Maybe you don't care about Deval Patrick who is the black Democratic governor of Massachusetts. But all of us on Brattle Street, which was actually Tory Row during the Revolution, voted for him as, in fact, did most of the folk in Dorchester and Southie, where over a quarter century ago Louise Day Hicks dominated Boston politics and won (one) election to the U.S. House of Representatives. What can I say about her? She was a racist. The question is: when she died in 2003 did she meet her maker? Patrick won the gubernatorial race by a large margin against a not-exactly-smart Republican woman who'd been lieutenant governor under Mitt Romney. Patrick is a quintessential liberal pol, not bad really but also not especially good. A fresh idea hasn't come out of his mouth. But fresh ideas don't come naturally out of governors' mouths. His burden, like that of most governors, is how to find the money to pay for at least some of the lavish promises he'd made during the campaign. The problem is that Patrick had made many such promises. That's the currency of a Democratic campaign. His past has come back to haunt him in many other ways, too. One is that he was on the board of directors (at $360,000 a year) of ACC Capitol, a private company owned by billionaire Roland E. Arnall. Its major holding is Ameriquest Mortgage, one of those specialists in sub-prime mortgages that, as the Boston Globe delicately put it "has frequently been accused of predatory lending practices." "Oh, we'll lend you the down payment up front. No Problem." This is the kind of lending that is driving the whole stock market down, down, down and that will destroy the lenders, the insurers of the lenders (watch them heading south on the market) and those who have brought the below credit paper. The people who will really suffer are the borrowers. "Tangle of loans feeds foreclosure crisis," reads a headline on Tuesday's front page of the Globe. Well, my governor, when he was governor, made what he described as a "private" call to Robert Rubin, former Secretary of the Treasury and now a top man at Citigroup, to get help from Rubin for a loan to ACC. I don't recall whether Citigroup did make the loan. But it's been dropping steadily for making other such loans. Now, what do we make of a liberal squishy-hearted Democrat--not a conservative hard-hearted Republican--making his money off a business that traffics in fraud?