Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Murray?

May 23, 2013

The local dailies have very – all together now – different takes on yesterday’s swan song for Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray.

The Boston Globe runs it upper left on today’s front page:

 

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The Boston Herald gives it all of Page One:

 

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And page two . . and page four . . . and page five . . .

 

Picture 4

 

Picture 5

 

Never one to disappoint, the feisty local tabloid features all the usual aspects in today’s coverage, starting with Joe Battenfeld’s batting Murray around:

IMG_2307.JPGTim Murray, we hardly needed ye

When Tim Murray flees the lieutenant governor’s office, he will leave behind a historic legacy: that we don’t need a lieutenant governor . . .

Despite Patrick’s flowery tribute to his second banana yesterday, Murray had no power or influence in the administration and usually could be found standing behind the governor at press conferences, saying nothing. The lieutenant governor ranked so low he didn’t even merit one of those cool MEMA vests that Patrick wears during disasters.

 

And etc.

Next up, Howie Carr mails in his balding retreads:

010512murray03‘Crash’ is no test dummy

The Worcester Chamber of Commerce?

Nobody’s all that surprised to see Tim “Crash” Murray take the golden parachute. But shouldn’t it have been a more appropriate job, like, say, with NASCAR?

 

Ha-hah!

As you’d expect, the going-away party is a lot more subdued crosstown at the stately local broadsheet. In addition to the straightforward Page One piece, there’s this sober-minded assessment from op-ed columnist Joan Vennochi:

Murray’s ambition meets reality

IF ONLY there were no mysterious car crash.

If only he weren’t embroiled in a possible fund-raising scandal.

If only Governor Deval Patrick resigned and left the job of acting governor to his lieutenant governor, Timothy P. Murray could be the Democrat to beat in 2014.

Murray’s ambition — always grander than his profile — felt more delusional as time and controversy dragged on.

 

Even the boyos at the Herald would agree with that, yeah?

The Globe also features a largely judgment-free editorial about Murray’s departure:

An unsurprising end to Murray’s once-promising political career

The announcement Wednesday that Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray will resign to lead the Worcester Chamber of Commerce mainly served to ratify what most on Beacon Hill basically knew: that his recent political scandals had left him without a path to higher office, while his current duties were too limited to sustain an ambitious person’s career.

Murray’s departure ends an awkward chapter in Massachusetts political history . . .

 

That level of understatement, however, is entirely missing from the Herald’s editorial today:

Lt. Gov. Tim Murray yesterday gave the people of Massachusetts his two-week notice, thus drawing a curtain on one of the most underwhelming tenures of a statewide office-holder in recent Massachusetts history. And that’s saying something.

Murray is trading the privilege of elected office for what amounts to a bigger salary and a shorter commute, resigning with nearly two years left in his term to accept a lucrative job as president of the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Now, we aren’t particularly sorry to see Murray go but we happen to think elected officials shouldn’t throw over the voters simply for the favor of a fat paycheck.

 

Wait a second . . . the Herald spends all this time saying Murray was a useless slug in a worthless job, but now he should have stayed?

The hardreading staff will be at the chiropractor’s if you need us.

 

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Herald’s Gelzinis: Cahill a Good Guy. Globe’s Vennochi: Good Law, Bad Case

March 9, 2013

Two different – but not necessarily contradictory – takes in the local dailies about former Massachusetts Treasurer Tim Cahill’s close call with the law over financial shenanigans in the Bay State’s 2010 gubernatorial race.

First up: Joan Vennochi’s column in Thursday’s Boston Globe:

With Cahill, a good law and a weak case

IT’S EASY when it’s cash stuffed between a state senator’s breasts or checks funneled through a law partner directly into the pockets of the speaker of the House.

It’s harder — as it should be — when a case for political corruption consists of a feel-good lottery ad campaign that cost taxpayers $1.5 million but never mentions the name of the state treasurer who ordered it up. Those are the underlying facts in the case that Attorney General Martha Coakley brought against former state Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill.

While treasurer, Cahill spent public money to advance a personal political agenda — his failed campaign for governor. A new state law makes it a crime for politicians to do that — if prosecutors can show “fraudulent intent.” But in the case against Cahill, the evidence of fraudulent intent simply wasn’t strong enough.

 

That’s the legal angle. Peter Gelzinis had the human angle in his Friday Boston Herald column:

PQ5W8772.JPGTim Cahill: I’m still here

Tim Cahill tucked himself away at a back table a couple of mornings ago, inside his favorite breakfast haunt, McKay’s in Quincy. The word other customers kept tossing his way was, “Congratulations!”

Cahill thanked them all with the grateful smile of someone who’d just come out of a coma.

“I hesitate to think of these past two years as a near-death experience,” he said, referring to his disastrous gubernatorial bid, followed by Attorney General Martha Coakley’s corruption indictment, the threat of serious jail time, a trial that ended in a hung jury and, finally, a negotiated plea to something called “a perception of wrongdoing.”

 

The piece ends with this, which is bound to warm the hearts of Cahill supporters and make his detractors burning mad:

The experience, he said feels “as if I’ve been to my own wake. For two years, I couldn’t really talk to anyone and yet I’ve had all these friends come by to wish me well and tell me they were praying for me. Then, the weirdest, or perhaps, the nicest thing, is that I’m still here to be with them all.”

 

Instead of in the sneezer, where very few ever thought Cahill should wind up.

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Jury’s Out on Carmen Ortiz

January 17, 2013

Not-quite-matching her & her columns in the local papers on the topic of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and her (over?)zealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz.

Start with Margery Eagan’s column in the Boston Herald:

IMG_6554.JPGOutrage over zealous feds

Statement too little, too late

Just days ago, speculation was rampant. Gov. Carmen Ortiz? U.S. Sen. Carmen Ortiz?

Well, that’s all over now.

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is done. Finished. Forever linked to bringing the full and frightening weight of the federal government down upon a 26-year-old computer genius — and a suicide risk.

 

If that’s not tough enough for you, how about this, regarding the six month/guilty plea deal Swartz was offered :

“Oh, so you’re innocent. Do only six months in jail,” said a sarcastic Harvey Silverglate, Boston civil liberties 
attorney and author of “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.” He accused Ortiz’s office of being “drunk with power” and said up to now the media had “protected” Ortiz 
because “she’s a Hispanic woman.”

 

Ouch.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, the view was quite different in Joan Vennochi’s op-ed piece.

Swartz case is sad, but not an overreach

WHEN IT comes to the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old computer prodigy who killed himself, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz has explaining to do.

But there are also questions for Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters.

Why reject the government’s offer of a four-to-six month prison sentence? That’s much less than the 35 years and $1 million fine allowed under the federal law that Swartz was charged with violating.

Peters told the Globe that Swartz didn’t believe he was a felon; he was acting on the principle that information on the Internet should be free when he downloaded academic journals from an MIT computer system. But defending principle was not his lawyer’s job. It was to provide Swartz with the best legal advice, given the charges and the government’s refusal to back down.

 

Vennochi says “the widespread revulsion directed at the US attorney’s office is overreach by cyber-bullies.”

So take your pick – did Oriz bully Swartz or are Internet thugs bullying her?

Or both?

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Brian Maloney Middlesex Truck & Coach Edition

July 31, 2012

From our compare and contrast in clear idiomatic English desk

Joan Vennochi’s 7/22 Boston Globe op-ed:

A business built on hard work – and government

Moments before a jeans-clad Mitt Romney strode into a garage bay at a Roxbury truck repair company, a campaign aide carefully wiped grit from a tool chest slated to share the spotlight with the candidate.

Too much reality spoils a good picture. Just as his campaign put a gloss on the tool chest, Romney put a gloss on the truth about Middlesex Truck & Coach.

“This is not the result of government,” he declared. “This is the result of people who take risk, who have dreams, who build for themselves and for their families.”

Yet owner Brian Maloney acknowledged that his business did receive some government help, via a low-interest loan given for new development and start-ups. “The only way I was able to come here, because I had no money, was with an industrial-revenue bond,” Maloney told Jon Keller of WBZ-TV.

Joe Battenfeld 7/30 Boston Herald column:

Liberals attack

The vile, hate-filled messages started showing up soon after Mitt Romney and the national press corps left Brian Maloney’s truck repair shop in Roxbury.

“It was incredible,” Maloney tells the Herald. “It was crude, abusive, mindless garbage.”

Maloney hadn’t committed a crime, but to some Democrats and liberals he had done something far more heinous: He had dared to criticize President Obama.

Two different worlds. That’s American politics – and news media – these days.

Get used to it.

 

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