By The River

Does Messiah College turn out anything other than young Republican idealogues?

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.

Posted by David at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The weather on this Memorial Day weekend seems almost too pleasant to think about June politics, but your intrepid blogger must charge ahead even though he would rather be relaxing.

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.

Posted by David at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I stopped by the Broad Street Market on Saturday, where my wife was running a booth sale of Girl Scout cookies, and ran into Sheila Dow Ford and her husband, Les Ford. They were gathering signatures on a petition to put Sheila on the Democratic primary ballot this spring. She hopes to run against Congressman Tim Holden of Schuylkill County for the < a href="http://www.sheilaforcongress.com/">Democratic nomination to Congress from the 17th District, which includes Harrisburg. I added my signature and stopped to chat.

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.

Posted by David at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As we head into an almost certain repeat of the Pennsylvania state budget stalemate of 2009, I would urge the press to be honest about the Republican Party when it publishes its day-by-day stories of Gov. Rendell's failure to pass his budget.

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.

Posted by David at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's really quite simple why President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. It was for turning away from the belligerent, go-it-alone foreign policy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that so distressed Europeans and many others around the world. Obama has decided to work to build up respect for America in the Middle East and elsewhere. They love him out there, or at the very least pay him grudging respect, and everything I've read says this is paying big dividends for America's standing in the world.

So the newspapers and columnists who have called the prize "an embarrassment" or questioned whether Obama has done anything to deserve it are simply missing the point. Abandoning the Bush/Cheney foreign policy was a major step toward world peace, and the President was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so.

Posted by David at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a modest proposal: the National Rifle Association should pay damages to the three children of Meleanie and Scott Hains. The parents died in a blaze of gunfire from weapons the NRA and other groups encouraged them to buy and carry.

It's only fair. The Hains couple died for the Dream, the Dream that one day all Americans will openly carry handguns with them wherever they go, ready to shoot it out with bad guys. Melanie Hain, aka the "pistol-packin' soccer mom," drew nationwide attention to the pro-gun cause last summer when she irresponsibly carried a loaded handgun, worn on a hip holster, to her five-year-old daughter's soccer game.

Now "Daddy shot mommy," as the young Hains children screamed as they ran from their home in Lebanon, Pa., on Wednesday night. They will be forever scarred, victims of the "gun rights" crowd every bit as much as their parents.

Scott Hains, if the most likely scenario is confirmed by police, chose to pick up a gun and shoot his wife to death, then shot himself to death. When I was a young reporter in Shamokin in 1977, I was called one Saturday morning to a trailer home to take pictures at the scene of a similar murder. The husband, a prison guard (as Scott Hains formerly was) had blown his wife away and then fled. If there had been no guns in the house, both Meleanie Hains and Linda Feigley might still be alive. Absent a gun, the remaining options tend to be far less deadly, or easily deadly.

The "gun rights" crowd screams "protection!" But statistics show that guns in the home are far more likely to be used against their owner or someone in the household than against some home invader. Meleanie Hains' gun didn't protect her from her husband.

Everyone who tried to stop her from openly carrying a gun to her daughter's soccer game deserves a medal, especially the sheriff who revoked her pistol permit. Imagine if she had gotten into an argument with Scott Hains at a soccer game and they both pulled out their pistols and began shooting? How many children might have died? They, too, would have died for the NRA dream.

So NRA, pull out your fat checkbook and write a big one to the three children of Meleanie and Scott Hains. You don't even have to call it "damages." Call it "lifetime support." Honor them for their sacrifice. And go to hell.

Posted by David at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I walked over to the State Library today to print out two old Philadelphia Inquirer articles. I had the first article up on the microfilm reader-printer, put in my quarter, pushed the button and nothing happened. I summoned a librarian, who determined the printer was out of toner. He told me, apologetically, that they don't have any more toner and can't get more until the Legislature passes the 2009-10 budget, overdue since July 1. He took out the toner cartridge, did a little "twist and shout" with it, and managed to jar loose enough toner for one copy, but not two.

Thank you, hard-right Republican ideologues in the state Senate for putting your no-tax-increase religion above the needs of Pennsylvania residents. We so appreciate it.

Posted by David at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

Time magazine, Issue of Oct. 5, 2009:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the list of cowards so far:

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

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

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

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

How times have changed.

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

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

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

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

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

I watched Sen. Ted Kennedy's funeral on TV today. I think it was my second Kennedy funeral; I watched John's on television--who didn't?--but I'm not sure about Bobby's. It was a wonderful ceremony, befitting a liberal lion who did so much good for so many people, his personal failings aside.

Dissent from conservative Catholics over Kennedy's funeral has thankfully been given little attention. After all, he was divorced and remarried and supported abortion rights, although earlier in his life he didn't. There are extremist Catholics out there who wanted him to be denied a church funeral, as if he was a Mafia chieftain. You can read some of the opposition to Kennedy's Catholic funeral in the comments section of this story. It's ugly, hateful crap, but why should that come as a surprise in this day and age?

Watching the funeral, I was struck by the body language and lack of participation of Boston Cardinal Shawn O'Malley. He gave every indication of not wanting to be there, even as the other priests who actually conducted the service carried out their duties in the way you would expect. The Los Angeles Times reports that O'Malley issued a "brief and grudging statement" when Kennedy died, unlike several other cardinals who praised his life.

One could almost believe that the Vatican issued an order to cool it for the Kennedy funeral to avoid inflaming hatred of the Catholic Church. Sen. Kennedy's extraordinary letter to Pope Benedict in the waning days of his life can be read as a plea to be considered a good Catholic. Was there a behind-the-scenes effort to keep the extremists under wraps? After the pasting the Catholic Church took earlier this year when extremist Catholics loudly and publicly tried to block President Obama's speech at Notre Dame University, they can't have wanted a repeat that would anger even more people. There was plenty at the funeral today to piss off the extremists: Obama giving the main eulogy, the deference given to the senator's second wife, no order to non-Catholics not to take Communion, and the presence of O'Malley. But you know what? Too bad. It was a beautiful and moving service, and that's all that should matter to anyone.

Posted by David at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For all his personal failings, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009) did great things for America. A few excerpts from his New York Times obituary today:

"He led the fight for the 18-year-old vote, the abolition of the draft, deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, and the post-Watergate campaign finance legislation. He was deeply involved in renewals of the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing law of 1968. He helped establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He built federal support for community health care centers, increased cancer research financing and helped create the Meals on Wheels program. He was a major proponent of a health and nutrition program for pregnant women and infants."

"His most notable focus was civil rights, “still the unfinished business of America,” he often said. In 1982, he led a successful fight to defeat the Reagan administration’s effort to weaken the Voting Rights Act."

"Perhaps his greatest success on civil rights came in 1990 with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which required employers and public facilities to make “reasonable accommodation” for the disabled. When the law was finally passed, Mr. Kennedy and others told how their views on the bill had been shaped by having relatives with disabilities. Mr. Kennedy cited his mentally disabled sister, Rosemary, and his son who had lost a leg to cancer."

"He was a forceful and successful opponent of the confirmation of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court...Mr. Bork’s “extremist view of the Constitution,” he said, meant that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of Americans.”

And so on, and so on. I'll leave recounting of the blacker, bleaker moments of his life to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and the like, who will be all Chappaquidick, all day long. Ask yourself this: would America have been a better or worse place without Teddy Kennedy in the Senate? I think the answer is obvious.

Posted by David at 06:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the big lies spread by Republicans opposed to national healthcare is that the 43 million uninsured Americans are mostly illegal aliens or young people who choose not to buy insurance, and thus we shouldn't care what happens to them. Leaving aside the smug, pharisaical aspects of this wrong-headed belief, it simply isn't true.

When I was home recently in Holland, Michigan, my wife and I had coffee with an old friend who I'll call Diane. She is about 58 years-old, too young for Medicare, and was two classes ahead of me at Holland High School. Diane is an educated white woman, recently divorced after a long second marriage, and working part-time in her life occupation in Holland, where she returned after her marriage fell apart. Her second ex-husband, also a friend of mine, lives in northern Michigan. She would like to be full-time, but there weren't any full-time jobs available at the prominent Holland institution where she is employed. As a result, she has no health insurance.

Current law allows employers to insure only full-time employees. It is one reason there are so many part-time jobs out there. Wal-Mart, for example, long used this dodge to increase its profits until public criticism forced it to offer health insurance to part-timers, some of whom were poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

A couple of months ago, Diane recalled, she was doing some gardening. She was up on a pick-up truck unloading bags of organic horse manure. The day was misty and rainy, and she had muck boots on. The bed of the truck was "like an ice-skating rink," she said. "I was pulling the manure to the back of the truck and simply skated backwards off the edge." She came down hard on the pavement and broke several bones in her wrist. It could have happened to anybody.

"The swelling was amazing. And the pain brain jarring. I could not move and thought for sure I had broken my legs and worse. I've always made fun of cellphones and the fact that people use them constantly and are so unaware of who's listening. But I was grateful to be able to pull mine out of my pocket with my left hand and call Bill (name changed) to come and get me."

Bill was her long ago first husband and a physician. His name is changed because Diane worries his practice partners might be angry that he gave away care. Even as she lay there in pain, Diane was terrified of being bankrupted by medical bills. While most hospitals are required to give away a certain amount of emergency care, they will first try to collect the bill and aren't always gentle in their tactics. And there is no obligation for free follow-up care, such as physical therapy.

Bill could not give away an X-ray, so Diane had to take the chance that her bones might heal crooked. Bill advised her to purchase a wrist splint, and she was still wearing it when we saw her that day. The splint provided a degree of protection, and allowed her to soak her injured wrist in a solution of warm water and medicinal herbs that she says eased the pain. A friend who is a sports massage therapist worked on her wrist when Diane could tolerate the pain. Ultimately, she was lucky. Her wrist healed slightly out of whack, but with nearly full range of motion that allows her to continue to work. She paid cash for one physical therapy session to learn exercises she could do at home to rehabilitate her wrist.

"That and the wrist brace were my only out-of-pocket expenses," Diane said. "Thank God for [Bill's] help. I would be swimming in debt otherwise."

With the loss of her 401k savings in the recession George W. Bush gave America, she says, "I am experiencing poverty up close and personal. I've never been one to want a lot of money, as I live simply anyway, but it is worrisome to be heading into old age with no safety net except the blessings of the network of friends and family. Every one of my good girlfriends whom I've known for decades is now alone."

Think of Diane's story--and that of millions like her--the next time rightwing thugs disrupt a public meeting on the Obama healthcare plan and start mouthing their lies about "death panels" and the like. No one should be forced to depend on private charity to be treated for a serious injury or for any injury or illness. If Diane or those like her lived in Canada, France, or Britain, they would have been fully treated for their injuries at no cost, no questions asked. And yes, in Diane's case it would have been the same day as her fall. Don't believe what you hear about unreasonable treatment delays in countries with national healthcare. We need national healthcare for all. We must not surrender to fear and intimidation.

Posted by David at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tired of birthers, death panelists, gun toters, and other assorted hard right Republican idiots who have been popping up everywhere? Check out Congressman Barney Frank's response to one of them in this You Tube clip. Turns out the woman was actually a Lyndon Larouche supporter, but of late they're indistinguishable from run-of-the-mill Republicans.

Posted by David at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't know who to blame more, Gov. Rendell for slashing the budget of the State Library or the Senate Republicans who made him do it.

South Central Pennsylvania's largest public library, the State Library in downtown Harrisburg, is now open just three days a week and only during the day. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 9 to 4 p.m. Too bad if you're a working stiff planning on using the library's unparalleled genealogical resources, or researching a book. You've paid for this library through your taxes, and now you can't, unless you take vacation time or rush over on your lunch hour.

Rendell said, quite inacccurately, that the State Library is "primarily a repository for government documents." It indeed is a federal depository library, but that's not what most people come for. They come for the millions of books dating back to the 18th century, although most are from the 20th century. For a writer without a university library to fall back on, the State Library makes it possible to research and write new books in Harrisburg.

Just a couple of years ago, the state spent $6.6 million restoring the Rare Books room in the State Library. Some $3 million of that came from the National Archives, a reflection of the value of the rare books and documents the State Library owns. I wonder what the National Archives would think of spending that kind of money on a Rare Books room that is hardly ever open.

The restoration of that room was a sort of penance by the state for a 1996 atrocity--an example of idiotic bureacracy at its worst--that contaminated much of the State Library's closed stacks with lead paint dust during a project to repaint the window frames in the Forum Building. The books were off limits for nearly a year while they were painstakingly cleaned and made safe to read. I wrote a number of articles about this horror show, and some of them can be found via Google.

I feel story for the 21 employees who lost their jobs because of the budget cutbacks. I would suspect most of them had been there for years. Good paying full-time library jobs are hard to find these days, so it will likely mean early retirement for many of them. They were never less than professional, always willing to go the extra mile to find an ancient book I needed for my research.

And what is it about Democratic governors and libraries? The last Pennsylvania governor to slash State Library funding was Gov. Robert P. Casey (it was restored by Gov. Tom Ridge). At least Rendell didn't go as far as Gov. Jennifer Granholm in Michigan, who proposed closing the Library of Michigan and splitting up its collections among libraries around the state. That has drawn howls of protest and marches in Lansing.

Granholm, with 15 percent unemployment and Republicans in her Legislature who, like their cousins in Pennsylvania, squeal NO! NO! NO! and stomp their feet in unison in response to any proposal for a modest tax increase, has it worse than Rendell. But closing major research libraries is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Posted by David at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With the government plan, said Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, “you will have to call a bureaucrat and hope to God his calculator is more compassionate and smarter than your doctor.”
--New York Times, July 31, 2009

The moral bankruptcy of the corporations and politicians fighting against national healthcare for all is summed up in the above quote from Congressman Mike Rogers, a Republican who represents a district in the middle of Michigan that includes the state capital, Lansing, but also numerous small towns. The quote is a complete and utter lie, part of the scare tactics being used against national healthcare that are hammered home by rightwing television and radio commentators.

Do you know someone on Medicare, the "government-run healthcare" that serves people over 65 in this country, and serves them well? Ask them if they've ever once had to call a "government bureaucrat" for permission to be treated, or for anything else. Rogers, a former FBI agent and home builder, knows what he's saying is a lie. Either that or he's too deluded to master even the Washington, D.C., Metro system, let along serious legislation. One of Rogers' previous big issues was stopping the importation of Canadian garbage to landfills in the United States. He apparently sees a Canadian-style health plan in much the same light, even though vast majorities of Canadians have no problem with a system that remove financial worries from the picture and gives them longer life expectancies than Americans.

Coming from an economic basket case state with the nation's highest unemployment rate, he could help his constituents far more by ensuring the Obama healthcare plan passes than by shilling for the healthcare industry and the diehard ideologues of the Republican Party.

One reason national healthcare seems to be losing is that we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to ensure that television and radio stations present balanced stories, or give people the right to reply on air with their own points of view. The law was in effect from 1949 to the mid-1980s, and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving a rightwing Christian radio station in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. Congress repealed the law during the Reagan era de-regulation of the middle 1980s.

It is no accident that the American Right began its rise at about the same time. Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine gave rise to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilley, who could not operate with quite the same unmitigated venom if the Fairness Doctrine was still in place. Nothing would stop them from reporting facts to their listeners, but there's the rub. The Fairness Doctrine, for better or worse, enforced an unsteady moderation in American political discourse, legally only for broadcast discourse but through a spillover effect to all political discourse. It made it harder for extreme political minorities to get airtime for their views, but they were not foreclosed in any way from print media.

Without the Fairness Doctrine, minority political factions backed by big corporate money can broadcast any old lie they want without fear of having a "response" run on the same station. In a perfect world, listeners to slanted broadcasts would take the time to research the issues and draw their own conclusions. But in fact, as the bad guys of world history discovered, if you tell people that they'll have to get the permission of a government bureaucrat to get treated for illness often enough, many will come to believe it.

Even if it is a lie.

Posted by David at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Americans really don't have much of a tradition of taking to the streets in mass protest. Despite images and events dating back 40 years to the Vietnam War, most Americans are exceedingly reluctant to parade their grievances against government or corporations for all to see. And that's a shame, given that nice First Amendment we have in our Constitution.

What I'd really like to see is a million or more Americans descend on Washington, D.C., to demand that Congress enact single-payer national health care, or at least the Obama plan with the so-called "public option" to compete with the private insurance companies. Polls show overwhelming public support for the Obama plan, yet healthcare reform is in danger of failing because of the millions of dollars the insurance industry is spending every day to defeat the plan. Their allies among the rightwing talk radio hosts put out a daily diet of distortions and lies about national healthcare. We are in grave danger of keeping the awful status quo, or at best status quo plus a few meaningless "reforms" that still leave 40 million Americans uninsured.

Something is needed to break the stranglehold of the lobbyists and talk radio over this critical debate. And that is a massive invasion of angry but polite citizens into our nation's capital to demand that Congress do the right thing--or else. I'd like to see large rallies on the same day in each of the 50 state capitals to drive home the point that America wants healthcare for all at a minimum, reasonable price to individuals and families. Like in France, Canada, and Britain.

While I'm at it, I would also encourage the state employees of Pennsylvania to take their grievances to the streets of Harrisburg. They're about to lose their paychecks indefinitely because the Senate Republicans won't, for purely ideological reasons, agree to a modest, temporary tax hike on individuals and a delay in a scheduled reduction in the state's Capital Stock and Franchise Tax (don't ask) on large businesses much beloved by the Chamber of Commerce types. As a result, the budget stalemate continues.

The Senate Republicans say a recession is no time for a tax hike. Guess what--they say that when times are flush, too. They see the recession as a perfect opportunity to slash the size of government, and too bad if you happened to like your local library or small business development center. That modest tax hike will be paid only by individuals who still have jobs, since unemployment compensation is not taxed in Pennsylvania (were that so at the Federal level--thank you Ronald Reagan).

So state workers--to the barricades! Let them know you are angry at being pawns in this GOP ideological game. You have families to feed and bills to pay. Get going.

Posted by David at 06:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You won't find anything about it in the obituaries that ran yesterday, but the incident in Robert McNamara's life that always fascinated me was when a young anti-war protester tried and nearly succeeded in throwing the former Defense Secretary off the Martha's Vineyard ferry on Sept. 29, 1972. He had him over the side, but McNamara saved himself by clingling tightly to the railing until help arrived. He did not press charges, and the 27-year-old artist who had tried to kill him vanished.

But not entirely. Washington Post reporter Paul Hendrickson tracked him down and interviewed him for a 1995 book on McNamara. The artist still lives on Martha's Vineyard, according to Hendrickson, and has run into McNamara at least once over the years.

He had been consumed by rage over the 58,000 useless American deaths in the Vietnam War, of which McNamara was the chief architect and engineer. When he saw McNamara enjoying himself with friends on the ferry, he lured him out to the deck and tried to kill him. Such were the passions engendered by the Vietnam War.

If you want to know what McNamara was all about, watch Errol Morris' Academy Award-winning 2000 documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." McNamara, by then in a repentant stage in his life, cooperated fully with Morris. The film is chilling. Watch it and then consider what happened to McNamara that day on the ferry.

Posted by David at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I read articles like today's "Europe's Free, State-Run Healthcare Has Drawbacks" in the Washington Post and despair if the vast majority of Americans who want a similar healthcare system here have any chance at all to see it happen.

Here's a headline you won't see in the Post: "Canadians, French, British laud their national healthcare systems, dismiss problems as minor." Or, "Canadians fear to travel to U.S. for fear of having an accident and being hit with crippling medical bills." Or, "If you get sick in France, you're treated for free: no questions asked."

Too many American journalists have been cowed by the right into not writing stories they logically should write, namely that by huge majorities, residents of single-payer healthcare system countries like Canada, Britain, and France love their system. The Washington Post, which leans ever further to the right (forget about Watergate--this is penance for that), even dropped the "free" from the headline of today's story on the website. You only see the word "free" if you actually call up the story.

Do single-payer national healthcare systems have problems? Sure. But our own system has a helluva lot more. It is elitist and silly to argue that we can't have single-payer health care here because it might cause a brief delay in new drug introduction WHEN MILLIONS OF AMERICANS HAVE NO HEALTH INSURANCE AND CAN'T GET ANY DRUGS AT ALL. I'm friends with two French doctors, a husband and wife, who work at Hershey Medical Center. They've told me there are good drugs they routinely prescribed in France that are simply not available here.

It is time for all of us who want single-payer health care to begin to write letters to the editor of our local newspapers demanding that they print the truth about single-payer healthcare in foreign countries. And if that doesn't work, picket outside their buildings and call the local TV stations.

Posted by David at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Good news from Minnesota this afternoon. The state Supreme Court ruled that Democrat Al Franken was the winner of the U.S. Senate race there (in November 2008) by I think 312 votes over the Republican Norm "Sore Loser" Coleman. After an hour or so of collective holding of breath, Coleman finally conceded. Franken becomes the 60th Democratic senator and a potential end to Republican filibusters of health care and other important issues for America.

I first saw Al Franken on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970s. He was mainly a writer on the show, but occasionally appeared on camera to do political commentaries that inevitably got around to the question of, "What does it mean to me, Al Franken?" Franken is smart, liberal, and progressive in the Minnesota tradition.

Coleman can't be blamed entirely for this fiasco. He was put up to the recount fight and financed by the national Republican Party, who desperately wanted Franken and his 60th vote kept out of the Senate as long as possible. And no, it wasn't the same as Gore vs. Bush in Florida in 2000. Gore never received a fair count by unbiased officials. Coleman got that and more, but the handwriting on the wall was clear long ago that Franken had won.

Posted by David at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The strange tale of Gov. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, got even stranger this afternoon. The governor, intercepted at the Atlanta airport by a reporter from The State, South Carolina's leading newspaper, admitted that he actually wasn't hiking the Appalachian Trail as his staff had insisted. Instead, he was in Argentina having an affair with an old friend.

Of course, he apologized to his family and said his wife knew about his Argentine firecracker. His yet unnamed girlfriend is believed to be the first Argentine to play a part in an American political scandal since stripper Annabelle "Fanne Fox" Battistella cavorted in the Washington Tidal Basin with Democratic Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas in 1974. Actually, cavorting might not be the right word. She actually ran out of Mills' car after it was pulled over by the D.C. Park Police and jumped in the water. Whatever verb you prefer, It did wonders for her career, if not for that of Mills, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Sanford can now join that other presidential wannabe Sen. Jon Ensign, R-Nevada, on a Family Values ticket in 2012, provided one of them can muscle Sarah Palin out of the way for the right to be the next Alf Landon and lose to FDR, er, Obama, by historic proportions. At least Sanford wasn't nailing a member of his own staff whose husband also was on his staff. Who do you take him for, anyway? Jon Ensign?

Someone really needs to call the Appalachian Trail Conference in Harper's Ferry, W.Va., and ask spokesman Brian King if they have a comment on all this. Sanford, incidentally, says that he hiked on the A.T. as a younger man. But then he also says he spent the weekend driving the coastline of Argentina relax. One of those pesky reporters from The State figured out that it isn't really possible to do that because there is no Argentine equivalent of Highway 1 in California.

I'm going to go set the DVR right now for tonight's sure to be classic episode of The Daily Show.

Posted by David at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hard to believe that Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina was once mentioned seriously as a potential candidate for Republicans hoping to take back the White House from Barack Obama in 2012.

Sanford, previously best known for trying to reject the Obama Administration stimulus money for his state's many unemployed citizens, is out in the woods somewhere as I write this. No, really. Last weekend, he ditched his security detail and headed off alone to the woods with a backpack. Apparently the pressures of idiocy finally became too much to bear, or maybe the thought of fighting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for the GOP nomination in 2012 finally made him snap.

The latest is that he's somewhere on the Appalachian Trail, which cuts across western NORTH Carolina but not South Carolina, the cradle of slavery and the Civil War that he pretends to govern. How appropriate, I thought.

Back in the early 1990s, after reading about a series of bloody murders on the Appalachian Trail, including the murders of a young man and woman near Duncannon, Pa., north of Harrisburg, I did an in-depth investigation of Appalachian Trail crime for The Patriot-News, talking to police in every state along the trail between Georgia and Maine. For this I earned the undying hatred of the Appalachian Trail Commission, which was then fond of saying, "You're safer on the trail than driving to the trail." Actually, you're not. I feel much safer in my car.

What I learned from police and psychologists was that troubled people are drawn to the Appalachian Trail. They see it as a sort of green leaf utopia that will apply balm to their souls. Which it may, for a time, but without curing their underlying ills. Serious problems can arise when these troubled souls realize that and then come in contact with real hikers on the trail. That's what happened when Paul David Crews, the Duncannon killer, met his young victims at a trail shelter on Cove Mountain.

Crews was from (drum roll) South Carolina. Need hikers worry about Gov. Sanford? Probably not, unless he has his "budget knife" in his backpack...

I'll stop now.

Posted by David at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the best news on the healthcare front in months, if not years.

The New York Times and CBS News released the results of a poll tonight that shows Americans overwhelmingly in favor of creating a government-run health plan to compete with private health insurance plans. The numbers are staggering: 72 percent of all Americans favor having a government plan, 87 percent of Democrats, and 50 percent of Republicans.

This should put an an end to the debate, but probably won't, because the private health insurance companies will fight tooth and nail to keep their huge profits and bloated CEO bonuses. It is up to each of us now to let our Congressman and Senators know that the current system has to end. If Americans are going to be required to buy health insurance, they shouldn't be forced to buy from private companies who hire people to deny legitimate claims.

The American people are good and smart enough to run a national healthcare plan, just like they are good and smart enough to run Medicare and Social Security. Government is us, not space aliens. Deep down, people who have issues with government-run anything have serious issues with their fellow Americans.

Posted by David at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't read many books that shook me as much as Dave Cullen's "Columbine," the new and definitive account of the Columbine High School school massacre on April 20, 1999. The bare details of the massacre: 12 Columbine students and one teacher were murdered by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who then killed themselves. Many other students were wounded, some permanently. We can only be thankful that Harris was an incompetent bomb maker, because most of the big bombs he intended to cause mass carnage never exploded.

As a journalist, I can tell you that Cullen did a magnificent job. He spent nine years researching this book, and it all shows. The book took that long to write in part because of the years-long cover-up by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office of critical documents in the case that was finally ended by Colorado's tough freedom of information law. Why the cover-up? In short, because they could have prevented the massacre but didn't. It's all there in the book.

Cullen dispels numerous myths about Columbine. Harris and Klebold were not outcasts at the high school. They had friends, dated, and Klebold even went to the prom the weekend before the massacre. There was no "Trench Coat Mafia" of murderous Goths. The massacre grew out of Eric Harris' murderous revenge fantasies against the entire world, not out of a desire to target "jocks" and "rich kids."

Harris, Cullen says, was a classic psychopath. He felt no emotion other than glee when he killed, and felt absolutely no remorse. He also had another classic psychopathic trait, the ability to lie convincingly. Dylan Klebold was a weak follower, depressed and suicidal. He went along with Harris primarily as a means to kill himself. The reader leaves the book with a certain amount of sympathy for Klebold's parents, who tried hard to straighten him out, but none for Mr. and Mrs. Harris. Mr. Harris, a miliary martinet, applied harsh discipline to Eric but also tried to try to protect him from school officials and police after the many precursor incidents to the massacre.

Evangelical Christians don't come off particularly well in the book. Cullen convincingly disproves the myth that student Cassie Bernall was asked by Klebold if she believed in God and shot to death in the school library after she said "Yes." The story was first told by one of the other students in the library; turned out he had Cassie confused with another girl, Valerie Schnurr, who was wounded but survived. Two other students in the library said there was no exchange of words between Cassie and Klebold other than him saying "Peekaboo" when he looked under the table, saw Bernall, and fired his shotgun without further comment by either.

Bernall became an evangelical saint, while Schnurr, also an evangelical, was snubbed as a wanabee when she tried to tell her own story. Bernall's parents refused to believe the story wasn't true, and her mother went forward with publication of a book immortalizing her daughter even after a meeting with police at which the facts were laid on the table.

Another evangelical girl, Robyn Anderson, who briefly dated Klebold, acted as a straw buyer to get the shotguns and rifle Harris wanted for the massacre. He and Klebold had tried to buy them a gun show in Denver in December 1998 but were turned away because they were 17. Anderson, who was 18, went back to purchase the shotguns, one of which was used to murder Cassie Bernall. Harris told her they wanted them to go hunting. Anderson broke no law in turning over the long-barrel weapons to the boys, who promptly sawed off the shotgun barrels, a felony under federal law.

Colorado has since closed the "gun show loophole" that allows purchases of firearms at gun shows without background checks, in part because of testimony by Anderson that a background check might have deterred her from making the straw purchase. The National Rifle Association, as usual, prevented a Federal law being passed. A semi-automatic handgun used in the slayings was sold to Harris by a man who was a friend of someone Harris worked with at a pizzeria. Supplying a handgun to a minor was a crime, and both men served brief prison sentences.

This book is full of revelations. It will be in print for years to come, and I urge everyone to read it. Some of the passages will move you to anger, others to tears. "Columbine" is a monumental work of non-fiction writing.

P.S. - This book could not have been written if Columbine had occurred in Pennsylvania, because the state's weak Open Records Act, even the new and improved version that took effect this year, has a near-total exemption for law enforcement records. Had it occurred in Pennsylvania, we would still be as much in the dark about why the shootings occurred as we are about the Amish school shootings in Lancaster County in 2006. Did local police have warnings that killer was about to go on a rampage? We'll never know.

Posted by David at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having lived through the American stolen election (2000) and the eight lost years that followed, I can appreciate what Iranians who voted against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are going through, the emotions they are feeling.

I never had the feelings against Iranians that many Americans shared after the 1979 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. I had known Iranians at Hope College and elsewhere, and they always seemed to be nice. Of course, these were educated Iranians from the country's pro-Western elite. It puzzled me at the time that the country that produced those students could also produce the radical Islamic students who seized the embassy.

The Islamic fundamentalists will never go away in Iran, just like our own religious right in America is unlikely to disappear. At best they can be contained by a democratic majority of Iranians or Americans who don't hold the same beliefs and don't want the conservatives to be able to impose their benighted beliefs upon them. But free, untainted elections are critical in both countries. Without them you get George W. Bush or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Posted by David at 05:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Terry McAuliffe, fund raiser par excellence for the Clintons in the 1990s, lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Virginia. He lost decisively to R. Creigh Deeds, a lawyer from one of Virginia's least populous counties. The turn-out was as low or lower in relative terms than the Harrisburg city mayoral primary last month, but Deeds' victory appears to have been more broad-based than Linda Thompson's.

Deeds was endorsed by the Washington Post. He's a moderate Democrat, pro-gun, who has a good shot (bad choice of words) of succeeding Gov. Tim Kaine, also a Democrat, who was considered by Barack Obama as his running mate last fall and who cannot seek a third term.

McAuliffe's entry into the Virginia race--he has lived in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., for years--was one of those carpetbagging moments that make everyone uncomfortable. Yes, the people should be able to pick the candidate they want. But McAuliffe, who was born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y.(I've read his autobiography), seemed more carpetbagger-ish than most. It appears the voters of Virginia agreed.

Posted by David at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm beginning to think of the religious zealots who gun down doctors who perform abortions as America's own corps of suicide bombers.

Even though they don't actually detonate bombs, they commit these crimes knowing they are ending their own lives, either with a life prison term or, in the case of Rev. Paul Jennings Hill, executed. These males (they are always males) sacrifice their own lives to eliminate doctors who provide reproductive choice to women.

I don't believe for a moment that the "responsible" anti-abortion groups are crying anything more than crocodile tears over the murder this week of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. If you don't believe me, check out the photo in the New York Times today. Tiller was one of the few doctors in America still performing late-term abortions, a rare procedure performed almost exclusively to save the life or ability to bear more babies of women with problem pregnancies.

We have little credibility criticizing the suicide bombers in the Muslim world if we tolerate our own suicide bombers. It is time for Attorney General Holder to bring the full force of federal law enforcement against those who would conspire to deny, through violence and intimidation, a woman's right to choose.

Today it is doctors who provide abortions. Tomorrow it could be doctors who write prescriptions for birth control pills.

Posted by David at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who thinks that 25 years of rightwing Republicanism ended with the election of Barack Obama should read E.J. Dionne's column today in the Washington Post. Dionne, always an interesting columnist, suggests that media coverage of Obama and things like national healthcare are being skewed to the right by slavish media attention to anything that comes out of the mouths of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. The opinions of left-leaning liberal politicians and commentators are left off the table.

That is certainly true in the healthcare debate, where the yearning of many Americans for a top-quality French or even Canadian-style single-payer (i.e., government-run) healthcare system covering all, no questions asked, and paid for by tax revenues is simply out of bounds for serious discussion, derided as "socialism" by the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis. Do you want to be forced to buy a health insurance policy from a private insurance company that hires people to look for ways not to pay your claims? That's where the debate is heading with single-payer taken off the table.

It is also true in Pennsylvania when it comes to options for closing the state's yawning budget deficit. Only the slash-the-budget, no-new-taxes approach of the Senate Republicans is deemed worthy of consideration by the Harrisburg Patriot-News and many other newspapers. We are told we must accept drastic cuts in library funding, an end to the acclaimed Governor's Schools for the Arts, and other programs that benefit everyone in the community rather than raise taxes. And if there is to be any kind of tax increase, it can only be in the state personal income tax on individuals and very small businesses, not in the various corporate taxes that affect Hershey Foods and other large corporations in the state.

I suspect many Republicans in the State Senate could be defeated in their next election by Democrats willing to run as Obama Democrats and not as Republican-Lites. The mass of Pennsylvanians didn't vote for Obama to keep the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis in power for another generation. They wanted real change and an end to the control by the rightwing Republicans at all levels. It is time to give them what they want.

Posted by David at 05:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Burg Life reprints a post by Tattoo Jim, a citizen activist in Harrisburg, about a scary phone call he received from City Council president Linda Thompson, who may be the next mayor of Harrisburg.

I've heard a first-hand account of one other scary call a citizen activist received from Thompson, who doesn't seem to be able to contain her anger when someone says or does something she doesn't like.

Posted by David at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm glad the Patriot-News has finally taken note of the panic among city residents, white, Asian, Hispanic and black, at the prospect of Linda Thompson becoming mayor of Harrisburg after capturing the votes of about 12 percent of the electorate.

I am reprovingly accused by the editorial writers, neither of whom live in Harrisburg, of having "cast the election nearly entirely in racial terms" and having used the phrase "Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna." The first is simplistically wrong, the second is true. My approach has been to treat city blacks as just another interest group vying for power, not as a privileged class immune from criticism for observable behavior. Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna refers to the regrettable example of Zimbabwe in Africa, where the few remaining whites, who ran the country in colonial days, are persecuted by the black nationalist tyrant Robert Mugabe. The country has become an economic and human rights hellhole as a result, with blacks harmed far more than whites.

Linda Thompson, instead of reaching out to reassure white voters in the wake of her victory in the Democratic primary, has made Mugabe-like promises to fire the white superintendent of schools, Dr. Gerald Kohn, and replace him with an "urban," i.e., black superintendent. During the campaign, she spoke of the need to have blacks run the city police department. This and her observable behavior as city council president during the televised meetings has led many white residents of Harrisburg to conclude that Thompson will make life worse and hurt their property values. In my own Shipoke neighborhood, where 83 people voted for Stephen Reed, 13 for Thompson and 7 for Les Ford, the talk has been of organizing the neighborhood to mow the parks and haul trash to the incinerator if those city services fall apart under a Thompson administration.

The Patriot-News may have decided it has no dog in this fight. Two years ago, the newspaper seriously considered moving its editorial and business offices out of the city to sites in either Susquehanna or Silver Spring Twp. When the economy and newspaper advertising tanked, that move was put on hold. Like the two editorial writers, most of the editorial staff and all the upper managers live in the suburbs already. It is easy to dismiss the well-grounded fears of Harrisburg residents when you live in Mechanicsburg or Susquehanna Twp.

As someone who does own a home in the city and who has an interest in seeing the progress of the Reed years continue, I would issue these reporting challenges to the Patriot-News:

--Start looking into the persistent rumors that Thompson's campaign violated state election law by offering free lunches to blacks in Allison Hill and Uptown who agreed to vote for her.

--Commit the staff and resources to doing a full-blown, in-depth investigation of Thompson's life and career. Pull the IRS Form 990s on Loveship, her non-profit, and see where its money comes from and where it goes. Talk to people who knew her over the years, friend and foe. Do a criminal record check in Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. There may be nothing there, but if there is, voters deserve to know. In other words, do your job. Just like you did in freeing Thompson's brother, Steven Crawford, from prison for murder. Is that why she wants to remove whites from the police management ranks, as revenge for her brother's unjust arrest?

I rarely quote George W. Bush, but I would urge the Patriot-News to recall his statement condemning, "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Treat Thompson just as you would a controversial white candidate. No worse, no better, just what is appropriate. Just do your job as a newspaper.

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

The Patriot-News today quotes Randy King, a consultant and former aide to Mayor Stephen R. Reed of Harrisburg, as saying his former boss is seriously considering a write-in campaign. King makes the astute observation that only 25 percent of Harrisburg's 28,000 registered voters cast ballots in the primary election, and that the general election remains "wide open."

I've made the same point several times. I don't deny the difficulty of a write-in campaign, but I hope Reed goes for it. Perhaps there is a deal with Mindlin to drop out of the Republican side of the race? Stranger things have happened in politics.

Posted by David at 06:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm heading out to California on Friday for the marriage of my cousin Barb up in the mountains above Half Moon Bay. This is a "normal" marriage to a guy, but among the guests will be my sister Gretchen and her lesbian partner Patty, who I'll be meeting for the first time. They were among the 18,000 gays and lesbians in California who managed to get married in the Golden State before the hateful Proposition 8 shut the door. The California Supreme Court upheld Prop. 8 today, but did not invalidate any of the marriages performed before Prop. 8 passed, stoked by Mormon money and contributions from rightwing conservatives around the country. That included $450,000 from Elsa Prince, mother of Blackwater mercenary CEO Erik Prince from our hometown of Holland, Michigan.

California will probably overturn Prop 8 in another referendum in a year or two. The trend is definitely against so-called "defense of marriage" laws aimed at gays and lesbians. The issue is dying out, slowly. President Obama even had someone people involved in progressive politics have told me is a "quiet lesbian," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, on his shortlist for the Supreme Court nomination. She didn't get it, but Obama was clearly ready to take on the gay bashers should her sexual orientation become an issue. It's all rather silly, really. In another 50 years folks will wonder what all the fuss was about.

Posted by David at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you haven't had an opportunity to hear Linda Thompson's victory speech after the results came in last week from the Democratic primary in Harrisburg, you can listen to it here. She is consumed with anger and arrogance, dissing Mayor Steve Reed, whom she defeated in the primary, Reed's city council candidates, including Patty Kim, and Les Ford, the other black candidate in the mayoral primary. She claims to have seen Ford, for whom she had nothing but contempt, sleeping in Reservoir Park on Election Day.

So instead of trying to build bridges with the people she will need to work with if she wins in the general election in November, Thompson was busy burning them. She has people scared, and the stories about her are flying. Some--they can't be described or even hinted at here without solid documentary proof--are so bad that it is hard to see how her candidacy could continue if they proved true. Scurrilous stories are the mother's milk of American politics, and sometimes they are totally false. But other times they aren't.

Posted by David at 08:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

White panic in Harrisburg over the prospect of "Mayor Linda Thompson" may have reached a fever pitch this morning with word that Reed did not get enough Republican write-in votes to capture the Republican nomination for mayor. He could still attempt to mount a write-in campaign, and I would be there with my pencil, but he faces steep odds against success. Under state law, he can't run as an independent. I don't know if he could run under the Green Party banner; probably not.

Nevin Mindlin, a former Democrat from a United Steelworkers Union family, is now the best hope for stopping Thompson from getting control of the city and its $60 million budget. I'm sure they're doing high-fives at Rhoads & Sinon, the city law firm that financed her campaign. Mindlin will need Reed's support and, just as important, the support of Reed's financial backers to have a hope of defeating Thompson. As I've pointed out before, Thompson won in a primary from which Republicans and independents were excluded. That won't be true in the general election.

The other possibility is that something turns up in Thompson's past that forces her to withdraw from the ticket. She remains largely unexplored territory for good investigative journalism. Did you know, for example, that she is the sister of Steven Crawford, who was convicted of murder and spent 20 years in prison before being freed in response to a Patriot-News investigation that raised serious questions about his guilt? The split between her and Reed is said to stem from the financial benefits she derived from the lawsuit her brother filed and won against the city while she was on city council.

There are also rumors about enticements--free lunches--offered to black voters in Allison Hill to get them to turn out to vote for her. If true, this was illegal and ought to be investigated by District Attorney Marsico, although prosecutors in Pennsylvania are extremely reluctant to pursue these sorts of cases. I don't think anyone has ever been removed from office for even blatant, serious campaign violations.

I'm sure Reed is having sleepless nights wondering why he didn't do this or didn't do that. He should have campaigned harder and made Thompson the issue. But we still owe him a debt of gratitude for having turned Harrisburg around.

Posted by David at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Stephen R. Reed's loss to City Council President Linda Thompson in the Democratic primary was topic number one when I encountered neighbors on the street yesterday. People are in a state of shock, and waiting to see if Reed had enough write-in and absentee ballots to win the Republican nomination. The word is that many of the city's business and other leaders are urging Reed to fight on if he does.

If he chooses to run, and I hope he does, Reed will be in a much better position to win in November. Republicans (save those who wrote him in) and independents, of which there are many in the city, were barred from voting in the Democratic primary. In November, the entire city of Harrisburg can decide whether Thompson, of whom "nutjob" is one of the nicer comments posted in online chat forums, should lead the city and its $60 million budget in place of Reed.

Reed, who is white, owes a fall campaign to the many people, white and black, who have devoted their careers to working for him and who can expect to be axed if Thompson, who is black, becomes mayor. This was a racial campaign, and Thompson is already on record vowing to replace Dr. Gerald Kohn, the white superintendent of the Harrisburg School District, with an "urban superintendent," i.e., black. You can be sure she will end mayoral control of the schools and return control to the same crowd that ran it into the ground in the first place. Similarly, white police managers like Chief of Police Charles Kellar can expect to be axed given Thompson's public statements about wanting to have more black police captains and other managers.

I heard criticism of Reed among my neighbors for not running an active enough campaign, of resting on his laurels and assuming he would win again as he had so many times before since 1982. I think that's a valid complaint. Perhaps he was tired, especially of having to deal with the hostility of Thompson and her supporters in City Council week after week after week. But again, he owes it to his many supporters to wage a fierce campaign in the fall if he gets that Republican nomination.

Posted by David at 06:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Stephen R. Reed, in office since 1982, lost the race for renomination on the Democratic Party decisively last night to City Council President Linda Thompson. The vote totals were 3,546 for Thompson, 2,511 for Reed, and 403 for Les Ford. Reed may still get the Republican nomination depending on whether all or nearly all of the 435 write-in votes on the Republican side were for him. Nevin Mindlin, the Republican candidate, received 422 votes. Absentee votes could be crucial here. More on this in a minute.

In stark terms, this was a white vs. black election, Reed, of course, being the white. Some black voters in the city have chafed for years at their inability to translate their slight majority in the city into electoral control. Reed faced a black woman in a past election who told her supporters it was "our turn." White voters were in shock last night. While some of the "I'm going to move" sentiments heard will fade with time, they reflect a real fear that the city will decline precipitously under Thompson given her televised performances as city council president. One person joked to me that anyone who voted for Thompson must not have cable television.

Why did Thompson win? She out-hustled Reed in getting her black supporters to the polls, while at the same time drawing a few white protest votes even in my own Shipoke neighborhood. We don't know how ugly and how racial her appeal was behind closed doors, but I heard from a white poll worker that one black voter and Thompson supporter proclaimed on arrival that Reed "didn't hire blacks," which is, on the face of it, ludicrous. Thompson was smart enough not to make blatant racial appeals that would have scared white voters, but the code words were all there. Another interesting question: did Reed's presumed gayness also become an issue for blacks?

Why did Reed lose the Democratic nomination so decisively? Turn-out killed him. Only 7,333 total votes were cast in a city of about 47,000 population. Reed's campaign organization may have bred over-confidence when it released the results of a poll in late April showing Reed well ahead of Thompson, but with a sizeable undecided vote. There was a follow-up poll--I know, because I participated in it--but those results were not released, to the best of my knowledge. Another factor in Reed's loss was the poor performance of the other black candidate, Les Ford, who had been expected to split the black vote with Thompson. Instead, he drew an embarassingly small vote, less than the Republican Mindlin. Reed's own issues, with the incinerator and the Museum of the American West, of course hurt him as well.

Assuming Reed wins the Republican nomination, will he accept it and run in the fall? I suspect the answer is yes. Will this anger some people? Yes. Is it unfair or unsporting? No, or no more so than only allowing a handful of registered Democrats to determine the city's future in the primary. The general election, which is open to all registered voters, is the only legitimate and fair forum for deciding Harrisburg's future. If he runs, Reed will have to take off the gloves and let the public know who Linda Thompson really is

Harrisburg must not become Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna, and white voters must not delude themselves that Thompson won't really be all that bad.. Remember back to 2000 when some of you consoled yourselves that George W. Bush couldn't be that bad a President.

Posted by David at 05:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Stephen R. Reed of Harrisburg is nobody's idea of perfect. Yet I feel comfortable with him as mayor and hope he wins the Democratic nomination tomorrow.

What I value about Reed is his experience in running the city, but more than that, his grand vision for how it can become a better place to live. Where too many mayors are willing to play only timid defense, looking merely to cut expenses and try to keep their town's head above water, Reed plays offense and seeks to build, to add to Harrisburg. The National Civil War Museum, which has been commended in the New York Times, is a good example. The collections are first-rate and so is the visiting experience. Eventually it will be a major tourist destination among the Civil War set. Ah, but what about the "Wild West Museum" critics ask? That may have been overreaching on Reed's part, but when I saw the list of artifacts that Linda Thompson and her allies on City Council forced him to dump on the market at a loss, I was sorry I would never see them in a top-knotch professional museum.

Another example of his vision is Restaurant Row downtown. While some may protest that individual entrepreneurs built those eating establishments and bars, the construction of the city parking garage on Second Street in the late 1990s gave patrons a convenient place to park and was critical to the downtown resurgence. Reed encouraged Restaurant Row and was reasonable on the noise issue. When I first moved to Harrisburg in 1987, the idea that the city would ever have downtown nightlife beyond a couple of isolated bars was laughable. No more.

And of course, living in the Shipoke neighborhood along the Susquehanna, I want Reed to be in charge of flood warning and recovery. If a flood threatens, we know the city will distribute accurate information on a timely basis. We pay several hundred dollars less annually in flood insurance (when a policy tops $1,000 a year, this is meaningful) because the city takes steps encouraged by the National Flood Insurance Program to mitigate risk. We know Reed will devote the full weight of city resources to helping us recover if there is a flood, as he did in 1996 and 2004.

Reed's major failing has been the Harrisburg Incinerator mess, a major financial catastrophe for the city and ratepayers. This problem is a mixture of contractor incompetence and and throwing good money after bad. It seems as immune to easy solution as the Vietnam War was in the 1960s, and will probably go on at least as long. I'd rather have Reed trying to fix the incinerator than Linda Thompson.

So Reed has my vote, and I suspect he will win again, though perhaps not by as big a margin as in the past. Every Reed supporter needs to vote tomorrow.

Posted by David at 05:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So it's been what, two months since I last wrote something? Blame the demands of the graduate course in documentary filmmaking I'm taking at George Washington University and some ambivalence about continuing By the River. I finally decided there was just too much I want to write about to let it slip away. The film course is coming to what appears to be a disappointing end. More on that later.

The primary election is Tuesday, and for residents of my neighborhood the big question, the ONLY question really is whether Mayor Stephen R. Reed is re-elected to another term. Reed signs dot the neighborhood, and while support is not universal or wholehearted, few look forward to a Mayor Linda Thompson or Mayor Les Ford, the two black candidates.

Thompson, president of city council, who was exposed Friday as a school tax delinquent on the building occupied by her Loveship non-profit, is the most feared candidate. If she gets elected, we can look forward to Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna. Ford, who advocated closing the nationally-renowned Civil War Museum and selling off the artifacts, seems a decent enough fellow but his comments on the museum were irresponsible pandering. He's backed off somewhat now, saying no new museums. There is a fourth candidate, Nevin Mindlin, the Republican, whose only function seems to be to make it harder for Reed to get the Republican nomination on write-ins.

Reed should be okay. A poll released about a week ago showed him with a comfortable lead, albeit with a large enough percentage of undecideds to swing the election to Thompson if she got nearly all of them. That isn't likely to happen unless she can get Obama-level turn-out among her black supporters and maybe not even then. The poll found that Reed supporters are far more likely to go out and vote than Thompson supporters. An interesting question not addressed by the poll is how Harrisburg's growing Asian community will vote. Reed has paid attention to them. Thompson hasn't. If they come out to vote for Councilwoman Patty Kim they'll likely vote for Reed, too.

Another issue is campaign finance. Thompson and Ford simply don't have the resources to overturn a longtime incumbent. I could be surprised Tuesday, but I suspect Reed will win the Democratic nomination and go on to another, and probably final term as Harrisburg's mayor. Reed isn't perfect, but if there's another flood, I want him in charge, not Thompson.

Posted by David at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What a choice.

Is it better to have U.S. Sen Arlen Specter run in 2010 as an Independent and be handily re-elected, thus preserving all the benefits to Pennsylvania of his seniority? Or better to have him seek re-election as a Republican, get thwacked in the primary by Pat Toomey or Peg Luksik, and then have Toomey or Luksik thwacked by whomever the Democrats put up to run?

Decisions, decisions. Specter told the Hill newspaper today that he's considering running as an Independent in 2010 to avoid a Republican primary he will probably, though not certainly, lose. Pennsylvania law doesn't allow him to run as an Independent if he first runs in a party primary, unlike some states.

Specter is one of the last of a dying breed, the moderate Republican. Nearly all Republicans in Congress now are rightwing conservatives, which Specter certainly is not. In the Hill article he speaks wistfully of making the GOP once again a national party instead of a regional party based in the Bible Belt South and Mormon Utah and Idaho. That could happen, but only after the GOP undergoesa thorough electoral thwacking that reduces their Congressional numbers to Socialist Party levels. The name will disappear, but it will be America's second, somewhat more conservative party.

America has figured out it doesn't like what Republicans stand for, and that's a hard opinion to turn around. The "moral" issues aren't working for the GOP anymore as people worry more about their jobs and health care than whether the gay couple down the street want to get legally married, or whether the Hispanic man doing work on their neighbor's house is a legal or illegal immigrant. And good riddance. The Republican right has hurt America for the past 30 years, and we need to get back to real liberal democracy.

Specter has been urged by Gov. Rendell, Sen. Casey, and Vice President Biden to switch to the Democratic side, but he doesn't show any inclination to do so. Don't be too surprised if he changes his mind. Specter is a consumate survivor, quite willing to spend the year before an election making people forget what they don't like about him. In this case, that he's a member of the party of George W. Bush.

Posted by David at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is notable for two things: the advent of Barack Obama, and the end of the eight-year national nightmare named George W. Bush.

It won't look like Bush is being ridden out of town on a rail, but he is, minus the tar and feathers that usually accompanied that honor in our 19th century frontier past. His approval rating is 22 percent, the worst of any President since polling began.

But we should thank Bush for one thing and one thing only: he has thoroughly discredited the rightwing conservative movement that began with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. Republicans won't have a realistic chance to reclaim the Presidency until they return to the pre-Reagan moderate conservatism of the GOP exemplified by Gerald Ford. You can't run a national party based on Bible thumpers, snake handlers, and cut-taxes-to-zero advocates.

I think back to that famous Doonesbury strip that ran a day or so after Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. It showed the White House with the sun shining, squirrels romping, and birds singing. No words, but everybody knew what it meant. It means the same thing today.

Our long national nightmare is over. Barack Obama is here.

Posted by David at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Most young people watching the Obama inaugural concert today on HBO probably didn't pick up on the significance of that last, aged, grey-haired performer who came out with Bruce Springsteen to sing the Woody Guthrie anthem, "This Land Is Your Land."

I saw Pete Seeger walk out with his banjo and said to myself that finally, the McCarthy Era in American politics is over. Seeger, a renowned American folk singer, was a Communist Party member in his youth, and was blacklisted from television and radio for years beginning in the 1950s. Like many American Communist Party members, he later abandoned his support of the Soviet Union while still advocating socialist programs to help common folks.

And there he was at age 89, leading the huge crowd in that left wing song, even the two verses about private property and people on relief that are usually omitted to make it more palatable to people who worry about that sort of thing. I'm afraid Seeger is going to die tomorrow, finally redeemed after all these years in the eyes of the country he loves.

So no, it's not just the execrable George W. Bush who exits the scene this week. It is also the final curtain call for the red baiters who have polluted American life for the last 75 years. It all seems so silly now.

Posted by David at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania probably won't end up having endured two complete terms of frustration, unlike fellow Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. But not by much. Both Rendell and Granholm were re-elected to their second terms by large margins, and saw Barack Obama win their states in the 2008 election by large margins, but have seen their programs frustrated by diehard Republican taxcutters and pro-business conservatives in control of their respective state Senates.

Two articles in today's Patriot-News in Harrisburg serve to highlight Rendell's frustration. One is about Senate Republican footdragging on confirming John Hanger as secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection. Rendell submitted his nomination to the Senate in August and there it sits.

Hanger, 51, is the founder of the Penn Future public policy group in Harrisburg. It champions the environment, and has made a special target of the coal-fired power plants in western Pennsylvania and the pollution they too often emit. One of the triumphs of DEP in the Rendell years was enacting regulations to control deadly mercury emissions from these plants. Hanger and then-DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty won approval for these regs in 2006 over the steadfast opposition of Sen. Mary Jo White, R-Venango, a champion of the coal industry and chairman of the same committee that must now consider Hanger's nomination. Hmmm.

I first got to know White as a Patriot-News reporter in the early part of the decade when she and Sen. Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia, were steadfast supporters of telecom deregulation. That was before she moved up to chair the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, and I was frankly shocked that someone who was so pro-public interest on telecom issues could become a roadblock to important environmental legislation. But she did. They mine coal in her district, you see. White favored weaker mercury regulations proposed by the coal industry that would have allowed polluters to buy their way out of controlling mercury.

The other interesting article in the Patriot-News today is an op-ed piece by former Dauphin County Commissioner Lowman Henry, now chairman and CEO of the conservative Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion Research of Lower Paxton Twp. The group was created in the 1990s with funding from Richard Mellon Scaife around the same time Scaife was funding the War Against the Clintons and the rise of the modern conservative movement. But I digress.

Henry is the lead apostle for the absolute dogma of today's Republican Party that taxes can never be raised, only cut. He believes that fiscal tomfoolery by Republicans in Washington, not the George W. Bush nightmare, led to big Democratic gains last year. His article praises Senate President Pro-Tem Joseph Scarnatti, a Republican, for ruling out raising taxes to close Pennsylvania's looming budget deficit. Scarnatti is also lieutenant governor of the state, a position he assumed after the death of Democratic Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll, and Henry is beside himself with the idea of Scarnatti acting to "rival Rendell as the face of state government."

It's always important to remember that Pennsylvania is required by law to have a balanced budget, and that if you don't raise taxes to fill a budget deficit, you have to cut aid to schools, limit plowing of roads in winter, close libraries, things like that. Pennsylvania has a very lean state government for its size. There isn't a significant amount of "fat" to cut. Henry would prefer that you, the public, be hurt by the budget deficit rather than the business fat cats who fund the Lincoln Institute.

When Henry refers in his articles to the "people of Penn's Woods" who will supposedly be hurt by a "job-crushing" tax increase (a favorite GOP adjective), you know he's not referring to the majority of the state that overwhelmingly re-elected Rendell in 2006 and picked Obama over John McCain by large margins in 2008. The majority of the Pennsylvania public likes reasonable big government, and is willing to pay reasonable taxes to fund it. The Republican majority in the state Senate should keep that in mind.

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

It's time for Rev. Rick Warren to find some face-saving excuse to step aside from delivering the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama's inaugural.

Obama got bad advice on this one. Either that or he was over-compensating for his own former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But in any case, Warren has no place on the program. Not with his far right views on gay marriage, the place of women, and other topics important to Obama's base, as outlined so well in this piece by Katha Pollitt.

Warren is not the new Rev. Billy Graham. Graham was piece of work at times, and is most associated with President Richard Nixon, but at least he knew when to avoid divisive social issues and stick to the Gospel. In the age of the Internet, a pastor's every utterance, whether to 'friendly' audiences or not, is often available at the click of a mouse. Will Warren pray "in the name of Jesus," as many evangelicals insist on doing in all instances, and thereby offend Jews and Muslims?

There are many good and decent pastors out there who support both Obama and the issues important to a majority of Americans. Pick one of them, Mr. President.

Posted by David at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

He may have been there among the throngs of Obama fans in Grant Park in Chicago last night celebrating the Democrat's huge victory. Bill Ayers, aka "Obama's terrorist pal," told the Washington Post he planned to stroll on down, uninvited or not. If he did, perhaps accompanied by his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, I'm sure he was chuckling all the way.

Ayers, of course, became the centerpiece of John McCain's last-ditch effort to stop the Obama juggernaut. The YouTube video I just linked, viewed the morning after Obama's landslide victory, shows perhaps better than anything how out of touch McCain and the national Republican Party were with the America of the early 21st century. As one who came of age in the late 1960s, I remember Ayers, Dohrn, and the Weather Underground quite well, but I suspect that 20-somethings today are as unfamiliar with them as I was at their age with Emma Goldman, Jack Reed, and the radical leftists of the early 20th century.

Some commentators have made much of Obama being the first post-Boomer candidate for President. He was, but this election was far more about the passions of the 1960s than the elections of 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004, in which Boomers Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry were the Democratic candidates. The 2008 election finally delivered on the promise of the 1960s, the overturning of the old order begun by legions of young people.

They fought against Southern racism, demanding civil rights for blacks. They fought against the Vietnam War, viewing it, like Iraq today, as a needless and costly war of choice. And they fought to make merit, rather than skin color or other accidents of birth, a more determining factor in individual achievement. Obama's success is a tribute to their efforts.

Every movement has its fringe members, and Ayers, Dohrn, and their fellow members of Students for a Democratic Society (Weather Underground was a later splinter faction) played that role here. They plotted against the American government in the name of ending the Vietnam War and racism, and did plant bombs that occasionally went off as planned. To many, even today, they were romantic outlaws more than dangerous terrorists.

Ayers and Dohrn spent years in hiding, and when they emerged it was impossible to prosecute them, so badly had the Nixon Administration mishandled their case and violated their Constitutional rights. Whenever someone like John McCain starts railing against the radicals of the 1960s, it is helpful to remember that the excesses of the left were more than matched by the excesses of the right. Dohrn became a law professor and Ayers an educational reformer, continuing the work he had begun as a student at the University of Michigan from 1964-68.

Yes, they live in the same Chicago neighborhood as Obama and vote at the same polling place. Louis Farrakhan votes there too, by the way, as do many Chicago young professionals who live in the Shipoke-like area. Ayers and Dohrn became so conventional that they have a nameplate bearing both their last names on the front of their house, along with the house number. You can see it in the photo that accompanies this story in The New Yorker.

So as they strolled to Grant Park last night, at least in their minds, did they recall the Days of Rage, tear gas, nightsticks, and the townhouse bomb explosion? Or did they talk about how Obama would finally deliver on the better part of their dreams, of a post-racial America in which all children get a good education, have enough to eat, receive top-notch healthcare, and don't have to fight in senseless wars?

I'm betting on the latter. And I'm sure they laughed at the irony of it all.

Posted by David at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can't say they're for Obama, can't say they're not. But a couple of my neighbors put out white Christmas lights on small trees in front of their houses last night. It was Election Eve. Welcoming the One?

Vote today. No excuses!

Posted by David at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you watched Sen. John McCain on Saturday Night Live last night you had a (now) rare opportunity to see the McCain that so charmed the national press from 2000 through early 2008. Funny, willing to poke fun at himself, possessed of a wicked grin, you could hardly imagine that he was the same John McCain who authorized some of the anti-Obama ads that ran incessantly during commercial breaks on the show, at least here in central Pennsylvania.

And there's the rub. If you vote for McCain, you vote for George W. Bush and the awful ugliness of the last eight years. McCain made a deal with the devil--Bush guru Karl Rove--back in the summer, accepting a Rove acolyte to run his campaign. The ads got dirtier, Sarah Palin arrived on the scene, and McCain himself shut out the press he once so ardently courted.

But in a sense this has been good, because it was unlikely that the jocular McCain of the "Straight Talk Express" would have been the McCain who governed as President. He would have been (I'm assuming an Obama victory, but that's not exactly a stretch at this point...) unable to resist pressure from the Repubican right to continue the worst aspects of the Bush regime. And McCain has been quite clear that he would have appointed hard right justices to the Supreme Court, which would have returned America to the pre-Roosevelt era when business and conservative clerics ruled the land and the people be damned.

McCain, to be fair to Karl Rove, made many of his own worst mistakes, including acceding to the selection of the disastrous Palin after a cursory vetting process. I can't wait for the insider accounts from the McCain campaign to tell us just how nutty Palin really was.

Many Democrats still worry that Karl Rove will find some way to engineer a victory for McCain, most likely through the computerized voting machines that seem incapable of being made tamper-proof. They really should be banned. I would happily go back to paper ballots or traditional voting machines in the name of stopping an apocalyptic election theft.

Obama, again assuming he wins on Tuesday, should have an opportunity that only rarely comes to American presidents, that of making substantive, lasting, positive change in our lives. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the opportunity, and so did Lyndon B. Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. Each transformed American life in ways that still benefit us today. Roosevelt gave us unions and Social Security. Johnson restored civil rights to black Americans and made life less harsh for millions of Americans, black and white. I'm obviously leaving out a lot, but you get the idea.

How will Obama make our lives better? National health insurance is the obvious answer. That would help so many Americans--and American businesses--that I think it will win out over the forces who benefit financially from the current mess that leaves tens of millions in America without protection from crushing medical bills.

But beyond that, Obama must undo the most toxic legacy of the Bush years: he must make the federal government once again a bastion of competency and concern, a government as good as the American people. Not a government that cozies up to polluters and looks at the needs of a few wealthy business owners before it considers what would help 300 million Americans.

Tuesday will be interesting, to be sure.

Posted by David at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you watched Sen. John McCain on Saturday Night Live last night you had a (now) rare opportunity to see the McCain that so charmed the national press from 2000 through early 2008. Funny, willing to poke fun at himself, possessed of a wicked grin, you could hardly imagine that he was the same John McCain who authorized some of the anti-Obama ads that ran incessantly during commercial breaks on the show, at least here in central Pennsylvania.

And there's the rub. If you vote for McCain, you vote for George W. Bush and the awful ugliness of the last eight years. McCain made a deal with the devil--Bush guru Karl Rove--back in the summer, accepting a Rove acolyte to run his campaign. The ads got dirtier, Sarah Palin arrived on the scene, and McCain himself shut out the press he once so ardently courted.

But in a sense this has been good, because it was unlikely that the jocular McCain of the "Straight Talk Express" would have been the McCain who governed as President. He would have been (I'm assuming an Obama victory, but that's not exactly a stretch at this point...) unable to resist pressure from the Repubican right to continue the worst aspects of the Bush regime. And McCain has been quite clear that he would have appointed hard right justices to the Supreme Court, which would have returned America to the pre-Roosevelt era when business and conservative clerics ruled the land and the people be damned.

McCain, to be fair to Karl Rove, made many of his own worst mistakes, including acceding to the selection of the disastrous Palin after a cursory vetting process. I can't wait for the insider accounts from the McCain campaign to tell us just how nutty Palin really was.

Many Democrats still worry that Karl Rove will find some way to engineer a victory for McCain, most likely through the computerized voting machines that seem incapable of being made tamper-proof. They really should be banned. I would happily go back to paper ballots or traditional voting machines in the name of stopping an apocalyptic election theft.

Obama, again assuming he wins on Tuesday, should have an opportunity that only rarely comes to American presidents, that of making substantive, lasting, positive change in our lives. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the opportunity, and so did Lyndon B. Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. Each transformed American life in ways that still benefit us today. Roosevelt gave us unions and Social Security. Johnson restored civil rights to black Americans and made life less harsh for millions of Americans, black and white. I'm obviously leaving out a lot, but you get the idea.

How will Obama make our lives better? National health insurance is the obvious answer. That would help so many Americans--and American businesses--that I think it will win out over the forces who benefit financially from the current mess that leaves tens of millions in America without protection from crushing medical bills.

But beyond that, Obama must undo the most toxic legacy of the Bush years: he must make the federal government once again a bastion of competency and concern, a government as good as the American people. Not a government that cozies up to polluters and looks at the needs of a few wealthy business owners before it considers what would help 300 million Americans.

Tuesday will be interesting, to be sure.

Posted by David at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If liberals have learned anything in the last 25 years, it is they must beware of sneak attacks from the right that aim through lies and trickery to make it impossible to create the government programs we know are necessary to help the majority of Americans. Like national healthcare.

One such maneuver in Arizona, almost unnoticed until Washington Post columnist George Will wrote an article praising it, would make it illegal under Arizona law to require state residents to participate in a comprehensive health insurance program on the order of those in France or Canada, let alone a much more modest program like that in Massachusetts. Proposition 101 would, in effect, lock the current healthcare mess in place under high-flying rhetoric about "freedom of choice."

If your employer provides you with good health insurance, charges you nothing, or a modest amount for it, or you have the means to buy your own good plan, you'll have "freedom of choice." If you're in the working poor, unemployed, or your employer provides no health insurance, your "freedom" won't get you any health insurance. How many people can on their own afford a typical family health insurance plan costing $12,000 to $15,000 a year or more?

Here's how Proposition 101 is worded: "Because all people should have the right to make decisions about their health care, no law shall be passed that restricts a person's freedom of choice of private health care systems or private plans of any type. No law shall interfere with a person's or entity's right to pay directly for lawful medical services, nor shall any law impose a penalty or fine, of any type, for choosing to obtain or decline health care coverage or for participation in any particular health care system or plan."

This reminds me of U.S. Supreme Court rulings during the so-called "Lochner Era" around the turn of the 20th century. The Court regularly struck down state worker protection laws, including child labor laws, on the grounds that they violated "right of contract." In other words, they stopped you from contracting with an employer to work a low-paid, dangerous job. They stopped 8-year-olds from working in mills. You get the idea.

I've made no secret of my admiration for France's national health insurance model, which provides timely, comprehensive, no-questions-asked health care to all residents of that country in return for a modest payment of about $1,500 per year. If you are poor or unemployed, even that co-pay is waived as I understand it. Treatment delays--the great bugaboo of U.S. national healthcare opponents--are minimal to none. The French government pays for most of this through taxation. Yes, French taxes are higher than American taxes, but you get something for them other than senseless wars of choice.

Proposition 101 would bar even efforts by the state of Arizona to place reasonable regulations on health insurance plans. The key words are "private plans of any types." So if a health insurance company wants to offer a plan with crappy coverage and lots of trick clauses that allow them to deny coverage if you get sick, that would be its right under Proposition 101. You have complete freedom to be deceived or cheated.

I'm sure the proponents of Proposition 101 are counting on cheap rhetoric, widespread public misunderstanding about the French and Canadian healthcare systems, and outright deception to get this benighted proposal past voter scrutiny. Those who benefit financially from the current health care mess are desperate to stop likely President Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress from finally ending their gravy train.

Don't be deceived.

Posted by David at 06:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

History never really repeats itself, but it is often interesting to look at parallels between a politician of one era and a politician of another. Character types often repeat themselves in remarkably similar ways from one era to the next.

The recent revelation on Politico.com that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, aka "Hockey Mom to the People," had been outfitted at party expense with $150,000 in new clothing for the fall campaign has prompted an orgy of predictions that this revelation would finish Palin with swing voters and even the Republican base. And it may well do that, although she was plummeting in the popularity polls even before the clothes horse stampede.

No one that I know of has drawn the obvious parallel that Palin is recreating the life of Eva Peron, the First Lady of Argentina from 1946-52. Known as Evita to her adoring working class crowds (Madonna played her in the film version of Evita), she dressed regally in European fashions. If that seemed out of place for someone dedicated to the interests of the poor, Evita would argue back that her followers expected it of her. She was living the life they wanted to but could not. Makes a certain amount of crazy sense.

In this historical parallel game, Sen. John McCain becomes Juan Peron, the President of Argentina and Evita's husband. Peron was 24 years older than Evita, while McCain is 28 years older than Palin. Close enough to keep the game alive. And here's where the game really gets interesting: in 1951, Evita attempted to become her husband's vice president.

As Wikipedia puts it: "In 1951, Evita set her sights on earning a place on the ballot as candidate for vice-president. This move angered many military leaders who despised Evita and her increasing powers within the government. According to the Argentine Constitution, the Vice President automatically succeeds the President in the event of the President's death. The possibility of Evita becoming president in the event of Juan Perón's death was not something the military could accept."

Substitute Gen. Colin Powell for the Argentine military and the parallel continues. But unlike in America, Evita withdrew from the ticket under pressure and died of cancer a year later. So there you have it: history never really repeats itself exactly.

And no, this isn't sexism. One conservative commentator argued that no one would pay attention if a male Democratic candidate splurged on clothes at Brooks Brothers. Probably not. As an occasional Brooks Brothers customer, I can tell you that a male candidate could be outfitted there for far less than $150,000. Brooks Brothers suits typically cost just under $1,000 each. Let's assume the candidate needs 10 of those, so we're up to $10,000. Add 10 white shirts at $75 each, and the total reaches $10,750. Add 10 ties at $60 apiece and we're at $11,350. Men don't need a lot of shoes, so we'll add four pairs of dress shoes at a liberal $350 apiece. Now we've spent $12,750. And looking really good, too.

No, this is about an over-developed sense of entitlement, which Eva Peron (and Imelda Marcos) had in spades and, it seems, Sarah Palin does as well.

Posted by David at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent court ruling in Lebanon, Pa., that "soccer mom" Meleanie Hain has a legal right to carry a handgun in a holster at her five-year-old daughter's soccer games has terrified other parents and left soccer league officials scrambling for a legal way they can keep Hain away from games. So far, they haven't found one. Judge Robert Eby criticized her for poor judgment, but in my opinion that's just mother's milk to gun zealots, feeding their persecution fantasies and making them heroes in their own mind.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 ruling that the Second Amendment supposedly creates an "individual" right to own a firearm (for the first 225 years of the U.S. Constitution, courts had consistently held that the 2nd Amendment only established the right of states to their own armies, i.e., National Guards). Even conservative legal scholars have criticized this decision as driven by rightwing politics instead of good legal scholarship.

Very few people have a legitimate need to carry a handgun, and Mrs. Hain doesn't appear to be one of them. That's what police are for. The argument that crime could happen anywhere and all people need to carry a handgun is the first step down the road to anarchy. Overall violent crime in America has been in decline for many years. Do we really want Mrs. Hain deciding who needs to be shot? There are enough problems when police (as they must) make this life-and-death decision. Here's to the hope that a way can be found to keep her and her like away from youth sporting events.

Posted by David at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy official Columbus Day to you all. The weather in Harrisburg, Pa., looks to be beautiful again, and Sen. Barack Obama appears headed toward an electoral vote landslide.

Go to Electoral-Vote.com if you don't believe me. This is one of several similar sites which aggregates polling data from the 50 states and keeps track of who is up and who is down. They say that if the election was held today, Obama would likely win 343 electoral votes, Sen. John McCain 184.

Of the 343 electoral votes pegged for Obama, 235 are considered "strong." That means he needs just 35 more to win the Presidency. He is leading in the states pegged for him that are not in the "strong" category, just not by as much.

What's interesting is that some of the states in the former Confederacy still counted for McCain are sliding toward the Obama camp. In North Carolina, the polls have Obama and McCain separated by only one percentage point. McCain still leads in Georgia and Mississippi, but by margins way less than George W. Bush received in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Black voter turn-out will be the key in all the Southern states.

Florida, which like North Carolina has received many Northern transplants, is counted for Obama. He leads McCain here by 4 percentage points, too close to count as a "strong" state, especially given what happened here in the 2000 election. Obama is leading McCain in Virginia by 51-45 percent, and in West Virginia by 50-42 percent.

In the north, Pennsylvania is comfortably in the Obama column. In Ohio, Obama leads by a not-comfortable 49-46 percent. All of the Northeast is comfortably in the Obama camp except for Maine, where he leads McCain by just five points.

Electoral-Vote.com also shows that if the election was held today, the Democrats would end up with 59 seats, one short of the number needed to create a filibuster-proof majority. Obama will need that to bring about the change the country needs, but I have a feeling that the tide is with him and he'll get that last Senate seat--or more.

Posted by David at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Did you notice? Sarah Palin received NOT ONE tough question from moderator Gwen Ifill in the vice presidential debate tonight.

Nothing about the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing about, "I can see Russia from my house." Nothing about her vehement opposition to abortion and stem cell research. Nothing about her demand that "Intelligent Design" be taught alongside evolution in high school biology classes. Nothing about firing the director of the Alaska State Police because he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, then involved in a bitter child custody dispute with her sister. Nothing but softball questions.

Ifill, a former New York Times reporter who now works for PBS, appears to have been thoroughly cowed by the rightwing attacks on her credibility that preceded the debate. Her "sin" in their eyes was to have a book coming out in January that included Sen. Barack Obama as one of four "breakthrough" black politicians. Which, win or lose, he is.

Ifill failed to keep Palin on topic, admittedly a tough task. Palin simply didn't answer questions she didn't like or couldn't answer, and at one point boasted that she wasn't going to be bound by the questions asked but would instead "tell my story to the American people." Palin showed that when she is coached for several weeks she can sound competent on stage. Why can't she do the same in an interview with Katie Couric?

Biden generally did well, better than I hoped. He smiled too much, though, and should have denounced Palin for accusing Obama of "waving the white flag of surrender" by wanting to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. That was despicable. I think she knew Biden was going easy on her and decided to chance taking a few cheap shots to please her handlers. It was gratifying to see that CBS's audience of undecideds showed (via their Nielsen meters) a sharp negative reaction to Palin's slur.

And Palin's voice. The "Fargo" voice. The dropped 'g's and the "betcha's." My younger daughter, age 11, finally announced that Palin's voice was quite annoying. She stuck out the entire debate, though, and I'm proud of her for that.

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

On paper, Sen. Joe Biden should wipe the floor with Gov. Sarah Palin in the vice presidential debate tonight in St. Louis. He is an experienced and respected U.S. Senator who heads the Foreign Relations Committee. Palin, on the other hand, has managed to make cringe-worthy remarks on each of the few times the McCain campaign has allowed her to speak to the press, most notably in the recent Katie Couric interview.

But Biden is prone to what I'll call "honest gaffes" in which the vocal cords get out ahead of the brain synapses. A recent example of this was when he commented that President Frankin D. Roosevelt spoke "on television" to the American people about the Great Depression. Of course, he meant FDR's famous "Fireside Chats" on radio. He knew that. He just misspoke himself. The danger is that this sort of a gaffe can prove a distraction to his and Barack Obama's overall message.

Not that I think it's going to matter. Obama is surging in the polls, taking a significant lead over McCain overall and in important swing states like Pennsyvania, Ohio, and Florida. I was driving through Hampden Twp. in West Shore suburban Harrisburg yesterday and was pleased at the number of Obama yard signs I saw in this Republican stronghold. If Obama can keep up the good work, our eight-year national nightmare that began with the stolen election in 2000 may soon be over.

Posted by David at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Barack Obama did what he had to do in his initial debate with John McCain.

He stood up to McCain's repeated taunts and delivered cogent arguments in support of the foreign policies he would embrace as President. Whether you agree or disagree with his positions, he argued them well and didn't ever flounder. Unlike McCain, Obama didn't mangle the names of foreign heads of state or veer off on weird tangents, such as when McCain tried to make "watch Ukraine" the new national watchwords. The CBS audience meter showed a decided spike for Obama when he drove home the point that McCain had supported the Iraq War from the start and helped spread Bush's nonsense about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

My only disappointment in Obama's performance was his embrace of the "Russia all bad, Georgia all good" argument that McCain and his neo-conservative supporters have been advancing since Russia moved troops into South Ossetia to defend the population there against Georgian aggression. I wish he would have thrown more caveats into his support for Georgia. McCain again voiced support for bringing Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO, which should increase the risk of a needless and bloody war with Russia by quite a bit.

The debate was nearly as much about economics as it was about foreign policy. I credit Obama with keeping the economic focus on the middle class and how they are struggling. McCain probably solidified his support with the "cut taxes and cut government programs" crowd who don't care if America doesn't solve its problems as long as they're not inconvenienced. But I doubt if he won much support among average Americans struggling with layoffs and no health insurance.

No knockout punches were landed by either candidate, but Obama won on points by sounding smart and informed and not like a babe in the woods on the important foreign policy issues of the day. That's supposed to be McCain's strong point, at least if you ignore a lot of things.

Posted by David at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Project Censored, which has been around for 32 years, has released its annual list of the top 25 "censored" stories, meaning those that haven't gotten the attention of the media but which seem like they ought to have.

Topping the list is the allegation that 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. occupation of their country. Bringing up the rear is the claim that former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer was brought down by the Bush Administration (with help from his dalliance with a prostitute) because of his war against the sub-prime mortgage mess now making headlines and giving John McCain an excuse to maybe duck tonight's debate with Barack Obama.

Project Censored picks their "censored" stories from a leftist perspective, but whether you agree or disagree with their choices, they do make you think.

Posted by David at 06:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So on the day that new polls show Barack Obama significantly widening his lead over John McCain, in large part because the public is terrified of the tanking economy and doesn't believe McCain has a clue, the Arizona senator dramatically "suspends" his campaign and asks that the Presidential debate scheduled for Friday night be postponed for the supposed good of the country. He wants to work with Obama to craft a consensus on a bail-out plan for the fat-cat bankers who got us into this mess, preferably without inconveniencing them in any way.

And when would the first debate be held? Why, it would be on Oct. 2 in place of the vice presidential debate. When would the vice presidential debate be held? Uh, they're working on that. At a later date. Sometime. Maybe during Game 7 of the World Series.

Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania pointed out to the New York Times that it was highly unlikely Congress would be in session on Friday at 9 p.m., when the first debate is scheduled. Obama, who has wisely rejected McCain's call to suspend his own campaign and postpone the first debate, said being President is nothing if not about multi-tasking several crises at once. He said the American people deserve to hear how he or McCain would handle the Wall Street crisis when one of them takes office in January.

This is a transparent political ploy by McCain to draw attention away from his slumping poll numbers and, even more importantly, to stop the vice presidential debate between his ball-and-chain, er, running mate, Sarah Palin and Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden. Judging by her halting performance in her interview with Katie Couric of CBS News broadcast tonight, McCain has real cause for concern.

Posted by David at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a fun new drinking game. Watch Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric of CBS News. Everytime she drops a "g," take a drink of your favorite adult beverage. You'll be sloshed in no time! Last man or woman standing wins! If nothing else you will numb the pain and temporarily ease the gut-wrenching fear you have that Palin might become President.

Posted by David at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Obama leads McCain by 52 to 43 percent among likely voters in the latest Washington Post poll. Voters believe he is more likely to deal with the current economic woes than McCain. And they are figuring out that Palin gives them the willies.

Don't get over-confident...

Posted by David at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After four weeks on the ticket, Republican John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin still isn't deemed ready to meet the press. The McCain campaign tried to exclude all reporters from a "meeting" Palin had with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. They only intended to let in cameras, and only for half a minute, but CNN then announced it was pulling out its cameras and Palin's handlers relented. Sort of.

You have to understand that most polticians allow reporters to attend and ask questions at photo ops. Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania is famous for it. But Palin is obviously deemed by her handlers to be so vulnerable to saying something stupid about a whole range of things that they can't risk letting her "inform" the public except through carefully scripted statements she reads off a teleprompter.

This is no laughing matter. What if McCain drops dead or is incapacitated in his first month in office? Do you want Palin running the country and controlling our destinies? In truth, she would be a figurehead president controlled by lobbyists. Much like McCain already is.

But it's looking better for Obama. He's doing well in key polls.

Posted by David at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We find ourselves at an odd juncture where economics have overtaken politics, where the collapse of Wall Street titans like Lehman Brothers has, at least for now, pushed McCain, Palin, Obama, and Biden out of the main headlines of the day.

That will change this Friday, of course, when the first of the Presidential Debates is held. But for now, Wall Street has our attention. No one has jumped out of a building, other than figuratively, but the collapse and the $700 billion no-strings bail-out proposed by the Bush Administration has changed, perhaps permanently, the tenor of the campaign. The only real questions being asked anymore are whether the candidates support the bail-out or support it with modifications.

Just as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, wiped out the obsessions of the summer of 2001, most notably the Chandra Levy case, Wall Street's woes have terminated our current obsessions over Sarah Palin's qualifications, or lack thereof, and the pressing question of whether Obama is really a radical Muslim anti-Christ. Yes, the anti-Christ. Toss that around while you're passing the rattlesnakes. I hope Palin, a rightwing religious zealot, is asked directly at the Vice Presidential Debate whether she believes this garbage.

And there I go, obsessing about Palin when George W. Bush wants to hand $700 billion to Wall Street to repair the woes the Republicans created with their "government bad, deregulation good" schemes over the past eight or so years.

Posted by David at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kudos to the folks at NarcoNews.com in Alaska for digging out the story about the tanning bed Gov. Sarah Palin had installed in the Governor's Mansion in Juneau. They got a tip from a citizen and broke a story which, while not as cancerous (in metaphorical terms) as some of the others, raises a lot of interesting questions.

But first, tanning beds are those sarcophogus-shaped machines in which one lies down to get an off-season tan. I used one myself a couple of times when I was heading down to Latin America and wanted to get a base tan to reduce my chances of getting a bad burn. NarcoNews quotes a Fairbanks tanning salon operator as saying a tanning bed costs upwards of $35,000 and the electric work is extra. Interestingly, the mansion has had a lot of electric work lately, but an official spokesman insists it was merely to bring the house up to code. No doubt.

Palin's spokesman says she paid for the tanning bed herself, which is what you'd better say if your the reform queen and don't want to go to reform school. Well, I guess adults can't do that. Using taxpayer funds would turn your reform credentials into something looking like a bad application of Tanfastic, if they still market that stuff. Accepting it as a gift would mean disclosing it on her financial disclosure form, since its value is higher than $150. That's Alaska law. NarcoNews says there's no mention of it on her form.

So we are left with the possibility that she dropped $35,000 on an impulse purchase, which is nice if you can manage it on a salary of about $115,000 a year. But none of her kids appear likely to incur any college expenses, so maybe Palin was feeling flush. Of course, there's that shotgun wedding to pay for, but how much is a box of shells?

All kidding aside, the steady drip, drip, drip of embarrassing revelations about Palin can't be helping her standing among voters. Or at least I hope.

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

John McCain, reeling from harsh reaction to his Hoover-like comment today that "the fundamentals of the American economy are strong," unveiled what may be a new attack line against the Democrats: that criticism of the sad state of the economy means you're "against" American workers.

Now that isn't exactly what he said, but it's the clear implication of his follow-up comments. To wit: “My opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals of America are strong…. Our workers have always been the strength of our economy, and they remain the strength of our economy today.”

Given that for the last five years any criticism of the Iraq War meant you were "against" the troops fighting the war--a ludicrous argument, but one hammered home by Republicans--it only stands to reason that the next falsehood from McCain would be an accusation that if Obama criticizes the state of the Bush economy, he must have contempt for American workers.

Don't think it's possible? Too stupid for words? Let's see what you think in a few weeks. I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect I'm not.

Posted by David at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been thinking a lot about the false testimony given by members of the Dover (Pa.) Area School Board during the Intelligent Design trial in Harrisburg in 2005, and how it relates to the strategy of lying being employed by Republican presidential nominee John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin to burnish their own records and tarnish that of Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

To refresh your memory, the Dover school board was taken over by religious fundamentalists in the early part of the decade. By the fall of 2003, their control was complete. A year later, they took steps to introduce their conservative religious beliefs into the teaching of high school biology at Dover. Specifically, students were required to listen to a statement read by school officials (science teachers refused, at great risk to their jobs) designed to cast doubt on Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

A group of parents sued, and the ACLU and the Pepper Hamilton law firm in Philadelphia took their case on a pro bono basis. When members of the school board were deposed under oath on Jan. 3, 2005, they spun a web of lies about their deeds and motivations, denying, for example, that they ever talked about creationism at public meetings, in the face of a host of witnesses who said they did. They continued spinning fantasies when the case went to trial in the fall of 2005. They lost utterly, were thrown out of office by Dover citizens (who were stuck with a million dollars in legal fees), and were denounced for their false testimony by Judge John Jones III in his ruling in the case in late 2005.

This was, I think, a case of misguided faith that they did nothing wrong triumphing over clear and easily available facts. The Dover school board members involved in the case confused faith in God with faith in themselves and their own godliness, and they went down to destruction--although the Bush Administration Justice Department has so far not lifted a finger to prosecute them for perjury.

I don't think Palin is stupid enough to believe she never supported the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she really went to Iraq like she said (the latest controversy), or that she didn't try to get her brother-in-law fired as a state trooper because a bitter child custody suit with her sister. I suspect she and McCain have cynically calculated that the voters from the religious right who worship Palin will take her denials on faith. They need these voters to have any chance to win.

McCain's spokesman told Politico today that they turned to the dark side because the press wasn't covering their "nice" campaign earlier in the summer. McCain has decided to win at any cost.

I know the Clinton haters will come crawling out from under their logs to say that he did it first. Yes, he lied about private, consensual sex. He didn't tell personally damaging lies about George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole, his electoral opponents in 1992 and 1996. That's such a big difference it's ludicrous to even spend any time discussing it. I have to laugh when I think about how newspapers ran stories during the Clinton impeachment in 1998 about how to talk to your children about what Clinton did.

Perhaps it's time for a new round of stories about how to explain to your kids that even if McCain and Palin tell blatant lies, it's not okay for them to do it

Posted by David at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Anchorage Daily News contributes another fine article about Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, this one examining her ultra-conservative religious beliefs. They weren't able to ask any new questions to Palin. The McCain campaign refused to let her answer these questions the public has a right to know.

Same for this accompanying article about how Palin used state funds to travel to a graduation ceremony at an overtly religious school in her hometown of Wasilla and deliver an overtly religious speech. The speech, among other things, urged students to pray for a new natural gas pipeline she favored.

Posted by David at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't expect Republican nominee for vice president Sarah Palin to meet the press anytime soon, if ever. She's the only candidate not scheduled for one of the Sunday morning talk shows tomorrow, and no interviews with major national media are in the cards anytime soon. Can the Rove-McCain team pull it off? Can they keep her from saying anything unscripted and embarrassing until the election is over? I'm not even sure she's going to debate Joe Biden. The GOP may brazenly refuse, or set unacceptable conditions for her participation. She'll be portrayed as a chicken, a lightweight, or worse, but that may be better for McCain than for her to go on national television and announce that it's God's will that McCain wins, or say anything about abortion.

And on the "qualified?" front comes word that Palin attended five colleges in six years before limping across the finish line with a journalism degree (see Joe Namath, Alabama) from the University of Idaho. Not that she apparently ever worked at the campus newspaper or TV station. But let's be real: anyone who's been to college knows 5+6 doesn't add up to "serious student." You can be sure the party girl stories are coming.

If any of you think the press is being mean, or partisan, or whatever in digging up dirt on Palin, let me give you two words: George Bush. The press, or enough of the press, didn't do its job in 2000 when Bush was pretending to be a moderate in his campaign against Al Gore. They aren't about to get fooled again, especially when Palin stands a better than even chance of succeeding to the presidency, not getting elected to it. If the press does its job, no one who casts a vote for Palin as vice president in November will be able to claim they didn't know who she really was.

Posted by David at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This just in: Republican Sen. John McCain says he'll spend his entire Presidency in a dank, 4x6-foot cell in the White House basement, just like the one where he spent his P.O.W. years in the Hanoi Hilton. "I did my best thinking there," McCain said. "There's nothing like a good beating to make you think like a Republican."

That's not true, of course, but it might as well be. Enough already. McCain's biographical film last night at the Republican National Convention, his acceptance speech, and just about every other thing said about him during the convention was heavy on the P.O.W., light on specifics of what he would do to get the country out of the mess it has been left in by George W. Bush, who wasn't mentioned by name in the speech. Laura Bush was, but not George W. Neither was abortion.

McCain touted the same economic plan that has been on his website since at least last April. He mentioned once again his plan to "change" unemployment compensation. He gave no details, but you can be sure conservative Republicans don't like the idea of you sitting around and dreaming of getting your old job back. They want to "retrain" you for something else. If you live in a small town with few opportunities, does that mean you "retrain" for McDonald's? Or move halfway across the country? Or lose your benefits if you refuse? He doesn't say. This strikes me as yet another stealth attempt by the right to eliminate or greatly reduce a tax paid by business, in this case the unemployment compensation tax, just as Bush's failed attempt to "reform" Social Security was at its heart an effort to eliminate or reduce the half of Social Security taxes paid by business.

McCain's speech struck me as almost as a valedictory, a summing up of a career more than a serious call to action. He looked old. A vigorous old, but old. With the Church Lady by his side, he will set out for one last joust against the windmill.

Posted by David at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gave a safe speech tonight in accepting the Republican nomination for vice president. It was devoid of any indication that she is a rightwing religious zealot. She was back in stealth mode, hiding her faith under a bushel. There was not a word about abortion, which she opposes in all instances, or stem cell research, or so-called Intelligent Design.

As Palin delivered her speech in her chirpy voice, smiling broadly, I kept thinking of her demanding that books be banned from the Wasilla Public Library after she became mayor in 1996, and cruelly firing the town librarian when she refused to go along. Public outrage forced her to retreat and restore the librarian to her job. And throwing her own mother-in-law under the bus in an election to succeed her as mayor because she was pro-choice.

And there was at least one moment of pure mendacity in the speech, when Palin claimed she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" from the beginning, when in fact she was for it long before she was against it and kept the money for other state projects.

The cameras several times showed the tele-prompters that Palin was reading off. Her real test will come when she goes out on the campaign trail and faces the press in unscripted situations where the McCain campaign can't control the questions she is asked. She will be asked again and again about the book banning attempt, her support if not official membership (assuming the records weren't altered) of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, and her documented, on the record support of the Bridge to Nowhere and other earmarks.

And everything else.

Posted by David at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Obviously the Republicans have been singed by the many comments, including here, about the lack of black faces in the audience at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night. I'm watching on PBS, and it seems a black or Asian face pops up every time the camera pans the crowd. Coincidence? A sudden surge of attendance by blacks eager to hear white men and women speak? Doubtful. Ringers? Perhaps. Or artful moving around of the few blacks there as delegates.

Right now, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is speaking and snarking his way through a predictable speech. And old white guys in cowboy hats are jumping up and down and yelling "Zero!" for what they have deluded themselves into believing is the sum total of Obama's experience. Giuliani is the worst. I feel like throwing something at the TV.

Now the delegates are working themselves into a frenzy, yelling "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

Posted by David at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a favorite of the religious right, is speaking right now at the Republican National Convention. He just denounced Barack Obama for going to Europe earlier this summer and bringing back supposedly dangerous "European ideas" like health care for all. Huckabee, like most of his rightwing ilk, calls that "picking your pocket." Big applause from the delegates.

Huck''s an entertaining speaker by and large, if you ignore the deeper meaning of his remarks and who he's really speaking to. He wasn't so great ethically as governor of Arkansas, but that never holds back rightwing Republicans.

Posted by David at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times is reporting tonight that presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, shortly after becoming mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, approached the town librarian about banning certain books from the public library, then fired the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, after Emmons pledged to resist all censorship. Public outcry forced Palin to rescind the firing and back off from removing books that offended her fundamentalist religious beliefs.

This is scary stuff, and it is time to face the fact that Palin is a religious zealot. The article describes how she defeated the incumbent mayor by introducing wedge issues like abortion and guns to municipal elections that had been folksy affairs about real local issues up till then. Even worse, she said that Wasilla would have its "first Christian mayor," a slap at the more casual religious beliefs of the incumbent mayor.

People wonder why the press and bloggers are being so hard on Palin. This is why. I said a few minutes ago that I thought her membership in the secessionist Alaska Independence Party would ultimately be the most damaging thing to come out about her. I take that back. I can't imagine John McCain wants to run with a woman who sought to ban books and fired the town librarian. This is something that goes to the worst fears of many moderates and liberals, and not a few real conservatives.

We in central Pennsylvania have the example of the Dover Area School Board to show what can happen when religious zealots take over government. In 2005, they tried to introduce so-called Intelligent Design to the high school biology curriculum in Dover as a challenge to evolution and in violation of the Constitutional separation of church and state. They lost utterly when they were sued in Federal court by angry parents, and were defeated for re-election, but they cost local taxpayers a million dollars in legal fees and tore the community apart.

Palin can do a lot more damage to America as vice president, or, God forbid, as president, than the Dover Area School Board could. She will be the running mate of a 72-year-old man with a history of skin cancer who won't let his doctors fully and freely discuss his medical history. He was a prisoner-of-war under brutal conditions, an experience that has shortened the lives of other prisoners held in similar conditions. The chance of Palin succeeding to the presidency is much, much higher than it has been for any other vice president.

We have every right to question every aspect of her life.

Posted by David at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everytime the cameras scanned the audience tonight at the Republican National Convention, I searched for black faces. I think I saw one (Thomas Sowell?), but white people, especially older white people, predominated among the delegates. No surprise, really. The GOP is mainly a white party, dominated by the South.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, completed his estrangement from his party with a speech at the convention endorsing John McCain. He looked uncomfortable, and his wife, Hadassah Lieberman, who made a campaign stop here in Harrisburg in 2000 when her husband was Al Gore's running mate, looked even more so. She was seated next to Cindy McCain, and got the kiss-kiss from Barbara Bush the Elder when Lieberman's obnoxious speech was over.

Tomorrow night is Sarah Palin's night. She will accept the nomination for vice president, assuming nothing surfaces in the morning news cycle to give McCain second thoughts. But I'm not counting on it. Better her withdrawal happen in about two weeks anyhow. Associated Press is reporting tonight that Levi Johnston, husband-to-be of Palin's pregnant daughter Bristol, is on his way from Alaska to Minnesota for a big family values photo-op at the convention after his future mother-in-law's acceptance speech. His mother insists he wasn't pressured into marrying her. Interestingly, she won't say if he's still in high school.

Posted by David at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President George W. Bush, speaking on a television link tonight to the Republican National Conven tion, endorsed John McCain for president. Even better, he praised McCain's support of the Iraq War. McCain is George's man. Remember that.

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

This gets crazier and crazier. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was formerly a member, along with her husband, of the Alaska Independence Party, which favors secession from the United States. So much for putting America first, which John McCain has made the slogan of his campaign for President. Check out the video link on the Jed Report blog, which juxtaposes Palin's welcoming speech to the AIP with a speech by the party's founder at a secessionist convention in Tennessee. If there was any serious vetting of Palin by McCain, this should have been picked up.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure...

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

With the announcement yesterday that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol is five-months pregnant, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sought to quash rumors that her four-month-old son Trig, the one with Down Syndrome, was really Bristol's child.

Of course, we have to take her at her word that Bristol is only five months pregnant and not four, or three. Palin also said Bristol will marry the father, later identified as Levi Johnston, a hometown boy.

The questions that occur to me are: (1) Did Gov. Palin encourage her daughter to use birth control? Not likely. Palin favors "abstinence only" sex education. (2) Did Bristol want to end the pregnancy? (3) Did she really want to get married to Levi, or was this forced upon her by her parents? (4) Had she planned to go to college after high school, or was settling down with a local boy her goal in life? (5) Will she even finish high school? She already missed a lot last year from "mononucleosis," we're told.

None of this would be any of our business if Palin wasn't seeking the vice presidency of the United States and presenting herself as a so-called "family values" candidate blessed by the religious right, by James Dobson of Focus on the Family himself.

By marrying Bristol off to Levi, Gov. Palin will likely be leaving her behind in Alaska and have one less distraction if she goes off to Washington as John McCain's vice president. Did "Sarah Barracuda" as she was known in high school, let her ambition dictate her daughter's life as well? We now know she threw her own mother-in-law under the bus, supporting the opposing candidate to succeed her as mayor of Wasilla because the elder Mrs. Palin, who lost the election, was pro-choice.

I had to laugh yesterday when I heard that the McCain campaign was sending a team of lawyers to Alaska for to finally do some real vetting of Palin. Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

Posted by David at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh, to be a reporter right now on the staff of the Anchorage Daily News. The big snows haven't come and an important national story has landed in their laps.

I'm referring, of course, to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her pick by Sen. John McCain as his running mate on the Republican ticket. Palin is an embarassment of riches, it seems, when it comes to scandal. The latest story out of Anchorage has the former state police commissioner, the one Palin fired for refusing to fire her cheatin' brother-in-law, saying Palin spoke to him personally about the matter.

If so, that would be (1) an abuse of power, or (2) official oppression, take your pick. Palin would have used the power of her position as governor--a post she's held for all of 18 months--to pursue a private vendetta against the man involved in a bitter divorce and child custody dispute with her sister. The Alaska State Police, like every police department, have rules and regulations governing trooper behavior, and a well-defined disciplinary process. Palin sought to bypass that.

But again, I would point you to the comments in the story that quote the former state police commissioner as saying the McCain campaign never contacted him about Palin when they were supposedly "vetting" Palin for the vice presidency. Alaska GOP leaders say the McCain folks didn't send anyone to Alaska to check into the background of the woman they would put a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Looking at this from a broader historical perspective, Palin would seem to be the latest in a string of Republican appointees who have crashed and burned over ethical issues during the Bush Administration. I guess when you think the federal government is the great Satan, you don't much care who you pick to conduct the nation's business.

As Hurricane Gustav bears down on New Orleans, it would be wise to consider this Republican record of incompetence and corruption and wonder if perhaps Palin ought to make a hasty exit from the ticket. It won't happen, though, because the religious right sees Palin as saintly for her stance on abortion and would erupt in anger if McCain admitted he made a mistake and dumped her. Expect a statement from McCain soon that he is backing her "1000 percent."

The Eagleton in my headline is Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who withdrew as Sen. George McGovern's running mate in 1972 after it was learned he had twice undergone electro-shock treatment in a mental hospital for "nervous exhaustion." Eagleton had been picked on July 14, 1972, after only a minimal background check in which he failed to mention the hospitalizations and treatments. He withdrew on Aug. 1 despite McGovern saying he was backing him "1000 percent." He was replaced by Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver, father of Maria Shriver. The ticket went on to a crushing defeat.

All the talk of Palin being a "game-changing move" for McCain won't matter a hill of beans if she is being battered on a daily basis by new revelations that the minimal background check on her failed to reveal.

Posted by David at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Let us dispense immediately with the thought that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain's running mate to "reach out" to disaffected, diehard Hillary Clinton supporters. She is a darling of the hard right, of the religious right, forced on McCain--who met her only once--by Karl Rove, who I suspect would rather have the Republican Party go down to defeat than have a squishy moderate pro-choicer like Tom Ridge or ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman on the ticket. The idea that Hillary's most fervent supporters would support Palin simply because she is a woman is ludicrous, as you will see.

Republican leaders in Alaska say the McCain team didn't send anyone to Alaska to vet Palin (read about 3/4 of the way down the linked story), which if true is an incredibly foolish mistake that hints of a last-minute change-of-mind after Karl Rove warned against picking Lieberman. You can't get the true measure of a person without talking to people who inhabit the same environment he or she does. My gut feeling is that this is going to end badly for McCain, perhaps with a Thomas Eagleton-like withdrawal of Palin from the ticket. He had apparently met her only once.

So who is Sarah Palin? Her choice should quiet Republican claims that Barack Obama is "inexperienced." She has been governor of Alaska, a state with 650,000 residents, for 18 months. Prior to that, she was mayor of the town of Wasilla, Alaska, which on the official city website is listed a having a population of 6,715. To put those population figures in central Pennsylvania terms, she was the governor of a state with a population just a little more than the combined populations of Dauphin, Cumberland, Lebanon and Perry counties. She was the mayor of a town with a population falling between that of Steelton and Camp Hill. And let's not forget her two terms on City Council in Wasilla. She was elected governor with a vote total of 114,697 votes, a couple of hundred MORE votes than President George W. Bush received in 2004--in York County, Pennsylvania.

So okay, Palin hasn't exactly been voted for by huge numbers of people. In fairness, many Democrats in 2004 would have been quite willing to have former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont--a state with even fewer residents than Alaska--become President. And Delaware, home of Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, has just 844,000 people.

But where does Palin stand on the issues of the day? Her Palin-for-Governor website has been scrubbed of specific issue papers, but the record is there. She is against abortion except to save the life of the mother, and would require victims of rape or incest to bear their attacker's baby. Palin, 44, has been deified in pro-life circles for refusing to get an abortion, as 80 percent of mothers in the same situation do, after being told her fetus would have Down Syndrome.

The baby is now four months-old and has accompanied Palin on her initial campaign forays with McCain. But here is where the lack of vetting could get interesting. Palin kept her pregnancy a secret for seven months. Why? There is a belief among some in Alaska that this is actually her 16-year-old daughter's baby. The daughter disappeared from school for several months, supposedly with a persistent case of mononucleosis. True? Who knows. Unfair and intrusive? Probably. But if Palin is going to push to take away a woman's right to choose, and hold herself up as a holy paradigm--Focus on the Family founder James Dobson called it "bravery and integrity in action"--it goes with the territory if you're running to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Palin is an evangelical Christian, and attends fundamentalist churches. She is against embryonic stem cell research, and favors the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in public school biology classes. She said that in a televised debate while running for governor in 2006.

And on the environment? Her views line up squarely with those of Big Oil. She strongly favors drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and opposed the decision by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to list polar bears as an endangered species.

How has Palin been as governor? Good in some respects, Republican in others. She is under investigation by the Alaska Legislature for supposedly pressuring, or having her staff pressure, the head of the Alaska State Police to fire her sister's husband, who was then involved in a bitter divorce and child custody dispute, and then firing the head of the state police when he refused to fire the trooper. Palin's brother-in-law sounds like no prize, but governors must refrain from allowing their personal feelings to trump law and common sense. In fact, the whole brother-in-law saga sounds like a trashy reality TV show, which may actually play well in some quarters of the electorate.

Palin deserves credit for having come this far, and for attacking some of the corruption in the Alaska Republican Party, one of the more snakebitten political organizations to walk the Earth. She would probably be a welcome addition to the U.S. Senate. But she isn't ready to stand next-in-line to a 72-year-old President with persistent skin cancer problems that he still won't allow his doctors to fully discuss.

Posted by David at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I felt a lot better about the election last night after watching Bill Clinton's wonderful speech endorsing Barack Obama for President. Anyone Democrat who watched that speech was transported back to the 1990s and the best of Bill Clinton's eight years in the White House. I'm listening to it again today on The New York Times website, and it's just as good. My favorite line: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than the example of our power." That's the same point author Ron Suskind makes in his new book, "The Way of the World," that America will only reclaim its position in the world by returning to its ideals and repudiating the Bush-Cheney torture regime.

Hillary's speech Tuesday night was also good, but she's never been the speaker her husband is. I still worry that her attacks on Obama during the primary campaign will help John McCain, but their speeches in Denver went a long way to repairing that damage.

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

Breaking news out of Denver concerns a possible assassination plot against Barack Obama. FBI and Secret Service agents arrested two men and a woman after police in Aurora, Colo., arrested a third man after pulling him over for driving erratically, as if drunk. In the truck were two scoped rifles, ammunition, sighting scopes, a bulletproof vest, and walkie-talkies. He allegedly implicated the others, one of whom jumped from a sixth floor hotel window when authorities arrived to question him, but survived. The plot was supposedly to shoot Obama on Thursday night while he delivers his acceptance speech outdoors before 70,000 people at Invesco Field. One of the men wore a white supremacist swastika ring.

I've linked the Los Angeles Times report on the plot above. I recommend watching the YouTube video it includes of a local Denver television report on the arrests. Here also is a column today from Bob Herbert of The New York Times in which he mentions a Detroit Free Press poll that showed 57 percent of Michigan residents feared that someone would try to hurt Obama because of his race and that they feared for his safety.

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

Sen. Barack Obama has picked Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Great choice! Pennsylvania now moves decisively into the Obama column. Biden, an Irish Catholic born in Scranton, will do much to recapture the votes of Democrats in the Anthracite Region who went overwhelmingly for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary. Will this lead McCain to pick former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who is pro-choice, to keep his chances here alive? Or cause McCain to write off Pennsylvania entirely and pick a running mate from the GOP's right to shore up his votes there?

Posted by David at 05:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm just getting around to the latest Franklin & Marshall Poll. It was collected Aug. 4-10 and shows Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain in Pennsylvania by 8 points among all voters, and by by 5 points among "likely" voters. The poll reinforces the general belief that the election is Obama's to lose, but runs counter to a growing perception that Pennsylvania is McCain's to lose. In fact, it may be why McCain is giving serious consideration to picking former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge as his running mate: he needs help in the Keystone State.

Some of the poll's findings: 77 percent of Pennsylvania residents believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, and 37 percent are worse off economically this year than last. A majority of the state, 55 percent, believe McCain will follow the policies of President George W. Bush and are less likely to vote for him as a result.

Obama leads among younger voters, non-whites, college graduates, women, and residents of Philadelphia. An almost comical 82 percent of Philadelphians are for Obama, compared to just 7 percent for McCain. McCain leads among Protestants, fundamentalist Christians, and among residents of northwest and northeast Pennsylvania. That latter statistic is among reasons Obama is considering Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Biden is an Irish Catholic who spent the first 10 years of his life in Scranton.

And here's my favorite statistic from the poll: 3 percent of Pennsylvania residents believe President George W. Bush is doing an "excellent" job. Who are these people?

Posted by David at 06:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When you look at who is being considered by Barack Obama and John McCain as their vice presidential running mates, the importance of Pennsylvania to each becomes clear.

McCain, the Republican, is said to have former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge high on his list. Some rapturous Republicans here think that would give McCain an easy victory in Pennsylvania. I'm not so sure. McCain will get a lot of those votes no matter who he picks, and the Republicans haven't done that well in statewide elections of late. McCain might be betting that Ridge can make him palatable to white Democrats who are reluctant to vote for Obama because of his race.

Ridge carries liabilities here as well, including his consorting with Enron during the push to electric competition in 1996. The records of that are locked away for 25 years under the state's idiotic records laws. Don't count on the Repubican-controlled Senate to allow any consideration of a bill to open Ridge's gubernatorial papers to public inspection. Nationally, Ridge was the first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a millstone around anyone's neck. Expect a lot of document searches there under the much-stronger federal Freedom of Information Act to ferret out any dirt from that, especially as relates to the run-up to Hurricane Katrina and the FEMA cesspool.

And of course, there is the whole issue of Ridge being pro-choice and thus supposedly unacceptable to the religious right that forms the base of the Republican Party nationally. I suspect that if Ridge gets the nomination, the right would come to tolerate him. He was never a table pounder for abortion rights, seeming moderate only in contrast to the ban-abortion crowd.

On the Democratic side, Obama has two potential choices with strong Pennsylvania backgrounds. Hillary Clinton's father, Hugh Rodham, was born and raised in Scranton, and the family had a cottage on Lake Winola in the Poconos. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, who is in the running mainly for his foreign policy background, was also born in Scranton and lived there until age 10, when the family moved to Delaware. He is an Irish Catholic--his mother was a Finnegan. Both Clinton and Biden would help Obama win votes outside of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions, especially in the Anthracite Region around Scranton.

And of course, Obama could ensure that Pennsylvania's electoral votes end up in his column by selecting Gov. Ed Rendell, who remains popular across the state even if deeply annoying to Democratic liberals who consider him a (DINO) Democrat In Name Only. Rendell has disclaimd any interest, in part because of the Catherine problem. The elderly Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll would become governor if Rendell becomes vice president, and she just isn't up to the demands of the job.

So Pennsylvania appears likely to be fought over in 2008 even more than it was in 2004 or 2000. That doesn't guarantee we'll get a vice presidential candidate on either ticket with state ties. Winning national elections CAN be done without Pennsylvania, even if we relish thinking of ourselves as the keystone to victory.

Update: I think we can scratch Ed Rendell off the list, if he was ever on it. Rendell just named a new Secretary of Environmental Protection, John Hanger. I doubt Hanger would have agreed to take the job without some assurance that Rendell wasn't going to resign in the next couple of months.

Posted by David at 06:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, do you ever wonder how many Americans think Soviet troops invaded the U.S. state of Georgia?

Given the state of geographical and political knowledge here, there have to be at least a few. Sad, really. But let's take this a little further and imagine that the Atlanta government had clamped down hard on its northern counties, say an area of about 31x31 miles. In that enclave, which once was a part of Tennessee, the Atlanta government imposed a language not spoken by 90 percent of the population and took away their right to vote. The enclave declared its independence, attacked state officials send from Atlanta to enforce the new rules, and appealed to the rest of America for help. In response, the Atlanta government sends in the National Guard to brutally suppress the rebellion, burning towns and killing hundreds of old people, women and children in the breakaway counties.

Meanwhile, the Federal government in Washington moves troops across the Tennessee border to free the northern enclave from Atlanta control. Fighting between American troops and the Georgia National Guard is fierce, but the National Guard quickly retreats. American troops continue beyond the enclave and march on Atlanta to punish the state for its murderous actions against the breakaway counties. This draws harsh condemnation from Vladimir Putin in Russia, who is close to the governor of Georgia thanks to a lobbyist on his staff who until recently represented Georgia interests in Moscow. Putin says "We are all Georgians" and urges his country to back Georgia. The European Union sends diplomats to America to try to broker a ceasefire.

Who would you back in this situation? The state government in Atlanta or the federal government in Washington? Would Putin seem like a belligerant, meddling idiot, seeking to interfere in matters clearly within Washington's legitimate sphere of influence?

The point I'm trying to make, of course, is that Sen. John McCain is pursuing a wrong-headed, dangerous course in his unabashed, unqualified backing for the country of Georgia in the fight it picked with Russia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia (yes, there is a North Ossetia--it is part of Russia). Ossetians are not Georgians. Georgia did oppress them, including imposing Georgian as the national language. Moscow sent troops into Georgia--part of Russia and then the Soviet Union from 1801 to 1991.

I'm no fan of Putin and his efforts to drag Russia back to the oppressive years of Communism. But this is no more our fight than it was Russia's fight when we invaded Grenada in 1983. We can be unhappy about the situation in Georgia, as much of the world was with us after Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada and the deaths of more than 100 people. But ultimately, Grenada was seen to be within our sphere of influence and things calmed down pretty quickly.

What makes the real Georgia situation disturbing is that it appears to be yet another effort by the far right in America to mess with foreign policy in ways that endanger America. They remember history and have learned nothing from it, chafing over the past refusal of the United States to go to war with the Soviet Union over its suppression of independence or liberalization movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tragedies both. No doubt about it. But were they worth a nuclear war with Moscow that might have killed tens of millions of people on both sides?

The neo-cons who brought us the Iraq disaster say we must "stand with" Georgia because it sent 2000 troops to help us in the Iraq disaster, withdrawing many of them to suppress the rebellion in South Ossetia. I find it particularly disturbing that McCain appears to have been steered toward his support of Georgia as much by lobbyists as neo-cons, echoing the run-up to the Iraq war, when the neo-cons fell all over Ahmed Chalabi and the myths he spread about how our invasion supposedly would be met with flower petals, not bullets and bombs. McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheuneman, was a lobbyist for Georgia until several months ago.

McCain's approach to foreign policy, as I've written before, is rooted in his belief that the U.S. should have continued fighting the Vietnam War until it won. He does not seem able to rise above reflexive belligerency. A war with Russia in the 21st century would be long and bloody. Even if we pushed them out of Georgia, where would we stop?

On the road to Moscow? A million dead soldiers later, assuming no resort to nuclear weapons? It isn't worth it, or necessary, except in the minds of rightwing bitter-enders.

Posted by David at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you have a strong stomach, read the account in the New York Times today about how federal immigration officials and their camp guards in state and local prisons let a Chinese immigrant, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, die horribly of bone cancer. Indeed, they went out of their way to make it difficult for him to get treatment and actively frustrated his efforts to meet with lawyers who might have helped him.

The Bush Administration's persecution of non-citizens--they have succeeded gays as the main target of the hard right's group hate (in part because they were increasingly hating themselves)--shames everything America stands for. I don't care that Ng didn't have legal status. He overstayed a legal tourist visa at age 19 and had made a good life for himself in America. He had a wife and two young children and a good job providing computer services to a firm in the Empire State Building.

What was done to him in our names is little different than what Hitler did to the Jews or the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s did to political dissidents. It appears to be murder, and lawyers for the family have asked that a criminal investigation be opened.

That's the difference between America in 2008 and Nazi Germany in 1944. The rule of law can still trump the politics of hate. Not that it's a slam dunk: Attorney General Michael Mukasey yesterday told the American Bar Association he had no intention of prosecuting midstate native Monica Goodling and others who broke the law by using political criteria to hire career Justice Department employees. That case cries out for the appointment of a special prosecutor immune from the influence of Bush and Cheney.

Yesterday I happened to call a plumber in the Harrisburg area. I was taken aback when the receptionist answered the phone, "We're proud to be Americans. [name deleted] Plumbing and Heating." I'm glad they are, but increasingly Americans can make statements like that only with their eyes firmly shut and their ears plugged.

Did you know that the York County Prison and the Snyder County Prison are both immigration prisons under contract to the Federal government? What happened to Ng could be happening right in our own backyards.

Posted by David at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A report is out this morning from the Justice Department Office of Inspector General today with the ominous title, "An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring by Monica Goodling and Other Staff in the Office of Attorney General."

Here is the full Monica Goodling report.

Goodling, the York Haven, Pa., native, ethically-challenged Messiah College graduate, former West Shore Country Club lifeguard, and, most importantly, George W. Bush devotee, is accused of weeding out Democrats and lesbians from people hired as attorneys in the Justice Department. If true, that's against the law. Political hiring is legal for only a tiny fraction of the Justice Department's 110,000 employees. Hiring of everyone but a few top-ranking people is subject to Civil Service restrictions, which bar basing hiring decisions on politics or even asking about them. Always been illegal (in the modern era), always will be illegal.

The report concludes that she and several colleagues broke the law and violated department policy in their actions. The question is whether she can be prosecuted--she was granted limited immunity for her testimony before Congress where she talked about a lot of this stuff. And the report says nothing about the people above Goodling in the food chain and how they may have been involved in the illegal actions. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, her boss, claims he just didn't know what she was doing.

Perhaps he didn't, although if you believe that, you probably also believe that low-ranking Army enlisted personnel decided on their own that torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq was okay. It's time for some high-level accountability in the Bush Administration.

Posted by David at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge being talked about as a possible running mate for John McCain this fall, the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents he generated as governor from 1995-2001 need to be opened to public scrutiny.

As I noted last week, Ridge's papers are stored at public expense in the State Archives in Harrisburg, but are closed to public access for around 25 years. In theory, a journalist can ask for access, but in reality you won't get in. I was told by Ridge's archivist, Nicolette Parisi, that Glen Thomas, the former Ridge aide and Public Utility Commission chairman, was the person to see about access to these documents, but he denies that. Regardless, they remain locked up.

Those might have been interesting, given the close involvement of the corrupt Texas corporation Enron in the Pennsylvania electric competition debate back then, the personal visit Enron chairman Ken Lay made to Ridge in Harrisburg, and the call then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas made to Ridge on Lay's behalf. No wonder Ridge locked them away.

No matter what the technical legal status of Ridge's papers may beunder state law, the public has moral rights to them. We paid the taxes that Ridge used to govern the state. It is only right that we be able to see what went on in our name during his administration. These are not personal notes from Ridge to his wife we're talking about. They are the documents generated by Ridge and his direct staff carrying out their official duties. Gov. Robert Casey's papers were opened not very long after he left office.

In many other states--Texas, ironically, being one of them--a governor's papers are considered public property and are open almost from the day they arrive in the state archives at the end of his or her administration. But not here. Even the new Open Records Act exempts documents in the State Archives from mandatory public access. Pennsylvania had one of the worst freedom of information statutes before that law was passed, and still does.

Will Ridge be the nominee? Probably not. As much as McCain and Ridge apparently like each other, McCain will almost be forced to pick a hard right anti-abortion conservative as his running mate. Ridge is at least nominally pro-choice, which will likely doom his chances.

The only chance Ridge really has is if McCain decides the possibility of winning Pennsylvania with Ridge on the ticket outweigh the losses of votes from the religious right. Interestingly, when Ridge was considered for vice president by Bush in 2000 and then for Secretary of Defense in 2001, the main thing used against him by the right, in addition to his pro-choice positions, was that he had no defense experience beyond his Army service in Vietnam. Gary Bauer called him a "peacenik" and Robert Novak attacked him for not supporting President Reagan's Star Wars initiative.

I personally don't think Ridge being on the ticket will matter much to McCain in whether he wins the state. Ridge has been out of office and away from the state for years. The fact that Camp Hill Republicans think Ridge means victory doesn't really mean much in the end. Whether Gov. Rendell's people are finally talking to Barack Obama's people will have far more impact.

And McCain isn't running for President of Pennsylvania. The only thing people nationally know about Ridge is that he was the first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. In the minds of many voters, that equates to long lines at airports, color-code security alerts, and the disaster in New Orleans, even though that happened 10 months after Ridge stepped down as DHS secretary.

Ridge did some good things as governor, but electric competition has not turned out to be one of them. In the name of understanding how we got into this mess, and so the public at large can better understand what type of a vice president he might be, it is time to open the Ridge Papers to full public scrutiny.

Posted by David at 06:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You may well have missed it, but there was an interesting story this week in the Lebanon (Pa.) Daily News by reporter Richard Fellinger about how Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett's own chief of staff and other staffers move back and forth between their jobs and getting the boss re-elected.

Corbett, of course, is a Republican and newly the scourge of the Democratic Party in the Legislature. Earlier this month, he indicted 12 Democrats for allegedly conducting politics on the public dime. Among the indicted were Michael Manzo, former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, and Jeff Foreman, former chief of staff to House Majority Whip Mike Veon, who was himself indicted. Of course, it's Corbett's job to enforce the law, but the timing of the arrests just as the fall campaign is getting under way, and the televised perp walks of a hand-cuffed Veon and others--who haven't yet been convicted of anything-- suggest that Republican political goals were as important here as law enforcement.

Corbett is in a re-election battle this fall with Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, the Democratic candidate, who wasted little time after the Lebanon Daily News article appeared in accusing Corbett of hypocrisy. The Republicans also hope to retake the House, which they lost by a single seat in the 2006 election after years in control.

Fellinger's article points out that Brian Nutt, Corbett's chief of staff, has moved off the state payroll to become his campaign chief, and that several other staffers have played dual roles as well. Kevin Harley, Corbett's press secretary, insists it was all perfectly legal. "There is a right way to do this, and a legal way, and that's what is being done," he told Fellinger.

But political activist Gene Stilp, who applauded the Bonusgate arrests, remains troubled. "This is not showing good judgment," he said of Corbett. "He has to be squeaky clean, and this is not squeaky clean."

One of my Shipoke neighbors, a lawyer, says Corbett may have opened a Pandora's box, and wonders who on the Attorney General's staff made the decision to stage televised perp walks or even to bring certain cases before the statewide grand jury. Permanent or political staff? God knows we need cleaner politics in Pennsylvania, but we don't need politicized justice.

Posted by David at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports on its website that Canada is about to send back U.S. Army deserter Robin Long to face military justice in the United States. Long deserted and fled to Canada after concluding that the war in Iraq was wrong, for reasons that included the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Canada sheltered close to 100,000 American draft resisters and perhaps a thousand deserters during the Vietnam War, in large part because Canadian Liberal Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau in 1969 opened the borders and didn't return otherwise law-abiding young Americans to the U.S. Although the two nations had a criminal extradition treaty, Trudeau found a loophole: Canada had no draft, so draft evasion was not a crime there. Border guards were instructed not to ask young American men about their draft status. He even went to Washington in 1969 and defended his decision in a news conference at the National Press Club, rubbing his thumb in President Nixon's eye.

So what has changed? For one thing, the current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is from the Conservative Party and is an ally of George W. Bush. Canada as part of NATO is engaged in a shooting war in Afghanistan and has had soldiers killed. And basicly, deserters don't find the same level of public sympathy that draft evaders did. I understand and appreciate Long's argument, that he signed up to defend his country, not to fight an illegal war of aggression in Iraq and participate, even indirectly, in the George Bush torture machine. But many people don't, harboring a mental image of someone running from the battlefield that really isn't very accurate. The military is the only industry where they can sell you a bill of goods to get you to take the job, and then you can't quit once you figure it out.

Over the past three decades, especially after Presidents Gerald Ford and especially Jimmy Carter allowed the evaders and deserters in Canada to come home without penalty, I can't tell you how many Americans have told me that if the draft was ever re-instituted, they would send their son to Canada. It was the great American mental escape hatch, and not just for military matters. If abortion was ever made flatly illegal in the U.S., well, there was always Canada. That escape hatch is still open as far as I know.

And perhaps it would be for draft evaders, too, if the U.S. ever managed to start drafting young men again and then sent them off to an unpopular war like Iraq. But maybe not. Pierre Trudeau was a rare and amazing leader. His like does not come along very often.

Posted by David at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is the "presentment" by the statewide grand jury meeting in Harrisburg. It is 75 pages long. About 4/5 of it is about how successful the Democrat political organization was in the years leading up to retaking control of the House after the 2006 election. What you should remember is that the acts themselves aren't illegal. What could be illegal is how they were paid for. Was it taxpayer money, which would be illegal, or political contributions from individuals?

The last fifth of the document concerns the sort of political corruption people are more accustomed to in Pennsylvania: using taxpayer money to pay staffers to do purely personal work for an elected official, and hiring a "ghost employee" who gets paid for little or no real work. This part has the Monica Lewinsky/cigar moment of the grand jury's presentment.

Posted by David at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The indictments of 12 Democrats on political corruption charges were announced yesterday in Harrisburg by Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett, a Republican.

I have no illusions when it comes to the possibilities for political corruption in Pennsylvania, once considered the most corrupt state in the union. But I also have no illusions about the current crop of Republican prosecutors across the nation, who have shown time and again that they are willing to put people in prison to achieve political ends. The imprisonment of former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama is the most notorious example, but there are many others. Not all prosecutors appointed by the current Republicans are political animals, but how do we know which ones aren't? Are Corbett's deputies dispassionate professionals or hard right Federalist Society ideologues with an agenda?

Corbett's investigation, which he insists looked at Republicans, too, began after the Patriot-News reported in January 2007 that bonuses awarded to Democratic staffers in the Legislature may have been tied to work done in the 2006 campaign. It was a good story. But were the tips that brought it about motivated by true outrage over misspent taxpayer dollars? Or the start of a Republican campagin to retake the state House of Representatives, which they narrowly lost to the Democrats that previous fall after years in control?

Corbett wasn't the first attorney general to hold a press conference to announce indictments. But given the current atmosphere in the country, he would have gone far toward reassuring the public that this wasn't a political witch hunt if he hadn't had blown-up photos of the people indicted up on the stage for all to see, with his own name prominently displayed at the bottom. And one small note of levity: when I see Corbett, I can't help but think of actor Leslie Nielsen.

It is so crucial to keep politics out of criminal investigations because the power to indict is the power to destroy. I look at those photos and see, not criminals, but people who you'd run into at the fitness center, grocery store, or Senators game. Whether they are found guilty or innocent, each of them will owe tens of thousands of dollars, possibly over a hundred thousand dollars, in legal fees. Their lives, and those of their families, will never be the same. Guilty or innocent.

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

In 1973, Congress, fed up with the Vietnam War and especially Republican President Richard M. Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in 1970, passed the War Powers Act. The law, enacted over Nixon's veto, requires the President to consult with Congress before committing U.S. forces to war and to seek Congressional authorization for the war within 60 days. If not, the troops are supposed to come home. If war is authorized, the President must report back to Congress on the course of the conflict at least every six months. Congress can cut off funds for a misguided war by majority vote.

It made sense then and it makes sense now. There are common-sense exceptions for attacks on the United States, but the law is supposed to prevent a President from launching wars-of-choice like Cambodia overseas. If he can persuade the Congress to authorize a war, as George W. Bush snowed Congress into doing for Iraq in 2002, he can still go to war. And Congress members can be held accountable for their votes, as Sen. Hillary Clinton was during the Democratic primary campaign.

But now a group of our supposedly wise elders, led by, get this, James Baker and Warren Christopher (see Florida, 2000), wants to "reform" the War Powers Act so lawyers like themselves will "respect" it. Question number 1 is who appointed Warren Christopher to represent the American people? After his weak, pathetic, playing-fields-of-Eton performance in the 2000 Florida recount fiasco (see the excellent film "Recount" on HBO) where Baker and the other Bush people arguably stole the election from Al Gore and gave us eight years of Bush. I don't want him anywhere near something as important as the War Powers Act. This is a bad joke.

For that matter, I don't see anyone on the "commission" appointed by the Miller Center for Public Policy at the University of Virginia to pursue "reform" of the War Powers Act who is remotely left-leaning or liberal. But the other side is well-represented. They get Ed Meese, but where's our Dennis Kucinich? If a commission with fair representation of the left came out with a recommendation to get rid of the War Powers Act, I would at least listen. But not to this bunch of Bush enablers.

Baker and Christopher propose a "War Powers Consultation Act" that would supposedly require a President to consult with specified members of Congress before going to war. But instead of automatically stopping a President's foreign adventure if the Congress fails to give approval within 60 days, the war would continue unless Congress acts on its own within 30 days. Kind of like one of those deals where a business charges you for something and won't stop charging you unless you object and wait on hold in voicemail hell for an hour. A vote to cut off funds for a war under the new Christopher surrender plan would require a two-thirds majority. Ask yourself this: do you really think Bush would have sought the Iraq War Resolution without the War Powers Act in place?

I frankly doubt this is going anywhere, but it shows the fragility of the legal protections the left has won for America in the past 40 years. Bush and his people--and McCain and his--would take them away if they could.

Posted by David at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes the masks come off.

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision yesterday affirming that the Guantanamo detainees have access to Federal courts and the protections of the Constitution was a rebuke to President George W. Bush and his conduct of the war against terrorism, real and imagined. It was also a sharp rebuke to the rightwing movement in America that produced Bush. One of the tenets of that movement is worship of executive and corporate power, which it hoped to enshrine by denying access to the courts to anyone, be they detainees in Gitmo or citizens injured by a reckess corporation, who might challenge that power and force the mighty ones to do something they otherwise could not be forced to do.

The responses yesterday were telling. Bush, who seems to have lost his love for 5-4 Supreme Court decisions when they don't go his way, said: "We'll abide by the court's decision. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it. It was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented." Actually, as Salon.com points out, he doesn't have any choice about abiding by the decision.

Chief Justice John Roberts, hailed just recently for his supposed new moderate bent, let the mask fall, sounding more like Rush Limbaugh defending Bush than a Supreme Court justice. He railed against "judicial activism," a rightwing code word for any court decision, no matter how grounded in law and the Constitution, that displeases them. Roberts said the decision would cause the American people to "lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation's foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges." Look at what he's really saying: if the President does it, the Supreme Court has no right to hold him to Constitutional standards.

And of course, Justice Antonin Scalia, who New York Magazine has revealed to be a closet fan of Sarah Jessica Parker and 'Sex and the City,' did his best to imitate screaming Nazi judge Roland Freisler in the White Rose trial, warning that, "Americans will be killed!" Judicial temperament went out the window.

It isn't over, as satisfying as that court decision was to anyone who values American constitutional values. Bush has suggested he might try to ram a new law through Congress--an excellent distraction for the fall campaign, even if doomed to failure. Attorney General Mukasey says the Gitmo 'military commission' hearings will go forward as planned, well-timed for the fall election.

After all, if the President is the supreme leader of the nation, how can a mere Supreme Court decision stop him from exercising his will? I'm being sarcastic. Stay tuned.

Posted by David at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm glad my paranoid musings about Hillary Clinton running as a third-party candidate have been proven wrong by her (finally) graceful withdrawal from the race and ringing endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for president.

I suspect the ill will that she and Bill Clinton generated during the campaign will rapidly vanish. That's how politics is. Yesterday's bitter opponent tends to become tomorrow's valued statesman or stateswoman.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, who ran against incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980, fatally weakened Carter for the fall election against Ronald Reagan, who won. But Kennedy went on to a long and distinguished career in the Senate, now most likely in its last days because of the brain tumor discovered last month.

Sen Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter, no matter what story line his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, may be pushing at the moment. Obama is likely to win in November. As I side note, I suspect Jimmy Carter's days as a punching bag are coming to an end. If Ronald Reagan hadn't dismantled Carter's alternative energy programs (even to removing solar panels from the White House roof), we might not be facing quite as bad an energy crisis today. There is much that was good in the Carter Administration apart from the Iran fiasco, just as we should value President Lyndon B. Johnson for his wonderful domestic anti-poverty programs apart from the Vietnam War.

When the smoke clears and the dust settles, Bill and Hillary Clinton will be remembered by history for eight years of peace and prosperity, and even more importantly, for standing firm against the Republican right wing minority's push to destroy the Democratic Party and liberal democracy. They went through hell so you didn't have to. While they were unable to prevent the rise of the country's worst and most disastrous President, George W. Bush, and bear a share of responsibility for that because of his indiscrete personal conduct, I blame Al Gore and his advisers, too. They kept President Clinton at arm's length during the 2000 fall campaign, even though he was enormously popular with a majority of Americans and might have been able to bring over the one more state Gore needed to win the Presidency. Let's not forget that had Bill Clinton been able to run for a third term, he likely would have won. But by then, as the recent HBO film "Recount" tells so well, a significant part of the Democratic Party was in full defeatist mode and ready to surrender to Bush's stealing of the election.

But that is behind us now. We have the best Democratic candidate since John F. Kennedy, possibly since Franklin Roosevelt. If there is anyone who can lead America out of the wasteland, it is Barack Obama.

Posted by David at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just had a horrible thought.

Does Hillary's refusal to concede and her demand that her supporters be "heard" mean she's planning to run as a third-party candidate?

Is that what she plans if Obama refuses to make her his vice president?

Let's hope I'm just being paranoid.

Posted by David at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the final numbers from this long campaign:

2,118 delegates needed for the Democratic nomination.

Barack Obama, 2,154 delegates, UNOFFICIAL NOMINEE, ACCORDING TO ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hillary Clinton, 1,919 delegates

Montana Primary

Democrats

Obama, 101,811 votes, 56 percent
Clinton, 74,550 votes, 41 percent

Republicans

John McCain, 72,134 votes, 76 percent
Ron Paul, 20,392 votes, 22 percent

South Dakota

Democrats

Clinton, 54,179 votes, 55 percent
Obama, 43,726 votes, 45 percent

Republicans

McCain, 70 percent
Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney, 30 percent combined

Once again, as we have seen in earlier contests, McCain doesn't get between 20-30 percent of the Republican vote, a bad portent if those voters sit out the election or cast their votes for Libertarian nominee Bob Barr.

Obama finished the primary season with a solid win in Montana, getting more votes than Clinton or McCain. I think of Obama as a runner who has won and lost some preliminary heats to a tough opponent, but in the end squeaked out an overall victory by a tenth of a second. Is it any less of a victory? Do we award the gold medal to his opponent because of those preliminary wins or because half the crowd wanted the opponent to win? Not in this universe.

Posted by David at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AP just reported that Sen. Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination for President. Of course, it isn't final until the convention, but he has passed the pledged delegate (including super-delegate) total he needs.

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

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan will soon release a damaging memoir of his years in the Bush Administration. Among the "revelations," which are revelations perhaps only to Bush's dwindling numbers of true believers: the President used propaganda to sell the Iraq War, the Bush Administration was in a "state of denial" for a week after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, and the administration wasn't honest about the involvement of Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the retaliation against CIA agent Valerie Plame for her husband's truth-telling about some of the events leading up to the Iraq War. Bush is proclaimed guilty of massive self-deception. Here's an even more detailed story about the book from Cox Newspapers.

Didn't know any of that, did you? Ha! Of course, what makes McClellan's memoir valuable is exactly that: it confirms from deep inside of the worst presidential administration in history what many on the outside already knew or strongly suspected. It it one more step in the consignment of George W. Bush and his administration to historical ignominy. Future historians will be hard-pressed to name one positive accomplishment of the Bush Administration (which wasn't at all true of President Richard M. Nixon, for all his crimes). They will spend careers detailing the pits and excesses, driving home the point again and again that America must never be led or forced--take your pick--down this path again.

Posted by David at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Any doubt that we are in a watershed political year vanished with the sad news earlier this week that Sen. Ted Kennedy has brain cancer. Most doctors say it is incurable and likely will kill him in 1-2 years or less. Kennedy has been in the Senate since 1962, when he was elected at age 30 to the seat vacated two years earlier when his brother, John F. Kennedy, was elected President. It is difficult to imagine the Senate without Kennedy as the champion of liberal causes.

As a practical matter--and few are talking about this yet--if his death occurrs quickly it could return the Senate to Republican control until the November election. The Massachusetts legislature in 2004 enacted a law barring the governor--then Republican Mitt Romney--from appointing a successor to Sen. John Kerry if Kerry was elected President. Instead, the seat would remain vacant until a special election could be held. Kerry lost to George W. Bush, but the law remains on the books. At present, the Senate remains in Democratic control by 51-49 only because "Independent Democrat" Joseph Lieberman caucuses with the Democrats. I don't think anyone can rule out a party switch by the politically traitorous Lieberman, who is reviled by many Democrats and has been mentioned as a possible running mate for McCain to pull older Jews away from Sen. Barack Obama.

Obama almost has the nomination in the bag and everyone assumes that it is only a matter of time. Clinton flails wildly, comparing her demand that Florida and Michigan delegates be seated to earlier battles for civil rights. I suspect she is only in it for the money now, since staying in the race until the convention in August is the only way to ensure she has an opportunity to get paid back for the $11 million she personally loaned to her campaign. The latest figure on her total campaign debt--$31 million--boggles the mind. Were she somehow to win the Democratic nomination and become President, she would be incredibly beholden to big money interests who presumably would help her pay down that staggering debt. John McCain will have the same problem, but that's another story.

I sense a great weariness with the primary season and an eagerness to get onto to the fall battle between Obama and McCain (and Bob Barr and maybe Ron Paul--let's wish them luck as the Ralph Naders of the right in 2008). Enough of this already. Let's get to the main event.

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

Any doubt that we are in a watershed political year vanished with the sad news earlier this week that Sen. Ted Kennedy has brain cancer. Most doctors say it is incurable and likely will kill him in 1-2 years or less. Kennedy has been in the Senate since 1962, when he was elected at age 30 to the seat vacated two years earlier when his brother, John F. Kennedy, was elected President. It is difficult to imagine the Senate without Kennedy as the champion of liberal causes.

As a practical matter--and few are talking about this yet--if his death occurrs quickly it could return the Senate to Republican control until the November election. The Massachusetts legislature in 2004 enacted a law barring the governor--then Republican Mitt Romney--from appointing a successor to Sen. John Kerry if Kerry was elected President. Instead, the seat would remain vacant until a special election could be held. Kerry lost to George W. Bush, but the law remains on the books. At present, the Senate remains in Democratic control by 51-49 only because "Independent Democrat" Joseph Lieberman caucuses with the Democrats. I don't think anyone can rule out a party switch by the politically traitorous Lieberman, who is reviled by many Democrats and has been mentioned as a possible running mate for McCain to pull older Jews away from Sen. Barack Obama.

Obama almost has the nomination in the bag and everyone assumes that it is only a matter of time. Clinton flails wildly, comparing her demand that Florida and Michigan delegates be seated to earlier battles for civil rights. I suspect she is only in it for the money now, since staying in the race until the convention in August is the only way to ensure she has an opportunity to get paid back for the $11 million she personally loaned to her campaign. The latest figure on her total campaign debt--$31 million--boggles the mind. Were she somehow to win the Democratic nomination and become President, she would be incredibly beholden to big money interests who presumably would help her pay down that staggering debt. John McCain will have the same problem, but that's another story.

I sense a great weariness with the primary season and an eagerness to get onto to the fall battle between Obama and McCain (and Bob Barr and maybe Ron Paul--let's wish them luck as the Ralph Naders of the right in 2008). Enough of this already. Let's get to the main event. Ted Kennedy is a strong Obama supporter, and I hope for many reasons he lives long enough to see Obama in the White House.

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

It's sad the Pennsylvania Legislature wastes time on nonsense like the "defense of marriage" amendment when the state's public schools had their mediocrity affirmed once again today by the annual Newsweek/Washington Post Challenge Index, which ranks public schools across the country on how much of an academic challenge they present to their students.

It is based on how many students take Advance Placement, International Baccalaurete, or Cambridge exams each year, divided by enrollment and with the school's poverty level thrown in. There are 1,400 PUBLIC schools (no private or parochial) on the list, ranked in order.

A magnet school in Philadelphia ranked 125th, but you have to jump to #304 before you get to a regular Pennsylvania high school, Berwyn. In the midstate, Hershey came in at 1,076 and Lower Dauphin at 1,128. Another doctor town, Danville (Geisinger Medical Center) in Montour County, ranked 1,264. Camp Hill was not on the list. If you go to the Post webpage, you can easily separate out the Pennsylvania schools by searching on PA.

AP and IB aren't the be-all and end-all of high school education, but they are challenging courses that prepare students for the rigors of good colleges. They look good on academic transcripts (provided you get a good grade). It would behoove the Legislature to drop the gay marriage amendment and start concentrating on what it might do to get Pennsylvania public schools scattered among the top 100 of that list in coming years.

Posted by David at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, if Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Central Pennsylvania makes an overtly political statement during Mass that is intended to influence the state Legislature, does that put the diocese's Federal tax exemption at risk?

Interesting question. On Sunday, during a Mass for couples celebrating their 50th wedding anniversaries, Rhoades said he was "saddened" by the California Supreme Court ruling last week legalizing gay marriage in that state. Okay so far--he's just stating an opinion based on the teachings of his church. But here's what he said next, according to the top of page one story in today's Patriot-News:

The bishop hoped the California decision "would be a wake-up call for Pennsylvania. The same kind of thing could happen here if we don't protect marriage by a constitutional amendment."

Message to Legislature: Bishop Rhoades wants you to approve the "defense of marriage" amendment to the state constitution currently tabled in the Senate.

That veers dangerously close to the kind of pulpit politicking that churches receiving an exemption from Federal taxes aren't supposed to engage in. Bishop Rhoades can preach hatred of gays and lesbians from the pulpit till the cows come home, but if he urges specific political action to carry out his beliefs, the IRS could come knocking.

Interestingly, even one of the 50-year couples quoted in the story appeared to favor civil unions for gays "so they could get health insurance." That would possibly be banned by the extreme "defense of marriage" amendment in Pennsylvania.

It's sad the Legislature wastes time on nonsense like this when the state's public schools had their mediocrity affirmed once again today by the annual Newsweek/Washington Post Challenge Index, which ranks public schools across the country on how much of an academic challenge they present to their students. It's based on how many students take Advance Placement, International Baccalaurete, or Cambridge exams each year, divided by enrollment and with the school's poverty level thrown in. There are 1,400 PUBLIC schools on the list, ranked in order.

A magnet school in Philadelphia ranked 125th, but you have to jump to #304 before you get to a regular Pennsylvania high school, Berwyn. In the midstate, Hershey came in at 1,076 and Lower Dauphin at 1,128. Another doctor town, Danville (Geisinger Medical Center) in Montour County, ranked 1,264. Camp Hill was not on the list. If you go to the Post webpage, you can easily separate out the Pennsylvania schools by searching on PA.

AP and IB aren't the be-all and end-all of high school education, but they are challenging courses that prepare students for the rigors of good colleges. They look good on academic transcripts (provided you get a good grade). It would behoove the Legislature to drop the gay marriage amendment and start concentrating on what it might do to get Pennsylvania public schools scattered among the top 100 of that list in coming years.

Posted by David at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Former Sen. John Edwards is about to endorse Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for President. He will appear with Obama in Grand Rapids, Mich., to make the announcement. That means 19 more delegates for Obama.

Posted by David at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The worst excesses and crimes of the Bush Administration take place where they think the public won't see or won't care, and where the President and his cronies can claim the Constitution does not apply.

We have seen this sickness at work in the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, where prisoners, many arrested simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, were tortured repeatedly by American soldiers and other government or contractor personnel with the full knowledge and approval of their superiors. Same at the Guantanamo horror show at our Navy base in Cuba.

Some Americans will brush this aside because the victims of those crimes seem so different from themselves.

But bad things also happen to nice white people who get caught up in the Bush Administration's draconian immigration polices. These policies, fed by public hysteria fanned by the President's rightwing commentator brigade, seem too often enforced by low-ranking Customs and Border Protection personnel who channel the worst of American know-nothingism. Even those who aren't find themselves having to enforce repugnant policies passed down from the rightwing cabal in Washington.

Take the case of Domenico Salerno, 35, of Rome, Italy. The New York Times reports today how Salerno, by all accounts a "very open, fun and helpful guy," fell into a Kafkaesque nightmare on April 29 because an immigration agent thought he intended to stay in America illegally to work. In fact, he traveled back and forth to see his American girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper, who grew up across the road from George Washington's Mt. Vernon estate.

In short, here's what happened: a border agent detained Salerno on arrival, refusing to admit him to the U.S. or let him go back to Rome. They claimed he asked for asylum in the U.S., which Salerno denies. As his Cooper put it, "Who on earth would seek asylum from Italy?" Cooper, who went to Dulles Airport to try to straighten things out. A border agent told her, according to the Times story, that her boyfriend "should try spending a little more time in his own country." Salerno was clapped in shackles and taken to a Virginia jail for the next 10 days. Cooper's family got Sen. John Warner on the case, and hired two former immigration prosecutors to defend him. Even then, it appears that only the interest of the Times in the case forced federal officials to release Salerno.

This is one case involving one man, but it speaks volumes about America's standing in the world. Anyone who lands in America, whether in the airport or standing in front of the White House, should have the full protection of American law and the Constitution. No one gave George W. Bush the right to do otherwise.

Today would have been my German grandfather's 107th birthday. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1924 and became a citizen seven years later. I write this for him.

Posted by David at 06:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pennsylvania isn't the only state singled out for racism in an article today in the Washington Post about racial incidents involving the Obama campaign. Indiana is, too, but I live in Pennsylvania.

We in the liberal cities of the Keystone State tend to dismiss residual racism, the kind of animosity that can prompt a voter to tell a caller from the Obama campaign, "hang that darky from a tree." I doubt if "darky" was the word used originally. I suspect the campaign worker cleaned it up a bit in telling the story, embarassed to repeat the raw bigotry word for word. But there it was for all to see.

Gov. Rendell back in January said his lopsided re-election victory over black former Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann in 2006 was due in part to racism, noting that he received votes in areas that had never voted for Democrats. Rendell later took a lot of heat by saying that some white voters in Pennsylvania would never vote for a black candidate, i.e., Obama. He was closer to the truth than many of us wanted to believe.

Ultimately, racist voters are a small minority. But that they still exist at all is a reproach to both schools and churches.

Posted by David at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What a difference a week makes. Since Sen.Hillary Clinton lost big in the North Carolina primary and won only narrowly in Indiana-possibly aided there by Rush Limbaugh's ditto-heads, who want to mess with Obama--the public mood has turned decisively against her.

Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina is the latest to say it might be time for her to throw in the towel. It is as if the nation collectively woke up last Wednesday and said, "enough of this." Clinton is in a tough spot financially, having loaned her own campaign $11 million and owing another $14 million or so in unpaid bills from the cost of campaigning.

According to an article from Bloomberg News, a little-known provision in the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law bars a candidate who drops out before the convention from continuing to raise money to retire his or her personal loans to the campaign. They can raise money to pay off campaign debts to printing companies, airlines, and the like, but not money they loaned themselves. Why? Beats me.

The latest rumor is that Clinton is in talks with Obama over his campaign agreeing to pay off most of that if she drops out of the race now. Both sides are denying it, which probably means it is true.

The other issue out there is whether Obama would agree to have Hillary as his running mate. I don't think this is going to happen, and not only because Michelle Obama supposedly can't stand Hillary. Columnist Robert Novak first reported that story. Obama himself issued a non-denial denial, saying only that his wife "does not talk to Bob Novak on a regular basis." I don't think this is going to happen.

I remember back in 1976, when Ronald Reagan was challenging President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination for President at the Republican convention. A rumor started making the rounds that Ford might agree to go back to being vice president--under Reagan. One television commentator--I can't remember now which one--speculated this might be the "dream ticket." Commentator James J. Kilpatrick (he of 'Point/Counterpoint' on '60 Minutes,' and the satirical, "Jane, you ignorant slut" on Saturday Night Live) huffed in response that it would in fact be "the nightmare ticket." For a variety of reasons.

And that's pretty much my thinking on an Obama/Clinton ticket. They would never get along or trust each other. Vice presidents who aren't enthusiastic partners (see, Lloyd Bentsen, Michael Dukakis' running mate in 1988) can be a drag on the ticket. And what about Bill?

Posted by David at 05:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Barack Obama did better than I expected in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries yesterday, winning the former decisively and losing the latter to Hillary Clinton by just 22,000 votes. But it feels more like a victory by an exhausted competitor carried over the line by momentum than a breakaway sprint toward the finish line. It reminds me of the story about the first marathon runner in ancient Greece, who ran 26 miles to bring the news of victory. He gasped out, "Rejoice! We conquer!"--and then dropped dead.

Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic, but I believe Obama is still carrying the heavy weight of Rev. Wright on his back as he runs. Exit polls in Indiana found it was a significant issue among Hillary voters.

I agree with the Times reporter that many Hillary voters will return to the fold and vote for Obama in November if he gets the nomination. It will require some effort on his part. Just as Hillary has tried with some success to get past the reservations white men have about her, so must Obama find a way to make voters--some of whom are clearly uncomfortable voting for a black candidate--comfortable with him. While it's too late to put Rev. Wright into some political version of the extraordinary rendition program, Obama needs to lay down the law to his former pastor and remind him forcefully of the stakes involved. Wright needs to take a seven-month vacation to somewhere far, far away.

And lets not forget that John McCain appears ready, willing, and able to become the next George W. Bush. Yesterday at Wake Forest University he promised to appoint more Supreme Court justices like the rightwing ideologues Samuel Alito and John Roberts. The Bush millstone should be enough to get any Democrat elected this year. The Democrats have barely scratched the surface of McCain's past, and Obama will have the money to make sure voters know who their Republican candidate really is.

My big worry is that Bush will launch an October surprise--perhaps an attack on Iran--to make some voters move to McCain out of fear.

Posted by David at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who is laboring under the illusion that Sen. John McCain would be a different, better sort of President than George W. Bush should read this story from Reuters about a speech the Arizona president plans to deliver today in North Carolina.

McCain plans to say he will pick the same kind of judges for the U.S. Supreme Court as the hard right ideologues that Bush put on the high court, where they will keep his sickness alive for the next 20-30 years.

"I will look for people in the cast of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and my friend the late Wiliam Rehnquist--jurists of the highest caliber who know their own minds, and know the law, and know the difference," McCain says in the speech.

More of the same. A continuation of the worst of George W. Bush. You can't say you haven't been warned.

Posted by David at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not sure now that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President this year. Despite his break from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of his church, and his denunciation yesterday of Wright's comments, this damage may be permanent. I hope I'm wrong, but I sense that Obama is in a deep hole with walls of sand that will collapse as he tries to climb out.

How well he does in North Carolina and Indiana will determine his fate. If he doesn't win North Carolina by a large enough margin, or loses Indiana, I suspect both the momentum of this race and the superdelegates will begin to shift to Hillary Clinton. It is already happening to a certain extent.

Here's a statement issued this morning by one of the previously uncommitted Pennsylvania superdelegates, Bill George, president of the state AFL-CIO. He says Clinton is the "most electable" candidate against John McCain:

“Hillary Clinton has the strength and experience to jumpstart the economy and rebuild the middle class,” George said. “Working families in Pennsylvania overwhelmingly favored her in last week’s primary, and I feel that she is our strongest candidate to carry Pennsylvania in November and win back the White House.”

Obama has been a new type of black candidate, rising above the many and legitimate grievances of his race in the name of a greater good. But he is being pulled down by the midgets around him, notably Rev. Wright, who wallow in the past. Like too many clergy, Wright is tone deaf to how his comments will be perceived outside his own church and now, advised of that, doesn't really care. Wright, at a news conference at the National Press Club several days ago arranged by a rabid Clinton supporter, gave vent to some of the worst sort of conspiracy theories that have circulated over the past 20 years, saying for example that AIDS was released in Africa by the U.S. government.

Obama can get past this, but only if he becomes tougher and more confrontational on the campaign trail. It is silly to think this sort of attack will cease if he gets the nomination. The Republicans will probably have Wright speak at their convention, the Zell Miller of 2008. Liberals have been losers over the past 25 years because they assumed that the rightness of their positions would be apparent to voters bombarded with slime attacks on liberal candidates. Obama has to get in their and fight, or Clinton will win.

Posted by David at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Guilt by association is not only a valid campaign tactic, but it is also a necessary ingredient to getting to know a candidate."
--Bobby Eberle, president and CEO of GOP USA, 4-24-08

It's not often you read a straight-out defense of right-wing smear tactics like this, but here's the post it came from. This could have come straight from the playbook of the old smearmeister himself, the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin. GOP USA is not the national party organization, but rather a far right group that works to advance conservative "ideals," according to its website.

Eberle, who is said to have once employed fake journalist and former gay male escort "Jeff Gannon" in his Talon News Service (gay by association?), was defending a sleazy new TV ad being run in North Carolina by the state Republican Party against two Democratic gubernatorial candidates, but which ultimately targets Barack Obama. The ad, which you can view on the link in the second paragraph, notes that these two candidates support Obama, who in turn "supports" Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the soon-to-be Willie Horton of the 2008 campaign. As you may have heard, Rev. Wright, pastor of the church Obama attends, goes off on radical tangents on rare occasions, saying things that many black people believe but which tend to outrage whitey.

(Just as an aside, if everyone quit their place of worship when the preacher, rabbi, or imam said something they didn't like, the world would look like a Keystone Kops routine. People belong to churches, synagogues and mosques and support them for more reasons than who's giving the sermons).

Sen. John McCain, who may be worried about ads linking him to people like Charles Keating, has condemned the ad, as have some other national Republicans, which upset Eberle to no end. But McCain can't really control this sort of hate-mongering, and we can expect more of these Six Degrees of Separation ads linking Democratic candidates, through Obama, to everyone from Adolph Hitler to people who club baby seals. The sense of shame that once made people hide their support for slimeball tactics like this has been replaced by an ethos of, if it works for us, it is good for us.

The key is to not let it work for anyone.

Posted by David at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No matter what you may read elsewhere, Hillary Clinton's margin of victory over Barack Obama in Pennsylvania currently stands at 9.2 percent, with 99.51 percent of precincts reporting, according to state election officials. Not 10 percent, the double-digit benchmark set by some of her prominent supporters prior to the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday.

As far as the delegate count after Pennsylvania, Clinton narrowed the gap with Sen. Barack Obama by only nine delegates because of the proportional representation system used in all Democratic primaries and caucuses. She got 82, he got 73, according to CBS News. Not sure where the other three went, but I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

Posted by David at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sen. Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary over Sen. Barack Obama, but her victory margin was in the single digits, 9.2 percent, under the 10 percent benchmark set by her supporters. Given that this is her kind of state, with lots of older white people, it should have been much higher.

Clinton, according to official figures from the Pennsylvania Department of State, received 1,237,696 votes, or 54.6 percent, to Obama's 1,029,672 votes, or 45.4 percent. That's with 99.44 percent of precincts counted. The number of delegates she receives isn't certain because of Pennsylvania's odd way of assigning them. Fifty-five of the state's 158 delegates are assigned proportionally based on statewide totals. The other 103 are assigned proportionally based on the totals in each Congressional District. That's too much math for this early in the morning, but the results won't much changes Obama's overall lead in delegates or his lead in total popular vote.

Obama carried Philadelphia with 65 percent of the vote, and that city accounted for 280,147, or 26.8 percent, of his statewide total. He also won big, though not as big as in Philadelphia, in Dauphin, Centre, Union, Lancaster, Chester, and Delaware counties. Centre County is the home of Penn State University and Union the home of Bucknell University, the critical factors in his victories there. Obama did particularly poorly in Fayette County, where he got only 21 percent of the vote, and in the Anthracite Region, especially Luzerne and Lackawanna counties, where he did only slightly better. Gov. Rendell's endorsement of Clinton proved more important here than Sen. Bob Casey's endorsement of Obama.

Obama's strength in Dauphin County, home of Harrisburg, the state capital, was not surprising in one sense because of the signifiant black, Hispanic and Asian population here. But his strength crossed the Susquehanna River into mostly white Cumberland County, where he lost to Clinton by only 6 points. He was nearly as strong in many of the midstate counties, a spillover no doubt of the Harrisburg Patriot-News endorsement and his large campaign rallies in Harrisburg.

On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain carried all of the state's 67 counties and received 585,447 votes, or 72.7 percent of the total Republican vote. Congressman Ron Paul received 15.9 percent, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, still on the ballot despite dropping out of the race, received 11.4 percent. That McCain lost 27.3 percent of the vote in a nearly uncontested primary tells me that he is at significant risk if a viable third-party candidate emerges from the Republican religious right. That could be Ron Paul's reason for staying in the race and running radio ads attacking McCain during the primary campaign.

McCain failed to get 70 percent of the vote in 18 counties, including Dauphin. His worst was Juniata County, where he got 58.7 percent of the vote to 27.5 percent for Paul and 13.7 percent for Huckabee. Those kind of numbers suggest majority support, but with a significant disaffected minority that could throw the electoral votes of certain states to the Democratic nominee in a tight race if a strong third party candidate--such as Ron Paul--were to enter the fall campaign under, say, the Libertarian Party banner. It could be Ralph Nader all over again, but this time for the Republicans.

Pennsylvania turned out pretty much as I expected. Obama used his greater financial resources to greatly narrow the gap with Clinton in a state that should have been her's for the taking. On to Indiana for the next round in this bloody slugfest.

Posted by David at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pennsylvania finally votes today on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and I expect my wife and I will walk the block to our polling place shortly after they open. Shipoke, our neighborhood, always has a healthy turn-out, so I don't anticipate greatly increased lines over what we normally have. The difference could be if people are so eager to vote that they all come before they go to work instead of waiting until they get home this afternoon.

Who will win? Probably Clinton. The polls consistently show her on top by 6 to 10 points. Turnout among the newly registered voters and those who switched from Republican to Democrat will be the key. Those are believed to be Obama voters by and large, or Republicans who wanted the opportunity to vote against their old nemesis, Mrs. Clinton.

This is a state that is comfortable with the old and the tired, suspicious of glittery new ideas no matter how attractive they might seem to others. We keep a state liquor store system here that is widely despised, and disallow the sale of six-packs of beer in supermarkets, drugstores, and convenience stores because of a general fear of change. Those who would change that system lose out to those who profit from the old ways and use fear of change to cripple attempts at reform. We can't directly order expensive wines from small California wineries--you must go through a cumbersome process controlled by the state Liquor Control Board--because fears were raised that teenagers would order $50 bottles of pinot noir by mail to evade the drinking age.

Yet it is also a state that produced a local boy federal judge, John Jones III, who listened to all the evidence and wrote a legal opinion banning so-called Intelligent Design--warmed over creationism--from the public schools. Jones was chairman of that same Liquor Control Board before he became a judge. Go figure.

I always tell people that Pennsylvania is "relentlessly moderate" in its politics, which is a function of its resistance to change. An Arlen Specter is right out of that tradition. A Rick Santorum is not, and he eventually was thrown out by voters tired of his rightwing extremism. It is a state tailor-made for Hillary Clinton. But it will probably shift its allegiances to Barack Obama in the general election, especially after voters really get to know John McCain and how much he is like-or worse than--George W. Bush, whom they twice rejected.

My prediction for today: Hillary by only five points, given the success of the Obama campaign in mobilizing new voters and getting them to the polls.

Posted by David at 05:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pennsylvania finally votes today on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and I expect my wife and I will walk the block to our polling place shortly after they open. Shipoke, our neighborhood, always has a healthy turn-out, so I don't anticipate greatly increased lines over what we normally have. The difference could be if people are so eager to vote that they all come before they go to work instead of waiting until they get home this afternoon.

Who will win? Probably Clinton. The polls consistently show her on top by 6 to 10 points. Turnout among the newly registered voters and those who switched from Republican to Democrat will be the key. Those are believed to be Obama voters by and large, or Republicans who wanted the opportunity to vote against their old nemesis, Mrs. Clinton.

This is a state that is comfortable with the old and the tired, suspicious of glittery new ideas no matter how attractive they might seem to others. We keep a state liquor store system here that is widely despised, and disallow the sale of six-packs of beer in supermarkets, drugstores, and convenience stores because of a general fear of change. Those who would change that system lose out to those who profit from the old ways and use fear of change to cripple attempts at reform. We can't directly order expensive wines from small California wineries--you must go through a cumbersome process controlled by the state Liquor Control Board--because fears were raised that teenagers would order $50 bottles of pinot noir by mail to evade the drinking age.

Yet it is also a state that produced a local boy federal judge, John Jones III, who listened to all the evidence and wrote a legal opinion banning so-called Intelligent Design--warmed over creationism--from the public schools. Jones was chairman of that same Liquor Control Board before he became a judge. Go figure.

I always tell people that Pennsylvania is "relentlessly moderate" in its politics, which is a function of its resistance to change. An Arlen Specter is right out of that tradition. A Rick Santorum is not, and he eventually was thrown out by voters tired of his rightwing extremism. It is a state tailor-made for Hillary Clinton. But it will probably shift its allegiances to Barack Obama in the general election, especially after voters really get to know John McCain and how much he is like-or worse than--George W. Bush, whom they twice rejected.

My prediction for today: Hillary by only five points, given the success of the Obama campaign in mobilizing new voters and getting them to the polls.

Posted by David at 05:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)