Oh, two political tidbits, one for each party:

1. Jane Swift, who took the "monkey see, monkey do" approach to forming the Office of Commonwealth Security, didn't bother to fund it when she submitted the state budget.

So we have a clean elections law that the legislature didn't appropriate money for, and a security office that was left high and dry by the same person who brought it into existance. This could be a new trend in governance: all new laws and offices are left unfunded, thus not burgeoning the state coffers. They can fight the homeless for bottle returns, vending machine change, and winning lottery tickets that were thrown away by mistake.

That or we can merge them. I hereby announce that I would like to be the first executive director of the Office of Clean and Secure Commonwealth Elections.

I'll work gratis, of course.

2. Secretary of State William Galvin isn't running for governor. He doesn't think he can get the required number of delegates to get on the primary ballot.

This is kind of funny, given that the 15% rule that I've railed on about is designed just to get hacks like him on the ballot and protect them from candidates with less organization or party support. But it's also telling that Galvin is the sort of party hack that people are getting just a mite fed up with.

Or, to suppose that Galvin's got something going on upstairs other than his happenin' 'do, perhaps he doesn't want to take over a state in the midst of recession and have to clean up after Swifty. Not to mention the whole doing battle with the forces of evil thing.

(And to be fair, Finneran's picture is much worse than Galvin's.)