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British Occupied Ireland ?The bias of these western media “ intellectual terrorists” ( thank you Baba Ramdev ji) will never change , perhaps until each of us in India and every Indian media starts designating Ireland as “ British Occupied Ireland” or start writing “ Marxist Bernie Sanders” or “ Talibani London Mayor” and many more..Acceleration of anti India rant, from 2014 !Should add Al Jazeera to this anti India list of international media. India and Indians should continue to ignore the provocations of these biased western & Arab media.No matter how much these “ peaceful religion” media agents shout/write/speak about Kashmir , it simply matters nothing for Indians.Misleading and mischievous reporting on Kashmir :Why are they even commenting about administrative actions in J&K ? How many times India has explained that this 370 stuff is totally “ internal” to India, yet BBC etc have never ever attached the word “ temporary” while describing Article 370. The entire drama in Kashmir is because of this stupidity of leaving the “temporary” wide open and never ending.These guys in Western media either do not intentionally say this fact of 370 being a “ temporary” provision or do not have the ability to comprehend the Constitution of India ?Why are these media houses doing this anti-India propaganda?There could be many reasons and there are many theories on this. No other nation on the earth gets attacked so much as India gets attacked. The never ending hate India campaign is obvious. Why so ?The top most reason is the blatant interference by the self appointed guardian of religious freedom, a sham called United States Commission on International Religious Freedom on India’s internal affairs under the garb human rights . Here’s the latest report, Nov 2019 (https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2019%20India%20Issue%20Brief%20-%20Religious%20Freedom%20Implications.pdf) .As one can see most of the assumptions/claims of this so called commission, are based on shady news reports from our Indian media as well as BBC such as this India puts 1.9m people at risk of statelessness . This USCIRF and few other so called human rights agencies make a collection of such garbage fake news reports from NYT, BBC and Washington Post, to justify their interference on the affairs of India.Thus, the #1 reason for NYT, BBC, WP to maintain anti India rant is to feed false information to the anti India radicals in various western Governments who would keep taunting India on so called human rights. And, our Indian brothers and sisters like Burkha Dutt, Arundati Roy, Jhon Dayal etc pander to these media/USCIRF. For all the big hue and cry the western media made on Jamal Khassogi , there is not a cc of report in any newspaper of US now..Over 80% of the writers are by training Maoists/Leftists, pretty similar to Arundati Roy who said “Maoists/Naxals are Gandhis with guns”These 80% journalist crowd is also extremely poor in comprehending data/numbers. For example, if there was one unfortunate incident of a murder crime in NCR Delhi, these journos will write it as “ several murders everyday across Delhi” They just can’t count beyond 1 , so everything becomes “ several” , beyond 1. If an Indian journo is so poor on Mathematics, you can imagine how bad the US journos in NYT /WP etc.Doing mathematics is considered a very big deal in US/UK, over 95% of the journalism undergrads in Columbia University or all those liberal Universities, can’t multiply 45x40 without a calculator. Thus their ability to reason or think logically is almost non existent. Manifestation of this lack of basic arithmetical skill combined with zero reasoning power, leads to reports like “ mobile services clamped in Kashmir”. The reality is that all the mobility operators in India are struggling to maintain the call quality even in the VVIP areas such as Jor Bagh or Khan Market in Delhi. With all of them on the verge of bankruptcy, they are fighting an epic battle within themselves to survive. Who cares about Kashmir’s network ? Kashmir is their last priority. But for zero logic genius journo from NYT or Doha or London , the only word he/she knows to describe the temporary outage of the MNO’s network is “ clampdown”.150+ years of missionaries working actively, yet only a part of Kerala and North East is significant Christian majority. This is a big irritant for the evangelicals in US media, they are so mad at India, that every small negative news is picked by the likes of NYT.An example of how vast is this anti India network in US :Ruckus in Princeton University by Pakistani activists, heckling Aarti Tikoo :Locked Down or Liberated?: The Story of KashmirOn the invitation of Princeton University Aarti Tikoo was addressing the Princeton University students/staff. However, the event turned very ugly with outsiders ( folks from Pakistani grocery stores in NJ disguising themselves as students/scholars of Princeton) turning up and created a complete ruckus. The University doesn’t normally prevent anyone from attending such public events. Participants are expected to be civilized in their interaction with the guest speaker, but that doesn’t work with Pakistani Americans and their breed of journalists. So much was the harassment, at one point of time Aarti had to say that she needs to seek the University’s Police force to escort her out of the venue. What a shame ! This is the kind of hooliganism the Western journalists encourage. Of course, this ugly incident of harassing Aarti was never ever reported in any media anywhere in India or US. By chance I ran into the live description of the Pakistan sponsored ruckusPhoto : Aarti Tikoo addressing the audience in Princeton University, Oct 2019Summary of the ruckus with Aarti.. ( as reported by a participant, a Princeton University’s Indian scholar)Less than half of the 70 people present were actually Princeton University affiliates, rest were all outsiders who came with predetermined questions and minds made up ( see the Pakistani holding a paper with notes)One Pakistani spoke about neo-Nazi BJP and everyone laughed !!Some guy asked why are you speaking only about Islamic terrorism in Kashmir, what about VHP, RSS, and BJP? Aarti responded back “ is there even RSS in Kashmir” ? Obviously those Pakistanis were angry at Aarti for her curt response, then began the ruckus..Such is the desperation of breaking India/anti India forces in US/West/Arab world. And, not necessarily all of them are western/Arab origin, there are so many left/Marxists running amok with these kind of “ protests” and campaigns against India. While none of these matter for an average Indian for now, it has long term impact on India.Yet another recent fake news about “Kashmir protests” at Howdy Modi !Raghuraman Chandrasekaran's answer to Were the well-planned protests for the Howdy Modi event success or failure?Changing the narrative to positives..A continued tirade and rant against India by these fellows will have some impact on their western/Arab audience. That should be countered by Govt of India as much as it can. And, I would think that the Govt folks are working on it.. For example, consider this : The Gulf News reported something very positive about the export of Kashmiri apples to UAE; something that none of the west media did and almost none from India covered, other than a few pro BJP media. And Gulf News didn’t run down Modi/Govt of India while reporting the news.Famed Kashmiri apples on supermarket shelves in the UAE soon ( Gulf News)From Swarajya, India : After PM Modi’s Push, Middle East’s LuLu Group Starts Importing Kashmiri Apples, Other CommoditiesThese are not news items for NYT etc, as it doesn’t fit it to their anti India narrative.Mr. Amit Shah has given a clear statement today ( 20th Nov’ 2019) in Parliament supported by statistics that life in Kashmir is near normal, but this will never get counter checked and reported in the likes of Al Jazeera/ BBC .However, if a Kashmir terrorist makes a fake claim on “ aggression” by security forces, that would run in prime-time news hours of Al Jazeera. Sick as it is, that’s the reality of these fellows.What should India/Indians do ?Rather than just brooding over it and cribbing in social media about these biased western/Indian media, we should act decisively that hurts them. They certainly don’t seem to care about the English illiterate Indians. Their target audience is the English speaking West/Arabs, and of course Muslim majority countries in Asia. Some thoughts..Boycott Amazon in India, giving a strong message to Jeff Bezos to reign in control on the rouge journos in Washington Post.Hopefully, Modi ji conveys some strong advise to Bezos whenever he meets Bezos to stop the rouges in Washington Post from blabbering nonsense about India. each of us can send the specific fake news items on India/Kashmir in WP to the PMO.Counter each of these fake news by BBC/Al Jazeera/NYT/WP in Twitter/FB or wherever as and when you come across the fake news.Every one of these NYT, Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera anti India agents on the payroll of of radicalized “ religion of peace” and the evangelicals , should be banned from entering India, forever. We should care a damn if they or their radical journo community protests. We should learn from China. We have had enough of “ freedom of expression” .Govt of India in consultation with our overseas embassies should release the list of classified anti India communication/Indology/journalism/social science/history Professors/academicians in US, supported by evidences on how many articles/posts / biased research papers these Profs/teachers have published. In 2020 Union Budget , the Govt should set aside a budget for this to MEA. For once we have a very professional and brilliant IFS cadre man as the Minister heading MEA who can execute this swiftly. This anti India report should be made public, shared in all Universities/Institutes of India.Eventually, we have to plan/ work towards promoting an Indian media /business to take controlling stakes in NYT and create a channel as big as BBC.We have a long way to go before India starts to counter the offenses of these rogue, radicalized Western/Arab news reporters on India. But, am one of those who believe that counter offense from India will happen in the next 6–8 years, if not sooner.Jai Hind !

Just when the Republican Party was about to be doomed to a kind of permanent cell in purgatory comes a ghost of the Republican past, a scion of honor, a blue blood whose veins run deep in sinews of the Mayflower, a man from the family the Cabot spoke too after having dinner with the Lowell's. So you got it. Weld is a Yankee by birthright. Here is a summary of his Governorship in Massachusetts:FROM THE MAGAZINEBill Weld’s Revolution That Wasn’tMassachusetts’s governor came to office promising drastic reductions in government. Five years later, the bureaucracy is bigger than ever.Jeff JacobyWinter 1996In his January 1991 inaugural address, Governor William Weld put the Massachusetts political establishment on notice that he was about to sweep the old order away. He defined his mandate precisely and clearly: “Last fall the people of Massachusetts voted to disenthrall themselves from the failed dogmas of big government.” And so, said the new governor, the public sector was going to shrink. He promised a leaner, more “entrepreneurial” state, one tending “to steer rather than row,” one that “understands that sometimes the most helpful thing to do is to get out of the way. . . . Fewer rules and more results—that’s my definition of entrepreneurial government.” His newborn administration would set about “reinventing the way state government functions,” dismantling “bureaucracies 50 years out of date, sluggish and centralized, in which hierarchies rule and orders are issued from the top of a power pyramid.”It was revolution Weld was talking, especially for famously liberal Massachusetts, a state that had been governed by Michael Dukakis for 12 of the past 16 years and by a Democratic legislature since the late 1950s. Yet the new governor’s radical remarks only underscored the promises he had made throughout his 1990 campaign. He had launched his candidacy one year earlier with a vow to end “big government,” to slash the state payroll by 10,000, and to cut $1 billion out of the state budget (which then stood at $12.8 billion and would rise, by Election Day, to $13.4 billion). “This state government has taken on a life of its own,” he declared. “[It] has forgotten the simple truth that there’s no such thing as government money; there’s only taxpayers’ money.”Over and over, he repeated these themes. Referring to the $6 billion by which the state budget had grown under Dukakis, Weld said, “I would be very, very surprised if there was 16 percent of that $6 billion that couldn’t be pried away.” Had state spending merely kept pace with inflation since 1983, he calculated, it would have been 25 percent less than it was at the end of Dukakis’s term.To emphasize his determination to reduce spending drastically, Weld endorsed Question 3, a ballot initiative (ultimately unsuccessful) to roll back more than $2 billion in recent tax increases. Budgets, he declared in May 1990, ought to start each year “from scratch. . . . You assume no program is necessary . . . no bureaucrat's job is necessary . . . no line item in the budget is necessary.” He cheerfully told editorial boards he would “blow up” unneeded state agencies and cited robust privatization as the key to shrinking “the beast”—his term for state government. “If the private sector can run something better and cheaper, and it isn’t a core function of government, I say: More power to them.”He was scathing in his indictment of the Democrats who ran the State Senate and House of Representatives. “The Legislature,” he said, “has proven itself incapable of restructuring state government.” By contrast, he was an outsider who would remain an outsider: “I particularly despise the philosophy . . . that you have to go along to get along.” He also despised William Bulger, the vindictive, arm-twisting Senate president. Beacon Hill was “rotten to the core,” snapped Weld, a former federal prosecutor, and much of the rot was due to Bulger. In an October debate with his Democratic opponent, Boston University president John Silber, Weld snorted: “I think you’ve been hanging around your friend Senator Bulger too long, absorbing the 1,001 reasons why it’s impossible to change anything on Beacon Hill.”So how has the Weld revolution turned out? Did the first Republican to be elected governor of Massachusetts since 1970 make good on his vow to reduce state government radically?Not according to one high state official, who in August 1995—more than four and a half years after Weld took office—portrayed a state still mired in government, taxes, and regulation. Far from shrinking, the state's tax revenues and budget had climbed every year since 1992. The official characterized Massachusetts in Year 5 of the Weld administration much as the governor himself had five years earlier: “A bunch of boards . . . regulate barbers and cosmetologists and landscape architects and the like, . . . because somebody thought government ought to save both people and shrubs from the trauma of a bad haircut. . . . We’re choking on an excess of benevolence. . . .“[The state] props up segments of industry that ought to die a noble death in the marketplace. It creates social distortions like welfare that destroy the people they’re supposed to help. . . . In our cities we’ve got people living in places where government interference has completely driven out all the economic and social vitality of the community. These places are nothing short of public sector hells. . . . If a program fails, government historically . . . has slapped another program on top of it. . . . That's how Massachusetts wound up with 23 separate agencies serving the disabled; 41 separate job-training programs. . . . The Code of Massachusetts Regulations has grown so vast, bookshelves buckle under it.”It was a grim description; but most depressing was the speaker’s identity: William Weld. Nearly five years after the inaugural address that was to have ushered in an unprecedented downsizing of state government, Weld was still announcing the revolution's imminent arrival. His rhetoric was as pro-market and anti-statist as it had been in 1990. By 1995, however, it was hard for any but the most wishful to believe he actually meant it.Weld took office in the middle of the state’s worst crisis in five decades. Just three years after Michael Dukakis had run for president on the strength of the "Massachusetts miracle," the Bay State was on the verge of fiscal collapse. The $13.4 billion 1991 budget, which Dukakis had pronounced balanced when it was adopted in July 1990, was being pronounced $500 million out of balance by the time Weld was elected. In fact, as Weld would discover after taking office, the deficit was closer to $800 million.There never really had been a Massachusetts miracle. The state hadoutperformed most of the nation during the economic boom of the mid-1980s, but not because of any Dukakis wizardry. Its soaring growth had been powered by two engines: Proposition 21/2, the 1980 property tax cut adopted by ballot initiative that lit a fire under the Massachusetts real estate market; and the Reagan-era military buildup, which pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Route 128, the high-tech highway ringing Boston.As the economy surged, so did tax revenues—and state spending. With money no object, the Dukakis budget had room for all manner of new government programs and benefits, each of which instantly acquired a political constituency. By the time the downturn came in 1987 and revenues slowed to a trickle, spending was out of control. Unable to turn off the cash-guzzling machine they had revved up, Dukakis and the Legislature resorted to frantic borrowing and repeated increases in state taxes and fees.It wasn’t enough. By 1990, deficit spending reached unprecedented levels. Despite three years of jolting tax and fee hikes, Beacon Hill couldn't balance its books. The state began floating bonds to cover operating expenses. As more and more money was bled from the private sector, and as the national recession grew more severe, the state’s condition grew worse. By the time Dukakis departed, Massachusetts’s bond rating was the lowest of any state, just one step above “non-investment grade”—junk—level.Meanwhile, the recession, deepened by the tax increases, vaporized hundreds of thousands of jobs. Unemployment was 8 percent—well above the national figure—and climbing. Real estate prices were collapsing. The public’s mood lurched between anger and panic. As Weld came to power, Massachusetts had become a fiscal Beirut.The new governor’s first priority was to stop the trauma, and he did so. He forced the 1991 budget he’d inherited from Dukakis into balance, in part by requiring state workers to take unpaid "furloughs," in part by cutting state aid to cities and towns—but mostly by landing an unexpected windfall: a $531 million federal reimbursement for Medicaid expenses (a “gooney bird,” Weld called it—a piece of great fortune that fell from the sky).However it was done, it was done: the 1991 fiscal year ended in the black. A scheduled expansion of the sales tax was scrapped. A decrease in the state income tax took place as planned. For fiscal 1992, Weld actually budgeted less money than the year before. That was a Massachusetts miracle, and it earned the governor glowing attention from conservatives nationwide. The Wall Street Journalhailed Weld as one of the nation’s most “courageous” chief executives. The libertarian Cato Institute rated him the best governor in America.In July 1992, Weld’s first full budget cycle came to an end. Total spending had indeed decreased from 1991. Not by much—only 1.7 percent (about $200 million)—but it was the clearest sign imaginable that the budget meltdown had been confronted and reversed. In a political culture where “cut” commonly means “raising spending by less than planned,” Weld’s accomplishment—actually reducing spending from one year to the next—seemed wondrous. Soon Wall Street was raising the commonwealth’s paper out of the bond-rating basement. Unemployment dropped. The state’s business groups expressed renewed confidence. The crisis was over.Ending the budgetary free fall bequeathed by Dukakis has been Weld’s signal achievement as governor. He has balanced each of his budgets without short-term borrowing and without raising taxes—in fact, the state has finished each year with a slight surplus, and some business taxes have been cut. In September 1995, Financial Worldranked Massachusetts the 11th-best-managed state in the nation; four years earlier it had ranked the Bay State dead last.It helped greatly, of course, that the recession that had battered New England so badly ended early on Weld’s watch. Before the recovery finally began in 1992, Massachusetts had lost 360,000 jobs—a staggering 11 percent of its employment base. Since then, jobs have grown by 1.9 percent annually, a little lower than the national average of 2.2 percent. “That isn’t a bad performance,” says economist Sara Johnson of DRI/McGraw Hill, a leading econometric forecasting firm. “But Massachusetts could certainly do much better.”Which, in a way, sums up the Weld administration’s record.Weld, to his great credit, put Massachusetts’s books right side up: Beacon Hill no longer spends more than it takes in. But that is about as far as his “reinventing government” has gone. The state’s fiscal house no longer totters on its foundation. But neither has it been rebuilt according to the entrepreneurial, privatized, free-market blueprint on which Weld had campaigned.For all Weld’s talk of downsizing, his administration has “upsized” in every year save its first. Final spending by Massachusetts in fiscal year 1992 was $13.4 billion; the appropriation for the current fiscal year (ending July 31, 1996) is $16.8 billion. State spending, in other words, will have climbed 25.4 percent in just four years. Inflation has totaled just 10.3 percent.By January 1992, Weld had abandoned his oft-repeated vow to carve $1 billion from the budget. In his State of the State address that month, he proposed adding $1 billion instead. He boasted of multi-million-dollar “increases in several key programs” in his forthcoming fiscal 1993 spending plan. “As these examples illustrate,” he said, “we’re not against government spending. We don’t wish to dismantle government.”A year later, Weld’s proposed 1994 budget included yet another $1 billion spending hike. “We’re seeing a completely different Bill Weld than we saw a couple of years ago,” exulted James Braude, director of the staunchly liberal Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts, which had led the fight against Question 3, the 1990 tax rollback ballot issue. The state’s foremost anti-tax advocate, by contrast, was dismayed. “Spending is out of control,” said Barbara Anderson of Citizens for Limited Taxation, “just like it used to be.”How could Weld, who had come to office waving a budget-slashing scimitar, have turned into a bigger spender than his predecessor? “Anyone who looks at this budget,” said State Representative Tom Finneran, the moderate Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “will see Mike Dukakis, a foot taller, with a different shade of hair. The governor is doing everything he accused Dukakis of.”Weld’s own explanation was incoherent. “My hope is that revenues continue to go up,” he told the Boston Herald, “even if that means the budget goes up. If to some extent we’re victims of our own successes, . . . that’s not all bad.” Was this the same Republican who used to remind audiences that there was no such thing as government money, only taxpayers’ money?In reality, once the budget crisis was over, a majority of Beacon Hill Democrats found spending cuts intolerable. To cut spending a second (or third, or fourth) year in a row, Weld would have had to fight the legislative leadership—hard. It would have been unpleasant, and Weld avoids unpleasant fights. Not for lack of mettle: as a federal prosecutor he was tenacious. But when it comes to relationships with people he must deal with, Weld is conflict averse. Forced to choose between antagonizing the top Democrats in the statehouse and adjusting his ends, Weld adjusted.Besides, his passion for budget cutting as an end in itself—as a way to reduce the scope of government and shift power to the private sector—seemed to have largely dried up after the inaugural. Rather than pressing the genuinely revolutionary view that the state should spend less and do less because less government would be better for the economy and for society, Weld argued only that spending had to be curbed to avert economic collapse. When the fiscal storm ended, that argument lost its force.If Weld—a Republican governor facing a Democratic legislature—had really hoped to push a government-shrinking agenda, it was clear he would have had to draw political strength from some source other than public desperation. For that, he had two options: build a powerful cadre of loyalists in his own administration, or expand the Republican minority in the Legislature. He did neither.From the outset, most of Weld’s appointees did not share his campaign vision of a sharply slimmed-down government. His post-election transition committee tilted noticeably leftward. “Weld Picks a Lot of Liberals” was the headline on a Herald story two weeks after the 1990 election. To some extent, Weld was merely paying a political debt. He had been elected with a strong crossover vote from liberal Democrats put off by their own party’s abrasive nominee, John Silber.But Weld’s appointments also reflected his social and cultural orientation. A high-bred Yankee with Long Island roots, an education at Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, and a wife (the former Susan Roosevelt of Oyster Bay) who backed Dukakis for president, Weld is at ease in the liberal milieu of Cambridge, where he lives. He is a Republican of the Elliot Richardson, not the Ronald Reagan, variety. The ambience of a Grateful Dead concert is far more congenial to him—he donned a black ribbon when Jerry Garcia died—than that of a Republican convention.As Weld shaped his team, the nod often went to appointees on the strength of personal friendship or politically correct “diversity.” He won kudos for the number of women and blacks he named to his Cabinet, but by common acknowledgment they were generally the least impressive members of the administration. He named former Dukakis aides and supporters to Cabinet posts and judgeships. In one agency after another—Public Utilities, Public Health, Youth Services, Environmental Affairs—the faces of the fledgling Republican administration were those of the outgoing, discredited Democratic administration. In a political roundup column one year into the nouveau regime, the Herald quoted the lyrics of a Who song to characterize the Weld bureaucracy: “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.”There were, of course, exceptions—most notably James J. Kerasiotes, Weld’s first highway commissioner (later elevated to the Cabinet as transportation secretary). He unapologetically swept “Dukakoids” from his agency, sliced its budget and payroll, and mounted a hatchet in his office as a symbol of his willingness to battle defenders of the status quo. “That’s what elections are all about,” Kerasiotes said. “Those people who can’t work in sync with your agenda ought to leave.”Kerasiotes’s combative style earned the enmity of state-employee unions. Unlike other Weld officials, he was happy to return the bureaucrats' scorn. To audiences and interviewers, he relayed a stream of anecdotes about the goldbricking and waste he was uncovering. More significantly, he began changing the way his department did business. He halved the number of state cars taken home by employees of the state mass-transit authority and auctioned off the excess vehicles. For the first time in 30 years, the department used competitive bidding to retain bond counsel. Kerasiotes cut a public relations staff of eight to one. He was explicit about whose agenda he was following. “Until I’m told otherwise,” he said, “I’m taking the governor’s campaign promises as my marching orders.”But more typical were the department and commission heads who shared none of Weld’s early fervor for downsizing, and who had no intention of dismantling anything. Some of the most crucial positions in state government went to appointees completely at odds with Weld’s philosophy. “He just never grasped the importance of doing an ideology check on people,” said a member of the governor’s senior staff. Another aide lamented in a confidential 1992 memo: “How can we possibly revolutionize state government when virtually the entire bureaucracy is in enemy hands?”But by then it was clear that Weld no longer intended to revolutionize state government. The ideological clarity of his campaign and his inaugural message was dissipated. “Philosophically, I’m a work in progress,” Weld said of himself, and his performance echoed his lack of focus.Latitudinarian by nature, Weld was uncomfortable with the idea of testing potential nominees for ideological purity. But a governor who doesn’t concern himself with the political views of his appointees is not a governor who can lead a revolution. In May 1992, Martin Kaplan, chairman of the state Board of Education, told the Boston Globe: “The governor has never, when I came on the board or became chairman, told me how I should move on certain issues.” Across much of the Weld administration, that was the prevailing attitude.Weld proved no better at building a strong Republican presence in the State Legislature. The 1990 election that had swept Weld into office had also swelled Republican ranks in the 40-member State Senate to 16—enough to sustain a gubernatorial veto. Weld’s power to strike down bills was a weapon the Democrats who controlled the Legislature had to respect. If Weld were serious about transforming state government, preserving his veto and expanding the GOP base should have been his top political priorities.Instead, he allowed the Republican Party to fall apart. He paid little attention to the GOP’s few officeholders and kept the Republican State Committee powerless. He recruited few candidates to run for office and delivered minimal assistance to those who did. Result: in the 1992 legislative elections, Republican Senate seats shrank from 16 to 9. Weld's power shrank, too. Democrats could now override his vetoes at will, and often did. In December 1993, Weld suffered a key defeat: over his objection, the Legislature enacted a law intended to prevent privatization.Yet even this loss seemed to teach him nothing. When he ran for reelection in 1994, he again left fellow Republicans to fend for themselves, even as he spent more than $4.5 million on his own campaign against a weak Democratic nominee. As he romped to a second term with 71 percent of the vote, his party gained exactly zero seats on Beacon Hill. In a year of massive GOP pickups around the country, Massachusetts was one of only four states where Republicans gained no ground.“Why didn’t he recruit a slate of 40 Republicans to run for the Senate?” asked one unhappy Republican activist. “I love Bill Weld, but he’s going to be hurt by his failure to do anything to help his party.” Former State Senator Arthur Chase, a Worcester Republican, concluded that Weld “was more concerned about getting the largest possible reelection margin for himself than with electing the largest number of Republicans. I think his objective was to catapult himself onto the national scene.”By the end of 1994, Weld appeared to have lost interest in his job. Increasingly absorbed with national Republican politics, he began taking soundings for a presidential run. He seized every opportunity to fly to Washington for appearances with the new Republican leaders in Congress. He bragged about the book he and Speaker Newt Gingrich allegedly were going to write together.Weld eventually decided not to run for the White House and signed on instead as a top fund-raiser for California Governor Pete Wilson. He plunged into Wilson's presidential campaign (and out of Massachusetts) so energetically that his absence became a running joke. The Globe began clocking the hours Weld actually spent in his office in a feature called “Weld Watch.” The Herald editorialized: “Time to come home, Bill.” One Boston radio station even sent two talk-show hosts on a “Where’s Weld-o?” search for the missing governor.But Weld’s efforts to project influence nationally didn’t alter his standing on Beacon Hill, where—lacking an aggressive command staff and bereft of Republican troops in the Legislature—he has found himself without much political muscle. Disinclined by temperament to “pull a Reagan”—that is, to bypass the Legislature and take his case to the people—Weld came to adopt a policy of accommodation.He began bending over backward to get along with the legislative leadership. No longer did he condemn the Legislature as “rotten to the core.” On the contrary: in November 1994, in the face of enormous public hostility (but to enthusiastic acclaim inside the statehouse), he introduced a bill to raise legislators' pay by 55 percent. The move came just a few weeks after Weld told reporters that a pay hike was “not something we’re considering.” Adding insult to injury, the bill made the raise unrepealable by referendum.Weld’s aides insisted he wasn’t sleeping with the enemy but simply being cagey and practical. The governor’s willingness to take the heat for a pay raise, they pointed out, was promptly rewarded by the Legislature with the capital gains tax cut Weld had long sought.But such victories were few and very far between, not enough to explain Weld’s ostentatious chumminess with the legislative leaders he used to execrate. Just how far he was willing to go to win favor with the Democrats was evident on Election Day 1994. At a polling place in South Boston, Weld actually campaigned with Bill Bulger, the State Senate president he had denounced so hotly four years earlier. He introduced himself to bemused voters as “Senator Bulger’s campaign manager” and urged them to reelect the senator—the state’s most powerful Democrat, a vehement opponent of term limits, tax cuts, and most privatization, the antithesis of nearly everything Weld had stood for in 1990. “He’s a good man,” Weld grinned. One year later, Weld helped this “good man” step up to the presidency of the University of Massachusetts.What happened? It may be that Weld doesn’t take governing—or political differences—too seriously. He enjoys the gamesmanship of politics more than the substance of policy. Embracing the Democrats who hold power on Beacon Hill was a way of staying in the game, of demonstrating his good sportsmanship. It certainly added to his reputation for puckish unpredictability.Weld’s change of opinion about Bulger symbolized his transformation from an anti-government crusader to an amiable status-quo politician, from an outsider bent on “reinventing government” to an insider content with managing the government that exists.Just how committed Weld ever really was to “taming the beast” is open to question. Like sunspots, his anti-government zeal flares up at intervals. When Weld is running for office, that zeal is pronounced; thereafter it largely subsides. On the campaign trail in 1990 and 1994, he fervently attacked government's wasteful, oppressive ineptitude. Once the votes were counted, he seemed to find government much less offensive. In November 1995, as he prepared to run against U.S. Senator John Kerry, Weld again cranked up the downsizing rhetoric.“We’ve insulated, we’ve sealed, we’ve caulked the old place”—state government— “as much as possible,” he proclaimed, “but it’s still leaking taxpayer dollars like crazy. It’s time to knock the old fleabag down.” He proposed a slew of reforms, from abolishing Cabinet departments to privatizing mass transit to making driver’s licenses permanent. He said his plan would reduce state spending by $659 million, and that most of the savings would be returned in the form of tax cuts. Whether the governor who had driven state spending up at two and a half times the rate of inflation actually meant any of this was—not to put too fine a point on it—uncertain.In fairness, Weld has presided over some downsizing of state functions. A number of market-oriented reforms have taken effect, some despite harsh opposition. For example, in its first year, the Weld administration hired a private firm to provide medical services for the state’s prison inmates, replacing some 200 state workers, reducing costs to the treasury, and improving the quality of care. Similarly, the Department of Mental Retardation privatized food and housekeeping services at facilities housing 1,600 retarded citizens. In-house operations that had required 725 state workers and cost $23 million were contracted to private vendors. Costs dropped $10 million, most of the laid-off state workers found jobs with the new vendors, and the department reported “substantial improvements in cleanliness, sanitation, and quality of food.”A Weld drive to shut down nine underused public hospitals was largely successful. The administration closed eight of them by late 1993, moving thousands of patients to residential settings or into nursing homes and saving some $36 million per year. The administration drew praise for keeping its promise that every transferred patient would end up receiving “equal or better care.”Beginning in 1992, Weld's administration contracted out highway maintenance in eastern Massachusetts, long the domain of public-sector unions. The results are impressive by any measure: the Highway Department has cut its workforce from 3,100 to 2,300 and its operating budget from $96 million to $73 million—while increasing the frequency of grass mowing, bridge washing, and road sweeping. In Dukakis's last term, 302 state bridges were repaired or rebuilt; in Weld’s first term, that number nearly doubled, to 595. Researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government audited the privatization program in Essex County and found it 21 percent more cost-effective than the old system.Weld has reined in Medicaid spending, the biggest line-item in the budget, to an annual growth rate of less than 3 percent—a phenomenal change from Dukakis's last term, when it was skyrocketing 20 percent a year. In essence, the Weld administration transformed Medicaid into a giant HMO, using the state’s financial clout to win lower prices from hospitals and nursing homes. A private firm took over mental health care and drug treatment. For the first time, the system concentrated on treating Medicaid patients in the right setting—steering them away from gold-plated teaching hospitals, for example, when a community hospital would be more appropriate. Weld also won passage of a law deregulating hospital finances: no longer would the state tell insurers how much to pay hospitals for various services; now insurers (including Medicaid) were free to negotiate deals for themselves. Result: a remarkable slowing of the rise in health care costs and the taming of what had been the worst budget buster in Massachusetts.These were not trivial accomplishments. But they hardly added up to a sweeping overhaul of Massachusetts government. And they didn't spring from any administration-wide passion to shrink state government. Almost all the downsizing and privatizing successes were the work of two officials who shared a genuine commitment to curbing the scope of government. One was Kerasiotes, the highway commissioner later elevated to transportation secretary. The other was Charles D. Baker, who joined the administration as undersecretary for health, moved up to secretary of health and human services, and in 1994 was made secretary of administration and finance, the highest post in the Cabinet.Weld once called Baker “the soul of the Weld administration.” He said of Kerasiotes: “I wish I had a dozen like him.” That he had only one of each was no one’s fault but Weld’s. Had he paid greater attention to personnel, seeking out and appointing more Bakers and Kerasioteses to state office, a Weld revolution might indeed have taken place.What took place instead was a retreat. On the evidence of his first five years, Weld’s enthusiasm for reining in government is gone. He may still, on occasion, talk the talk—his call last November to “knock the old fleabag down” was, if anything, even more radical than his first inaugural address; and in his race for the Senate, he has revived the conservative themes of his gubernatorial campaigns. But in most areas, he has yet to walk the walk.Some illustrations:Reducing Massachusetts’s network of state colleges once stood high on Weld’s to-do list. While public higher education predominates elsewhere, in Massachusetts—where the tradition of private higher learning is older than statehood—state institutions award only 20 percent of academic degrees. Yet an empire of 29 mediocre public colleges has bloated up, built mostly to satisfy the “edifice complex” of a succession of governors and legislators. Weld had said he would consolidate the system, closing campuses and trimming the budget by $40 million. But when an uproar ensued, he reversed course. In May 1991 he announced: “There will be no campus closings; . . . that $40 million is going back into the higher ed budget.” Today Weld dreams of building “a public university on a par with Michigan and California.” Spending on the state college empire is now 24 percent more than when he was inaugurated.Privatizing chunks of the state’s transportation infrastructure was supposed to be part of the Great Downsizing. In April 1991 Weld’s first transportation secretary touted the virtues of privately operated toll roads. At various times, Weld or his aides have suggested privatizing the new Central Artery, a below-ground highway now under construction; the Massachusetts Turnpike, a 135-mile road running from Boston to New York State; the traffic tunnels that connect downtown Boston to the East Boston peninsula; the buses and subways of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority; and Logan International Airport. Except for the MBTA (still unprivatized, but Kerasiotes is talking about it), all these suggestions have died.Weld took office vowing to privatize Boston’s state-owned Hynes Convention Center, a paradigm of mismanagement that loses millions annually. But when Bulger—whose former chief aide is executive director of the Hynes—objected, Weld backed down. He even signed a law providing the Hynes with a guaranteed subsidy. “Weld’s first cave-in was on the Hynes,” recalls GOP Congressman Peter Blute, who as a state legislator had led the effort to privatize the convention center. “There was a big meeting with Weld and all of us who had been fighting the Democrats on the Hynes, and we urged him not to do it. We told him, ‘Hey, we have a lot invested here.’ But he basically said he had to deal with Bulger.” By 1994 Weld was backing efforts to build a second government-owned convention center in Boston.In 1992, Weld favored ending Massachusetts’s ludicrous requirement that all road repair or construction sites be supervised by police officers on paid details—a government monopoly that costs utilities and municipalities at least $100 million annually. But the Legislature, heavily lobbied by police unions unwilling to give up this lucrative perk, refused to consider the issue. So Weld declined to push it. “Come back when you’ve got 81 votes [a majority] in the House, and let’s talk about it,” he told the Globe. Any attempt on his part to change legislators’ minds, he said, “would be performing a vain act.”Just before his inauguration, Weld noted that he looked forward to “blowing up” the Metropolitan District Commission, a hodgepodge state agency that manages—with notorious incompetence—an assortment of Greater Boston parks, pools, beaches, and roadways. Five years later the MDC remains unscathed, with a favorite Weld aide at its head.Since Weld has been governor, in fact, no state agency or bureau has been abolished. Several, however, have been created. Weld has further cluttered the state’s bureaucracy with an executive office of education (complete with a Cabinet secretary), several new licensing boards, a Gay and Lesbian Youth Commission, and a Governor’s Advisory Committee on Women’s Issues.In 1992 he lobbied for the creation of government-managed investment funds to back start-up companies that private lenders deemed too risky. “Some people,” Weld acknowledged, “will ask, ‘Why are you being so proactive?’ I say, these are market failures we are responding to.” This was a far cry from the fiscal libertarian who in 1990 had condemned the state’s “unwieldy structure of ‘industrial policy,’” scorning anyone who thought government ought to be picking the economy’s winners and losers.In the 1988 presidential campaign, one of Michael Dukakis’s mantras was “competence, not ideology.” Ironically, that slogan in many ways describes not the performance of Dukakis but of his successor in the Massachusetts statehouse. The Bay State today is managed much as Dukakis must have wished he could manage it—by a government that is large, intrusive, and expensive, but mostly free of scandal and able to balance its budget.Frankly, there is little about the commonwealth's government in Year 5 of the Weld era that Dukakis would object to. Expenditures and tax revenues go up each year—both by several points more than the inflation rate—but spending never outstrips income. Massachusetts citizens pay very high taxes (the Tax Foundation estimates their tax burden as the nation’s eighth-heaviest), and the state is ruled by a government that involves itself in everything: foster care and smoking prevention, job training and arts subsidies, liquor wholesaling and harness racing, school discipline and the price of milk, manicurists, and auto insurance. In the name of environmental protection, the state promulgates reams of regulations, many of them stringent and costly to business. The state supervises and regulates dozens of professions, and only a few of its functions have been privatized. State employees are very well paid; state legislators—thanks to the Weld pay raise—even more so. As a rule, the government's priorities are Democratic priorities. Racial preferences are required by law and defended by the governor. Abortion is widely available and in many cases state funded. Onerous new mandates have been signed into law—mandatory electric car quotas, mandatory helmets for kids riding bikes, a mandatory school curriculum on “gay sensitivity.”I was living in the state at the time. I voted for him . He was down the African American agenda. The previous years I had voted for Dukasis. I think for Black Republicans he is a good choice.