Romney's not Weld. That's bad -- but maybe good, too. Bill Weld exemplified the kind of Republican who can thrive in Massachusetts: he was fiscally conservative, tough on crime, but libertarian on personal-freedom issues such as reproductive choice and lesbian and gay rights. I suspect Governor-elect Mitt Romney would have doubled his margin over his Democratic opponent, Shannon O'Brien, if he had done a better job of assuring voters that he's not a social conservative. Certainly Romney's retrograde stand against civil unions -- never mind same-sex marriage -- didn't help.

But there was one gaping hole in Weld's administration, as well as those of his successors, Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift. And if Romney is willing to fill that hole, he can improve considerably over the records of his Republican predecessors. Weld campaigned against the Democratic machine in 1990, targeting then-Senate president Bill Bulger with the same tenacity with which Romney went after the "Gang of Three" -- House Speaker Tom Finneran, incoming Senate president Bob Travaglini, and O'Brien. But to say that Weld didn't mean it would be quite an understatement. Weld ended up presiding over an administration as laden with patronage as any in the state's history. He even made common cause with Bulger, who, in his day, was as unpopular with the public as Finneran is in 2002.

Perhaps nothing symbolized Weld's indulgence of the machine politics that he'd campaigned against as much as his elevation of David Balfour, a Republican hack whom the then-governor elevated to be the head of the MDC. On November 4, the Globe's Stephanie Ebbert quoted an unnamed Democratic consultant as saying that Balfour exemplified the difference between Weld and Romney:

"Bill Weld would embrace the David Balfours of the world and get a kick out of them," the consultant said, referring to the Republican advance man and Metropolitan District Commission chief who has been nominated for a clerk-magistrate job. "Mitt Romney doesn't get a kick out of them. This is a very political world, so it's hard to know how it will play."

This morning it all comes together on the front page of the Boston Herald. David Wedge and Jack Sullivan report that Balfour's MDC recently paid $675,000 in public (i.e., our) money to buy a tiny slice of land that is now being used as a parking lot by a Stoneham restaurant where Balfour likes to eat, and which is sometimes the venue for MDC meetings. Outraged Stoneham officials, 30 percent of whose town is already owned by the MDC and is thus exempt from local taxes, are demanding an investigation. "We feel very, very strongly they are doing something illegal. I just feel it's wrong to acquire this land with public money," selectman Cosmo Ciccarello told the Herald.

Balfour is now up for a cushy clerk-magistrate's job in Suffolk Juvenile Court, a post to which he was nominated by Governor Swift. The Governor's Council will vote on November 27.

Romney doesn't become governor until January. But if he's serious about eliminating patronage abuses, he should send a loud, public signal that the parking-lot fiasco will be the subject of a vigorous investigation once he's in office -- and that the Governor's Council ought to think twice before handing a lifetime job to someone who will be the principal subject of that investigation.

Friedman on Bush and the UN. It seems lazy and obvious to point out that Tom Friedman has a brilliant column in this morning's New York Times, but guess what? He does. Friedman puts his finger on precisely why the UN Security Council's unanimous vote to force Saddam Hussein to comply with weapons inspections is such a hopeful development. Writes Friedman:

It was the first time since then [9/11] that the world community seemed to be ready to overcome all of its cultural, religious and strategic differences to impose a global norm -- that a country that raped its neighbor and defied U.N. demands that it give up its weapons of mass destruction not be allowed to get away with it.

And Friedman gives George W. Bush just the right amount of credit for standing up not only to Saddam, but to the "superhawks" in his own administration who tried to convince him that real men don't ask the UN for anything.

Obviously a lot could still go wrong, and with a Republican Senate, I worry that Bush will be more inclined to listen to warmongers such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz than Colin Powell. But this has been a good week for anyone who supports both peace and a vigorous, UN-backed effort to force Saddam to give up his weapons.

Mitt Romney, defender of the Constitution. Jay Fitzgerald has a fascinating item on Mitt Romney's inconsistent stand on patronage (jobs for his top-level supporters, a meritocracy for everyone else). "He didn't make that distinction before the election, so he's probably going to take some heat for it now," writes Fitzgerald. The most interesting part, though, is Fitzgerald's discussion of a 1990 US Supreme Court decision, Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois, in which the Court held that patronage is unconstitutional in hiring government workers because it violates their First Amendment right to hold the political views of their choice. The one exception: top-level appointments, the theory being that elected officials need to fill the most important jobs with people with whom they agree, and who will be committed to carrying out their agenda.

The majority opinion was written by a liberal, Justice William Brennan, who opens in this vein:

To the victor belong only those spoils that may be constitutionally obtained. Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976), and Branti v. Finkel, 445 U.S. 507 (1980), decided that the First Amendment forbids government officials to discharge or threaten to discharge public employees solely for not being supporters of the political party in power, unless party affiliation is an appropriate requirement for the position involved.

Well, now. Romney must certainly take comfort in knowing that he can wrap himself in the Constitution as he goes about rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.

And now, the rest of the story. With apologies to Paul Harvey, this morning Media Log points out an inexplicable omission in a cry from the heart written by state representative Brian Golden and published on the op-ed page of today's Boston Herald. Golden, a Democrat (at least that's what he claims) from Brighton, calls for the removal of Democratic State Committee chairman Phil Johnston, blaming him for such allegedly extreme liberal views as believing that lesbians and gay men ought to have the same rights as everyone else. Such apostasy, Golden argues, was responsible for Republican Mitt Romney's surprisingly easy victory in last week's gubernatorial election.

But this is just boilerplate, designed to run up the word count so that Golden can talk about what's really on his mind:

[I]n a highly unusual move, Johnston interfered in at least two local Democratic primaries -- one of them being mine.

As a two-term incumbent, I was shocked to find the state Democratic Party backing one Democrat over another. Rather than allowing local Democrats to choose their own nominees, Johnston injected himself into races and places he didn't even vaguely understand.

Here's what Golden leaves out: in October 2000, just before Al Gore and George W. Bush held their first debate -- in Boston, no less -- Golden announced that he had decided to endorse Bush because of the Republican's opposition to the late-term abortion procedure that opponents label "partial-birth abortion," and because Bush favored public aid to Catholic schools.

Now, of course, there's nothing wrong with disagreeing with your party's presidential candidate on the issues -- even in public. But to endorse his opponent is to call into question whether you ought to be a member of that party in the first place. There's a name for Johnston's effort to replace Golden with a real Democrat: politics. Then, too, if Golden re-registered as a Republican, his career as a state rep would be over.

"There is no role for differences on matters of conscience in Johnston's party, no big-tent philosophy," Golden whines at the end of his Herald piece. What tent? As Lyndon Johnson once explained in deciding to reappoint the notorious J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, "It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." Golden stepped outside the "big tent" two years ago. And he's been relieving himself on his supposed fellow Democrats ever since.

Tony Hawk II. I knew this was going to happen. It turns out that the Boston Globe published a 2000-word feature on Tony Hawk last June, on the front of the Sunday arts section. Although it's long gone from the Globe's free archives, I managed to find the piece -- by staff writer Geoff Edgers -- here. So obviously my argument that the mainstream media have ignored Hawk was off the mark. Nevertheless, given Hawk's enormous popularity with teenagers, his appearance at the FleetCenter last week deserved more coverage than it got.

Patronage, Romney-style. Just in case there were any doubts, Mitt Romney has said it twice since becoming governor-elect last Tuesday: his crusade against patronage was not meant to apply to his political allies, just to people who have to work for a living.

Here's the relevant excerpt from Rick Klein's piece in last Thursday's Globe:

Romney, who railed against patronage appointments on the campaign trail, also sought to clarify to reporters yesterday what role people with political connections will play in his administration. He said he expects to appoint some people with political experience and connections to top posts in his administration. But for lower-level workers, he said that ties to political leaders or his campaign will be a disadvantage, not an advantage.

"I will look for people to get jobs based on what they know, not who they know," Romney said. "I want people who are secretaries of the various executive offices -- some of them -- to have substantial political experience. But as we look down those organizations, and as we go into middle management, the people driving the trucks and clearing the snow, there's no reason to have political association with those kinds of jobs."

Then there's this, from Yvonne Abraham's front-page interview with Romney published in the Sunday Globe:

He was also reluctant to discuss what his new administration would look like. The Republican, who railed against patronage on the campaign trail, was very specific in his definition of the term on Friday. He said his top staffers would include some of the people who had worked on his campaign, people with extensive political experience, and with whom he had worked for a long time. Nothing wrong with that, he said.

"Where patronage begins, in my view, is where you start going down into the positions inside a government, where that kind of political experience is not necessary,'' he said. ''And yet where campaign workers and members of the party and perhaps even contributors find themselves getting jobs in the courts, or the Turnpike Authority, where it's clear political history is being rewarded.''

For applicants for those positions, Romney said, ''a political history, or a relative in politics, will be a burden they will have to overcome.''

Romney couldn't have been more clear. If you're an aspiring bureaucrat, especially an aspiring top-level bureaucrat, you'd better have made your bones getting Romney elected. But if you're down on your luck and looking for a job as a toll-taker, a truck-driver, and the like, well, you can fill out an application just like anybody else, pal.

It's easy to be for a meritocracy when it only applies to people you don't know.

The indispensable man. Today's New York Times has a fascinating inside look at how Secretary of State Colin Powell, starting in August, managed to steer President Bush away from gung-ho, let's-invade-Iraq-now advisers such as Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and toward a multilateral approach to disarming Saddam Hussein. The result was yesterday's stunning 15-0 vote on the part of the UN Security Council to back tough new weapons inspections in Iraq --- a vote that carries with it the implicit threat to topple Saddam's regime if he continues to resist international efforts to remove his weapons of mass destruction.

Bush deserves enormous credit for taking the approach advocted by Powell rather than launching the unilateral war he seemed to be on the verge of declaring these past several months. But it also cements Powell's reputation as the one indispensable member of Bush's foreign-policy team. Just last week, I picked up an old issue of Time magazine in a doctor's office in which sources to Powell said he would definitely leave at the end of Bush's first term. That's a truly scary prospect.

America's best-known unknown superstar. Tony Hawk is a pop-culture phenomenon. Yet I'm pretty sure my son, Tim, is the only person I know who can tell you anything about him. Last night, Tim and I spent two hours at the FleetCenter taking in something called "Tony Hawk's Boom Boom Huck Jam," an extreme-sports combination of skateboarding (Hawk is among the best in the world, and certainly the sport's most accomplished promoter), BMX stunt-bike riding, moto-cross motorcycle tricks (Tim informed me that one of the riders last night is the boyfriend of Pink), music (two DJs plus a 40-minute set by the veteran punk-metal band Social Distortion), a light show, and a loud and extremely annoying emcee.

The FleetCenter appeared to be sold out, although it was hard to tell, since large sections of the arena were closed off for line-of-sight and safety reasons. And though a large proportion of the audience consisted of fathers and their sons (ages six through early teens, I'd estimate), there were also a lot of teenagers and twentysomethings on hand, as well as a small but vocal subset of Social Distortion fans who'd come more for the music than the half-pipe antics.

Yet the Globe offered not one word on this beforehand, and the Herald had only a brief preview last Wednesday. (The Phoenix's Carly Carioli wrote a fairly meaty preview in the November 2 issue.) Nor was there anything in either daily today. Now, maybe they'll prove me wrong with a Sunday feature, but it strikes me that Tony Hawk is an example of something that had supposedly all but disappeared in today's overhyped media environment: a wildly popular performer who is instantly recognizable to millions of fans, and yet who has managed to slip almost entirely under the radar of the mainstream.

Goldman to Finneran: No new taxes! Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman -- a leading liberal who advised Robert Reich during his gubernatorial run -- has written an open letter to House Speaker Tom Finneran begging him not to raise taxes, thereby letting Governor-elect Mitt Romney take credit for solving the state's fiscal crisis à la Bill Weld in 1990. It's a great read. But it's on the Salem News site, so hurry up and read it! Salem News links expire faster than unpasteurized cream.

I want my TNR -- on time. Got my pre-election issue of the New Republic yesterday afternoon. Thanks, Marty! If I had a bird cage, I could do something with it. Meanwhile, please get your circulation department to take a look at the Weekly Standard's website. Rupe and company let paid subscribers download the entire issue as a PDF file on Saturday, at the same time that the print edition is coming off the presses. If you've got a fast enough printer, you could even print out the entire issue and take it to the bathroom with you.

Meanwhile, TNR keeps offering less and less of its print-edition content online. That's understandable -- giving content away on the Web hasn't exactly proved to be a viable business model. But that's the beauty of what the Standard is doing. It's only available to readers who've already bought subscriptions. And you get the entire magazine, including advertisements -- thus negating an argument one of your editors once made to me in explaining why TNR couldn't be made available to subscribers electronically.

Marty, I would even be willing to subscribe only to an electronic edition of TNR -- for a substantial discount, of course. But think of all the production costs and postage you'd save. And you'd have at least one less pissed-off customer forced to look at coverlines such as "Can the GOP Convince Blacks Not To Vote?" two days after we already know the answer.

The bumpy road ahead. The Democrats' intramural war over the next two years will be fought between the moderate, neoliberal branch that dominated during the Clinton years and the paleoliberals who always harbored a grudge over Bill Clinton's accommodation to the center.

Today the New Republic's Peter Beinart stakes out the neoliberal ground while the Nation's David Corn speaks up for that old-time liberalism. Not that they disagree entirely -- both urge the Democrats to challenge George W. Bush's tax cut for the rich, something the party was notably loath to do in the past election. For the most part, though, they lay out different visions for the Democrats -- although not radically different, since both Beinart and Corn are more or less on the same side.

Both of these pieces are worth reading for any liberal who's wondering where we go from here.

The Republican victory. The Democrats lost the Senate -- and George W. Bush finally gained the legitimacy he failed to earn two years ago -- because Daschle, Gephardt, et al. tried to campaign on a gutless, vacuous agenda. Later today, bostonphoenix.com will publish a post-election roundup, including a few thoughts from me. Meanwhile, if you -- like me -- are a liberal who's gnashing your teeth today, let me add to your pain: the Weekly Standard's David Brooks gets it exactly right. Can the Democrats learn?

A Mass. tax backlash. Before last night, the scenario for solving the state's fiscal crisis if Mitt Romney were elected governor was simple. The legislature would pass a tax increase. Romney would veto it. The legislature would override Romney's veto. And everyone would get back to business as usual. Romney would fulminate, and try to use the "Democrat tax hike" to boost Republican numbers in the legislature in 2004. But with deficits looming as far as the eye can see, he wouldn't be all that upset to have the extra money.

Well, you can now rule that scenario out. Not only was Romney's victory by a wider margin than anyone had expected, thus giving a boost to his anti-tax message; but Question One, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Carla Howell's radical proposal to eliminate the state income tax, lost by a margin of only 55 percent to 45 percent. Given such circumstances, the Democratic-controlled legislature can no longer be expected to go out on a political limb and raise taxes. As WLVI-TV (Channel 56) Jon Keller observed last night, not a single poll had predicted Question One would do that well, which demonstrates pretty decisively that there's a lot more anger and frustration among voters than any of the prognosticators had realized.

In fact, the Globe/WBZ-TV (Channel 4) poll of November 1 showed Question One losing by 59 percent to 34 percent; on September 29, the margin was 58 percent to 31 percent. What that means is that virtually everyone who made up her or his mind at the last minute voted for a massive tax cut that would leave the state on the brink of bankruptcy.

Of course, late deciders are also the least informed and most disengaged part of the electorate. So when Romney said he could cut taxes without harming services by going after the bureaucracy, these voters actually believed him. At some point Romney can be expected to pay a price for his disingenuousness, but not this week. His victory was so broad that he won an absolute majority -- nearly 50.6 percent -- even if the votes of all five candidates are tallied up. And if you assume that Shannon O'Brien would have received all of the votes that went to the Green Party's Jill Stein, she still only would have gotten 48.4 percent.

Mitt's got a mandate. We'll see how well he delivers.

Kristof's ugly smear. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof today charges that "liberal Web sites" are raising the possibility that Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone -- killed in a plane crash a week and a half ago -- was the victim of an assassination by his political enemies on the right. "The White House team that executed Vincent Foster must have struck again," Kristof sneers. His so-called point is that liberals are reacting to George W. Bush and the Republican Party with the same demented paranoia that marked conservatives' stance toward Bill Clinton and the Democrats.

Kristof's use of the word "liberal" suggests that mainstream Democrats are calling for an investigation into whether Bushies planted themselves on Minnesota's equivalent of the grassy knoll and shot down Wellstone's plane. But he offers no evidence in trying to make the case for moral equivalence. Cartoonist Ted Rall -- who's way to the left of liberal -- recently wrote a piece claiming that "some Democrats and progressive Americans" are raising questions about the Wellstone tragedy. But, like Kristof, Rall names no names, and in the end he concludes that the conspiracy theory is highly unlikely. There's also some chatter on the websites of the Independent Media Centers, which, frankly, are way to the left of Rall. Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan, writing in Salon.com, had to strain to find another nutty conspiracy theorist, a Dr. Michael I. Niman of Buffalo State College. And even Niman ends up admitting that Wellstone's death was probably just an accident.

It's not that no one is raising questions about Wellstone's death. It is, after all, not difficult to find websites that raise questions about whether the earth is round, or if people really did land on the moon. But Kristof's tone suggests that I should be able to read the latest on the Wellstone conspiracy at the website of, say, the Democratic National Committee. Please. When Clinton aide Vince Foster committed suicide, no fewer than two special prosecutors were ordered by congressional Republicans to look specifically into the question of whether the White House had him assassinated. Even the sex-crazed Ken Starr concluded that was ridiculous. As Times columnist Bill Keller pointed out on Saturday, Republican congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, a member of the House leadership team, once went so far as to shoot bullets into a watermelon in a twisted attempt to prove his Foster-was-murdered theory. (Presumably Burton would have used a cocoanut if he believed Foster had really killed himself.) Where are the Democrats calling for an investigation into the Wellstone "assassination"? The answer is that there aren't any.

Conservative paranoia during the Clinton years reached the highest levels of the Republican Party. By contrast, Kristof offers no evidence that anyone other than a few people on the far left believe the Bush White House had anything to do with Wellstone's tragic death. Kristof's charge amounts to a smear against Democrats and liberals, unsupported by facts.

Embrace, extend, and standardize. Last week I was cleaning out an old desk when I found a box of five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks. They contained much of the work I'd done in graduate school, including my master's thesis. And though I didn't throw them out, they are also utterly worthless: the documents imbedded on them were created on a Radio Shack Color Computer, a machine with its own perverse and obscure operating system, abandoned by the world some 15 years ago.

Which brings to mind last Friday's decision by US District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to give Microsoft little more than a slap on the wrist in the seemingly endless antitrust case. The suit had long since been abandoned by the federal government, but it continues to be pursued like Moby Dick by a handful of Ahab-esque attorneys general, including Tom Reilly of Massachusetts. The desultory media coverage Kollar-Kotelly's ruling generated shows that we live in a world considerably different from the one that existed in 1997, when the Clinton administration first filed suit. Amid the wreckage of the New Economy, Microsoft -- a technology company that makes real products and turns a real profit -- now looks pretty good.

Moreover, the commodification of the personal computer and the software that makes it useful has advanced considerably during the past five years. Bill Gates likes to talk about the "freedom to innovate," but that's always been ridiculous. Microsoft's products over the years have invariably been derivative and, in many cases, inferior to products that came to market first. The company's real innovation has been to bring dozens of competing standards under one roof and to enable nearly everyone who uses a personal computer to speak the same language. I don't like Microsoft Word, and I don't use it. Yet the ability to share files created with Word makes for a much more efficient universe. I pay a price for my obstinacy, having to use kludgy translation software whose results are imperfect at best. Even more important, files created with Word today are likely to be readable in at least some form 15 years from now, unlike my poor lost master's thesis. For the vast majority of us, innovation is nice, but standards are better. The Wall Street Journal editorial page today puts it this way:

We've always argued that Microsoft's sin, if you'd call it that, was primarily in giving consumers what they wanted -- a standard operating system for hardware and software makers alike. Quibbles over the company's hardball business strategies aside, the main effect of its monopoly position was to get new Web tools to consumers quickly and efficiently, vastly speeding up the PC revolution.

That's too sunny a spin, but it's right on the facts.

The frustrating thing, and one many Microsoft critics seemingly can't get over, is that Gates and company won by waging total, relentless war against their competitors, illegally (don't forget that) exploiting the monopoly their Windows operating system enjoyed to harm other products, such as Netscape Navigator and Sun's Java. Last week, Salon.com ran a detailed, two-part report that Microsoft's tactics continue: the company has reportedly incorporated features of streaming-video software called Burst into its Windows Media Player, and is being sued by Burst.com.

My view of the Microsoft case is admittedly colored by two factors. First, I own some Microsoft stock. Second, I don't use any Microsoft products, with the exception of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh. (I also sometimes use Mozilla, an "open source" alternative to Explorer that is supposed to be the choice of concerned anti-Microsofties everywhere. Guess what? It's not as good.) Yes, I like standards, but I've gambled that Apple has succeeded in establishing an alternative standard that will be supported well into the forseeable future. So, yes, I'd like my stock to increase in value, and no, I don't believe that anyone is forced to use Microsoft products, which is what the Tom Reillys of the world would have you believe.

Mr. Attorney General, if you'll abandon your futile quest, I will send you a box of five-and-quarter-inch disks. The postage is on me.

Why O'Brien isn't leading Romney by six points. "There's nothing that I have concretely said that I would support" -- Shannon O'Brien, on the possibility of a gas-tax increase, in today's Boston Herald. Got that?

Fritz ducks killer bugs! Hurry! This could change by the time you read it. But right now, Drudge has a weird and wonderful juxtaposition of headlines. His banner: "EXPERTS WARN: 'SUPERFLU' COULD KILL HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS." The kicker: "MONDALE DOESN'T SHOW AT DEBATE ..." All that's missing is a reference to Mondale's age.

The Florida fiasco revisited. WGBH-TV (Channel 2) will air Danny Schechter's documentary on the fiasco in Florida, Counting on Democracy, tonight from 10 to 11. Schechter, well-known in Boston from his days as the "News Dissector" on the old WBCN Radio, wrote about his efforts to get PBS to run Counting on Democracy a couple of weeks ago in the Boston Phoenix. Although he's had no luck with the network, at least Boston's public television outlet has agreed to show it, and in prime time no less.

Counting on Democracy convincingly demonstrates that the presidential election in Florida ended in a virtual tie only because a massive and corrupt disenfranchisement of African-American voters cost Al Gore a decisive victory over George W. Bush. You can learn more about Counting on Democracy by clicking here; choose "Watch a Scene," and you'll be able to see a clip that, among other things, features an interview with yours truly. I was included because of a piece I wrote on African-American disenfranchisement after the US Supreme Court had declared Bush the president-elect.

Two years after Bush was made president despite losing the popular election by a half-million votes and despite the dubious outcome in Florida, this misfiring of democracy remains an open wound. Josh Marshall today points to an excellent commentary by the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on Bush's bizarre "victory," and on Gore's subsequent silence -- a refusal to "accept ... the responsibility that his popular-vote victory had laid upon him."

Being denied a Gore presidency isn't worth one shed tear or one lost moment's sleep. What happened to our electoral system two years ago, though, remains something to ponder and even mourn.

Cutting back at the Prospect. The Globe's Mark Jurkowitz today reveals that the liberal American Prospect will soon move from a biweekly to a monthly publication schedule. New executive editor (and former Globe publisher) Ben Taylor -- whose hiring was reported exclusively in Media Log yesterday (okay, okay, the Prospect's own website got there first) -- tells Jurkowitz, "It's a more natural schedule. I think we can do a good job in a monthly format.''

Macero: Romney lied. Globe columnist Brian McGrory this morning is outraged because "Shannon O'Brien call[ed] Mitt Romney a liar in Tuesday's debate." Brian, could it be because ... he lied? The Herald's Cosmo Macero, no flaming liberal, writes today:

I felt like throwing the TV out the window the other night when Shannon O'Brien had the nerve to call Mitt Romney a liar in their final debate.

And then the darndest thing happened: Mitt lied.

No two ways about it, Romney pledged back in August to try to squeeze $1.7 billion in additional Medicaid reimbursements from the federal government.

Romney's flat-out denial that he'd ever said such a thing was and is a shocking breach of debate protocol -- far worse than finger-wagging, interrupting, and smirking, the O'Brien tics that tick McGrory off so much. O'Brien's attempts to evade answering questions about tax hikes were visible for all to see, and voters can judge her accordingly. But by lying about his past statements on live television, Romney calls into question the very purpose of having debates. Yes, the O'Brien campaign was able to refute Romney's refutation after the debate. But the average viewer probably came away convinced that O'Brien had leveled a reckless charge against Romney, and that Romney had skillfully swatted it away. Ugly stuff.