The lead editorial in today's edition of The Morning Call Girl (April 17, 2005) attempts to describe Pennsylvania Governor Edward "Fast Eddie" Rendell's visit last Wednesday (April  13, 2005) to the senior citizens center in Bethlehem.

Fast Eddie, his poll numbers falling across Pennsylvania, came to hawk his hard-sell pitch for Act 71 - legalized casino slot machine gambling - and his, and the legislature's, "bait and switch" Act 72 - promised, property-tax reduction fraud.

Once again publisher-madam L Susan Hunt flouts public decency.  Once again the Call Girl lies down and spread her pages for political johns like Rendell.

Madam Hunt by her own admission as revealed in the pages of her own publication is embarrassed that she serves in a conflict-of-interest position on every board of directors in the Lehigh Valley,  a political jurisdiction bearing a greater resemblance to the Southern gothic novelist William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County in the Mississippi Delta of Memphis, Tennessee, than to any bona fide regional government.

(If Madam Hunt and other regional government advocates like the Brookings Institute, RenewPA, New Urbanists of Easton, etc., are genuinely interested in regional government, why not go legit and lobby for metropolitan government, such as the one consisting of Nashville, Tennessee, and surrounding small towns and rural communities of Davidson County.)

Drop the pretense.  Be brutally frank.  Fast Eddie came to the senior citizen center in Bethlehem last Wednesday with a loaded pistol.  And he held it to the temple of every property-tax payer in Yoknapatawpha County - for the second time, the first time being when he and the legislature pressed the muzzle of that same loaded gun to those same Gray Ghosts' heads and forced Act 71 and Act 72 down their throats.

Just tell it like it is.

And when Fast Eddie warned the audience that their obstinacy was making him and the legislature angry, he succeeded only in bringing the Gray Ghosts, including this writer, and Northampton County Councilman Ron Angle to their feet. Fast Eddie beat a hasty retreat from the senior citizens center, not to return immediately to Harrisburg, however, but to pay Donald Trump a visit and extend a personal invitation to bring his Atlantic City casinos across the Delaware to Philadelphia and to other Pennsylvania communities - and to bring along with him Michael Perrucci, Phillipsburg, New Jersey, multimillionaire lawyer, developer, former Warren County Democratic Party Committee Chair, and law partner of former New Jersey Governor James Florio.

By inviting Perrucci, Fast Eddie also reached across the Hudson River to Perrucci's Manhattan business partner in the gambling industry, the Newmark Company.

As a matter of fact, by bringing in Perrucci, Rendell reached halfway across the U.S. continent to Las Vegas, Nevada, and across several oceans, sea, and straits to the former Portuguese Colony of Macau - now a possession of the People's Republic of China - and to the Las Vegas Sands and Venetian Casinos and their multi-billionaire owner Sheldon Adelson.  (Adelson and his wife Miriam both support President George W. Bush, each one donating $250,000 to Bush's 2005 Inaugural while Indian Ocean coastal nations were being ravaged by the most devastating tsunami in recorded history.)

Other Bush and gambling supporters are "Casino" Jack Abramoff and his partners Ralph Reed of the Moral Majority and Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay.