Mike Dukakis

Our roving UHub photographer assures us that's Mike Dukakis getting onto a crowded Green Line trolley at Longwood this morning - just like he used to do when he was governor.

Globe: In supporting Khazei, the Globe believes that this state’s future depends on new ideas.

Dukakis: It is his courage and his conviction on the important issues of the time that impress me most of all.

At least on days when he has to get from downtown to Northeastern, where he teaches a class. Rhea Becker reports on an encounter with the ex-gov - who still picks up litter.

Mike Dukakis, who knows something about the Green Line, cannot believe the snail's pace of the Green Line extension through Somerville and Medford and the reconstruction of the Kenmore Square bus stop:

... In Boston we're in our fifth year of reconstructing Kenmore Square. It's a joke. It’s absurd. They're talking about six years to extend the Green line from Lechmere through Somerville to Tufts on existing railway. Chinese and Irish immigrants were laying four miles of railway a day in 1867.

He also doesn't think much of the Perpetual Kenmore Busway Project. Also click the link to see his thoughts on rebuilding America (and why Amtrak would today be a great service, if only he'd been elected president).

Via CommonWealth Unbound.

Gienna recounts how she came by to call Mike Dukakis an ass - under her breath, granted - on a flight back from San Francisco.

Of course he did. Charley on the MTA interviews our former governor and public-transportation backer:

Former Gov. Mike Dukakis arrived in Denver last night on an Amtrak train, along with two grandkids. "I played nineteen games of Candy Land on the train," Dukakis said. So it seemed natural to ask Dukakis about some train/transit issues. ...

But not on Beacon Street or Harvard Avenue. In Los Angeles.

Via John Daley.

Mike Dukakis wows Charlie on the MTA at a confab last evening involving former governors talking about Massachusetts:

... He's still got his fastball -- and it's a Mariano Rivera cutter that cleaves bats in two.

Dukakis couldn't make his contempt for the current governor's reign any more obvious: He tweaked Romney for his Iraq trip; and a back-and-forth with Cellucci on housing yielded this zinger:

CELLUCCI: The problem is zoning and building codes --
DUKAKIS (muttering): The problem's in Iraq. ...

Matt Margolis attended as well, and allows as how, yes, Dukakis was the best of the bunch, although he also found Jane Swift particularly well spoken.