By The River

Does Messiah College turn out anything other than young Republican idealogues?

Of course they do, and I've met some of them. But when your college's most heralded graduate is Monica Goodling, who led the drive to politicize the Bush Justice Department, and now we have another bright young graduate of Messiah pronouncing Elena Kagan unqualified to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, you've got to wonder.

The Kagan critic is Amanda Lavis, who gushes like a Miss America contestant in today's Patriot-News about being "part of history" and digging up opposition research (aka "dirt") on Kagan for U.S. Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Republican of Alabama and ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I was witnessing history firsthand," she said. "I was thrilled. No matter what I do in life, that will probably one of my top moments."

What COULD top that for a young Republican lawyer? Suing ACORN? Prosecuting the mythical New Black Panther Party? Winning an award from the Federalist Society?

Her former boss--Lavis is now an associate for the Rhoads & Sinon law firm in Harrisburg, the same law firm that employs Linda Thompson handler James Ellison--opposed Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, as did all but about four other Republicans. Kagan was Solicitor General of the United States and dean of the Harvard Law School, but that wasn't enough for Lavis. "As a woman, I admire her accomplishments"--nice condescension--"but I [as a 25-year-old first year associate] do not believe she is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court."

Whew! Good thing she wasn't around when Sen. Hugo Black of Alabama, a personal injury lawyer who had briefly been a police court judge, was nominated by Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Supreme Court and went on to become one of the most influential Justices of the 20th century.

Then there's the matter of who she was working for. Her former boss, Senator Sessions, was only the second nominee for a federal district court judgeship in 48 years to be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee when his nomination came before the committee in 1986. President Reagan then withdrew the nomination. Sessions had a bad habit of making comments that called his commitment to civil rights for blacks into questions. There was testimony that he referred to the ACLU as a "Communist" organization that "forced civil rights down the throats of people." Then there was the howler--he later defended it as a "joke"--that "I was okay with the Klan until I found out they smoked pot." Or that he referred to a black assistant U.S. Attorney as "boy." It's that last one that chills the soul, that really ought to bring any conversation to a halt.

That's who Lavis was doing opposition research for. Way to go Messiah! Sessions, by the way, will become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the Republicans retake control of the Senate in November. I don't think that's going to happen, but I'll save my thoughts on that for another day.

Posted by David at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Linda Thompson today gave the boot to three members of the Harrisburg Authority who were appointed about six weeks ago by Harrisburg City Council. The trio included her chief critic, lawyer Bill Cluck, who was well along with plans to have a forensic audit conducted of the Harrisburg Authority's transactions during the reign of Rhodes & Sinon partner James Ellison, especially regarding the infamous city incinerator. Cluck didn't even get a courtesy call.

The others booted, so far, were Neil Grover and Eric Davidson. Erica Bryce, the other council appointee, has her interview tomorrow. In their places, Thompson intends to appoint Harry L. Witte, Barton A. Fields, Cathy M. Hall, and J. Marc Kurowski, the only current member to keep his or her seat. Hall was on the board with Ellison, according to Cluck, and Witte was on Thompson's transition team.

Or as one observer put it, "four yes ma'am votes."

This should be considered Thompson's version of President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when he fired Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. This should be a wake-up call to the U.S. Attorney in Harrisburg to start investigating, if he is not already, the awful stink coming from the old Harrisburg Authority and its dealings with the city.

Thompson got the opportunity to boot her critics because of an unfortunate decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that ruled the mayor, not city council, had sole authority to appoint members of the Harrisburg Authority. You can be sure either Thompson or the new board will come out with some platitudes soon about "wanting to move forward" and "not getting bogged down in past history."

The sole purpose of firing Cluck, Grover, and Davidson, and especially Cluck, was to make sure that reeking past was not uncovered. It was a despicable action.

Update: Mayor Thompson has now seen the light and reappointed Bill Cluck to the Harrisburg Authority. His appointment was confirmed by City Council.

Posted by David at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who isn't blind can see there are a lot of unsold homes on the market in Harrisburg. Drive up Second Street from Forster Street to Division and you'll see what I mean. In my own neighborhood, the pleasant walled enclave of Shipoke down by the Susquehanna River, there are 11 homes on the market, possibly a record. A 12th is up for sheriff sale and a 13th is in foreclosure with a notice tacked on the front door saying the bank will pay $1,000 if the occupants get the heck out. Very un-Shipoke. Yes, George W. Bush left us an economy in deep recession, but I don't think that accounts for all of the "for sale" signs.

Many, although not all of these homes have gone up for sale since Linda Thompson was elected mayor of Harrisburg last November. While it isn't possible to generalize about why people are trying to leave Harrisburg, one hears much talk about leaving because of fears that Thompson will drive the city into the ground. These are fears based on observations of Thompson's behavior both as city council president over the past several years and in her first six months as mayor.

She still has no financial rescue plan for the city, and you know she's just itching to take advantage of an unfortunate Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling of about a week or so ago and replace her critics on the Harrisburg Authority, especially lawyer Bill Cluck, with stooges who won't authorize the forensic accounting investigation of the authority that Cluck says is necessary to get to the bottom of the city's financial mess. Cluck has studied the authority and its operations for a long time, is a smart lawyer, and if Thompson removes him it ought to be a red flag for the U.S. Attorney in Harrisburg to start his own investigation.

The economy, the city's finances, dislike of Thompson's behavior, such as buying a $4,000 desk, and now the recent phenomenon of wolf packs roaming Midtown and robbing and beating people at gunpoint have combined to send the Harrisburg housing market into a tailspin. The mayor seems rather sensitive about the unsold homes. When ABC 27, normally a friendly venue for her, asked her about the real estate situation she came back with an answer to a question that doesn't appear to have been asked: "I will not let them lay that on my feet," she told the television station, using one of her increasingly famous malapropisms. "Their inability to sell houses in rough times." It's there on the video.

When will the housing market recover? In Shipoke, my neighbors are looking forward to the change of governors in January, which is always good for home sales. The old guys sell, the new guys buy, and if you live in Shipoke, as everyone from Rick Santorum to Bill DeWeese once did, you can walk to work. But unless Thompson, who is clearly in over her head, accepts the help she needs to get the city back on the right track, more of the newcomers may choose to live elsewhere.

Posted by David at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are several interesting parallels between Pennsylvania's long-burning Centralia mine fire, which ultimately destroyed the small town of Centralia, and the current oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Both were predictable outcomes of our thirst for energy. Both were caused by violations of law and common sense, aggravated by hamhanded responses and bad luck. And the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe, like the Centralia mine fire, seems destined to ruin the lives of many people who had nothing to do with the initial accident.

We are actually a few days past the 48th anniversary of the Centralia mine fire, which began on Sunday, May 27, 1962, three days shy of the traditional Memorial Day until 1971. There is almost nothing left of Centralia today, but in 1962 it was a proud small town of about 1,400, with perhaps 500 homes, churches and other buildings. It was little different than other small coal towns in the Anthracite Region of northeastern Pennsylvania.

As I describe in my book, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, workers hired by the borough council started the mine fire accidentally during the annual clean-up of the landfill, which was in an old strip mining pit a literal stone's throw from the Odd Fellows Cemetery. They illegally set the dump on fire to rid it of odors and make it less offensive to the many expected visitors to the cemetery on Memorial Day. They let the fire burn for awhile, then extinguished it with water from a fire company tanker. At least they thought they did.

Tragically, the fire was still smoldering down in the depths of the garbage. It spread through an opening in the pit into the labyrinth of abandoned deep mines that underlay Centralia, the legacy of more than 100 years of unregulated coal mining. The strip mine had cut through old, abandoned deep mines, as many here do. A state landfill inspector, knowing all too well of the potential danger, had ordered borough council to close all holes in the pit, but they had left one open.

Unlike the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, there is no corporate bad guy in the Centralia story. If anything, private mining companies tried to help, but were rebuffed by government bureaucrats at the state and federal level. Centralia was a failure of government at all levels.

Throughout the summer of 1962, Centralia Council appealed to the state and federal governments for help. Centralia's elected officials did nothing. In August, the state finally agreed to dig the mine fire out of the ground. But the project was underfunded, took several days off for the Labor Day weekend (the fire, of course, did not), and when the money ran out the fire was still there. This happened two more times in 1962 and 1963. Between 1965-70, the federal Bureau of Mines built an underground fly ash barrier--think of the booms encircling the oil spill--to block the fire from coming into Centralia. The barriers ultimately failed.

In late 1979, the fire and its deadly gases began moving under the populated part of Centralia and things got progressively worse. In 1983, the state and federal governments decided to relocate all Centralia residents at a cost of $42 million. Digging the fire out of the ground would have cost an estimated $660 million in 1983 and would have destroyed much of the town in the process.

What will be the fate of America's Gulf Coast and the Gulf of Mexico itself? BP, the owner of the spewing well, seems unable to stop the spill. There have even been semi-serious proposals to use nuclear weapons to seal the well. Russia supposedly has done this several times. Centralia still attracts earnest entrepreneurs who believe they have a way to extinguish the fire without digging. I heard from one just the other day who sounded promising. But I doubt the state of Pennsylvania will agree to spend the money. There are fewer than 10 people left in Centralia, and they will be gone soon. What is the point? Even though the fire has a clear path to Mount Carmel, several miles to the west, it might take 200 years for the fire to reach that far at its current rate of advancement. I'm sure the thought is, leave it for some bureaucrat in the 22nd century to worry about. We have more pressing problems.

Perhaps Memorial Day will come to have an environmental significance, when we think not just about wars between peoples and their cost, but wars against the environment and the equally lasting damage they do.

Posted by David at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The weather on this Memorial Day weekend seems almost too pleasant to think about June politics, but your intrepid blogger must charge ahead even though he would rather be relaxing.

We are heading into budget month, the annual spectacle of Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell matching wits, so to speak, with the Republican Senate on who will blink first on education funding. Wait-education funding? Isn't there an entire state budget to pass? Well, yes, but it really all comes down to education funding. Last year's 101-day budget impasse, education insiders will tell you, was nearly entirely about Rendell's desire to increase education funding by a substantial amount. He eventually got his way, but at the price of severe cuts to libraries and other parts of the state budget demanded by "no-tax" Republicans in the Senate (who actually did blink and agree to minor tax increases).

This year, Rendell is seeking an additional $354 million in school funding on top of last year's increase. Let me say from the outset that I agree with the need for this funding, both as counter-recessionary spending and to bring the bulk of the state's public schools out of their comfortable mediocrity. But it needs to be paid for with a tax increase of some sort, not by further cuts to favorite Republican targets like the Department of Environmental Protection.

School districts are hurting this year, forced by the Act 1 spending limits to lay off unprecedented numbers of teachers, cut foreign languages, driver's ed, and even full-day kindergarten. Full-day kindergarten is sacrosanct to Rendell and his policy czar, Donna Cooper, the real Secretary of Education. The Education Department is currently weighing several requests from school districts around the state to go back to half-day kindergarten as a means of balancing their budget. Insiders say the fear is that if one is approved, there will be a flood of other requests, full-day kindergarten still being seen as free daycare for Yuppie moms on many of the more benighted school boards around the state.

Act 1 of 2006 requires school boards to keep their tax increases under an inflation index derived from two other indexes, one of costs for schools and the other of statewide wage increases in the previous 12 months. The Republicans want to do this to all of state government, but so far have only been able to impose it on schools because of the wide unpopularity of the local property tax on which school districts depend too much because of, until recently, the annual shortfalls in state school funding. Act 1's inflation index this year was 2.9 perent, down from a figure in the 4's last year. Next year, if trends hold true, the figure will be 1.5 percent. That figure is calculated by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials and you can see their math on their website. Click on "Act 1 Index Data" and then go to the last page of the PowerPoint document that comes up.

So come next January and February, expect some school districts to begin pointing out that a lot of things parents take for granted aren't really required by the School Code. Some school boards will use the relief valve built into Act 1 by Democrats and seek "exceptions" for certain expenses, but they may not be able to find enough "exceptions" to avoid massive cuts in education.

We have the "no-tax" Republicans and their Democratic enablers to thank for much of this. And while Act 1 may finally force the bloated Harrisburg School District to pare the untold numbers of political jobs added at all levels over the years, it will cut the legs off many good public schools and set back public education in Pennsylvania for a long time to come. And that would suit the more extreme elements of the Republican Party just fine.

Posted by David at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Although I sometimes despair over the harsh conservative track some in America would have us follow, I take heart when I see evidence of the triumph of liberal values during the past 50 years.

On Saturday, a series of frantic phone calls were made to my younger daughter from her friends at Harrisburg Academy. It seemed that a boy in her 7th grade class, who had been dating one of the girls in the class, had asked another girl in the class to go out on a date. Treachery! Betrayal!

What made me smile was that the boy is black, his former girlfriend is white, and the second girl in the triangle is Indian. And none of that mattered in the least, as it certainly would have when I was in 7th grade so long ago.

Posted by David at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In my nightmare, I smelled something odd. I got out of bed, quickly dressed and walked outside into the early dawn. The smell was coming from the Susquehanna River, and when I reached Riverfront Park I could see a thick plume of oil forcing its way upstream against the current. The oil gushing from the Deepwater Horizon break and eruption in the Gulf of Mexico had finally reached Harrisburg.

The experts who comment on this sort of thing had speculated at first that the break, while bad, could be contained. What they did not know, because BP had not told them, was that the day before the catastrophe they had quite unexpectedly pushed their drill into a vast and unknown oil pool that had erupted to the surface. Now the experts were saying it could spew oil for 200 years.

The water in my house stayed clean for a couple of days, but one morning when I turned on the shower crude oil began dripping out. I tried the bathroom sink and the kitchen sink and they pushed out oil as well. I walked outside again and my neighbors were packing things in their cars to flee. But to where? I awoke with a start and went to the bathroom. The water was again clean and pure. But for how long?

Posted by David at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)