated with lawyers and professional politicians more concerned with sound bytes and mitigation than with leadership or justice.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the rush to throw Massachusetts under the special-interest driven expanded-gambling bandwagon this year, which, behind closed doors, exchanged lives for contributions and job buzz, and was justified with specious data provided by impartial sources.

Definitley not 'nice'.

And the gubernatorial candidates would seem to herald more of the same.

Deval Patrick weighs his support of gambling on the scales of avarice and re-election, Charlie Baker actually believes there's such a thing as a 'starter casino', and Tim Cahill would install Keno games in high school cafeterias if we'd let him.

Gambling issue aside, what kind of person do you want standing up for you on Beacon Hill?  A cartoon or the real thing?  Someone whose stake in the future means more than the next election?  Someone who just wants to give you something for the pain, or someone who actually wants to save the limb?

Fortunately, there is a doctor in the house.

A doctor by the name of Jill Stein, is running in this year's gubernatorial election, and I would urge you all, whether you are for, against or neutral on the issue of expanded gambling to check out Jill's web site, watch her in the debates, and seriously consider casting your vote for her.  Like me, you might be pleasantly surprised.

I've met Jill in person, and found her to be refreshingly honest and forthright in her positions.  Unlike most politicians I've met, she's really gone out of her way to get the facts on the gambling issue.  And you could have knocked me over with a feather to find her at a gambling hearing, holding onto testimony, waiting her turn in the cheap seats, and looking down the barrel of an unwieldy gavel with the rest of us.  Best of all, instead of having to guess where my family and I stand on her personal scales of avarice, I'm pretty confident that Jill doesn't possess such a thing.

Perhaps because doctors, as you know, live by the credo, “first, do no harm”, and frankly, after three and a half years of dodging lobbyists and divining tea leaves for answers, of getting ignored, gaveled and shut out entirely, that sure seems like a "nicer" place to start.

Ephemera

The game is afoot.

A mystery in the form of several boxes of casino-related

"engineering studies, maps, deeds, plans, letters and public notices"

rests in assorted corners in the offices of Middleboro Town Manager Charles J. Cristello and Planning Director Ruth M. Geoffroy, awaiting public inspection.

No one is quite sure why.

But apparently, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe filed a public-records request last month for various ephemera relating to the Middleboro casino chronicles and paid $3,000 for the privilege.

Does this have anything to do with the Tribe's casino defection to Fall River?  Or the Town's claim's that the Tribe can't be trusted?  Could it be related to certain un-paid bills? A bizarre form of intimidation?  Or perhaps the fulfillment of some cryptic federal requirement triggered whenever a Tribe attempts to renege on a done-deal?

And wouldn't it be poetic justice if the Tribe's lawyers somehow end up using Article 3 or the slightly less than 2/3 vote on the intergovernmental agreement vote as their own 'get out of Middleboro Free" card?

The article sheds no light on the mystery, but being the Enterprise, that's hardly surprising.  Still... the Town seems equally befuddled, and Cedric Cromwell isn't talking.

And so that can only mean one thing.  That this is no great mystery, but yet another installment of our favorite, long-running soap opera, The Stupid and the Damned.

And while Stan Rosenberg may be glued to the screen, most of us have already changed the channel.

Because, just speaking for myself, it's difficult maintaining a suspension of disbelief having watched Cromwell insist his Tribe lives in dire straits, only to discover he's retained an attorney and shelled out three grand for a bunch of dusty crap from the era of inevitability.

If Cromwell, a one-man Peyton Place, wants to know why his Tribe keeps getting dissed left and right, he need only look in a mirror.   Between this pouty little intrigue and his other less than stellar actions, it makes it hard to trust him as the leader of a neighboring sovereign nation, let alone the captain of an industry so well associated with corruption and greed.

And, if he's waiting for the town fathers to figure out his mysterious motives, he may as well pull up a comfortable chair and have a nap.

Oddly enough, I too, have a box of ephemera collected during the last three years.  It contains, among other things, a handwritten letter from a State senator thanking me for building the USS-Mass web site, my crumpled and discarded testimony from the 2008 casino hearings, notebooks, a cherished t-shirt with the word "Honest" across the front that I received as a gift, an crumbling long-stem rose from a winter's evening at Faneuil Hall, political cartoons snipped from newspapers, highlighted reams of federal regulations, and a letter from a State Rep expressing his amazement that so few of his colleagues are willing to vote their conscience.

My collection reminds me that, while we wait for the next twist in the plot of this endless melodrama - or at least for the Cape Cod Times to flesh out the facts of the mysterious ephemera on view in Middleboro - there is at least one thing of which I'm already certain - and that is that there is more truth and integrity to be found among my collection of dusty little artifacts than was ever contained within that Pandora's box opened three and a half years ago.

And like sands through the hourglass, my friends, so are the days of our lives.

Hang Fire - Day Ten

Hang Fire - Day Nine

Hang Fire - Day Eight

Hang Fire - Day Seven

Hang Fire - Day Six

Hang Fire - Day Five

Hang Fire - Day Four

Hang Fire - Day Three

Hang Fire - Day Two

Hang Fire