The 150 or so people seemed to still be nursing a collective endorphin buzz left over from last November. Not only did they see their party win the presidency and both houses of Congress, but the local party also picked up thousands of new registrations.

The keynote speaker was Joe Sestak, the congressman and former admiral from the Philly burbs who plans to take on Sen. Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary next year. I couldn't help but reflect on the irony of seeing him get pretty much the same reception that Pat Toomey always got at Republican gatherings.

A lot of them would tell you they weren't crazy about Specter, but backed him out of sheer practicality as the best chance for maintaining a Republican occupant in his Senate seat. I'm getting the impression that a lot of local Democrats are similarly torn.

Sestak was subtle in his remarks, perhaps recognizing that it would be awkward for party leaders such as local Chairman Mike Johnson to blatantly endorse one candidate or the other.

Sestak never directly attacked Specter. But he did repeatedly blame the recession equally on President Bush and on the legislative leaders who made his policies possible, clearly implicating his long-serving opponent.

After Sestak's speech, I spoke to him a little about the race.

Specter says that having candidates like Toomey hound him in the primaries led to his decision to switch parties, ultimately depriving Republicans of a majority in the Senate. By taking on Specter from the Democratic side, could Sestak be setting his party up for a similar fate?

Sestak replied that Specter's party switch was a transparent act of self interest, and all the more reason why Democrats should support him instead.

"We need a real Democrat," he told me. "Not one out of convenience, but one out of conviction."

I got an e-mail from the campaign of Jim Gerlach, congressman from Chester County, who is taking on Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett for the right to run as next year's Republican gubernatorial candidate.

Gerlach's campaign seems to be implying that Corbett is hypocritical for not stepping down as attorney general while he's running for governor, despite stating in a 1996 interview that he believes state attorney general should be an appointed office to eliminate any appearance of impropriety.

I have no problem with attack ads, as long as they're relevant and accurate. If your opponent's done something wrong and the electorate ought to know it, hey, go nuts.

But frankly, I think this particular criticism is kind of a reach. Absent any indications that Corbett has demonstrated conflict of interest, I'm not too worried about him keeping his job for now.

That bieng said, I was pretty impressed with Gerlach when he spoke at the York County Republican Victory Dinner at the Holiday Inn in West Manchester the Thursday before last.

Gerlach's not a flashy speaker. After a rather lame joke and the obligatory reference to his difficult upbringing, much of his discussion involved minute detailing of his policy proposals.

And that's exactly what impressed me. When it comes to political candidates, I tend to gravitate toward the one who'd look more at home in a back office going over reports and accounting sheets than in front of a podium, stirring up the crowd with his lofty rhetoric.

"Hey, if you elect me, here's what I want to do ..." Now that's my kind of campaign speech!

Anyway, here's the press release:

Before his current practice of investigating political corruption by day and campaigning by night, he saw need to avoid "even the appearance" that deep-pocketed contributors were influencing decisions

EXTON (PA) -- Even though his office continues investigating lawmakers and political operatives at the same time he is running for governor, Attorney General Tom Corbett seems less concerned today about avoiding conflicts of interest than he was a few years ago, the campaign of Republican Jim Gerlach said today.

Corbett told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a December 1996 interview that the Pennsylvania Attorney General should be an appointed position "to eliminate any chance that deep-pocketed campaign contributors might create even the appearance that they have won easier access and influence."

Fast forward to 2009.

Corbett now appears to be ignoring this same principle as he seeks political support and campaign contributions for his campaign for governor while the Attorney General's office is reportedly investigating political corruption in both houses of the Pennsylvania Legislature. Corbett has even gone so far as to promise that this investigation, which has dragged on for more than two years, would yield charges that "shock the conscience."

"Mr. Corbett obviously is not practicing now what he preached in 1996," said Scott Migli, Gerlach campaign manager. "He has created the kind of double-standard that Pennsylvania residents know all too well about politicians in Harrisburg, and that has contributed to historic levels of cynicism about state government.

"Mr. Corbett had a great opportunity to demonstrate how to keep politics out of the Attorney General's office. He could have resigned as Attorney General when he declared his candidacy for governor several weeks ago or declined to enter the race in order to finish an investigation that has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. And we think there will be a growing chorus of questions if he maintains this conflicting duality of the state's top prosecutor and political candidate."

Last week, Corbett actually came face-to-face with another Attorney General who got it right when confronted with the exact same issue of whether to stay in office while running for governor.

Corbett was a special guest during a Philadelphia fundraiser for Bob McDonnell, who immediately left his Attorney General's post when he formally declared he was running for governor in Virginia.

McDonnell said in February that he was resigning so that "taxpayers have a full-time Attorney General running the Commonwealth's law firm, and that the Office is free from politics during a campaign year."

And McDonnell, unlike Corbett, was not in the middle of a political corruption investigation lasting more than two years and costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

For months, Corbett has seemingly ignored what editorial boards across the Commonwealth have recognized as a major conflict of interest.

In August, Jim Gerlach, the only Republican candidate with proven results creating jobs, cutting taxes and cutting government waste, called on Corbett to either suspend his gubernatorial campaign or resign his position as Attorney General. Despite raising money and political support for his gubernatorial effort since March from within the same political circles as those he is supposed to be investigating, Corbett officially announced his candidacy September 14th and has refused calls to step down as Attorney General.

Last month, the Patriot News, which first discovered the illegal bonuses that led to Corbett's investigation, raised further concerns about Corbett's political ambitions while trying to run a full-time investigation. The editorial board called on Corbett to make a decision by October, stating that "too much is at stake for taxpayers and good governance to see this critical investigation be called into question by election politics."

And while other editorial boards around the state have called on Corbett to drop his bid for Governor, the Chambersburg Public Opinion wrote that "it doesn't bode well for the state's highest office when a leading candidate seems to mix the pursuit of justice with his own ambitions."

Former US Attorney David Marston agreed. In an editorial he penned back in April, Marston said Corbett "does us all a disservice" by trying to campaign and prosecute at the same time, and that he needs to choose one over the other. He added that it raises too many questions: "if you were a state legislator under prosecutor Corbett's microscope, would it not seem prudent to support Corbett for governor?" "Is he advancing the public interest in honest government, or his personal interest in becoming governor?" "Worse, the trials of cases brought in Bonusgate could very well take place during the heat of the gubernatorial race, presenting defense attorneys with a potent argument that it really is all about politics."

Yeah, I like the convenience of listening to music that way, but what I really enjoy are the podcasts. One of my recent discoveries is a podcast that plays great old radio shows from the 1920s through the 1940s.

I was listening to one this morning that featured a detective with a tough female sidekick. It got me thinking about the recession, and what it might mean for women.

A couple of times, the detective warned her not to accompany him because the situation was too dangerous for a woman, but she would have none of it.

He solved the case, but she actually ended up doing the heavy lifting. In a climactic scene, she conked the murderer over the head with a hammer as he was trying to strangle the detective, knocking him unconscious. What a gal!

I don't know when that particular episode was made, but I assume it was the 1930s or later. The tough-talking female sidekick was around before then, but the '30s was the decade when she really elbowed herself a spot at pop fiction's bar and demanded a shot of whatever the boys were drinking.

I don't think it's a coincidence that it happened during the Great Depression.

A while back, I read a biography of Peter the Great in which writer Robert K. Massie described life in 17th-century Russian before Peter's modernization efforts. The wealthy upper classes treated women like breeding mares -- locked away in isolation for most of their lives, and let out to be impregnated as the need arose.

That kind of sexism was a luxury the peasants literally couldn't afford. Peasant men, living on the raw edge of subsistence, needed the brain and muscle power that their wives and daughters could provide. Paradoxically, by virtue of their poverty, peasant women exercised more power in their lives than noblewomen.

It reminds me of a conversation I once had with an older gentleman from North Carolina's Appalachian mountains, who as a child helped his bootlegging parents operate their still.

Back in the bootlegging days, he told me, any man who tried to put Appalachian women "in their place" did so at his own peril. By necessity, the women were just as tough as the men. Life was hard, and you didn't survive by being a submissive Donna Reed type.

That could be why the Depression is when tough broads such as "The Thin Man's" Nora Charles suddenly showed their steely-eyed faces in pop culture. It reflected a trend in society as a whole, where survival demanded that everyone pull his or her weight.

In the 1940s, of course, women had to work the factory jobs on the homefront -- a task every bit as important for American victory as that of the men fighting abroad.

After accomplishments like that, women simply weren't going to settle for the roles of demure servants. And thus the nascent feminist movement grew to maturity and became mainstream.

If only the fight for women ended then. But it didn't, of course. Each successive generation of women has found it necessary to vigilantly guard their rights.

I remember when a male friend of mine became a Reagan-era fundamentalist back in college. He liked to bluster about how our society went off-track by allowing women into the workplace, and how men had a moral obligation to keep them at home looking after the kids.

Of course, he abandoned that line of reasoning soon after getting married and weighing the consequences of living off a single paycheck. (I suspect a night or two of sleeping on the couch might have played a role, too.)

So if anything good does come out of this recession, it may be another reminder for men that trying to work through the tough times alone is a daunting proposition. You've always got a better chance of cracking the case with a gutsy dame on your side. Especially if she's good with a hammer.