My County

I had heard recently that there was a cross set aflame in a rural area in the Northwest corner of Susquehanna County. So when I saw a headline on AOL that read "Racists React to Obama Victory" and said there had been ten incidents nationwide, I clicked on it to see if our little corner of the country actually made the list.

Oh, it did. Understand, we live in a geographically large county with a relatively tiny population and the distinction of being one of the two poorest counties in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But c'mon -- as rural as it is here, and as Republican as I know this county to be, I didn't expect it to make up 20% of the items on a supposedly national list. Don't believe me? Here's the link to the AOL article. But upon closer examination, it seems that the two items is all part of the same case. Whew! That's a relief -- we're just making up 11% of the nation's bigotry.

In Apolocon, a cross was burned on the lawn of a biracial couple. The couple in question (she's Jewish, he's black) have lived here for 5 years; they have a pottery studio where they teach classes and sell their creations. And in the Binghamton newspaper article (because you know it didn't make the local weekly newspapers), there is an open question of whether this was because the couple is biracial, or because she's Jewish (anti-Semitism, anyone?) or because they supported Barack Obama. In nearby Little Meadows, I learn, there used to be KKK rallies. This is so profoundly revolting, I don't know where to begin.

It turns out the Friendsville item may be the criminal action against the two men arrested for racial intimidation. Still not reported in our local newspapers; maybe next week when it will appear in the police blotter....

The point here is not a liberal trope about bitterness, guns, religion, and bigotry. It's not even the more nuanced point about racism going both ways, and that we need to condemn the cross-burning as much as the burning rhetoric from the Reverend Wrights of the world.

What I take away from this is the feeling that my county -- and yes, I wasn't born here but by gosh I live here now -- needs better education and more intervention and a chance for people to learn what's going on in the world without feeling like the world is leaving them behind. We need jobs, and services, and a chance to get better, do better, appear better.

Before I look to Barack Obama, or even to Congressman Carney (reelected to his second term), I have to look to myself. I am reminded that I need to be involved with the welfare of my neighbors. I could condemn them, but how does that help? So I have to figure out a way to help make this a better place. I can't do it single-handedly, but I can make a difference.

That's a change I can believe in.

The Election

Hey, how about that -- my guy won. Whoo-hoo! And our lawn signs weren't stolen this time around. That's cause for celebration.

Mind you, Susquehanna County didn't go for Barack Obama, and my township sure didn't. I live in Harford Township, and it's pretty well Republican:

The first column is Barack Obama/Joe Biden, the second column is McCain/Palin. But I can't feel too bad about that result -- I suspect Barack for a vote or two from registered Republicans.

Coffee Jones, my famous cousin from the greater Boston area, came to town to help with phonebanking and canvassing on the weekend before the election. We were assigned to one of the two wards in Forest City. (Don't remember which one, sorry.)


We must have done our job because both Forest City precincts went for Obama! Whoo-hoo! Coffee even used the Internet to follow the returns from Susquehanna County. Gotta love the Internet...

And now for a sign of the apocalypse, Susquehanna County style. I again volunteered to be the lawyer for the Democratic Party in the county, and I also got to be Barack Obama's lawyer. My official title: "County Counsel for Change," which is silly, but this was a bunch of "inside the Beltway" guys who used acronyms and weird terminology like "flying squads" and "boiler room," so I let them call me what they wanted to.

My primary mandate was to deal with voter protection issues in the county. I made sure the Democratic poll watchers knew who I was and what I was about, and they all had (at some point in time, at least) my cell phone number. No one called me. *sigh* I did have one voter protection issue come up, but provisional ballots had already been cast and there wasn't much I could do.

So, in order to be helpful, I made phone calls (GOTV in our "flying squad" lexicon -- Get Out The Vote) on election day to make sure that likely Obama supporters voted. I had a specific precinct to call -- I won't say which one -- and was nearly through the list when I got a nice fellow. It was his wife I had on my list, but she was napping. Still, he assured me that they had both voted earlier in the day. Then he volunteered the following story.

When his wife gave her name to the election official handling the book -- you know, the book you sign -- the election official said, "Who are you voting for?" This is, of course, wildly illegal. But wait, there's more: When the voter answered (as she surely didn't need to) that she was going to vote for Obama, the election official then said, "You're going to vote for the Antichrist?"

Now, I have no idea if this actually happened, but if it did, it's vote suppression -- or at least attempted vote suppression. Only -- and this has to be classic Susquehanna County -- it wasn't a Republican effort to suppress the vote, it was a loony religious crackpot effort to suppress the vote.

The voter didn't want to lodge a formal complaint, so all I did was tell the election officials at the Courthouse of the anecdotal suggestion that someone at that specific precinct was, uh, taking a possible religious mandate as trumping the civic duty to permit voters to vote in peace. For what it's worth, none of the other voters I spoke with reporting anything like that. So who knows -- could be a one-off.

I finished my election day at the Courthouse watching as they tabulated all the votes. The folks who do this job are very very good at it, and I really didn't have any concerns going in. It was all very smooth, so I mostly listened to NPR's election coverage using headphones (I would share results with the Resolution Board -- a bipartisan group of four citizens who fill in replacement ballots when the machine kicks out a damaged ballot, but I was very discreet). But at some point it occurred to me that I was being treated with a certain amount of deference. I have to say, I don't see myself that way: you know, as someone who has to be treated with deference. And then it hit me: I was the Democratic Party in that room. I was the person prepared to testify if anything went wrong. I was the Official Observer. And there was someone doing this precise job in every other county in Pennsylvania, and presumably every county in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and so forth...

That was my election day. I voted, I called, I observed. And at the end of the day, I cried when I watched President-Elect Obama's speech from Grant Park. For me, the significance is so huge, but in no way greater than the fact that I actually want to keep following the political landscape. I didn't enjoy the election that much, but I suspect it will be fun to watch Barack Obama serve as our 44th president.

Paulson's Plunder -or- Financial Armageddon?

As I type this, miserable with a weird cold, the House of Representatives has voted against the bailout plan proposed by the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, and the stock market has dropped 600 points or so.

Now, I'm in a weird position here. I'm not shocked by any of this. In fact, I predicted it (alas, without sufficient specificity to know precisely when it would happen), and I actually think worse news is on its way.

So sue me for being gloomy. Or blame it on the cold. But it just made sense to me -- we'd been so arrogant in our financial dealings and assumptions (we = Americans generically) that it seemed obvious to me that things had to collapse. In the past four years, I've said as much to two different financial advisors, both of whom looked at me funny and decided I was just "risk-averse."

Well, despite my prescience, I didn't really know what I was talking about, and so I've learned a bit in the past two weeks. Here's what I think I understand now: First, this is absolutely an instance of our having adopted a capitalist approach to gains and socialist approach to losses. And yes, the people who got so greedy should suffer the consequences. But I've seen the enemy, and they are us (or however Walt Kelly first put that). We're the ones who voted for deregulation, celebrated tax cuts, day-traded, bought homes with weird mortgages, invested in funds that promised big yields, and generally got greedy. Now, I know YOU aren't greedy/wealthy/knowledgeable about the stock market. You may not have a subprime mortgage, a house that's over-valued, or a job that's teetering on the brink. You may feel like you're the victim here -- that your economic security is going to go down the tubes because of someone else's greed and lack of oversight. And you'd be right. But you'd also be wrong to think that you had nothing to do with this crisis.

I do know some people with no connection to the current economic crisis; they are very poor. I agree, they had nothing to do with this. But the rest of us . . . well, that's a different story. We all benefited from the attitude, left over from the Reagan administration, that there was no reason why we couldn't have it all: artificially low gas prices, affordable housing, big SUVs, etc. We just are not very frugal in this country -- it's not in our culture. We live large, and we worry about tomorrow sometime next week. And we all did too little to say that the Reagan voodoo economics were dangerous. We got a huge reprieve with the Clinton administration and the dot com explosion; remember when there was no deficit? Wow, does that seem a long time ago.

And then came the current administration, which cut taxes and raised spending, particularly for a crazy war. (As an aside, did you know that there are people who actually believe that the wealthiest 1% has a legitimate complaint because when some past president raised taxes on the wealthy, that increase was promised to be temporary, so really their taxes should come down all the way to -- oh, the 1960s or something? Wow.) So now we have a massive deficit, and it's getting harder and harder to think that we'll ever be able to grow our way out of it, ever. What a legacy for our kids.

The thing about the bailout plan that bothers me is that it probably isn't enough at this time, so the next president (President Obama, if I have anything to say about it) will have to go through this process all over again. And that's why I think we need to back up and look at this whole thing a different way.

The current bailout is intended to help out the financial institutions who are holding all this bad paper that's basically every risky mortgage roled up into some weird sort of security. On the one hand, why should the taxpayers buy these securities when we didn't create the underlying problem? Let them eat the losses. Well, of course, it's not that simple -- if the financial institutions fail, and credit dries up, businesses will start to fail in huge numbers, people will lose their jobs, so they default on their non-risky mortgages, and the next thing we know, we've got a depression on our hands. It'll look different than the 1930s, but it will be just as bad.

But -- and here's where I get muddled up in my thinking -- why are we only getting one option? For example, why can't we pump money into the economy in key sectors (infrastructure, education, child care, health care) that can't be outsourced, need to be done, and help all of us in more tangible ways? Why can't some of the $1 trillion (counting the $700 billion plus the funds already spent on economic recovery/bailouts) be spent, as the language has it, on Main Street (or Elm Street or Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard)?

My congressman, Chris Carney, just voted against the bailout. Hmmm. He's a smart guy -- does he believe that to vote for it would be political suicide (he's running against a crazy-conservative rich guy), or does he believe a better plan can be passed, or does he favor letting the markets work it out. I'll be looking forward to his explanation -- I hope it's more than just "I heard from you, the constituents, that you didn't approve," because I'll tell ya, I don't think that we (the constituents) know precisely what's really going on.

I don't know what will happen if no bailout plan is passed, and I don't think it's even sensible to ask, because something will be done, even if it's too little and too late. But I guarantee -- come January. President Obama's going to have a lot more opportunity to be great than even we'd imagined. And we're all going to have a chance to get smarter about money. It's about time.

46 Days and Counting

I got two viral emails this week that I love. I forwarded the first (it had lots of photos of an anti-Palin rally in Anchorage where the participants went to the trouble of making signs like "Hockey Mama for Obama" and "Voted for Her Once -- Never Again"), so if your mailbox got clogged uploading 4 MB of photos, I apologize.

But this one, I thought I'd put here:

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight . . .

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're 'exotic, different.'
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
Name your kids Willow, Trig, and Track, you're a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.
Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

If you spent 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black resident of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

If your total resume is: local sportscaster girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society. If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don't represent America's.

If you're husband is nicknamed 'First Dude', with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

I did some checking on the Internet, and I think the original author might be someone named Alan Goodman, posting in the Comments section of a post on Don Surber's blog where he asked people to list their five reasons why McCain has pulled ahead. Of course, according to the most recent Gallup polls, the race is pretty close and Obama has regained his pre-conventions narrow lead. If the news on Wall Street continues to be bad, I figure the polls will continue to edge toward Barack.

Also according to those recent polls, all Palin has done is energize the Republican base. That's fine. I'm glad the election is close. I'm glad the Democrats aren't getting complacent, figuring we can't lose. I'm glad independents and seldom-voters are getting involved. We need record numbers. Of course, I say that because I think more people voting = an Obama victory.

I've made my peace with the fact that there are people out there who won't vote for him, no way no how. They may say it's because of Hillary; they may say they genuinely believe he's been indoctrinated into the Muslim faith since childhood (and not ever ask themselves why that should even matter -- not all Muslims are actively trying to destroy America, you know); they may openly admit that it's because he's black. But I don't care about those people, and if McCain wins because there are more of "those sorts" in this country than I'd realized, well, then maybe we're just going to get the president we deserve, in a bad way.

But I don't think so. I think there are a lot of smart people out there who have moved away from politics and elections. Well, go register to vote, why don't you? Cast your ballot, get involved, make a difference. That's what will get Barack Obama elected -- people smart enough to have gotten disillusioned checking back in. Because if one thing's true, it's this: John McCain and Sarah Palin represent the very sorts of politicians who turned people off in the first place.

My favorite sign at the anti-Palin rally in Anchorage? That's a picture I'll share:

It's the sign on the left, mocked up to look like the McCain/Palin signs we see now. Only, doesn't that just sum them up? He's reckless and she's inexperienced. So people who just have to vote against Barack Obama can do so, but I hope they have half a clue what they're voting for.

Those Chickens are Looking Better and Better

I was on the phone with a political contact and friend up here, and she said that if McCain/Palin win in November, she's out of politics for good. (I know the feeling -- I'm old enough that I can remember feeling that way when Nixon won in 1972!) And on a day when the Dow Jones lost 500 points, I can also understand why my friend thinks Armageddon is in store if the Republicans win the presidency for another term. Even I'm not that pessimistic, although I do look at our 24 acres and think, "Well, with some solar panels, a wind turbine, a vegetable garden and some chickens, we could probably eke out a living on this property..."

All of this led into a conversation I just had with my husband. He's thinking about seeing if he can get some work in his field (computer programming) to help offset some larger-than-expected outlays this year. This led to a conversation about the economy, a favorite topic of mine. I don't entirely subscribe to the notion of Armageddon, but I do think the economy is in the toilet for at least five years if McCain wins in November. Husband asked me why I think that.

"Because [McCain is] an idiot about economics," I said. Three times.

"Why do you [Americans] give so much power to one individual?" my English husband asked.

I spontaneously came up with the following theory, which you can all help me refine. It is in the American psyche to believe in the power of the individual. We don't do monarchies, we don't do collectives (except as exercises in counter-culture), and we don't really trust others too much. But we believe in superheroes, which is the individual come to save us! So we like to empower the president with the ability to get stuff done. It also helps that Congress is effectively a committee of committees, and committees are many people trying to do the work of one -- a pattern card of inefficiency.

[In defense of Congress, I would like to say at this point that we desperately need it to keep doing the watch-dog work it excels at. Congress doesn't make the president work better, it makes the president work more honestly.]

But when we elect presidents, we tend to like them stupid, folksy, or messianic -- or some combination of all three. Franklin Roosevelt was messianic, which turned out to be a good thing. Carter was folksy and not messianic; not such a success as a president. Reagan was, arguably, stupid and folksy -- he didn't accomplish a lot of the stuff he promised as a candidate; he might have been messianic, though. It's kind of an actor's trait, isn't it? Clinton: folksy & messianic. Bush: stupid & folksy.

Obama: messianic, in a good way. Not stupid or folksy, though.

McCain: None of the three. Which could explain why his campaign was so lacking in fire before the pick of Palin as his running mate. She's certainly folksy, and her lack of experience looks a bit dumb, and I think she's got messianic written all over her resume. The trifecta!

So what's the problem? Well, we have real problems in our economy. Funny thing I heard on the radio the other day -- some guy (and I feel bad that I don't recall enough about which program he was on to be able to scour the Internet for a link to his book) has a theory that Republicans rack up huge deficits in their presidencies solely so that the succeeding Democratic president has to deal with the carnage on his/her watch. It happened to Carter, it happened to Clinton, and it will happen to whomever follows George W. Bush. This makes sense -- Reagan talked a good game, but he left his successor (George H.W. Bush) with an economic mess, which as a basically honorable guy, he tried to deal with. (Remember "Read my lips"?) That was political suicide.

So if McCain wins, we're in the toilet, economically, for four more years, `cause I really don't see him raising taxes. And I don't think we can expect another technological boom to save us, the way in did in the 90s.

*sigh*

Those chickens are starting to look pretty good, right about now.

How to Save a Polar Bear!

I have said in the past that I didn't see how a Democratic woman could be elected president. Misogyny runs too deep in some people, and I figured the only way some segments of the population could vote for a woman was if she was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican. President Kay Bailey Hutchison, anyone?

I know this seems a cynical viewpoint in a year when 18 million people voted for Hillary Clinton, but you'll notice she's not the Democratic nominee. And Sarah Palin, I would argue, not only makes my point but actually proves I wasn't cynical enough. Because as unpleasant as a Kay Bailey Hutchison presidency would be, at least she's arguably competent. And she's mature. And probably thinks before she speaks. (Even better case in point: Senator Olympia Snowe.)

By contrast, Sarah Palin is a MILF. Well, sorry folks, but after eight years of having as our president a guy a lot of people figure would be fun to drink a beer with, we now have the chance to elect to the second highest office in the land a woman some people would like to look like, and some others would like to "do."

Does commenting on Governor Palin's appearance really make me a misogynist? Why? It's clearly part of her appeal, and I for one am having trouble seeing the rest of the package. She is smart, to be sure (although I think I could take her in a debate, and I am certain Joe Biden can!), but she's aggressive, politically expedient, inexperienced and there's some evidence that what experience she does have reflects unfavorably on her qualifications. (Putting an airplane up on eBay doesn't set her that far apart from millions of other people who sell on eBay. In fact, I wonder that it was a smart thing to do, if the idea was to save Alaska money -- eBay isn't exactly the first website I'd try if I was looking to buy a used jet. That makes it a publicity ploy more than a real money-maker. Do we know what they got for the plane, by the way? And was it more than the cost of Ms. Palin's family travelling back to Wasilla, where they get a per diem for living in their own home?)

Wasilla -- I've been there, as it happens -- is a small town north of Anchorage. I can well believe the claim that it was debt-free before Ms. Palin became its mayor, and was saddled with $22 million in debt when she left. That's a rookie mistake -- the sort made by politicians who feel they have to do something to prove their worth and don't think out carefully enough what they want to do, how to do it, what the costs & benefits are, etc.

So, no, I'm not impressed with Sarah Palin. But here's a woman I can completely support: Eve Ensler! She wrote the The Vagina Monologues. And she wrote this for the Huffington Post:

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

(Click on the link above for the whole piece -- I heard it on the radio last night, and it's great!)

Eve, it seems, has a thing for polar bears. And really, who doesn't? They're beautiful, and they're endangered. And we want to fight for them, even when we really don't know what we're supposed to do to help. (Is turning off this light bulb really going to save a polar bear?)

But now, finally, we have a way to fight back against Sarah Palin! Let's claim that electing her will literally kill this:

(Credit: Alaska Image Library/United States Fish and Wildlife Service, via Bloomberg News and the New York Times. Read accompanying story here.)

What a gorgeous animal, wouldn't you agree? Wouldn't it be a shame if thousands of these lovely animals died because YOU voted for McCain/Palin? There's a very simple solution. Don't vote for the pretty girl just because she's a novelty, or fun to listen to, or you admire her moxie. She wants -- literally, from a helicopter -- to kill the polar bears.

What's that? Uh, sure polar bears are not particularly crucial to this campaign. But that train left the station a few weeks ago. We're supposed to be focused on the economy, and foreign relations, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you really think after a week of arguing over lipstick on a pig that it matters if I use a polar bear to counteract Sarah Palin's dubious charm as a VP candidate? Puh-leeze. To paraphrase, Nobody ever got elected overestimating the intelligence of the American public.

But its compassion for polar bears is legendary!

Conspiracy of Dunces?

I got an email today from a woman in England whom my husband dated briefly. I call her "The Fair Arlene," not entirely sarcastically. (Actually, she's good fun.) Anyway, she wrote to us this afternoon, superficially to compliment us on our wedding photos, but really to ask for my opinion of some video that alleges our current economic woes are the result of a cabal of international bankers who planned to undermine our economy. (Why a woman from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, now living in the U.K., is concerned about the machinations of international bankers meddling in the U.S. economy, that I can't say.)

Anyway, I responded to her as follows -- and this is just what I dashed off in a rush, mind you, so no footnotes!

Arlene -- How nice to hear from you. Re: international bankers having it in for the U.S.: I hate to rain on a good conspiracy theory, but I have to suggest that we (Americans) managed to trash our own economy on all our own. I don't doubt we got help, but the whole thing has been the dog's breakfast. Here's my view of how it happened:

The dot-com boom in the mid- to late-90s was truly the rising tide that floated (almost) all boats in this country. That led to an explosion of the American tendency toward self-aggrandizement and arrogance. Truly wealthy people were convinced that they could do everything, buy everything, have everything. Merely moneyed people were convinced they were already really wealthy, or would end up very wealthy in short order. They favored regressive monetary policy that increased the opportunity (risk-free, they thought!) to make money hand-over-fist. Middle class folks also thought it was just a matter of time before they were rich too, so they voted in line with the wealthy. This was known as "aspirational voting."

So, when Bush took office in 2001, he inherited a surplus (not that we weren't still in debt, but we'd been making more money through tax and other revenues than we'd been spending) and a mandate to loosen or get rid of regulation that hampered the free market forces so loved by conservatives. The next thing you know, we have Enron (a company that really figured that their financial shell game was okay because, you know, they were making money), and the housing market that permitted absurd lending practices on the grounds that it was good for poor people to own their own houses, and after all, we're all making money. But then 9/11 happened (now, do you think that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of these shadowy international bankers? That would be hinky!), and Bush led us into not one but two wars in short order. Chasing after oil revenues was part of that, of course -- and don't miss the fact that the oil companies are pretty much the only sector making money hand-over-fist even today! -- plus the arrogance and self-aggrandizement natural to Republicans. (They *say* they're all about fiscal responsibility but it's a lie.) Well, just like Enron, so went the credit business entirely. And I'm not optimistic overall. But I really don't think anyone planned this. I'm pretty sure it happened the way all sorts of bad things happen: Nobody thought it could happen, so they failed to heed conventional wisdom and common sense, and then that it-could-never-happen bad thing happened.

As I say, though, if you prefer the elaborate conspiracy theory, don't let me stop you. There's undoubtedly enough bad news to fuel everyone's pessimism!

Take care -- Magdalen

Once More Into The Breech

I got a call from Kathie Shelley, who used to be "the" Democratic lawyer in Susquehanna County. She'd received a call from a lawyer in Philadelphia working for the Obama campaign and trying to put together lead attorneys in each of Pennsylvania's counties. This is preparing for the November election, and as Kathie has retired, she wanted to give him my name. Sure, no problem, I said.

So once again I'll be the lawyer on the spot for the Democrats on election day. That's fine; I've done it before. It will be interesting to see if there's more activity on election day here than there was in 2006. It will also be interesting to see if Barack Obama's historical candidacy will resonate in this still-quite-conservative county.

Of course, you would think there would be a Republican lawyer doing the same thing, just for the sake of parity. But you would be wrong, and really quite silly. This is Susquehanna County -- the Republicans don't need to worry that any of their sizable number will be messed about by election day antics. What they don't seem to understand is that among their sizable number are quite a few people who will vote for the Democratic candidate in some races. There are hard Republicans here, and soft ones. It will be interesting to see how the numbers break out when all the votes are counted.

And that's my job: to make sure that all the legitimate votes get counted. It's actually quite an honor.

A Quick Check

I know at least one person checks this blog because that one person reminded me recently that it was STILL SNOWING on my masthead, and even in Susquehanna County, we do get summer. Fair comment. [Changes have been made. -- Ed.]

So while I'm waiting for today's torrential rains to abate long enough for me to take a more summery photo for the masthead, here's a quick check of my thoughts on the current political scene.

1. Who's this woman in Massachusetts who cares enough about one-upsmanship in political signage during the annual Fourth of July parade that she had to write in to the Independent? I mean, if people did what she said they did (or, rather, if they did what she wants people to believe they did -- her command of a coherent narrative style left me a bit confused as to what she was alleging actually happened), then sure -- bad on those Carney supporters. But the whole thing is hinky. Supposedly she's writing out of a sense of patriotism and community nostalgia. But who actually cares enough to write to the paper of a community you've already left? And where was she when Don Sherwood was shtupping some woman in D.C., then (allegedly) hitting her, then (allegedly) paying her off as settlement of a civil action? What I'm trying to say is, Chris Carney isn't responsible for every action -- misguided or not -- of his supporters, but Don Sherwood is responsible for who he [fill in crude verb of choice].

So this woman can claim that she's not partisan, that she's just complaining about how some over-zealous political supporters were behaving badly. She can even say she would have written the exact same letter if it had been Hackett supporters blocking the Carney signs. But until she produces the letter to the editor she wrote two years ago to say that Don Sherwood has besmirched the good name and reputation of his loyal supporters in Montrose when he behaved so egregiously . . . she's got no credibility with me.

2. I'm an Obama supporter.

I'm a long-time subscriber to The New Yorker magazine.

I thought The Cover was funny.

But I can see why others didn't. Whatev.

Here's what does surprise me. Why aren't I allowed to think it's funny? I had people telling me that it WASN'T funny, that it WAS offensive, and that no one {liberal/Obama-supporting/with a conscience/with a pulse} could possibly think it acceptable. Only I am liberal/Obama-supporting/have a conscience/and have a pulse. And I'm also pretty certain it's not me who has a problem here.

For one thing, "they" can't articulate precisely why I should be offended by The Cover. In the space of ten minutes, I heard on two different liberal leaning radio programs (Air America and Here and Now) that The Cover was offensive because it wasn't realistic ("Michelle Obama has never worn her hair like that!") and that The Cover was offensive because it was too realistic ("satire is extreme; this wasn't extreme"). Well, make up your tiny minds!

For another thing, all that outrage seemed awfully convenient. I swear the pundits listen to each other and react accordingly. Would the one person who did think it was funny get ostracized by the others? Is there some sort of punditry punishment for mavericks?

And "their" certainty was so odd, as if they'd established the offensiveness of The Cover by irrefutable Aristotelian logic, Venn diagrams, and reductio ad absurdum arguments straight from their high school debating clubs. I half expected someone to say "Q.E.D." with a flourish of the hand. And isn't that ironic, because I'm pretty sure The Cover was mocking precisely that rush to judgment, that certainty without proof, that -- well, reductio ad absurdum. As I saw it, it was saying, "If everything everyone has said about the Obamas were true -- she's got militant ties, he's a secret Muslim, she's too black for America, he's not black enough, etc., etc. -- here's what you'd get."

Sorry, I still think it's funny. And I really thought Jon Stewart was right on target, pointing out that it's odd how the Obama campaign got upset that The Cover showed him as an Muslim Extremist, because Muslim Extremists are the ones who get upset about cartoons. If you want to watch the video clip, it's here.

3. I was asked, recently, why I thought Obama should be elected and how his election would help quilters. (Hey, I have other facets to my life -- and I post more about quilting, too!) Here's what I replied:

The current administration has dug a pretty horrible hole for us within the global community, and that's affecting us at home more than people realize. The dollar is down against the Euro, the Asian currencies, and so forth -- that, in turn, is making all us poorer in the global economy. Given that we've been lured into complacency about gas guzzling cars and energy inefficient consumption, that means one thing: LESS MONEY FOR BUYING FABRIC. (Sorry for the yelling...) A stronger US economy starts abroad, and if we can pull that off, we can spend more at home.

Obama gets it that we have to start mending fences abroad. More internationalism, less cowboy/military action. Let's impress our neighbors abroad that we're smarter than the 43rd president. Let's encourage investment in the US -- heck, let's export more American-designed fabric! (And American ingenuity, know-how, creativity, and complexity -- we've got a great product once you stop our national leaders from waving guns around.)

Obama also gets it that we all work hard and need a break at home. I think he'll do a much better job of supporting us as busy professionals. Look at his position on the reformed G.I. Bill legislation -- that's support for the folks who've made such monumental sacrifices for our country. Let's get them home, provide them with mental health services and job placement and education, and a sense that we know we've asked far too much of them, so it's our turn to give back. And if Obama -- and not McCain -- thinks that's important for our nation's military, then I think we can guess which candidate will do a better job supporting our nation's quilters. (Not that those are mutually exclusive groups, you understand. I have no doubt there are loads of military quilters.)

Finally, McCain lost his gadfly cred when he backed Bush in Iraq and at home. Obama is bucking a long-standing tradition of politics as a backroom business. He believes this nation can do great things again, and he's made me believe that as well. I think he can pull it off, but even if all he does is restore a sense of urgency and excitement about the presidential election, and governing the nation as a whole, he's done us all a great favor. If we can sleep at night knowing our government is not all a bunch of horses' derrieres, then that means we'll be better rested in the morning. And you know what a well rested quilter means, don't you? A more consistent quarter-inch seam. Say it with me: Yes, we can!

Well, has anyone noticed how Barack Obama is being received abroad? Not too shabby, hunh? When you can impress the prime minister of Iraq, King Abdullah of Jordan, the US troops, and the German public, you're doing something right. So, my answer might have been tongue-in-cheek, but it might also have been prescient. How awesome would it be if we had the guy that everyone thought was cool and impressive? They might even like us a little, again.

We're In The Money (not)

We've arrived -- we finally got an official offer from Chesapeake Energy to lease our land for $2,550 - 2,750/acre, depending on the length of the lease.

We're not going to do it -- it's not worth the money to us -- but I can see why people who leased two years ago for $25 are pissed off. Someone told me that gas leases in Texas are up to $22,000/acre. That might almost get me interested, but . . . probably not.

Recount

My ex-husband and I went to see "Recount," the HBO movie about the 2000 presidential election results (or lack thereof). I had free tickets to an advance screening in Philadelphia (although the concept of an advance screening was stretched a bit by the fact that HBO had televised the movie the preceding Sunday -- eh, what did I care? I don't get HBO) and as it was during a trip to Philly for doctors' appointments, and I was staying with the ex, it seemed reasonable to take him along.

My ex-husband, like my current husband, is British. The difference is that I was in the first marriage in 2000, so H. and I had lived through the legal and political debacle that was that election. The movie is rather fun; I enjoyed it well enough. (H. only looked like he was going to explode once that I noticed...) But what the entire event revealed is that politics is everywhere. You would have thought that people -- reasonable people -- would have wanted to have all the votes counted to determine who actually won the election. But no, people -- yes, even reasonable people! -- want their candidate to get elected. And if it seems likely that counting more votes will risk the other guy getting elected, then you don't want more votes counted.

This is important, and sad, in equal measure. I reluctantly agree that Bush would have won -- probably -- if all the votes had been counted. But boy can I disagree with how this all played out. I have a friend, who I suspect of being slightly more Democrat than Republican, and he feels strongly that the Supreme Court was right to close the Florida recount down when it did. I dunno. I still think it's sad that the Supreme Court revealed its own political biases even in the face of its own stated precedents. The same conservative justices who trumpet states' rights voted to stop a state from resolving a state-run election. That just doesn't look good to me. I wasn't a fan of the Supreme Court before that decision, but I thought it had some integrity. I sure don't think so now.

And how outrageous is it that Justice Scalia has the gall to say, in effect, "That's old news. Get over it," when asked by Lesley Stahl about the result in Bush v. Gore on 60 Minutes. This is the court that lives by stare decisis, the principle that they are bound by precedent even decades or centuries old. It was a big deal in 1938 when the court overturned a hundred-year-old principle in Erie v. Tompkins. Eight years ago, and it's "old news"? Oh, that's so annoying.

Otherwise, well, it's politics, innit? I've read the criticisms about how John Hurt has portrayed Warren Christopher; I can't get worked up about them. (After all, they set up one of the film's best jokes, when a Republican operative says of Christopher's manners, "He probably eats his M&Ms with a knife and fork!") Sure, liberals like me wanted the Gore team to get down and fight hard. And particularly now, when we look at what Bush has done with his presidency. But the film version of Warren Christopher was hoping for a reasonable discussion of how to resolve a bizarre situation. What's so bad about being reasonable?

It's like elitism. What's so wrong with elitism? Being elite is a good thing. You want your child to get into an elite college. Barack Obama went to an elite law school. Hillary Clinton went to an elite law school from an elite college. (Of course, what does that prove -- George W. Bush went to an elite college and an elite business school, and I'm not sure he's even close to being anyone's notion of "elite.")

What we don't want is stuffy. We don't want a "not-our-kind-dear" mentality in our politicians. We don't want to feel that politicians are condescending to us. We want to be understood, liked, appreciated, cared for. They do it in different ways, but I think both Obama and Clinton succeed there.

And there's a difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. Back in 2000, pundits wondered why working class voters were favoring Republicans. The answer, as studies showed, was that they were casting their votes not based on what favored their socio-economic interests in the moment, but what would help them when they got rich. "Aspirational voting," it was called.

I hope that working class voters get it now, during this "not a recession dear" economic down turn, that their interests have not been well served by eight years of a Republican president. Supposedly, back in 2000, Bush was the guy more people wanted to have a beer with. But after eight years of a Bush presidency, can they still afford to drink with him?

It makes you wonder how people would vote now in the 2000 election.

Trey Casimir

A funny thing happened to me recently. I got an email from a candidate who had met me at the Young Democrats breakfast a couple months ago and wanted to meet in person. Mysteriously, AOL hadn't thought this was spam. For once, they were right!

The candidate is Trey Casimir, running for State Senate in the 23rd district. He's running unopposed for the Democratic slot; three Republicans face off in the primary on the 22nd to see who'll run against Trey. I'm sure the senate seat has been traditionally Republican, but stranger things have happened than that a Democrat has successfully contested the conventional wisdom about who would be best to respresent a predominantly rural section of Pennsylvania in the state legislature!

(Trey's district runs right up the middle of the state, or slightly east of the middle: Parts of Union County, all of Lycoming, Sullivan and Bradford Counties, and the western and northern bits of Susquehanna County. I am not in his district, but that doesn't stop me from supporting him.)

After establishing that I can't vote for him, Trey and I agreed to meet yesterday at a mutually inconvenient spot off I-81. I had a great time talking with him. He's smart, he listens well, he's quirky (that's a compliment coming from me), and he actually reminds me why someone smart would want to run for office. Understand, I'm as cynical as the next person, so of course I assume that people run for office to wield power, or because they're narcissistic and the job supports that, or because they're too stupid for a real job. Or some combination of all three. (Any resemblance to a current president is purely intentional...)

But Trey is none of those things. I actually believe that he wants to make his part of Pennsylvania a better place, and if that means driving hundreds of miles to crisscross five counties, then that's what he'll do. Wow! That's dedication, particularly with gas prices as high as they are.

So where do I come in? Well, it's not because of this blog, which I've neglected mercilessly (insert woefully inadequate excuse here: sickness, planning an overseas wedding, rendered mute by the brilliance of Barack's March 18 "race" speech, etc.). And it's not my sparkling personality, as he could find many more interesting people to approach. Nor is it that I uniquely have my finger on the pulse of the electorate in Susquehanna County. I'm not sure anyone does, but I know I don't!

But Trey's got a much cannier approach to these things. He's on the lookout for smart people to help him with his campaign, and when he finds them, he latches on. Again, the cynical view would be that he just wants my money. He does, but that's not all. He wants my help to get elected, and if he finds a dozen or so more people like me, he's doing well. I can't guarantee votes, but I can work hard and enthusiastically.

What's he got then, to promote such enthusiasm? Well, smarts is the first thing. He's thought about a lot of issues I hadn't even contemplated, such as the effect of making I-80 (which runs through the southern part of his district) a toll road. (His approach: make it a toll road going into Pennsylvania, but not leaving the state. That will capture a lot of the revenue from traffic travelling the length of the highway, but leave alone those drivers just going 30 miles in one direction or another.) He's thought about truckers, and says that trucking is one of the few remaining blue collar jobs available. I respect that sort of thinking -- I wonder if the current crop of millionaire Republicans running for local office have really thought about the effect of diesel fuel costs on the welfare of a substantial population in the area? And he's thought about the ecomony. He's in favor of state-generate tax rebates to stimulate the economy. I don't necessarily agree with him about that, but I respect his wanting a statewide approach to the economy.

Most of all, I'm encouraged by candidates like Trey and Chris Carney. They bring a comprehension to the issues of life in rural Pennsylvania -- they understand why people want to live here, and what those people need to make it here. And most of all, they get it that what we really need is not to be ignored by Washington or Harrisburg. I want someone smart talking about the issues important in our part of Pennsylvania. And even if he won't be my senator in Harrisburg, he'll do a great job looking out for my neighbors just a few miles to the west of me. I take the approach that if my neighbors are better off, I'm better off.

So, yeah, I'll send him money. And I'll host an open house in the summer. I'll even drive down to Lewisburg and stuff envelopes. I want to do this, but I also feel I have to do this. A prosperous future here means having guys like Trey stepping up and saying, "Yeah, I'll run. I'll serve." And that future is achieveable if people like me say, "Yeah, I'll help out. Just tell me what you need."

Presidential Candidates

I favor Barack, myself. That's okay -- I know people who favor Hillary, and I think no less of them. My reasons for backing Barack Obama are, possibly, unique to me. I can explain them, but I can hardly require others to agree with me. Here they are:

My parents were born in 1914 & 1919, respectively, so they grew up Depression children. They were both Roosevelt Democrats, and their stories of FDR were inspiring to me as I grew up. Like him or not, I gather he had at least three things going for him: 1) He was a gifted speaker, using rhetoric to support, console, reassure, and rally a nation facing a profound economic crisis that affected everyone, and then the attack on Pearl Harbor and our subsequent entry into WWII. 2) He got things done. You can argue about the New Deal, but it did something. You can argue about his foreign policy, but it did something. 3) He got us into a just war.

I was born in 1956. Here's my personal report card on the presidents in my lifetime:

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Not a great speaker. Got things done, though (I love the Interstate system). Not sure about the Korean War. Final grade: B-

John F. Kennedy: Great speaker. Got some things done (space program, Peace Corps); didn't get other things done (civil rights; foreign policy crises). Got Vietnam started. Final grade: B

Lyndon Johnson: Not a great speaker ("my felluh Muricans"). Got some cool domestic things done (civil rights -- for which I give him, as a Texan, extra credit). Escalated the Vietnam War rather than shutting it down. Final grade: B+

Richard Nixon: Terrible speaker -- it's never a good sign when you're that easy to satirize. His accomplishments in foreign policy (China) are vastly outweighed by his bungling of the Vietnam war, and I can't think of a domestic accomplishment to offset Watergate. Vietnam turned out to be an unwinnable war. We withdrew after killing far too many of everybody: our troops, the South Vietnamese troops & civilians, and North Vietnamese troops & civilians. Yes, we should have respected the sacrifice of our military men and women when they came home; that's a national shame I hope we've forever learned not to do, but I wonder why our current leaders don't respect their sacrifice by not inflicting it so cavalierly on a new generation of military personal and families. Final grade: D- (I gotta grade on a curve, and someone is actually worse. See below.)

Gerald Ford: Not a great speaker. (Personal disclosure: My opinion of Ford's speeches was warped by the fact that my dad went to law school with him and said when Gerry spoke in class, he was particularly bland and vacuous.) Can't think of anything bad he did, nor anything good. He tried to heal the nation after Watergate: enh. Didn't get us into war, though. Final grade: C.

Jimmy Carter: Not a great speaker as president. No great accomplishments while in office, and the hostage crisis was not his finest hour. (Can't help thinking FDR or Truman would have done something...) Didn't wage war, though. Tough one for me, but I have to say it. Final grade: C+ (Final grade as a former president: A+ Truly, he lives and thinks as we all should, but don't.)

Ronald Reagan: Not a great speaker, for me personally. Joviality does not a great president make, I think. I personally have a hard time naming his accomplishments, perhaps because I don't think trickle-down economics made sense. (I'll concede he advanced the conservative Republican agenda; you'll forgive me if I don't list that as an accomplishment. If you think that was great, write your own blog.) I think he endorsed the notion that we (Americans) get it all and pay nothing for it, which is one of the reasons our environmental & energy policies are so screwy now. Iran-Contra was a problem too, and either he tacitly endorsed that, or he was asleep at the switch. I can't really hold Granada against him, but I don't think he gets credit for the hostages being released on the day he took office, nor the collapse of Communism. (I'd give the nod to Mikhail Gorbachev for that one.) Final grade: D+

George H. W. Bush: Not a great speaker (think Dana Carvey's "Not prudent at this juncture"; see Nixon, above). I totally give him credit for raising taxes, and I think he was right to do that. No big surprise that it was political suicide. Doesn't matter, it was what we needed and I'm glad he did it. Hated his domestic policy, though -- 1,000 points of [expletive deleted], if you ask me. I do give him points for getting the Kuwait/Iran thing right. Too bad his son couldn't leave well enough alone. Final grade: B-

Bill Clinton: Great speaker, even if Darrell Hammond skewered him on SNL. (No, I wasn't a great Bill Clinton fan, but even I was able to stomach the State of the Union when he did it.) Didn't get health care done (recognizing that it needs doing doesn't really count, particularly as he darn near left it undoable for a political generation); did get welfare reform done.* Economy boomed, and he actually accomplished a surplus. Whoo-hoo! Did not take us into war -- unless you count Kosovo, which I don't. Final grade: B

George W. Bush: Worst speaker of the bunch. Seriously -- worse than Nixon. (Nixon actually was a pretty smart guy, regrettably.) I can't think of a good accomplishment, and the list of bad ones keeps being written. (Latest example: he's threatening to veto a tax incentive for renewable energy like wind and solar because it's funding would come from cancelling tax incentives for oil and gas companies. I mean, seriously -- that's not even close to passing the smell test after the record profits Exxon & the like have posted recently. Let them fund their own damn exploration! Insanity.) And he fails the "unjust war" test worst of all, particularly as he has created the very condition he lied about to get us in there. I have some sympathy for John McCain's predicament -- he may be right that we have to stay in there because now (NOW!) there are terrorists in Iran because Bush took away the dictator keeping al-Qaeda out. And don't give me that "But Saddam was a brutal dictator" crap -- we've been supporting brutal, torturing Right-Wing dictators in South American for years. Final grade: F

So there you have it. About the candidates, here are my predicted grade ranges:

John McCain: Not a bad speaker, but not great. His potential accomplishments, or lack thereof, rather depend on whether he'll do the same switcheroo as Dubya, only in the other direction. When Bush ran in 2000, we heard a lot about compassionate conservativism, but that sure didn't seem to be a part of his presidency (with one teeny exception: inexplicablyly he funds HIV services worldwide). Well, we're now hearing a lot of mainstream conservative positions from McCain as he panders to the Christian Right, the anti-immigration crowd, and so forth. If we get the old McCain for president, he could be very good for the country: election reform would be a great boon to our political process! If we get the new, Genghis Kahn-version of McCain -- well, that will just be very sad. He'll be maintaining a bad war, which is a thankless task. Potential grade range: anywhere from a Reagan-esque D+ to a LBJ-style B+

Hillary Clinton: I'm not a fan of her speaking style, which isn't as rousing as her husband's. She has accomplished a lot as New York's junior senator, so we might really do well. I worry, though, that she'll be a micro-manager who gets bogged down in details and her paranoia goes off the charts, resulting in some really ugly stuff. I know she won't take us back into war unless she really needs to -- that's an area where I think a woman is an excellent choice. (Seriously -- moms know how to pick their battles with bullies.) Potential grade range: anywhere from a Nixon-like meltdown-causing D- to an outstanding A-.

Barack Obama: Great speaker. First one in a LONG time to inspire and heal, I think. I have real hope for his accomplishments because I think he understands the value of learning what works by trying lots of stuff, and then putting in place the one that works. Like Hillary, he'll get us out of Iraq and I believe he'll use a much more global/diplomatic approach to combating terrorism. And so he's the only one I can see getting an FDR-caliber A+. At his very, very worst, I can't see him getting lower than a Kennedy B.

But that's just me.


*Here's my sidebar on economics vs. entitlement programs: I'm all for entitlement programs. I would fund Headstart to the max. I would fund a huge increase in TeachAmerica. I would have sent in the Army Corps of Engineers to the Gulf Coast post-Katrina and told them to stay until. But, we have to get real about Medicare and Social Security. They will bankrupt us eventually, and while it surely has not helped to launch and fund a morass-of-a-military-campaign in the Middle East, that's chicken-feed compared to the two worst economic problems looming. I applauded Bill Clinton's welfare reform because I believe it's good to get entrenched programs out of the trench and re-formed. We have to do the same with our programs for the elderly.

The problem with Medicare and Social Security is that no one will ever vote against the interests of Grandmas & Pop-pops, particularly with so many of us heading inexorably into old age. We can't pick on old people -- they don't deserve it the way "welfare mothers" did. (For some reason, you have to demonize the recipient of an entitlement program before you can "reform" it.) Well, that's just crazy. How is it going to help Grandma & Pop-pop if the country is bankrupt? I am not suggesting we cut them off cold turkey, but we have to do something now about the money we're going to owe then. If we announced, "The minimum age will go up in X years," we have a chance to get people used to the idea. But we talk about the "third rail of politics" and do nothing. Boy, what a great suit the emperor is wearing today!

Even-Handedness

I know people who revile the "other" political party -- on both sides of the aisle! I know Democrats who hate Republicans, and vice versa. (I'll admit, I don't know a lot of the latter sort -- after all, I'm a Democrat of sorts, and most of my friends manage not to revile me...)

I understand this attitude, but it's not how I feel. I'm more of a "Why can't we all get along?" type. At the same time, I don't really want everyone to agree. I just want us all to listen to each other. Even if this falls into the category of "know your enemy," I think it's a good idea.

Toward that end, I'm reading the February 25 issue of The New Yorker. It has a long article about John McCain and the Republican party. Fascinating stuff. I had not appreciated today's challenges for Republicans. Newt Gingrich thinks the GOP has to embrace the concept of being "pro-good government." Grover Norquist believes that the special interest groups that make up the Republican base can be grown to form a "supermajority" even though -- according to the article -- that group does not include voters who care about national security above all else. (It's hard to be anti-government but pro-national security, I guess.)

Now, this should sound familiar to us in the Endless Mountains. Conservative Republican candidates for Chris Carney's congressional seat are running ads on TV. I don't see how voters can tell them apart because they use the same buzz words: "immigration" and "conservative." (They can't use "security" as a buzzword because Chris has the goods in that area. And they can't use the oldie-but-goody, "economy" because the Bush administration has poisoned that well for the GOP.) These guys aren't our problem yet (by "us" I mean Democrats) as they have to face each other in the primary first. But it's useful to think about their ads now.

"Conservative" is easy -- that is political shorthand for pro-life, pro-guns, pro-death penalty, and anti-gay marriage. Those are Norquist's special interest groups. But the immigration issue is tricky. The Republican party of my childhood (think Barry Goldwater -- that's how old I am!) was the party of small & big business. Now, I have to tell you -- businessmen have mixed positions on illegal immigration. If your business only makes money because the people you pay to pick the fruits & veggies (or whatever) work cheap and don't, uh, require a lot of paperwork (if you know what I mean), you're not necessarily jumping up and down in favor of stricter oversight of undocumented workers.

The people who rev up on the topic of immigration are in two groups: workers who resent -- not unreasonably -- the idea that undocumented workers get jobs without having to pay taxes, etc., and taxpayers who are concerned -- also not unreasonably -- that illegal immigrants cost us money by being drains on government services. There are points to make for both groups. Illegal immigrants would LOVE to pay taxes! That's because they would love to be legal. That doesn't make the anti-immigration crowd happy, of course, but it's true. And for the taxpayers? Well, I wonder how the economics really break down -- certain sectors of our economy rely on cheap labor, and undocumented workers are highly motivated to work for not a lot of money. If you could magically eliminate all undocumented aliens from the U.S., would we be economically better off, or worse off? I don't know -- and I rather suspect the figures could be tweaked to come out either way.

My point is, immigration is not a simple issue, even for those groups who want it to be a simple issue. And that's the problem the Republicans have in other areas. John McCain believes that the Iraq war is a rallying point for the GOP, but it isn't really. I recently saw the awesome documentary, No End in Sight. I highly recommend it for everyone, in both parties. Democrats like me will be horrified by a few key individuals (it's hard to respect Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld after this movie) but will gain a respect for the very hard work, under perilous conditions, the troops put in to accomplish the impossible. Republicans -- well, a hard line pro-war Republican could argue with some of the conclusions the movie proposes, but it's hard to see how anyone could watch the movie and not think of all the mistakes that were made. Even if you supported the war, this movie will point out all the things that could and should have been done better. After all, almost all the people interviewed supported the war, just not the way the Pentagon chose to do it. Given our actual record in Iraq, how can the Republicans rally around the war? (You can support the troops, and I do. But some of us think that three and four consecutive tours of duty isn't "supporting the troops," it's misusing the troops. Supporting the troops is getting this mess sorted, and fast.)

But here's the kicker for me: we got lucky with Chris Carney: he's mainstream, a good family man (we know what that's code language for!), has military and counter-terrorism experience, and he's smart! He's been surprisingly effective in his first year, bringing in money and working to bring jobs to the area. I really have a hard time thinking of a reason why we'd want to get rid of him. Okay, I can think of one reason. If you're a Republican, he's one vote for (some, not all) Democratic initiatives. But maybe we here in a poor county want a Democratic congressman as long as Democrats are in power in Congress...?

And that's where evenhandedness gets you: Do you support an effective congressman who has been bringing money into the county, or support a Republican candidate simply because he's a Republican. We all know that longevity is the key to pork barrel politics; if Chris isn't defeated this November, he might be in for a long, long time. The national and state Republican party officials would hate to see that happen, but we live here! We should be asking ourselves what's in our best interest.

After we balance all the issues, that is.

My First Commissioners' Meeting

Hey, I went to my very first commissioners meeting.

Susquehanna County has three commissioners. For the first time in a lo-o-ong time, two are Democrats, MaryAnn Warren and Leon Allen. The third is Mike Giangrieco, a man who could do voice-over work for the actor Joe Mantegna if his day job (lawyer) and other day job (county commissioner) somehow faltered.

You know, it would be easy to think the little dramas I witnessed today fell along party lines. I gather that just isn't so. Yes, there were a couple occasions -- most notably the passage of the 2008 budget -- where Commissioner Giangrieco voted in opposition to the Democrat commissioners. Despite several questions from the press and members of the public, Commissioner Giangrieco declined to explain his vote. Can't say why he did that; it gave him a rather churlish look, but it was clearly his right to vote without explanation. At the same time, I had sympathy with those who wanted to know why.

I'm not used to seeing politics up close like this. I'm used to politicians -- in both parties -- who have something to say, or just like to hear themselves talk. It was odd to see an elected official refuse to explain why he thinks he's representing the voters better by voting against the budget. Some of the public appeared to believe he might know something about the budget and if he did, they wanted to know too. Others seemed to think he just needed to explain himself.

Here's what I wanted to know: Don't these people talk to each other? My limited experience with government (I worked for New York State's Health Department for a while, and both my parents were civil servants back in the day) is that there's a public face to what's going on, and a private face. If Commissioner Giangrieco had a problem with the budget, maybe he should talk with Commissioners Allen and Warren to resolve that problem behind the scenes. And maybe he's doing that. I hope he is.

If he voted no simply to be obstructive, though, where was the political value for him? Why not make a mini speech during the public comment period? Why not expose the Democrats for whatever failure he might claim they're guilty of? I hate to criticise a guy I first set eyes on just three hours ago, but it's hard to see how he wins this way.

Same thing with the issue of gas leases. I'm new to this one, but two very articulate and knowledgeable guys showed up to the meeting to make a very firm and specific point about gas leases. In particular, they want the county commissioners to look at the possibility of taxing the companies that lease gas rights from landowners. Here's what I understand is going on: Susquehanna County is very poor in industry, but it's got a lot of land. Private landowners are being approached by gas companies who want to lease the gas rights on these parcels. It can be big money -- if you have 100 acres and get offered even as little as $50 per acre, that's $5,000 for doing nothing more than owning land.

What landowners don't understand is that as soon as they sign that lease, they own less of their land than they used to, and that can cost them real money. It's as if they just sold something tangible, and if they were to try to sell their acreage, they'd discover just what that something was really worth. To put some numbers on this, suppose the land had been worth $4,000 per acre. The landowner got $50 per acre for the gas lease, but on the open market the land might now be worth only $2,500 per acre. That's a loss of $150,000 in land value in exchange for a quick $5K. Doesn't seem like such a good idea.

I had a chance to talk to Fred & John, the knowledgeable guys (staunch Republicans, mind you), after the meeting. I gather -- and this is not my area of expertise -- that this transaction is heavily weighted in favor of the gas operation, but it doesn't have to be. Landowners can protect themselves, first by not signing in a hurry, and then by taking some basic precautions in the negotiation of the lease, most importantly by implementing some sort of land management plan.

Look, I'm as new to all this as you are. But I can see a real problem when out-of-county (and, often, out-of-state) companies take advantage of poor & unprotected landowners. At the very least, we all need to know a lot more about this. I'll do my part in this blog, but where are the newspapers on this issue?

John & Fred were both pushing the commissioners to consider the possibility of extracting taxes from the gas operators. Commissioners Allen and Giangrieco both said they were studying the issue. I hope that's true -- I get it that this is a real freewheeling, laissez-faire county in some ways, and not too inclined to have the government poking its nose into private people's business, but some concern for the citizens of Susquehanna County before they're cheated is maybe not such a bad thing. Oh, and getting these companies to pay in taxes for the privilege of cheating our neighbors? That's not such a bad thing either.

Which brings us to the oddest political issue of the morning. Commissioners Allen and Warren are in favor of creating a fiscal administrator position for the county. In a deliciously bizarre quirk of politics, there is a job description drawn up, but we (the public) are not to know what that is because there is as yet no job. Okay, but can't we at least know what the person would do?

From what we could understand, Warren and Allen both believe that a fiscal administrator would be the person responsible for all grant dollars obtained and administered by the county. Now, this I know something about! When I worked for the AIDS Institute in the New York State Department of Health (yes, that was 20 years ago, but some things never change), the grant process for federal and private dollars was, literally, never ending. I don't care what the amount of the grant is, there's a lot of paperwork associated with it. You have to apply for it, get it, spend it (and there's a lot of paperwork associated with spending it!), then report back to the grantor about what you did with the money. I gather there are some pots of money the county is eligible for, only it's expected to spend its own money then seek reimbursement. That's even more complicated. Paper, paper, paper.

We did get a little sense of how this process is likely to be run currently. Earlier in the meeting, the board voted to appoint someone to the Growing Greener II Advisory Committee. Commissioner Giangrieco acquiesced to the reappointment of three Advisory Committee members, but objected to the appointment of a fourth. In the course of explaining why the fourth was an appropriate appointment, Commissioner Warren explained that the Advisory Committee came about when the county received a one-time grant of $1 million, of which only $13,000 was left. Hey, cool, I thought. I wonder what they spent $987,000 on. Not that I doubted it was spent wisely, I just wanted to know.

Well, I wasn't the only one. Someone in the public asked precisely that, and Commissioner Warren hesitated. The questioner persisted, was there a list someplace. Commissioner Warren thought about this and said, "Yeah, there's probably a list on my computer."

Now, I'm not in any way suggesting that Commissioner Warren has done anything wrong. In fact, it's likely a sign of her real commitment to her job that she maintained a list of how the money was spent. But I can tell you right now, if that hadn't been a one-time grant -- if that had been recurring funds -- we would have ensured it was only one-time. With every source of funds I've ever had anything to do with, there's a report generated showing how the funds were administered or those funds aren't renewed.

Well, if all Commissioners Warren and Allen wanted was for someone to take over the reporting duties, I could see Commissioner Giangrieco's and Treasurer Benedict's concerns. After all, why pay someone to do a job that at least someone (MaryAnn Warren) has been doing, in effect, as part of her job. But the issue is bigger than that. What if there are other grants and funding that the county could apply for? Who even knows about these funding streams? And if someone stumbled upon one, who would write the grant application? (Sidebar: someone in the public kept suggesting that this was just a matter of filling in a form. Like getting grant money was just a matter of writing out maybe a single sheet of paper, double-sided. Uh, dude -- the last grant application I saw was three inches thick, with separate addenda. Okay, so it was for millions of dollars under the federal Ryan White funding stream, but the point remains. There is no "form to fill out." Wish there was, but there isn't.)

And to sweeten the pot, Commissioners Warren and Allen were prepared to make the position contingent on performance. If the successful applicant didn't manage to bring more money into the county than that person's salary, the line item would get cut and the person fired. You can't get a lot more fiscally responsible than that.

So why do Commissioner Giangrieco and Treasurer Benedict oppose this measure? Again, it's hard to say. Treasurer Benedict raised the red herring of a financial consulting contract that no one knew about. I agree wholeheartedly we need to know more about that issue! But I don't see its relevance to the issue of someone with administrative experience who could oversee the process of obtaining grant funding and then maintaining that funding while seeking more and more funds. More funds means more for the county. Is there really a downside to that?

Even my new best [staunch Republican] friends, John & Fred, were in favor. In their minds, a fiscal administrator would be someone to see the big picture, including issues like their pet topic of gas leases. (I gather there's potential liability issues for the county based on current Clean & Green laws. I don't know about this, so I hesitate to suggest that Fred & John are right. It certainly sounded like something I'd look into.)

So, when staunch Republicans support a measure that is intended to make money for the county and thus for its citizens, why would Commissioner Giangrieco and Treasurer Benedict oppose it? We didn't find out at the meeting. Maybe Commissioner Giangrieco made himself available to the press afterwards for a probing interview. Maybe we'll get to read about it in next week's newspapers.

Or maybe not.

Let's just say, I'm not holding my breath.

Young Democrats

I've just come back from the Second Annual Young Democrats breakfast. Chris Carney, our congressman, was there, as was Trey Casimir, who's running for state senate in the 23rd District. Leon Allen and MaryAnn Warren both spoke.

It sounds like it should have been boring, right? A "rubber chicken" dinner, only at 9:00 a.m. on a snowy Sunday morning.

Well, it wasn't. It was friendly, and fun, and lively, and most important of all -- it was energizing! I say that because it energized me.

But first, a backstory. I'm pretty allergic to politics. Like working in a sausage factory: you just don't want to know how it's really done. When George Bush defeated John Kerry, though, I tried to get involved in Philadelphia, where I lived during the week. I joined the local alternative movement, and went to a few meetings. But I got just a wee bit exasperated when the group -- quite united in their disgust of then-current political regime and its war -- started to fight each other over what was the right way to implement change. One faction thought we should run for local political office (committee person positions and the like), another thought we needed to work on national issues, still another thought something else. Me? I thought we needed to work on getting the media more comfortable representing progressive positions as viable. But I saw all the other suggestions as good ones too. They just weren't the suggestions that energized me.

One day, I said as much. "Why are we arguing?" I asked. "Why doesn't everyone pick the thing or approach that excites them and go do something toward that goal? Then we can maximize the effort and see what works." Another woman, a sociologist (she said), retorted angrily, "We're NOT fighting!!" and then went back to fighting.

I never went back.

Fast foward to my move fulltime to Susquehanna County in 2006. I signed up to be a Democrat -- definitely the minority party up here -- and settled back into my usual complacency. Politics, like sausage-making, is a job I expected someone else to do for me. But when I had signed up as a Democrat, I must have said something about having done election-rights work for the Kerry campaign. (I'm an attorney, although not one with any special election rights experience, but an attorney is an attorney, so I helped out in Throop on election day 2004.) Karen & John Hoffman, our party chairs here in Susquehanna County, latched onto me and got me involved in the election for 2006. Happy to help out.

Since then, I've been modestly and tangentially involved in a couple things here. Sitting at the breakfast this morning, I got excited again about the possibilities here. Democrats make up a greater percentage of the electorate than in the past few decades, we have two Democrat county commissioners -- and thus a majority -- in Montrose, and Chris Carney has been working hard even in the 13 months he's been in office to get "green collar" jobs in NE Pennsylvania. I think it's a great time to be a Democrat, but it's also just a great time to be politically active.

So I'm finally going to do what I had wanted to do three years ago: Contribute to the media. No offense to the two newspapers in Susquehanna County (the Susquehanna County Transcript and the Independent), but they're not the best source of information about what's really happening. Maybe it's the quality of the reporting, maybe it's their political bias, or maybe -- and I think this is the most likely explanation -- it's the pressure of too much work done by too few people. I just know that Susquehanna County can and should get more information than it does.

This, then, is my first entry to my political blog. I want to post about jobs, finances, energy policy, the awesome work done at the township level, how I don't think the political parties are the problem locally and a lot of other topics. Let's look at how we do things here in Susquehanna County. Let's celebrate the good stuff and work to improve the other stuff. And I want to know what you think. Leave a comment -- it's all good.