High above Easton's Gallows Hill and hidden from public view inside the shadowy Northampton County Government Center still, Glenn Reibman and his moonshining boys, Jim Hickey from neighboring Lehigh County, and moonshine marketer Vince Dominach, distill the worst white lightning anywhere around. Even so, through aggressive marketing, their rotgut provides them with full, well-paying employment.

The county's chief law enforcement official, revenuer John Morganelli, blinds himself to the existence of the still, operating in broad daylight, under his very nose. County doubters puzzle over this blindness, Morganelli's office and lockup both being only spittin' distance away. County cynics ascribe the blindness to a greenback-tinged cloud. It drifts from the still through Morganelli's open office door, which he commands his staffers never to close. "Slamming the door shut," Morganelli cautions, "could frustrate the county's economic development and threaten jobs, most notably my own."

Puzzling as well to Northampton countians is something else: How can stillmaster Reibman turn out such bad whiskey when he uses the best organically grown corn taxpayer money can buy? After all, he purchases exclusively from Downtown Easton's premier, and only, health food vendor, Nature's Way, located in the 100 block of Northampton Street. Snubbing Easton's water, Reibman buys only that of Perrier-pure quality (it's costs less than Easton's, too) and chemical-free cane sugar for the distilling of his white lightning. He also buys croaker sacks of juniper berries and manufactures bathtub gin for clients who prefer martinis to corn whiskey Manhattans.

Aside. Reibman would never throw his business to any other vendor except Nature's Way owner David Harder. The New Jersey resident lobbies for a $3 million, 112-space parking deck that would also serve his customers although he has a 24-car parking lot directly behind his building conveniently accessible from the 100 block of Church Street. This is one of the few remaining public alley streets not abandoned by Easton's officials to private ownership.

The city's most recent abandonments are those of the 100 blocks of Pine and Green streets. Easton Mayor Tom Goldsmith ceded these blocks to New York City developers Theodore Kheel and Peter Koehler, the defunct Hotel Easton owners who would lease the proposed, adjacent, city-owned parking deck. In blocking access from Northampton Street into South Green Street, Koehler and Kheel trespass on public property.

Goldsmith, Kheel, and Koehler have in mind a mixed use of boutiques, ballroom, corporate offices, and restaurant. The trio would retain the building's rathskellar. It would double as a dry-dock in times of drought like now or a boatyard in times of flood, like the one of '55. Has businessman David Harder not taken all these proposed uses into account? He would find himself in direct competition with Goldsmith-Koehler-Kheel Inc., which would need the 112 parking spaces for its political-patronage employees. Guess who in this competition would go home with the Gold?

Every two weeks or so, Reibman and his boys tilt the Little Brown Jug and glug their profits. This is to screw up enough Dutch courage for another showdown with the county council boys and gals. The moonshiners bring along Philadelphia bond-counsel Jeff Blumenfeld. The $111 million megabond's language contains tricky words like "practicable, "impractical," "feasible," and "not feasible." Blumenfeld is there to parse the hair-splitting legal distinctions between these terms.

A free consultation with Noah Webster would have explained to him, in BillyBytes' rough paraphrase, that children could be transported to school in a hot-air balloon ("impracticable," though not impossible), but that getting them there in school buses makes more sense ("practical," and clearly possible).

Blumenfeld's point was to persuade council it could not alter any megabond project unless its accomplishment was impossible; e.g., Council could not delete the $13.1 million road through 1,600 acres of Bethlehem Steel Superfund land (leading nowhere except to a bankruptcy court in Manhattan) or the $2.35 million for a note many see as a balloon to re-float the old Hotel Easton, sunk by 10 years of mismanagement as murky as the Delaware River that flooded the relic's check-in desk in 1955.

That's when Councilman Ron Angle interrupted and gave Blumenfeld a practical example defining "practical," "not impracticable," and "feasible." What Council had done was effectively lop off four stories of Reibman's eight-story, high-rise prison and plop them down on a site across Union Street. Moreover, Blumenfeld is haunted by his words from an earlier bond-flotation attempt: "The only way to change [bond] projects will be by amending the [bond] ordinance by county council. It's clearly stated in the ordinance that's in front of you."

When at last Reibman passed the jug to Council, Ann McHale grabbed it first. In the style of a woman from Bethlehem's South Mountain, she curled her pinky around the jug's handle. Resting the jug on her expertly crook'd arm, she threw back her head and pulled the jug's mouth closer to quaff Reibman's nectar, beading on the jug's moist, rounded lip like sun-lit drops of mountain morning dew.

Soon after, McHale stupefied the council audience with her observation that the megabond ordinance, spread before her, referred only to a parking deck in the city of Easton, with no reference to the hotel. On that note, Council President J. Michael Dowd adjourned the meeting, leaving a dazed audience wondering if McHale's observation would spare taxpayers the burden of a parking deck next to, or even near, the derelict Hotel.

In December 2000 county council, by an 8-0 vote that some members later called a "mistake," directed County Executive Glenn Reibman to provide it with a copy of Arthur Tredinnick's investigative report of alleged official misconduct in the county prison. Was the post-vote "mistake" characterization the result of Reibman arm-twisting? In any event, Council President Wayne Grube said he's "not planning to pursue the report," which Reibman refused to give council.

Similarly, in January 2002 county council voted in an official open public meeting to pursue a Quo Warranto court action that in all probability would have led to the dissolution of the illegal General Purpose Authority, and with it the invalidation of the $111 million megabond. On the very day of that official vote, Council's president and other members met illegally, in violation of the Open Meetings Act and the public's Right-to-Know law, and conspired not to proceed with the Quo Warranto.

Although Peg Ferraro is not chairman of Northampton County Council, she is head of the county's Republican Party Committee and should not quail before the Democrats. Even Democrat Council Member Grube acknowledges in yesterday's edition of The Excess-Times that "opposition to the bond issue was a major rallying cry for the voters, who in November gave Republicans their first-ever majority on council."

That election victory gave Northampton County Republicans a political power that, as Republican member Ron Angle rightly complains, they refuse to exercise. In voting to pursue Quo Warranto, but then pulling out, Angle quipped that his Republican council colleagues (are they, really?) "loaded the pistol but didn't pull the trigger."

Northampton County Republicans can't "out-me-too" a Democratic Party Solomon-Reibman-Morganelli Axis of Evil. Why would the Republicans want to? If the Republicans are sincere about winning offices in this gubernatorial election year, they'd better show it. Politics makes strange bedfellows, but Northampton County Republicans just make strange.