By The River

Good news from Minnesota this afternoon. The state Supreme Court ruled that Democrat Al Franken was the winner of the U.S. Senate race there (in November 2008) by I think 312 votes over the Republican Norm "Sore Loser" Coleman. After an hour or so of collective holding of breath, Coleman finally conceded. Franken becomes the 60th Democratic senator and a potential end to Republican filibusters of health care and other important issues for America.

I first saw Al Franken on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970s. He was mainly a writer on the show, but occasionally appeared on camera to do political commentaries that inevitably got around to the question of, "What does it mean to me, Al Franken?" Franken is smart, liberal, and progressive in the Minnesota tradition.

Coleman can't be blamed entirely for this fiasco. He was put up to the recount fight and financed by the national Republican Party, who desperately wanted Franken and his 60th vote kept out of the Senate as long as possible. And no, it wasn't the same as Gore vs. Bush in Florida in 2000. Gore never received a fair count by unbiased officials. Coleman got that and more, but the handwriting on the wall was clear long ago that Franken had won.

Posted by David at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, no, not me.

We had a going-away party yesterday for Scott and Heather Emery, who are leaving Shipoke for Olympia, Washington. Scott finished his general surgery residency at Pinnacle Hospital and accepted a job in a surgery practice back in their home state. Heather was a lawyer for the state, most recently for the Independent Regulatory Review Commission. She doesn't have a new job lined up, but as a result will be able to work on their new home with its views of Puget Sound.

I'll miss Scott's genial good nature and Heather's peppery wit. They arrived not long before the 2004 flood, so are full-fledged Shipoke residents. Your status here is based on how many floods you have gone through. I don't think we have any '36-ers left, and there may be one or two survivors of the Agnes and Eloise floods in the 1970s. But for most of us, the question comes down to whether you can regale newcomers like Cali McCullough and her husband with stories of the 1996 and 2004 floods. We don't even have to make stuff up. Reality is good enough.

So we sat under the picnic shelter in the playground yesterday telling these stories and drinking wine, or beer, and snacking on wraps from Wegman's (courtesy of Bill Cluck) and potato salad from me--first of the season. I don't look forward to another flood, even though I would love to make a documentary film if it happens. Floods are brutal events, wearing on the body, soul and pocketbook. But like soldiers who have gone through battle, we relive them again and again.

In a perfect world, I would have arranged for the State Farm adjuster from the 2004 flood to be at the party for Heather to finally strangle. But don't get me started on that fiasco. Heather and Scott won't escape flood insurance and its onerous cost at their new home, either, but I suspect Puget Sound floods a lot less than the mighty Susquehanna. We all wish them the best.

Posted by David at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill, who is my congressman, and U.S. Rep. Todd Platts, R-York, who represents a district on the other side of the Susquehanna River, both voted against the Obama Administration's climate/energy bill that passed the House narrowly on Friday.

With Platts, what can you do? Only eight Republicans were willing to buck the tight GOP party discipline and vote in favor of the first serious U.S. effort to stop global warming. That party is firmly controlled by the energy industry and the global warming deniers.

But Holden was a disappointment. I've searched for any statement by him defending his vote, but haven't been able to find one. I imagine he voted against the bill in a misguided effort to save anthracite coal mining jobs in his district. If mining jobs make up more than 1 percent of the total jobs in his district, I'd be surprised, but you can never rule out an attack of "magical thinking" up there about reviving the anthracite coal industry.

Holden knows he can go against the wishes of liberal Democrats like me because we know that if he is replaced by a Republican, it will be some Bible-thumper who wants to cut taxes for the wealthy. But Holden should also consider what votes like this will do to his efforts in the future to get help from the Obama Administration on any number of other issues.

But at least it passed, and now it goes on to the Senate. U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter had better beware about voting against this bill. His likely Democratic primary challenger next year, Rep. Joe Sestak, was among the Pennsylvania Democrats who voted in favor of the global warming bill. Specter's poll numbers still show him leading Sestak, but with a large number of undecideds. Specter can't take Democratic votes for granted.

Posted by David at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The strange tale of Gov. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, got even stranger this afternoon. The governor, intercepted at the Atlanta airport by a reporter from The State, South Carolina's leading newspaper, admitted that he actually wasn't hiking the Appalachian Trail as his staff had insisted. Instead, he was in Argentina having an affair with an old friend.

Of course, he apologized to his family and said his wife knew about his Argentine firecracker. His yet unnamed girlfriend is believed to be the first Argentine to play a part in an American political scandal since stripper Annabelle "Fanne Fox" Battistella cavorted in the Washington Tidal Basin with Democratic Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas in 1974. Actually, cavorting might not be the right word. She actually ran out of Mills' car after it was pulled over by the D.C. Park Police and jumped in the water. Whatever verb you prefer, It did wonders for her career, if not for that of Mills, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Sanford can now join that other presidential wannabe Sen. Jon Ensign, R-Nevada, on a Family Values ticket in 2012, provided one of them can muscle Sarah Palin out of the way for the right to be the next Alf Landon and lose to FDR, er, Obama, by historic proportions. At least Sanford wasn't nailing a member of his own staff whose husband also was on his staff. Who do you take him for, anyway? Jon Ensign?

Someone really needs to call the Appalachian Trail Conference in Harper's Ferry, W.Va., and ask spokesman Brian King if they have a comment on all this. Sanford, incidentally, says that he hiked on the A.T. as a younger man. But then he also says he spent the weekend driving the coastline of Argentina relax. One of those pesky reporters from The State figured out that it isn't really possible to do that because there is no Argentine equivalent of Highway 1 in California.

I'm going to go set the DVR right now for tonight's sure to be classic episode of The Daily Show.

Posted by David at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hard to believe that Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina was once mentioned seriously as a potential candidate for Republicans hoping to take back the White House from Barack Obama in 2012.

Sanford, previously best known for trying to reject the Obama Administration stimulus money for his state's many unemployed citizens, is out in the woods somewhere as I write this. No, really. Last weekend, he ditched his security detail and headed off alone to the woods with a backpack. Apparently the pressures of idiocy finally became too much to bear, or maybe the thought of fighting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for the GOP nomination in 2012 finally made him snap.

The latest is that he's somewhere on the Appalachian Trail, which cuts across western NORTH Carolina but not South Carolina, the cradle of slavery and the Civil War that he pretends to govern. How appropriate, I thought.

Back in the early 1990s, after reading about a series of bloody murders on the Appalachian Trail, including the murders of a young man and woman near Duncannon, Pa., north of Harrisburg, I did an in-depth investigation of Appalachian Trail crime for The Patriot-News, talking to police in every state along the trail between Georgia and Maine. For this I earned the undying hatred of the Appalachian Trail Commission, which was then fond of saying, "You're safer on the trail than driving to the trail." Actually, you're not. I feel much safer in my car.

What I learned from police and psychologists was that troubled people are drawn to the Appalachian Trail. They see it as a sort of green leaf utopia that will apply balm to their souls. Which it may, for a time, but without curing their underlying ills. Serious problems can arise when these troubled souls realize that and then come in contact with real hikers on the trail. That's what happened when Paul David Crews, the Duncannon killer, met his young victims at a trail shelter on Cove Mountain.

Crews was from (drum roll) South Carolina. Need hikers worry about Gov. Sanford? Probably not, unless he has his "budget knife" in his backpack...

I'll stop now.

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

This is the best news on the healthcare front in months, if not years.

The New York Times and CBS News released the results of a poll tonight that shows Americans overwhelmingly in favor of creating a government-run health plan to compete with private health insurance plans. The numbers are staggering: 72 percent of all Americans favor having a government plan, 87 percent of Democrats, and 50 percent of Republicans.

This should put an an end to the debate, but probably won't, because the private health insurance companies will fight tooth and nail to keep their huge profits and bloated CEO bonuses. It is up to each of us now to let our Congressman and Senators know that the current system has to end. If Americans are going to be required to buy health insurance, they shouldn't be forced to buy from private companies who hire people to deny legitimate claims.

The American people are good and smart enough to run a national healthcare plan, just like they are good and smart enough to run Medicare and Social Security. Government is us, not space aliens. Deep down, people who have issues with government-run anything have serious issues with their fellow Americans.

Posted by David at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't read many books that shook me as much as Dave Cullen's "Columbine," the new and definitive account of the Columbine High School school massacre on April 20, 1999. The bare details of the massacre: 12 Columbine students and one teacher were murdered by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who then killed themselves. Many other students were wounded, some permanently. We can only be thankful that Harris was an incompetent bomb maker, because most of the big bombs he intended to cause mass carnage never exploded.

As a journalist, I can tell you that Cullen did a magnificent job. He spent nine years researching this book, and it all shows. The book took that long to write in part because of the years-long cover-up by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office of critical documents in the case that was finally ended by Colorado's tough freedom of information law. Why the cover-up? In short, because they could have prevented the massacre but didn't. It's all there in the book.

Cullen dispels numerous myths about Columbine. Harris and Klebold were not outcasts at the high school. They had friends, dated, and Klebold even went to the prom the weekend before the massacre. There was no "Trench Coat Mafia" of murderous Goths. The massacre grew out of Eric Harris' murderous revenge fantasies against the entire world, not out of a desire to target "jocks" and "rich kids."

Harris, Cullen says, was a classic psychopath. He felt no emotion other than glee when he killed, and felt absolutely no remorse. He also had another classic psychopathic trait, the ability to lie convincingly. Dylan Klebold was a weak follower, depressed and suicidal. He went along with Harris primarily as a means to kill himself. The reader leaves the book with a certain amount of sympathy for Klebold's parents, who tried hard to straighten him out, but none for Mr. and Mrs. Harris. Mr. Harris, a miliary martinet, applied harsh discipline to Eric but also tried to try to protect him from school officials and police after the many precursor incidents to the massacre.

Evangelical Christians don't come off particularly well in the book. Cullen convincingly disproves the myth that student Cassie Bernall was asked by Klebold if she believed in God and shot to death in the school library after she said "Yes." The story was first told by one of the other students in the library; turned out he had Cassie confused with another girl, Valerie Schnurr, who was wounded but survived. Two other students in the library said there was no exchange of words between Cassie and Klebold other than him saying "Peekaboo" when he looked under the table, saw Bernall, and fired his shotgun without further comment by either.

Bernall became an evangelical saint, while Schnurr, also an evangelical, was snubbed as a wanabee when she tried to tell her own story. Bernall's parents refused to believe the story wasn't true, and her mother went forward with publication of a book immortalizing her daughter even after a meeting with police at which the facts were laid on the table.

Another evangelical girl, Robyn Anderson, who briefly dated Klebold, acted as a straw buyer to get the shotguns and rifle Harris wanted for the massacre. He and Klebold had tried to buy them a gun show in Denver in December 1998 but were turned away because they were 17. Anderson, who was 18, went back to purchase the shotguns, one of which was used to murder Cassie Bernall. Harris told her they wanted them to go hunting. Anderson broke no law in turning over the long-barrel weapons to the boys, who promptly sawed off the shotgun barrels, a felony under federal law.

Colorado has since closed the "gun show loophole" that allows purchases of firearms at gun shows without background checks, in part because of testimony by Anderson that a background check might have deterred her from making the straw purchase. The National Rifle Association, as usual, prevented a Federal law being passed. A semi-automatic handgun used in the slayings was sold to Harris by a man who was a friend of someone Harris worked with at a pizzeria. Supplying a handgun to a minor was a crime, and both men served brief prison sentences.

This book is full of revelations. It will be in print for years to come, and I urge everyone to read it. Some of the passages will move you to anger, others to tears. "Columbine" is a monumental work of non-fiction writing.

P.S. - This book could not have been written if Columbine had occurred in Pennsylvania, because the state's weak Open Records Act, even the new and improved version that took effect this year, has a near-total exemption for law enforcement records. Had it occurred in Pennsylvania, we would still be as much in the dark about why the shootings occurred as we are about the Amish school shootings in Lancaster County in 2006. Did local police have warnings that killer was about to go on a rampage? We'll never know.

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

I just got back from the Silverdocs documentary film festival in Silver Spring, Md. The big event tonight was a tribute to Albert Maysles, who with his late brother David made some of the best examples of the genre, including "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter." The former is about a zany mother and daughter on Long Island who count Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis among their close relations. Maysles commented last night that Big Edie and Little Edie Beale "were just like everyone else, only more so." The latter is about the tragic Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969.

I'm concluding a six-month documentary filmmaking program at George Washington University that has had its ups and downs. This was definitely one of the ups. Mayles was introduced by Barbara Kopple, a two-time Academy Award winner for documentary film who was a student of Maysles and who first came to prominence with the scary and wonderful film, "Harlan County USA."

She was followed to the podium by Christo and Jeanne Claude, the French artists who create huge, dramatic, and temporary public art. I saw them wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris in 1985, and walked through the series of orange gates they erected in Central Park in 2004 (that was my Facebook picture until a couple of days ago). Maysles makes a film of most of their projects. Jeanne Claude, whose hair was dyed the color of the Central Park gates, joked that Maysles shoots chronologically but doesn't edit that way. There is a scene in the Pont Neuf film where she and Christo are seen walking into an office during their 10-year quest for a permit to wrap the bridge. She is heavier than she would like to be when she walks in and thin when she walks out because scenes were shot a year or more apart "and you know how women are heavy one year and not the next."

Maysles, who is 82 but still making films, talked about his reputation for capturing magic moments on film, but talked about the ones that got away. In the old days, it just wasn't practical to carry a 16 mm film camera with you everywhere. He accompanied Fidel Castro to a party at the Chinese Embassy in Havana sans camera in the early 1960s and saw Castro's face when he opened a telegram from the U.S. State Department informing him that diplomatic relations were being broken off. And he recalled as a 10-year-old boy getting a rare strapping from his father and then seeing him a few moments later leaning against his bedroom wall crying.

He said that the documentary filmmaker must find a way through the competing poles of human emotion, namely to keep something secret or dislose it to the world. The latter emotion is stronger, Maysles believes. Or as Little Edie Beale told him after seeing her life laid out on film, "Everyone should do this!"

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

I've been amazed, but probably shouldn't have been, at the speed at which corporate America has seized upon the idea of pay cuts for rank and file employees.

This is new in my lifetime. I've lived through a number of economic recessions in my 55 years, and can't remember a previous time when pay cuts have come on almost a daily basis. To be honest, I can't remember any previous pay cuts being announced at all. I'm sure they happened, but infrequently and with little or no publicity.

I suspect there are a couple of reasons for this. One of the big ones is the decline of union membership in America. Workers covered by union contracts are protected against pay cuts. The Patriot-News, where I formerly was the Newspaper Guild president, wouldn't have been able to impose 10 furlough days--an effective pay cut--on the newsroom if they still had a union contract. Would not have happened. Unions protect both their own members and, at one time, deterred corporations without them from doing what they could to their workers for fear of losing their "union-free" status. God forbid.

Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle. Corporations now realize they can cut pay for any reason or no reason and get away with it. Need to make your quarterly numbers to please the corporate overlords in Texas? Cut pay! Weep crocodile tears about how this step was taken with oh-so great reluctance. Reap a bigger bonus at the end of the year! Think they won't do this?

There was a time when most American businesses provided free health insurance to their employees. No more. That change happened gradually and was driven by more factors than simple greed. But I've believed for some time that a lot of this was driven by a follow-the-pack mentality. They did it because they could, and because they were unimaginative, not because they absolutely needed to.

Pay cuts are already getting out of hand. If you need an example of greed-driven thinking, consider British Airways (this phenomenon isn't limited to the U.S.), which just asked its employees to not simply take a one-month furlough but to continue working during the furlough! Talk about chutzpah.

Posted by David at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having lived through the American stolen election (2000) and the eight lost years that followed, I can appreciate what Iranians who voted against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are going through, the emotions they are feeling.

I never had the feelings against Iranians that many Americans shared after the 1979 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. I had known Iranians at Hope College and elsewhere, and they always seemed to be nice. Of course, these were educated Iranians from the country's pro-Western elite. It puzzled me at the time that the country that produced those students could also produce the radical Islamic students who seized the embassy.

The Islamic fundamentalists will never go away in Iran, just like our own religious right in America is unlikely to disappear. At best they can be contained by a democratic majority of Iranians or Americans who don't hold the same beliefs and don't want the conservatives to be able to impose their benighted beliefs upon them. But free, untainted elections are critical in both countries. Without them you get George W. Bush or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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

A German boy claims he was hit by a tiny meteorite on the way to school. The comments go both ways (and seem unusually intelligent for new story commenters, just like my valued blog commenters). Hey, it's a more interesting story than you usually come across.

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The New York Times published an eye-opening op-ed column about the Amanda Knox case in Italy today that really got my attention.

Knox, 20, a fetching young American college student from Seattle, and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito are accused of the murder of a young British woman, Meredith Kercher, who was her roommate. According to Timothy Egan, the author of the piece, there is no solid evidence against her or Sollecito and much physical evidence implicating one Rudy Guede, who has already been convicted of the murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Why is she still being prosecuted? In large part, Egan says, because of the ego and "honor" of the Italian prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini. Knox, who speaks only broken Italian, was interrogated by Mignini for hours with no translator or lawyer present, then held in prison for nearly a year before charges were even filed. Mignini, who is facing charges of professional misconduct in another case, seems to have a penchant for making up fantastical scenarios--here, it is that Kercher was slain during a sex game--and sticking to them, no matter the inconvenient facts. An outside consultant hired by CBS News looked at the case and termed it a "railroad job."

This could not have happened in the American legal system, which has protections for the accused--long derided by rightwing conservatives--that stop legal travesties like this before they can get too far. We don't have a perfect system--consider the number of men freed from death row by DNA testing--but it's far better than what the Italians have. Think about that the next time Limbaugh or O'Reilly rail against the rights of the accused.

Posted by David at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Terry McAuliffe, fund raiser par excellence for the Clintons in the 1990s, lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Virginia. He lost decisively to R. Creigh Deeds, a lawyer from one of Virginia's least populous counties. The turn-out was as low or lower in relative terms than the Harrisburg city mayoral primary last month, but Deeds' victory appears to have been more broad-based than Linda Thompson's.

Deeds was endorsed by the Washington Post. He's a moderate Democrat, pro-gun, who has a good shot (bad choice of words) of succeeding Gov. Tim Kaine, also a Democrat, who was considered by Barack Obama as his running mate last fall and who cannot seek a third term.

McAuliffe's entry into the Virginia race--he has lived in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., for years--was one of those carpetbagging moments that make everyone uncomfortable. Yes, the people should be able to pick the candidate they want. But McAuliffe, who was born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y.(I've read his autobiography), seemed more carpetbagger-ish than most. It appears the voters of Virginia agreed.

Posted by David at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm beginning to think of the religious zealots who gun down doctors who perform abortions as America's own corps of suicide bombers.

Even though they don't actually detonate bombs, they commit these crimes knowing they are ending their own lives, either with a life prison term or, in the case of Rev. Paul Jennings Hill, executed. These males (they are always males) sacrifice their own lives to eliminate doctors who provide reproductive choice to women.

I don't believe for a moment that the "responsible" anti-abortion groups are crying anything more than crocodile tears over the murder this week of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. If you don't believe me, check out the photo in the New York Times today. Tiller was one of the few doctors in America still performing late-term abortions, a rare procedure performed almost exclusively to save the life or ability to bear more babies of women with problem pregnancies.

We have little credibility criticizing the suicide bombers in the Muslim world if we tolerate our own suicide bombers. It is time for Attorney General Holder to bring the full force of federal law enforcement against those who would conspire to deny, through violence and intimidation, a woman's right to choose.

Today it is doctors who provide abortions. Tomorrow it could be doctors who write prescriptions for birth control pills.

Posted by David at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back to my old hometown today. The family of Erwin Jordan, the man whose remains were taken by mistake to a landfill in the Holland-Zeeland area and buried with the trash has finally settled their civil lawsuit against the parties responsible. No details, of course, but the family is said to be pleased with the damages they received.

This has spawned a host of damning comments in the Holland Sentinel from the folks who believe any time a blue collar family receives damages from a corporation it must somehow be undeserved. If you're poor, I guess you're just supposed to take whatever the big boys hand out and not complain.

Jordan's body was kept in a cold garage at the Notier-Verlee-Langeland Funeral Home on 16th Street in Holland pending a decision by the family whether to bury or cremate him. Priority Arrowaste, which appears to have employed mainly morons, thought the body (in a cardboard box) was trash and tossed it in the truck. It ended up in Waste Management, Inc.'s Auburn Hills landfill in Zeeland Twp.

The Jordan family, being from the other side of the economic tracks, then got the bum's rush when they complained and demanded their father's body be dug out of the landfill for a proper burial. The landfill conducted a desultory search but failed to find Jordan's body. Amazingly, the state of Michigan did not require them to keep searching. While this may sound like one of those needle-in-a-haystack situations, the police out East have a good record of finding crime victim bodies in landfills. It costs money--there's the rub--but it can be done.

To continue this awful story, Ottawa County Circuit Judge Jon Van Allsburg, the sort of judge beloved by rightwing conservatives, ruled that the Jordan family couldn't sue for emotional distress because they didn't personally witness their father's body being dumped in the landfill. Van Allsburg is the sort of judge who can always find a loophole to prevent well-lawyered corporations from being held to to account for their misdeeds.

I'm glad the responsible parties finally settled this case, and I would love to know the cost to their bottom line of this foolish and reprehensible episode. Jordan's body remains in the Auburn Hills landfill, sharing space with tin cans and soda bottles and who knows what else. He deserved far better than he got.

Posted by David at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who thinks that 25 years of rightwing Republicanism ended with the election of Barack Obama should read E.J. Dionne's column today in the Washington Post. Dionne, always an interesting columnist, suggests that media coverage of Obama and things like national healthcare are being skewed to the right by slavish media attention to anything that comes out of the mouths of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. The opinions of left-leaning liberal politicians and commentators are left off the table.

That is certainly true in the healthcare debate, where the yearning of many Americans for a top-quality French or even Canadian-style single-payer (i.e., government-run) healthcare system covering all, no questions asked, and paid for by tax revenues is simply out of bounds for serious discussion, derided as "socialism" by the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis. Do you want to be forced to buy a health insurance policy from a private insurance company that hires people to look for ways not to pay your claims? That's where the debate is heading with single-payer taken off the table.

It is also true in Pennsylvania when it comes to options for closing the state's yawning budget deficit. Only the slash-the-budget, no-new-taxes approach of the Senate Republicans is deemed worthy of consideration by the Harrisburg Patriot-News and many other newspapers. We are told we must accept drastic cuts in library funding, an end to the acclaimed Governor's Schools for the Arts, and other programs that benefit everyone in the community rather than raise taxes. And if there is to be any kind of tax increase, it can only be in the state personal income tax on individuals and very small businesses, not in the various corporate taxes that affect Hershey Foods and other large corporations in the state.

I suspect many Republicans in the State Senate could be defeated in their next election by Democrats willing to run as Obama Democrats and not as Republican-Lites. The mass of Pennsylvanians didn't vote for Obama to keep the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis in power for another generation. They wanted real change and an end to the control by the rightwing Republicans at all levels. It is time to give them what they want.

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

Burg Life reprints a post by Tattoo Jim, a citizen activist in Harrisburg, about a scary phone call he received from City Council president Linda Thompson, who may be the next mayor of Harrisburg.

I've heard a first-hand account of one other scary call a citizen activist received from Thompson, who doesn't seem to be able to contain her anger when someone says or does something she doesn't like.

Posted by David at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)