By The River

The Pennsylvania race for governor kicked off yesterday with Attorney General Tom Corbett's decision to join with 12 other Republican state attorneys general to threaten Democratic leaders in Congress with legal action if they do not rescind the deal that won the vote for national healthcare of Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat. Corbett and several other of the AGs are running for governor in 2010.

They hope to derail the deal and push Nelson into the "no healthcare" column before the bill makes it out of conference committee and back to the House and Senate for final approval. Since the Democrats had just 60 votes, the exact number needed for passage under the un-democratic rules of the Senate (but not the House), the loss of Nelson's vote could kill the expansion of health insurance to 30 million Americans who don't have it now. The deal with Nelson, part of the normal horse-trading in which senators fight for their home states, gives Nebraska (and Vermont and Massachusetts) additional federal assistance to pay their state share for the expansion of Medicaid in the bill to more poor families.

Corbett and his Republican buddies claim this forces all Americans to pay for Nebraska's Medicaid program. Yes, just as a Congressional decision to build a highway in one state forces all other Americans to pay for that state's highway. If building a highway in one state triggered a requirement to build one in each of the other 49 no roads would ever be built. States get disparate treatment from Congress all the time. It's a normal part of the political process. You benefit from it today, the guy in West Virginia benefits from it tomorrow.

The screaming teabaggers on the right are trying, with some success, to force all Republicans running for office in 2010 to pledge to repeal national healthcare if they are elected. They know they suffered a major defeat with passage of the bill this month, and know that national healthcare will be as unassailable as Social Security once it has been in place for 10 years, maybe less.

Until then, Democrats and progressives must stand together to vote against candidates like Corbett (and yes, Democratic Congressman Tim Holden) if they continue to threaten a bill that will help so many millions of Americans.

Posted by David at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Patriot-News publisher John Kirkpatrick made public today what the staff has been expecting for two years, that the newspaper is leaving the city of Harrisburg for an office building near its printing plant in Hampden Twp.

Why are they leaving? A primary reason is that their current building at 812 Market Street is in bad shape. Built in 1953, and added to over the years, it is a heating and cooling nightmare that is perpetually in danger from flooding by nearby Paxton Creek. The worst incidence of that was in the Agnes Flood in 1972, when the entire first floor and all of the printing presses were flooded. One employee drowned during the evacuation, and the old presses never ran quite right afterward. Heating and cooling inside the building could fluctuate wildly, and the HVAC crew was there more than the copier technicians.

At the beginning of the decade, the paper acquired land near Interstate 81 in Hampden Twp. and built a new building for new printing presses that enabled it to print the spectacular color that is its hallmark today. At the time, I wondered if the printing plant was the 21st century equivalent of the last and best buggy factory in the early 20th century, about to be displaced by the automobile (Internet). So far, that hasn't happened, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the paper went all on-line in 2-3 years.

The other reason for the move, as any staff member can tell you, is that the paper sees the suburbs as its future. A couple of years ago, the paper categorized area communities as Tier 1 or Tier 2. Tier 1 communities, which included high-growth suburbs like East Pennsboro Twp. and Hampden Twp., were supposed to get beefed up coverage at the expense of the city of Harrisburg and some other places. The problem with that scenario is that the big news tends to happen in Harrisburg and the Capitol, not in Enola.

When management first began discussing the move 2-3 years ago (dates blur), the plan was to move to either the cavernous former PHICO building in Silver Spring Twp. or to a new building that was to be erected on the site of the Arches Restaurant in Susquehanna Twp. They looked at and rejected the Ghost Building on Cameron Street. The PHICO site would have been a disaster, too far from downtown to make it easy for newsmakers to come out for editorial board meetings, and too far from downtown over traffic-choked roads for reporters to get down there very easily to cover breaking stories in the city, after they find a place to park. Heck, it's almost in Carlisle. But if the state's capital city is no longer your number one priority, maybe it wouldn't have mattered.

What will happen to the old building at 812 Market Street? I'm quite sure demolition is in its future. Trust me, no one would want to buy it as an office building. The story has been that Harrisburg University wants the Post Office site across the street for expansion, and that the Postal Service is amenable, but wants part of the Patriot-News tract for a branch station. That will still leave a lot of ground unused. That area will always be flood-prone. Maybe it would be better as a nicely landscaped city park.

Heck, call it Patriot-News Park in honor of all the men and women who spent their lives there reporting the important news of the city and its suburbs. The ones who stayed during the TMI accident, who went out in boats during Agnes and walked to work during the Blizzard of '96, the ones who covered state Treasurer Budd Dwyer's final press conference in 1986 and staggered back to the paper in shock after Dwyer pulled out a gun and blew his brains out. They will be missed.

Posted by David at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We're almost there. We almost have the first American national healthcare plan.

The Senate this morning (I got up and watched the vote on C-Span2) voted 60-39 to approve the Obama healthcare bill. No Republicans voted for it, which I think will come back to haunt them. One Republican didn't vote at all, but I haven't yet heard who that was.

I was hoping that a couple of Republicans, now that they knew the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority, would break away from the pack to stand on the right side of history. But the power of the GOP diehards and the teabagger thugs is such that none dared do it. Not that there are more than three or four quasi-moderate Republican senators left.

This isn't the last step. The bill now goes to conference committee to resolve the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, and where progressives may mount a last ditch effort to save the 'public option' or Medicare buy-in.

None of us who have supported national healthcare for years are happy with the bill, especially as the final version approved in conference is not likely to have the public option. But it is a critical first step. We are far better off with this bill than without it. As a journalist, I met many people over the decades who would have benefited from this bill. They came to me as a last resort.

The day is in sight when we no longer will experience the national shame of people holding bakesales to raise money for treatment of a sick person who has no insurance or inadequate insurance. The day is in sight when a stone-hearted insurance functionary hoping for a bonus can no longer deny treatment to a desperately ill child so her company can make its quarterly profit numbers. No, not all insurance companies are bad. But too many of them are, and even one is too many.

No more bakesales, No more deaths from no insurance or bad insurance. From this bill will finally come, eventually, national healthcare worthy of the nation we are.

Posted by David at 08:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This just in: the invitations to Mayor Linda Thompson's inaugural are out. She is holding a $100 a person reception Jan. 4 in the Farm Show Arena, and a $75 luncheon for business leaders on Jan. 5 at the Civil War Museum.

I'm assuming this shindig will be financed by donors and by ticket sales, not the taxpayers of Harrisburg. $100 is about what Gov. Rendell charged at his inaugural parties, which were also held in the Farm Show. But hey, I'd celebrate, too, if I was going from making $20,000 a year and being sued by credit card companies to being mayor of the state capital and controlling a $160 million budget, slightly more than the $35,000 her Loveship non-profit cleared in good years.

Wonder how many of her people will be able to afford to go? Does she really think there are enough business leaders and lobbyists to fill that huge space? Time will tell.

Posted by David at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The FBI today re-arrested the two white teens from Shenandoah, PA, who were acquitted of any serious charges in the July 2008 beating death of Luis Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant, a case that shocked the Hispanic community. And they arrested three members of the Shenandoah Police Department for obstruction of justice. In other words, the police helped frustrate the D.A.'s case against the teens. One of the cops was dating the mother of one of the accused boys, another had a son who played on the football team with the accused boys.

Shenandoah (pronounced SHEN-a-dough or sometimes SHAN-a-dough) is a tough mining town and always has been. Politics are blood sport, and the former newspaper there, the Evening Herald, made the in-your-face style of the Paxton Herald, a weekly newspaper in suburban Harrisburg, Pa., seem tame. But this crime seemed like it came from the South during the worst years of the terror and hatred against blacks there. The teens now stand accused of federal hate crimes.

Conservatives love to call hate crime laws unnecessary. They claim that regular state laws against assault and murder are good enough for every purpose, that to outlaw hate crimes somehow gives ethnic and sexual minority groups special status over white people. But as we saw time and again in Southern states, federal charges may be the only way to punish someone who is guilty as hell of infamous crimes but who the local justice system won't convict. Even then it can be hard, with justice perhaps coming years or decades after the fact.

I grew up with Mexicans, worked with Mexicans, and went to school with Mexicans in my hometown of Holland, Michigan. They came up after World War II as seasonal migrant labor on farms around Holland, and stayed to get factory jobs. Holland was one of the whitest cities in America prior to their arrival, and the Mexicans added a welcome, if minimal streak of color. In general, the Dutch and Mexicans got along. There was rarely any overt hostility.

What we didn't have then, thankfully, was the Republican Party and its amen chorus on talk radio fanning hatred of Hispanic immigrants and in essence telling weak-minded men and boys that it was okay to hate Mexicans. I've pointed out several times that the anti-immigrant fervor blew up all of a sudden about three years ago when the crusade against gays and gay marriage was starting to lose its punch as regular folks discovered they had gay relatives, too. A new group to demonize was needed, and all of a sudden the U.S. was building a fence along the Mexican border and Republicans in Congress were trying to pass tough new laws against immigrants who did not have legal status.

Lou Barletta, the Republican mayor of Hazleton, Pa., just up the road from Shenandoah, even got his city council to pass a law making it illegal to rent to or hire illegal immigrants. Barletta almost rode his anti-immigrant crusade to Congress, losing narrowly to longtime Democratic incumbent Paul Kanjorski.

I know and appreciate the plight of low income whites in both Shenandoah and Hazleton. Their towns are decaying, especially Shenandoah, jobs are rare and good jobs even rarer, and nothing ever seems to improve. Just as in the South, some low income whites need to lord it over someone. All it takes is some talk radio moron, or deluded politician, to throw the match on the oily rags.

Posted by David at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor-elect Linda Thompson has filed her post-election financial disclosure form--oops! She forgot to sign it! Her campaign manager James Ellison did, but the space for her signature, where she verifies that her Leadership for Harrisburg PAC did not to the best of her knowledge violate any election laws, is conspicuously blank. Just an oversight, I'm sure. Her opponent, Nevin Mindlin, did remember to sign his.

One of my neighbors was kind enough to parse all of Thompson's campaign disclosure forms this year. She spent a grand total of $101,196 on her campaign. Of that, the Harrisburg law firm of Rhodes & Sinon, where Ellison is a partner, provided $25,000, far and away more than anyone else.

And why not? Rhodes & Sinon, according to my neighbor, has billed the Harrisburg Authority more than $300,000 in legal fees in 2008 and 2009. Ellison, who is chairman of the Harrisburg Authority, owner of the incinerator mess, is said to have recused himself on some of the votes to pay those legal bills. Not that it really matters. As a Rhodes & Sinon partner, he knows what happens to law firm profits.They get distributed to partners. Is there anyone here who isn't clear what is going on?

Among other contributions of interest was a $200 donation--small, to be sure--from a John T. Durbin of 12 Emlyn Lane, Mechanicsburg. Durbin was executive director of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission for eight years under Govs. Ridge and Schweiker. He got the job as a reward for his fundraising prowess the first time Ridge ran for governor in 1994. I laud some of the reforms he brought to the Turnpike, especially EZPass, but he's a big-time Republican who lives in the suburbs. In the past few years he has donated $2,300 to John McCain, $1,550 to Rudolph Guiliani, $1,000 to Mitt Romney, and so on. Why is he interested in Linda Thompson?

This and Thompson's employment of hard right Republican Charlie Gerow (see, Swift Boating, John Kerry, 2008) as her consultant/spokesman, a slap in the face to Democrats, is just more fuel for my growing belief that she plans to turn Republican at some convenient point after she gets into office. Oh, and one other thing. The Dauphin County Republican Committee didn't lift a finger to help their own mayoral candidate, Nevin Mindlin, the strongest Republican candidate in Harrisburg in years. No contribution to Mindlin. He did get a de minimus $200 from the city Republican committee and $500 from Friends of (Sen.) Jeff Piccola, but really. These sort of things don't happen in politics just by happenstance. Something is coming.

Why would the Republicans want Thompson? Because they don't have many blacks in their party. Thompson would be an anti-abortion, Bible thumping candidate who could add the GOP base to her own know-nothing base. For governor? Senator? Heck, they'd be thrilled just to keep her as mayor of Harrisburg.

I also looked at her campaign expenditures in the most recent support, and one thing that caught my eye was more than $600 for "volunteer lunches" on election day. The story that circulated after Thompson's primary victory last May was that she used free food to entice voters from her base to come to the polls, which is illegal under state election law, not that it's ever enforced. Then I heard she was claiming the food went to "volunteers." $600 buys a lot of pizzas. Ellison received $200 for "reimbursement for youth volunteers." Considering that 27,000 registered voters stayed home that day, and Thompson got the votes of only 12 percent of all registered voters in the city, it does not appear to have been money well spent.

And finally, my favorite Thompson campaign expenditure, $15 for a "parking ticket," paid on Nov. 18, 2009, after the election. I'm sure there's a fascinating story behind that one.

Posted by David at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The acquittal of Bonusgate defendant Sean Ramaley by a Dauphin County jury yesterday is not a good omen for Attorney General Tom Corbett's plan to seek the Republican nomination for governor next year. One of the jurors told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the initial vote was 9-3 for acquittal and that there just wasn't enough evidence to justify a conviction.

While I don't deny that Corbett has made strong prima facie cases against several of the defendants, this shows the danger of simply accepting prosecutorial versions of events as the Gospel truth. Whatever Corbett may have thought, the jury thought otherwise.

This didn't have to be a politically-motivated investigation, but it was. Corbett indicted only Democrats in the first round, and timed the indictments to affect the November 2008 election (didn't seem to have any effect, though). Likewise, the belated indictment of former House Speaker John Perzel and several other Republicans, plus the trial of the initial Democratic defendants, seems nicely timed to have the maximum impact on his run for governor in 2010.

But perhaps Corbett's remarkable physical resemblance to "Naked Gun" actor Leslie Nielsen,who plays the clueless Inspector Frank Drebben, is more than just physical. We'll have plenty of opportunity to see as the Bonusgate trials play out.

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

You knew this was going to happen. Harrisburg City Council has voted to delay severance payments to a number of longtime and faithful city employees who served for decades under Mayor Reed and now want to leave before Linda Thompson becomes mayor. Council is shocked, shocked that it ever authorized employees to be paid for their unused sick, vacation and personal days.

And why wouldn't they leave, given that Mayor 12 Percent is likely to fire them soon after taking office so she can give their jobs to her "urban" supporters? Is it so offensive to Thompson and her allies on City Council that these longtime public servants devoted so much of their lives to working for Mayor Reed and the people of Harrisburg? Thompson has done nothing, nothing at all to reassure white employees of the city that they will be treated fairly and decently under her administration, just as she has done nothing to reassure white residents of the city that she will be their mayor, too.

As one of my neighbors put it, God help the city if a major snowstorm hits during the first week of the new year, because there won't be anyone left who knows how to run a snow removal operation.

Admittedly the City of Harrisburg is in a bad budgetary situation. But the severance payments are contractual obligations and the retiring employes should retain legal counsel and sue if council now refuses to pay up.

Posted by David at 05:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I came back to Shipoke this afternoon after taking my older daughter for her regular physical at Jones, Daly & Coldren. I parked in front of my house and noticed I was behind a big American car with municipal plates. My first thought was that the driver was a parking enforcement officer, but it wasn't the right time for him to be here.

He emerged from the car carrying pieces of paper. I couldn't see what they said. He walked up to one of the houses across the street from mine and stapled the flyers on the wall and door. Uh-oh, I thought. Now I could read them. SHERIFF SALE. He worked for the Dauphin County Sheriff (not a law enforcement position in Pennsylvania) and his job was to deliver the worst sort of economic bad news.

I went over and read the notice. The judgment on the property at 110 Conoy was $179,000 and change. This was obviously a mortgage foreclosure, perhaps with some back taxes thrown in for good measure. I knew the owner slightly. He had lived in the house with his family for about a year, then moved away and rented the house to the Motorcycle Guy. But I realized I hadn't seen the Motorcycle Guy in quite awhile, and I wondered if the lack of rental income had pushed the owner over the financial cliff. Not many houses are selling in Shipoke these days.

I turned to the man from the Sheriff's Office and said, "It's a shame." He agreed, and said it had been a busy week. He had posted 35 Sheriff Sale notices in Harrisburg on Monday, 20 on Tuesday, and I think he said 25 on Wednesday, or perhaps that was today's quota. His territory is confined to the city. He mentioned something about Lower Paxton Twp. and gave me the impression that it was likewise a busy territory for sorrow. So was the rest of Dauphin County.

I suspect the rest of America is, too. Obama's stimulus program, while good, wasn't big enough to do more than prevent us from a repeat of the Great Depression. I'll take Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's word on that. Krugman favors a second big stimulus program, but worries, as I do, that Obama has been--I almost wrote spooked--rattled by the noisy conservative advocates of the do less, spend less approach to economic recovery. Krugman, who I interviewed once for the Patriot-News, says we might not recover for 10 years or more if we don't do more to jumpstart the economy.

Foreclosure will be financially devastating for my former neighbor, but he doesn't live there anymore and so won't be put out on the street. That isn't true for many other people. It's worth remembering that the worst of the Great Depression didn't begin until well into 1930. Our crash was a year ago, in the fall of 2008, so if history is indeed repeating itself, things are about to get much worse.

Posted by David at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The next time a blowhard conservative tells you that government never creates anything worthwhile, tell him the story of Lester Shubin, who died this week at age 84.

Shubin, a government scientist, and Nicholas Montanarelli, a civilian employee of the Army, came up with the idea of using Kevlar, a fiber created by Dupont for use in tires, to make lightweight bulletproof vests. Dupont didn't develop Kevlar vests. It was our very own Federal government.

Rightwing conservatives have tried for years to demonize the Federal government, in part because so many Americans liked big government after it saved them during the Great Depression and World War II. Would the war have turned out so well if not for the hand of big government making sure business did what needed to be done? I doubt it. Imagine someone like George W. Bush in charge of World War II instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt. You may need an Ambien to get past the nightmares.

Markets are not efficient because they are not perfect manifestations of capitalism. Corporations control patents on products. Dupont may have had no interest in Kevlar vests--the market for tires is a lot larger than the market for vests. A government scientist, however, can force the issue and has the funds to bypass corporations and their petty interests.

Kevlar vests have saved the lives of several thousand police officers. Thank the Federal government for that.

Posted by David at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Eighty-five miles south of Harrisburg, Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, a Democrat, has been convicted of stealing gift cards intended for the city's poor children. As you read this story, I'm sure certain thoughts will come to your mind, if you live in Harrisburg that is. Quick to anger, very religious, sense of entitlement, diehard supporters, hmmm. Anyone we know? Dixon, however, appears to have been elected by far more than 12 percent of the registered voters.

And here's a Baltimore Sun columnist's take on Dixon and her trial. The majority black jury was apparently widely expected to bring back an O.J. verdict, and nearly did. But in the end, the evidence won over a couple of jurors who initially told the others they would not convict Baltimore's first black mayor of anything, no matter the evidence.

Posted by David at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)