1. Boston Globe picks up on RedMassGroup reporting regarding Carl Stanley McGee
The Boston Globe has picked up on Red Mass Group reporting regarding the gaming commission and Carl Stanley McGee.
The newly created state gambling commission badly underestimated public reaction to the fact that Carl Stanley McGee, the man tapped to be executive director of the new panel, had been arrested in 2007 in a sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy, internal e-mails show.
The e-mails, obtained by the conservative blog RedMassGroup and given to the Globe, show that the commission's public relations consultant predicted in one e-mail that the allegations "will be no more than a paragraph deep into an otherwise extremely favorable story about Stan."
When Gaming Commission chairman Stephen Crosby asked the Patrick administration if it had any concerns about the selection of McGee, then part of Patrick's economic development team, the answer was no.
2. Speaking of McGee the Patrick Administration still doesn't get it.
In the above piece by Andrea Estes, the Patrick Administration is quoted as saying:
"It's not our thing to raise Stan's history," he said, adding that the administration supported McGee, so "why would we raise Stan's past?"
Yep that's right the Patrick administration wouldn't raise the fact that Stan McGee was alleged to perform oral sex on an unwilling 15 year old. Non-consensual pederasty just doesn't seem to phase this governor's staff. If that doesn't phase the governor's staff, what does?
Some would say that the Governor really doesn't have all that much wisdom to begin with. What little is left is being removed today in the form of his wisdom teeth. He is expected to be out of commission until Tuesday.
4. Commonwealth Mag also wrote about McGee.
Practically simultaneously, with the Red Mass Group story on what happened behind the scenes with the Carl Stanley McGee hiring at the gaming commission, Commonwealth Magazine wrote a story. It's well worth a read.
5. Job's numbers tank
Leave it to the Patrick administration to spin bad jobs numbers. According to SHNS the Patrick Administration is still rosy about the Commonwealth's outlook amid tanking jobs numbers.
Despite a dip downward in Massachusetts jobs from May to June, the Patrick administration is confident that the overall trend is still toward more jobs and more employment. "All the numbers are trending the right way for the first six months of this year and that's what we're happy about," Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki told the News Service. Since January, Massachusetts has added 32,700 jobs. The private sector had an even larger net job gain, with 34,900 jobs year-to-date. Bialecki and Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Joanne Goldstein both said their take on Thursday morning's data was that the Massachusetts economy was holding steady. "With everything that's happening in the world, we think steady is good," said Bialecki. The state unemployment rate held at 6 percent from May to June; the national unemployment rate is 8.2 percent. Both the state and the national rates are also more than a point lower than where they stood in June 2011. The Massachusetts-specific data released on Thursday morning was collected using two methods - surveys of employers and surveys of Massachusetts households - and while the employer survey indicated the state lost 2,600 jobs in June, the household survey actually showed a gain in employment for Massachusetts residents. The survey estimated 3,254,000 Bay State residents have jobs, which is the greatest number of people employed since November 2008. Neither secretary was willing to venture a guess at what the July reports will say when they are released in August. "We've given up predicting them," said Goldstein.
Greg, the rate is down because people have given up looking for work...