Gil Spencer’s started doing his usual hit jobs on area Dems in his column, taking aim at David Landau last week. (And on a high holiday–REALLY classy, Gil!)

David can politic for himself, and nobody but the local wingnuts listen to Gil anyway. (He was so very infuential in Sestak vs. Weldon, wasn’t he?)

But I’m calling this bum out on his blatant chauvinism. Look at how he talks about Magisterial District Judge Stephanie Klein:

Landau says county government needs to be “cleaned up” and the “system” is “disgraceful.”

I guess by that he means some of the nepotism and cronyism that can easily be found around the county.

And yet, Landau himself is not the best person to criticize that sort of thing.

As head of the Democratic Party in Nether Providence, Landau helped engineer his wife’s nomination and election to a plum district judge position.

Let’s get this point straight. Judge Klein is an elected official. No matter how ambitious Landau may be, you cannot confuse an elected official with a nepotistic appointment in the courthouse. Stephanie Klein represents the people who elected her to the bench.

But it’s the underlying assumption behind Spencer’s potshot that deserves a wag of the finger. He completely discounts the role that Klein herself played in her election. Did she want to be a district judge? Sure, her politically savvy husband helped with fund raising and campaign logistics. But who went door-to-door?

I’ll tell you. It was Stephanie Klein. Stephanie has her own constituency. Long before I knew David Landau, I knew Judge Klein. It was she who came to my door and asked for my support. And my son doesn’t know who David Landau is, but he knows Stephanie Klein from her doorstep and polling site visits.

To hear Spencer tell it, you’d think that Landau could just snap his fingers and some magical Democratic machine would simply install his wife on the bench. Maybe that’s the way it works for Republicans around here, but Dems have always had to earn their successes.

And let’s not forget that she’s been re-elected twice, and will be elected one more time in November. Why am I so certain of Klein’s re-election to the bench?

In May, she beat a well-known local Republican official (and president-elect of the County Bar Association) in the Republican Primary.  I worked the polls at her opponent’s home precinct that day, one of the few places she didn’t carry. But in all my years of election day poll-working, I’ve never had so many people approach me to say something nice about one of the candidates whose ballots I carried.

So my advice, Gil, is to leave Stephanie–Judge Klein to you–alone and stick to people on your own level.

For red-meat Republicans, he still seems to be seen as a technical guru on electioneering. To Democrats, he’s a demon. Possibly because he rarely appeared in public interviews, or because he’s part of an intensely secretive administration, we have only vague impressions of what the truth might be about Karl Rove. All we know for sure is that he’s a damn poor rapper.

Yesterday’s postmortem in the Post-Gazette on the Rove era is typical of the shallow tripe we’ve been fed by much of the press for years. “Rove’s political acumen was evident in PA,” is the title of the piece. The premise is that Rove focused feverishly on Pennsylvania, and figured out how to turn out the Republican base in PA like nobody ever had before in the 2004 election.

Of course, Bush didn’t carry PA in 2000 or 2004. In 2006, a wave of anti-Bush sentiment allowed four Democratic congressional challengers and one senatorial challenger to defeat incumbent Republicans. Whatever Rove has been peddling, Pennsylvania wasn’t buying it.

Rove’s touted strategy of narrowly holding power via an energized base is at odds with his other claimed interest in creating a permanent Republican majority. A base-only focus seems to be a strategy without contingency, otherwise known as a poor strategy. It is not unlike winning a decisive military battle with a post-war strategy of “we’ll be greeted in the streets with flowers, and oil revenue will pay for everything.”

On this point I will agree with ex-Bush speech writer David Frum in his NY Times editorial:

Building coalitions is essential to political success. But it is not the same thing as political success. The point of politics is to elect governments, and political organizations are ultimately judged by the quality of government they deliver.

Now that we can see his final portfolio, Rove looks to be, at best, a skilled tactician. As a strategist, he seems to have failed almost completely. And if election results in Pennsylvania are any evidence, his tactical dominance is probably overrated too. If Rove’s GOtV operation couldn’t beat the squads of rag-tag MoveOn volunteers, how good could he have been?

Ornery Delco Times pundit Gil Spencer has never missed an opportunity to tweak freshman Congressman Joe Sestak (PA-7). In his most recent column, he performed a useful journalistic service while dishing out his usual critique of all things Sestak.

Gil got the goods on who Sestak’s opponent might be in 2008. Delco GOP candidates don’t run in primaries. They obtain blessings from machine power brokers like Upper Darby’s John McNichol. According to Spencer, two men are currently courting the approval of the war boarders–attorney Steve Elliott and wealthy real estate developer Tim Pulte. McNichol pulled no punches in explaining to the Times columnist how his party sizes up its potential candidates:

It was Pulte, Upper Darby GOP leader John McNichol mentioned first.

“He’s an attractive candidate, but his family is a little reluctant.”

Which is to say, he’s “interested,” but his wife is less so.

While not dismissive of Elliott, who is a state department lawyer with excellent national security credentials, McNichol looks at all the money Pulte could bring into the race with him.

“The family has a ton of money,” McNichol says, and the candidate would have his own “personal fortune” from which to draw.

“He’s never been in the political arena,” McNichol said of Pulte, but …

“He knew a lot about Sestak. He’s done his research and if he became the candidate, he’d get in there with both feet.”

McNichol was less enthusiastic about Elliott, but only because of his lack of dough.

“He’s well spoken and knows the issues,” said McNichol. “He’s a credible looking candidate.” But, he said, “We’re a ways from making any decisions.” That won’t happen until after Labor Day.

Sestak already has over $1M cash-on-hand saved up for 2008. He can also count on the DCCC defending him like Fort Knox if his race gets even remotely close. The GOP has no choice but to consider fundraising prowess in choosing a candidate to back.

If you haven’t visited the Delco Times web site recently, they changed the format. (The changes appear to be in the pipeline for all of the other sites in the network: AllAroundPhilly.com, DailyLocal.com, PhoenixvilleNews.com, Pottstown Mercury.com, TheReporterOnline.com, TimesHerald.com, and the Trentonian.com.)

While more readable than the archaic-looking legacy sites, the new sites are a serious buzzkill for those who linked to any past news articles. They’re all busted. As in kaput. Serious darts to you, tech boys! It’s like you hate the people who drive traffic to you. I don’t get it.

While you’re at it, test out your style sheets in browsers other than Explorer on the PC. I can vouch that your site doesn’t load properly on a Mac with Safari or Firefox.

And while I’m griping, Mr. Heron, you can’t claim to be a blogging editor unless you have a comments section and you link to other sites. Otherwise, it’s just another editorial. The medium is the message.

Anyhoo, thanks to those who wrote comments in to me to tell me about my broken links. It’s all the paper’s fault. Please redirect your complaints to:

Philip E. Heron, Editor of the Daily Times. Email him at editor@delcotimes.com, or call (610) 622-8818.

By all accounts, they’re expecting a full-sized mob at the FAA public comment hearing in Essington tomorrow. The blogger part of me wishes I could be there, but another part of me is very ambivalent about the process. It’s almost impossible to discern the presence of factual information.

What is certain is that the FAA has a terrible communications strategy. What do the risk management people say? Risk = hazard + outrage. They’re about to wake up and smell the outrage.

The local papers are covering the political jockeying over the FAA situation. But I’m terribly disappointed that they’ve let us down by failing to inform the public about what’s really going on. How many planes are we really talking about? Where? How much noise are we really talking about? As long as this issue has been going on, why can’t why have a little gumshoe reporting?

I apologize to anybody who might come here looking for a play-by-play of the event on Wednesday. If it’s all redeeming, I’m going to spend the whole day tomorrow fulfilling an important civic duty.

In a clip from Bill Moyers Journal, two Knight-Ridder reporters who seemed to be asking the right questions in the runup to the war.

The quote in the last few seconds of the clip are telling. Their stories were going out to the papers, but the papers were often not picking them up. For whatever reason (take your pick), the editors ran with the stories from other wire services.

Insert your own moral to the story in the comments section if you like.

PSotD played the “Free Beer” trick last week, but with the lure of undressed (ick) Ann (ick) Coulter. The point of the exercise was not merely to lure people with a strange pruience. It was to make a point about search engines and the importance of blogrolls and linking.

I covered the topic of Google PageRank and it’s implications for political commentary and electioneering here about six weeks ago. PSotD’s post points out another potential for search engines to be gamed or bombed. I was trying to point to a more legitimate area of search optimization that every single small-time blogger should reckon with. (Actually, I’m hoping that only my friends on the progressive side of the blogosphere are paying attention.)

Blogs have themes. Over time, any good blog is going to come to own mindshare on the conversation of the topics it blogs about most.

The lefty side of the Pennsylvania blogosphere is already more developed than its right-wing counterpart. There already exists a pretty robust variety of bloggers, big and small, promoting the progressive agenda in PA, whereas the conservatives seem to be congregating in concentrated enclaves like Grassroots PA. The conservative side seems to be much more focused on the editorial page of newspapers, but that often puts them at a disadvantage with respect to developing PageRank.

For PSotD’s observations to be useful, we have to get past blogrolls. Being included on a Blogroll is helpful, but it’s far more important for bloggers to keep linking to each other’s specific posts. Not only does the attention stroke your comrades’ inherent narcissism, it also promotes their voice on the topics that matter. The difference is the keywords that people use in actual searches. People don’t search for “Daddy Democrat,” they search for news on Delaware County or Joe Sestak and find their way here.

It’s great to leave comments on posts you like. But if you have a blog or community diary, it’s far grander to extend the conversation with a post.

All for one, and one for all.