By The River

The biggest story of the week, at least since Wednesday, was buried on the inside of Saturday's Patriot-News. "Pennsylvania Medical Society finds support for universal healthcare" was the story, and David Wenner, an old friend, was the reporter.

What it said--ready for a surprise?--is that nearly 66 percent of state residents want universal healthcare. That's up from a similar poll in July 2008, when 64.4 percent of state residents said they wanted everyone to receive the healthcare they need.

Republicans have been shouting and screaming all week, pointing to the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts on Tuesday as evidence that "America" has turned against the Obama healthcare plan. Heck, all it really showed was that Coakley was a terrible candidate and Brown was a skillful one. And I have a gut feeling Kennedy fatigue may have set in after nearly 60 years, even though Coakley didn't ask for Kennedy help until it was too late.

Like Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts Governor who was the failed Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, Coakley punched all the right tickets on her way up, endorsed all the right causes. This Boston Globe story from before the election is a good summation of her pros and cons. Unlike Dukakis, her career centered around prosecutions of people for alleged sex crimes or crimes against children, notably nanny Louise Woodward. She also fought clemency for Gerald Amirault in the Fells Acre Day Care Case long after the "evidence" against him had been discredited as largely nonsensical. Coakley came off as a descendant of the Puritan prosecutors in Massachusetts.

Looking at her admittedly from the outside, Coakley seemed like a cold professional woman who knew little about Massachusetts outside her own wealthy enclave and circle of elite friends. Yet despite all that, she still got 47 percent of the vote to 52 percent for Scott Brown, who was a George W. Bush type of candidate, the one you'd want to have a beer with. And as we know all too well from eight years of Bush, that's a bad reason to vote for a candidate.

So Democrats in Pennsylvania, man up. Stay the course on universal healhcare--the people want it. You've got a reputable poll telling you so.

Posted by David at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My neighbor the lawyer had to file a Right to Know request to the Pennsylvania Department of State to get this information, but he finally unearthed both the list of directors of Mayor Linda Thompson's Loveship non-profit, and as a bonus, its original bylaws. Loveship has gone into drydock since Thompson was elected mayor, but this stuff is still interesting.

Most of the bylaws are basic boilerplate, but then the curious reader comes to "Article V-Officers" and this paragraph:

"The Chairman of the Board of Directors shall be Linda Thompson, who shall serve until her death or resignation. The Chairman may also be removed by a unanimous vote of the remaining members of the Board only for gross errors defined as severe deviation from the teaching of the Bible (Old and New Testament read together as a whole) which would tend to spiritually endanger and lead the members of the fellowship away from the Lord, the God of the Bible."

Now Linda Thompson the private citizen can have just about any bylaws she wants in her own 501(c)3, even one with the overtly secular agenda of "home ownership counseling" and "combat academic underachievement."

I think it's fair to say most Americans want their elected officials to be religious or have a strong moral compass, but the above paragraph might go too far for many of them. It suggests deeply fundamentalist beliefs which are not held by the majority of Americans. Combine this with Thompson's comparison of herself to the prophet Nehemiah sent to save Jerusalem, i.e., Harrisburg that used to be on her website, and the Bible verses my lawyer friend saw posted liberally about the interior of Loveship, and its more religion than a lot of voters want.

At its core, that paragraph is simply a severe limitation on the grounds for Thompson to be removed as head of Loveship (known as Timeship in the original incorporation papers, with a ring of science fiction). The part about the Old and New Testament read together is clever--it means she can't, for example, be removed for eating pork or shellfish, banned in the Old but blessed in the New. Thompson, who has pledged transparency as mayor, was loading the dice to make sure she couldn't be removed as head of Loveship.

The danger of having a deeply--and I mean deeply--religious person of fundamentalist beliefs as mayor of Harrisburg or in any major elected post is that she starts filtering her decisions for the public through her personal religious beliefs. No matter what the Christian Right may tell you, the U.S. Constitution mandates the separation of church and state.

Oh, and the Loveship directors for 2008 were Gerald Robinson, Dr. Norman LaCasse, K. Lameson Lawrence, Jacquetta McCoy, Lois Glass, Greg Rothman, and of course Thompson herself.

Posted by David at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)