If only Gov. Charlie Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn “Pay to Play” Polito were as easy to get rid of as their hack $130,000-a-year minion, Driftin’ Dave Ismay.
Is there anything in Maskachusetts that Baker and Polito can’t screw up?
Here are some headlines just in from the administration run by the man Joe Biden calls “Charlie Parker”:
UMass Amherst tells employed students not to go to work amid coronavirus upsurge.
27,000 drunken drivers in MA may be eligible to contest their convictions.
Gov. calls 1,200 wasted vaccines ‘tremendous loss.’
Wife of MSP sergeant accused of assault had filed harassment complaint against girlfriend.
And that’s just a very partial list of state government’s fiascoes, from a single day.
Let’s start with the vaccination rollout disaster, which is part of the Parker-Polito administration’s record of incompetent overreaction to a seasonal virus.
I got this email Wednesday night from a guy named Bill:
“I brought my elderly mom to get her COVID shot tonight in the cold, dark, icy weather. My brother set up the appointment.
“Of course we get there and she wasn’t on the list. We will have to go back Saturday.
“I am not surprised at all at this stupidity.
“Many old people in wheelchairs and walkers were out in the dark, cold and icy world. One false slip and it’s a year of surgery and rehab. I heard the very old man next to us say, ‘I’ll come back Saturday….’
“It probably happened to many old-timers who got themselves there, defying danger, only to be rejected!”
Is there anything the dynamic duo of Parker ‘n’ Polito can’t utterly mismanage into complete catastrophe? So many ongoing calamities have been unfolding here in the East Germany of New England that some barely even warrant a mention on the nightly news any longer.
For instance, did you know that on Monday, Maskachusetts passed the “grim milestone” of 15,000 COVID deaths? Of course not, because once Trump could no longer be blamed for the toll, the term “grim milestone” totally vanished from the headlines.
The MBTA is practically defunct. The number of passengers on commuter rail is down over 90%, on the subway lines 60-75%. Yet the general manager, Steve Poftak, got a 2020 performance bonus of $20,800 on top of a salary of $324,000.
But what does Charlie Parker care? He’s still pocketing his $185,000-a-year paycheck, plus his $65,000 housing allowance, until that golden parachute at the combined Tufts-Harvard Health Care Plan opens up.
This guy presides over the highest nursing-home death rate in the country, the third highest overall death rate, and he’s going to get promoted to run a … health care system.
When does Rod Serling step out of the shadows to introduce this latest episode of the Twilight Zone?
As the governor awaits his next boondoogle, it’s business as usual in the hackerama. On Tuesday, he nominated two more hacks for $184,693.74-a-year state judgeships.
One of the hacks, Sharon Lalli, is a payroll patriot out of the Creedon crew in Brockton. She’s already slurping at the courthouse trough in Plymouth County for $134,923.25 a year.
The other is James M. Murphy and would you care to guess if he’s in the public or private sector? Correct, like Lalli he’s an assistant clerk magistrate, in Woburn, for $119,414.88 a year.
The beautiful thing for some of these courthouse payroll Charlies scoring judgeships is that some of them already are vested for multimillion-dollar state pensions, and now they very quickly vest into second, even more lucrative judicial pensions.
Already, dozens of retired judges are double-dipping up to $200,000-plus a year on their multiple pensions … and some of them are grabbing a third paycheck as recall judges.
All this rampant greed, while the state under Charlie Parker suffers the fourth highest rate of jobs lost in the entire nation.
The Dreaded Private Sector in Massachusetts is moribund, yet the cash register bells keep ringing at the State House. Meet John E. Garland, just nominated for a judgeship in the Boston Municipal Court.
Garland got his judgeship the old-fashioned way — he ponied up $375 for Charlie Parker, $50 for Pay to Polito, $200 to disgraced Lt. Gov. Tim “Crash” Murray, $175 to the unindicted co-conspirator Robert DeLeo, $100 to ex-Gov. Small Deval Patrick, etc.
Then there’s Maureen Mulligan, just nominated for the Superior Court, a total partisan Democrat — $2,100 to Atty. Gen. Maura Healey, $500 to Small Deval, $200 to “Marsha” Coakley, $100 to Suffolk DA Rachael Rollins …
Even before the Panic, their annual work week was never much more than 35 weeks a year. So how much have they been working this last year? How much were these judges “working”? About as much, I’d say, as all the $300,000-a-year associate assistant deputy senior junior vice chancellor provosts at UMass, which is to say, very little, if at all.
Somewhere, probably at a bus station in “Eastern Boston,” clutching his ticket out of town for parts unknown, a forlorn Driftin’ Dave Ismay sits this morning, wondering how he became the first hack in this state to lose his six-figure, no-heavy-lifting job since… forever.
One down, 30,000 to go.