Friday, January 11, 2013
Almost 800,000 federal workers will join the ranks of the unemployed in the event of a shutdown. Members of Congress, however, will continue to be paid.
As a Democrat, I confess that I am not overjoyed with Obama. Sure, I would have been appalled if Romney had won. However, I did not vote for Obama to have him fail to defend the principles on which he ran: social justice such as health care, unemployment relief, food stamps, the redistribution of the tax burden, education and immigration reform, etc. He also ran on the proposition that the national debt should be reduced. To let the Tea Party succeed in holding hostage the country with threats of fiscal cliffs or other self-inflicted financial calamities because Republicans are in fear of being attacked from the right is simply to surrender his agenda to nincompoops. In short, Obama has allowed the idiots to run the asylum. We are now …
Friday, November 16, 2012
President Obama has every right to stick to his guns.
If Romney had won and Obama had lost, I would be seriously depressed and consider that the Republicans would, and have the right to, impose their agenda. The one whine from me might have been that Romney’s victory had been brought about by the seemingly endless media ads paid for by super-pac donors with limitless pocket books. Happily from my standpoint, Romney lost and Obama won with a sizeable margin of votes in the electoral college and in the popular vote. This victory was somewhat of a surprise to the country, and especially to the Romney camp, which after the election freely conceded that they thought Romney was a shoe-in. There is no need for me to crow over the victory, and I don’t. Indeed, H.L. Mencken’s famous remark “No one …
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
The Lehigh Valley is a great predictor of how Pennsylvania will vote in presidential elections.
Muhlenberg College professor and pollster Christopher Borick won’t predict who is going to win Tuesday's presidential election. And he won’t say who will take Pennsylvania. But he will say this: “I’m very confident that who ever wins the Valley will win Pennsylvania.” The Lehigh Valley, with its cities, suburbs and rural areas, has become a bellwether for Pennsylvania politics. In 2008, both Northampton and Lehigh counties went for Barack Obama, just like the state. The Lehigh Valley went for Democrats John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000, as did Pennsylvania as whole. “Pennsylvania hasn’t been a very good predictor of elections,” said Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. But “the Lehigh Valley as a …
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
The angst we display when “our candidate” is not elected reveals that our trust is in human rulers rather than in the Supreme Ruler who presides over all humankind.
- OPINION
- Tim Zuck
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Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Three factors contributed to the writing of a this public confession: a powerful scene from the book and movie Blue Like Jazz, in which Don Miller and his friends construct a confession booth on the campus of Reed College and confess their sins and the sins of Christianity to their classmates; my most recent sermon on the petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our sins”; and my personal observation of the religious right’s infatuation with utilizing politics to exert cultural influence in the name of Jesus. Ministers are accustomed to encouraging confession and on occasions to hearing confessions of sins. However, ministers are not always as amenable to publicly confessing their own sins to their congregations, let alone on the World …
Monday, October 15, 2012
Not every conspiracy theory is wrong, but few are ever right.
Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. So sang the three witches as they stirred their brew which contained, among other icky stuff, eye of Newt. When John F. Welch Jr., the former CEO of GE, tweeted that the Obama administration had dealt a card from the bottom of the deck when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the unemployment rate was now 7.8 percent, right after last week’s presidential debate, he was creating his own witches’ brew--a conspiracy theory. In this case, Welch’s theory was that the Obama administration had conspired to falsify the unemployment statistics so as to defeat the Republicans in the forthcoming election. Welch cited no evidence whatsoever. To give him the benefit of the …
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Northampton County Democrats have a 31,017 edge over Republicans but hundreds of voter registrations are still being tallied and verified. Registration exceeds the 2008 presidential election.
With last minute surges in voter registration, Northampton County Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 31,017, as of Friday morning. But the Northampton County Election Office still had hundreds more registrations to check addresses for and to put into the computer system, said Dee Rumsey, county director of elections. As of Friday morning (Oct. 12), Northampton County had 101,338 registered Democrats, 70,321 Republicans and 37,426 independents and members of other parties, according to Rumsey. That’s a total number of 209,085 voters, though it was being updated by the minute. That tops registration for the 2008 Presidential Election, when Northampton County, had 208,521 registered voters. In that election, county residents cast 130,417 …
Friday, August 17, 2012
The decision handed down by Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson Wednesday is unconstitutional and should be reversed.
As Patch reported on Wednesday, Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr., of Nazareth, decided a case brought in the Commonwealth Court by a huge list of Pennsylvania voters, organizations and public groups opposing a Republican-supported law that requires citizens to present a valid photo ID in order to vote. The plaintiffs lost. Not surprisingly, Judge Simpson is a Republican. Republican officials almost unanimously approve of the decision and Democrats do not. One of the things they don’t teach you in law school is that more often than not, the outcome of an appeal depends upon the political, religious or social philosophy of the judge or judges hearing the appeal--not the arguments of the attorneys or the “law” applicable to the case. Thus when the…
Saturday, October 1, 2011
The senator was the keynote speaker for a Democratic fundraising gala in Easton Friday night.
Sen. Bob Casey stopped in Northampton County Friday night to lend fellow local Democrats encouragement in their election campaigns and spread the political party's messages to voters. Giving the keynote speech at the fundraising gala, “Easton in Blue,” held at the Bank Street Annex in the downtown district, Casey focused on employment and the importance of job creation, also offering ideas for creating job growth in Pennsylvania. “The most important thing we can do...is to create jobs,” he said, noting it will take a bipartisan effort to be successful. “There is no Democrat and no Republican way to create jobs. We have to work together....We can't just wake up every day and say we're Democrats and we're not talking to you.” Casey also …
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The most interesting blowback, says columnist Jon Geeting, has come from within the GOP.
Last week Governor Tom Corbett and Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi raised Pennsylvania's profile in the 2012 presidential race with a plan to change the way Pennsylvania awards its electoral votes. Mr. Pileggi would have Pennsylvania join two other states, Nebraska and Maine, in abandoning the winner-take-all system. One electoral vote would be awarded for each of the state's Congressional districts, and the winner of the popular vote would receive two more. If this system had been in place in 2008, President Obama would have beaten John McCain by a narrow margin, 11-10, rather than winning all 21 electoral votes that were up for grabs. Since the 2012 presidential race seems likely to be much closer, and the freshly gerrymandered …
Friday, July 1, 2011
Legislators from across eastern Pennsylvania react to the passage of the state budget Thursday.
- GOVERNMENT
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Friday, July 1, 2011
As the ink from Gov. Corbett's pen dries from signing his first budget in office, citizens from across the commonwealth are mulling over the implications of the $27.15 billion budget. Legislators from eastern Pennsylvania are among those opining on a bill that Republicans champion for being 4.1 percent lower than its predecessor. Many Democrats, meanwhile, bemoan what they see as critical cuts to education and other programming. Below is a sampling of views from General Assembly members in Bucks, Berks, Chester, Delaware, Lehigh, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton and Philadelphia counties, as collected by Patch editors. Sen. Lisa Boscola (D-18/Northampton, Lehigh and Monroe) - “Irresponsible budget cuts are just as bad as irresponsible …
John Csellak
3:46 pm on Friday, March 22, 2013
Joe Sommers: Health care is a problem. The U.S. spends nearly 18% of our GDP on health care, while other developed countries spend 12% or less, and nearly all have better health outcomes at a lower cost. The right kind of government intervention in health care could go a long way to fixing that problem. Social Security is full solvent through 2033, and after that can continue to pay out 75% of … more ›