Editor: I agree with Girard Histed's comments (Your Opinion, Aug. 31) regarding the Lackawanna County commissioners and the Lackawanna County Stadium Authority. His remarks about John McGee, whose passion returned professional baseball to NEPA, is right on as well.

Another "kink in the armor" has surfaced with Luzerne County suing Lackawanna County for breach of contract. It's long past due that the commissioners and stadium authority get their act together so that professional baseball can survive and thrive here.

It's also premature to begin discussing building a new stadium when the SWB Yankees can't fill the existing seats in PNC Field. And it's not because the parent New York Yankees haven't put a winning product on the field. The local Yankees just clinched their fourth consecutive International League North title and they can't get 4,000 people to attend a game, and that includes paid season ticket holders.

I've been a season ticket holder since the Red Barons began in 1989. They had few winning seasons, let alone championships, because of poor Phillies support. However, they were able to attract many more fans than the present team.

Why? They did a better marketing job than the present organization. The local Yankees did very well during their initial season. However, attendance has declined every subsequent year.

The SWB Yankees have to develop a better marketing plan to get fans into the seats. That means being creative in the offseason to attract corporate-sponsored games and provide giveaways to the attendees.

The team's marketing efforts should be focused on how to better attract the daily "walk up" crowd. The season ticket holders will always be there; however, there's a drop in that area as well.

Let's hope they can put fans in the seats to support the winning effort on the field. Only then should discussions proceed regarding a new stadium.

PAUL KOWALSKI

MOSCOW

Be good stewards of farmland

Editor: It was not long ago that NEPA was grievously scarred by the coal barons; we are still living with the results of their greed. We are facing another onslaught, as if these 19th century land-rapists were resurrected, in order to continue their gluttonous feast: they have returned in the form of gas drilling companies.

It was not cruel enough that our once beautiful valley was ravished; now it is the farmland. This is a testament to the asininities of our government that sets punitive taxation and regulations on small farms, putting them out of business.

A friend's cousin held a farm that was the oldest in our commonwealth, farmed by the same family for over 200 years. As a result of taxation this farm was sold and devoured by a "developer." This is why our farmers and land holders are considering leasing to the gas vampires.

This evil cannot be allowed to play out. These latest profits will be blood money indeed.

When the latest cancer-clusters arise, when livers are damaged, what will we do? Our pristine aquifers will be damaged beyond reclamation, the soil poisoned. Consider the destruction of life quality: noise, increased traffic, expansion of roadways.

To be healthy, we need the countryside. One needn't be a "fundamentalist" to see the merit in the Garden of Eden story, where our Lord entrusted us to be stewards of the Earth; this trust doesn't include the wanton use of concrete and asphalt, or "fracking" fluid.

Farmers should consider conserving arable land, place it in a trust. Remember your calling to the soil is holy. To nonfarmers with "profitable" land: consider the ugliness you'll bring onto future generations for your quick "thirty pieces of silver."

CHRIS BILARDI

TRUCKSVILLE, LUZERNE COUNTY

Cut lawmakers, limit terms

Editor: Well folks, we're in hot pursuit of Election Day. We're being bombarded on TV, on radio and in the papers by candidates for state and national office.

It makes you wish you could vote for "all of the above," doesn't it? It doesn't? Well, actually that's good. In fact, it's better then good. On the one hand we keep hearing about the soaring costs of bloated governments, while on the other hand we keep hearing from people who want to be part of those governments.

Wouldn't it make more sense if all those folks who claim to know the secret of reducing government actually practiced what they preach and stop trying to get in on the gravy train. The only real way to start reducing the cost of government, especially at the state level, is to start by reducing the size of the Legislature.

Once they've done that, the job would be done. Well, almost done.

I'm in favor of good government. I'm in favor of effective government. I'm in favor of smaller government. So let's start cutting out all the perks of those who govern. Let's get rid of the professional politicians and start hiring volunteer leaders who serve one or two terms and then get out. Any longer and they get so they hate to give up their seats of power.

We don't need powerful legislators in Harrisburg or Washington. We need people who will do the right thing.

ED COLE

CLARKS SUMMIT

Lack of books tells a story

Editor: With Monday's news of the opening of the school year, an interesting item in George Will's column should bring attention to homework.

One of the factors he points out for proficiency in school is "the number of pages read for homework."

Driving past city schools at dismissal times, it is rather shocking to see students leaving without any books in their possession.

Maybe for a good beginning this year students and teachers alike can turn over a new leaf and adhere to the columnist's advice.

MARIAGNES BROWN

SCRANTON

Pennsylvania's experience already has demonstrated that Gov. Ed Rendell's goal of increasing the amount of solar-generated power statewide, from just 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent by 2021, is very doable.

A recent installation of a 40,000-panel solar array at Pocono International Raceway, for example, provides enough power for that sprawling sports complex and for 1,000 nearby homes.

An array planned for Carbon County would be the state's largest, providing power for 1,500 homes.

Increased solar generation alone will not eliminate the need for power produced with fossil fuels or by nuclear fission. But it is far more reliable than many people think, and during hot weather it is especially valuable in meeting demand.

Solar produces no greenhouse gas emissions and, as the governor argues, it can help to drive the state's economy. More than 600 companies in the commonwealth produce, distribute or sell and install solar power systems.

Alternative energy development is a growing industry that the state would be wise to continue to support. Penn State University has a $129 million federal grant to develop energy-efficient buildings, and many universities across the state are engaged in energy research.

The Legislature should join the governor in driving that industry by adopting the new solar energy standard.

At the same time, they have not attempted to assess the value of the services provided by those institutions to the community. And in the case of the University of Scranton, which some members of Scranton City Council seem to view as a potential cash cow, politicians have scoffed at or ignored the institution's own analysis of its economic contribution to the city and region.

But there are two sides to every ledger. Any attempt to extract payments or, in the case of the U of S higher payments, from nonprofit institutions must include an analysis of the value of the services they provide.

While members of city council and the Scranton School Board have attempted to calculate the value of property acquired by the university, for example, they have not weighed that against the institution's contribution to the local economy - valued by the school at more than $400 million a year - or the value of other contributions.

Since 2007 the Leahy Clinic at the U of S, for example, has provided millions of dollars worth of free medical care to uninsured local residents - large numbers of them from Scranton - at no cost to the city or any other government.

And what of services provided by nonprofits that otherwise would have to be provided by some level of the government? Is the average city taxpayer more comfortable with a trauma center operated by the tax-exempt Community Medical Center or the city government?

Tax-exempt institutions are indeed a service burden for the city government. But there are examples large and small of how they mitigate that burden, from thousands of service hours contributed by high school and college students to city residents through medical, social and community services performed at no costs to the government.

It is inherently unfair that city taxpayers bear the costs of nonprofit services that serve a substantially broader area, but it's also true that the city reaps the major share of the economic activity generated by many of those institutions.

The best way to spread those costs is through shared services among governments and initiative that promote growth in Scranton. But, since Scranton City Council has rejected cooperative planning with 10 other communities in Lackawanna County, its apparent preference is to attempt to shake down the institutions themselves.

Before it attempts to do so, it at least should conduct a comprehensive analysis of the institutions' contributions, rather than lamenting costs alone.

Tea partiers toiled mightily to nominate Ken Buck as the Republican candidate to run against Sen. Michael Bennet, who is a direct descendant of a Mayflower passenger, grandson of an economic adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and son of an official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. He attended tony St. Alban's school in Washington, D.C., and Yale Law School. Buck is a Princetonian.

But to erase the stain of privilege, Buck stresses that his family, although hardly poor, was frugal - "No, you won't get a Happy Meal, you'll get a burger." And he worked in a Princeton cafeteria and later as a truck driver, ranch hand and janitor, so there.

A large man with close-cropped gray hair, he was a college football player talented enough to get a tryout as a punter with the New York Giants. Having, perhaps, an unslaked appetite for blocking and tackling, he became, after years in business, a prosecutor in Weld County, north of Denver. Explaining his Senate candidacy, he says: "I was in law enforcement for a long time and had seen how politicians had screwed up, so I decided I couldn't do worse and might do better."

Colorado Republicans have nominated a weak candidate for governor, and former Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, an immigration obsessive who is running for governor as an independent, will siphon away some Republican votes. So Republicans assume that Democrats, assured of holding the governorship, will direct more money to Bennet. Republicans, however, hope Tancredo will pull to the polls some disaffected conservative voters who otherwise might not show up, and who also will vote for Buck.

Bennet, formerly superintendent of Denver's schools, was appointed to the Senate after Barack Obama nominated Sen. Ken Salazar to be secretary of the interior. He is one of six current appointed senators. The other five are Roland Burris, D-Ill., who replaced Obama; Edward Kaufman, D-Del., who replaced Joe Biden; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who replaced Hillary Clinton; George LeMieux, R-Fla., who replaced Mel Martinez, who resigned; and Carte Goodwin, D-W.Va., who replaced the late Robert Byrd. A seventh senator, Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican, was appointed in 2002 (by the then-governor, her father). She was elected to a full term in 2004, but narrowly lost last week's Republican primary.

Joe Miller, who defeated Murkowski, is another populist with an elite pedigree. Before earning a law degree at Yale, he was a West Pointer and a decorated (Bronze Star) Gulf War combat veteran. He is a former judge and a member of the Federalist Society of conservative lawyers. He, like Buck, is one of seven Republicans who won Senate nominations by defeating candidates favored by national party leaders. The other five are Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Mike Lee in Utah and Linda McMahon in Connecticut.

Buck identifies with candidates such as Rubio, Paul and Pat Toomey (former congressman, now Republican Senate nominee in Pennsylvania). An admirer of Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Buck would start over on health care reform, stressing health savings accounts, medical malpractice tort reform and portability of insurance coverage.

Colorado is a red state that has recently turned purple and that Democrats still hope to make blue. Doing so would have national implications because until recently the Republican strategy in presidential elections was to hold the South and the Mountain West and spend half the gross domestic product to carry Ohio. In the last decade, however, parts of the Mountain West, and especially Colorado, have become competitive. Colorado's governor, both senators and five of seven U.S. representatives are Democrats, and Obama carried the state with 53.66 percent.

Coloradans, Buck says, now are "50-50 about Obama" but "80-20 against Washington." His one campaign stumble may actually have helped him. It occurred after an event where someone questioned whether Obama is an American citizen. Speaking within range of a tape recorder belonging to a Democratic worker who was following Buck around, Buck laughingly said to someone, "Will you tell those dumbasses at the tea party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I'm on the camera?"

Buck says his language was inappropriate, but many people disagree. Tea party leaders - that is not quite an oxymoron - know that Obama's performance, not his provenance, is the point.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. E-mail: georgewill@washpost.

When last spring the Pew Global Attitudes Project asked residents of Islamic countries what they thought about Obama, he got good marks when it came to such matters as climate change. But when the question was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the numbers not only declined in Indonesia and Turkey, they nearly went through the floor in the three Arab countries polled. In Jordan, 84 percent disapproved of the way Obama was handling the conflict. In Egypt, the figure was 88 percent and in Lebanon it was 90 percent.

For Obama, the figures must be disheartening. They suggest that his attempt to woo the Arab world, to convince it that America can be an honest broker, has dismally failed. The extent of this failure is most stark in Lebanon. There, 100 percent of Shiite respondents - in other words, Hezbollah and others - have no faith in Obama and his good intentions. This may be a setback for Obama, but it is paradoxically a success for American values.

What the Arab world seems to appreciate is that America will never agree to what the Arab world most wants - an Islamic state where a Jewish one now exists. This reasonable conclusion is based on what has long been American policy - not what the State Department wanted but what the American people supported. America has always liked the idea of Israel. The Arab world, for totally understandable reasons, has always hated it. Nothing has changed.

A fundamental document in this area - a once-secret CIA analysis from 1947 - was unearthed (to my knowledge) by Thomas W. Lippman and reported in the winter 2007 issue of the Middle East Journal. The CIA argued that creation of Israel was not in America's interests and that therefore Washington ought to be opposed. This was no different than what later diplomats and military men (most recently, David Petraeus) have argued and it is correct. Supporting Israel hurts America in the Islamic - particularly the Arab - world and, given the importance of Middle Eastern oil, makes no practical sense.

The CIA argued that the Arab-Israeli conflict would widen to become an Israeli-Islamic conflict - another bull's-eye for what was then an infant intelligence service. That process was already under way, which is why some non-Arabs (Bosnian Muslims, for instance) fought the creation of Israel, and has only intensified as radical Islam, laced with healthy doses of anti-Semitism, has gotten even stronger.

But where the CIA went wrong - and not, alas, for the last time - was in predicting that the Arabs would defeat Israel and that the state would not survive. The CIA was sure of the outcome, what a later CIA figure might have called a "slam dunk."

What neither the CIA nor, for that matter, the anti-Israel State Department recognized in the late 1940s is that America's interests are not always measurably pragmatic - metrics, in the jargon of our day. Sometimes, our interests reflect our national ethic, an affinity for other democracies, sympathy for the underdog. These, too, are in America's interests and they may be modified, but not abandoned, for the sake of mere metrics.

This is why Obama's overture to the Arab world, clumsily executed, was never going to succeed. America can please some Arab governments - Egypt and Jordan, for instance - but not the Arab people. What they want, and what they have been told repeatedly they deserve, is a return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel and total control over all of Jerusalem. These are both out of the question as far as Israel is concerned. It is not willing to give up its capital and, in relatively short time, its Jewish majority.

This week, Palestinians and Israelis will once again talk peace in Washington. But until both sides, particularly the Arab peoples, give up on what they really want, the clock will remain where it has been. Those Pew polls show that's around 1947.

RICHARD COHEN writes for The Washington Post. cohenr@washpost.com.

Good luck getting this guy to empty his pockets at the courthouse metal detectors.

I kid. The city is actually being sued by Olde Good Things, a salvage and antiques business owned by a religious cult founded by a former atheist and vacuum cleaner salesman who claims to be the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah.

So it's not as weird as I first made it seem.

Anywhere else, such a development would inspire amused disbelief, but this is Scranton, where truth is almost always stranger than fiction, the sacred and profane are often one and the same and lawyers routinely and successfully argue that up is down, black is white and the moon is just the sun at night.

Conflict of interest?

Speaking of lawyers who make a good living straining credulity, Olde Good Things is represented by Scranton City Council solicitor Boyd Hughes. That's right - council's solicitor is suing his employer on behalf of a cult founded by a former atheist and vacuum cleaner salesman who claims to be the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah.

I'm still not making any of this up.

While news of Mr. Hughes' obvious conflict of interest had tongues wagging all over town last week, most of their owners likely had no clue that his client is the business arm of a cult. In fairness, it's possible Mr. Hughes didn't know the background of Olde Good Things, either.

The business is owned by the Church of Bible Understanding. I reported on the cult shortly after it set up shop here in a series of stories published in 2003.

The series made a brief splash, but like anything else, Olde Good Things' cult connection soon faded from public attention. There are only so many businesses (one) in Scranton where you can buy doorknobs from the original New York Times building. The business also has locations in New York and Los Angeles.

Former Forever Family

For the uninitiated, here's the short course on the mysterious organization cult experts and ex-members call COBU: Stewart Traill, now 74, founded the Church of Bible Understanding in Allentown in 1971. It was originally called the Forever Family and soon spread to Bethlehem, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Within three years, the group was recruiting wayward youth in Philadelphia, New York, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Baltimore.

Wherever its army of proselytizers turned up, COBU soon wore out its welcome. A March 1, 1976, Time magazine article described vigilante attacks on "fellowship houses" in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Time quoted Monsignor and future Bishop James C. Timlin, then chancellor of the Diocese of Scranton, warning local youths not to be "taken in" by the Forever Family's "easy and simple solutions to very complex problems."

Mr. Traill changed the cult's name in 1976, the same year he started Christian Brothers Carpet Cleaning Inc. in Manhattan. The "carpet cleaning cult" lampooned in an episode of "Seinfeld" was a spoof of Christian Brothers.

COBU members believe the Bible is written in a color-based code only Mr. Traill can interpret. If you really want to grasp the good news of the gospels, you must enslave yourself to him and work in his sweatshop businesses for little or no compensation.

Mr. Traill's followers reportedly live in squalor while he lives it up between Philadelphia and Pompano Beach, Fla. He has access to at least two private planes. COBU once claimed 10,000 members, but most experts suspect it actually peaked at around 3,000. Today, membership is believed to be fewer than 50.

Cult's assets $7.4M

The latest federal tax records available show that COBU reported total revenue of $3.5 million in 2008, including $3 million from contributions. It listed $1.9 million in total expenses, including about $546,000 for a pair of orphanages COBU operates in Haiti. Even ex-members who say the cult is destructive to its adherents insist the orphanages are legitimate and truly help people.

COBU reported assets of $7.4 million as a nonprofit organization in 2008. Unlike other nonprofits, it pays property taxes because Olde Good Things is a for-profit business. Based on county assessment records, COBU paid $43,782 to the county, school district and city in property taxes last year. Deadline came before I could find out if it pays mercantile, business privilege, occupational and wage taxes.

Olde Good Things' lawsuit against the city and the Scranton Sewer Authority stems from a December 2007 fire at a warehouse it owned at North Ninth and Lackawanna avenues. The sidewalk above the building crumbled, and the damage was worsened by heavy rains. The city contends that the fire and subsequent demolition of the remains of the building caused the damage. Olde Good Things claims the sidewalk collapsed because the sewer system failed, and wants the city to take responsibility for stopping the flow of raw sewage onto the property.

To hear neighbors tell it, the sewage backups aren't confined to the Olde Good Things site. The property is an eyesore, strewn with debris and wood.

A neighbor I talked to last week said she and others are fed up with the mess and want the city to do something about it. That seems unlikely as long as the lawsuit is unresolved.

Legal case not issue

The fact that Olde Good Things is owned by a cult is immaterial in terms of deciding its dispute with the city. This is America, where we are free to follow any former atheist vacuum cleaner salesman we choose. When an employee of the taxpayers of Scranton takes sides against them, however, they deserve to know all the details. In a sense, it's hard to blame Mr. Hughes for taking COBU's case. When a prophet as important as Elijah asks you to represent him, you at least have to take the call. Beyond that, Mr. Hughes apparently represented the cult before he was appointed to his council post.

Now that the taxpayers are on the hook for any award he might win on behalf of the cult, however, Mr. Hughes should find someone else to handle the matter. His involvement may not legally constitute a conflict of interest, but he clearly has one.

To put it in a local perspective that can't be misunderstood: Johnny Damon plays for the Tigers now. He doesn't bat for the Red Sox or Yankees when they're in Detroit.

Council silent

If Mr. Hughes can't see his obvious conflict of interest, it is up to city council, and particularly President Janet Evans, to educate him. Council may have conveniently suspended the summer meetings Mrs. Evans and others once called sacrosanct, but that does not preclude her from weighing in on this issue.

Mrs. Evans won't talk to The Times-Tribune, but it's a safe bet she has Mr. Hughes' telephone number. She should call him and explain that his representation of Olde Good Things against the city he is paid to serve is not only counterproductive, but morally and ethically wrong.

Up is not down, black is not white, and the moon is not the sun at night.

That such things need to be said would be remarkable anywhere else, but this is Scranton, where personal gain at the expense of the public good is a time-honored tradition, arrogance is a virtue and the loudest critics of corruption are often just sore about being denied a place at the trough.

CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, is still not making any of this up. Contact the writer: kellysworld@timesshamrock.com

Voila, we have a new American idol, a fresh icon to distract us from the drudgery of madness and remind us that humor is the best weapon against anger or angst.

For those who live in the alternate universe known as Planet Earth, where life is a process of tangible interactions and time is measured by the rotation of planets, the name Antoine Dodson may not ring a bell. A month ago, one might have been forgiven. Few beyond his Huntsville, Ala., housing project knew who he was.

Today, he is a phenom - the kind that can occur only in the world of Internet viruses and social media. Google produces more than 7 million links. YouTube offers a universe of musical remixes featuring everybody's New Favorite Person Ever.

At least for a while, to know Dodson is to love him.

His stratospheric rise to celebrity began when a man climbed into the bedroom window - and then the bed - of Dodson's 22-year-old sister, Kelly, and tried to assault her. When Dodson heard his sister scream, he ran to her room and wrestled her assailant, who managed to escape.

Next came the police, the cameras - and Dodson's now-famous performance.

Sometimes we don't know what we're made of until forced into action by circumstances. Tsunamis and hurricanes reveal heroes and expose monsters. A would-be rapist and a television crew bring out the beautiful and, yes, hilarious fury of a brother in the throes of his own Howard Beale moment.

Words can't do justice to Dodson's performance. You simply have to watch it. And then you have to watch the remix by the Gregory Brothers, famous for especially "auto-tuning" news clips.

In spite of the seriousness of the event, it is impossible to keep a straight face as Dodson rails against his sister's assailant, red bandana and passions ablaze:

"Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up, trying to rape them; so y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband, because they're raping everybody out here. ... We're looking for you. We gonna find you. I'm letting you know that. So you can run and tell that, homeboy!"

It's all in the delivery.

Nobody's laughing about what happened, least of all Dodson and his sister. But both admit to laughing - all the way to the bank - about what has transpired since. With the help of the Gregory Brothers and that indefinable something that causes a moment to become a movement, Dodson has taken a lemon and made a lemonade franchise.

Through Facebook, Twitter and a PayPal button, the proceeds from which he splits with the musicians, Dodson has made enough money to move his family out of the projects. So you can run and tell that, homeboy!

It's not a Horatio Alger story, whose rags-to-riches tales described how unlucky boys could achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, determination and courage. Dodson did display courage when he saved his sister from rape, but his moment on the stage was just that. A moment, random and uninvited.

Such is the new mechanism for the American Dream. Wealth and fame are valued over work and achievement. Social media have made 20-somethings into billionaires.

Dodson's fortunes, though modest by comparison, are nonetheless gratifying. We don't begrudge him his moment of fame because, among other things, he made us laugh. He also expressed a rage that most feel but don't express. Finally, on some level, we all recognize that luck has much to do with anyone's claiming the dream.

Dodson and his family weren't enjoying much luck when some idiot climbed through that window. The story of Antoine Dodson is a high-tech fairy tale where the bad guy is a joke; the brother who saves his sister is a hero and gets rich; and the Gregory Brothers are a merry band of musical pranksters.

Only in America.

The end.

KATHLEEN PARKER writes for The Washington Post. kathleenparker@washpost.com.

Remedies for these problems can at least be imagined. But America's tragic number - tragic because it is difficult to conceive remedial policies - is 70 percent. This is the portion of African-American children born to unmarried women. It may explain what puzzles Nathan Glazer.

Writing in The American Interest, Glazer, sociology professor emeritus at Harvard, considers it a "paradox" that the election of Barack Obama "coincided with the almost complete disappearance from American public life of discussion of the black condition and what public policy might do to improve it." This, says Glazer, is the black condition:

Employment prospects for young black men worsened even when the economy was robust. By the early 2000s, more than a third of all young black non-college men were incarcerated. More than 60 percent of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s go to prison. Mass incarceration blights the prospects of black women seeking husbands. So does another trend noted by sociologist William Julius Wilson: "In 2003-2004, for every 100 bachelor's degrees conferred on black men, 200 were conferred on black women."

Because changes in laws and mores have lowered barriers, the black middle class has been able to leave inner cities, which have become, Glazer says, "concentrations of the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and unemployable." High out-of-wedlock birth rates mean a constantly renewed cohort of adolescent males without male parenting, which means disorderly neighborhoods and schools. Glazer thinks it is possible that for some young black males, "acting white" - trying to excel in school - is considered "a betrayal of their group culture." This severely limits opportunities in an increasingly service economy where working with people matters more than working with things in manufacturing employment.

Now, from the Educational Testing Service, comes a report about "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped," written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley. It examines the "startling" fact that most of the progress in closing the gap in reading and mathematics occurred in the 1970s and '80s. This means "progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination."

Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents, which partly explains why, while only 24 percent of white eighth-graders watch four or more hours of television on an average day, 59 percent of their black peers do. (Privileged children waste their time on new social media and other very mixed blessings of computers and fancy phones.)

Black children also are disproportionately handicapped by this class-based disparity: By age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family and about 35 million more than the average child in a welfare family - a child often alone with a mother who is a high school dropout.

After surveying much research concerning many possible explanations of why progress stopped, particularly in neighborhoods characterized by a "concentration of deprivation," the ETS report says:

"It is very hard to imagine progress resuming in reducing the education attainment and achievement gap without turning these family trends around - i.e., increasing marriage rates, and getting fathers back into the business of nurturing children." And: "It is similarly difficult to envision direct policy levers" to effect that.

So, two final numbers: Two decades, five factors. Two decades have passed since Barton wrote "America's Smallest School: The Family." He has estimated that about 90 percent of the difference in schools' proficiencies can be explained by five factors: the number of days students are absent from school, the number of hours students spend watching television, the number of pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading material in the students' homes - and, much the most important, the presence of two parents in the home. Public policies can have little purchase on these five, and least of all on the fifth.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. georgewill@washpost.com.

As dangerous as he suspects a potential training center for State Department security personnel could be to the surrounding neighborhood in Conyngham Twp., Mr. Barletta is taking just as big a risk politically by publicly opposing it.

In the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, with unemployment rates at their highest levels in a long time, with jobs a big issue in his contest with incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski, the Hazleton mayor just went on record as opposed to a proposal that could bring 1,000 jobs to the region.

There is no way this project will be built by Election Day and maybe it won't even be far enough along for the State Department to decide on a site.

Its merits or demerits will be debated over the coming months. The truth of the matter might not be known for a long time, but for the next two months Mr. Barletta will have to explain why he's questioning jobs that Mr. Kanjorski has worked to bring here for more than a year.

"He's saying, 'There are jobs and then there are jobs. These are not the jobs we want here,'" Thomas J. Baldino, Ph.D., a professor of political science at Wilkes University. "Before you make a statement like that, you need to investigate. Better for him to have remained silent and say, 'Maybe I should have studied this more.'"

Mr. Barletta has hedged. He has said he is willing to be convinced otherwise about a project that could also bring hundreds of annual bomb blasts and machine-gun fire.

For now, it looks like he just wrote a campaign commercial for Mr. Kanjorski.

"Absolutely," Dr. Baldino said.

Let's start in Conyngham Twp., a southern Luzerne County neighbor of Hazleton. If there is going to be opposition to the project, most of the outrage will be there.

You won't see it in Lackawanna or Monroe counties.

In the eyes of Lackawanna and Monroe voters, Mr. Barletta's opposition might not be that of a neighborhood protector. They could see him as an obstructionist trying to stop people from finding a job.

Certainly, Mr. Kanjorski's campaign commercial will portray it that way. You won't see or hear anything in that ad about the project risks. You'll just see and hear that Mr. Barletta is against new jobs.

Ed Mitchell, Mr. Kanjorski's media consultant, will connect that with Hazleton's high unemployment rate.

Mr. Mitchell got a quick start Friday.

"Isn't that incredible? Mr. No. He'll fit right in with the Republicans in Washington," Mr. Mitchell said. "A bomb range. He makes it sound like it's Hiroshima ... The State Department wants to get it going. The last thing we need is a public (fight) over it to block it or stop it ... It's no wonder Hazleton has the highest unemployment rate in the state if he has that attitude. He's against any kind of progress."

You can see where this is going.

In interviews, Mr. Barletta prides himself on doing what he thinks is right. Maybe he is right. Maybe it's a dangerous project that shouldn't fly, at least not where Mr. Kanjorski proposed it. Maybe Mr. Barletta can suggest a better location. He wondered Friday why the State Department has not decided to build the center at one of the dozens of closed military bases. By the way, none of them are in the region. Mr. Barletta suggested this whole announcement might be nothing more than a political ploy on Mr. Kanjorksi's part.

"I'm not coming out against jobs. I want to weigh the impact of the project," Mr. Barletta said. "As far as political risk, I've never put the politics over the importance of doing my job. I've taken political risks before."

So far, in his third bid to knock off Mr. Kanjorski, the narrative has favored Mr. Barletta. He's done most of the attacking, benefitted from the publicity of his attacks and Republican polls that show him way ahead and avoided mistakes.

Maybe this is a Republican year, as the Washington congressional-race trackers believe, and Mr. Barletta is wearing a suit of Teflon so that no matter what he says or what anyone else says about him just slides off.

There is one more maybe.

Maybe Mr. Barletta just handed Mr. Kanjorski a bomb and a machine gun.

BORYS KRAWCZENIUK, The Times-Tribune politics reporter, writes Random Notes.

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

n Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the tea party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

n Disgust with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

n Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

n Opposition to a 15-story Islamic cultural center and mosque near ground zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance:

Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities - often lopsided majorities - oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a ground zero mosque.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that pre-empts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the tea party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays - particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the ground zero mosque.

The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims - a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean?"

The Democrats are going to get beaten in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. Not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left.

But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER writes for The Washington Post.

A profound change, however, is this: Talk about the crisis between Israel and "the Arab world" is anachronistic. Israel has treaties with two Arab nations, Egypt and Jordan, and Israel's most lethal enemy is Iran, which is not an Arab state. It and another non-Arab nation, Turkey, are eclipsing the Arab world, where 60 percent of the population of 300 million is under 25, and 26 percent of that cohort is unemployed. The prerequisites for Arab progress - freedom, education and the emancipation of women - are not contemplated.

Syria's Bashar al-Assad, a dictator buttressed by torture, recently called Israel a state "based on crime, slaughter." Imagine what Israelis thought when, at about the time Assad was saying this, a State Department ninny visiting Syria was tweeting to the world, "I'm not kidding when I say I just had the greatest frappacino (sic) ever."

Israel has changed what it can, its own near neighborhood. Since 1967, faced with unrelenting Palestinian irredentism, Israel has been weaving the West Bank into a common fabric with the coastal plain, the nation's economic and population center of gravity. Withdrawal from the West Bank would bring Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport within range of short-range rockets fired by persons overlooking the runways. So, the feasibility of such a withdrawal depends on how much has changed since 1974, when Yasser Arafat received a standing ovation at the U.N. when he said Israel has no right to exist.

Thirty-six years later, Israelis can watch West Bank Palestinian television incessantly inculcating anti-Semitism and denial of Israel's right to exist. Across the fence that has substantially reduced terrorism from the West Bank, Israelis see Ramallah, where Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, lives and where a square was recently named in honor of Dalal Mughrabi. In 1978, she, together with 11 other terrorists, hijacked an Israeli bus and massacred 37 Israelis and one American. Cigarette lighters sold on the West Bank show, when lit, the World Trade Center burning.

The Obama administration, which seems to consider itself too talented to bother with anything but "comprehensive" solutions to problems, may yet make matters worse by presenting its own plan for a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Barack Obama insists that it is "costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure," although he does not say how. Gen. David Petraeus says Israeli-Palestinian tensions "have an enormous effect on the strategic context." As though, were the tensions to subside, the hard men managing Iran's decades-long drive for nuclear weapons would then say, "Oh, well, in that case, let's call the whole thing off."

The biggest threat to peace might be the peace process -or, more precisely, the illusion that there is one. The mirage becomes the reason for maintaining its imaginary "momentum" by extorting concessions from Israel, the only party susceptible to U.S. pressure. Israel is, however, decreasingly susceptible. In one month, history will recycle when the partial 10-month moratorium on Israeli construction on the West Bank expires. Resumption of construction - even here, in the capital, which was not included in the moratorium - will be denounced by a fiction, "the international community," as a threat to another fiction, "the peace process."

This, even though no Israeli government of any political hue has ever endorsed a ban on construction in Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, where about 40 percent of the capital's Jewish population lives. Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, who says "the War of Independence has not ended" 62 years after 1948, says of an extension of the moratorium: "The prime minister is opposed to it. He said that clearly. The decision was for 10 months. (On) Sept. 27, we are immediately going to return" to construction and "Jerusalem is outside the discussion."

Predictably, Palestinian officials are demanding that the moratorium be extended as the price of their willingness to continue direct talks with Israel - which begin Sept. 2 - beyond Sept. 27. If this demand succeeds, history will remain cyclical: The "peace process" will be sustained by rewarding the Palestinian tactic of making the mere fact of negotiations contingent on Israeli concessions concerning matters that should be settled by negotiations.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. georgewill@washpost.com.

The country's unemployment level continues to hover around 9.5 percent, while the level in Pennsylvania is a similar 9.3 percent. In our region the rate languishes around 10 percent. Last month, the economy shed 131,000 jobs in a country where 14.6 million people are already looking for work. Factoring in those who have settled for part-time work or who simply have given up, the number of unemployed or underemployed Americans tops 25 million.

Compounding this is a frightening problem looming on the horizon; in the next few months thousands of long-term unemployed citizens will exhaust all of their unemployment benefits.

By the end of the year, nearly 160,000 Pennsylvanians will be ineligible for further help through unemployment benefits. Often referred to as "99ers," these individuals and families have exhausted all of their unemployment benefits totaling up to 99 weeks.

Various analyses of the data indicate that 99ers are often older workers who were members of the middle class.

And the numbers keep growing week by week in our region. From Jan. 1 through July 17, 821 confirmed individuals in Lackawanna County exhausted their unemployment compensation benefits. By the week ending July 24, another 25 residents were added to this list, and by year's end the projected total for our community will be somewhere around 3,013 individuals - over 3,000 of our neighbors who will no longer have an income or receive benefits.

After two years or more without jobs, many of our friends and neighbors are losing a critical safety net at a time when finding work is still incredibly difficult.

Earlier this month, the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits hit the half million mark. This increase in applications for benefits marks the third straight week that the number has risen. In a healthy economy, the number usually drops below 400,000. Right now, they've risen to 500,000.

While our friends and neighbors fear how they will survive without an income, community service agencies are fearing how they'll be able to keep up with the historic upswing in cries for help from the rising numbers of those in dire financial need.

The United Way of Lackawanna and Wayne Counties is currently conducting its annual fundraising campaign amidst these sobering statistics. Individuals who, for many years, reached out to help their neighbors in need through individual or employee payroll contributions are now faced with seeking help of their own. United Way and our partners in the region and across Pennsylvania are mobilizing to assist long-term unemployed Pennsylvanians and explore additional possible solutions and responses, but we need your help in order to move forward in helping those most in need. We are asking those who are in a position to help to support this effort by making a contribution to the United Way.

In the meantime, unemployed Pennsylvanians can visit their local Pennsylvania Careerlink and www.compass.state.pa.us, where they can fill out an application and see immediately what assistance they may be eligible for, such as cash assistance and food stamps through the Department of Public Welfare, reduced and free breakfast and school lunch programs for children through the departments of agriculture and education, and available insurance for low-income families.

It is safe to say that we all know of someone or some family who is struggling with unemployment. This crisis is real and affects all Pennsylvanians. We encourage everyone to celebrate this Labor Day weekend by helping your neighbors who have fallen on hard times and make a donation to the United Way of Lackawanna and Wayne Counties, local emergency clothing and food banks and other organizations that are working for long-term solutions to the needs in their communities. Together we can all make an impact on the lives of our neighbors who are most in need.

This is not a complicated matter. If you believe that an entire religion of upward of a billion followers attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, then it is understandable that locating a mosque near the fallen World Trade Center might be upsetting. But the facts are otherwise. Islam was not in on the attack - just a sliver of believers. That being the case, those people with legitimate hurt feelings are mistaken. They need our understanding, not our indulgence.

If, on the other hand, you do not believe that the attack was launched by an entire religion, then you have a moral duty to support the creation of the Islamic center. Lots of people fall into this category - or say they do - and still protest the mosque. They include Newt Gingrich, New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and that Twittering Twit of the Tundra, Sarah Palin. They indulge in a kind of pornography of analogy - a bit of demagogic buffoonery that is becoming more and more obvious. They pretend that they have a solemn obligation to defend the (powerful) majority from the demands of the (powerless) minority and champion people whose emotions are based on a misreading of the facts.

Those of us who are of a certain age remember the days when African-Americans and their champions were being cautioned to go slow, compromise. They were being told to take into consideration the tender feelings of whites, no matter how ugly their racism, and protect their dewy Scarlett O'Hara way of life. Leading politicians espoused this course, President Eisenhower among them. Wrong was somehow to become a little less so, but right would be painfully postponed. What was compromise? The middle of the bus?

From that era I exhume a term: moral suasion. Repeatedly, civil rights activists urged Eisenhower to use the bully pulpit to guide the country on a moral course, to set an example. For the longest time, Ike refused to budge. The hero of Normandy somehow forgot how to lead until Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus forced the president to literally call out the troops. The era remains a huge blot on Eisenhower's otherwise exemplary record.

Now something similar is happening. It's not merely that unscrupulous politicians are demagoguing the mosque issue, it is also that most others have kept their mouths shut. The Washington Post suggested that Bush, who has always shown great leadership on interfaith issues, speak out. Hughes, who argued the case for the mosque and then advocated building it elsewhere, should have followed her own logic. And the archbishop, instead of urging compromise, should have urged his congregants to show tolerance. He's not a labor mediator. He's a moral leader.

Over the years, thousands of priests have abused many thousands of children. This is a lamentable fact. Yet no rational person can possibly believe that all priests are pedophiles and that a plan to erect a church should or could be opposed by victims of priestly pedophilia. We know the difference between the acts of individuals - even many of them - and the dogma or beliefs of an entire religion. I am a Jew, but do not judge me by Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 murdered 29 Muslims in Hebron.

Appearing on ABC's "This Week with Christiane Amanpour," Daisy Khan, a founder of the mosque (and the wife of the imam), rejected any compromise. She was right to do so because to compromise is to accede, even a bit, to the arguments of bigots, demagogues or the merely uninformed. This is no longer her fight. The fight is now all of ours.

It has become something of a cliche, I know, but no one ever put this sort of thing better than William Butler Yeats in his poem "The Second Coming." "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Some passionate intensity from the best is past due.

RICHARD COHEN writes for The Washington Post. cohenr@washpost.com.

He is also a human being, even though he has done his worst to disqualify himself from the considerations that distinction affords.

Mr. Pinto, 29, pleaded guilty in May to producing child pornography and was shipped to Lackawanna County Prison to await sentencing in federal court. He should still be in his cell, but instead he lies comatose in intensive care at Community Medical Center in Scranton, his face pulverized, his brain floating in a lake of blood.

He is breathing and eating through tubes, according to Patrick Rogan, the Scranton lawyer who is preparing a slam-dunk federal civil rights suit against the county and anyone and everyone who can be held legally responsible for his client's condition. The lawsuit will probably require a forklift to file after all the defendants are listed. The taxpayers of Lackawanna County won't be named, but we ultimately will be stuck with the bill.

Police say Mr. Pinto was sent to the hospital by Michael Simonson, who at just 33 has distinguished himself as a genuine menace, charged with murder, attempted murder and related offenses. At his arraignment on the murder charge in a Luzerne County courtroom, he head-butted his co-defendant, who was taken away on a stretcher. Mr. Simonson's penchant for mayhem was well known when he was sent to Lackawanna County Prison, where he should not have had access to a beam of sunlight, let alone Mr. Pinto.

And yet there he was on the morning of Aug. 8 as Mr. Pinto, a protective custody inmate, returned from recreation.

Police say Mr. Simonson, an "administrative custody (known to head-butt without warning)" inmate, punched Mr. Pinto and knocked him to the ground. He then hit and kicked Mr. Pinto before stomping on his head at least 15 times.

The gaps

How long does it take to stomp on someone's head 15 times? Such statistical information is hard to find, even on the Internet, but I tried it at home with a pillow and it took me an average of 16 seconds. Add to my stomping time the 10 seconds it took me to knock the pillow to the floor and punch and kick it a few times, and you're looking at close to half a minute for the whole attack. On my pillow.

It is unclear how long the attack on Mr. Pinto lasted, and it is unlikely we will ever have anything but witness testimony as a gauge. One of the three correctional officers who were supposed to be minding the store had gone out to his car. Another was on the phone. Who knows what the third may have been distracted by, but The Sunday Times Giant Sudoku puzzle is wildly popular. The coupons are great, too. Just saying.

Fewer guards may explain the slow response, but not the fact that Mr. Simonson apparently was somehow allowed to wipe his sneakers clean with a rag, a misstep that wouldn't be digestible as a plot twist in a TV legal drama. There are but two explanations for such an obvious blunder on the part of the responding officers - gross incompetence or criminal complicity. Which one is acceptable?

Whether the shoes or rag were collected as evidence is also unclear. If they were not, everyone involved in the immediate response to the incident should be fired. From a cannon.

There would be no question about what happened and who is responsible if all areas of the prison where inmates travel were outfitted with cameras that record. Incredibly, some areas of the prison have less video surveillance than the average convenience store. It's likely some inmates were convicted based on the same type of video evidence the prison administration is incapable of producing.

How is such technological stagnation acceptable to the correctional officers union? Recording cameras would undoubtedly enhance the safety of officers and back them up (or not) when things go wrong. On the other hand, cameras would also make the extremely lucrative trafficking of contraband like tobacco much tougher. Somehow, I doubt any grievances would get filed.

Sgt. Bill Shanley, union president, showed up at Wednesday's prison board meeting to suggest an outside investigation of the Pinto beating. After three hours of closed-door talks, the board announced it had already decided to ask the state Department of Corrections to conduct a probe, scheduled to begin Tuesday.

Déjà vu

Here's hoping it is more thorough than a three-day inspection conducted in March 2007, after which the department of corrections rated the county prison 100 percent compliant with state standards.

Then-county Commissioner Bob Cordaro and Commissioner A.J. Munchak, who have since been indicted on a raft of federal corruption charges, pointed to the "perfect rating" as irrefutable evidence that the prison had recovered from a 2003 scandal rooted in a Times-Tribune investigation and a pair of grand jury probes that uncovered a host of abuses at the prison. The abuses, which included inmates used as slave labor, brutal beatings and witness intimidation, were a major factor in Mr. Cordaro and Mr. Munchak unseating the previous majority.

"We've overcome a lot," Mr. Cordaro said of the sterling inspection.

Three months later, inmate Shakira Staten gave birth to a baby girl in a prison cell after four hours of labor less than two miles from three hospitals.

The county dodged a multimillion-dollar bullet in what should have been a slam-dunk prison birth lawsuit because Ms. Staten's attorney, Nicholas Fick, dropped the ball. The case was dismissed after he missed filing deadlines. He has appealed, but a reversal seems unlikely.

Mr. Pinto's lawyer is unlikely to have such slippery fingers. Mr. Rogan has been handed a layup, and the only thing between him and the basket is his client's status as an admitted child pornographer. Sympathy for such a wretch is difficult to engender in a jury, but Mr. Rogan will have a baby born in a cage in his back pocket. If she's not enough, there's always Thomas Ogden.

Who was Thomas Ogden? He was a husband and father from Archbald. He is the answer to those who blithely dismiss prison violence with statements like, "Well, if you don't want to get (raped, stomped, or otherwise damaged), stay out of prison."

Mr. Ogden was living proof that not everyone in the county lockup is a rapist, murderer, drug dealer or child pornographer. Some people land there for failing to pay child support, petty theft, DUI, even failure to ensure their children go to school.

Thomas Ogden was 51 when Lackawanna County Judge Chester Harhut sentenced him to 14 days in prison for failing to show up for a parenting class meant to address his 14-year-old daughter's chronic truancy. Mr. Ogden had emphysema, and said he missed the parenting class due to his illness.

Mr. Ogden needed oxygen therapy 24 hours a day, something his family claimed he did not receive at the prison. On June 29, 2005, he complained to prison medical staff that he was having trouble breathing. After what his family claimed was a golden hour that might have saved him, prison officials called an ambulance at 8:32 a.m., and Mr. Ogden was taken to Mercy Hospital.

He was pronounced dead 14 minutes later. Pulmonary embolisms. His wife, Donna, who was also locked up on truancy charges, was released after his death.

Jenine Ikeler, senior disinformation specialist for the Cordaro/Munchak administration, said at the time that prison officials were investigating Mr. Ogden's death. The investigation was deemed "unnecessary," however, after an autopsy determined the death was not suspicious, county Chief of Staff Maria Elkins told me Friday after she spoke with Mrs. Donate.

I had no luck tracking down Mr. Ogden's family, but I'll keep trying. In the meantime, it is enough to know that Mr. Ogden entered the prison with 14 days to serve and left it with 14 minutes to live. And he's not the only inmate who walked into Lackawanna County Prison over the past 10 years and never walked back out.

n Nicholas Pinto now joins the sad roster of Samuel Swan, Frank Demeo, Daniel Jackson and Michael J. Campbell, but with an important asterisk:

n He is still alive.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, prefers "The Shawshank Redemption" to "Cool Hand Luke." Contact the writer: kellysworld@timesshamrock.com

An Aug. 4 Times-Tribune editorial suggested that, for the program to be effective, training should be provided to all Scranton officers on a mandatory basis. Neither the philosophy behind CIT, as it has been implemented across the country, nor the evidence of the program's effectiveness supports this assertion.

CIT is a program in which police officers are selected from a pool of volunteers to undergo a rigorous 40-hour course of training, during which they receive detailed information about mental illness, learn advanced de-escalation techniques, and begin to establish relationships with mental health treatment providers, consumers of mental health services and their family members.

CIT officers commit to spending a great deal of time interacting with these segments of the community and participating in educational programs. Data from police departments across the country shows it is highly effective in reducing arrests, increasing referrals for treatment, and, most importantly, decreasing injuries to both consumers and police officers.

The goal of the program is to train enough officers to provide sufficient coverage on each shift, so that when a mental health crisis call is received, a CIT officer can be dispatched to the scene. The ideal number of officers trained in CIT on a police force the size of Scranton's is 25-30 percent. The skills these officers receive during their intensive training are honed each time they respond to a call, and it is through experience that they become experts.

Just as not all police officers are suited to be members of the SWAT team or the canine unit, only those officers who are interested, willing, and meet the selection criteria are appropriate for the crisis intervention team. They are the officers who will be most invested in the program and most effective in establishing the necessary relationships and handling mental health crisis situations.

The CIT model was chosen because, as designed, it is not only highly effective but also cost-efficient. The cost to run the 40-hour training course is approximately $400 per officer, but through extensive fundraising and grant-seeking, Scranton Area CIT is able to offer free training to a select group of officers. If all officers were required to attend, not only would the program's effectiveness be diminished, but the costs of training would have to be assumed by the police department and passed on to the taxpayers.

Certainly, all police officers will come in contact with people with mental illnesses during their careers. All officers should, and do, receive state-mandated training to help them handle these encounters.

Scranton Area CIT looks forward to offering additional mental health-related workshops to all officers to enhance their training. But the intensive training and commitment required of a volunteer CIT officer is a key element to the success of the program. Selectivity is a hallmark of CIT, and the program is so effective precisely because it is voluntary.

On Aug. 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. With one pen stroke he laid the foundation of modern American social policy. Today, millions of retirees live in dignity thanks to their monthly Social Security benefit payment. Over the decades, Social Security expanded to not only protect against the risk of poverty in old age, but also the economic risk of career-ending disability and the premature death of a worker.

In his statement at the signing of the Social Security Act, President Roosevelt said, "If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time." I could not agree more.

A little over a quarter century ago, I came to Washington to work on Social Security. Just a few months later, I got a very important lesson on how important Social Security is to families. My own father, who was almost the same age I am today, suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He started to recover, and then we got the bad news that he had a fatal form of brain cancer, so we began the process to apply for Social Security disability benefits. That was a very anxious time for my family, and particularly for my mother. We were all very concerned that the health care costs for my father would bankrupt her; it was a great relief when the decision came. That's a lesson that has always stuck with me and why I push very hard as commissioner to try to make sure that we get benefit decisions to claimants as quickly as possible. As we celebrate 75 years, I reflect on how Social Security was there for my family, how proud I am to work for this remarkable program, and how lucky I am to lead such a talented and compassionate work force.

I have two wonderful children who entered the work force in the past year. One is being called up for active military duty in October and the other will teach inner-city children. It is imperative that they and millions of other young Americans have confidence that we will continue to honor the great intergenerational contract that is Social Security. It is in this spirit that President Obama established the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that in December will make recommendations regarding the future of Social Security.

With the 75th anniversary of the Social Security Act upon us, the agency has been revitalized despite the huge workloads caused by higher unemployment. Compared to four years ago, productivity is up, backlogs are down, and an aging IT infrastructure is being replaced with state-of-the-art systems and the best electronic services in the federal government.

I am excited about the next 75 years of Social Security, and you should be too.

Tomorrow, however, that might not be the case. And the sad thing is, many Pennsylvanians aren't aware that something they value, and possibly take for granted, could be snatched away.

And that's their right to be heard, loud and clear, by their local elected leaders.

State lawmakers are preparing to hold hearings on two serious threats to our democratic way of life, House Bill 2431 and Senate Bill 1357, which would radically reshape our commonwealth by snuffing out townships and boroughs.

The most onerous measure, House Bill 2431, is nothing short of a slap in the face to our founding fathers. Proposed by Rep. Thomas Caltagirone of Berks County, the bill would make Pennsylvania's community-based system of governing unconstitutional - unconstitutional! - and replace it with something he says is better: an out-of-sight mega-bureaucracy overseen by the county.

In protest, supervisors in hundreds of townships have rallied and passed resolutions that oppose the bills.

Despite this grass-roots uprising - isn't that what America is all about? - Mr. Caltagirone and his fellow "do-gooders" continue to stand firm on their bigger-is-better platform, a house of cards built on whimsy, not fact, and claim they know what is best for Pennsylvania.

Their argument hinges on the debatable premise that the commonwealth should follow the lead of a handful of other states, bulldoze its patchwork of "inefficient" and "redundant" municipalities, and create a landscape of bigger, supposedly more efficient governments.

But we don't have to look beyond our borders for examples of the bigger-government model.

We've got them right here in Pennsylvania. Look at places like Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Reading and Allentown. They're larger, for sure, but are they more efficient? More responsive? More affordable?

Not by a long shot.

But if you're searching for an example of a better-government model, look no farther than the nearest township. There, you'll find hardworking, fiscally responsible men and women who work together, do more with less, and are frugal with tax dollars. They're also deeply committed to preserving Pennsylvania's long-standing tradition of government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in an age where big boxes (think Home Depot) rule.

But are big boxes the solution? Maybe for grocery stores and discount retailers, but not for government, where hands-on, within-reach leadership - the vision of William Penn and our nation's founding fathers - still makes as much sense today as it did hundreds of years ago.

Of course, critics will say that township supervisors are protesting the likes of House Bill 2431 because they want to preserve their jobs and power. But self-preservation is not their motivation.

Townships, instead, are determined to protect something they know their residents hold sacred, and that's their fundamental right to govern themselves locally.

Why, I ask, would anyone want it any other way?

It's almost axiomatic.

In Lackawanna County, if a county commissioner election is approaching, something goes wrong at the prison.

In 2003, the mother of all local prison scandals unfolded three months before the election as Democratic county Commissioner Joe Corcoran sought a sixth term with his first-term running mate, Commissioner Randy Castellani. Unquestionably, the scandal contributed to their undoing and handed the commissioners' office to Republicans Bob Cordaro and A.J. Munchak.

The Democrats might have survived. Internal polling by both sides had them up 10 percentage points in the last two weeks. Mr. Cordaro often said all the prison-related publicity The Times-Tribune showered on the Democrats had created sympathy for the incumbents among voters. One Republican adviser looked at the poll and told Mr. Cordaro to save his money because he was going to lose.

A stubborn Mr. Cordaro threw more money at the race and got a break. A week before the election, it came out that Mr. Corcoran had withheld, for two months, a new state report critical of prison operations. Some loyal Democrats think that's what really did in their hero, who lost to Mr. Munchak by only a couple of hundred votes.

Mr. Castellani survived that election, but resigned in the middle of his term in 2005, making way for Commissioner Mike Washo's appointment.

In July 2007 a 22-year-old woman facing federal drug-related charges gave birth to a baby girl in a prison cell, despite pleading desperately for hours to go to the hospital because she was in labor. Shakira Staten is out of jail now and still seeking justice because her lawyer appears to have bungled what should have been a slam-dunk federal lawsuit.

Mr. Cordaro is gone, ousted by voters for a whole lot of reasons, with the baby birth maybe - and we mean only maybe - being only one of them. It was hard to tell the birth's political effect on the election because Mr. Cordaro's brash, outspoken, in-your-face style turned off so many people.

The public was certainly furious, too, that Mr. Cordaro and Mr. Munchak promised a 25 percent property tax cut and delivered a 48 percent tax hike.

Given his indictment with Mr. Cordaro on federal charges, Mr. Munchak is likely on his way out, too. He'll probably either resign as part of a plea deal or voters will show him the door, regardless of whether he is acquitted or convicted.

Now, one inmate stomps another into a coma.

It is hard to talk about politics when the victim of the attack, Nicholas Pinto, is still struggling to survive.

County Commissioner Corey O'Brien declined to assess the political effect when asked this week, but the reality is the commissioners' response to what happened will be fair game next year.

The economy is a huge factor in politics at the moment and probably will be next year. So how the latest prison mess will play out politically is especially hard to gauge so far out.

One thing that's different already from 2007 is that no one is defending what happened. Remember, Mr. Munchak called a news conference days after Ms. Staten gave birth and acted as if everyone was diligent in their duties that night.

Our guess is that voters will forgive if the prison board - and all three commissioners are on it - take the steps necessary to finally prevent further public fiascoes there.

Little-known fact

President Warren G. Harding's ancestors used to live in the Wyoming Valley before moving to Ohio, which is where he was born and grew up. Of course, his administration was infamous for its corruption (the Teapot Dome scandal), something else local residents can relate to.

"His father, Dr. George T. (Tryon) Harding, a village physician, came of Scotch ancestors who settled in Connecticut and then moved to the Wyoming Valley, Pa., before going to Ohio," Mr. Harding's New York Times obituary says. You can look up the obituary by searching the president's name and Wyoming Valley.

Amos Harding III was the president's great-great grandfather, according to "The Rise of Warren Gamaliel Harding, 1865-1920" by Randolph C. Downes. Amos was actually one of the founders of the village of Clifford in Susquehanna County. Amos' son was George Tryon Harding I, the president's great-grandfather, who had a son named Charles A. Harding, the president's grandfather, whose son was George T. Harding, the doctor and the president's father.

BORYS KRAWCZENIUK, The Times-Tribune politics reporter, writes Random Notes. The column has appeared since 1895.

The next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom - upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.

You're left looking like a fool because Obama has said nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.

It takes no courage to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand for their right to build a mosque, giving the impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project, and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to find another site.

The liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and difficulty dealing with analogies.

The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only grounds for opposing the mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the convent at Auschwitz? Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.

How does Kinsley explain this order to pray - but not there? He simply asserts that the decision is something "I confess that I never did understand."

That's his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?

At least Richard Cohen of The Washington Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive, but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely "a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai."

Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren't crazies. They were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives.

They were the leading edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, financial and theological support, a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers who protect and guard them.

Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions, and engaged in operations against radical Muslims - because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?

Radical Islam is not a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers - according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., over 80 million souls - it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on alert.

Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is provocative.

Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under 85 has any responsibility for that infamy, representatives of Islam - the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name - should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER writes for The Washington Post.

During Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's July visit to Washington, Barack Obama praised him as "willing to take risks for peace." There was a time when that meant swapping "land for peace" - Israel sacrificing something tangible and irrecoverable, strategic depth, in exchange for something intangible and perishable, promises of diplomatic normality.

Strategic depth matters in a nation where almost everyone is a soldier, so society cannot function for long with the nation fully mobilized. Also, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel within the borders established by the 1949 armistice was in one place just nine miles wide, a fact that moved George W. Bush to say: In Texas we have driveways that long. Israel exchanged a lot of land to achieve a chilly peace with Egypt, yielding the Sinai, which is almost three times larger than Israel and was 89 percent of the land captured in the process of repelling the 1967 aggression.

The intifada was launched by the late Yasser Arafat -terrorist and Nobel Peace Prize winner - after the July 2000 Camp David meeting, during which then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede control of all of Gaza and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, with small swaps of land to accommodate the growth of Jerusalem suburbs just across the 1949 armistice line.

Israelis are famously fractious, but the intifada produced among them a consensus that the most any government of theirs could offer without forfeiting domestic support is less than any Palestinian interlocutor would demand. Furthermore, the intifada was part of a pattern. As in 1936 and 1947, talk about partition prompted Arab violence.

In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded that there was "an irrepressible conflict" - a phrase coined by an American historian to describe the U.S. Civil War - "between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." And: "Neither of the two national ideals permits" a combination "in the service of a single state." The commission recommended "a surgical operation" - partition. What followed was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.

On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. recommended a partition plan. Israel accepted the recommendation. On Nov. 30, Israel was attacked.

Palestine has a seemingly limitless capacity for eliciting nonsense from afar, as it did recently when Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Gaza as a "prison camp." In a sense it is, but not in the sense Cameron intended. His implication was that Israel is the cruel imprisoner. Gaza's actual misfortune is to be under the iron fist of Hamas, a terrorist organization.

In May, a flotilla launched from Turkey approached Gaza in order to provoke a confrontation with Israel, which, like Egypt, administers a blockade to prevent arms from reaching Hamas. The flotilla's pretense was humanitarian relief for Gaza - where the infant mortality rate is lower and life expectancy is higher than in Turkey.

Israelis less than 50 years old have no memory of their nation within the 1967 borders set by the 1949 armistice that ended the War of Independence. The rest of the world seems to have no memory at all concerning the intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. georgewill@washpost.com.