Strange Bedfellows

This is where the job of being a city official gets real tough. Imagine, having the awesome responsibility of picking the name of someone worthy to associate with the city's long-awaited criminal justice center, which is scheduled to open - finally! - sometime next month. The names submitted to City Council so far are a mixed bag of heavy- hitters, all sadly no longer with us: Clerk of Quarter Sessions Edgar C. Campbell Sr.; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; state Supreme Court Justice James T. McDermott, and Mayor Frank Rizzo.

Sure, politics makes strange bedfellows. But isn't a marriage of Wilson Goode and Vice President Bush's brother taking things just a bit far? Maybe Goode has seen the light. It sure looks like it. Goode and Prescott Bush Jr. have agreed to become co-chairmen of the national Privatization Council. As Goode put it when his appointment was announced, he "believes strongly in privatization as an appropriate tool for delivering public services and facilities". If you put aside the ruling conventional wisdom in this town for just a little while, the concept of Goode embracing privatization - with a vengeance - actually makes sense.

A GRASSROOTS movement can sometimes turn out to be an Astro Turf joke. It looks real at first. But on closer inspection - and frankly, you don't have to look too hard - some of this year's politicians are strange bedfellows indeed. Let's see . . . A local Democratic Senate candidate unabashedly supports a conservative Constitution Party candidate for the same job. Nationally, Republicans ride the bandwagon of pesky independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, while Democrats are working hard to steer that wagon into a deep ditch.

TOP HEAVY Tragedy struck the U.S. Olympic team during closing ceremonies when an unidentified member was crushed by the weight of the advertisements on his warm-up uniforms. YOU'RE WRONG, KISS ME Mary Matalin, deputy manager of the George Bush campaign and author of the infamous "sleaze memo," is romantically linked to Bill Clinton strategist James Carville. Politics makes for strange bedfellows. LIGHT READING Last week, 30th aniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe, saw the number of people writing books about the star actually outnumber those who saw her films.

Funny Dirty Little War takes place in 1974 Argentina, the year Juan Peron died and left a political vacuum violently filled by a military government. Director Hector Olivera's slapstick tragicomedy, a funny, dirty little movie, satirizes how Peronism, which came to mean all things to all Argentines, led to the military takeover. In the sleepy pampas hamlet of Colonia Vega, word comes to the local Peronist boss that he, Suprino (Hector Bidonde), must eliminate left-wing infiltrators of the Peronist party.

Back in the Gilded Age, when money lubricated the machinery of machine politics, the U.S. Senate was known as "the millionaire's club. " New Jersey, where millionaire political neophyte Jon Corzine was elected to the Senate in 2000, and where millionaire near-political-neophyte Douglas Forrester won the Republican senatorial nomination last week, appears to be reviving the tradition. Though he was the first of New Jersey's new breed, Frank R. Lautenberg thinks Do You Want to Be a Millionaire Senator?

Voters in the 8th District are faced with a hodgepodge of fresh faces as they choose their first new Council member in 20 years. When Council President Joseph E. Coleman announced earlier this year that he would retire, after two decades in office, he left no clear front-runner. That has brought seven Democratic candidates scurrying to carve niches for themselves in the economically and racially diverse district. The 8th encompasses parts of Tioga, Nicetown, Olney, Germantown, East and West Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill.

CHURCH AND STATE I appreciate your editorial of July 5, "A Judicial Lie: The Court Votes Against the Law. " It is essential to determine to what extent the personal religious convictions of each Supreme Court justice (?) influenced his position and actions. Have any of them violated Article 1 of the Amendments to the Constitution? Is enforced pregnancy (via the court) contemplated in Article XIII on "involuntary servitude"? We have heard of efforts to "pack the court.

It wasn't so long ago that George Bush was ridiculed by Democrats for extolling volunteerism and invoking "a thousand points of light. " That same George Bush will be hawking volunteerism in Philadelphia next weekend - but this time, with support from his Democratic successor and the moderates who now run the Democratic Party. The Presidents' Summit for America's Future is being staged at a time of upheaval in American politics. Old labels are being shed. The traditional dichotomies of left and right are no longer operative.

ALEC Baldwin has a new bosom buddy: Beltway GOP strategist Grover Norquist. The Bush-bashing actor-turned-activist and the Muslim vote-courting political organizer joined together at a recent conference to perpetuate lies about the Patriot Act and to oppose the "repressive" war on terror (repressing terrorist suspects apparently being a bad thing). Baldwin and Norquist's panel, titled "Strange Bedfellows," was sponsored by the ultraliberal group People for the American Way. When People head Ralph Neas ranted about the lack of judicial and congressional oversight of the Justice Department's terror investigations, the audience applauded passionately.

Liberal political talk show host Bill Maher has jumped to the defense of conservative radio jock Rush Limbaugh. Maher, a comedian and host of HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," defended Limbaugh through Twitter. And, he scolded liberals for not accepting Limbaugh's apology for disparaging a Georgetown law student on his radio show. Limbaugh called the student, Sandra Fluke, a "slut" and a "prostitute," after she had testified at a congressional hearing last month in support of the Obama administration's new contraception rule mandating insurance coverage for birth control.

If this Thursday evening is like other evenings, the nurses, technologists and therapists who are replacing Temple University's striking health-care professionals will be kicking back at the Sheraton Center City hotel bar, relaxing after yet another 12-hour shift. But Thursday won't be like the other nights. That's because the union on strike at Temple will be holding its annual leadership meeting at the very same hotel, now occupied by their replacements - about 800, double-bunked in 400 rooms.

For the 32d time since Israel was founded in 1948, it will have a new coalition government, one that nearly spans the globe of political possibilities. It has a centrist leadership, a left-wing partner, and now a far right-wing party, led by the polarizing Avigdor Lieberman, who bluntly believes Arabs and Jews can't live together and once called for the execution of Israeli Arab lawmakers who talked to the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas. So how can this coalition of very strange bedfellows accomplish anything of significance, and is there a quilt wide enough to throw across them?

In the end, Camden's unlikely coalition worked. A last-minute surge of support from some of her most vocal critics gave Mayor Gwendolyn Faison the edge she needed Tuesday to beat an all-out challenge from Assemblywoman Nilsa Cruz-Perez in a runoff election. Councilman Ali Sloan El, who has knocked Faison for years, and demolition mogul William Hargrove, who has tangled with her legally and verbally, were among those clapping and chanting her name on election night. Unofficial results showed Faison basically picking up the votes that had gone to Sloan El in the predominantly African American areas of Camden during the May 10 nonpartisan election, in which he placed third.

A GRASSROOTS movement can sometimes turn out to be an Astro Turf joke. It looks real at first. But on closer inspection - and frankly, you don't have to look too hard - some of this year's politicians are strange bedfellows indeed. Let's see . . . A local Democratic Senate candidate unabashedly supports a conservative Constitution Party candidate for the same job. Nationally, Republicans ride the bandwagon of pesky independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, while Democrats are working hard to steer that wagon into a deep ditch.

ALEC Baldwin has a new bosom buddy: Beltway GOP strategist Grover Norquist. The Bush-bashing actor-turned-activist and the Muslim vote-courting political organizer joined together at a recent conference to perpetuate lies about the Patriot Act and to oppose the "repressive" war on terror (repressing terrorist suspects apparently being a bad thing). Baldwin and Norquist's panel, titled "Strange Bedfellows," was sponsored by the ultraliberal group People for the American Way. When People head Ralph Neas ranted about the lack of judicial and congressional oversight of the Justice Department's terror investigations, the audience applauded passionately.

Back in the Gilded Age, when money lubricated the machinery of machine politics, the U.S. Senate was known as "the millionaire's club. " New Jersey, where millionaire political neophyte Jon Corzine was elected to the Senate in 2000, and where millionaire near-political-neophyte Douglas Forrester won the Republican senatorial nomination last week, appears to be reviving the tradition. Though he was the first of New Jersey's new breed, Frank R. Lautenberg thinks Do You Want to Be a Millionaire Senator?

The great Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse once described a doctrine he called "repressive tolerance. " Crudely stated, repressive tolerance is the device by which bourgeois society neutralizes challenges to the dominant culture: by embracing them. I have always thought the best illustration of repressive tolerance - in America, anyway - is to step inside an office elevator and listen for the Thousand and One Strings rendition of a Bob Dylan song. But there are many variations, and sometimes they are found in unexpected places.

It was a decision hailed by electricity suppliers and steeped in free-market philosophy. Key consumer advocates responded skeptically, worrying that its potential benefits would leave some people behind, especially the poor and elderly. Hearing that reaction, one might have supposed that last week's Public Utility Commission ruling on the future of Peco Energy was the product of a conservative Republican majority. A reasonable supposition, but a wrong one. Welcome to the strange world of Pennsylvania regulatory politics, where old stereotypes die hard, or never made much sense in the first place.

It wasn't so long ago that George Bush was ridiculed by Democrats for extolling volunteerism and invoking "a thousand points of light. " That same George Bush will be hawking volunteerism in Philadelphia next weekend - but this time, with support from his Democratic successor and the moderates who now run the Democratic Party. The Presidents' Summit for America's Future is being staged at a time of upheaval in American politics. Old labels are being shed. The traditional dichotomies of left and right are no longer operative.