Of course they do, and I've met some of them. But when your college's most heralded graduate is Monica Goodling, who led the drive to politicize the Bush Justice Department, and now we have another bright young graduate of Messiah pronouncing Elena Kagan unqualified to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, you've got to wonder.

The Kagan critic is Amanda Lavis, who gushes like a Miss America contestant in today's Patriot-News about being "part of history" and digging up opposition research (aka "dirt") on Kagan for U.S. Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Republican of Alabama and ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I was witnessing history firsthand," she said. "I was thrilled. No matter what I do in life, that will probably one of my top moments."

What COULD top that for a young Republican lawyer? Suing ACORN? Prosecuting the mythical New Black Panther Party? Winning an award from the Federalist Society?

Her former boss--Lavis is now an associate for the Rhoads & Sinon law firm in Harrisburg, the same law firm that employs Linda Thompson handler James Ellison--opposed Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, as did all but about four other Republicans. Kagan was Solicitor General of the United States and dean of the Harvard Law School, but that wasn't enough for Lavis. "As a woman, I admire her accomplishments"--nice condescension--"but I [as a 25-year-old first year associate] do not believe she is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court."

Whew! Good thing she wasn't around when Sen. Hugo Black of Alabama, a personal injury lawyer who had briefly been a police court judge, was nominated by Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Supreme Court and went on to become one of the most influential Justices of the 20th century.

Then there's the matter of who she was working for. Her former boss, Senator Sessions, was only the second nominee for a federal district court judgeship in 48 years to be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee when his nomination came before the committee in 1986. President Reagan then withdrew the nomination. Sessions had a bad habit of making comments that called his commitment to civil rights for blacks into questions. There was testimony that he referred to the ACLU as a "Communist" organization that "forced civil rights down the throats of people." Then there was the howler--he later defended it as a "joke"--that "I was okay with the Klan until I found out they smoked pot." Or that he referred to a black assistant U.S. Attorney as "boy." It's that last one that chills the soul, that really ought to bring any conversation to a halt.

That's who Lavis was doing opposition research for. Way to go Messiah! Sessions, by the way, will become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the Republicans retake control of the Senate in November. I don't think that's going to happen, but I'll save my thoughts on that for another day.

The others booted, so far, were Neil Grover and Eric Davidson. Erica Bryce, the other council appointee, has her interview tomorrow. In their places, Thompson intends to appoint Harry L. Witte, Barton A. Fields, Cathy M. Hall, and J. Marc Kurowski, the only current member to keep his or her seat. Hall was on the board with Ellison, according to Cluck, and Witte was on Thompson's transition team.

Or as one observer put it, "four yes ma'am votes."

This should be considered Thompson's version of President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when he fired Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. This should be a wake-up call to the U.S. Attorney in Harrisburg to start investigating, if he is not already, the awful stink coming from the old Harrisburg Authority and its dealings with the city.

Thompson got the opportunity to boot her critics because of an unfortunate decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that ruled the mayor, not city council, had sole authority to appoint members of the Harrisburg Authority. You can be sure either Thompson or the new board will come out with some platitudes soon about "wanting to move forward" and "not getting bogged down in past history."

The sole purpose of firing Cluck, Grover, and Davidson, and especially Cluck, was to make sure that reeking past was not uncovered. It was a despicable action.

Update: Mayor Thompson has now seen the light and reappointed Bill Cluck to the Harrisburg Authority. His appointment was confirmed by City Council.

Many, although not all of these homes have gone up for sale since Linda Thompson was elected mayor of Harrisburg last November. While it isn't possible to generalize about why people are trying to leave Harrisburg, one hears much talk about leaving because of fears that Thompson will drive the city into the ground. These are fears based on observations of Thompson's behavior both as city council president over the past several years and in her first six months as mayor.

She still has no financial rescue plan for the city, and you know she's just itching to take advantage of an unfortunate Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling of about a week or so ago and replace her critics on the Harrisburg Authority, especially lawyer Bill Cluck, with stooges who won't authorize the forensic accounting investigation of the authority that Cluck says is necessary to get to the bottom of the city's financial mess. Cluck has studied the authority and its operations for a long time, is a smart lawyer, and if Thompson removes him it ought to be a red flag for the U.S. Attorney in Harrisburg to start his own investigation.

The economy, the city's finances, dislike of Thompson's behavior, such as buying a $4,000 desk, and now the recent phenomenon of wolf packs roaming Midtown and robbing and beating people at gunpoint have combined to send the Harrisburg housing market into a tailspin. The mayor seems rather sensitive about the unsold homes. When ABC 27, normally a friendly venue for her, asked her about the real estate situation she came back with an answer to a question that doesn't appear to have been asked: "I will not let them lay that on my feet," she told the television station, using one of her increasingly famous malapropisms. "Their inability to sell houses in rough times." It's there on the video.

When will the housing market recover? In Shipoke, my neighbors are looking forward to the change of governors in January, which is always good for home sales. The old guys sell, the new guys buy, and if you live in Shipoke, as everyone from Rick Santorum to Bill DeWeese once did, you can walk to work. But unless Thompson, who is clearly in over her head, accepts the help she needs to get the city back on the right track, more of the newcomers may choose to live elsewhere.

We are actually a few days past the 48th anniversary of the Centralia mine fire, which began on Sunday, May 27, 1962, three days shy of the traditional Memorial Day until 1971. There is almost nothing left of Centralia today, but in 1962 it was a proud small town of about 1,400, with perhaps 500 homes, churches and other buildings. It was little different than other small coal towns in the Anthracite Region of northeastern Pennsylvania.

As I describe in my book, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, workers hired by the borough council started the mine fire accidentally during the annual clean-up of the landfill, which was in an old strip mining pit a literal stone's throw from the Odd Fellows Cemetery. They illegally set the dump on fire to rid it of odors and make it less offensive to the many expected visitors to the cemetery on Memorial Day. They let the fire burn for awhile, then extinguished it with water from a fire company tanker. At least they thought they did.

Tragically, the fire was still smoldering down in the depths of the garbage. It spread through an opening in the pit into the labyrinth of abandoned deep mines that underlay Centralia, the legacy of more than 100 years of unregulated coal mining. The strip mine had cut through old, abandoned deep mines, as many here do. A state landfill inspector, knowing all too well of the potential danger, had ordered borough council to close all holes in the pit, but they had left one open.

Unlike the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, there is no corporate bad guy in the Centralia story. If anything, private mining companies tried to help, but were rebuffed by government bureaucrats at the state and federal level. Centralia was a failure of government at all levels.

Throughout the summer of 1962, Centralia Council appealed to the state and federal governments for help. Centralia's elected officials did nothing. In August, the state finally agreed to dig the mine fire out of the ground. But the project was underfunded, took several days off for the Labor Day weekend (the fire, of course, did not), and when the money ran out the fire was still there. This happened two more times in 1962 and 1963. Between 1965-70, the federal Bureau of Mines built an underground fly ash barrier--think of the booms encircling the oil spill--to block the fire from coming into Centralia. The barriers ultimately failed.

In late 1979, the fire and its deadly gases began moving under the populated part of Centralia and things got progressively worse. In 1983, the state and federal governments decided to relocate all Centralia residents at a cost of $42 million. Digging the fire out of the ground would have cost an estimated $660 million in 1983 and would have destroyed much of the town in the process.

What will be the fate of America's Gulf Coast and the Gulf of Mexico itself? BP, the owner of the spewing well, seems unable to stop the spill. There have even been semi-serious proposals to use nuclear weapons to seal the well. Russia supposedly has done this several times. Centralia still attracts earnest entrepreneurs who believe they have a way to extinguish the fire without digging. I heard from one just the other day who sounded promising. But I doubt the state of Pennsylvania will agree to spend the money. There are fewer than 10 people left in Centralia, and they will be gone soon. What is the point? Even though the fire has a clear path to Mount Carmel, several miles to the west, it might take 200 years for the fire to reach that far at its current rate of advancement. I'm sure the thought is, leave it for some bureaucrat in the 22nd century to worry about. We have more pressing problems.

Perhaps Memorial Day will come to have an environmental significance, when we think not just about wars between peoples and their cost, but wars against the environment and the equally lasting damage they do.

We are heading into budget month, the annual spectacle of Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell matching wits, so to speak, with the Republican Senate on who will blink first on education funding. Wait-education funding? Isn't there an entire state budget to pass? Well, yes, but it really all comes down to education funding. Last year's 101-day budget impasse, education insiders will tell you, was nearly entirely about Rendell's desire to increase education funding by a substantial amount. He eventually got his way, but at the price of severe cuts to libraries and other parts of the state budget demanded by "no-tax" Republicans in the Senate (who actually did blink and agree to minor tax increases).

This year, Rendell is seeking an additional $354 million in school funding on top of last year's increase. Let me say from the outset that I agree with the need for this funding, both as counter-recessionary spending and to bring the bulk of the state's public schools out of their comfortable mediocrity. But it needs to be paid for with a tax increase of some sort, not by further cuts to favorite Republican targets like the Department of Environmental Protection.

School districts are hurting this year, forced by the Act 1 spending limits to lay off unprecedented numbers of teachers, cut foreign languages, driver's ed, and even full-day kindergarten. Full-day kindergarten is sacrosanct to Rendell and his policy czar, Donna Cooper, the real Secretary of Education. The Education Department is currently weighing several requests from school districts around the state to go back to half-day kindergarten as a means of balancing their budget. Insiders say the fear is that if one is approved, there will be a flood of other requests, full-day kindergarten still being seen as free daycare for Yuppie moms on many of the more benighted school boards around the state.

Act 1 of 2006 requires school boards to keep their tax increases under an inflation index derived from two other indexes, one of costs for schools and the other of statewide wage increases in the previous 12 months. The Republicans want to do this to all of state government, but so far have only been able to impose it on schools because of the wide unpopularity of the local property tax on which school districts depend too much because of, until recently, the annual shortfalls in state school funding. Act 1's inflation index this year was 2.9 perent, down from a figure in the 4's last year. Next year, if trends hold true, the figure will be 1.5 percent. That figure is calculated by the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials and you can see their math on their website. Click on "Act 1 Index Data" and then go to the last page of the PowerPoint document that comes up.

So come next January and February, expect some school districts to begin pointing out that a lot of things parents take for granted aren't really required by the School Code. Some school boards will use the relief valve built into Act 1 by Democrats and seek "exceptions" for certain expenses, but they may not be able to find enough "exceptions" to avoid massive cuts in education.

We have the "no-tax" Republicans and their Democratic enablers to thank for much of this. And while Act 1 may finally force the bloated Harrisburg School District to pare the untold numbers of political jobs added at all levels over the years, it will cut the legs off many good public schools and set back public education in Pennsylvania for a long time to come. And that would suit the more extreme elements of the Republican Party just fine.

On Saturday, a series of frantic phone calls were made to my younger daughter from her friends at Harrisburg Academy. It seemed that a boy in her 7th grade class, who had been dating one of the girls in the class, had asked another girl in the class to go out on a date. Treachery! Betrayal!

What made me smile was that the boy is black, his former girlfriend is white, and the second girl in the triangle is Indian. And none of that mattered in the least, as it certainly would have when I was in 7th grade so long ago.

The experts who comment on this sort of thing had speculated at first that the break, while bad, could be contained. What they did not know, because BP had not told them, was that the day before the catastrophe they had quite unexpectedly pushed their drill into a vast and unknown oil pool that had erupted to the surface. Now the experts were saying it could spew oil for 200 years.

The water in my house stayed clean for a couple of days, but one morning when I turned on the shower crude oil began dripping out. I tried the bathroom sink and the kitchen sink and they pushed out oil as well. I walked outside again and my neighbors were packing things in their cars to flee. But to where? I awoke with a start and went to the bathroom. The water was again clean and pure. But for how long?

I couldn't help but think back to stories I had written over the years about people without health insurance or who had problems with health insurers denying care. This type of story was a staple for American journalists for the past 30 years, pushing many of our hot buttons.

I remember in particular Danny Appleton, a 12-year-old boy in the Bloomsburg area. His was the very first story I wrote on my very first day at the Harrisburg Patriot-News in June 1987, and I wrote several follow-up stories later. He had severe medical problems growing out of brain surgery. That was one part of the story, but the other was the battle of his parents, Miles and Sherry Appleton, to pay for the care that was keeping him alive. They were bumping up against a lifetime care cap in their policy, something that will be eliminated by the Obama bill passed last night.

More recently, I think of a story I blogged about, how the employees of Turbine Airfoyle Division on Cameron Street in Harrisburg lost their health coverage when their employer stopped making payments to the health insurance company. One worker had his chemotherapy cut off and died.

We aren't out of the woods completely. The immediate backlash from the Tea Party thugs will be severe. Anyone who can yell "Nigger" and "Faggot" at Democratic Congressmen arriving for the vote won't go quietly into the night. Republicans have vowed to repeal the bill.

I think they will fail. Actually, I'm quite sure they will fail. President Obama has promised a quick and intensive campaign to sell the bill--the real bill, not the Republican myth--to the American people. We will have national healthcare.

Les Ford is well-known from his run for the Democratic nomination for mayor of Harrisburg last spring. He and Mayor Stephen Reed lost that election to Linda Thompson, who is now mayor. Sheila is a force in her own right, however, with a strong background as an attorney, past president of United Way of the Capital Region, co-founding the Sylvan Heights Science Charter School, and service on many other charitable boards.

Dow Ford is the challenger from the left that Holden has been courting with his conservative votes in Congress. She seems moderate-to-liberal in her positions. Holden lost me when he became one of a handful of Democratic congressmen to vote against the Obama healthcare bill. Dow Ford told me she both supports that bill and favors adding the so-called "public option," a Medicare-like entity that would provide competition to the health insurance giants who have been making life (if they allow it to continue) miserable for so many millions of Americans.

She and her husband are also no fans of Mayor Thompson, believing her to be disastrous for the city. Holden not only endorsed the lamentable Thompson for mayor, but made her his guest at the State of the Union speech last month.

Dow Ford doesn't underestimate the challenges she will face as an African American candidate in the non-Harrisburg parts of the 17th District, but intends to run everywhere and has already made appearances in Schuylkill County. She is finding Perry County a harder nut to crack, however, and is looking for help from Democrats there to find her way in.

But I suspect they also laughed about white reaction to a Linda Thompson victory, how a combination of white guilt and white reluctance to challenge the city's first black mayor would give her a free ride to do what she wanted once she took over the city. All she and her clergy friends had to do was play the race card a few times and the white-dominated mainstream media would back off.

What Thompson and Ellison failed to take into account was the Internet, and how it has empowered people to publicize their grievances against an elected official without filtration by the mainstream media. There are blogs, like this one, which mix news and opinion but try to keep it professional, and there is the Harrisburg Forum on PennLive, a seething maelstrom of the public id in which valid information competes for attention with complete bullshit. Citizen activists like Bill Cluck or your average everyday tipster can either talk to me or post directly on PennLive. Thompson has been unable to control this, and her enraged outburst on Channel 27 Friday night shows that it's getting to her and she may be worried about her tenure in office.

Not that it's easy to get rid of an elected official in Pennsylvania. She could equip everyone in City Hall with $4,000 desks like hers and throw the remaining Museum of the American West artifacts out on one the city's many unplowed streets (piled with uncollected garbage) and she'd still be mayor for another three years and nine months. There is no provision for recall of elected officials in Pennsylvania. Only the Legislature can remove a mayor, and that isn't likely to happen unless she is convicted of a felony and refuses to resign, and maybe not then.

Thompson was in full Angry Black Woman mode Friday night, dealing the (implied) race cards like a demented gambler. If she was a national figure, they would create a regular shtick on Saturday Night Live to parody her. That may only be a matter of time. Supposedly Glenn Beck is aware of her and mentioned her on his show, not favorably.

I hear all sorts of things, and suspect at least 80 percent of them are true. To wit: Thompson had Mayor Reed's office repainted three times by city employees because she didn't like the color the first two times. Mayor Reed's desk, a historic piece from the old city hall, was trashed after her $4,000 new desk arrived, probably because of her near-physical aversion to anything Reed touched. School Superintendent Gerald Kohn is under a tight gag order and can't even lobby for funds for the school district. Yes, things are a bit paranoid in the Führerbunker. Then there is the question of who told the Harrisburg Authority they didn't need to require a performance bond on the new incinerator. The mighty might fall on the answer to that question.

Things are bad, folks. I take no pleasure in telling you any of this, but it's getting to the point where things that were once unimaginable are crowding into my daymares. My current favorite: what if the operations of the city water purification plant go downhill? Everyone takes clean water for granted these days, but keeping it clean requires expensive chemicals and technical expertise. And everyone drinks water. Not just 12 percent.

But this takes things to a new level, a stunning gesture of contempt to her critics. Yes, she had every right to get the smoke odor out--former Mayor Reed was a heavy smoker--but a city facing bankruptcy cannot afford to give her a $4,000 desk, not when it's hard to spend more than $650 on a similar desk at OfficeMax.com. Why did Dan Miller, the new city controller, sign off on this extravagant purchase? His signature is right there on the invoice.

Thompson contracted for the furniture purchases with The Phillips Group , a traditional office supply house, instead of going someplace like OfficeMax or Staples. Traditional office supply houses have lost ground in the overall business market to the chains because, well, unless you're the CEO of a prosperous corporation, which Thompson is not, it's hard to justify spending $4,000 on a desk when you can get a perfectly good one for $650 or less. I'm sure Thompson's desk and everything else sold by Phillips is very nice, but that's not the point. She doesn't need a $4,000 desk and the city can't afford it.

I suspect there is another motive to some of these purchases. If you look at the link to the invoices in the Patriot-News story, you will see that she also had the vanity, faucet, and toilet replaced in the mayoral bathroom. The cost was modest, $284, but porcelain doesn't absorb smoke smell. Why not just give them a good cleaning? I would not be surprised if the real reason for a lot of this new furniture and fixtures is that Thompson has an aversion to Reed and doesn't want to touch anything he touched or used. To which I say, you're a grown-up, get over it.

We don't know how much labor added to the $35,000 cost, because those invoices weren't released. Was the clean-up and repainting, etc., done by city employees or by a private contractor? The new $8,000 carpeting was installed by the vendor, Essis & Sons, but there's no clue on the other stuff. If she hired a private contractor or contractors, I'd like to know who they were, how they got the business, and whether they submitted competitive bids.

The $4,000 desk, the $963 two-drawer lateral cabinet (Office Max: $479), and the $194 "mouse platform" need to be returned to Phillips for a refund if they can be. If not, Thompson should pay for them herself. These purchases were outrageous and should not stand.

Last year's coverage made it seem like the the budget wasn't being passed because the legislators were, oh, out golfing or drinking at the Pep Grill. Most stories implied that the fault for not passing a budget was equally shared by Democrats and Republicans. In fact, the reason it took so long was because the modern Republican Party refuses under almost any circumstances to raise taxes, insisting instead that valuable programs be cut to the bone or eliminated.

If you recall, Gov. Rendell last year wanted to raise the state personal income tax by a modest amount. The great thing about the income tax is that you have to have income to be taxed. If you are unemployed during a recession, a state income tax increase has no effect on you. Unemployment compensation is not taxed by the state, although thanks to Ronald Reagan, it is by the federal government. The property tax has to be paid whether you are working or not. Pennsylvania has a long history of raising the income tax during recessions and cutting it back when times improve. It's a no-brainer.

Today's Republican Party sees that sort of compromise as the work of the Devil. They use the same arguments during good times and bad. Taxes can only be cut, because to raise them would (stop the good times) (choke off the recovery). Because of this, Rendell was forced to cut funding to the bone for libraries and other services a modern society needs and lay off state employees. If he really plans to increase education funding this year, we can expect more of the same.

The press needs to start including the Republican core belief that taxes can never be raised in every story they do about the budget stalemate so the public can decide whether they want these irresponsible radicals running state government. To pretend that this core belief against raising taxes isn't relevant is dishonest reporting. It isn't "liberal reporting." It isn't "taking sides." Republicans boast about it. Why shouldn't you report it? It is central to everything they are as a political party.

This has reached ludicrous proportions in the reporting of the Republican refusal to approve a tax on Marcellus shale gas extraction, which every other gas-producing state, including Texas, levies. They have actually made the argument that a tax will choke off this "young industry" before it has a chance to get started, as if the people drilling for gas in northeastern Pennsylvania were garage tinkerers and not Exxon and Halliburton and other giants of the energy industry.

Modern economies need sufficient tax revenue to provide the infrastructure and services people want and need, and which private industry can't or won't provide. Republicans used to be responsible about taxes. We are headed for banana republic status if they continue down the path they are on and the public is not given the information they need to evaluate whether they can be trusted with the reins of government.

What it said--ready for a surprise?--is that nearly 66 percent of state residents want universal healthcare. That's up from a similar poll in July 2008, when 64.4 percent of state residents said they wanted everyone to receive the healthcare they need.

Republicans have been shouting and screaming all week, pointing to the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts on Tuesday as evidence that "America" has turned against the Obama healthcare plan. Heck, all it really showed was that Coakley was a terrible candidate and Brown was a skillful one. And I have a gut feeling Kennedy fatigue may have set in after nearly 60 years, even though Coakley didn't ask for Kennedy help until it was too late.

Like Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts Governor who was the failed Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, Coakley punched all the right tickets on her way up, endorsed all the right causes. This Boston Globe story from before the election is a good summation of her pros and cons. Unlike Dukakis, her career centered around prosecutions of people for alleged sex crimes or crimes against children, notably nanny Louise Woodward. She also fought clemency for Gerald Amirault in the Fells Acre Day Care Case long after the "evidence" against him had been discredited as largely nonsensical. Coakley came off as a descendant of the Puritan prosecutors in Massachusetts.

Looking at her admittedly from the outside, Coakley seemed like a cold professional woman who knew little about Massachusetts outside her own wealthy enclave and circle of elite friends. Yet despite all that, she still got 47 percent of the vote to 52 percent for Scott Brown, who was a George W. Bush type of candidate, the one you'd want to have a beer with. And as we know all too well from eight years of Bush, that's a bad reason to vote for a candidate.

So Democrats in Pennsylvania, man up. Stay the course on universal healhcare--the people want it. You've got a reputable poll telling you so.

Most of the bylaws are basic boilerplate, but then the curious reader comes to "Article V-Officers" and this paragraph:

"The Chairman of the Board of Directors shall be Linda Thompson, who shall serve until her death or resignation. The Chairman may also be removed by a unanimous vote of the remaining members of the Board only for gross errors defined as severe deviation from the teaching of the Bible (Old and New Testament read together as a whole) which would tend to spiritually endanger and lead the members of the fellowship away from the Lord, the God of the Bible."

Now Linda Thompson the private citizen can have just about any bylaws she wants in her own 501(c)3, even one with the overtly secular agenda of "home ownership counseling" and "combat academic underachievement."

I think it's fair to say most Americans want their elected officials to be religious or have a strong moral compass, but the above paragraph might go too far for many of them. It suggests deeply fundamentalist beliefs which are not held by the majority of Americans. Combine this with Thompson's comparison of herself to the prophet Nehemiah sent to save Jerusalem, i.e., Harrisburg that used to be on her website, and the Bible verses my lawyer friend saw posted liberally about the interior of Loveship, and its more religion than a lot of voters want.

At its core, that paragraph is simply a severe limitation on the grounds for Thompson to be removed as head of Loveship (known as Timeship in the original incorporation papers, with a ring of science fiction). The part about the Old and New Testament read together is clever--it means she can't, for example, be removed for eating pork or shellfish, banned in the Old but blessed in the New. Thompson, who has pledged transparency as mayor, was loading the dice to make sure she couldn't be removed as head of Loveship.

The danger of having a deeply--and I mean deeply--religious person of fundamentalist beliefs as mayor of Harrisburg or in any major elected post is that she starts filtering her decisions for the public through her personal religious beliefs. No matter what the Christian Right may tell you, the U.S. Constitution mandates the separation of church and state.

Oh, and the Loveship directors for 2008 were Gerald Robinson, Dr. Norman LaCasse, K. Lameson Lawrence, Jacquetta McCoy, Lois Glass, Greg Rothman, and of course Thompson herself.

"We appreciate the efforts of members of Congress like Tim Holden who are standing up to their [Democratic] leadership and insisting we can do better along with others representing our region, [Republicans] Todd Platts, Bill Shuster, and Joe Pitts," he wrote.

Black is just being his usual pro-corporate, anti-worker self. It's what he's paid to do. If a bill came along allowing corporations to dump health insurance for their workers but keep it for the CEO and top management only, he'd be jumping up and down cheering on its passage. But I digress.

It's Holden I'm concerned about. He was one of the few Democrats to vote against the national healthcare bill that would finally extend health insurance to nearly all Americans and eliminate insurance industry abuses. The bill passed the House with a five-vote margin and the Senate by 60-40, as everyone knows, but the two versions of the bill must still be reconciled and voted on again. We need Holden's vote this time around.

Why this is particularly dicey is today's election in Massachusetts, where Democrat Martha Coakley is running against Republican Scott Brown, a diehard conservative state senator who once posed semi-nude for Cosmopolitan Magazine, for the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy. Brown is leading and has vowed to destroy national healthcare if he wins, providing the 41st and crucial vote needed to sustain a filibuster in our undemocratic Senate. Majority doesn't rule.

If he wins (late polls have shown Coakley with a tiny edge), President Obama and the Democratic leadership will do what they have to do to get the bill passed. That may include asking House Democrats to vote for the Senate version of the bill as it stands, eliminating the need to bring it back to the Senate for another vote. Because there may be defections, Holden's vote FOR the bill is vital. And obviously, David Black and the business lobby are hoping he will abandon the people who put him in office and vote their way.

If Holden again votes against national healthcare, that's it for me. I won't vote for a Republican but I won't vote for him, either. My hope is that if Holden continues down this path, that Sheila Dow Ford of Harrisburg will carry through on her threat to jump into the Democratic primary to oppose him and give moderates and liberals a real choice.