By The River

Oh, to be a reporter right now on the staff of the Anchorage Daily News. The big snows haven't come and an important national story has landed in their laps.

I'm referring, of course, to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her pick by Sen. John McCain as his running mate on the Republican ticket. Palin is an embarassment of riches, it seems, when it comes to scandal. The latest story out of Anchorage has the former state police commissioner, the one Palin fired for refusing to fire her cheatin' brother-in-law, saying Palin spoke to him personally about the matter.

If so, that would be (1) an abuse of power, or (2) official oppression, take your pick. Palin would have used the power of her position as governor--a post she's held for all of 18 months--to pursue a private vendetta against the man involved in a bitter divorce and child custody dispute with her sister. The Alaska State Police, like every police department, have rules and regulations governing trooper behavior, and a well-defined disciplinary process. Palin sought to bypass that.

But again, I would point you to the comments in the story that quote the former state police commissioner as saying the McCain campaign never contacted him about Palin when they were supposedly "vetting" Palin for the vice presidency. Alaska GOP leaders say the McCain folks didn't send anyone to Alaska to check into the background of the woman they would put a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Looking at this from a broader historical perspective, Palin would seem to be the latest in a string of Republican appointees who have crashed and burned over ethical issues during the Bush Administration. I guess when you think the federal government is the great Satan, you don't much care who you pick to conduct the nation's business.

As Hurricane Gustav bears down on New Orleans, it would be wise to consider this Republican record of incompetence and corruption and wonder if perhaps Palin ought to make a hasty exit from the ticket. It won't happen, though, because the religious right sees Palin as saintly for her stance on abortion and would erupt in anger if McCain admitted he made a mistake and dumped her. Expect a statement from McCain soon that he is backing her "1000 percent."

The Eagleton in my headline is Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who withdrew as Sen. George McGovern's running mate in 1972 after it was learned he had twice undergone electro-shock treatment in a mental hospital for "nervous exhaustion." Eagleton had been picked on July 14, 1972, after only a minimal background check in which he failed to mention the hospitalizations and treatments. He withdrew on Aug. 1 despite McGovern saying he was backing him "1000 percent." He was replaced by Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver, father of Maria Shriver. The ticket went on to a crushing defeat.

All the talk of Palin being a "game-changing move" for McCain won't matter a hill of beans if she is being battered on a daily basis by new revelations that the minimal background check on her failed to reveal.

Posted by David at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Let us dispense immediately with the thought that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain's running mate to "reach out" to disaffected, diehard Hillary Clinton supporters. She is a darling of the hard right, of the religious right, forced on McCain--who met her only once--by Karl Rove, who I suspect would rather have the Republican Party go down to defeat than have a squishy moderate pro-choicer like Tom Ridge or ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman on the ticket. The idea that Hillary's most fervent supporters would support Palin simply because she is a woman is ludicrous, as you will see.

Republican leaders in Alaska say the McCain team didn't send anyone to Alaska to vet Palin (read about 3/4 of the way down the linked story), which if true is an incredibly foolish mistake that hints of a last-minute change-of-mind after Karl Rove warned against picking Lieberman. You can't get the true measure of a person without talking to people who inhabit the same environment he or she does. My gut feeling is that this is going to end badly for McCain, perhaps with a Thomas Eagleton-like withdrawal of Palin from the ticket. He had apparently met her only once.

So who is Sarah Palin? Her choice should quiet Republican claims that Barack Obama is "inexperienced." She has been governor of Alaska, a state with 650,000 residents, for 18 months. Prior to that, she was mayor of the town of Wasilla, Alaska, which on the official city website is listed a having a population of 6,715. To put those population figures in central Pennsylvania terms, she was the governor of a state with a population just a little more than the combined populations of Dauphin, Cumberland, Lebanon and Perry counties. She was the mayor of a town with a population falling between that of Steelton and Camp Hill. And let's not forget her two terms on City Council in Wasilla. She was elected governor with a vote total of 114,697 votes, a couple of hundred MORE votes than President George W. Bush received in 2004--in York County, Pennsylvania.

So okay, Palin hasn't exactly been voted for by huge numbers of people. In fairness, many Democrats in 2004 would have been quite willing to have former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont--a state with even fewer residents than Alaska--become President. And Delaware, home of Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, has just 844,000 people.

But where does Palin stand on the issues of the day? Her Palin-for-Governor website has been scrubbed of specific issue papers, but the record is there. She is against abortion except to save the life of the mother, and would require victims of rape or incest to bear their attacker's baby. Palin, 44, has been deified in pro-life circles for refusing to get an abortion, as 80 percent of mothers in the same situation do, after being told her fetus would have Down Syndrome.

The baby is now four months-old and has accompanied Palin on her initial campaign forays with McCain. But here is where the lack of vetting could get interesting. Palin kept her pregnancy a secret for seven months. Why? There is a belief among some in Alaska that this is actually her 16-year-old daughter's baby. The daughter disappeared from school for several months, supposedly with a persistent case of mononucleosis. True? Who knows. Unfair and intrusive? Probably. But if Palin is going to push to take away a woman's right to choose, and hold herself up as a holy paradigm--Focus on the Family founder James Dobson called it "bravery and integrity in action"--it goes with the territory if you're running to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Palin is an evangelical Christian, and attends fundamentalist churches. She is against embryonic stem cell research, and favors the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in public school biology classes. She said that in a televised debate while running for governor in 2006.

And on the environment? Her views line up squarely with those of Big Oil. She strongly favors drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and opposed the decision by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to list polar bears as an endangered species.

How has Palin been as governor? Good in some respects, Republican in others. She is under investigation by the Alaska Legislature for supposedly pressuring, or having her staff pressure, the head of the Alaska State Police to fire her sister's husband, who was then involved in a bitter divorce and child custody dispute, and then firing the head of the state police when he refused to fire the trooper. Palin's brother-in-law sounds like no prize, but governors must refrain from allowing their personal feelings to trump law and common sense. In fact, the whole brother-in-law saga sounds like a trashy reality TV show, which may actually play well in some quarters of the electorate.

Palin deserves credit for having come this far, and for attacking some of the corruption in the Alaska Republican Party, one of the more snakebitten political organizations to walk the Earth. She would probably be a welcome addition to the U.S. Senate. But she isn't ready to stand next-in-line to a 72-year-old President with persistent skin cancer problems that he still won't allow his doctors to fully discuss.

Posted by David at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everything seemed to go so well for Barack Obama last night. It didn't rain on his open-air acceptance speech at Invesco Field in Denver, it was 45 years to the day since Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and Obama delivered a speech that was eloquent to the ears and slashing to John McCain and George W. Bush.

Add to that Bill Clinton's wonderful speech Wednesday night and the seemingly sincere effort by both Bill and Hillary Clinton, if not all her diehard supporters, to make their rival Obama the next President of the United States. All the stars seem to be aligned for a historic Democratic victory in November.

But I'm still worried and anxious. Despite polls that show Americans want change, that they are sick of the senseless war in Iraq, sick of George W. Bush's other war, on the environment, and worried to death about the economy and their place in it, Obama and McCain are still close in the polls. And that leads to my biggest source of anxiety, that the Republicans will find a way to once again steal a close election.

That it happened in Florida in 2000--the Original Sin that gave us eight lost years under George W. Bush--seems beyond doubt. That it happened in Ohio in 2004, when the man in charge of the voting process was an aggressively partisan Republican, seems arguable. When Democratic precincts got shorted on voting machines, and voters--some voters--stood 10 hours in line to cast their ballots, you have to wonder.

I doubt that I'm the only Democrat still scarred by what happened and what might have been. I worry, too, about the well-documented "Bradley Effect," the phenomenon of white voters lying to pollsters when black candidates are on the ballot. Even in the relative anonymity of a telephone conversation with a pollster, some white voters don't want to be perceived as racially prejudiced and so say they are undecided or are voting for the black candidate when in fact they are not.

No war is easy, and it will not be easy to restore good and honest government to America. But we have a candidate who will deliver the change we need if we can only put him in the White House. Now the hard work begins.

Posted by David at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I felt a lot better about the election last night after watching Bill Clinton's wonderful speech endorsing Barack Obama for President. Anyone Democrat who watched that speech was transported back to the 1990s and the best of Bill Clinton's eight years in the White House. I'm listening to it again today on The New York Times website, and it's just as good. My favorite line: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than the example of our power." That's the same point author Ron Suskind makes in his new book, "The Way of the World," that America will only reclaim its position in the world by returning to its ideals and repudiating the Bush-Cheney torture regime.

Hillary's speech Tuesday night was also good, but she's never been the speaker her husband is. I still worry that her attacks on Obama during the primary campaign will help John McCain, but their speeches in Denver went a long way to repairing that damage.

Posted by David at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Breaking news out of Denver concerns a possible assassination plot against Barack Obama. FBI and Secret Service agents arrested two men and a woman after police in Aurora, Colo., arrested a third man after pulling him over for driving erratically, as if drunk. In the truck were two scoped rifles, ammunition, sighting scopes, a bulletproof vest, and walkie-talkies. He allegedly implicated the others, one of whom jumped from a sixth floor hotel window when authorities arrived to question him, but survived. The plot was supposedly to shoot Obama on Thursday night while he delivers his acceptance speech outdoors before 70,000 people at Invesco Field. One of the men wore a white supremacist swastika ring.

I've linked the Los Angeles Times report on the plot above. I recommend watching the YouTube video it includes of a local Denver television report on the arrests. Here also is a column today from Bob Herbert of The New York Times in which he mentions a Detroit Free Press poll that showed 57 percent of Michigan residents feared that someone would try to hurt Obama because of his race and that they feared for his safety.

Posted by David at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sen. Barack Obama has picked Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Great choice! Pennsylvania now moves decisively into the Obama column. Biden, an Irish Catholic born in Scranton, will do much to recapture the votes of Democrats in the Anthracite Region who went overwhelmingly for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary. Will this lead McCain to pick former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who is pro-choice, to keep his chances here alive? Or cause McCain to write off Pennsylvania entirely and pick a running mate from the GOP's right to shore up his votes there?

Posted by David at 05:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm just getting around to the latest Franklin & Marshall Poll. It was collected Aug. 4-10 and shows Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain in Pennsylvania by 8 points among all voters, and by by 5 points among "likely" voters. The poll reinforces the general belief that the election is Obama's to lose, but runs counter to a growing perception that Pennsylvania is McCain's to lose. In fact, it may be why McCain is giving serious consideration to picking former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge as his running mate: he needs help in the Keystone State.

Some of the poll's findings: 77 percent of Pennsylvania residents believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, and 37 percent are worse off economically this year than last. A majority of the state, 55 percent, believe McCain will follow the policies of President George W. Bush and are less likely to vote for him as a result.

Obama leads among younger voters, non-whites, college graduates, women, and residents of Philadelphia. An almost comical 82 percent of Philadelphians are for Obama, compared to just 7 percent for McCain. McCain leads among Protestants, fundamentalist Christians, and among residents of northwest and northeast Pennsylvania. That latter statistic is among reasons Obama is considering Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Biden is an Irish Catholic who spent the first 10 years of his life in Scranton.

And here's my favorite statistic from the poll: 3 percent of Pennsylvania residents believe President George W. Bush is doing an "excellent" job. Who are these people?

Posted by David at 06:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

When you look at who is being considered by Barack Obama and John McCain as their vice presidential running mates, the importance of Pennsylvania to each becomes clear.

McCain, the Republican, is said to have former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge high on his list. Some rapturous Republicans here think that would give McCain an easy victory in Pennsylvania. I'm not so sure. McCain will get a lot of those votes no matter who he picks, and the Republicans haven't done that well in statewide elections of late. McCain might be betting that Ridge can make him palatable to white Democrats who are reluctant to vote for Obama because of his race.

Ridge carries liabilities here as well, including his consorting with Enron during the push to electric competition in 1996. The records of that are locked away for 25 years under the state's idiotic records laws. Don't count on the Repubican-controlled Senate to allow any consideration of a bill to open Ridge's gubernatorial papers to public inspection. Nationally, Ridge was the first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a millstone around anyone's neck. Expect a lot of document searches there under the much-stronger federal Freedom of Information Act to ferret out any dirt from that, especially as relates to the run-up to Hurricane Katrina and the FEMA cesspool.

And of course, there is the whole issue of Ridge being pro-choice and thus supposedly unacceptable to the religious right that forms the base of the Republican Party nationally. I suspect that if Ridge gets the nomination, the right would come to tolerate him. He was never a table pounder for abortion rights, seeming moderate only in contrast to the ban-abortion crowd.

On the Democratic side, Obama has two potential choices with strong Pennsylvania backgrounds. Hillary Clinton's father, Hugh Rodham, was born and raised in Scranton, and the family had a cottage on Lake Winola in the Poconos. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, who is in the running mainly for his foreign policy background, was also born in Scranton and lived there until age 10, when the family moved to Delaware. He is an Irish Catholic--his mother was a Finnegan. Both Clinton and Biden would help Obama win votes outside of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions, especially in the Anthracite Region around Scranton.

And of course, Obama could ensure that Pennsylvania's electoral votes end up in his column by selecting Gov. Ed Rendell, who remains popular across the state even if deeply annoying to Democratic liberals who consider him a (DINO) Democrat In Name Only. Rendell has disclaimd any interest, in part because of the Catherine problem. The elderly Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll would become governor if Rendell becomes vice president, and she just isn't up to the demands of the job.

So Pennsylvania appears likely to be fought over in 2008 even more than it was in 2004 or 2000. That doesn't guarantee we'll get a vice presidential candidate on either ticket with state ties. Winning national elections CAN be done without Pennsylvania, even if we relish thinking of ourselves as the keystone to victory.

Update: I think we can scratch Ed Rendell off the list, if he was ever on it. Rendell just named a new Secretary of Environmental Protection, John Hanger. I doubt Hanger would have agreed to take the job without some assurance that Rendell wasn't going to resign in the next couple of months.

Posted by David at 06:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was a fascinating story in the New York Times the other day about corruption and potential corruption in the wind turbine industry in upstate New York. It seems the players in the wind industry have figured out they can use payoffs to further their corporate goals and overcome local opposition to the erection of giant wind turbines.

The payoffs could be as blatant as a municipal official being told to look on the back seat of the car, where two company logo polo shirts and an envelope stuffed with cash were waiting for him. Or it could be the local elected official who has cut a wind turbine lease deal with an energy company who then votes to allow the turbines to go up elsewhere in the town as well.

If it's happening in New York, you can be sure it's happening in Pennsylvania.

In Pennsylvania, local government is, if anything, even more fragmented. Few rural townships have zoning ordinances, just about the only way a local government can put brakes on wind turbine development in Pennsylvania. With the Rendell Administration pushing wind development and no state siting regulations to determine whether a turbine is appropriate for a particular location, it falls to three-member township boards to make that decision.

While many local elected officials take their jobs seriously and aren't steamrollered by the wind companies, others are suckered by the promise of jobs (turbines create just a handful, and they often go to outsiders) or tax revenue (minimal, far less than a house of the same value). The real winners are the wind companies themselves and the local landowners who lease ground for the turbines.

How wind turbines can tear apart a community was something I wrote about for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg before I abruptly left that beat a year ago. Now Helen O'Neill of Associated Press has written a chilling story about how wind development in in a small New York community and how it has torn apart families. Another O'Neill, Eugene, would have loved this story. Elderly father controls the land and takes the wind money, leaving his bitter sons with wind turbines that are driving them mad with the soft whup, whup, whup of the blades and the shadow flicker they create.

There is an important place for wind energy, properly sited. But it mustn't be forced down the throats of small towns in the name of "energy independence" that the turbines won't do much to alleviate. Pennsylvania needs to make wind turbine siting a state-level process with tough rules that allow a community to just say no. And law enforcement needs to be alert for the possibility of corruption.

I think back to 1979 and a trial I covered for the Shamokin News-Item in U.S. District Court, Williamsport. Several former members of the Shamokin Area School Board were on trial for bribery and extortion, essentially for shaking down a Harrisburg architectural firm for kickbacks on the construction of Shamokin Area Elementary School.

The money wasn't left on the backseat of a car in this instance. Instead, a meeting in a local restaurant was arranged. Money was placed inside a menu and slid across the table to greedy, outstretched hands. Comical, almost. And different hands are still at the ready someplace in rural Pennsylvania where the wind industry wants to do business.

Posted by David at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, do you ever wonder how many Americans think Soviet troops invaded the U.S. state of Georgia?

Given the state of geographical and political knowledge here, there have to be at least a few. Sad, really. But let's take this a little further and imagine that the Atlanta government had clamped down hard on its northern counties, say an area of about 31x31 miles. In that enclave, which once was a part of Tennessee, the Atlanta government imposed a language not spoken by 90 percent of the population and took away their right to vote. The enclave declared its independence, attacked state officials send from Atlanta to enforce the new rules, and appealed to the rest of America for help. In response, the Atlanta government sends in the National Guard to brutally suppress the rebellion, burning towns and killing hundreds of old people, women and children in the breakaway counties.

Meanwhile, the Federal government in Washington moves troops across the Tennessee border to free the northern enclave from Atlanta control. Fighting between American troops and the Georgia National Guard is fierce, but the National Guard quickly retreats. American troops continue beyond the enclave and march on Atlanta to punish the state for its murderous actions against the breakaway counties. This draws harsh condemnation from Vladimir Putin in Russia, who is close to the governor of Georgia thanks to a lobbyist on his staff who until recently represented Georgia interests in Moscow. Putin says "We are all Georgians" and urges his country to back Georgia. The European Union sends diplomats to America to try to broker a ceasefire.

Who would you back in this situation? The state government in Atlanta or the federal government in Washington? Would Putin seem like a belligerant, meddling idiot, seeking to interfere in matters clearly within Washington's legitimate sphere of influence?

The point I'm trying to make, of course, is that Sen. John McCain is pursuing a wrong-headed, dangerous course in his unabashed, unqualified backing for the country of Georgia in the fight it picked with Russia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia (yes, there is a North Ossetia--it is part of Russia). Ossetians are not Georgians. Georgia did oppress them, including imposing Georgian as the national language. Moscow sent troops into Georgia--part of Russia and then the Soviet Union from 1801 to 1991.

I'm no fan of Putin and his efforts to drag Russia back to the oppressive years of Communism. But this is no more our fight than it was Russia's fight when we invaded Grenada in 1983. We can be unhappy about the situation in Georgia, as much of the world was with us after Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada and the deaths of more than 100 people. But ultimately, Grenada was seen to be within our sphere of influence and things calmed down pretty quickly.

What makes the real Georgia situation disturbing is that it appears to be yet another effort by the far right in America to mess with foreign policy in ways that endanger America. They remember history and have learned nothing from it, chafing over the past refusal of the United States to go to war with the Soviet Union over its suppression of independence or liberalization movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tragedies both. No doubt about it. But were they worth a nuclear war with Moscow that might have killed tens of millions of people on both sides?

The neo-cons who brought us the Iraq disaster say we must "stand with" Georgia because it sent 2000 troops to help us in the Iraq disaster, withdrawing many of them to suppress the rebellion in South Ossetia. I find it particularly disturbing that McCain appears to have been steered toward his support of Georgia as much by lobbyists as neo-cons, echoing the run-up to the Iraq war, when the neo-cons fell all over Ahmed Chalabi and the myths he spread about how our invasion supposedly would be met with flower petals, not bullets and bombs. McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheuneman, was a lobbyist for Georgia until several months ago.

McCain's approach to foreign policy, as I've written before, is rooted in his belief that the U.S. should have continued fighting the Vietnam War until it won. He does not seem able to rise above reflexive belligerency. A war with Russia in the 21st century would be long and bloody. Even if we pushed them out of Georgia, where would we stop?

On the road to Moscow? A million dead soldiers later, assuming no resort to nuclear weapons? It isn't worth it, or necessary, except in the minds of rightwing bitter-enders.

Posted by David at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If you have a strong stomach, read the account in the New York Times today about how federal immigration officials and their camp guards in state and local prisons let a Chinese immigrant, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, die horribly of bone cancer. Indeed, they went out of their way to make it difficult for him to get treatment and actively frustrated his efforts to meet with lawyers who might have helped him.

The Bush Administration's persecution of non-citizens--they have succeeded gays as the main target of the hard right's group hate (in part because they were increasingly hating themselves)--shames everything America stands for. I don't care that Ng didn't have legal status. He overstayed a legal tourist visa at age 19 and had made a good life for himself in America. He had a wife and two young children and a good job providing computer services to a firm in the Empire State Building.

What was done to him in our names is little different than what Hitler did to the Jews or the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s did to political dissidents. It appears to be murder, and lawyers for the family have asked that a criminal investigation be opened.

That's the difference between America in 2008 and Nazi Germany in 1944. The rule of law can still trump the politics of hate. Not that it's a slam dunk: Attorney General Michael Mukasey yesterday told the American Bar Association he had no intention of prosecuting midstate native Monica Goodling and others who broke the law by using political criteria to hire career Justice Department employees. That case cries out for the appointment of a special prosecutor immune from the influence of Bush and Cheney.

Yesterday I happened to call a plumber in the Harrisburg area. I was taken aback when the receptionist answered the phone, "We're proud to be Americans. [name deleted] Plumbing and Heating." I'm glad they are, but increasingly Americans can make statements like that only with their eyes firmly shut and their ears plugged.

Did you know that the York County Prison and the Snyder County Prison are both immigration prisons under contract to the Federal government? What happened to Ng could be happening right in our own backyards.

Posted by David at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine you are living a peaceful, rural life in beautiful Bedford County and a large Texas natural gas company arrives one day. They tell you to get off your land, and oh, here's a check. Would you be upset?

That's the situation faced by several land owners near Clearville, Pa., which is about 20 miles east of Bedford, Pa. Spectra Energy of Houston and its partner, New Jersey Resources, wants to seize land via eminent domain to create an underground storage facility for 17.7 billion cubic feet of gas. Among the customers would be the growing number of gas-fired power plants in the Northeast. This is known as the Steckman Ridge project, and work to build pipelines to the site is already underway. Spectra, the former Duke Energy Gas Transmission, plans to open the facility on April 1, 2009.

You, as a homeowner, might be upset both about the land grab--even with court-determined compensation, which may or may not be what you think the land is worth--and because you might be blocked from a royalty windfall if new natural gas deposits are discovered in the Marcellus Shale layer that is the subject of increasingly frenzied energy exploration in Pennsylvania.

This story was first reported last month by the Altoona Mirror, which has also provided links to key court and regulatory documents in the case. The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat also wrote a good story, as did the Bedford Gazette. The Gazette doesn't provide its stories online. I happened to pick up a copy when I stopped with my family at Ed's Steakhouse in Bedford on Saturday night returning from vacation in Michigan, which was how I first learned this was going on. This story hasn't gone statewide, in part because the state's larger newspapers are increasingly retreating into their core territories in the misguided belief that "readers" aren't interested in news outside their home municipalities.

Small town newspapers can report the heck out of stories like this, but as I learned covering the Centralia mine fire for the Shamokin News-Item from 1976-86, you remain a voice crying in the wilderness unless the big city newspapers, TV stations, and Associated Press pick up on your work and do their own reporting.

The affected land owners, who include a York couple, are fighting back. Some of them have retained a Pittsburgh lawyer, and they have succeeded in persuading the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to at least consider a rehearing of its original approval of the project. Eminent domain papers have already been filed against them by Spectra Energy's local lawyer, Charles Rubendall of Harrisburg. There is an unseemly rush to all this that seems driven by Spectra Energy's self-imposed deadline of opening the facility next spring.

No one argues that the Northeast needs more natural gas, although it needs a massive effort to improve the energy efficiency of homes and commercial buildings even more. The question here is fairness to the landowners involved. Spectra Energy has the right under the Natural Gas Act to take their property, but the sad history of energy development in this country is that little people will get trampled by large corporations if someone isn't sticking up for their rights.

Posted by David at 06:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of late, we come to Michigan about this time of the summer. We rent a cottage by Lake Michigan near my hometown of Holland and have a family reunion.

Our cottage this year overlooks Lake Macatawa, but is within easy walking distance of the Big Lake, as it is known. I can sit on the expansive front porch of this old Victorian cottage and watch boats of all descriptions sailing out of Lake Macatawa into Lake Michigan. Everything from Jet Skis to motor boats, to, improbably, a Chinese junk go cruising by.

The reunion was a couple of days ago at my uncle's cottage, which does front on Lake Michigan. The advantage here was a nice backyard and only about 25 steps down to the beach. We have rented cottages in the past with 50 or more steps. It isn't so much going down them as coming back up at the end of a blissful day.

Lake Michigan was very warm this year, probably about 72 degrees. Even my wife, notoriously finicky about coldish water, found it enjoyable. From our own cottage, we walk about a quarter mile along a relatively flat sidewalk that leads to our Lake Michigan beach. At one point the sidewalk splits into a high road and low road. The high road leads past magnificent Victorian cottages that cling to the side of the dune.

If I wanted to get political, I would call the high road the Obama path, and the low road the McCain path. But politics seem far away this week.

Posted by David at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every journalist has a few heroes. One of mine was Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who managed to combine great literature with great investigative reporting in exposing the brutality of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union.

Solzhenitzsyn, who died Sunday at age 89, first became famous for his novella, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which detailed a single day in the life of a Soviet political prisoner in the camps, a life Solzhenitsyn knew firsthand, having been a prisoner himself. It was allowed to be published in 1963 by Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev, who hoped it would help discredit his murderous predecessor, Joseph Stalin.

But I revered Solzhenitsyn most for his three volume history of the Soviet prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, the first volume of which appeared in 1973. Gulag was investigative reporting as literature, laying out all the crimes of the Soviet Union from its beginning in 1918 through the 1950s. I could only imagine the work that Solzhenitsyn did to collect and verify the terrible tales he relates in his magnum opus. I read every word, and indeed have read two-thirds of all the books he wrote, excepting only the last three historical novels in the Red Wheel series.

Solzhenitsyn led a difficult life. He was thrown into the camps originally for referring to Stalin originally as "the man with the mustache," and barely survived stomach cancer. After Kruschchev was deposed in the mid-1960s, he led an increasingly perilous existence, collecting stories, writing them down, and secreting what he wrote to keep it away from the Soviet secret police. Gulag was published after the police interrogated his typist, who gave up the location of one of the copies and then hanged herself in shame.
Solzhenitsyn's fame around the world kept him alive, but he was thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1974, four years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He spent 18 years living in exile with his family in Vermont, and managed to alienate many of his western supporters with his writings and speeches. I don't hold that against him. Many great artists and great investigative reporters (Sy Hersh comes to mind) have personality issues. They aren't necessarily people you would want to hang out with, but you value their work.

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