Nancy, When I awoke this morning with the idea of e-mailing you, I first checked some of my www.billybytes.com Website articles and http://www.billybytes.com/blog/.

I also looked in my wallet on my bedside nightstand for the scrap of paper containing the name of your U.S. Senator John McCain’s legislative aide in Tucson.

I have forgotten his name and the scrap of paper containing it has since been misplaced: My wife Kathy, whose always chided me about the mini-, make-shift library I always carry around in my wallet, had cleaned it out to make room for the credit cards, driver’s license, and other indispensible documents like driver’s license and AAA-Plus and medical identification cards. Kathy had taken possession of my wallet for safe-keeping when I was hospitalized for cancer surgery and had deciced to clean it out to make breathing space for the credit cards.
(The family’s 1994 940 Series Volvo station wagon in parked right now in the lot of Integrated Automobile Services (IAS) here in Easton last Wednesday night where my younger daughter Fiona and I had it towed when it broke down just west of Newark Airport where I had picked her up from her flight from her apartment in Chicaco to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with Kathy, Fiona’s older sister Sarah, and me.

(We celebrated the holiday at Sarah’s house in Martins Creek, where she is a neighbor of IAS’s owner, David Leggett. His automobile sales and repair business, located in Easton, is one of the 33 properties that the City of Easton and its Redevelopment Authority are threatening to “take” under the not always unveiled threat of eminent domain.

Easton, Northampton County, of which Easton is the seat, Pennsylvania’s Governor Edward Rendell and the state’s legislature, LANTA, the bi-county transportation authority of Northampton County and its neighbor to the west, Lehigh County, Easton’s Lafayette College, Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators Arlen Specter and Rich Santorum and other legislative delegates like U.S. Congressman Charlie Dent, state representative Robert Freeman and state senator Rob Wonderling, and Lafayette College’s real-estate development partner Arcadia Properties, covet the 33 already privately owned properties for the construction a a new urban community in Easton called “Bushkill Village,” located in the flood-prone corridor of the Delaware River and Bushkill Creek between Larry Holmes Drive, named in honor of Larry Holmes, the “Easton Assassin, a local businessman, Easton native, and former heavy-weight boxing champion of the world.

(Larry himself has already built two commercial buildings in the floodplain where Bushkill Creek and the Delaware and Lehigh rivers merge. But the City of Easton required Holmes, an African-American, to build in strict accordance with its zoning ordinances, the county’s Comprehensive Plan, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, and the statutes and regulations of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

(Easton was wise to have imposed these zoning- and building-code restrictions on Holmes: Just since September of 2004 and continuing through June of this year, Easton has suffered through three major floodings. And even last week, heavy rainfall flooded the Lehigh Rivers, forcing Easton to close Lehigh Drive, where in one of the previous floods, an Easton resident drowned, prompting his family to bring a lawsuit against the city.

(These devastating floods, starting with Hurricane Ivan, have turned Easton and its environs into a “Little New Orleans,” and Ivan into another “Katrina, the Gulf Coast disaster that inspired movie-maker Spike Lee to make a documentary, an account of which may be found on the http://www.billybytes.com/blog/.

(Lee’s documentary lays much of the blame for this national shame at the feet of Michael Chertoff, whom President George W. Bush plucked from Philadelphia’a Third Circuit Court Appeals, as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security after the retirment of HSD’s first secretary, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge.

(When Ridge left Harrisburg to form HSD’s nascent “Office of Homeland Security,” he took with him his long-time chief-of-staFF while Governor and before that the U.S. Congreeman representing the district arount Erie, Pennsylvania, Mark Holman and Eric Buchholz, both senior partners of the Philadelphia lawfirm Blank, Rome, Comisky, and McCauley, a major Republican Party fund-raiser.

(Ridge also took a high-ranking female official from Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED).

(The managing partner of Blank Rome is David F. Girard-DiCarlo, who was a “pioneer” in nominee Bush’s Presidential bid in 2000, meaning DiCarlo was responsible for raising a minimum of $100,000 for the campaign.

(DiCarlo’s success was rewarded with promotion to the position of “ranger” for President Bush’s 2004 re-election, a position that obligated DiCarlo to raise at least twice - $200,000 - the year 2000 amount.

(Blank Rome’s presence was also prominent at the 2004 Republican National Convention held in New York City.

(Blank Rome is also counsel to Northampton County for the series of fraudulent multi-million general-obligation bonds the county has floated since 1997 by the county’s illegal General Purpose Authority, created in 1998 following the election of Glenn Reibman and his Democratic Party county council.

Before proceeding to write you, Nancy, I quickly checked The New York Times on-line and saw the article titled, “Cities Compete in Hipness Battle to Attract Young,” by reporter Shaila Dewan.

I have written volumes in the various Billybytes publications (newletter handbills distributed on downtown Easton street corners and in Easton City Hall and Northampton County Government Center, the www.billybytes.com Website, and the hppt://www.billybytes.com/blog. on the subject of how Pennsylvania’s older citizens and taxpayers like me are being sacrificed to the Commonwealth’s - and America’s and increasingly the world’s - yuppies.

One of the guests at my daughter Sarah’s Thanksgiving dinner was a long-time family friend in Easton who now lives in New York City.

When I brought up the subject of the yuppies, she commented that they are also known as “trust-fund kids,” the spoiled children of the “Baby-Boomer” generation with the financial wherewithall to put their progeny up in expensive New York City apartments and pay their tuition and other expenses as students at ivy-league Columbia and the city’s other institutions of higher learning.

Meanwhile, those like our family friend who find it increasingly difficult to meet the rising living costs in the Big Apple are being forced out, back to places like Easton and even slightly cheaper Philadelphia, now known as “the sixth borough of New York City.”

Pennsylvania is wooing these disaffected youth with tax-abatement legislation enacted by Governor Rendell and the legislature in June 2004 under the title “Keystone Innovation Zone,” the latest in the series of KOZ (Keystone Opportunity Zone) bills first adopted in 1998 during the Governor Ridge and Easton Mayor Thomas F. Goldsmith administrations - legislation that helped Rendell win the Governorship in 2002 with heavy Republican-Party support, over Republican-Party nominee Pennsylvania Attorney General J. Michael “Mike” Fisher.

Like Lynn Swann, Fisher was never more than a token candidate, picked to assure the election of Rendell with a heavy Republican voter turnout, just as the Democrats’ nominee for Easton and Northampton and Lehigh counties’ 15th U.S. Congressional District, Ed O’Brian, was defeated by his Republican opponent, Pat Toomey, and state senator Democratic candidate Bob Mazza was defeated by Republican opponent Rob Wonderling.

Wonderling’s victory was accomplished by a legislative re-districting that eliminated state senate district 18 and its Democratic representative Lisa Boscola.

The district was absorbed by Wonderling’s Republican district 24 with its heavily Republican Montgomery County.

As the “trust-fund kids” and their accommodating government officials and developers are being wooed to Easton with the carrot of irresistible tax abatments and incentives, the area’s seniors like me are beguiled with promises of school property tax relief through slot machine gambling casinos and horse-racing tracks with casinos called “racinos.”

And the taking of property through the threat of eminent domain, as in the case of “Bushkill Village,” Pennsylvania has gone to the extreme of using the courts to declare seniors mentally incompetent, auctioning off their homes, and forcing them into assisted-living facilities essentially under house arrest where they pay for their own care with their social security checks and pensions, controlled by a court-appointed “guardian.”

An example I have written volumes about is 81-year-old Anna Mae Kessler, a life-long resident of Plainfield Township in Northampton County, whose officials conspired with those across the Delaware River in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, to have Anna Mae abducted from the home where she was being cared for by her niece and forced into an “assisted-living” facility in Northampton County’s Bushill Township.