Eloquent as a box of rocks
Howie Carr Boston Herald 4/4/14
As far as I know, the State House has never had a Mensa chapter. If a hack has an IQ of 100, he’s likely known to his colleagues as “the Per-fessor.” Overall, the solons’ collective intellect lights up the world like a three-watt bulb.
But even by the below-average standards of Beacon Hill, there have been a lot of bone-headed remarks made lately. We start with the attorney general, who was named Marsha Coakley by Patches Kennedy. Now Marsha appears to be channeling Patches’ brilliant rhetoric.
On April Fools’ Day, she was asked about the Jared Remy case, and this was her reply:
“It was a circumstance where from my experience in looking at the thousands of cases that we see every day not all of the things that happened in that case happen, but the kinds of things that happened in that case many of us have seen happen time and time again.”
Note the Patches-like repetition of a single word: happen. It’s a happening thing, if you’re Patches Kennedy.
This sound cut was picked up by a “tracker,” one of those rascally Republicans who will be following Marsha around from now until the election.
Marsha is a font of stupid sound bites. Recall, “Technically, it is not illegal to be illegal in Masssachusetts.”
It’s going to be a long summer for Marsha, and a lot of laughs for her trackers.
Next, come on down Rep. Benjamin Swan, D-Springfield. This is the guy who refers to MCI-Cedar Junction as “Walpool.”
One thing about Rep. Swan — the race card, he never leaves home without it. And he was waving it around Wednesday night during the minimum-wage debate.
“If we had been around when abolition of slavery was being debated, there would be those who told us that to eliminate slavery in America would lead to unemployment.”
Whatever you say, Ben …
Next we bring on Gov. Deval Patrick. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man shall lead. Deval is the one-eyed man at the State House. His IQ is close to room temperature. After graduating from Harvard Law, it took him only three tries to pass the bar exam.
As Deval and his buddy Obama well know, there is no trouble so great that you can’t blame it on someone else, if not George W. Bush then the people of Massachusetts.
Defending the indefensible, last week Deval told a bunch of DCF social workers what the real problem is.
Not the incompetent Olga Roche, not foster parents with criminal records, not missing kids.
“Frankly,” the State House News Service quoted Deval as telling the staffers of DCF, “(it’s) a public that doesn’t understand the complexities of the population you serve, who look for simple answers; who look for short and quick answers, who look for a kind of a once-over-easy, put-it-back-in-the-box because it’s ugly and unattractive and complicated and difficult. ...”
Translation: It’s the Herald’s fault. It always is, isn’t it?
Surefire hack hall of famer
Howie Carr, Boston Herald 4/6/14
John Buonomo should be inducted immediately into the Hack Hall of Fame.
Forget the usual five-year waiting period, this is a payroll Charlie of impeccable credentials. In sports, they call particularly versatile athletes “triple threats.” In the hackerama, they’re known as “triple-dippers,” for the number of ways they’re ripping off the taxpayers.
Buonomo was that rarest of hack phenoms, a quadruple-dipper: County salary of approximately $110,000 a year. Somerville city pension beginning at age 48 that eventually got as high as $40,000 a year.
Ripping off his campaign account to the tune of $172,000.
Robbing untold thousands in his nightly raccoon-like depredations on the Xerox machines in the Registry of Deeds office downstairs from his own office in the East Cambridge courthouse.
In a career tragically cut short by state police infrared surveillance cameras, Buonomo posted Gehrig-like numbers. And consider the all-star lineup he had to break into back in the glory days of Somerville — the Piros, the McKennas, the Howes, not to mention Larry Bretta and Mike McLaughlin (better known these days by his Bureau of Prisons number 94973-038).
As Billy Bulger (of all people!) used to say of Somerville, “Why not just put up a fence around the whole city and give everybody inside 3-to-5?”
Alas, Buonomo’s snout was finally pried out of the trough this week by the Supreme Judicial Court when they severed his last link to the public dole, a $40,000 annual pension from the city of Somerville. In the ultimate rebuke, the SJC also ordered Buonomo to repay the All-American City’s retirement board $150,000.
Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to lose that monthly kiss in the mail.
Until I read the SJC decision, I never realized that Buonomo had been collecting the Somerville pension since 2000, when he was 48 years old. As a hack’s hack, Buonomo was always … hanging around, either at City Hall or at the courthouse in East Cambridge. That was where he worked for, among others, Mike McLaughlin, then a Middlesex county commissioner, now an inmate at the federal pen in Lewisburg until April 23, 2016.
Middlesex County — it’s just a name on the map now, but once it was a way of life. They had a county road department — but no county roads. A county employee once went out on disability after claiming he fell out of his swivel chair at the courthouse.
John Buonomo was the, ahem, executive administrator of Middlesex County. Just as McLaughlin filed for his grossly inflated pension with the city of Chelsea retirement board, Buonomo filed for his with the city of Somerville rather than the state. Payroll patriots figure it’s easier to cut a deal with the city boards than the State Retirement Board. The state treasurer now controls what were the retirement funds of Middlesex County, which as a corrupt organization and racketeering enterprise was abolished more than 20 years ago.
It’s a major decision for a hack, where he’s going to file. It’s like Roger Clemens deciding whether he wanted to be wearing a Red Sox or a Yankees cap on his bust in Cooperstown. McLaughlin and Buonomo both put up a lot of big numbers for the Middlesex Hack Sox, but on Mikey’s statue in the Hack Hall of Fame he’ll be wearing a “C,” and Buonomo’s cap says “S.”
Even in Somerville, the hack community was somewhat taken aback by who Buonomo decided to rip off. See, when Buonomo was an alderman, the mayor was Gene Brune. Buonomo was elected county register of probate, and Brune became the register of deeds. They just moved their base of operations two miles south, from Highland Ave. to East Cambridge.
And then, of all the people Buonomo could have stolen from, he picks his old hack associate from what we used to call the All-American City. Is there no honor … ?
Now his job’s gone, his pension’s gone, even his three hots and a cot at the Billerica House of Correction are gone. At the age of 62, John Buonomo may finally have to go out and get a real job. You do understand he never worked a day in his life.
As your former neighbor and constituent, John, I can tell you, you haven’t missed a thing.
(surveillance video: here )