There has been another nationwide search, and let’s go right to the magic number: $103,000.
That’s the salary for former state Rep. John Quinn. He retired from elective politics last year due to ill health — the voters got sick of him. But you can’t keep a good hack down, and now he’s got a new job, a newly created position in fact.
Would you care to guess if it’s the public or the Dreaded Private Sector?
Yes, you guessed it. He is going to work, if you can call it that, for UMass-Dartmouth, as the “director of graduate public service.”
In the Legislature, Quinn was a strong proponent of the massive boondoggle known as the UMass School of Law, which was created as a South Coast hack holding pen out of the ashes of a bust-out private law school.
And now the law school’s big backer, who is also by the way the son of a judge, gets a brand-new six-figure job doing, well, nothing.
The extraordinarily necessary job was created as part of the school’s “civic engagement expansion.”
As I said, he’ll be doing nothing. He ran last year for Bristol County sheriff against the GOP incumbent Tom Hodgson, but it was not to be. The story about Quinn’s new job (as opposed to work) was broken Friday in the Fall River Herald News, and one of the readers perfectly summed up this latest hiring in the hack-erama:
“Hodgson won the election, Quinn won the lottery.”
There’s an old rule of thumb. Anyone who serves more than three terms in the Legislature is almost certainly unemployable in any real job. Quinn served 17 years. Now he can really fatten up that pension of his.
Do you suppose in the course of his arduous academic duties he’ll run in to former Sen. Joan Menard, the newly appointed $120,000-a-year “acting vice president” at Bristol Community College? Joanie is 75 years young. Her daughter makes $110,000 a year as an acting clerk-magistrate.
Perhaps you saw this week that the president of the Mass. state Senate, Therese Murray, has decided that there’s way too much waste in state government. Last year the 18-year incumbent outspent her Republican opponent 10-1 and eked out a 52-48 percent win. This latest gag of hers just proves she’s running for re-election . . . as Barbara Anderson.
Waste, fraud and abuse. Where do you start, Madame President? How about with the drivers for politicians, or does that one hit a little too close to home?
What about all those do-nothing agencies — the regional planning councils. Or the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Fire the staff and just leave a rubber stamp in a drawer somewhere and let the judges write their own whitewashes.
Obviously no one’s serious about any of this “reform.” Quinn, like Menard before him, takes a hit or two in the papers and then fades into the hackerama. Forgotten but not gone. Defeat, where is thy sting?
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1334613
Thanks RR, Howie does a great job blasting all the hack corruption! It’s just unbelievable how these crooks just keep doing this and the sheep just keep voting them into office. Mass is a prime example of the failure of Democracy, what happened to our Republic?