Hey there, and thanks for stopping by. Thing is, I don’t live here anymore.

I’ve packed everything up and moved to paulmcmorrow.com. It’s nice over there – there’s loose talk, lots of white space, big pictures I’m using without permission, stuff like that.

In fact, it’s got pretty much everything that’s over here, except that it’ll keep getting updated with bloggy blog stuff. This one won’t. So reset your RSS feed settings and come on over!

[image via]

Wondering what to do with all that free money the government is tossing at you? Keep your coinage away from Sears (no, seriously, stay the f away from that place). Instead, stimulate the economy of your nearest newsstand and grab yourself a copy of the newest Boston magazine. It features a wicked comprehensive look at how power in Boston functions, including up-close looks at Mayor Tom Menino’s fearsome machine, power-schmoozers Jan Saragoni and Michael Goldman, and the university-slaying Beacon Hill Civic Association, along with some other stories by some other people. You also get a shakily-democratic approach to ranking the comparative powerfulness of Boston’s many power mongers. Pale journalists everywhere are absolutely in love with the thing. Maybe that’s because it’s an awesome read and way cheaper than this awful shirt. Get yours today!

A few changes of note around the old Rancho de TK TK. First off, this blog’s face has undergone minor reconstructive surgery, and unlike some people, I think we came out the other side looking better.

I’ve dumped Chris Pearson’s PressRow for his Cutline theme, and am really happy with the results. I think the new design feels more unified and less distracting than the old one. It also accommodates image headers on individual posts much better than the old one, which should really allow me to break up the look and feel of all those Hill and the Hall cross-posts.

If everything proves sufficiently usable and easy on the eyes, the next step will be getting paulmcmorrow.com hosted, and hauling this show from WordPress.com over to WordPress.org. The endgame here is, obviously, a heavy paper stock business card with a halfway professional-looking URL on it. And maybe a two-tone picture of the Golden Dome. We’ll see.

I’ve also been able to sprinkle some new content throughout the clip archives. Old stories about Mitt Romney being a bastard, kids on bicycles, art museum security guards and state IT policy join a wicked awesome new interview with Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, the homebrewing superstar behind Denmark’s Mikkeller brewing company.

Unrelated but noteworthy: The new Daytrotter session from Ezra Furman and the Harpoons? Awesome stuff.

(Cross-posted from the mighty mighty Boston Daily)

It’s budget season on Beacon Hill again. And it’s apt that it should coincide, roughly, with the run-up to area colleges’ final exams. After a semester of lying around and drinking, the legislature now has to pull a week of harried all-nighters before it can knock off work for the summer.

In broad strokes, this year’s House budget is big but not unduly wicked big, is unkind to out of state corporations, hates smokers, and offers, in Speaker Sal DiMasi’s own estimation, “nothing spectacular about any new initiative.” But you already knew that already.

So, in the interest of wrapping up the week with some semi-original reporting, here’s a few of the more interesting budget skirmishes to keep an eye on in the upcoming weeks.

First, does anybody remember how badly Gov. Deval Patrick caught hell last year for cutting Shannon grant money to pay for his 1,000 new cops campaign pledge? He couldn’t have done worse if he’d gunned down Chiara Levin himself. Luckily, the House rode to the rescue and restored the critical funds in its own budget.

So this year, Patrick, being a good governor and wanting to learn from his mistakes, not only ensured that the grants are in his budget, but he crows about “bringing funding for the program to its highest level ever.” And what does the House do? It tosses those increases in the garbage. Thanks for playing. Try again next year.

Open government advocates and reporters who like to see legislators’ fingerprints on budget amendments will have to wait ’til next year, too. The House has approved its normal measures for railroading the budget through to completion from behind closed doors. As usual, a motley coalition of Republicans and cranks tried to open budget debate procedures to sunshine, and, as usual, they were overwhelmingly defeated.

When Reps begin debating the budget next week, they won’t be doing it from the floor. Rather, when they cast votes, they’ll be voting on a raft of consolidated amendments that will be pre-screened and bundled by leadership, and that members will have had a half hour to review.

The closed-door process, Brian Wallace told us, “doesn’t shine with the lobbyists or the media,” but it keeps the bottom line from ballooning out of control.

Still, on Tuesday, Minority Leader Brad Jones warned that this year’s rules have been constructed “to take a little more power from members,” because, “You will have two days to get the budget and file amendments and Ways and Means will have nine days to figure out how to tell you ‘No.’” He also suggested that the tightly-controlled process was an effort, “to protect the members from themselves.”

The Republican leader’s criticism sparked one of the year’s most excellent floor exchanges. Angelo Scaccia, chair of the House rules committee, shot over Jones, “Mr. Speaker, that’s what the order did last year. But we have some of the most creative minds that this Commonwealth has ever seen in the Legislature.”

“So the gentleman is saying the mission of the order is to stifle creativity among the members?” Jones asked. “I’m shocked that the gentleman would want to stifle creativity.”

“Oh how he twists my words,” Scaccia replied. “Oh, what a twister. Never would I want to stifle creativity in this body. Mr. Speaker, does it say ’stupid’ across my forehead? … Maybe subterfuge is a better word than creativity.”

Later in the debate, Paul Casey landed one of the nastier (not to mention unprovoked) shots at Mayor Menino we’ve seen in a while, when he seemed to suggest that Scaccia’s desire to limit debate stemmed from his habit of breakfasting with Hizzoner:

“The gentleman would like to leave the discretion up to the leadership. What about the membership? The power of the chair, the power of the speaker is in the collective body. I understand the good gentleman from Readville understands a certain power in Boston that is unilateral. [But] we are a collective body.”

Good times.

The House also extinguished any lingering hopes that casino proponents had of sneaking expanded gambling through the back door when it barred all gaming-related amendments from the budget. So David Flynn will have to wait just a little while for that racino vote he’s been promised. It’ll be coming later. As will Christmas.

It’s been interesting to watch the official reaction from the governor’s office to the House’s proposals. Back in February, DiMasi took to Boston’s pages and scolded Patrick for finding defeat in partial legislative victories. “He needs to understand that when he wants 200 police officers and he gets 100, that’s a success,” the speaker told me. “That’s not a failure. That’s government. It’s all compromise. I didn’t get everything I wanted in the energy bill, but we accomplished a great energy bill. I worked with him on that bill for 11 months to change the things that he wanted. I didn’t go around saying, ‘How come you didn’t agree with my energy bill six months ago?’ I claimed victory, didn’t I? That’s it. That’s a learning process.”

Fast-forward a few months. The governor’s signature public safety and education initiatives have been slashed, victims of competing ambitions and austerity. Yet Patrick’s chief budget writer, Leslie Kirwan, is telling the Globe that the administration sees “a lot to like in this budget” because “They’ve adopted many of the reforms that the governor initiated.” And then House leadership turns around and thanks Patrick for his magnanimity.

Clearly, this cannot stand. WE DEMAND THAT YOU BATTLE FOR OUR AMUSEMENT. Thank you.

Finally, the Hill and the Hall would like to congratulate our governor – a man who ran against government by photo-op and press release – on surviving the hairiest photo-op of his young administration.

Dressed in a green jacket, hat, jeans and waders, Patrick ventured into the waters of Jamaica Pond, a sizable fish (described by one onlooker as “a big [f’er]”) in his arms. “Say goodbye!” he chirped, and the fish did, struggling to leap out of the governor’s clutches and, in all likelihood, devour a nearby child. It was, thankfully, unsuccessful, as Patrick applied some sort of kung-fu death grip that subdued the creature. “That’s me hugging a fish,” Patrick joked, before setting the monster loose.

City Councilor John Tobin, who was on the scene but not outfitted in traditional park ranger’s wardrobe, had this advice for any other politicians looking to dump fish into the Commonwealth’s waterways this spring: “Be prepared,” the always-dapper politician suggested. “When touching nature and stocking a pond, always come in leather dress shoes, and a suit and tie.”

Wire services contributed to this report.

But, really, is there any other kind of news floating out of Morrissey Boulevard these days? The headlines coming out of the New York Times Company’s first quarter earnings call have focused on the company’s surprising $335,000 loss, but the figures detailed in the call seem to be especially grim for the Globe.

Ad revenue at the Times Co.’s New England media group – the crumbling tenement that houses the Globe and the T&G – tumbled another 16.3%. As usual, that’s a harder fall than the company as a whole, which saw ad revenue decline an unprecedented 10.6%.

The New England unit has been a perennial drag on Times Co. earnings – to the point where the Globe’s parents reportedly couldn’t even unload it if they wanted to, because it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Multiple rounds of buyouts and the growth of Boston.com haven’t been able to keep up with a precipitous decline in, uh, pretty much everything: financial services, telecommunication, automotive, travel, and retail. All three classifieds sectors – jobs, real estate, and automotive – were down as well.

The question is, is there anybody left over there to fire, buy out or ship off to India? Because, from the outside, that stone looks pretty dry as it is.

Or, barring that, at least have the bums pay for shenanigans out of their own pockets. We’re inching closer to the latter, as the legislature advanced a bill yesterday that would make politicians and other public board members personally culpable for violations of the state’s Open Meeting Law. As things stand now, pols break the law, and when the get caught and fined, taxpayers foot the bill.

How eager is government to reform government? I first wrote about this bill way back in June, 2007. (See for yourself!) It had had a hearing the previous week, and was originally filed back in January of last year. And then it sat and sat some more. Most bills had to either be reported out of committee by the first week of April or die until next session; this one got a three-week extension, and beat out its new deadline for action by a whole day.

By comparison, Therese Murray’s health care reform-reform bill was filed six weeks ago, and it’s already cleared the Senate.

Deval Patrick’s second Times appearance in a month is shorter than his first (an A1 job in which the nation’s paper of record wondered how the F things on Beacon Hill could’ve gone so bad so quickly, and in which the governor allowed himself to be quoted as labeling Sal DiMasi as “part of what we ran against” on the morning of this hug-tastic press conference), but it’s got to be no easier to swallow.

The paper notes, quickly and glibly enough, that the state’s universal health care law is rapidly flying off the budgetary rails. The Times rode shotgun during the state’s first car wreck, and from the looks of things, it appears to be preparing for the eventuality of an encore.

(Cross-posted, belatedly, from Boston Daily)

Let’s start by picking on Hizzoner. Nothing gets the natives riled up like parking tickets, so Mayor Tom Menino’s $2.42 billion FY09 budget, which includes $13 million in new parking fines, is sure to be the only thing anybody in Boston ever talks about for the rest of time. Let the schools close; we demand parking amnesty now!

But seriously, the notion that the mayor is sewing great harm by balancing Boston’s budget on the backs of people who can’t manage to avoid parking in front of fire hydrants, rather than slogging through a nasty override fight, is about as dumb as the notion that kids wouldn’t be killing each other if it weren’t for these infernal T-shirts and video games. Gotta love this town.

In other City Hall news, the people who work inside City Hall still suck, just like they always have.

Are your civic outrage juices flowing? If so, please send some money to Michael Flaherty. The guy is really gonna need it. He’s not even officially in the mayor’s race yet, and it already appears that his fundraising base might be in danger of drying up.

Flaherty took in a little over $60,000 during the year’s first three months. Pocket change. He spent nearly $43,000 of it, and has around $450,000 in cash-on-hand. That’s in keeping with his 2007 fundraising patterns, when he didn’t really start raising money until May, taking in the bulk in the fall.

A look at Mayor Menino’s finances should throw a wicked scare into the Southie city councilor. The mayor has been raising money at a furious pace this year. He ended 2007 with over $973,000 in the bank, and through the end of March, had added $282,569 to that total. He has spent twice what Flaherty has – $86,000 – but has also socked away $650,000 in savings, investing in CDs and money market accounts.

Flaherty pounced on the 311 and parking ticket stories in this week’s papers, issuing a pair of press releases blasting the administration’s ineffectiveness. He has also been an outspoken (occasionally shouting and red-faced) opponent of towing. This suggests he may try to run a populist, nuts and bolts campaign, and try to out-mechanic the urban mechanic.

There’s no way Flaherty outspends Menino in this race. The mayor out-gunned him three to one last year, and that was during a City Council election. But it’s critical that he get whatever receipts he can this year, because once he is officially in this race, the pool of saps willing to cross the mayor and give money to him will only get smaller. (This is also one reason why observers believe Flaherty won’t, and can’t, declare his candidacy until after Labor Day.)

It seemed that if Dianne Wilkerson couldn’t lose last year – a year in which the powerful but embattled state senator couldn’t manage to wring 300 good signatures out of her sprawling district, and had to wage a high-wire write-in campaign against a two-headed Diaz monster and an old cop. All that self-destruction, the money troubles, the staggering sense of entitlement conveyed by the signature fiasco – and none of it seemed to matter. The woman was invincible.

Invincibility isn’t protecting her, though. Wilkerson looks to have two challengers this fall. JP’s Sonia Chang-Diaz is once again gunning for Wilkerson in September’s Democratic primary. An independent candidate, William Theodore Leonard, will sail into November’s election. That’s assuming, of course, that everyone involved can get signatures in by the end of this month. It shouldn’t be a significant hurdle, but for some reason, it is.

A third would-be challenger, Robert Patton-Spruill, pulled nomination papers for the seat but recently decided to shut down his nascent campaign and go to work for Chang-Diaz.

The Roxbury filmmaker (he shot Tim Murray’s campaign commercials, and his Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome debuts this month at the Independent Film Fest) began gathering signatures and says his campaign could’ve been competitive, but backed out when he decided he’d be “better off using my skills behind the scenes.” And he maintains that, with more time to organize this time around, the Chang-Diaz campaign can do more than just throw a scare into the eight-term senator.

In Jamaica Plain, Patton-Spruill says Wilkerson “has issues.” He also insists that “We can be strongly competitive in Roxbury.” They’ll have to be; Chang-Diaz got rolled on Wilkerson’s turf two years ago, and it cost her the race. “African-Americans of my generation are looking for change,” Patton-Spruill says. “They’re upset at the current black leadership on Beacon Hill. The whole country is looking for new youthful voices.”

That’s some Deval Patrick Just Words stuff right there, and it’ll be fascinating to see if a netroots organizational machine can be deployed with any success at the ward level. Patton-Spruill will be building an online broadband channel for Chang-Diaz, and loading it with long-form videos – “on demand” campaigning to “show the real Sonia” and help fuel shoeleather politics.

For this campaign to work, Chang-Diaz has to make the conversation about youth, hope, change and the like. Because, otherwise, commentators will look to the 2006 results and frame the election as a race about skin color, class, and neighborhood division. And that’s certainly not a conversation many people are eager to have anytime soon.

Neither woman has to file paperwork with OCPF until the fall, so until then, we’ll all have to be content with trolling through their 2007 off-year campaign finance reports.

One big difference: Wilkerson blew through nearly $34,000 in a non-election year by spending on staffing, fundraising, phones, food, and airfare. Chang-Diaz spent $618.

The off-year donor lists are interesting as well. Chang-Diaz got money from big names like Barbara Lee, former Menino aide Howard Leibowitz, and Micho Spring in 2007. Wilkerson received support from a buttload of labor unions, as well as Bruce Bolling, John Nucci, Maura Hennigan, lobbyist and former House Speaker Charlie Flaherty, Angela Menino, Susan Passoni, BRA planner Muhammad Ali-Salaam, Jerry Rappaport, Jr., Chris Iannella, and two members of the troubled Winn clan.

The milk spilled during yesterday’s big Pulitzer announcements has barely dried, the celebratory cookie crumbs have scarcely been swept up by some migrant worker, and already, the newspaper industry’s contact high has vanished. That’s because we’re still all gonna die. And not only are newspapers disintegrating before our very eyes, but the act of committing original, important journalism is furthering papers’ downfall. So says the savior of all media, Nick Denton.

And if you buy that argument, we’ve got a hot virtual-slave labor gig you should totally check out.

Denton, in a post that certainly appears to have topped his self-imposed 200-word target, ripped the awards as “self-congratulating” and “symptomatic of the decline of the newspaper industry.”

[N]ewspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet. Pulitzer-winning journalism will win Pulitzers; it won’t save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines in advertising revenue.

What’s more, the steaming douche-tard holds up British dailies, which “[lack] much of the worthy reporting that wins Pulitzers,” as objects for emulation. His advice: Regain readership by producing less newsworthy news.

This is the opposite of what needs to happen, obviously. Papers don’t win, or chase, Pulitzers entirely for the sake of editors’ egos. Instead, the awards recognize the type of reporting that papers have to do more of, not less, to survive – aggressive, unique, enterprising investigations and commentary that have broad social and political ramifications. They reinforce the newspaper as being more than a (failing) business, but also public good. And they’re a reminder that, every once in a while, there’s more to life than web stats and bargain-basement scat.

…but, if you’ve tried to either land or hold on to a job in news any time this century, you already knew that. But what about the details! They’re pouring in all the time. So here’s a few slightly belated thoughts on Eric Alterman’s recent news business obituary, before it disappears forever from the New Yorker’s front page for all eternity.

Reilly’s already hit this first bit, but it bears repeating: Damn, this is one restrained bit of reporting. For anyone, really, but especially for Alterman, who’s… yeah, you know. The fact that Alterman didn’t heap even a bit of blame for the newspaper industry’s current woes on right-wing vampires is, well, jaw dropping. Kid should get an award for this fact alone.

Still, while the reporting is solid and nuanced and restrained and all, the conclusions Alterman draws from his reporting are terrifying.

Take, for instance, the fact that newspaper companies are getting hammered on Wall Street. That’s not news to anybody. But it also doesn’t mean that publicly traded papers are worthless because traders say they are, nor does it mean that these papers will never be profitable. All it does mean that they are highly unlikely, in the foreseeable future, to post the kind of robust growth that stockholders rightly demand. So the solution isn’t to abandon papers altogether, but to find a different business model, built on nonprofit mechanisms and private owners comfortable with lower than usual rates of return on their money.

Then there’s the argument that the liberal blogosphere’s ability to “bypass the big media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded community” represents “genuinely democratic discourse,” since, “Thanks to the Web, we can all join in a Deweyan debate on Presidents, policies, and proposals.”

Think about that for a second. These conversations are Deweyan, are genuinely democratic, because they’re taking place “within a like-minded community.” That is, within a self-congratulatory echo chamber full of chimps screeching in unison and throwing handfuls of muck at each other for lack of anything better to do. The liberal blogs Alterman cites may mobilize bodies and generate noise, but the very fact that they’re like-minded – often, militantly so – doesn’t mean that they fuel “genuinely democratic discourse.” It just means that the blogs’ readers don’t have to talk to themselves to hear themselves talk.

Alterman does call out Arianna Huffington for failing to address the “parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers.” But he seems to shrug off the consequences of the parasites will wreak on their hosts:

[W]e are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

Uh, yeah. And, no thanks. Equally terrifying is Alterman allowing Huffington to argue that “wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting” can pick up the slack when the big and medium-sized papers fold, because “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom.”

The fact is, the biggest, most important stories newspapers report on – the type of stories that newspapers exist to cover in the first place – can’t be done by anyone but nonpartisan professionals with significant resources behind them. Hyperlocal blogs may be able to cover town politics just fine, but if it weren’t for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, and the paper’s significant legal budget, Cardinal Law wouldn’t be on Roman vacation right now, and BC wouldn’t be terrorizing its neighbors. That’s one story, and a whole host of significant ramifications.

The implications are greater on a national and international scale. Imagine what Bush-bashing would sound like without Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretaps, SWIFT banking, or signing statements. Among many, many others. Imagine what Alterman’s national narrative looks like without that agreed-upon set of facts. It ain’t pretty. Alterman mentions that “brazenly partisan newspapers” got along just fine in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; what’s not mentioned are the staggering levels of political and economic corruption that flourished under the partisan press.

So the answer isn’t to shrug off the death of newspapers as reporting organs (versus newspapers as ink-stained dead trees) while shrugging off the supremacy of the partisan internet, but to figure out, at all costs, how to stave off that death in the first place. The alternative isn’t anything any of us should want to see.