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Stonewall Sal

The Globe: DiMasi refuses to provide records:

House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi is refusing to comply with a demand for records from the state Ethics Commission in its conflict-of-interest investigation, leading to a secretive legal showdown that has yet to be resolved, according to officials familiar with the matter.

In this post-Wilkerson world in which we live, Mike Ball doesn't get it:

Contemporary with Sen. Dianne Wilkerson's protracted disgrace — and her unwillingness to live in the same world of laws and consequences as most of us — Salvatore F. DiMasi is likely blowing up his on scandal in the making.

The Outraged Liberal wonders if DiMasi really has something to hide in the case involving former DiMasi confidante Richard Vitale and the way Cognos (now part of IBM) got a state software contract:

... The circumstantial evidence surrounding DiMasi, Vitale and the software manufacturer Cognos is not pretty and needs to be properly sorted out. But that can't happen when principals decline to provide the material investigators say they need to do their job. ...

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Comments

When politicians exhibit such behavior is usually a strong indicator of the need to remove them from office.

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which Massachusetts really doesn't have at the moment. The Republican Party here is in terminal decline. It needs to be replaced by a new party that is not associated with divisive right-wing social issues, and concentrates instead on fiscal responsibility.

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I know almost as many Libertarians as I do Republicans and the funny thing is the Republicans I do know admit to being Libertarians at heart, but the Libertarians freak out if I call them Republican.

Ive always felt that the Libertarian party, or an offshoot thereof is the only right of center party that could possibly take hold in our state. I think its more likely that at some point the left wing will peel off the Democratic party and form their own group or at the very least be active as a loosely affiliated group of independants.

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We need a vote of no confidence or recall election available to us for situations like this. Don't want to hand over your dirty laundry to the Ethics Commission? No problem, we, the people, can get rid of you anyways.

The reason these guys keep acting like they can get away with nonsense like this is because they can. Up until recently, civility and good behavior were qualities demanded of a politician and it kept them more responsive to the demands of a system of checks and balances because nobody wanted to be the one to act up first. Bush basically blew this gentleman's agreement out of the water. If he didn't have a legal obligation to answer to the overseers, he wouldn't. Politicians on all levels have seen the lack of repercussions for acting out as such and now we have the situation we're in now. DiMasi doesn't want to give up any information to the Ethics Commission to hang himself with? Who's going to make him?

They should take him to court, but no politician wants to give the court its rightful powers over them because you never know when it'll come back to haunt you when someone else wants to take you to court and use your own case as precedent against you. The courts have become almost a vestigial organ of the checks and balances in this country's political structure lately. When they do inject themselves where they belong, they get labeled as "activists" and shunned.

So, if the courts aren't going to be used or be able to do anything against the other two branches and the rules let guys like DiMasi sit on his papers without repercussion, it's time for the people to regain the upper hand against their elected officials. Recall elections/no confidence votes are the answer. Now that would be a ballot question worth its weight in words.

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Up until recently, civility and good behavior were qualities demanded of a politician and it kept them more responsive to the demands of a system of checks and balances because nobody wanted to be the one to act up first. Bush basically blew this gentleman's agreement out of the water. If he didn't have a legal obligation to answer to the overseers, he wouldn't. Politicians on all levels have seen the lack of repercussions for acting out as such and now we have the situation we're in now.

I beg to differ. Look at your political history and you will see bad behavior that makes our modern stuff look silly. So you heard a story about some State Senator getting drunk at a bar across from the State House? How about when they used to ALL get drunk IN the chamber no less. Of yes secrets, if I recall Americans didnt know the CIA existed at one point, and the same goes for the NSA. Bush did what? Blew what out of the water? If I recall Nixon had a list of people he was trying to ruin. JFK slept with more women in one week then Clinton did his whole time in office. Dianne Wilkerson got ya down, lets take a trip to old school Chicago where little miss Diane would have been the most innocent of the bunch.

I am always for reform and will support reform. I am also all for exposing people when they lie and cheat in the State House but I find it hilarious that people act like this is all something new. We live in one of the most open times in our governmental history which is why we can even find out these problems to begin with, politicians of the past seemed above it all because they were able to keep you away from the books. By all means clean up the system, but lets not glamorize the past...

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I didn't mean to suggest that we didn't have nefarious politicians in the past. You can probably take everything you pointed out above and it would be a footnote compared to some of what down in Chicago over the years past. What I meant by civility and good behavior was for *after* they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Sure, they might not have been caught in time as often in the past and sure, they might have gotten away with tons that were never caught. But when they were caught, justice usually worked out in the end without a lot of stalling, etc. That's why we don't yet have these sorts of safeguards in place: because we never needed them before as the politician would accept the repercussions of his action and bow out with some dignity. The stonewalling and lying and spinning are far more recent and while Bush isn't the pioneer of these things, he's far and above his predecessors as a savant of these sleaze tactics for avoiding retribution for his unethical actions. The fact that he has been the head politician and continued to abuse the good faith of the process has just emboldened every other low-life politician to follow in his footsteps. Nobody admits to their failures and seeks redemption or a quick exit any more. It's always fight the charges, silence the overseers, and cover your critics in mud until the people/press move on to a new shiny bauble.

If their positions were far more tenuous, they would be much quicker to acknowledge their civility when we've discovered that they've gone down the wrong path.

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doing so hot either. While Bush deserves blame for lots of things, blazing any kinds of trails in American politics shouldn't be one of them. You give him too much credit. If people want to demonize GW or refuse to accept culpability by Lady Dianne, that's their right, we do get the government we deserve. Facts to ponder:
1. Two states have a real estate trust system that allows for anonymous ownership, IL and MA, (Chicago and Boston politics.)
2. MBTA real estate operations were outsourced a few years ago to a private firm, "Transit Realty".
3. Chicago Transit Authority just voted to privatize THEIR real estate operations. The contract went to Transit Realty.
Not a whole lot of difference between Chi-Town and Beantown, other than scale.
4. Sen. Charles Sumner got a statue in front of the State House, but it took getting his brains beaten out to do it. Righteous folks usually have to settle for the respect of the person in the mirror. The world, in the main, is populated by idiot ingrates.

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