Robert David Sullivan 2

Unless I'm in a suit, affecting a posh British accent, or mostly dressed in leather, stop calling me "sir." I don't care how big our age difference is!

The Herald's hack obsession

Today's Boston Herald has a follow-up to yesterday's story by Jay Fitzgerald that implied that the lion's share of federal stimulus funds were hijacked by the Patrick administration to pay for "hack" government jobs. Yesterday's front-page story, headlined "GOV'S STIM FLAM" on the front and "Stimulus saves hacks" on the inside, made it seem like the Patrick administration had chosen to steer stimulus funds toward public-sector jobs.

Today's story, buried deep in the paper and the website (and without any link to the previous story), gives more than a passing notice to the fact that much of the stimulus funding in question was specifically earmarked by the feds for hiring or retaining public-sector employees. (It's not quite a correction, more of a grudging acknowledgment that maybe Patrick isn't lying on this score.)

Putting aside the specifics of this particular story, my question for the Herald is, when did they start using "hack" to describe every single person in the public sector, no matter what their qualifications, salaries, duties, and competence in performing their jobs?