By The River

The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., needs to be more careful in the letters from readers it allows to be printed. There is one in Wednesday's paper that can be read, without too much trouble, as a call to assassinate President Obama.

After fulminating against "liberal" attempts to take over health care, the writer's rhetoric takes an apocalyptic turn. "It is so frightening to see what is happening in our country and the pace in which it is spinning out of control. Our forefathers must be churning in their graves. What they built and the bloodshed (sic) we spilled to protect and defend us is rapidly turning to sand."

And then the payoff line: "Someone has to stop all the takeovers and giveaways and do it quickly."

Someone.

The writer will no doubt say assassination wasn't the intent, but in the context of the rest of the letter this can be read as a call to murder and should not have been published. A weak-minded rightist, a Timothy McVeigh type, could be moved to action by words like that. Especially amid growing calls among the more dangerous elements of the right to do away with the President. Pennsylvania is not immune from that sort of thinking, or lack thereof. Newspapers need to be careful.

The Warren Times-Observer in Warren, Pennsylvania, actually ran a classified ad in May that expressed the hope that Obama would follow in the footsteps of "Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy," the four murdered U.S. presidents. No one on the classified ad staff apparently made the connection, and the publisher issued a public apology. The Secret Service is said to be investigating.

This is not a free speech issue. No one has the right under the First Amendment to publicly advocate the murder of another person, whether they use carefully coded language or not.

So Patriot-News, screen your letters more carefully. The editorial page and op-ed page are something I never fail to read, but I don't want to read rightwing garbage like today's letter.

Posted by David at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Good news from Minnesota this afternoon. The state Supreme Court ruled that Democrat Al Franken was the winner of the U.S. Senate race there (in November 2008) by I think 312 votes over the Republican Norm "Sore Loser" Coleman. After an hour or so of collective holding of breath, Coleman finally conceded. Franken becomes the 60th Democratic senator and a potential end to Republican filibusters of health care and other important issues for America.

I first saw Al Franken on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970s. He was mainly a writer on the show, but occasionally appeared on camera to do political commentaries that inevitably got around to the question of, "What does it mean to me, Al Franken?" Franken is smart, liberal, and progressive in the Minnesota tradition.

Coleman can't be blamed entirely for this fiasco. He was put up to the recount fight and financed by the national Republican Party, who desperately wanted Franken and his 60th vote kept out of the Senate as long as possible. And no, it wasn't the same as Gore vs. Bush in Florida in 2000. Gore never received a fair count by unbiased officials. Coleman got that and more, but the handwriting on the wall was clear long ago that Franken had won.

Posted by David at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, no, not me.

We had a going-away party yesterday for Scott and Heather Emery, who are leaving Shipoke for Olympia, Washington. Scott finished his general surgery residency at Pinnacle Hospital and accepted a job in a surgery practice back in their home state. Heather was a lawyer for the state, most recently for the Independent Regulatory Review Commission. She doesn't have a new job lined up, but as a result will be able to work on their new home with its views of Puget Sound.

I'll miss Scott's genial good nature and Heather's peppery wit. They arrived not long before the 2004 flood, so are full-fledged Shipoke residents. Your status here is based on how many floods you have gone through. I don't think we have any '36-ers left, and there may be one or two survivors of the Agnes and Eloise floods in the 1970s. But for most of us, the question comes down to whether you can regale newcomers like Cali McCullough and her husband with stories of the 1996 and 2004 floods. We don't even have to make stuff up. Reality is good enough.

So we sat under the picnic shelter in the playground yesterday telling these stories and drinking wine, or beer, and snacking on wraps from Wegman's (courtesy of Bill Cluck) and potato salad from me--first of the season. I don't look forward to another flood, even though I would love to make a documentary film if it happens. Floods are brutal events, wearing on the body, soul and pocketbook. But like soldiers who have gone through battle, we relive them again and again.

In a perfect world, I would have arranged for the State Farm adjuster from the 2004 flood to be at the party for Heather to finally strangle. But don't get me started on that fiasco. Heather and Scott won't escape flood insurance and its onerous cost at their new home, either, but I suspect Puget Sound floods a lot less than the mighty Susquehanna. We all wish them the best.

Posted by David at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill, who is my congressman, and U.S. Rep. Todd Platts, R-York, who represents a district on the other side of the Susquehanna River, both voted against the Obama Administration's climate/energy bill that passed the House narrowly on Friday.

With Platts, what can you do? Only eight Republicans were willing to buck the tight GOP party discipline and vote in favor of the first serious U.S. effort to stop global warming. That party is firmly controlled by the energy industry and the global warming deniers.

But Holden was a disappointment. I've searched for any statement by him defending his vote, but haven't been able to find one. I imagine he voted against the bill in a misguided effort to save anthracite coal mining jobs in his district. If mining jobs make up more than 1 percent of the total jobs in his district, I'd be surprised, but you can never rule out an attack of "magical thinking" up there about reviving the anthracite coal industry.

Holden knows he can go against the wishes of liberal Democrats like me because we know that if he is replaced by a Republican, it will be some Bible-thumper who wants to cut taxes for the wealthy. But Holden should also consider what votes like this will do to his efforts in the future to get help from the Obama Administration on any number of other issues.

But at least it passed, and now it goes on to the Senate. U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter had better beware about voting against this bill. His likely Democratic primary challenger next year, Rep. Joe Sestak, was among the Pennsylvania Democrats who voted in favor of the global warming bill. Specter's poll numbers still show him leading Sestak, but with a large number of undecideds. Specter can't take Democratic votes for granted.

Posted by David at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The strange tale of Gov. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, got even stranger this afternoon. The governor, intercepted at the Atlanta airport by a reporter from The State, South Carolina's leading newspaper, admitted that he actually wasn't hiking the Appalachian Trail as his staff had insisted. Instead, he was in Argentina having an affair with an old friend.

Of course, he apologized to his family and said his wife knew about his Argentine firecracker. His yet unnamed girlfriend is believed to be the first Argentine to play a part in an American political scandal since stripper Annabelle "Fanne Fox" Battistella cavorted in the Washington Tidal Basin with Democratic Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas in 1974. Actually, cavorting might not be the right word. She actually ran out of Mills' car after it was pulled over by the D.C. Park Police and jumped in the water. Whatever verb you prefer, It did wonders for her career, if not for that of Mills, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Sanford can now join that other presidential wannabe Sen. Jon Ensign, R-Nevada, on a Family Values ticket in 2012, provided one of them can muscle Sarah Palin out of the way for the right to be the next Alf Landon and lose to FDR, er, Obama, by historic proportions. At least Sanford wasn't nailing a member of his own staff whose husband also was on his staff. Who do you take him for, anyway? Jon Ensign?

Someone really needs to call the Appalachian Trail Conference in Harper's Ferry, W.Va., and ask spokesman Brian King if they have a comment on all this. Sanford, incidentally, says that he hiked on the A.T. as a younger man. But then he also says he spent the weekend driving the coastline of Argentina relax. One of those pesky reporters from The State figured out that it isn't really possible to do that because there is no Argentine equivalent of Highway 1 in California.

I'm going to go set the DVR right now for tonight's sure to be classic episode of The Daily Show.

Posted by David at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)