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Former Gov. Mitt Romney, a likely GOP presidential candidate for 2012, told supporters he won’t announce his candidacy before the end of the year — but political analysts said yesterday the discussion is the strongest indicator yet that he’ll run. “We know who is running, they’re just doing everything but coming out and saying so,” said Andy Smith, director of the Political Center at the University of New Hampshire. Romney held a conference call with 245 of his top supporters Thursday and told them that unlike his failed 2008 run, he won’t be announcing until later in the cycle, according...

HAVERHILL -- Former Massachusetts Turnpike chairman Matthew Amorello failed to appear in court today to face drunken driving charges, leading a Haverhill District Court judge to issue a default warrant for the man who once oversaw one of the largest public works projects in the state's history. A court official told Haverhill District Court Judge Stephen Abany this morning that Amorello is currently hospitalized at the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. The reason for his hospitalization was not specified in court. However, a spokeswoman said in a telephone interview that Amorello is not listed in the hospital's patient database....

The North Shore Connector is No. 3 in the nation among stimulus-funded projects that waste taxpayer money, two Republican senators say. In a report released Tuesday, Oklahoma's Tom Coburn and Arizona's John McCain said the $528.8 million light-rail extension beneath the Allegheny River to bring T riders to destinations such as PNC Park and Heinz Field is an example of stimulus dollars spent to fund projects with "questionable goals," or those that "are being mismanaged or were poorly planned." The "Summertime Blues" report, their third in a series, identifies 100 projects throughout the country that received money from the $787...

WASHINGTON – Sen. Scott Brown says he thinks former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is qualified to be president but right now he's supporting former Gov. Mitt Romney for the 2012 Republican nomination. As for his own ambitions, he say "absolutely in 2012" he's ruling out any run for the presidency. And in an interview broadcast Friday on NBC, Brown said "I'm not even going to jump" at a question about whether he would seek the presidency.

The Massachusetts Republican Party has nominated the most extreme pro-homosexual, anti-family candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor ever to run as Republicans for a state's top offices. Predictably, the results were greeted by cheers in homosexual blogs and websites across the country. The delegates to the Massachusetts State Republican Convention last Saturday overwhelmingly nominated Charlie Baker for Governor and his hand-picked running mate Richard Tisei for Lt. Governor. As some observers put it, the RINO takeover of the Massachusetts Republican party is now complete. Vast numbers of social conservatives essentially sold out their principles in favor of the party establishment's...

Here is video of Bill O'Reilly interviewing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney last night, where he pressed him hard on what he called the "fiscal disaster" of RomneyCare. Romney said it is essentially costing what they expected it to cost. He also claimed the plan takes people who had no health care and gives them a chance to purchase private, market-based health care. Romney argued that RomneyCare differs from ObamaCare in that it is a state-based solution rather than a Federal Program! He finally admitted that his plan in Massachusetts has NOT brought health care costs down, and he said...

America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation — rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends. He promised better; we deserved better. He calls his accomplishment “historic” — in this he is correct, although not for the reason he intends. Rather, it is an historic usurpation of the legislative process — he unleashed the nuclear option, enlisted not a single Republican vote in...

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In a vacuum there’s nothing newsy about this, but 2012 isn’t a vacuum. We’ve talked before about the developing narrative: Palin vs. anti-Palin, “true conservatives” vs. centrists, blue-collar vs. white-collar, and … populists vs. “elitists.” With Beck having brought down the house at CPAC and the GOP in the grip of tea party fee-vah, why oh why would a potential nominee spritz cold water on populism? Branding, dear boy, branding: As Mitt Romney sets out this week to promote his new book, “No Apology,’’ he is also auditioning for a rapidly disappearing role in American politics: a politician who is...

A top Massachusetts lawmaker is calling for a review of pedestrian handrails in Big Dig tunnels that have been connected to the deaths of seven people, including a state trooper. Most were dismembered.

Thus prompting the question: How uncool did he used to be? "He’s changed, he’s changed. You know, he’s actually — before he was an outsider coming in and he was, you know, kind of, you know, stiff. But he’s actually, like, funny, he’s like — when he was at my events he was cracking jokes, when we were on the bus — I was like, who is this guy? He’s really kind of, I think, settled into his role kind of being the elder statesman of the party and everything he went through as president. It’s kind of, and once...

(snip) The long-odds contender for the right to wage an up-hill fight against Teddy Kennedy bases his campaign on something rare among current Republican office-seekers: a positive, innovative and daring proposal. Tuesday in historic Faneuil Hall, at the fourth debate between the two contestants in the Sept. 20 GOP primary, heavily favored Mitt Romney mixed Republican boilerplate with me-too liberalism ("Sometimes I'll vote with Ted Kennedy"). His opponent, John Lakian, opened by commenting that Romney, in emphasizing crime and welfare, did "the traditional things that politicians do." (snip) When other Republican stars also proved reticent, the 47-year-old millionaire business-consultant son...

Reversing his previously stated belief that none of the Republican candidates for the GOP presidential nomination have all three legs of the conservative stool, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners Monday that Mitt Romney is indeed a three-leg conservative. Describing the three legs as "national security/foreign policy, the social conservatives, and the fiscal conservatives," Rush said, "The social conservatives are the cultural people. The fiscal conservatives are the economic crowd: low taxes, smaller government, get out of the way... The foreign policy crowd is obviously what it is. I don't think there's anybody on our side who doesn't care about national...

Recently, I asked a GOP consultant, who must remain nameless here, this question: Who advises Sarah Palin? His answer: No one. Really? I asked. Yes, he said, really.

The national health care reform debate is far from settled, but one of the casualties is already clear: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Three years ago, Romney was heralded for his innovative effort to institute near-universal health care in his state. But now that the issue has emerged as a partisan fault line and the Massachusetts plan has provided some guidance for Democratic reform efforts, Romney finds himself bruised and on the defensive as the GOP rallies around opposition to President Barack Obama’s plans. When Romney came to Washington last week to speak to social conservative activists at the annual...

BOSTON, MA—Six former managers of Aggregate Industries N.E., Inc.’s concrete division, the largest asphalt and concrete supply company in New England, were convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States by a jury in U.S. District Court in Boston late yesterday. Acting United States Attorney Michael K. Loucks; Theodore L. Doherty III, Special Agent in Charge of the New England Regional Office of the United States Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General; Warren T. Bamford, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation - Boston Field Division; and Colonel Mark Delaney, Superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police...

BOSTON (AP) — Two former managers of a Big Dig contractor pleaded guilty Wednesday to being part of a conspiracy to deliver substandard concrete to the massive highway project. Six former managers of Aggregate Industries NE Inc. were indicted in 2006 on charges they falsified records to hide the inferior quality of more than 5,000 truckloads of concrete. They were accused of recycling concrete that was too old or already rejected by inspectors and in some cases double-billing for the loads.

New Jersey officials have been planning the next train tunnel under the Hudson River for so long that it is already on its third name. This month, work is scheduled to begin on the Mass Transit Tunnel — formerly known as the Trans-Hudson Express and, before that, Access to the Region’s Core — more than 15 years after it was conceived. A ceremonial groundbreaking was set for Monday alongside a highway in North Bergen, N.J., the site of the first small piece of what could be the biggest transit project in the country. The tunnel, which is expected to take...

A group of lawyers is trying to stage a modern-day Boston Tea Party against what they see as unfair Massachusetts Turnpike tolls. Attorney Jan Schlichtmann...is leading a group arguing Massachusetts has been acting illegally by using money from the east-west Turnpike to pay debts for the north-south Big Dig project. Schlichtmann and the others argue the tolls amount to a user fee that can only be used to maintain the roadway on which they were incurred