By The River

This seemingly typical suburban apartment complex is actually in Berlin and not what it seems. I was taken here during a walking tour this morning of sites in the German capital associated with Hitler and World War II. About where that light standard juts up in the middle of the photo is where, in 1945, the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, were burned after they committed suicide with the Russians closing in. Some 50 feet down from that light standard was Hitler's bunker. The East German government twice blew up the remains of the bunker, intent on not having it become a shrine for rightists and fascists from around the world. No sign marks this site today.

In 1945, Hitler's chancellery--a combination residence and office complex--stood where the apartment complex stands now. It was huge, said our guide, stretching the length of "an American football field." This is a couple of blocks from the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate. Not much could look more normal than this.

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I'm in Berlin for the weekend, staying in a funky hotel in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in the former East Berlin. The "Prenzy," as it is known, is an up-and-coming place, full of new construction and restoration and a vibrant arts scene. You see homes that are practically falling down from neglect during the Communist era, even some with unrepaired war damage. But other places, like the Ackselhaus Hotel where I'm staying, are as modern as you could want. I took the U2 subway line to get here from Zoo Station (if you wonder where the Irish band got its name and an album title, well...). I was last in Berlin in 1990, a year after the wall fell, and the changes are immense. Vast open tracts of land where the Berlin Wall ran have been filled in with modern construction, especially around Potsdamer Platz. A new U.S. Embassy is rising next to the Brandenburg Gate, which once divided East and West Berlin. The open land where Pink Floyd performed "The Wall" in 1990 is no more.

Berlin has tackled the worst aspects of its history head-on. There is no attempt to whitewash what happened during the Hitler era, or ignore the deportation and murder of Jews that occurred. I attended the 4th Berlin Biennale art show on Friday. It was held in several buildings along August Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg. These were mostly workaday buildings, some very rundown, not art galleries. The catalog for the exhibition told the history of each building in the exhibition, and much of that history stemmed from the Nazi era.

The Jewish School for Girls, the last major construction project of the Jewish community in Berlin, was one of the venues. The school shut down in 1942 when the Nazis closed all Jewish schools. Large paint flakes dangled from the ceiling in some of the rooms. An apartment building, covered in graffiti (a major social problem in Germany) and falling apart, was unexceptional except for a tiny brass plaque in the sidewalk near the entrance. It said that a Jewish woman who lived there had been deported to Riga, Lithuania, in 1942 and murdered there. I didn't understand the reference until I went to the Jewish Museum today and learned that 16,000 Berlin Jews were deported to Riga.

I learned much at the Jewish Museum, which seeks to tell the story of all Jews but focuses, understandably, on the German Jewish community. Germany had about 560,000 Jews prior to World War II, far fewer than I expected. About half of them escaped to other countries before the deportations and mass exterminations began. The rest were murdered. That is compared to 2 million Jews who perished in Poland, more than a million in the Soviet Union, and 100,000 in the Netherlands, although some of the latter were German Jews, like Anne Frank's family, who had fled there from Nazi Germany.

After the Jewish Museum, I walked to nearby Checkpoint Charlie, the famous former crossing point for the Berlin Wall. My wife and I collected our Wall fragments here in 1990. The Wall is nearly all gone, and you almost need a guide to know where it was. I followed the path for a few blocks and came upon the remaining section. The Berlin government fenced it off so souvenir hunters could not cart away this section, too. It fronts "Topography of Terror," an outdoor museum on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Here you learn what happened to people who opposed Hitler.

I walked on to Brandenburg Gate, far spiffier than it was in 1990. Walking through, I noticed that an organ grinder still entertains the public, just as one did in 1990. But today he has a stuffed toy monkey, not the live one back then. Under den Linden, the street that begins on the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, is fashionable and lined with Linden trees once again. It was jarring to see a Starbucks and Ben and Jerry's in the former East, but it was better than the bullet-scarred walls (from the Battle of Berlin) still evident the last time I was here.

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I've always been intrigued by the former East Germany. Not for its awful government (although they did women's rights well) but for its cities and lands, which were largely off limits to American tourists for so many years.

I have a long free weekend between places where I have to be in Germany, and decided to spend most of it in Berlin, where I am writing this now. But on the way, I stopped at Eisenach, a city in the state of Thuringia. The attraction of Eisenach was Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran Church, found refuge with a local nobleman while he committed the revolutionary act of translating the New Testament from Latin into German. That made it accessible to average people, not just priests and nobility who could read Latin.

When I took the Lutheran confirmation classes as a child, I never forgot the image in the textbook of Luther throwing a bottle of ink at the Devil, who had supposedly appeared in his room one night. Whether or not it really happened, it's a great metaphor. And not just for Lutherans. It's really a perfect metaphor for what journalists do when they do their jobs well. All of us in the profession have thrown ink at the Devil, or wish we had.

Eisenach, like many cities in the former East Germany, looks tired and a bit down at the heels. My friends in Freiburg told how local authorities would spruce up houses along roads that former DDR leader Erich Honecker would travel when he came to visit, but only to the second floor. That's as far up as he could see from his moving automobile. Eisenach is full of history. In addition to the Luther connection, Johann Sebastian Bach was born here. He and Luther, a century or so apart, were choir boys in the same church.

Wartburg Castle sits atop a mountain. I took a city bus to the top, but after it lets you out, it was still 600 feet of steps to the front drawbridge. Having visited the castle, I put in the category of "European Monuments That Look Great from the Outside, But Not So Great Inside." Even Luther's room was a bit of a letdown, much more interesting for what happened there than how it looks. Only one thing is original in the room, a whalebone footrest. Tourists in the 19th century picked apart the desk he used, and tore away the alleged inkspot on the wall. That was gone after about 1901, a guide said.

Still, it was worth it. Acts of revolutionary writing need to be commemorated. And journalists need to throw more ink at more Devils.

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This photo of the war damage around the Freiburg cathedral after the bombing raid of Nov. 27, 1944, offers a number of lessons. The first is that this is the sort of blowback a country risks if it blindly follows a leader, as Germans did Hitler in the 1930s. The second is that not every catastrophe is permanent. There can be recovery and renewal. Virtually everything you see in this photo has been rebuilt. The plaza around the cathedral this morning was filled with produce vendors selling the new crop of white asparagus. School groups climbed the 209 steps to the top of the cathedral (called a Münster in German) for the spectacular views. People of all ages ate ice cream at the sidewalk cafes and sipped espresso coffee. The sun was shining.

Today, Freiburg is a highly desirable place to live, with housing prices second only to Munich as a result. Some 25,000 of the city's 200,000 residents are students at the university. They come and often don't want to leave. Freiburg is a couple of miles from the Rhine River and France, and barely 20 miles from Switzerland. It backs up against the hills of the Black Forest with its myriad hiking trails. The downtown is thriving, although that is not as unusual in German cities as it is in the U.S. Much of the old city around the cathedral is a pedestrian mall or nearly so. Cars are not unknown, but there are few places to park. Bicycles are everywhere. It dawned on me today that I rarely, if ever, saw a German wearing a bicycle helmet. I'll have to find out why.

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The former Communist state known as East Germany was all bad, wasn't it, a place that would have certainly qualified as one of President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" states had it still been in existence when he uttered those words in 2002. State repression of dissent, a failed economy, and the Berlin Wall were the hallmarks of what Americans know about East Germany.

Wasn't it?

Yesterday in Freiburg, I had lunch with my cousin, Meike Penkwitt, and her old friend Eva Manske, the director of Carl Schurz House, aka, the German-American Institute. Eva grew up in Leipzig in the former East Germany. Eva was the second East German woman I had met through Meike, the other being Sybille Brinz, who I met at Meike's wedding in 2003. Both told me essentially the same thing: as bad as East Germany was in the political sphere, it was very good for women. Women had true equality with men there, something they have lost in the reunification with West Germany after 1990.

Here's a summary of what Eva and Sybille told me, plus some interpretation of my own: In the former East Germany, daycare for children was readily available. Women were strongly encouraged by state policy to work and pursue professions. Everyone's talents were needed to build the communist state. Women were encouraged to be independent and self-reliant. There was no room for outmoded thinking on the proper role of women in the DDR (as East Germany was known).

Contrast that to the non-Communist West German model, where the attitude toward working women bears uncomfortable parallels to the the "Kinder, Kirche, Küche" (children, church, kitchen) model of the Nazi state. There is a widespread belief that women who pursue professions should remain childless. There is even a contemptuous German word, "Rabenmutter," (raven mother), used to refer to a mother who "flies off" to a job and leaves her children in daycare. Daycare in Germany today is expensive and restrictive.

Eva and Meike described a local daycare that requires mothers to spend the first eight weeks at the daycare facility with their child to ease the transition for both. Germany faces a declining birthrate, almost below the replacement level, in part because many women of childbearing age want or need to work, but feel socially pressured not to have children if they do. Don't get me wrong, some German women buy into these attitudes, too (even Eva said there were times in the old DDR when she wished she could be "just a housewife"), but for those who don't, life can be tough.

In France, where Eva actually resides (for my central Pennsylvania readers, France is almost as close to Freiburg as Carlisle is to Harrisburg, and living costs, especially for housing, are lower), the government provides well-run and reasonably-priced state-run daycare.

So arrive at an uncomfortable truth--that East Germany, and communist states in general, were better for women than free-market, capitalist states like West Germany. I've believed for a longtime that we in the West benefited in someways from the Communist East. In my opinion, the existence of Communism acted like a giant vortex, pulling Western nations like the U.S. toward the socialist left on such things as health care and government care for the poor from the 1930s through 1990.

Western capitalists worried greatly about Communism, probably to an unreasonable extent. But because they did, they sought to make Communism less attractive to the working men and women here. In other words, they gave them some of the good things about socialism so they wouldn't be tempted to embrace the bad, i.e., total state control of the economy. I don't think it's only coincidence that since the Berlin Wall fell and most Communist states collapsed in the early 1990s, America has been rapidly shedding those hat-tips to socialism, things like employer-paid health insurance and reasonable income gaps between the rich and working classes enforced by progressive taxation. Free market capitalism is taking its inevitable course. If you can get it, good. If not, too bad for you, loser.

Not that Eva is a victim of "Ostalgia," another German word coinage that means unreasoning nostalgia for the former East Germany. After all, she said, you had to wait 17 years to get an automobile, she recalled, and when it finally arrived, it was a Trabant--the "Trabi" being basicly an ugly metal box with a lawnmower engine. She also described witnessing a police crackdown on well-meaning citizens in Leipzig protesting the industrial pollution that was tolerated in the name of growth of the nation (note to Bush Administration: don't try this at home). But when it came to the status of women, the East Germans got it right.

For the sake of America's future, we need to stop free market capitalism from running rampant. We need to place rules on business to preserve the best of social democracy while not unreasonably impeding the ability of businesses to earn a fair profit.

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I happened to look out the window on my flight to Germany last night and realized we were passing over the Arctic, or at least a very snowy portion of Canada. It was still light, and there was snow everywhere, and some open water. I suppose airplanes fly over the polar ice cap all the time, but I had never seen the ice on any of my previous flights to Europe. It was like returning to winter. Approaching Frankfurt, I looked out the window again. Now it was dark, but the sky was cloudless and the stars were brilliant.

I'm in a cafe in the Frankfurt Airport train station. The clock says 7 a.m., but my body says 1 a.m.

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I leave for Germany tomorrow on a two week vacation. It's not my first trip there. Actually, it will be my fifth or sixth visit. My grandfather emigrated from Germany in 1924, and left a lot of family behind. I'll be traveling to Freiburg, Eisenach, Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and some little farming villages you never heard of. Most of my relatives live in the Hohenlöhe Region on the border of Baden-Württemburg and Bavaria. It is very rural and pastoral, a land of rolling hills and forests and vineyards. There is a house with my mother's family name above the door in the village of Elpersheim. My grandfather was born there in 1901.

I'm also excited about going to Berlin. I was last there in 1990, a year after the Wall fell. Much has changed, especially in the former East Berlin, where I'll be staying. The Berlin Biennale, a major art exhibition, is going on, and I'll be taking the Third Reich walking tour, where they show you the surviving places associated with Hitler's terror. My plan is to blog from the road when I can, perhaps even with a photo or two added to the site. And guess what? In Stuttgart, the beer gardens have just opened for the season. What could be better?

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Liberals are frequently criticized by rightwingers for their supposed lack of patriotism, which is defined by them as support for President Bush's Iraq debacle. Lest we forget what real patriotism is all about, here are some words on the subject from Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt in an address one day before Armistice Day (today known as Veterans Day) on Nov. 10, 1929. FDR was speaking at the annual "massing of the colors" ceremony at the (Episcopal) Church of the Heavenly Rest at 5th Avenue and E. 90th Street in New York City. Here is how the New York Times reported his remarks:

"Tomorrow at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month we celebrate the 11th anniversary of the ending of the greatest war in history. Today we are here to witness a beautiful and solemn ceremony, a ceremony which is not only beautiful as a spectacle but which is also a physical visualization of patriotism in its highest spiritual sense.

"As one by one the standards of your organizations move forward to group themselves around our country's flag, they bear with them a renewed vow of true patriotism from every member of each body they represent.

"There is, I fear, too great a tendency to give to patriotism mostly an interest in making our country unconquerable--a feeling that our chief aim is to see that our army and our navy are sufficient for our protection. That is but a part of our patriotic duty.

"Our country is, in a sense, continually at war. Against the ramparts of liberty, equality, and justice, on which our Republic is founded, surge constantly the evil forces of greed, of materialism, of selfishness, headed by those who cynically deny that there is any prosperity or goodness that cannot be expressed in dollars and cents, or happiness except as bank balances.

"Continually they seek to sap, to undermine, to destroy finally those high ideals without which our nation can no more survive than could those great nations of the past--those nations whose bodies died because their souls were dead.

"It is your duty as good soldiers of the faith not merely to keep alive the memory of those who gave their lives for their country's safety, but to fight militantly, tirelessly, against the moral enemies of our great Republic wherever and whenever they appear. Your flags have rallied around your country's banner. Make that no empty symbol. Move forward in your banner's path and underneath this, our country's symbol, consecrate yourself to defend not only your nation's boundaries, but your nation's soul, lest freedom and justice, equality and liberty, should perish from the earth."

The speech came about a month after the great stock market crash of October 1929. Roosevelt, of course, went on to become President of the United States from 1933-1945. He was the pre-eminent liberal of the 20th century, and when he talks about "the moral enemies of the Republic" he is not talking about immigrants, or gays, or evolutionists, or any of the other ginned-up "enemies" of our rightwing era. He is pointing the finger at the greedy rich who hold down the mass of Americans. Or in modern terms, the people from Texas and elsewhere whose wealth and power put George W. Bush in the White House to tear down Roosevelt's glorious legacy.

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Among the Bush Administration horrors that tend to get ignored in favor of the Iraq War, Supreme Court nominations, and the Hurricane Katrina response is the administration's efforts to roll back public access to government documents. One of the more recent manifestations of this was the revelation that since 2001, the CIA has been secretly reclassifying documents that had been made available to researchers by the National Archives. This came to light when a researcher discovered that documents he had used years ago were no longer available.

Now comes the FBI demand to be allowed to snoop through the hundreds of boxes of papers donated by the family of the late investigative reporter/columnist Jack Anderson to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. And it wants to confiscate any it deems were illegally in the columnist's possession. Anderson, who wrote the Washington Merry-Go-Round syndicated column for years after taking it over from Drew Pearson, was a frequent antagonist of the FBI. His sources were legendary, and they provided Anderson with secret documents used by him to embarass the government on any number of occasions. Anderson's papers had originally been at Brigham Young University (he was Mormon) in Utah. It was only when the family chose to move them to GWU, probably for more convenient scholarly access, that the FBI intervened. Revenge against the dead, more or less.

As a journalist who writes books, I wonder where this could lead. Might the Bush Administration or some future President decide that certain documents were "wrongly" released under the Freedom of Information Act and sue or threaten to jail scholars to get them back? The legal fees alone could be devastating, let alone the possibility of serious prison time. Anyone who thinks this couldn't happen should check out the rantings of morality czar and gambling addict William Bennett earlier this week. Bennett said three of the Pulitzer Prize winners should be jailed for what they wrote. What they wrote, of course, was less a threat to national security than embarassing to the lamentable Bush Administration.

Perhaps most troubling in the longterm is the restrictions Bush placed on access to certain documents that should have become public under law in the Reagan Presidential Library and his father's Presidential Library. He did it by executive order, so it will end when his Presidency ends, but that is scant comfort. Our Democracy depends on freedom of information, the exposing of dirty linen so mistakes can be analyzed and, hopefully, not repeated.

Posted by David at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Penn State University yesterday sanctioned women's basketball coach Rene Portland for creating a "hostile, intimidating, and offensive environment" for lesbian players and players perceived by her to be lesbians. She was fined $10,000, but drew no suspension. The university promises to have an Equal Opportunity monitor at exit interviews with players leaving the program. Portland was unapologetic.

This was the latest development to grow out of the lawsuit filed against Portland and Penn State by former Central Dauphin High School basketball star Jen Harris. You've got to suspect that Portland's job is now hanging by a thread. Have conservative alumni already weighed in to help her? I suspect that one more strike and she'll be out, probably to coach at a church-related school less concerned about treating gay and lesbian students with fairness and dignity than Penn State is.

Posted by David at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Are you a hard-right, doctrinaire conservative? Do you have lots of money? Then I have the vacation for you. Freedom Cruise 2006 departs from Rome, Italy, this August. Yes, there will be lots of glorious Mediterranean scenery and food, but the highlight of this vacation of a lifetime will be the speakers. Feel your heart quicken as Oliver North, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, and others reinforce your warped worldview and make you feel good about yourself and the Bush Administration you helped finance.

Topics include, "How to Win the Global War on Terror," "Defusing the Iranians," "Defending American Sovreignty," and of course, "The Bush Presidency." One-time convicted felon North (his conviction was later overturned on a technicality) who sold arms to the Iranians during the Reagan Administration to finance the Contra "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua should be particularly illuminating on the Iran question. I'm sure you'll get a fine explanation of why we're really winning the war in Iraq, and how the liberal press focuses only on the negative. Yes, join others in the virtuous 37 percent who still support the President and give back a little of your huge tax cuts to help "defeat the globalist agenda of Kofi Annan and his cronies at the United Nations."

I thought I'd seen it all, but obviously not.

Posted by David at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, you heard about the Boston Strangler...

Best-selling author Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm) is running into some flak over his new book, A Death in Belmont, which posits that confessed Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo, alleged killer of 13 women and rapist of many more, was the real killer of one of his childhood neighbors, Bessie Goldberg. A black day laborer, Roy Smith, who was in the Goldberg house that day in 1963, was convicted of the murder. Reviews of Junger's book say he tells a good story, and then of course there's that picture: his mother holding baby Sebastian while DeSalvo, a familiar figure in the neighborhood, standing in the background.

According to Publisher's Weekly, Leah Goldberg, daughter of the victim, issued a statement attacking the book's premise and saying Smith was indeed the murderer. She called the book "inaccurate." Now Junger and his publisher, Norton, have issued a strong statement defending the three years of research the author conducted and that the manuscript was "rigorously fact checked."

I tend to go with Junger on this one, and not because I had dinner in his bar, Half King, in New York City a few weeks ago (it was okay). As a reporter myself, I know how hard it is to challenge conventional wisdom. Even if you have the facts solidly on your side, conventional wisdom is hard to kill. I don't doubt that Leah Goldberg believes the old explanation. Would it be easy to acknowledge that an innocent man spent years in prison by mistake?

DeSalvo, of course, isn't around to comment. He was murdered in prison in 1974. His life sentence was not based on the murders he confessed to, for which he was never tried.

Posted by David at 07:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another day, another horrific murder in Lancaster County. Or six of them, to be exact, in the village of Leola. The deaths of the Wise family come about six months after David Ludwig murdered the parents of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Kara Beth Borden, and fled west with her. If that was "Badlands," this is "In Cold Blood." And let's not forget the notorious Laurie Show murder in 1991, in which two Lancaster County teen-aged girls, Lisa Michelle Lambert and Tabitha Buck, got life sentences, and friend Laurence Yunkin went off for a few years as well. All over a teenage love triangle. Every county has its share of murders, but Pennsylvania's strongest Bible Belt county seems to have more that truly horrify the public.

Having grown up in the strongly Calvinist community of Holland, Mich., as a member of a minority religion, i.e., Lutheran, I suspect that what we're seeing in Lancaster County may have an inverse relationship to the strongly conservative/fundamentalist brand of Protestantism practiced by many non-Amish in the county. No, I can't explain that. It's more of a gut feeling. That sort of religious petri dish can produce people who feel estranged from their community. Some go on to do good things elsewhere, but others seeth and rot on the fringes of where they were born. Milton Hershey, as his recent biographer writes, didn't much care for the church culture of Lancaster County. He turned his energies to business and in many ways, left his community behind. But not everyone is that lucky.

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You can tell when Republicans are upset and worried about an election when the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal starts fulminating. Today, a column by John Fund tries to gin up some outrage about the supposed "rancid history" of voting fraud in Pennsylvania. Specifically, he attacks Gov. Ed Rendell for vetoing a Republican bill that would have required all voters to show official photo i.d. at the polls before entering the booth. These bills, which have been tried by Republicans in other states, notably Georgia, are thinly disguised efforts to hold down voting by the poor and minorities, who are less likely than more affluent whites to have the required form of i.d. or be able to take the time and expense to obtain it. It's a poll tax in another form.

Could the Republicans be concerned about Sen. Rick Santorum's chances? Santorum, who is far from the relentlessly moderate political tradition of Pennsylvania, has real competition this year and has consistently trailed in the polls. Now the Republican nominee-designate for Governor, Lynn Swann, faces a vote-training third party challenge from Russ Diamond, the anti-pay raise king. I suspect certain Republicans are getting really worried.

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I still confess to having been surprised by the Iranian revolution in 1979. I was never much for the Shah of Iran, the former megalo-ruler, but I always liked Iranians. Among Middle Easterners of my acquaintance, they were the nicest, hands down. I knew several of them at Hope College, my alma mater in Holland, Michigan. This was 1971-75, when oil wealth was starting to have a real impact on the Middle East, and students from those countries were showing up at U.S. colleges with large wads of cash. At Hope, we had Iranians and we had Qataris. The latter were much harder to get to know. They got a lot of money from their government for living expenses, and could afford really nice new cars. Like a Mercedes 450-SL (I think that's right) sports car. Which a few months later had a crumpled fender caused by the owner's notoriously bad driving. The Iranians were much friendlier, generally didn't flash their cash, and tried harder to have American friends.

So the idea that Iranians could take U.S. hostages and run around screaming "Death to America! Death to the Great Satan!" came as a big surprise in 1979. I reasoned that, like Germany during the Nazi era, Iran had been taken over by a group of extremists that was not representative of the country at large. I still believe that. I used to chat about this with my opthalmologist at Hershey Medical Center, who grew up in and got much of his medical training in Iran.

Now the mullahs in Iran are trying to develop nuclear weapons, which is disturbing and dangerous. Yesterday, after I first posted this, the Iranian president boasted publicly that Iran's nuclear scientists have reached a new milestone in uranium enrichment. The question is how far along they are--most estimates say they are 10 years away from being able to build an A-bomb, a notoriously difficult weapon to craft. Bomb-grade uranium is even harder to create through the enrichment process than is fuel-grade uranium for electric power plants like Three Mile Island.

Bush was forced to deny this week that he had plans to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, or worse, send in troops (which ones? It would definitely mean a revival of the draft). An Iranian bomb is a serious problem, but after the Iraq debacle Bush has forfeited all credibility on deciding which countries are real threats. He is the boy who cried wolf. I find it absolutely hideous that Bush might be contemplating an Iranian action to revive his plummeting poll numbers, but can't rule that out. Yet all my skepticism doesn't eliminate the underlying problem. What do we do about Iran? All that time and blood and treasure wasted on Iraq, when the real problem was right next door.

Posted by David at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I work as a reporter at The Patriot-News and am president of the union there. Local 38016 of The Newspaper Guild to be exact. Until the Guild merged with the Communication Workers of America, we were Local 16, the low number reflecting the fact that we've been around since, I think, the late 1930s. Obviously, I'm not the first president! And I hope I won't be the last.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was preparing that Vietnamese chicken recipe, I received a two phone calls and a text message in quick succession that a city-side reporter at the newspaper, Pete Shellem, and a sports copy editor, Fred Sprunk, had launched an attempt to decertify the union. If they succeed, our union, our contract, and the limitations it places on the company's ability to control our lives 24/7 will disappear. We have good pay and benefits, including fully-paid health insurance that the company is trying to take away. The trick is that they have promised, sort of, to keep it free for the non-union departments in the building. That's the decertification carrot.

Why did Shellem and Sprunk do this? I don't know what Sprunk's problem is. Shellem, I'm told, has a personal grievance with a former Guild president dating back several years, which he didn't disclose in his letter seeking signatures on a decert petition. He says it's not about health insurance, because he has coverage through his wife, who works for the Capital Area Intermediate Unit. Ironically, she--and he--got that coverage through the union representing teachers and other professionals at the I.U. Now Shellem argues that we'll do better without a union.

So the Guild executive committee is having an emergency meeting tonight to finalize a strategy for defeating this petition and protecting our members. I don't think they'll get more than a handful of signatures, but we won't leave anything to chance. All I know for sure is that this will tear the newsroom apart and be a great cause of stress for a lot of people. And for what?

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Cooking is my hobby, as much as anything so important to a good life can be considered just a hobby. Today I went into the Little Saigon grocery store on Paxton Street in Harrisburg, not far from the Dunkin' Donuts. It adjoins a Vietnamese restaurant of the same name and shares a parking lot with the hugely popular Jumbo (Chinese) Buffet and Grill. I like to go into grocery stores in foreign countries. You can learn a lot about a culture and its cuisine in just a few minutes of walking the aisles. I've done it in Italy, Germany and Canada. Going into Little Saigon was much the same experience. This was no Giant or Weis. Maybe 1-2 percent of the products on the shelves were familiar brands. Of all the Asian cuisines, I've always liked Vietnamese the best, probably because of the French influence. Recently, I read a review on the Los Angeles Times website of a Vietnamese cookbook with the coincidental title of "The Little Saigon Cookbook: Vietnamese Cuisine and Culture in Southern California's Little Saigon." Ann Le is the author. I ordered a copy from Buy.com, and decided to try Ga Chien, or Pan-Fried Spicy Chicken with Mint and Ginger.

I had about half the ingredients, but needed fish sauce, a staple in Vietnamese cooking, fresh coriander and mint, and something called a Thai bird chile (hot pepper). So off I went to Little Saigon, shopping list in hand. Inside, a man was bagging coriander leaves. Good sign. I grabbed a basket and began strolling the aisles, viewing the many unfamiliar products. Little Saigon has a large selection of fish sauces. Phuc Quoc was the brand suggested by the cookbook. It comes from an island in the Mekong Delta, said to be beautiful but unvisitable because of the smell of fermenting fish. I found the sauce, and the helpful lady working the cash register directed me to the mint and hot peppers. Some Vietnamese teens in the store spoke American-accented English, while other men and women spoke their native languages. The lady at the register handled them all with aplomb. Prices were very reasonable, and the store takes credit and ATM cards.

I had never worked with fish sauce before and the odor is a bit overpowering. My cats came running when they smelled it. But it made for a tasty marinade combined with everything else in the recipe. It gave the chicken a nice bite. Everyone liked it.

Posted by David at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shipoke, the Harrisburg neighborhood by the Susquehanna River where I live, is famous for its Friday night Happy Hours, which are always happy but often last more than an hour. We took advantage of the warm weather that arrived late Friday afternoon to sit out on the back patio after returning from my daughters' school play at the Forum. An old political friend was among those who stopped by. He is well-connected to the current administration, and talked about State Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum this fall. He was optimistic about Casey's chances, pointing out he has consistently led Santorum in the polls, usually by double digit figures. Of course, the real storm is yet to come when Santorum and the groups who support him began running negative ads against Casey. But about what? Casey is one of the genuinely "nice" politicians in the state and has earned his Boy Scout image. Of course, Ron Klink, the last Democrat to take on Santorum, had one of the highest pro-gun voting records among Democrats in the Congress, but the NRA turned on him with a vengeance. That wasn't Klink's only problem, but it didn't help. Casey needs to steel himself for what is ahead. He appears to have gotten a pass from moderate and liberal Democrats on the abortion issue. The Casey family is famously pro-life, but Democrats want so badly to defeat Santorum that many are willing to overlook that, my friend said. Now that Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League has reconsidered her brief bid to challenge Casey for the nomination from the left, the way for him seems clear. The doubters can be won over with the argument that unless Casey beats Santorum, there is little chance for the Democrats to regain control of the Senate. And if the Democrats had been in control of the Senate this year, they can be reminded, the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court never would have gotten out of committee.

Posted by David at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just about anything, it seems, can be ginned up into a religious freedom issue these days. The latest is a lawsuit filed in Harrisburg against the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources by the Institute for Justice, a conservative legal group, on behalf of Summer's Best Two Weeks, a faith-based summer camp in western Pennsylvania. The camp is aggrieved because DCNR said they had to use commercial guides for their summer rafting trips on the Lower Youghiogheny River, which they claim will cost them up to $30,000 per summer. The allegation is that DCNR is in cahoots with several commercial rafting trip operators. The department says any group which charges money for its services, as the camp does, must use a commercial outfitter. Individuals and casual groups who just want to have fun on the river can head out on their own, crash into Dimple Rock and drown for all DCNR cares. (DCNR recently refused to blow up Dimple Rock, responsible for 9 deaths since 1976) The camp says it conducted rafting trips on the Yough without injury for 30 years prior to the new regulations.

This is clearly an economic freedom issue that has nothing to do with religion. The Institute for Justice and its amen chorus at the Wall Street Journal have prominently labeled the camp a "Christian" summer camp, leaving the implication that Summer's Best Two Weeks is somehow being persecuted by Godless Democrats for its religious activities.

What's interesting is what isn't being said. The camp got written permission from the state to provide the trips in 1987 during the Casey Administration (Democratic). The rules requiring a commercial guide were issued in 2001 during either the Ridge or Schweiker Administrations (Republican), depending on what time of year they came out. Gov. Tom Ridge, as we all know, left after Sept. 11 to become the first Secretary of Homeland Security. Gov. Ed Rendell (Democratic) is in charge now, but can rightly argue he inherited this deal. What it smacks of is the same cozy, state-business deal-making that Republicans are famous for. Let's hope a happy settlement can be achieved that both protects children and allows camps which can demonstrate their ability to conduct a safe rafting trip to continue doing so.

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

It's been a bad six months for the creationists. First, Judge John Jones III in Harrisburg ruled decisively against so-called Intelligent Design in a case brought by parents against the Dover Area School Board in York County. Now comes the Missing Link, a fossil fish with legs that the journal Nature says is a transitional species between fish and land animals. The strange creature, now named the Tiktaalik, was found in the Canadian Arctic. One of the arguments of the anti-evolutionists has always been that no transitional species had been found in the fossil record, ergo, Genesis is literally true. No real scientist ever lost much sleep over that argument--there was plenty of other evidence. Perhaps now public school teachers can get back to teaching evolution without fear of the religious right. But don't hold your breath--I'm waiting for the first wingnut dissection of the personal lives of the scientists who found Tiktaalik to discern whether they're just mora them lyin' librals. Facts don't mean much to that crowd. It is important to remember that the religious right does not speak for all American Christians. I would guess, at most, that they speak for 25-30 percent. That leaves plenty of room for the rest of us to fight back.

Posted by David at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Massachusetts is poised to enact the first plan by a state to address the health insurance needs of all its residents. Note I didn't say "provide health insurance to all its residents" because that's not exactly what is happening here. The plan, which has bipartisan support and the support of the state's Republican governor, Mitt Romney, essentially works like this: if you have health insurance, you keep on using that, supposedly at reduced premiums. If you are poor, you get free or very low cost health insurance from the state. Now, here's the kicker: if you are not low income, you face a state mandate to purchase health insurance on your own. If you don't, you will pay a tax of up to $1,000 to the state. Businesses with more than 10 employees who don't insure their workers must pay an annual tax to the state of $295 per employee. It isn't clear on first reading whether individuals who pay the tax or the employees of businesses who pay the tax become enrolled in an insurance plan of some sort.

Gov. Romney, whose father was Governor of Michigan in the 1960s (father and son came to my hometown of Holland, Michigan, one year to march in the Tulip Time Parade), likes this plan because of the "personal responsibility" aspect. That's all well and good. But it appears easy to fall outside the group that qualifies for cut-rate insurance. Household income of more than $48,000 for a family of three will land you in the pay-tax group. Do assets count against you? If you lose your job but aren't poor enough will you still have to pay the tax?

A far better plan would be a Canadian style, single-payer plan. The Massachusetts plan will do little to restrain health care costs. Everyone will still be paying the massive costs of the medical-insurance bureaucracy. Charging businesses only $295 per year per employee is nothing. Health insurance can easily cost $12-14,000 per year per employee. If I'm a sleazeball business owner who cares only about my personal bottom line, let's see, $14,000 vs. $295. I think I'll dump my insurance plan and pay the state tax. This plan is a start, but it won't replace the need for a tax-based, comprehensive plan of the Canadian type.

Posted by David at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay announced his resignation today, surrendering to the legal tidal wave that had made his prospects for re-election, even in Texas, rather dicey. He was George W. Bush's chief enabler, particularly during the 2000 election. We can only hope that the Exerminator (his former profession) gets a quick trip to state prison. He will go to prison for a Capone-like conviction for something far less than he deserves (mobster Al Capone went to prison not for murder, but for tax evasion). Ol' Tom wasn't a murderer, unless you count American democracy as a victim. The 2000 election, I predict, will come to be seen as one of the greatest political atrocities in our history. George W. Bush wasn't meant to win. Everything that has happened since--the Iraq invasion, the war on the environment, the refusal to recognize global warming, the theocracy--are like one of those film fantasy sequences of what would have happened if history had turned out differently. Except it's real. All too real.

Posted by David at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I often walk to work at the Patriot-News from my home in Shipoke. On my stroll home Friday, I came out of Riverfront Park onto Front Street and thought I saw people standing in the street. As I drew closer, I saw a middle-aged woman laying in the street, moaning softly. No blood that I could see, but she was obviously in pain. Five or six people were clustered around her in case a car came, ready to slow it down and direct it around her. Traffic isn't much of a problem in Shipoke, but all it takes is one inattentive driver talking on his/her cellphone to cause a tragedy. They waited with her until an ambulance arrived. I later learned she was not from the neighborhood, but had apparently stopped to look at the Susquehanna River. Heading back to her car, she tripped off the curb and injured her shoulder. It's great to live in a neighborhood where people care.

Posted by David at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Boston Globe published a story by Bob Hohler on March 26 that goes into the most detail yet about former Central Dauphin basketball star Jennifer Harris and her bias lawsuit against Penn State basketball coach Rene Portland. This saga is increasingly ugly, and I don't see how Portland can last in her position. What brought about her apparent homophobia? One thing I haven't seen anywhere is comment by Portland's former mates on the Immaculata College team on which she played as an undergraduate beginning in 1972. Would be interesting to know what her attitudes were then.

Posted by David at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the grandson of immigrants (my paternal grandfather, Frank DeKok, from the Netherlands in 1909, and my maternal grandfather, John Kilian, from Germany in 1924), I've always tended to look upon immigration as a net positive phenomenon for America. I still do, even after reading New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's cautionary words recently that some lower-income Americans do suffer economic harm from immigration. Growing up in the Dutch-American town of Holland, Michigan, I always welcomed the cultural diversity the Mexican community there brought to my very whitebread hometown. Sure, there can be problems with immigrants, but they bring a lot of good, too.

The current immigration debate in Washington is another example of conservative Republican tomfoolery. The issue started appearing on rightwing websites less than a year ago. I'm still not sure why they decided to make it an issue now. Perhaps they decided their demonization of gays had gone as far as it could go, and they needed a new "threat" for their followers to focus their fears and hatred upon. The worst of the proposals before the Congress would make it illegal to even offer help to a sick, starving, illegal immigrant. Background checks on all prospective employees--against a national citizen database--would be required. You can imagine how anyone with a Spanish surname and a dark complexion would be constantly called upon to prove their citizenship.

My hope is that this will backfire on the Republicans like the California Proposition 187 in 1994 did. Prop. 187 would have barred illegal immigrants from receiving any public benefits, including school for their children. It turned the Hispanic community against Republicans and made them fairly reliable Democratic voters. Some Republicans dread the same effect from the current immigration "crackdown."

Posted by David at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For a long time, it has been officially unfashionable to criticize globalization. We've been told to suck it up, take your medicine, and in the end we will have a better, stronger economy that benefits all. I don't think that argument is tenable anymore. Slate "Moneybox" columnist Daniel Gross writes in today's New York Times that globalization--the easy movement of capital from one country to another--is responsible for the sad fact that rising corporate profits, both in America and Europe, are not translating into rising wages for the average person. Median incomes for American workers, he writes, have remained largely stagnant since 2000, while corporate profits have nearly doubled.

The deck is stacked against labor, whether in unions or not. It is too easy for corporations to move production to low-wage countries. There is simply no downside (apart from quality, but let's politely cough) to moving an American factory to China, or a German factory to Poland. Gross says the easy movement of capital has forced down wages. Perhaps the most insensitive remark George W. Bush has made in recent months (who can keep track of them all?) was in India, where he said American shouldn't be upset about high-tech jobs moving from America to India because "Americans need to train for 21st century jobs" or words to that effect. Of course, those computer programming jobs were exactly the sort of jobs that Americans thought would guarantee them a future in the Internet economy.

What we need are federal laws to make it disadvantageous to move jobs and investment from America to low-wage foreign countries. Either the carrot or the stick, and probably both, can be used. The Internet changed the equation faster than America and Europe were able to adapt. Just as speed limits weren't posted the first day automobiles hit the road in the late 19th century, we have not gotten around to posting economic speed limits to protect our jobs and society from the blowback of this century's great phenomenon, the Internet. But the time has come. As a free and democratic people, we have the right to demand that our legislators take steps to limit the unnecessary carnage on the Information Superhighway, to use an old phrase. The world will not come to an end.

Posted by David at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I admire Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., for moving ahead with his call to censure President Bush for his illegal domestic spying program, and I commend Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who I don't always agree with, for having the guts to hold a formal hearing on the resolution yesterday. Specter doesn't like domestic spying. Feingold has been denounced by the Republican right and their talk show chorus for treason for daring to call the King, er, Bush, to account. This isn't even an impeachment resolution, but the wingnuts are frothing at the mouth. Southern Republican Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Jon Cornyn of Texas rushed to accuse Feingold of supporting terrorism and not supporting our troops. Blah, blah, blah. But the hearing got really good when Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, struggled to distinguish Bush from President Richard M. Nixon. Bush, he said, acted in "good faith" in mounting a domestic spying operation, and Nixon didn't in doing all the things that got him booted out of the White House in 1974. So let me get this straight--as long as Bush, in the face of a clear federal law that said he was wrong, "thought" he was in the right, he can't be held to account? Cue the laugh track, Lisa.

Feingold won't succeed, of course. That would require too much Democratic backbone. But he has drawn a line, and we may look back on this in years to come as the beginning of the end for Bush. We can only hope.

Posted by David at 07:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)