Like the Pep Boys and brownbanded cockroaches, Larry Franklin evidently is in it for the long haul - even if it means blogging from the pokey.

You remember Franklin. He's the only defendant imprisoned in the abandoned "AIPAC spy scandal". A Defense Department functionary and part of Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans staff, he took the hit for passing on secret information about Iran to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while co-defendants (and AIPAC honchos) Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman walked.

This week, in a Foreign Policy post, My Secret Plan to Overthrow the Mullahs, Franklin offers part apologia and part rabble-rousing from his lonely prison cell.

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I voted for Barack Obama after long months of supporting his candidacy - sending him money online and prattling about him in every kitchen I could invade, to every friend or acquaintance I could buttonhole.

I became impressed with him in February 2007, when I watched him announce his campaign on a cold Saturday to a small crowd at the old statehouse in Springfield, Il - where Lincoln once worked, pundits never tired of telling us.

I liked what he said. It was 180-degrees from the reality we were living, four years downwind of the Iraq invasion, 19 months from the meltdown plunge, six years into the meanest, most infantile administration of physical and moral cowards with which, thankfully, we've ever been burdened in this country's history. If ever we wondered how the country would fare should ultimate authority fall into the hands of obnoxious, coddled frat boys, we discovered, too late, that fate would be a disaster generations mending.

For simply not being Geoge W. Bush, Barack Obama will always have my affection and gratitude, both as voter and American.

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