By The River

I'm spending Thanksgiving weekend with my parents in Holland, Michigan. One of the problems I always deal with at this time of year is what to get two 81-year-olds for Christmas.

This year I had an inspiration. I offered to replace all the traditional incandescent lightbulbs in their house with energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs. I did the same in our own house in Harrisburg, Pa., and the savings on my electric bill were noticeable and immediate. I'm probably saving 10 percent on my bill. With CFL's you get the same light for less electricity .

My parents liked the idea, so I jumped in the car and headed for Menard's, a regional home improvement store, and Home Depot. Turns out Menard's had the better prices and selection.

Before I left, I inventoried the bulbs in the house. I counted 30, but it turned out I missed a couple. I needed eleven 100-watt equivalent CFL's, nine 60's, four 3-way bulbs that went up to 150 watts, and five candelabra bulbs for a
light fixture in the dining rooms. Check these carefully to determine their wattage and what type base they have. You don't want to replace five 25's with five 40s and have the room lit up like a prison yard. I assumed they had
the pencil eraser size candelabra base, but instead they had the 'Edison' base like on a regular lightbulb.

I paid $82 for the bulbs. I didn't get the candelabras because I wasn't sure if my mother would like their shape. I'll keep looking for those.

The only problem we had was that three of the light fixtures were too small for the slightly larger CFL bulbs. The tiny overhead light in the library was slightly too small for even one of the new mini-100's I found at Menards. I thought I had it, then heard an ominous cracking sound. I removed the broken bulb and out the incandescent back in. Two of the three-ways were simply too large to fit in old lamps. I had to put the old bulbs back I those, too. But in 27 of the light fixtures, the new bulbs worked fine.

One note: when you go to a store like Menard's, you will see both 'daylight' and 'soft' CFL bulbs. Get the soft. The light the produce is most like the light from incandescent bulbs. Also, tell your parents that CFL bulbs can take as long as a minute to come to full brightness, although it is typically much less.

You'll feel quite satisfied when you're done, having helped your parents save money and spared the Earth some greenhouse gases. And Santa will know you've been a good boy.

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Yesterday was the official going-away ceremony at the Harrisburg Patriot-News for the first nine journalists to take the buy-out and head out to make new lives. This was sort of like my Holland High School graduation back in 1971 when right-thinking parents tried to force all the seniors to attend an "official" graduation party instead of some unofficial orgy of drinking and rutting organized by students. We went, but ended up out at the Lake Michigan beach anyway, doing one if not the other. Editors at the ceremony yesterday said nice things, some nicer than others, about us nine departees. They didn't invite any speeches from us, probably for good reason. It was long enough as it was.

Although we leave with decent severance--I'll relax when the money actually arrives--we are still eligible under state rules to obtain unemployment compensation. So this morning, as my wife Lisa drove me and my two daughters west on the Ohio Turnpike in the direction of Holland, Michigan, I applied for unemployment via my iPhone. Called up the form over the iPhone's Internet connection, filled it in, and hit 'send' somewhere near Youngstown, Ohio. By Cleveland, I had an e-mail back from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry telling me my claim was being proccessed.

I'd like to say the money was in the bank by the time I hit Holland, but it takes a week or two and you don't get paid for the first week you're off. What's up with that? I guess they figure you can de-mummify some Ramen noodles for seven days if you don't have severance.

Posted by David at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The drinks flowed freely last ngiht and so did the talk. What else would you expect at a gathering of journalists, many of whom won't be journalists for very much longer?

The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., will lose many longtime members of its newsroom staff to buy-outs between now and the end of the year. I'm leaving. So is the entire editorial board--Dale Davenport, Herb Field, John Goodrich and John Troutman. So are reporters Jim Lewis, Jerry Gleason, Frank Cozzoli, Ellen Lyon, Mary Bradley, Gerry Lenton, and Mary Warner. Nancy Eshelman, columnist, and Alan Hayakawa, online editor, are leaving. I don't talk much to the people in sports, and none were at the party--nighttime is sports time--but it is likely some of them are leaving, too. I'm probably missing a few others, too, especially on the copy desk, but you get the idea. The Patriot-News will be a very different place after Jan. 1 with so much talent going out the door.

The party was hosted by Mary Warner, who last covered religion and values for the paper, and her husband, Lebanon Valley College president Steve MacDonald, at their home in Bellevue Park. I've never seen a group of people so happy about losing their jobs. Indeed, the talk was more of the unlucky few who asked for buy-outs but who were told they had to stay.

Newspapers are dying, faster than anyone outside the industry realizes. Large cities, including in Pennsylvania, could be left with no newspaper at all before too long. There will always be journalism, but it will increasingly be delivered by television or online. Indeed, I hope to go to documentary film school so I will still have a venue for doing the kind of journalism I love. Plus some book and magazine writing. Maybe someone will start a credible new online newspaper in Harrisburg. It wouldn't be hard to staff.

It's a shame about newspapers, really is. I was in the Watergate Class of journalists who entered the profession in the mid-1970s after our heroes Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post brought down President Richard Nixon with their reporting of the Watergate scandal. And oh, the things we accomplished! Everything from the Philadelphia Inquirer's series exposing the abuses at Farview State Hospital in Pennsylvania to the Boston Globe's reporting of the Catholic Church sex scandals. And other stories too numerous to mention.My own reporting of the Centralia mine fire and its threat to the people of that small Pennsylvania town, which eventually led to the relocation of nearly everyone in the town at government expense, was in that same spirit. It was the golden age of investigative reporting.

I could talk about that for hours, and maybe those of us leaving the Patriot-News will eventually be sad we did. But like the people of Centralia, we have been given the opportunity for new lives, and I hope, better ones.

Posted by David at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received word yesterday that I've been approved for the buy-out at the Patriot-News, the newspaper in Harrisburg, Pa. where I've worked since 1987. Never having been down this road before, I'm not sure how one is supposed to feel. My family and I went out to celebrate the buy-out over some tasty ribs at DaPits, which still seems weird. Do you really celebrate losing a job you've had for 21 years, even if it gives you an opportunity--and a financial base--to do something different with your life? I guess I can say I was relieved, but with a tinge of anxiety, given the current economy.

A lot of the newsroom will be leaving, including some of the paper's best reporters. Maybe it will be like the Biblical rapture, where the Elect suddenly vanish from the newsroom and are assumed into their new lives, just like that. I'll try not to be pouring a cup of coffee when it happens.

Just as those Left Behind will need to adjust, so too will the community, especially the local governments and police departments accustomed to dealing with reporters who in some instances have covered them for years.

After dinner at DaPits I dropped off my wife at home and took my daughters to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace ( I still don't know what that title is supposed to mean--give me Goldfinger or You Only Live Twice anyday). On the way out, we ran into Dennis and Angie McMaster. He is chief of police in East Pennsboro Twp. and she is president of the school board.

I had covered East Pennsboro Twp. for a year after being moved off the business staff in September 2007. My assignment changed abruptly again in early October when I was shifted to night cops after the early buy-out approval of another reporter. Chief McMaster gave me a timely call one night after they arrested a man for the murder of his aunt.

So I mentioned I would be leaving the newspaper, and the McMasters said my colleague Jerry Gleason, who had covered East Pennsboro for years before I took it over, had told them he was leaving, too, which he is. Angie mentioned that Gerry Lenton of our staff had covered a couple of their school board meetings since I left. Oops. He's leaving, too, I told her. The chief is a big newspaper fan, but told me his younger officers don't read the Patriot-News, preferring to get their news online or via television. That kind of sums up the problem the newspaper faces.

They wished me the best and continued on out to the parking lot. The chief didn't like the Bond movie, by the way. I thought it was okay, apart from the weird title, but not a top-tier Bond.

So now I'm throwing myself into finishing my last big project for the Patriot-News, a story on the unsolved murder of Betsy Aardsma. She was from my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and went to my high school, and was stabbed to death Nov. 28, 1969, in the library at Penn State University up in State College. Fascinating story, and you can read it Nov. 23 in the Patriot-News or at the PennLive.com website.

Posted by David at 05:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

He may have been there among the throngs of Obama fans in Grant Park in Chicago last night celebrating the Democrat's huge victory. Bill Ayers, aka "Obama's terrorist pal," told the Washington Post he planned to stroll on down, uninvited or not. If he did, perhaps accompanied by his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, I'm sure he was chuckling all the way.

Ayers, of course, became the centerpiece of John McCain's last-ditch effort to stop the Obama juggernaut. The YouTube video I just linked, viewed the morning after Obama's landslide victory, shows perhaps better than anything how out of touch McCain and the national Republican Party were with the America of the early 21st century. As one who came of age in the late 1960s, I remember Ayers, Dohrn, and the Weather Underground quite well, but I suspect that 20-somethings today are as unfamiliar with them as I was at their age with Emma Goldman, Jack Reed, and the radical leftists of the early 20th century.

Some commentators have made much of Obama being the first post-Boomer candidate for President. He was, but this election was far more about the passions of the 1960s than the elections of 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004, in which Boomers Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry were the Democratic candidates. The 2008 election finally delivered on the promise of the 1960s, the overturning of the old order begun by legions of young people.

They fought against Southern racism, demanding civil rights for blacks. They fought against the Vietnam War, viewing it, like Iraq today, as a needless and costly war of choice. And they fought to make merit, rather than skin color or other accidents of birth, a more determining factor in individual achievement. Obama's success is a tribute to their efforts.

Every movement has its fringe members, and Ayers, Dohrn, and their fellow members of Students for a Democratic Society (Weather Underground was a later splinter faction) played that role here. They plotted against the American government in the name of ending the Vietnam War and racism, and did plant bombs that occasionally went off as planned. To many, even today, they were romantic outlaws more than dangerous terrorists.

Ayers and Dohrn spent years in hiding, and when they emerged it was impossible to prosecute them, so badly had the Nixon Administration mishandled their case and violated their Constitutional rights. Whenever someone like John McCain starts railing against the radicals of the 1960s, it is helpful to remember that the excesses of the left were more than matched by the excesses of the right. Dohrn became a law professor and Ayers an educational reformer, continuing the work he had begun as a student at the University of Michigan from 1964-68.

Yes, they live in the same Chicago neighborhood as Obama and vote at the same polling place. Louis Farrakhan votes there too, by the way, as do many Chicago young professionals who live in the Shipoke-like area. Ayers and Dohrn became so conventional that they have a nameplate bearing both their last names on the front of their house, along with the house number. You can see it in the photo that accompanies this story in The New Yorker.

So as they strolled to Grant Park last night, at least in their minds, did they recall the Days of Rage, tear gas, nightsticks, and the townhouse bomb explosion? Or did they talk about how Obama would finally deliver on the better part of their dreams, of a post-racial America in which all children get a good education, have enough to eat, receive top-notch healthcare, and don't have to fight in senseless wars?

I'm betting on the latter. And I'm sure they laughed at the irony of it all.

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

Can't say they're for Obama, can't say they're not. But a couple of my neighbors put out white Christmas lights on small trees in front of their houses last night. It was Election Eve. Welcoming the One?

Vote today. No excuses!

Posted by David at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you watched Sen. John McCain on Saturday Night Live last night you had a (now) rare opportunity to see the McCain that so charmed the national press from 2000 through early 2008. Funny, willing to poke fun at himself, possessed of a wicked grin, you could hardly imagine that he was the same John McCain who authorized some of the anti-Obama ads that ran incessantly during commercial breaks on the show, at least here in central Pennsylvania.

And there's the rub. If you vote for McCain, you vote for George W. Bush and the awful ugliness of the last eight years. McCain made a deal with the devil--Bush guru Karl Rove--back in the summer, accepting a Rove acolyte to run his campaign. The ads got dirtier, Sarah Palin arrived on the scene, and McCain himself shut out the press he once so ardently courted.

But in a sense this has been good, because it was unlikely that the jocular McCain of the "Straight Talk Express" would have been the McCain who governed as President. He would have been (I'm assuming an Obama victory, but that's not exactly a stretch at this point...) unable to resist pressure from the Repubican right to continue the worst aspects of the Bush regime. And McCain has been quite clear that he would have appointed hard right justices to the Supreme Court, which would have returned America to the pre-Roosevelt era when business and conservative clerics ruled the land and the people be damned.

McCain, to be fair to Karl Rove, made many of his own worst mistakes, including acceding to the selection of the disastrous Palin after a cursory vetting process. I can't wait for the insider accounts from the McCain campaign to tell us just how nutty Palin really was.

Many Democrats still worry that Karl Rove will find some way to engineer a victory for McCain, most likely through the computerized voting machines that seem incapable of being made tamper-proof. They really should be banned. I would happily go back to paper ballots or traditional voting machines in the name of stopping an apocalyptic election theft.

Obama, again assuming he wins on Tuesday, should have an opportunity that only rarely comes to American presidents, that of making substantive, lasting, positive change in our lives. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the opportunity, and so did Lyndon B. Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. Each transformed American life in ways that still benefit us today. Roosevelt gave us unions and Social Security. Johnson restored civil rights to black Americans and made life less harsh for millions of Americans, black and white. I'm obviously leaving out a lot, but you get the idea.

How will Obama make our lives better? National health insurance is the obvious answer. That would help so many Americans--and American businesses--that I think it will win out over the forces who benefit financially from the current mess that leaves tens of millions in America without protection from crushing medical bills.

But beyond that, Obama must undo the most toxic legacy of the Bush years: he must make the federal government once again a bastion of competency and concern, a government as good as the American people. Not a government that cozies up to polluters and looks at the needs of a few wealthy business owners before it considers what would help 300 million Americans.

Tuesday will be interesting, to be sure.

Posted by David at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you watched Sen. John McCain on Saturday Night Live last night you had a (now) rare opportunity to see the McCain that so charmed the national press from 2000 through early 2008. Funny, willing to poke fun at himself, possessed of a wicked grin, you could hardly imagine that he was the same John McCain who authorized some of the anti-Obama ads that ran incessantly during commercial breaks on the show, at least here in central Pennsylvania.

And there's the rub. If you vote for McCain, you vote for George W. Bush and the awful ugliness of the last eight years. McCain made a deal with the devil--Bush guru Karl Rove--back in the summer, accepting a Rove acolyte to run his campaign. The ads got dirtier, Sarah Palin arrived on the scene, and McCain himself shut out the press he once so ardently courted.

But in a sense this has been good, because it was unlikely that the jocular McCain of the "Straight Talk Express" would have been the McCain who governed as President. He would have been (I'm assuming an Obama victory, but that's not exactly a stretch at this point...) unable to resist pressure from the Repubican right to continue the worst aspects of the Bush regime. And McCain has been quite clear that he would have appointed hard right justices to the Supreme Court, which would have returned America to the pre-Roosevelt era when business and conservative clerics ruled the land and the people be damned.

McCain, to be fair to Karl Rove, made many of his own worst mistakes, including acceding to the selection of the disastrous Palin after a cursory vetting process. I can't wait for the insider accounts from the McCain campaign to tell us just how nutty Palin really was.

Many Democrats still worry that Karl Rove will find some way to engineer a victory for McCain, most likely through the computerized voting machines that seem incapable of being made tamper-proof. They really should be banned. I would happily go back to paper ballots or traditional voting machines in the name of stopping an apocalyptic election theft.

Obama, again assuming he wins on Tuesday, should have an opportunity that only rarely comes to American presidents, that of making substantive, lasting, positive change in our lives. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the opportunity, and so did Lyndon B. Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. Each transformed American life in ways that still benefit us today. Roosevelt gave us unions and Social Security. Johnson restored civil rights to black Americans and made life less harsh for millions of Americans, black and white. I'm obviously leaving out a lot, but you get the idea.

How will Obama make our lives better? National health insurance is the obvious answer. That would help so many Americans--and American businesses--that I think it will win out over the forces who benefit financially from the current mess that leaves tens of millions in America without protection from crushing medical bills.

But beyond that, Obama must undo the most toxic legacy of the Bush years: he must make the federal government once again a bastion of competency and concern, a government as good as the American people. Not a government that cozies up to polluters and looks at the needs of a few wealthy business owners before it considers what would help 300 million Americans.

Tuesday will be interesting, to be sure.

Posted by David at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)