Good government activist and 5thEstate.com editor, Ron Harper, Jr, challenges Paul Thibault, the chairman of political action committee Friends of Better Government (FBG), to a public debate on the merits of the Lancaster downtown convention center project.

The FBG political action committee recently took umbrage at Harper for calling this multi-million dollar government transfer to very-private-FBG-member Dale High a "fascist-like project". (FBGonline.com) Harper was, of course, referring to the economic element of fascism called "corporatism" which uses the government, rather than the free-market, to control, manipulate and deliver money to private interests.

FBG, refuses to address Harper's intellectually correct analysis and accurate description of the economics of the project. Instead FBG chooses instead to create a red herring by pretending Harper was referring to other elements of fascism when FBG writes, "... to refer to opponents as people who are similar to war criminals debases our politics and replaces debate with insult. "

Insults? It's not without irony that Thibault, while decrying Harper's accurate description of the Penn Square Project, attempts to mitigate Harper's website by calling him a name - "gadfly". Hardly an accurate description, Harper's website most recently has made an impact by unearthing facts that prompted the resignation of the School District of Lancaster's superintendent and motivated an FBI investigation into other possible avenues of corruption.

For FBG, it is not the first time that they would use name calling against enemies. For instance, during the height of the John Barley trashgate scandal, FBG called former county commissioner, Jim Huber, a part of "right-wing-fringe activists". One of the victims of trashgate, Ed Kladky, whose home was surrounded on four sides by Barley's land which was sold for a landfill, was called a "Liberal-nuclear-freeze-movement alumni"! What was Kladky's crime? He dared to fight against the man responsible for trashgate!

FBG chairman Thibault says, "So the key to continuing the experiment of our democratic republic is to talk about our ideals, to discuss, argue, ponder how and where we want to advance in order to get better government."

Let's have the public debate that Thibault says he supports. Let's give the public a chance to hear both sides of this transfer of almost 100 million dollars of publicly-funded assets to a private entity. This has NEVER happened! Let's see the Lancaster Newspapers push for such a debate over their pet project.

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