Tag Archives: Pennsylvania

April 30, 2013 · 2:39 PM

Governor Explains Away Poor Jobs Numbers: Most Unemployed People Are On Drugs

Unfortunately this sought of thing is group-think among certain politicians…

Seen on You Tube post:

Another Republican that stereotypes the less empowered and believes in “liberty” only for a ruling class. What a surprise.

Think Progress

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) is facing an uphill fight for re-election as he battles negative job approval ratings and a slow economic recovery. The state’s unemployment rate has dropped to 7.9 percent, but the “number of people working in Pennsylvania tumbled by about 14,000 in March, following a drop of 6,000 in February.” Private employment has remained flat for 13 months, “growing by a mere 1,000 jobs” and landing the state “49th in the nation for job creation during March.”

During an appearance on a local radio show this week, Corbett sought to explain away Pennsylvania’s less than stellar performance, arguing that the state gained 111,000 private sector jobs since he took office and is “doing better than other states.” But then he grew defensive and complained that “a lot” of businesses are still having trouble filling their ranks because too many Pennsylvanians use illegal drugs:

CORBETT: The other area is, there are many employers that say we’re looking for people but we can’t find anybody that has passed a drug test, a lot of them. And that’s a concern for me because we’re having a serious problem with that.

Watch it:

A Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released on Monday found Corbett trailing potental Democratic opponents by at least nine points.

Earlier this month, a state senator introduced a bill requiring drug testing of all recipients and applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in Pennsylvania. The state is currently “conducing a pilot program in 19 counties of testing only those convicted of felony drug offenses.” Since January of 2012, just two people have failed.

Related articles

 

1 Comment

Filed under U.S. Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

April 15, 2013 · 2:34 PM

What country does the Tea Party represent?

What country does the Tea Party represent?

Salon

House Republicans are no longer swayed by public opinion, imperiling the GOP and grinding government to a halt

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

With an assist from some long-term demographic trends, House Republicans have redistricted, propagandized and policed themselves into another country.

As a result, they have become unmoored from the political incentives that typically drive law-makers’ decision-making process. Public opinion no longer sways them, and that is creating a potentially insurmountable problem for the party establishment’s efforts to broaden the GOP’s appeal beyond angry old white people.

House Republicans may care about the GOP’s national fortunes in the abstract, but too many are impervious to what the public at large wants because of the nature of the districts they represent. At the same time, a steady stream of spin from the conservative media provides insulation from the realities of American politics, and deep-pocketed outside groups punish Republicans for any deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.

This isn’t just a serious problem for establishment Republicans. It’s ground our government to a halt, as Congress is virtually incapable of action, even on issues where there is something approaching a consensus among the public at large — like universal background checks for firearm purchases, for example. They’re supported by 80-90 percent of voters, but face a steep uphill climb in the House.

How did this happen?

The Great Gerrymander of 2010

In 2012, Democratic House candidates got 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, but came away 33 seats short of the majority – only the second time since World War Two that such a reversal has taken place. That was the fruit of a well-funded, multi-year plan by the Republican State Leadership Committee to take over state houses before the 2010 Census, and control the redistricting process that followed.

And they gerrymandered with a vengeance. As Princeton University scholar Sam Wang noted, “although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense… partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the political parties.”

By my seat-discrepancy criterion, 10 states are out of whack: [Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.

Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats [which] exactly matched the [proportion of the] newly elected delegation.

Democrats Are “Inefficiently Distributed”

But, as a number of observers pointed out after the mid-terms, even this aggressive effort to redraw districts in their favor wasn’t quite enough to lock in Republicans’ control of the House. This is where the organic trend comes in. Political scientists Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Jonathan Rodden of Stamford explain (PDF) that as a result of migration and urbanization, Democrats tend to be “highly clustered in dense central city areas, while Republicans are scattered more evenly through the suburban, exurban, and rural periphery.” This results in what the authors call “unintentional redistricting,” with “a skew in the distribution of partisanship across districts such that with 50 percent of the votes, Democrats can expect fewer than 50 percent of the seats.”

Hyper-Partisan Districts

Those two trends have resulted in a dwindling number of competitive districts. As the New York Times’ numbers-guru Nate Silver pointed out, the number of “landslide districts” – which he defined as those that went for one party by 20 or more percentage points than the electorate as a whole – has doubled since 1992, while the number of swing districts has fallen from 155 to just 64 over the same period.

When you look at the racial composition of districts, the trend becomes even more pronounced. According to the Census Bureau, 111 House republicans represent districts that are at least 80 percent white.

Continue below the chart, here…

Related articles

 

Comments Off

Filed under Gerrymandering, Republican Politics, Tea Party

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 29, 2013 · 9:46 AM

Walker starts to get cold feet on electoral scheme

The Maddow Blog

Over the weekend, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) offered cautious encouragement to Republicans hoping to rig the 2016 presidential election by changing how his state allocates electoral votes. The conservative governor didn’t explicitly endorse the idea, but Walker called it “interesting” and “worth looking at.”

Yesterday, the Wisconsin Republican was far more circumspect.

Gov. Scott Walker says he has a “real concern” about a Republican idea to change the way the state awards its electoral votes, conceding the move could make Wisconsin irrelevant in presidential campaigns. [...]

“One of our advantages is, as a swing state, candidates come here. We get to hear from the candidates,” said Walker in an interview Saturday at a conservative conference in Washington, D.C. “That’s good for voters. If we change that, that would take that away, it would largely make us irrelevant.”

That’s a far cry from what Walker was saying over the weekend, and it’s a welcome change. What’s more, it’s worth noting that the governor happens to be correct — if Wisconsin changed to a system in which electoral votes are dictated by gerrymandered district lines, the state would immediately go from key, contested battleground to campaign afterthought.

Indeed, that applies to any of the other states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida) where the election-rigging scheme has been discussed — candidates and their campaign teams wouldn’t have any incentive to invest time and energy in states where the outcome is predetermined.

So, does this mean Walker is against the idea?

It remains unclear — he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he’s “qualified” his comments from the weekend, and he’s “not embracing” the scheme, at least not yet.

Walker added, “The most important thing to me long-term as governor on that is what makes your voters be in play.” And if that’s true, this plan is a non-starter, since it would do the exact opposite.

This would, incidentally, put Walker at odds with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, a long-time ally of the governor who’s also from Wisconsin and who’s endorsed the scheme.

Related articles

Comments Off

Filed under U.S. Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 13, 2013 · 12:03 AM

West Wing Week: 01/11/13 or “The Interests of Our Country”

The White House

Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that’s happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, the President nominated a bipartisan slate of leaders to key administration jobs and the Vice President met with a wide array of organizations to talk about efforts to reduce gun violence.

Friday, January 4th:

Monday, January 7th: 

Wednesday, January 9th:

Thursday, January 10th:

  • The President called Alabama’s Head Football Coach Nick Saban to congratulate his team on their victory in the BCS National Championship Game.  The Crimson Tide has now won the title 3 times in the last 4 years.
  • That afternoon, the President held an event in the East Room of the White House to announce his intention to nominate Chief of Staff Jack Lew to be the new Treasury Secretary.

Comments Off

Filed under West Wing Week

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 12, 2013 · 1:45 AM

2nd Amendment

I’m bookmarking the following site.  I really appreciate its historical facts…

Cognitive Dissidence

Thanks to the vast right wing echo chamber, it appears that we cannot have a real debate on guns until we first make clear what the Founders had in mind when they authored the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Unfortunately, the right wing echo chamber has been hard at work trying to convince people that the 2nd Amendment was written to protect people from their “tyrannical Government”!   Studying the Founders, we realize that is wrong and just plain silly!

We also know that Founders wanted every man to be part of a “well regulated militia” instead of have a standing army.  They wanted everyone to band together to protect out country when the time came, instead of having a standing army.  Standing armies scared them:  Thomas Jefferson himself called them “an engine of oppression.”

Later, in an 1814 letter to Thomas Cooper, Jefferson wrote of standing armies: “The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves. The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.”

Had the early framers of the Constitution embraced a standing army during times of peace, then there would be no need for a regulated militia, and thus no need for the 2nd Amendment.

 Need some more:

In fact, during that first gun debate, the state of New Hampshire introduced an amendment that gave the government permission to confiscate guns when citizens “are or have been in Actual Rebellion.” To those early legislators in New Hampshire, the right to bear arms stops as soon as those arms are taken up against our “we the people” government.

Just ask the ancestors of those who participated in the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1794, armed Americans took up guns against what they viewed as a tyrannical George Washington administration imposing taxes on whiskey. President Washington called up 13,000 militia men, and personally led the troops to squash the rebellion of armed citizens in Bedford, Pennsylvania. No Army. No right to have guns to overthrow the oppressive US government.

Need some more let’s look  at the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion:

On August 1, 1794, President George Washington was once again leading troops. Only this time Washington was not striking out against the British but rather against fellow Americans. The occasion for this was the Whiskey Rebellion. Various efforts had been made to diminish the heated opposition towards the tax on distilled liquors. However, there was only one man who has derived the best course of action. That man, President George Washington, deserves all the credit and recognition for his actions concerning the Whiskey Rebellion. In September 1791 the western counties of Pennsylvania broke out in rebellion against a federal “excise” tax on the distillation of liquor. After local and federal officials were attacked, President Washington and his advisors decided to send troops to assuage the region. On August 14, 1792, under the militia law, Henry Knox (secretary of war) had called for 12,950 troops.

The Founders who had just overcome the British to form our own country, had no interest in the people that they governed doing the same thing to them.  So when there was that possibility George Washington squashed it quickly!

http://youtu.be/dBtZ6go_R4g

So its time to listen to people like General McChrystal:

 “I spent a career carrying typically either an M16 or an M4 Carbine. An M4 Carbine fires a .223 caliber round which is 5.56 mm at about 3000 feet per second. When it hits a human body, the effects are devastating. It’s designed for that,” McChrystal explained. “That’s what our soldiers ought to carry. I personally don’t think there’s any need for that kind of weaponry on the streets and particularly around the schools in America.”

By the way, Hitler encouraged the ownership of guns….he didn’t take your guns!  

Related articles

Comments Off

Filed under Gun Control Debate

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

November 4, 2012 · 9:47 PM

Romney staff refusing to let frostbitten children leave PA rally

So much for Mitt Romney’s “family values”.  His staff had no empathy toward people who were freezing out there…

America Blog

This is happening right now at Mitt Romney’s rally in Pennsylvania.  Apparently it’s freezing, and Romney’s staff is refusing to let rally-goers leave. People are begging reporters for help.

Absolutely incredible.

From the NYT’s Michael Barbaro:

From USA Today’s Jackie Kucinich:

My God.

Related articles

4 Comments

Filed under Mitt Romney Campaign

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 14, 2012 · 6:48 PM

Sunday Evening Wrap-up 10-14-2012

Obama Up in New Ohio Poll

Former Sen. Arlen Specter dead at 82

SNL on the Vice Presidential Debate

Right-Wing Media Attack Early Voting

Bengazi Episode Takes on Political Overtones

Video: Paul Ryan hypocrisy laid bare in debate

Derek Jeter injured as Tigers win ALCS opener

Video: Shot fired at Obama Colorado headquarters

What’s wrong with affirmative action — and why we need it

Father of slain ambassador: Don’t exploit my son’s death

1 Comment

Filed under Evening Wrap-up

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 2, 2012 · 12:19 PM

Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Ruling: Judge Halts Enforcement Of Law For Election

It appears that Judge Robert Simpson’s ruling might just be a band-aid for the law’s many problems.  Apparently voters don’t have to show ID but the poll worker can still ask for it!

Sounds like a quick-fix that may be filled with confusion and dismay on election day.

The Huffington Post

A Pennsylvania judge on Tuesday postponed the enforcement of the state’s new strict voter ID requirement until after the November presidential election.

In a much-anticipated ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr. ordered that voters without government-issued photo ID should be allowed to cast regular ballots.

“That’s a huge win,” said Witold J. Walczak, an attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, “because last week the judge was suggesting that he was going to have every [voter without ID] vote provisionally.”

At the same time, the judge specifically ruled to allow the state to continue its education and advertising campaign, which currently tells voters that IDs are required.

Walczak said that if the state doesn’t change that message, “we may be back in court.”

“You can’t be telling people you need ID if you’re not actually requiring ID,” he said. “That advertising has to be modified to reflect reality.”

“Confusion is not a good thing on election day,” he said. “Confusion is going to mean some voters stay home. Confusion is going to mean that some poll workers get it wrong.”

Matthew Keeler, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania secretary of state, said the state is “pleased because the law itself hasn’t changed. What’s going on is there’s a soft rollout for the general election, just like the primary.”

Voters will still be asked for ID, he noted. If they don’t have it, they’ll be given information on how to get it.

As for the advertising campaign, “we’re looking into what needs to be updated,” Keeler said. “To completely take that away, would just muddle the area, as it were.”

“We’ll work on fixing things if we think they need to be fixed,” Keeler added.

Opponents of the law had expressed fears that it could dissuade or prevent tens of thousands of mostly poor, elderly, young or infirm citizens from voting.

Simpson’s injunction “will have the effect of extending the express transition provisions of [the new law] through the general election,” the judge wrote. That means that, just like during the primary election, voters will be asked for ID but still be allowed to vote if they don’t have it.

The law as passed by the Republican legislature and signed by the Republican governor had only allowed people without ID to cast “provisional” ballots, which would be thrown out unless they returned with ID within six days.

The Pennsyvlania legislature is one of several that, after Republicans took control in 2010, passed legislation to make it harder, rather than easier, to vote.

The voter ID bills, like similar moves to restrict voter registration, eliminate early voting, purge voter rolls and send pollwatchers into minority precincts. All are ostensibly intended to prevent voter fraud, an almost nonexistent problem according to research on the issue. In contrast, such moves have a disproportionate effect on minorities and young voters, and ultimately serve to block legitimate but probably Democratic voters from exercising their constitutional rights.

Simpson’s new decision comes six weeks after he upheld the entire law as is.

His initial ruling dealt mostly with whether the General Assembly had the authority to establish such voting requirements. Simpson decided it did — basing his decision in part on a bigoted and discredited 19th century state court decision.

Opponents of the law appealed, and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court sent the case backto Simpson, this time ordering him to rule on the practical side of things, namely: Was the state upholding the law’s procedures for deployment of ID cards such that there would be “no voter disenfranchisement” as a result?

The high court’s order seemed designed to force the judge to enjoin the law, given that the state had stipulated it wasn’t following the exact procedures set out in the law and that so many registered voters clearly still lacked ID.

Witnesses last week movingly described the many frustrating barriers faced by the elderly and infirm in particular in their attempts to get ID.

But on Thursday, Simpson indicated that he would let “the good parts” of the bill stand.

Related articles

2 Comments

Filed under Voter Fraud, Voter Identification, Voter Suppression

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 22, 2012 · 2:01 PM

Penn. state Rep.: Photo ID law only disenfranchises the ‘lazy’ 47 percent

Daryl Metcalfe (YouTube)

The truth about state sponsored voter ID laws is seeping out at a steady pace…

The Raw Story

A Republican state representative in Pennsylvania is defending the state’s voter photo ID law by claiming that people who were too “lazy” to have identification were probably included in the 47 percent of Americans who Mitt Romney claims don’t pay income taxes.

During a radio interview with KDKA on Wednesday, Rep. Daryl Metcalfe defended Pennsylvania’s controversial photo ID law by bringing up a recently-released leaked video of Romney telling wealthy donors that it wasn’t his job to worry about the 47 percent of people who refused to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

“I don’t believe any legitimate voter that actually wants to exercise that right and takes on the according responsiblity that goes with that right to secure their photo ID will be disenfranchised,” Metcalfe insisted. “As Mitt Romney said, 47 percent of the people that are living off the public dole, living off their neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there that are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID they need.”

The lawmaker added: “If individuals are too lazy, the state can’t fix that.”

Earlier this year, state officials estimated that 758,00o registered voters in Pennsylvania did not have valid photo IDs.

Listen to this audio from KDKA via Think Progress, broadcast Sept. 19, 2012.

Related articles

1 Comment

Filed under Voter Disenfranchisement, Voter Suppression

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

September 1, 2012 · 9:46 AM

West Wing Week: 8/31/12 or, “It’s Summer Mailbag Time!”

The White House

Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that’s happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It’s the summer’s special Mailbag Edition of West Wing Week, featuring Elizabeth Olson, Director of Presidential Correspondence.  This week we’re taking a moment to pick out a few of your letters from the thousands that arrive everyday here at the White House and answer some of your questions on immigration, healthcare, and the economy.  That’s August 24th to August 30th or, “It’s Summer Mailbag Time!”

First, we went over to the National Economic Council to see Deputy Director, Brian Deese, who answered some of your letters about the economy.

Then we went over to the Domestic Policy Council to talk with Cecilia Muñoz about some of the letters she’d read about healthcare reform and the new deferred action process.

Tuesday, August 28th:

  • The President made a statement about preparedness for the arrival of Hurricane Isaac.

Thursday, August 30th:

  • We sat down with Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who spoke about the upcoming two year anniversary of the end of the war in Iraq for ‘The Rhodes Ahead.’

Thanks for checking out your West Wing Week.

Comments Off

Filed under West Wing Week

Tagged as , , , , , , ,