By The River

Harrisburg residents will have two opportunities to hear city mayoral candidates Nevin Mindlin and Linda Thompson debate the important issues facing the city--that is, if Thompson shows up. Mindlin has confirmed he will be at both debates. Thompson, so far, has not said whether she will attend.

The first debate, sponsored by the Community Action Commission, is at 6 p.m. Oct. 19 at Derry Street United Methodist Church at 1508 Derry Street. The second debate is at 7 p.m. Oct. 21 at the Zembo Shrine, 3rd and Division Streets.

If you care about the future of Harrisburg, be sure to attend one or preferably both of the debates. I'm sure Thompson will see that it is in her best interests to debate Mindlin, who is now carrying the hopes of many of the city voters who wanted Mayor Reed to serve another term.

Posted by David at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Time magazine, Issue of Oct. 5, 2009:

"Soon Detroit became a majority black city, and in 1973 it elected its first black mayor. Coleman Young was a talented politician who spent much of his 20 years in office devoting his talents to the politics of revenge. He called himself the 'MFIC'--the IC stood for 'in charge,' the MF for exactly what you think. Young was at first fairly effective, when he wasn't insulting suburban political leaders and alienating most of the city's remaining white residents with a posture that could be summed up in the phrase, Now it's our turn. But by his third term, Young was governing more by rhetoric than by action...Violent crime soared under Young. The school system began to cave in on itself. When jobs disappeared with the small businesses boarding up their doors and abandoning the city, the mayor seemed to find it more useful to bid the business owners good riddance than to address the job losses. Detroit was dying, and its mayor chose to preside over the funeral rather than find a way to work with the suburban and state officials who now detested him every bit as much as he had demonized them."

Sound familiar? If you are a Democrat, Republican, or independent and care about the future of Harrisburg, vote for Nevin Mindlin. Don't even think about voting for Linda Thompson, who so far has not been able to bring herself to make even one real attempt to win over white voters scared shitless--with good, non-racial reasoning--at the prospect of her running the city of Harrisburg.

Posted by David at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Questions are flying as to why famed film director Roman Polanski wasn't arrested in Switzerland earlier, since he owns a house in Gstaad, Switzerland, and has been in the country many times over the past 31 years since he fled the U.S.

Given the state of things, one wonders whether Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley made it happen now to embarass President Obama by forcing him to choose between enforcement of the law and the sentiments of many of his Hollywood supporters and donors. After all, Hollywood voted a best director Oscar to Polanski just three years ago for "The Pianist," and as I recall, the applause when he won was loud and long.

I don't know Cooley's politics, but justice was so politicized during the George W. Bush years that anything is possible.

Posted by David at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My old boss at the Patriot-News, John Troutman, used to argue that nearly every big news story had a midstate connection if you looked hard enough. And this wasn't Six Degrees of Separation stuff. It really did seem like someone from central Pennsylvania turned up in world news stories, though typically as a victim of a tsunami or something like that.

Here's some more proof: Susan Gailey, the mother of Samantha Gailey Geimer, the 13-year-old girl film director Roman Polanski drugged and raped in 1978, is from York, Pa., and now lives in Hawaii. According to the Washington Post, Gailey was famous in the D.C. area in the 1970s and 1980s for appearing in many TV ads for a local Chevy dealership in Washington. Samantha grew up in York. Her step-father was Jack Gailey, a York lawyer and one-time member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

The Polanski case is an odd one, combining reckless stupidity by a very talented director, apparent judicial misconduct in Los Angeles, and a public declaration of forgiveness of Polanski by Geimer, who now is in her 40s. Gailey, the mom, was dating a friend of Polanski in 1978 and allowed her daughter to meet with the director alone for a photo session at actor Jack Nicholson's house.

Polanski entered a guilty plea after receiving a plea agreement from prosecutors that set his jail time at the 42 days he served in prison during his psychiatric evaluation. He fled the country after the judge in the case, said by many to be a publicity hound, rejected the plea agreement and said he would send a stern message with the new sentence. The case has been the subject of a documentary, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," that raised serious questions about the judge's conduct.

So don't be too surprised if Polanski ends up a free man who can finally travel to the Oscar ceremony to pick up his Best Director statuette for "The Pianist." The Los Angeles Times published a commentary last night excoriating the L.A. district attorney for wasting taxpayer money to pursue Polanski, who is now 76. He may not even be extradited from Switzerland, where he was arrested yesterday.

York, Pennsylvania. Who would have thought?

Posted by David at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

With the decision of Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed not to run a write-in campaign for re-election, I believe that Harrisburg residents concerned about the future of the city should cast their votes for the Republican candidate, Nevin Mindlin.

He is the last chance we have to stop Linda Thompson, who won the Democratic primary last May because too many Reed voters assumed he had it in the bag and stayed home. While I'm told that I as a liberal Democrat probably would disagree with him on most national issues, Mindlin seems sane and sensible enough to be mayor of Harrisburg. We need a mayor who can work with the powers that be to get Harrisburg out of its financial mess.

If you're a Harrisburg taxpayer facing a doubling or more of property taxes because of the incinerator debacle, who do you want asking for state or federal aid? Mindlin or Linda Thompson? That goes double if Republican Attorney General Leslie Nielsen, aka Tom Corbett, is elected governor in 2010.

I met Mindlin at a meet-the-candidate night in Shipoke a couple of weeks ago and he comes off as an educated, earnest, well-meaning fellow. Not a scary, God-invoking nut who flies off the handle when provoked, ala his Democratic opponent.

Linda Thompson--and her handler, attorney James Ellison--would normally have this election in the bag as the Democratic candidate in a Democratic-majority city. But she has done nothing to reach out to white voters who are scared shitless of her--I don't think anyone has ever seen her campaign personally in Shipoke or Bellevue Park, for example--even while complaining that some voters "have closed their hearts to me." She probably believes her Allison Hill and Uptown supporters in the primary will carry her to victory in November and she doesn't need white, or for that matter, the many Asian or Hispanic voters in the city to win.

But remember, no Republicans or independents could vote in the primary. And a lot of Democrats who supported Reed are not going to vote for Thompson under any circumstances. Without Mayor Reed to run against, Thompson is forced to run on her own merits, not simply as the anti-Reed. If Mindlin mounts a vigorous campaign in the entire city, downplays the fact that he's a Republican, makes Thompson the issue, and motivates anti-Thompson voters to turn out in large numbers in the general election, he can win.

So even if you're a yellow dog Democrat like me, put aside party labels and vote for Nevin Mindlin as Harrisburg's next mayor. I, like many of you, am sad to see Mayor Reed humbled and hoped he would mount a successful write-in campaign. But he's not going to do that, and we have to face facts if we don't want our unsaleable houses on the tax sale list two years from now.

Posted by David at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If I ever seem impatient with my fellow Democrats in the Rendell Administration, it is because too much of the time they act like Republicans.

Just as the word went out from Harrisburg a couple of years ago that Pennsylvania was wide open for wind energy development, and that local residents who didn't want their mountain ridges despoiled by wind turbines would be treated as obstructionists, so too the welcome mat has been extended to the natural gas industry. Northeastern Pennsylvania, especially Susquehanna County, is part of the Marcellus shale belt, a promising place to find natural gas, and a certain full speed ahead mentality has set in. Landowners are struggling to get fair prices for the right to drill for gas on their property, turning in some instances to public interest lawyers like my Harrisburg neighbor Bill Cluck to help them get fair deals from these big Texas oil and gas companies.

The environmental toll is mounting. The state Department of Environmental Resources this week ordered Cabot Oil & Gas of Houston, Texas (of course), one of the most active explorers for natural gas in Pennsylvania, to shut down operations pending an intensive environmental review after having committed three chemical spills in nine days in Susquehanna County. Interestingly, one of the drilling contractors for Cabot was our old friend Haliburton, also of Houston, Texas (of course), who everyone came to love during George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's Iraq War. Just great, all around lovers of the environment.

A side note: remember how the Pennsylvania Senate Republicans fought hard and defeated Gov. Rendell's attempt to capture some of that natural gas revenue for the people of Pennsylvania, because we supposedly didn't want to hurt young, struggling start-up businesses--like Haliburton? Similarly, if you like the environmental record of gas drilling now, imagine what it will be after widely-rumored layoffs take place at DEP to help balance the state budget in place of those natural gas tax revenues.

Much of this gas drilling occurs in a part of Pennsylvania (as does wind energy development) that is far outside the backyard of any large newspaper. The only reporter who appears to be doing the kind of hard-hitting stories that need to be done is Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica, a relatively new, non-profit investigative reporting organization based in New York City. You can read his gas drilling stories here. Since ProPublica stories can, as I understand it, be used free by other media, newspapers in Pennsylvania ought to start running Lustgarten's pieces if they can't send their own reporters up there.

Posted by David at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The "Voices in the Crowd" story in today's Patriot-News was interesting both for the delusional thinking it highlights ("So why do you even need health insurance?") and for the fact that a story about a D.C. rally of about 75,000 people, organized and directed by a corporate-funded, Dick Armey-led organization, FreedomWorks, was written at all. That it was, and that it got prominent front page treatment, reflects an apparent belief at the newspaper and elsewhere that residents of the Midstate--south central Pennsylvania to the uninformed--are mainly conservative, even ultra-conservative in their political beliefs.

I don't deny there are a lot of Republicans around here, but there are a substantial number of Democrats and independents, too, and not just in the city of Harrisburg. Remember how close Sen. Jeff Piccola, R-Dauphin, came to losing to Democrat Judy Hirsh in his most recent re-election bid? Only some rural, heavily-Republican precincts in northern York County saved him. The sum total of Midstate political beliefs is not represented by the cocktail chatter at the West Shore Country Club in Camp Hill.

The people interviewed in today's Patriot-News story hold right-wing fringe beliefs fanned by talk radio screamers. Only the delusional would believe that a "rainy day fund"--of what, $100,000?--is enough to pay for a medical crisis in the absence of health insurance. Somehow--call me a cockeyed optimist--I don't believe that most people in the Midstate feel that way. Nor do I believe vast numbers of Midstaters truly see government--which is, after all, themselves--as an evil monster bent on doing them harm.

Interestingly, I see on Channel 21's 11 p.m. newscast that a rally in favor of national healthcare and the Obama plan was held yesterday in Harrisburg. Not a word about that in today's paper, even though it appeared that the number of people in this rally might be about the same as the number who got on the bus from the Midstate on Sept. 12 to go to D.C. and protest against Obama. And that's kind of the point. Many people in the Midstate--a majority in some municipalities, such as Harrisburg--voted for Obama and the positive change he represents. They deserve coverage, too.

Posted by David at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It isn't hard to learn the names of some of the more obstinate members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the ones who say they won't vote for ANY tax increase no matter how badly it is needed. You can find the names of those who put ideology before pragmatism on the website of Americans for Tax Reform, founded in 1985 by Grover Norquest, dubbed by Arianna Huffington "the dark wizard of the Republican anti-tax cult." Each has signed a "Taxpayer Protection Pledge"--yes, an actual written pledge--to vote against and actively seek to defeat ANY tax increase.

Five senators and 24 House members in Pennsylvania have signed these blood oaths, which allow no exceptions. None. Kind of like selling your soul to the Devil.

The five senators include Sen. Lisa Boscola, a rare Democrat on the list, who probably didn't know what she was signing. Sen. John H. Eichelberger, Republican of Blair County (Altoona), is also pushing an anti-gay marriage amendment to the state constitution. Sen. Mike Folmer, Republican of Lebanon, Pa., who when not selling carrots and cabbages from the back of his truck wants to lock Pennsylvania into permanent decline by limiting state budget increases to the rate of inflation and requiring a 60 percent super-majority to raise taxes. Sen. Jane Clare Orie, Republican Senate Majority Whip, has already broken the pledge by supporting the increase in the Capital Stock and Franchise Tax on big business contained in the current budget deal with Gov. Rendell. Naughty, naughty. So too with Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican who represents an oddly shaped district in northern Pennsylvania. He's also going to tax Hell. Never means never.

The 24 House members include, surprisingly, Rep. Camille "Bud" George, a Democrat whose spokesman, Matt Maciorkoski, says his boss thought the Taxpayer Protection Pledge applied to only one budget year several years ago. "[He] never thought it was a pledge forever. They've been dredging it up ever since. He now just pitches the form we get in the waste can....unscrupulous bunch." Hmmm. Smell the sulfur, anyone?

The others, mostly all Republicans, are Stephen Barrar (H-160) Kerry Benninghoff (H-171) Scott W. Boyd (H-43) James E. Casorio, Jr. (H-56) Jim Cox (H-129) Brian Ellis (H-11) Richard Grucela (H-137) Ted Harhai (H-58) Susan C. Helm (H-104) , Rob Kauffman (H-89), Tim Krieger (H-57) Jim Marshall (H-14) Daryl Metcalfe (H-12) Scott Perry (H-92) Joseph A. Petrarca (H-55) Jeff Pyle (H-60) Dave Reed (H-62) Brad Roae (H-6) Todd A. Rock (H-90) Samuel Rohrer (H-128) Mario M. Scavello (H-176) Rosemary Swanger (H-102) and Katherine McDowell Watson (H-144)

Anyone who signs that pledge and professes to believe in it should also reject all "Walking Around Money," the money given to legislators for pet projects in their districts, and indeed, reject any state jobs for their constituents. Because you can't have it both ways. You can't expect government to do nice things to help you get re-elected, and then posture and preen about how pure and wholesome little old you will never vote to raise ANY tax.

Posted by David at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President Obama took back the initiative in the debate over national healthcare last night. His speech was as good as it gets, explaining why national healthcare is needed, which of the critics' claims were pure balderdash, and how it would be paid for.

Still, the nutjobs on the right just couldn't contain themselves. Associated Press has identified Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, as the person in the audience who yelled, "It's a lie!" when Obama said it wasn't true that illegal immigrants would get free healthcare under his bill. Believe it or not, that was a new low for the Republicans. And this from a representative of the Southern state that introduced slavery to America and started the Civil War.

I'm sure there are many good people in South Carolina, but Wilson isn't one of them. He seems to be the spiritual descendant of South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks, who (literally) on the floor of the Congress beat a Northern senator bloody and senseless with his cane in 1856 for saying things about slavery he didn't like. Time for Wilson and his kind to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail.

(I looked at the story on the speech in The State, South Carolina's largest newspaper, and comments from locals are running nearly 100 percent against Wilson. They are embarrassed that someone like Wilson represents their state.)

I felt certain for the first time tonight that Obama will win and we will get national healthcare. Along with many on the liberal left, I would prefer single-payer national healthcare such as France has. But this is a good compromise that will end the tyranny of the insurance companies. People have long underestimated and written off Obama to their later chagrin. It happened during the 2008 campaign--remember how his candidacy was supposedly doomed by his friendship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright?--and it's happening now. He will win, and so will we.

Posted by David at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President Obama just finished his speech to American school children. He urged them to work hard and stay in school, and told them success requires hard work. In other words, just like every rational person expected, it was a completely good and innocuous speech. He did mention J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels--witchcraft alert! LOL--but any right winger who isn't completely delusional should have had no problem with it.

The school officials in central Pennsylvania and elsewhere around the country who banned viewing of the speech by their students or allowed them to "opt out" should reconsider whether they belong in education. Their caving in to the loony right was abhorrent to democratic values. What will they do the next time the loony right has a demand? Perhaps to fire gay teachers, or allow students to "opt out" of classes taught by a gay teacher? Or to "opt out" of biology class if evolution is taught?

Educators must be willing to say "no" to things they know are wrong. Or else we get on a slippery slope that ends with the real bad guys in charge of our lives.

Posted by David at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

School districts in central Pennsylvania, apparently forgetting the big vote for Barack Obama here a year ago, are falling all over themselves to appease the loony right and prevent their students from hearing the President's speech urging them to study hard and stay in school.

Here's the list of cowards so far:

1. Central Dauphin School District, long controlled or at least influenced by the religious right and which let George W. Bush come to the school to speak in 2004, will tape Obama's speech and decide via committee if it is "appropriate and has educational value" before letting students view it, according to the Patriot-News.
2. Northern York School District, where superintendent Linda Lemmon barred broadcast of the speech because "some parents" objected to the content.
3. Susquehanna Twp. School District, where superintendent David Volkman says it would be inconvenient to lunch hour scheduling to show the speech. Whatever.
4. Palmyra School District, which will allow high school and middle school teachers show it at their option, but will bar it from impressionable elementary students, according to superintendent Larry Schmidt.

Understand that these are not educational but political decisions, a craven capitulation to the loony right, rather than anything to do with education. These superintendents know that President Obama would not say anything inappropriate to their students. They are simply cowards, unwilling to tell a vocal minority, "No. You're wrong."

Posted by David at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was growing up in the 1960s, the far right in America was relegated to the fringes of national life. They had no credibility on much of anything, and were considered to be faintly comical for their obsession with finding Communists under every bed or fighting flouridation of water to stop tooth decay. Sometimes you would see the odd billboard--"Get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.'--along the highway. I remember when the student newspaper at Hope College, the anchor, where I spent much time over four years, received a free box of books from some rightwing publisher, and they could have been from another planet.

How times have changed.

Today, the far right and their fundamentalist allies in the churches have taken over the national Republican Party and are given a daily microphone by Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others. The loony right has gone mainstream, without ever having submitted to an election where the public could choose between a candidate freely espousing their craziest and scariest ideas and a candidate espousing the New Deal liberal ideas that made this country great. George W. Bush in 2000 doesn't count, because Bush did everything he could to fool people into thinking he was a moderate, and in 2004 used fear of terrorism to prevent the main focus of the election from being about how he was governing and the ideas he espoused. The right knows it can't win a straight-up, honest election, so it resorts to deception to get in the door and then proceeds to try to implement the ideas it wouldn't talk about honestly during the campaign.

This past week we had two notable examples of rightwing thinking, or lack thereof. One was the discovery of a master's thesis written by the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, in which he said working women were detrimental to their families, sex outside of marriage should be a criminal offense (as it once was in most states, decades ago), and equated being gay with "drug abuse." McDonnell was 34 years-old when he wrote it, so he can't claim he was young and foolish. In true rightwing style, McDonnell is desperately trying to persuade people that his thinking has evolved, but don't believe a word of it.

My other favorite bit of rightwing idiocy last week was the campaign to stop President Obama's speech to the school children of America, in which he plans to tell them to study hard and stay in school. Sound benign? Not to these nuts, who see it as the first step toward creating an American Hitler Youth. They are urging parents to keep their children home from school rather than be "poisoned" by hearing the President's exhortation to study hard. And perhaps they'll drink flouridated water from the fountain in the school hallway, too, and be told the President really wasn't born in Kenya and is a true, native-born American eligible for the Presidency.

The loony right doesn't accept the legitimacy of President Obama, even though he was elected by an overwhelming majority of Americans. That's the real reason they are horrified that he will be able to give a speech to the schoolchildren of America (as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did in their time as President). In the old days, people would have laughed at them and moved on. Today, in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine, the loony right broadcasts its hateful and nonsensical propaganda on a daily basis, and truth never quite catches up with the lies.

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

"Court allows suspected terrorist to name son Jihad."

You just can't make this stuff up. A word of background: Germany won't allow you to name your kid just any old thing. "Moon Unit" or "Dweezil" (the children of the late musician Frank Zappa) wouldn't fly there. That's why this dispute ended up in court.

Little Jihad has a great future, I'm sure.

Posted by David at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)