By The River

It has been a year since I took a buy-out from the Patriot-News, and what a year it has been.

I had really expected to work there until I retired. At age 55, I felt like I was at the top of my game as a journalist, and proved it one last time with a long investigative piece on the 1969 unsolved murder of Penn State graduate student Betsy Aardsma, who was from my hometown of Holland, Michigan. But I left because the future didn't look very bright. I had been advised by management that I could be transferred to a telemarketing center or the crew that cleans the presses overnight if I did not choose the buy-out, and in no case would be permitted to continue doing the sort of journalism I loved. So I left, deciding to try a career change to documentary filmmaking.

I was accepted into the Institute for Documentary Filmmaking, a six-month graduate program at George Washington University. I commuted down to D.C. twice a week and enjoyed the intellectual challenge of applying what I had learned as a print journalist to a new and related profession. I learned much. But i was troubled by the open disdain for journalism expressed regularly by the woman who heads the program. And I was twice told (and the class, too, in one of the instances) that documentary filmmaking is "a business for young people," filmmakers like Albert Maysles notwithstanding. I concluded that she saw her program as being more about training production assistants, the young foot soldiers of the film industry, than about training filmmakers and that old guys like me just didn't fit into the plan. But they were happy to take my tuition.

For being located in Washington, D.C., you would think the Institute for Documentary Filmmaking would take advantage of the rich mixture of politics, policy and humanity in the capital and produce some outstanding student films. But that isn't very often the case. One year the student film was about hotdog eating contests. The film to which I was consigned was about bicycle polo. A "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere develops in the film groups and is indeed expected and encouraged. But enough. Like I said, I learned a lot, but the wounds have not healed and I wouldn't recommend the Institute for Documentary Filmmaking to older professionals, especially men, contemplating a career change.

Bite the bullet and go to a two-year program like the Documentary Institute, a renowned documentary school which has just moved to Wake Forest University in North Carolina from the University of Florida, after the Florida Legislature slashed its funding. I suspect the funding assault may have been in part because of the string of socially significant and interesting student documentaries the school has produced, which probably finally pissed off enough powerful people in the Sunshine State. If you have dreams of being a director and not a production assistant, this program or one like it is the one for you.

Meanwhile, I had received a contract from Globe Pequot Press to write an updated version of my book on the Centralia Mine Fire, Unseen Danger. I finished that in April, and Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, was published Oct. 1. I am now working on a new book, The Epidemic, about a terrible typhoid epidemic in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1903. The company responsible for that became the company responsible for the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.

Can I make it as an author of books and the writer/director/producer of the occasional short film? That remains to be seen. The economics are tough, and I have already begun to search for a "day job" to help pay the bills. Fortunately my wife has a good job and benefits, so the pressure is somewhat reduced, but not gone entirely.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and I'll be back soon.

Posted by David at 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

My lawyer neighbor Bill Cluck has informed me that the recall statute I cited in my last blogpost only applies to the City of Philadelphia through its home rule statute. And as it turns out, our blessed and glorious Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that local statutes for recall, or removing elected officials like Linda Thompson from office, are all unconstitutional. The court ruled in 2003 that the only method that can be used is that specified for impeachment in the Pennsylvania Constitution.

Good luck. While the state constitution doesn't give mayors one free year to establish a "performance record," as the Philadelphia statute does, it does require that removals from office follow the impeachment process. That means that the House of Representatives would have to initiate and pass an impeachment resolution, to be followed by a trial in the Senate. Or the Governor could ask the Senate to take up impeachment.

If a mayor is convicted of an "infamous crime," defined in the state constitution as forgery, perjury, embezzlement of public monies, bribery or similar offenses, a court can remove them from office. Public officials can also be impeached for "misbehavior in office," defined as "breach of a positive statutory duty or the performance by a public official of a discretionary act with an improper or corrupt motive."

Trust me, the Governor, who endorsed Thompson, isn't going to quickly ask for her impeachment. House members are equally unlikely to be interested. With the Supreme Court having declared that impeachment under the State Constitution is the only means for removal of a public official that is legal, the Legislature is unlikely to pass a statewide recall statute. Their passing a constitutional amendment for voter consideration is equally unlikely. Does anyone really think they would vote to create a means for the public to remove them from office, too?

The hard fact is that short of her being convicted of an "infamous crime," we in Harrisburg are stuck with Linda Thompson, the choice of 12 percent of the electorate, as our mayor for four years. I apologize for getting this wrong in my last blogpost. I'll try harder not to make mistakes like that in the future.

There have been calls of late for a new state Constitutional Convention. That option seems more attractive every day, but carries extreme peril. Conservatives will try to write tax limitations into a new Constitution that will condemn Pennsylvania to permanent decline. They will try to gut teacher unions, ban gay marriage, and make all abortions illegal, even in cases of rape or to save the life of the mother. If there is a convention, moderates and liberals must fight hard to ensure that this doesn't happen.

Posted by David at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I received a Facebook e-mail the other day from a neighbor who was in despair at ever being able to sell his Shipoke house with Linda Thompson becoming mayor of Harrisburg in January. His house has been up for sale for quite awhile, since well before Thompson's Democratic primary victory last spring, and they've already moved out to a new home they built in the East Shore suburbs.

He asked me if there was a way to impeach Thompson, and he was quite serious about it. I told him there was a procedure for recalling mayors, but I didn't know the details of how it worked.

Now I do. If you go to this link, you will find good and bad news. The good news is that she can be recalled from office. The bad news is that Pennsylvania law bars recall elections during a new mayor's first year in office. The law actually states that this is to give the new mayor time to build a "performance record." Given Thompson's Loveship performance record, perhaps 10 years would be more fair.

But if Thompson performs like she did at Loveship, and as many assume she will as mayor, a recall petition can be filed in January 2011. It must contain valid signatures of 25 percent of the number of people who cast votes in the most recent mayoral election, with no more than one-fifth of the total coming from any one precinct. Because only 9,046 people voted in the Harrisburg mayoral election in 2009, there would need to be only 2,263 signatures on the recall petition, although it is generally advised to get double that number to be safe from challenges.

Once the petition is certified, the mayor has 10 days to resign or face a recall election. If Thompson lost a recall election, she would be barred from public office in Harrisburg, elected or appointed, for two years. City council would elect her successor, who would serve until the next municipal election. If council failed to do so, or achieved only a tie vote, ten voters could petition Dauphin County Court to appoint a successor.

Thompson won a narrow victory over Nevin Mindlin, by just 842 votes, and therein lies the peril and promise of recall. More than 27,000 registered Harrisburg voters failed to cast votes for mayor. How many of them opposed Thompson, but didn't want to vote for a white Jewish Republican (Mindlin) they knew little about? And how many were just apathetic drones who couldn't be bothered? The answer to those questions will decide a recall election. Thompson opponents would need to mount a fast and overwhelming media campaign, including the TV ads that might well have turned the election to Mindlin if he could have afforded them. Where will that money come from?

An election would also have to overcome Thompson's know-nothing base of about 4,000 voters who were unswayed by the massive evidence presented during the campaign that she was unfit to be mayor.

I know how many voters in Harrisburg are feeling right now. I hear from some of them periodically, and I know how I feel. They are deeply depressed that the city they devoted their lives to, where they owned and rehabilitated homes, raised their children, and rejoiced as the city came back under Mayor Reed from the depths of the early 1980s, is about to be taken over by someone they regard as a grifter, an illegitimate mayor who drew the votes of 12 percent of the electorate and who can do incalculable damage before she is removed from office. I think of those photographs of people in occupied Paris weeping as the German Army victory parade goes by. We trusted too much in our own Maginot Line--Mayor Reed--and failed to see the danger.

It is of critical importance that all good citizens become involved and not let despair prevent you from fighting back. We can't let the city become an ATM machine for Thompson and her friends. Go to council meetings. Speak out. Don't be intimidated. Your city needs you.

Posted by David at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Joseph Hoffman, the rightwing Conservative Party (and losing) candidate in New York State's until recently obscure 23rd Congressional District, charges that ACORN fixed the election! That was how the Democratic candidate Bill Owens won!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. You've gotta be kidding, right?

In truth, although the wingnuts try to make ACORN into this evil, SMERSH-like monster, in my experience in Harrisburg they're just folks from the neighborhoods trying to help poor people get ahead. Some are brilliant, some are morons. In other words, ACORN is much like the Republican Party itself, except for the focus on poor people that scares the bejeebers out of the wingnuts.

Posted by David at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ramping up his campaign for governor of Michigan, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, my old Hope College classmate, more or less, has blamed the Obama Administration's turn away from the brutal policies of the Bush Administration for the recent massacre committed at Fort Hood, Texas, by a Muslim soldier.

Hoekstra and I didn't know each other in college. I refer to him as the "invisible student" because on a campus of 2,200 students, he was almost a total non-entity. I couldn't remember him, even though we were both political science majors, one of the smaller departments at Hope. I must have been in classes with him, but...he was invisible (incidentally, after years of searching, I finally found a classmate who remembered him from one of her English classes). Big man on campus he was not, odd for a future Congressman and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until 2008.

I don't envy a Republican running for governor of Michigan. A Republican there can't promise anything that might require a tax increase (which means they can't promise anything), because that would violate the 12th Commandment, which is that Republicans may never, ever support even a badly needed tax increase. The last Republican candidate for Governor, Amway heir Dick DeVos, Jr., was the type who made farm visits in Italian suits and bespoke shoes and wondered why most people in economically troubled Michigan went for the Democrat.

Hoekstra spoke to our last Hope College Class of '75 reunion. We have another one coming up in 2010, so perhaps he'll show up again to troll for votes. I didn't know until I began writing this that he achieved some unwanted notoriety for a dumb comment comparing the travails of the anti-government demonstrators in Iran, who were being shot down in the street, to the travails of the Republicans in the U.S. House after the Democrats took control at the beginning of this year. To "Hoekstra" now means making a non-sensical comparison. Check out some of the funnier ones here.

Posted by David at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this month. The following is a first-person account of those days by my old friend Sybille Brinz, who grew up in Thuringia, East Germany, and now teaches English as a second language at a college in Aberdeen, Scotland:

The very night of the fall I finished work around 9pm and went back to my room in a shared flat - in Potsdam, close to Berlin. I was working in a high-profile international hotel (about as posh as it got in the East) and had been exposed to a fair share of western customers. I could never help feeling jealous when I overheard conversations of recent visits to Paris or the USA for example, but having been only 19 at the time the feeling hadn't been too strong (yet).

There had been a tremendous build-up of tension over the preceding months with the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria and the opening of the West German embassy in Prague to East Germans. There was a mass exodus [to Hungary] from East Germany and it was about impossible to get onto the Dresden-Prague-Budapest trains. The border points were more and more secured, and people discovered to be travelling 'on holiday' with all their family and [carrying their] career certifications were put in investigative custody. A colleague couple of ours ended up in the Potsdam custody cells for a few weeks.

This had been accompanied by the Leipzig demonstrations of course - and all these and the subsequent events were only possible because [Soviet Union President Mikhail] Gorbachev did not follow the usual [Communist] party response of armed intervention.

I guess you are aware of the circumstances of the actual fall of the Wall that night - the last-minute news item that was handed to the news reader and which caused the confusion. That opening was never planned, of course.

Hence when I got back to my room and switched on the telly the news had just passed (I didn't see the clip till it was repeated on a West German channel). Since in Potsdam we were able to receive West German TV (illegally of course) I saw the events unfolding and first didn't believe it. I carried on as usual, having dinner, snuggling into bed, the TV still on, and it gradually sank in. I didn't have a telephone back then (most of us didn't have a landline and mobiles weren't around yet), so I didn't really know what to do.

I just sat there and wondered what on earth was going on. It did occur to me that I could try and go there, but I didn't have a car, either, so I'd have had to go to the nearest public phone, tried to call a friend etc and I decided against it. A) I was in disbelief and b) I was scared! Scared of the masses of people, scared of what might happen - nobody KNEW it would not end in a bloodshed, and scared that they might close the Wall again while I was over there in the west! And I would never ever have left my family, etc., to start a new life in the west even if it had been offered to me.

So I just sat there in disbelief, worried, confused, but certainly not happy or in any euphoric mood! It wasn't until the next day when I returned to work that the real buzz started for me. Some of my colleagues had been there [West Berlin] and the whole day at work was just a chaotic noise of people telling what they'd seen, what they'd heard, what they thought, rumours mixed with the real stories but of course, nobody knew what was going to happen.

What we did know was that the Wall was still open and it was still possible to cross over into West Berlin. Thus I managed to go into West Berlin the night of 10 November, packed into the Trabi of my colleague. It was still a most amazing feeling. The border crossing points were crowded, there were new street parties going on, West Berliners slapping the Trabants and Wartburgs [East German-made cars] as they rolled over the border, spraying them with sparkling wine, shouting fantastic slogans and greetings at us. The border points had re-established some sort of order and every person crossing the border had a stamp put into their passport. What the point of it was I never knew because no note of our passport number was taken, and there were no scanners, etc., there. Just a stamp put in. And you know, even then I worried that I could get in trouble later because of that stamp in case it got all reverted and went back to where we'd been!

Anyway, I was stunned at seeing West Berlin. Illuminated buildings, shop windows still brightly lit so you could see even at night what they were selling during the day (a crazy thought to me then!), and I was most struck by the oriental carpet shops. They looked so luxurious and were so so full of carpets - I couldn't believe that there were enough people in West Berlin to buy so many carpets - and there were about 5 of those shops in the few streets we wandered.When we crossed back to the East at about 3am there were still queues in from the East, of people who had travelled for hours to get a glimpse of the West.

In the weeks that came I travelled to West Berlin quite often, (to buy bananas, yes of course, which had gone up in price overnight to about 5-10x the normal price!!!), mostly to stare at the things for sale. We'd been given 100DM [Deutschmarks] welcome money each, which we were able to collect from banks in West Germany on production of our passport. I spent it on a sewing machine and a good sleeping bag. We were then able to exchange [East German] money at a pretty lousy rate. I enjoyed the variety of food; a different flavour yoghurt ever night in the week!, fruit I'd never seen and had to ask how to eat, and fantastic sweets! I also enjoyed the colours in stationery shops, pens and paper and paper clips and and and - it was hard for me to resist all those 'wonderful' things!

All in all I'm grateful to Gorbachev though he'd never intended the East to unravel as it did. And I'm grateful that the events happened when they did - my education was not thrown into chaos, as it was for so many younger people, and my pension wasn't reduced to a pittance as it was for the pensioners. Neither did I lose a job at an 'unemployable' age and neither was I tempted to take out huge loans to buy Western car, fridge, TV, etc., only to THEN lose my job - as happened to so so many people. Neither did I work in a company that went into liquidation in the hands of the highly corrupt Treuhand organisation that 'sold' East German companies to West Germans who promptly closed them, unravelled them and upon reopening them employed West Germans with the 'right' skills and qualifications.

Anyway, I'll stop here, I could go on and on, but I'm sure you know all the stories and have a pretty good picture of the events.

Posted by David at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You can see it on the op-ed page of The Patriot-News today, and no doubt in many other newspapers. I'm talking about the libel that thousands of American soldiers were spit upon and called baby killers when they returned to the U.S. from the Vietnam War. In fact, there is not a single verifiable incident of it ever happening, and the "spitting libel" should not be allowed into newspapers without solid evidence to back it up. It slanders the many good people who opposed the Vietnam War, and in fact was created to do so.

The best debunking of this libel is the book, The Spitting Image, by New York University professor Jerry Lembke. You can read it here on Google Books. Lembcke looked long and hard for any documentary evidence of a returning soldier being spat upon, but could find none. Don't you think at least one person would have been arrested for disorderly conduct after one of the tens of thousands of times this supposedly occurred?

Lembke traces the origin of the myth to 1990 and the first Bush Administration's efforts to rally support for the first Iraq War, the first major engagement of U.S. troops in a war since Vietnam. He attributes the growing acceptance of the spitting myth to movies like "Rambo" that presented it as fact. Lembcke does his homework, and anyone who reads this book should come away doubting that any U.S. soldier anywhere was ever spit upon. It's impossible to prove a negative, but don't you think there would be some real evidence somewhere?

I grew up in a small Michigan town during the Vietnam War, and in my memory soldiers--mostly draftees then--and their families were treated with the utmost respect. My neighbor, Jim Reidsma, served in Vietnam and was wounded there. I have a strong memory of the day one of my classmate's brothers, a Green Beret, came to my junior high school in uniform for a visit. And I remember the sadness in school when Scott Freestone, whose sister was in my class, was killed during the Tet Offensive in 1968.

The Bush Administrations, first and second, and the Right in general has tried to equate opposition to their wars with lack of support of the troops. It has been wildly successful, thanks in large part to newspapers who refuse to challenge the spitting libel. But it is a slander upon the many Americans who opposed the Vietnam War for honorable reasons, among them a desire to stop more of their hometown boys from being killed or wounded in a war that never made any sense.

Posted by David at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

All of America scored a major victory Saturday when the U.S. House of Representatives voted 220-215 to approve the Obama healthcare bill, which will eventually provide health insurance for Americans and eliminate the insurance industry's most pernicious practices. The bill must still be approved by the U.S. Senate, which seems more and more likely.

Yet we in Harrisburg are surrounded by "No." All of the midstate congressmen, including the "Blue Dog" Democrat Tim Holden, who is my congressman, voted against the bill. The others were the Republicans Todd R. Platts, Bill Shuster, and Joe Pitts. Only one Republican in the nation dared to vote for the bill, so tight is their party discipline.

Holden makes it harder and harder for liberal Democrats to support him. I'm sure he thinks that the choice between "me or the Republican" will force us to suppress our gag reflex and vote for him so, like Connecticut voters and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, we can get his vote on other issues near and dear to Democrats. Holden was one of only two Democrats in the Pennsylvania delegation to vote against the healthcare bill.

I just don't get it. Holden has to know that no other bill that will come before him this year or indeed in his lifetime will help more of his constituents than this one. Patriot-News reporter Dave Wenner had a shocking story in the paper today about a local man who will die of cancer because he didn't have health insurance when his cancer was still treatable. Now it has spread to his brain. Doctors told him to come back right away if he got insurance. So much for the myth that anyone without health insurance can get treated by walking into the emergency room.

We need national health insurance and we need it now. And perhaps it is time for Holden to face a primary challenge from the left.

Posted by David at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My fellow pathetic blogger Jersey Mike reports that Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, headed by the Rev. Barry Lynn, has sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service asking that it investigate the clerical endorsement of mayoral candidate Linda Thompson offered by by the Rev. Martin Odom from the pulpit of his Bethel Village AME Church in Harrisburg. We'll see what comes of this. The most severe penalty the IRS could hand out would be loss of the church's tax exemption. That almost never happens for one offense, but at least someone is telling the black clergy that the law applies to them, too. Even for endorsements of self-proclaimed black Messiahs.

Posted by David at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Are you an urban intellectual? Discontented suburbanite? Worried that the rest of the world, especially in Harrisburg, isn't evolving in the way you think it ought to go? Wondering if mayor-elect Linda Thompson even knows who Darwin is? Then come to a concert to celebrate the life of the man who first explained the concept of "evolution."

I'm talking about Charles Darwin, of course, born 200 years ago this year. His magnum opus, The Origin of the Species, was published 150 years ago this year. Nice planning!

This coming Saturday, Nov. 7, from 7-10 p.m., you are invited to attend the Concert for Darwin at the nicely redone Midtown Scholar bookstore at 1302 N. Third Street in Harrisburg near the Broad Street Market. Admission is $15.

Performing will be folk rocker Jefferson Pepper of York County and rapper Baba Brinkman of Vancouver, Canada. Pepper will sing songs from his widely hailed latest CD, "American Evolution, Vol. 2." Brinkman is a comic and rap artist of the more literate variety who will give his own spin on "The Origin of the Species."

Rounding things out will be Kenneth Miller, biology professor, science writer, and two-time Colbert Report guest. Miller was one of the key witnesses in the so-called Intelligent Design trial of the Dover (Pa.) Area School Board in U.S. District Court, Harrisburg. Suffice it to say that evolution came out of that trial a big winner. Pepper's wife, author Lauri Lebo, wrote a book called "The Devil in Dover" about the school board's effort to introduce religion, aka "Intelligent Design," into high school biology classes and how some parents fought back.

So it looks to be a night of intellectual fun and frolic in Harrisburg. Be there.

Posted by David at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Despite heroic efforts by Republican candidate Nevin Mindlin and his supporters, Linda Thompson will be the next mayor of Harrisburg. That is a tragedy. No amount of Kumbaya comments or suggestions that the hard-edged reporting in blogs and on Channel 21 were "just political," or "scare tactics," can hide the fact that the city has elected a mayor with anger issues, who believes she is a black messiah, who can't manage her personal or business finances, and who won't respond to tough questions.

She is likely to face IRS issues over her Loveship non-profit, as are some of the black clergy who endorsed her and who may have pressured the newspaper to abandon its coverage of the race just as criticism of Thompson was peaking. I hope that isn't the case, and it's hard to imagine that it is, but the story is out there. There was supposed to be an article in the paper this past Sunday about James Ellison, Thompson's campaign manager and the chairman of the Harrisburg Authority, that never appeared.

If Thompson turns Harrisburg city government into a kleptocracy, an American Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna, there is the possibility of a recall election. But imagine the damage that could occur until that happens. We all must be vigilant, citizens and prosecutors alike. I live in Harrisburg and own property here, and will not be silenced by false accusations of racism from people who don't.

And you 20,000 some Harrisburg registered voters who didn't bother to come to the polls--you can all go to hell.

Posted by David at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The foolish effort by two Bishop McDevitt students to encourage write-in votes for Steve Reed should be ignored. Mayor Reed did great things for Harrisburg, but he is done. The only way to stop Linda Thompson from becoming mayor and getting her hands on the city budget is to elect Nevin Mindlin. Don't be like Ralph Nader voters in Florida in 2000. They didn't like some things about Al Gore, so they voted for Nader and handed the Presidency to George W. Bush.

Think of Thompson's awful record at Loveship and her public rants as city council president. Think of your property values and what will happen to them if she becomes mayor. Don't stay home, don't write in Steve Reed. Vote for Nevin Mindlin tomorrow.

Posted by David at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)