Tim Duncan and the city of Boston have had an interesting relationship over the years. It looked like the big guy would be coming here as a reward for the dismal 1997 Celtics season; Rick Pitino [make evil eye sign, spit on ground] even took the C's coaching job assuming that he'd get to coach Tim. As we all know, the Spurs' tank-job paid off, Duncan went to San Antonio, and Pitino stayed. Just to......

Say what you will about Mitt Romney, the man never loses his cool. Even if it seems like he loses his cool, such as in the ad in which he went jogging and his hair got mussed, the stray hairs were on purpose. But a reporter got under Romney's skin at a Staples in South Carolina this morning when Romney said lobbyists didn't run his campaign. The reporter, Glen Johnson, said that was bull. Alas,......

Political junkies have divided the last few months between obsessing over Iowa and New Hampshire and complaining about how much energy is wasted obsessing over Iowa and New Hampshire. Those states, the argument goes, are too white and too small and too rural to represent the country at large. But, while true, it always seems dismissive and elitist (possibly because we're writing this on a iPhone while stopped at a light in a Prius Zipcar.)......

Former Massachusetts governor and presidential aspirant Romney is putting his New England Spanking behind him and focusing entirely on winning the Michigan primary. He has pulled advertising from South Carolina and Florida and is going whole hog. Michigan seems to be loving the attention, at least according to the AP. Writer Glen Johnson declared that Romney received a "Hero's Welcome." But it's still not the kind of welcome Romney was expecting only a few weeks......

The space-saver war continues. Yesterday, Donovan Slack followed up on the city's attempts to get a few residents of South Boston to stop saving parking spaces after a snowstorm, even though they can keep the space for 48 hours. Apparently a few protesters feel that tradition trumps the law: But sending a special crew to South Boston angered some in the neighborhood. They interpreted the move as another offensive in the years-long battle between City......

Oprah and Obama Sunday, December 9 Verizon Wireless Arena, Manchester, NH Doors at 6:00 pm, rally at 7:30 pm You can knock, but you might not get in. Waiting List As the presidential race heats up, Barack Obama isn't messing around. He's already been to Boston several times and paid extra-special attention to New Hampshire, but now he's uncorking his secret weapon--Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey will be with Obama in South Carolina Sunday morning, and then......

With his staff was busy reaching out to his gay supporters, Mitt Romney went to work alienating what must be a much larger constituency: his extended family. At a campaign stop in South Carolina yesterday, Romney ran into a woman whom he misidentified as his "niece" (she's his second cousin) who works as a "teacher" (she's a pediatrician) and whose name he did not know. Despite her cousin's warm affections, Heather Krueger (whom Romney called......

Yeah, yeah, "Obama" as in "Barack" as in Deval Patrick's buddy sounds similar to "Osama" as in the despicable terrorist. But those are two names that you don't want to mix up in polite company. You don't want to mix up those names in impolite company. Alas, that's exactly what former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney did. Marc Ambinder has the quotation from a Romney presentation in Greenville, South Carolina: Actually, just......

This November's edition of Harper's has perhaps the best visual representation of former Massachusetts governor and current presidential aspirant Mitt Romney. The bobbleheads capture Romney's attempt to keep nodding his head to anyone who might have the power to put him in office. Ken Silverstein's article doesn't uncover anything that anyone who lives in Massachusetts doesn't already know. Romney is a businessman who will do what he's gotta do to get the job done,......

A man is as good as the company he keeps, right? If so, then former Massachusetts governor and presidential aspirant Mitt Romney needs to make some new friends as soon as possible. Last week, someone linked to Team Romney was accused of putting up a website called "Phoney Fred." The website criticized fellow presidential candidate/TV actor Fred Thompson, who is already smoking Romney in the polls. The site offers the many moods of Thompson, including......

We have a confession to make: we didn't pay a lot of attention to last night's Home Run Derby. Our tolerance for Chris Berman yelling "back back back" is low. Our desire to see kayakers crashing into each other in San Francisco Bay was present, but not overwhelming. And without Papi, what's the point? So congratulations to Anaheim's Vlad Guerrero, who won the Derby, despite the fact that no home runs landed in the huge......

The Massachusetts midterms were downright sane compared to what happened in the rest of the nation. There was voter deception in Virginia. A poll worker strangled a voter in Kentucky (you'd think it would have been the opposite). Computer glitches slowed down voting across the nation. South Carolina's governor wasn't able to vote for himself. Britney Spears divorced K-Fed, which may have been a cultural sign that "The Man" was about to get stuck.......

First, the Globe gave us the stunning revelation that Big Dig contractors got early warning that those ceiling panels might fall and kill someone, in the form of a memo from an engineer employed by sub-contractor John Keaveney. Then last week, we found out that actually, that 1999 memo was probably a self-aggrandizing hoax from the guy who claimed to have written it. Naturally, that was the cue for the Herald to go into full......

After a weekend of such incredible springtime weather and a Red Sox win on opening day, the rain sets in. The meteorologists are talking lots of rain and some possible snow over the next 48 hours. All Bostonist can think about is road trips. Fond memories of heading down 95 to visit the grandparents and Disneyworld. We're reminded of the signs which started somewhere in Jersey letting us know that South of the Border was......

Mitt's aspirations to be President of the United States seem to keep surfacing in the local news. Today he has finally confirmed that he is in fact testing the waters, but we'll have to wait until the fall for a firm bid. This mcuh-quoted utterance - "If someone said, well, you know, the governor's testing the national waters, that's a fair characterization," Romney said. "But I'm planning on running for governor. Time will tell, I'll......

If Gov. Mitt Romney had any aspirations of becoming President, then the latest poll by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center should slap him back into reality. The poll of 501 Mass. residents was taken March 5-8. [error margin of 4.4%.] Accordingly, 53 percent of respondents said Romney should not run for president, while 28 percent said he should. Furthermore, half of those surveyed thought Romney wouldn't make a decent president, a third......

As former Vermont Governor Howard Dean said “Not only are we going to New Hampshire, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York…Yearrrah.” Words that marked the primary cycle of the 2004 election ring true for Governor Mitt Romney. He traveled to South Carolina yesterday to deliver a speech to over 300 republican audience members. The political process......