Again taking two together; "Neal" asks:

What's next for Gov. Patrick? An Obama appointment (if he wins) to SJC or AG? A run for president in '16?

...while "JohnIAT" asks:

How badly does Scott Brown want to run for President?

On Deval Patrick, I haven't changed my thinking since I wrote about this one year ago this month.

Yes, I know, it's all Whitey all the time -- believe me, I'm enjoying the spectacle -- but let's remember that there's another sordid tale going on: the inability of the Massachusetts state legislature to pass a budget.

The fiscal year ends in six days, on Thursday June 30. So, to have money in the checkbook a week from today, a budget's got to be signed.

"This debate over budgets and deficits is about more than just numbers on a page, more than just cutting and spending. It's about the kind of future we want. It's about the kind of country we believe in."

That's from the very first paragraph of Barack Obama's big deficit-cutting speech today. If you spent time watching last year's Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign, it probably struck you as rather familiar.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives does not seem to be in a great rush to work on Governor Deval Patrick's and Senate President Therese Murray's top priority of the session, health care cost containment, Liz Kowalczyk writes in the Globe. So true. In fact, I've found that when you mention health care cost containment to people on the House side, they tend to assume you're talking just about moving municipalities to GIC for health insurance; the big reform Patrick and Murray are talking about doesn't seem to even be on their radar.

In this week's issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I write about the never-ending, and recently increasing, speculation about Governor Deval Patrick's personal plans. As you may have heard, he's going to be DNC chairman, or US Senator, or Obama campaign chair, or Supreme Court justice, or who knows what else.

Back in the early days of the Barack Obama presidency, when speculation was rampant that Deval Patrick would head to Washington for a post, a well-informed insider type speculated to me that Patrick could be named US Ambassador to China. Didn't happen -- it went to (Republican) Jon Huntsman of Utah. Well, Huntsman just resigned, supposedly to launch a Presidential bid.

In this week's issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I look at a new movement that might, finally, make real criminal-justice reform politically feasible. That movement is coming from die-hard movement conservatives.

Sure, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and the Concerned Women for America are coming at the issue from a different perspective than the generally liberal long-time advocates.

Oh, what an exciting week this is for those who enjoy the arcane rituals and traditions of the peaceful transfer of power in the world's greatest democracy!

For starters, congratulations to Stephen Murphy, who got voted in as the new president of the Boston City Council. He (and his staff!) finally get the big office, and all the trappings and attention that come with it -- and, one imagines, a fundraising boost toward his re-election later this year.

There is not a lot of big news coming out of the string of interviews Governor Deval Patrick is doing this week -- including one with me -- other than the fact that he's doing them at all. Patrick has not always made, shall we say, warm outreach to the fourth estate. Clearly, as he indicated in his one-on-one with me Tuesday afternoon, he hopes to get more positive press coverage in the second term, and I'd say he has realized the futility of his first-term strategy of sitting behind closed doors being bitter about the negative coverage.

I have been invited to interview Governor Deval Patrick tomorrow, in a series of 15-minute "exclusives" he's giving to community papers in advance of his inauguration. He wants to talk about his goals for his second term, as well as lessons he's learned from the first.

Well, I'm turning the floor over to you -- what would you like to ask the governor?

It turns out, you can be pretty snarky in 140 characters. I've been on Twitter for a couple of years now (follow me at twitter.com/dbernstein), and use it for a variety of purposes: breaking bits of political news; passing along news or commentary of interest; linking to my articles and blog posts; offering brief observations and commentary; interacting with readers and political junkies; and of course, cracking humorous one-liners.

Four years ago, Deval Patrick went in front of a gathering of editors and publishers and told them that they had all totally missed the story of his campaign, which was his incredible grassroots operation. True as it may have been, it's probably not too smart to start off your gubernatorial relationship with the media by telling them that you know how to do their jobs better than they do.

Two weeks ago, after the last round of polls on the Massachusetts Governor race began, I wrote:

...pretty much nobody seriously thinks that anybody is ahead by a comfortable margin in the Massachusetts governor's race.

Second: Every independent poll since Labor Day -- check that, since June -- has shown Deval Patrick leading with margins ranging from 1 percentage point (Globe/UNH) to 7, as in the Suffolk University poll that came out earlier this week.