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.

But one of the two comments attributed to blogs in the editorial--"Harrisburg is no longer a city! It is now Slumbville!! Gang Wars and Mass Killings Drive By's are on the rise!. The Dawgs are out in full force. Move out now!!! Perry County here we come"--was actually published in the PennLive Forum section on Nov. 4, 2009. I couldn't find the other one, "Where does she get her hair done, PetSmart?" via Google, but suspect it was also from PennLive.

PennLive is owned by the same people who own the Patriot-News. Think of them as different pockets in the same suit. The newspaper editors do not have complete control over the website--a source of great frustration to the staff when stories they wrote for the print edition inexplicably fail to appear on PennLive. Editors can have Forum comments removed if someone complains, but don't really want to do so, for legal reasons. We were always told that an unedited comments section has more legal protection than an edited one. Go figure, but it's apparently true.

The Patriot-News could eliminate a lot of the racial garbage by ending anonymous posting. Anonymous letters-to-the-editor aren't allowed. Why should Forum posts be? As for comments on my blog, I regretfully get very few of them. I allow nearly all to be published, but read each one before I do and weed out ones that are illogical or offensive. As with New York Times letters-to-the-editor, you have to make your case, or at least have an interesting opinion. I have allowed anonymous posts, but since I don't allow cheap shots, it is not a critical issue.

What I gather from some of the comments posted on PennLive is yes, there are still racists in America. But I also see that robust political dialogue is alive and well in America. Most of the criticism of Thompson--and all of it in this blog--has been based on facts and observations, not stereotypes.

One would need a psychiatrist and a couch to get to the deepest motivations of the person who wrote that editorial, but I suspect part of it stems from frustration by the newspaper that it is no longer in control of the news agenda in Harrisburg. The Patriot-News tried to portray Thompson sort of as Martin Luther King set upon by Bull Connor and his police dogs, but bloggers and the public weren't buying that. They saw a deeply flawed and divisive candidate with a taste for the high life, questionable personal finances, and a fundamentalist religious fervor that led her to believe she had been called by God to save Harrisburg.

Bloggers, including this one, wrote about the facts and contradictions in Thompson's record, treating her as they would any other serious candidate, and the newspaper, reluctantly it seemed, followed in our wake (at least until five days before the election, when coverage in the newspaper mysteriously ceased). Thompson received the votes of about 12 percent of registered voters in the city, but that was enough when the vast majority of voters stayed home.

Like I said in a previous post, we're stuck with her now, and those of us who own property in Harrisburg (and aren't leaving, like the Patriot-News), have a stake in her success in dealing with the city's monumental problems. Both Linda Thompson in her former role as city council president and former Mayor Stephen R. Reed had a hand in creating those problems. Let's hope someone can find a solution. In the meantime, I don't plan to cease my coverage.

I'm talking about Pennsylvania's most embarrassing myth, that agriculture is the state's "No. 1 industry" and "contributes $45 billion to the state economy." The Patriot-News, after nearly 10 years of studiously avoiding (because of my reporting) this mendacity, jumped back in with both feet on Sunday in its top story on A-1, "Candidates cultivate farm votes." Yes, it's Farm Show week. And Auditor General Jack Wagner is only the latest in a long line of elected officials to unknowingly help perpetuate this myth.

Before I go any further, let me give you the real statistics, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: in 2007, crop and animal agriculture, i.e., farms, contributed $3.3 billion to the $533.2 billion Pennsylvania economy. That's not even one percent! Let me give you some other statistics: manufacturing in 2007 contributed $73.4 billion to the state economy. Finance & insurance chipped in $40.4 billion. Government? $52.3 billion.

Farming didn't even beat out mining ($3.8 billion) or paper manufacturing ($3.6 billion). Agriculture in Pennsylvania is way, way down the list.

Ah, but wait, say the people at the state Department of Agriculture and the ag studies folks at Penn State whose jobs depend on this myth. If you add in food product manufacturing and the restaurant trade, that makes agriculture No. 1! Well, no, it doesn't. Food product manufacturing in 2007 contributed $7.8 billion to the state economy, and food service, $9.16 billion. Add that to farming and you get $20.26 billion. That's respectable, but well short of the claimed $45 billion and intellectually dishonest to boot. If you're going to count the rippling effect for farming, you also have to count it for mining, or paper, or any other basic industry. Those products also go into other products. Apples to apples, farming is one of the state's tiniest industries.

Income and jobs-wise, the situation is, if anything, worse. Pennsylvania had 7.4 million people employed in all jobs in 2008, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Of those, 56,230 were farmers. Now, the same folks who say agriculture is the state's number one industry say you have to also count farmhands, people working in food manufacturing (like Hanover Foods, for example), grocery stores, and bars and restaurants (I'm not making this up) as "agriculture" employees. Apart from the continuing intellectual dishonesty of this, that brings the total up to 746,660, or 10 percent of the workforce.

Sounds halfway respectable until you realize those are generally low-paying jobs. Total compensation in 2008 for the "expanded" definition of agriculture jobs was $14.2 billion, or 4.4 percent of the total $320.6 billion in compensation paid to Pennsylvania workers that year. Farmers alone were paid an average of $10,711 apiece. There have to be a lot of part-timers among the 56,230 who called themselves farmers that year.

So who benefits from this brazen mendacity? That's the really interesting part. Why should Pennsylvania have a separate cabinet department for one of its tiniest industries? Nostalgia is great, but we don't have a Department of Conestoga Wagons and Flintlock Rifles. The Ag Department ought to be merged with either the Department of Environmental Protection or the Department of Community and Economic Development to save money. But hey! Doesn't the state's "Number One Industry" deserve its own cabinet department?

But even more than that, and why the myth of Pennsylvania agriculture is so destructive, is the special status and attention it gains for farming in the state Legislature. I can tell you that many legislators believe the myth is gospel truth and act accordingly. That's why we have laws like the Right to Farm Act that limits what municipalities can do to control farm odors and other agricultural nuisances, and the loophole-ridden Nutrient Management Act that regulates how and where farmers may spread the enormous amount of manure generated by today's factory farms. I first debunked the myth while working on a 1998 series on factory hog farms and the problems they cause.

The clout of the agriculture industry in Harrisburg is such that DEP doesn't want to touch farmers, who generate much of the nutrients that are killing the Chesapeake Bay. Municipal sewage treatment plants are ordered to make costly upgrades that will burden ratepayers but yield only incremental benefits, while farmers are merely "encouraged" to undertake voluntary compliance measures like planting trees. Why would we want to burden our "Number One Industry"?

The hard truth is that animal agriculture may have to be banned or severely limited in south central Pennsylvania if the Chesapeake Bay is to be saved. Either that or the state will have to pay for manure incineration facilities for the region. As you saw from the income statistics, few farmers can afford a facility like that themselves. Farmers can't continue to burden the land (and drinking water) with endless annual applications of hog and poultry manure. I yield to no one in my love of a good meat entree, but things can't continue the way they have.

It is time for the leaders of Pennsylvania to acknowledge the truth. Agriculture isn't the number one industry and probably never was, at least since the very earliest days of the Commonwealth. It is an "important" industry, as many are. To falsely claim it is number one makes the state look ridiculous and probably harms real economic development.

(The Bureau of Economic Analysis website is at www.bea.gov. To find the contributions of various industries to the gross domestic product of Pennsylvania, follow these steps: Under "Regional," click on "GDP by State and Metropolitan Area." Under "State Annual Estimates," click on "Interactive Tables." Step 1, click NAICS. Step 2, highlight "Gross Domestic Product by State." Step 3, highlight "Pennsylvania." Step 4, highlight "All Industries." Step 5, highlight "All Years." This will bring up the table I used. To get to employment and income statistics for Pennsylvania, go back one page and click on "State Personal Income and Employment." Then click on "Interactive Tables, Annual Personal Income and Employment." Click on SA25 for "Employment by Industry" and SA06 for "Compensation by Industry." You will need to enter Pennsylvania and the years that interest you, just as before.)

He will be replaced, of course, by City Council President Linda Thompson. She was elected by 12 percent of registered voters in the city and comes in with a mandate only from her base in the poorest, blackest neighborhoods of Harrisburg. She won in large part because 27,000 registered voters stayed home. I don't doubt her supporters are ecstatic. The danger for Thompson, and for the rest of us, is that she may find it difficult to say no to any of them, or anyone who claims to speak for them.

I don't want Thompson to fail. I live here. I own property here. I have a stake in her success. I'm just afraid she'll do no better with city government and its $160 million budget than she did with her Loveship non-profit and its $25,000 to $35,000 budget.

She also seems to have a taste for high living that she obviously couldn't indulge on her $20,000 city council salary. She drives a Mercedes, which she hints her brother Steven Crawford paid for out of the settlement of his wrongful incarceration suit. She appeared to be carrying a designer handbag in one of the pictures during the campaign, although it could have been a knock-off. She is holding a grandiose, gubernatorial-like, $100 ticket inaugural ball at the Farm Show arena, with invitations that looked remarkably like wedding invitations. Mayor Reed had his inaugural party at the much smaller Hilton, and charged half as much. And via the print edition of the Patriot-News (it was oddly missing from the PennLive version) we now know that her inaugural gown was purchased, like Sarah Palin's campaign finery, at Neiman Marcus, a top tier luxury department store.

So the Plum in downtown Harrisburg, where many Harrisburg business women of all races purchase their finery, wasn't good enough? The nearest Neiman Marcus is in Philadelphia. How does this square with her self-professed image as a representative of the poor and downtrodden? I half expect her to have a balcony overlooking Market Square built out of the mayor's office and to proclaim, like Eva Peron, that her poor supporters expect her to dress in top designer fashions so they can bask in her glamour. I'm not suggesting she wear sackcloth and ashes, but every smart politician knows what the public will accept and what raises eyebrows.

This isn't a good beginning. Yes, it's legal for her to use campaign funds to pay for that dress, and for the inaugural ball, and for the hundreds of comped tickets that will likely go to her supporters to make the Farm Show look at least halfway full. All of this spending has to be disclosed at some point, and it will be interesting to see what the final bill will be. It is important for Mayor Thompson to understand that people, including people who in the worst way didn't want her to be mayor, will be monitoring her every step. She needs to follow the rules, written and unwritten. The high life is nice, but only if you can really afford it. Ask Mayor Sheila Dixon of Baltimore.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.