No ‘Justice’ in Courthouse Site

Posted on June 23, 2007
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Courthouses are about justice, but there’s no justice – or common sense – in the selection by federal officials of two “final sites” for a new federal courthouse building in Harrisburg, Pa.

The two sites encompass existing blocks of downtown commercial development. Because Harrisburg is a capitol city, more than a third of its property is already tax-exempt. Now the feds are proposing to remove more downtown property from the tax roles – and not just any property.

Some of the businesses most important to Harrisburg’s attempted downtown renewal are located in the two parcels of land – a trendy restaurant and a stylish women’s clothing store, among others. Exactly the sort of businesses the feds should be helping cities like Harrisburg develop or retain.

Where is the current federal sense of urban policy? Harrisburg has proposed a vacant tract of land at the edge of downtown for the new courthouse building. Sure it’s vacant and unprepossessing at present – but it’s in the city’s Midtown district which is poised for development as an extension of downtown.

Shouldn’t a federal government aware of the problems of older cities be working with them to build and extend business districts, rather than being concerned about constructing courthouses where judges, lawyers, litigants and citizens with federal business won’t have to walk too far to lunch or their parking spaces?

Older eastern cities need creative assistance, not the removal of taxable properties and going businesses that are hard enough to attract in the first place.

Hillary Clinton’s Ominous Record

Posted on June 7, 2007
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A book review isn’t going to determine the 2008 presidential contest, but if a recap of a couple of new books on a candidate ever deserved attention, Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Lady Vanishes” in the? June 11/18? New Yorker? surely does.

Just when we need a modest, other-regarding, competent president, we have two accounts – by Carl Bernstein and Jeff Gerth and? Don Van Natta, Jr. – of Hillary Clinton’s tendency toward arrogant self-assurance and frustration of effective ways to meet people’s needs – like affordable health care and avoiding a senseless war in Iraq. (If that’s truly Hillary. Kolbert, who has followed her for years, says we can’t be sure who Mrs. Clinton really is, and that she seems to pride herself on that.) One wishes she would just go away, devoting herself to some personal quest. Her record on the nation’s behalf is troubling.

As First Lady, Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner created a health care reform task force of 500 members, divided it into thirty-four committees and issued a 1,324-page report that was so complex nobody understood it. Then she announced that the Clinton Administration “was prepared to ‘demonize’ those who opposed the task force’s recommendations,” Kolbert quotes from Bernstein’s book, A Woman in Charge. “‘That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,’ Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, told Bernstein. ‘You don’t tell members of the Senate that you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypcrocisy.’”

Then there is Mrs. Clinton’s vote to authorize the Iraq war, cast, apparently, without reading a classified 90-page report entitled “National Intelligence Estimate: Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Kolbert notes that Senator Bob Graham, of Florida, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee, read the report, decided that the Bush Administration was hyping the need for war in Iraq, urged his colleagues to read it, and became one of the 23 senators who voted against the war (reprised in Gerth and Van Natta’s book Her Way).? Yet Mrs. Clinton feels she cast an appropriate vote, but was misled by the President. She is entitled to any self-appraisal she chooses, but it’s going to be an awfully long campaign season recalling such ominous failings.

Kolbert rightly concludes her review: “How a chief executive regards his (or her) mistakes is, after all, a matter of importance. (See President George W. Bush.) But, as A Woman in Charge and Her Way make clear, this is precisely the sort of question about Hillary that cannot be answered.”

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