Politics is heating up here in Pennsylvania.

Obama is over in Abington, Montgomery County, a suburb of Philadelphia, this afternoon. Philadelphia is close enough that Comcast customers get Philadelphia TV stations as well as the Lancaster/York/Harrisburg stations.

Saturday, there's a rally in Binn's Park. Kathleen Sibelius, the governor of Kansas, will be there to represent the Obama campaign. I'd kinda like to hear her.

I've mentioned before that I'm a conservative independent who is registered as a Republican. Sibelius is the daughter of John Gilligan, who was governor of Ohio in the early 1970s. I was newspapering back then, and met Gilligan in that capacity. I wasn't really impressed by Gilligan at the time. He was an old-style liberal. On the other hand, I don't recall any scandals over corruption.

Gilligan had the misfortune to follow Jim Rhodes in office. Rhodes was an extremely popular Republican, who fought hard for economic development. He tried to get every county to build an airport, to encourage people to build factories in Ohio. His point was that industrialists wanted to be able to fly their corporate jets to visit their factories, and if there wasn't a place nearby to land, they weren't interested in building a factory.

But Rhodes did some little things that made a big impression, as well. Ohio grows tomatoes. They don't grow oranges. He insisted on tomato juice, not orange juice, as appetizers for the banquets he was associated with. It was a drop in the bucket, as far as making an impact on the financial position of tomato growers, but he made a big deal about it, because it was symbolic of his activism in favor of Ohio business. I'm not sure, but I think he brought Honda to Ohio, which is a major, major, employer - and from what I've heard, they're a good employer as well, paying good wages, providing good benefits, and treating employees with respect. Respect counts for a lot.

The house voted today on the bailout rescue plan, and my congressman, Joe Pitts, voted against it.

Yes, it's a crappy bill - but if your car is on the edge of a cliff, wobbling, and threatening to go over the edge, do you complain that the only available towtruck is charging $300 for a job that other towtrucks would charge $100 for, if they were available?

The objection Congresscritter Pitts has to the rescue plan is that it would fundamentally change the relationship between government and the finance industry. Oh, yeah? Isn't FDIC fairly intrusive? What about SIPC? Doesn't the SEC stick its nose in there? Doesn't the president appoint the chairman of the Fed?

Since 1936, the government has bought up grain when it's cheap, and sold it when it's high-priced. They tell everybody that it's price supports for farmers, but farmers point out that it's really to prevent consumers from complaining about expensive bread and corn flakes. How is it that it's OK to screw around with the price of food, but not screw around with the cost of housing? Your mortgage amounts to about 75% of the cost of your home.

As I mentioned, I'm a conservative - but Joe Pitts isn't. He's a kneejerk Bush clone, without the wits to make his own decisions about what's good for his constituents. The value of the dollar has plunged 37% since 2001. Government under Bush has grown 28% per term, which it twice as fast as it grew under Clinton. And while Bill Clinton managed to run a surplus, Bush has run extreme deficits.

The fact is, Clinton was a better conservative than Bush was.

And when it comes to the bailout rescue, the neo-cons like Pitts and Bush are penny-wise and pound-foolish. It's "pay me now or pay me later" - and a conservative notes that oil changes are fairly cheap, compared to the cost of buying a new engine. A neo-con, falling off the Empire State Building, says "so far, so good" as he passes the 5th floor, dropping at 120 miles per hour.

Mom used to tell a story about the farm down the road. The guy who farmed the place died, and his son, an efficiency expert, inherited it.

Milk, he knew, was mostly water. He drilled a new well, and made sure his cows had lots of fresh, cold, clean water at all times - and milk production increased about 20%.

He had limited acreage to use for pasture, so his father had always sold off deacon calves to neighbors, who raised them for veal, and had taken his heifers to market as soon as they got pregnant. Buyers want to know that a heifer is capable of getting pregnant, because that's the only way it will ever give milk. The efficiency expert increased the size of his barn, though, and kept his heifers, doubling the size of his herd. He didn't have enough pasture, so he started buying hay and grain for them.

With the larger herd, he was able to negotiate a better deal with the dairy; after all, they were able to pick up twice as much milk per trip.

Then he got to thinking that grain was awfully expensive, and cows enjoy chewing their cud. He cut back on grain, and increased the haylage he fed the cows, and it cut feed costs 20% while only cutting production about 10%. That was a profitable move, so he stopped buying grain entirely.

But milk is mostly water, right? So he decided to cut back on the hay, and see what happened. Again, production dropped a little, but costs dropped even more, so he cut the haylage he fed even more.

And he almost had weaned the cows off hay entirely, which would have been incredibly profitable, when the worst of bad luck struck, and the herd died on him.

And that's what neo-cons are all about. Republicans get tired of the liberal press calling them stupid, and they point to Dan Quayle, and they talk about the stories about Ronald Reagan sleeping in meetings, and they talk about Dubya being ridiculed for being unable to say anything without mangling the pronunciation, and they talk about Chevy Chase making fun of Jerry Ford as if he were stupid and clumsy, and even the criticism that was made of Eisenhower for playing golf all the time.

But there's a reason why they get called stupid. In the production of Evita, Ms. Peron says "Did you hear that? They called me a whore! They actually called me a whore!" The response she gets from an Italian Admiral? "But, Segnora Per