“According to an extensive Associated Press report Friday, Mr [Tom] Ridge  stayed overnight twice at the Arizona home of long-time friend David Girard-diCarlo just as Homeland Security was starting up.  Mr. Ridge and Mr. Girard-diCarlo had worked together in Pennsylvania to raise more than $400,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 1999 and 2000.  Earlier, Mr. Girard-diCarlo had helped Mr. Ridge raise money as Pennsylvania governor,” according to the lead editorial published in the January 18, 2005, edition of The Morning Call.

“Mr. diCarlo is chairman of of Blank Rome, a lobbying firm that has agressively expanded its homeland security business.  Mr. DiCarlo lobbied Mr. Ridge’s department on behalf of 29 companies, three non-profit groups and a trade association for the software industry.  It hired two of Mr. Ridge’s aides to lobby Homeland Security; some of its clients secured major contracts.

“A case in point is Mark Holman, a government and political adviser to Mr. Ridge for more than 18 years.  Mr. Holman went to work for Mr. Girard-diCarlo’s firm, focusing on homeland security issues.  A federal law regarding conflicts of interest  barred Mr. Holman from lobbying the White House after his departure from Homeland Security.  But the restriction didn’t apply - a significant loophole - to Homeland Security [italics added].”

As reported earlier in the editorial, “Michael Chertoff’s wife agreed last week to resign from her job as a government lobbyist if her husband replaces Tom Ridge as secretary of the Homeland Security Department.  Meryl Justin Chertoff is a vice president for Nancy Becker Associates, based in New Jersey, and she used to work for one of the Homeland Security agencies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“The White House issued a statement a statement saying Mrs. Chertoff would resign from her job, effective on her husband’s confirmation.  ‘The step she’s taking is above and beyond what legally is required,’ the White House said, ‘and she’s taking that step so that there’s not even the appearnance of conflict [italics added].’”

This was the dodge that Northampton County Executive John Stoffa pulled when he tried to hire Mary T. Ensslin and Michael Corriere from their county council seats to positions in his administration before their resignations from council [italics added].

And Stoffa would have succeeded except for county critic Bernie O’Hare who filed a lawsuit challenging this attempted side-stepping of public probity and propriety if not of the strict letter of the law.

In any event, Bernie’s action inflamed public opinion against the the Stoffa-Ensslin-Corriere ploy.  It forced Ensslin and Corriere to resign from council before accepting positions in Stoffa’s administration.

Stoffa hoisted himself on his own petard through this faux pas, a fatal one from which his political enemies, including me, will never let him recover.

By excising Ensslin and Corriere from council, he gelded himself and surrendered the self-emasculated potency of his executiveship to his Democratic cohorts on council.

Swiftly and decisively, the opportunistic, but practiced Democratic doctors, controlled the transplant operation with their 4-3 majority over the Republican members of the surgical team, transplanted Stoffa’s severed gonads.

The Democrats then proceeded to increase their testosterone level by a power of two, from a majority on council of 4-3 to one of 6-3. having replaced Ensslin, a Republican, and Corriere, a Democrat.

This feat the Democrats pulled off by replacing Corriere, though a Democrat, and Ensslin, a Republican, with two Democrats, Lamont McClure and anthony Branco, both Democrats.

This thus gave the Democrats a net gain of two on county council.

The Democrats now had the 6-3 majority needed to override any attempted veto by the now self-emasculated County Executive John Stoffa.

More than that, council’s veto-proof Democratic majority  emasculated any lobbying effort by Stoffa supporters urging him to veto any ordinance, no matter how destructive of democracy (spelled with a little d),  adopted by council’s Democratic majority.

To return to a more serious vein, Blank Rome is Northampton County’s municipal bond counsel.

Blank Rome provides, for generous fees, financial advice to the county on its original bond issues and on their refundngs, or refinacing, through the risky financial instruments called swaptions.

Steve Forbes eschews these instruments like the bubonic plague, and financier Warren Buffet calls them financial “Weapons of Mass Destruction, or WMDs.”