General Motors (GM) gave a grant to an organization that supplies elementary schools with books promoting the transgender ideology.
The automotive manufacturing company donated money to the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN) “Rainbow Library Program,” according to a 2021 Social Impact Report published by GM.
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American Catholic leaders are acclaiming the life and work of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, whose scholarly writings emphasized the unity of faith and reason and, most fundamentally, the primary truth of the Catholic faith, which teaches God is Love.
Benedict, who was born Joseph Ratzinger, died Saturday at the age of 95. He became pope in April 2005, following the death of Pope John Paul II, and served until his resignation in February 2013.
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Over the weekend, Pennsylvania state Senator Ryan Aument (R-Lititz) told colleagues he will reintroduce a measure to clean up his state’s voter rolls.
Concern about the Keystone State’s voter records grew after Democratic Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a report in December 2019 alerting lawmakers to copious apparent errors in the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE).
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As the year comes to a close, Pennsylvania will get almost $100 million to improve its public health infrastructure, from employee hiring to IT upgrades.
The federal funds, coming from the CDC’s Public Health Infrastructure grant program, provides $98 million to 10 county and municipal health departments.
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Philadelphia has again failed to stop murders in the city, as it repeats a homicide toll that surpasses 500 deaths. While murders are down compared to a year ago, the level of violence dwarfs recent years, when as few as 277 murders happened in 2016.
As of December 28, 514 people have been victims of homicide in Philadelphia. That number is down 7% from 2021, when a record 562 people died, but higher than the 499 deaths in 2020 and 356 in 2019.
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America has seen a spike in overdose deaths since the pandemic, when drug overdose deaths rose more than 14% from 2020 to 2021.
The biggest increase, perhaps surprisingly, came from adults aged 65 and over, but rates for adults 35-44 remain highest. As synthetic opioids like fentanyl continue to displace heroin, overdose deaths have increased.
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A measure proposed in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives this week would require the administering of pain medication to an unborn child before an abortion is performed.
State Representative Tim Bonner (R-Grove City) circulated a memorandum asking other representatives to back his upcoming bill which would instruct abortion doctors to dispense pain relief to a fetus if the organism has gestated for longer than 15 weeks. Bonner suggested his bill would not affect the legality of ending a pregnancy and entreated lawmakers on both sides of the abortion issue to join him in sponsoring the legislation.
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Pennsylvania state senators are asking other lawmakers to support an upcoming bill to let nonpartisan voters participate in primaries.
State Senators Daniel LaughlinTwo (R-Erie) and Lisa Boscola (D-Bethlehem) proposed legislation permitting all state residents whose voter registrations reflect no party affiliation to cast a ballot in either the GOP or Democratic nomination contests. The senators cite 2021 data from the commonwealth indicating that 1,233,748 Pennsylvanians are registered to vote but choose to identify with neither of the two major parties. Since 2017, that number has increased by 51,816.
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Appeals to federal lawmakers to pass cannabis banking reforms fell on deaf ears, leaving a business sector more exposed to risks of theft and violence than it needs to be, advocates say.
Those advocates of reform include a number of Pennsylvania Republican officials.
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Three left-wing members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives announced they intend to introduce a bill to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.
Representatives Danilo Burgos, Joe Hohenstein and Chris Rabb, all Philadelphia Democrats, asserted that unlawful U.S. residents should be able to obtain driving licenses or learners’ permits if they can establish to authorities their real names and dates of birth. They say acceptable documents to prove identity could be passports, consular identification papers, marriage licenses, divorce records or adoption certificates.
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A Pennsylvania city treasurer has been charged by the attorney general’s office for absconding with more than $100,000 of taxpayer money.
Uniontown city Treasurer Antoinette Hodge is accused of stealing almost $107,000 in 2020-2021 while serving as an elected official.
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In Pennsylvania, a phone call from a local jail can cost more than three times the cost of one from a state prison.
Thanks to the outsourcing of phone services, high costs get passed off to families of inmates, many of whom are less well-off than the median Pennsylvania family.
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As the holiday weekend nears, Pennsylvania state senators are viewing initial written arguments from Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) contesting his impeachment.
The then-GOP-controlled state House of Representatives voted last month 107-85 to try the radical prosecutor in the Senate to consider his removal from office. Senate leaders then issued a writ of summons to Krasner outlining seven counts against him. Articles of impeachment concern alleged “dereliction of duty and refusal to enforce the law,” obstruction of a legislative investigation against him, improper conduct in two criminal trials, failure to admit conflict of interest, failure to heed victims’ rights and refusal to prosecute certain crimes.
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Pennsylvania’s number of open jobs remains high while its number of workers in the labor force continues to shrink.
The trend, which has been ongoing for years, became worse when the pandemic hit in March 2020. The commonwealth has struggled to recover to its 2019-era labor force participation rate.
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In the name of fighting climate change, rural Pennsylvania is to receive $1 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for renewable energy projects.
The money, most of it authorized through the Inflation Reduction Act, will go to 17 projects in 13 Pennsylvania counties. Nationally, the funds are part of a $300 million Rural Energy for America program.
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Republican members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives responsible for conducting Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s impeachment are arguing Krasner can’t resort to the courts to avoid the state Senate trial.
Earlier this month, the far-left prosecutor asked the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court to preempt the proceedings initiated by Republican lawmakers in November. He cited three reasons: First, a new General Assembly has taken office; second, he contends that the state Constitution doesn’t authorize a city district attorney’s impeachment; and third, he disputes that “misbehavior in office” is seriously alleged.
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A bill soon to be reintroduced in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly aims to prevent unemployment claimants from undermining their own job searches to keep benefits flowing.
Last year, state Representative Shelby Labs (R-Doylestown) introduced the legislation to explicitly codify state policy on work-search requirements. The commonwealth requires every individual seeking unemployment compensation (UC) to apply for at least two jobs and follow through with one work-search activity every week.
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Pennsylvania’s Lycoming County will conduct a recount of its 2020 presidential election results amid mounting pressure from residents on officials to provide transparency on their handling of the contest.
The county commissioners made the decision following the submission of a 5,000-name petition demanding the recount, according to the Epoch Times. The county has approximately 70,000 registered voters and the petition’s size was a motivating factor in securing the recount, officials told the outlet.
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As transit agencies across the country struggle to recover from pandemic-induced ridership loss, getting back to the basics of reliability might matter most.
A new report from Moovit, a trip-planning app, analyzed user data in 2022 in 10 major American cities. Transit riders complained of unreliable systems, fare prices, trip time, safety, and cleanliness, among other issues.
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Philadelphia officials will require masks again in public schools in January, claiming the move is “proactive” against winter viruses.
“In an effort to be proactive in supporting healthy environments and maintaining in-person learning following students and staff returning from winter break, the District will implement mandatory masking from January 3 through January 13, 2023,” school officials said Wednesday, as The Daily Mail reported.
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The liberal voting activist group that dumped $350 million of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money on local election offices during the 2020 presidential election is back again with another $80 million to give over the next five years.
And Wisconsin once again will be front and center in the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s “generosity.”
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Pennsylvania State Senators Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) and Scott Hutchinson (R-Oil City) Thursday announced they would reintroduce a bill proposed in the last legislative session designed to prevent social media platforms from censoring Pennsylvanians.
Mastriano and Hutchinson introduced the original measure in May 2021. They secured the cosponsorship of four other senators, all Republicans, but the bill did not receive a vote in the Senate Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee. The two lawmakers said new developments impelled them to try again in the new session. They cited the recently released “Twitter files,” internal documents pertaining largely to the social-media company’s decision in late 2020 to deny users access to a New York Post story concerning Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s personal computer.
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Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler (R-Quarryville) on Thursday insisted he has the right to schedule special elections for three legislative vacancies. He wants two elections to take place during next May’s primaries.
Cutler’s party has tussled with Democrats over control of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in the wake of November’s elections. Democrats won a majority of House seats that month, but Republican members nonetheless outnumber Democrats by two insofar as three seats to which the latter party won elections are vacant.
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Philadelphia schools will again require students and staff to wear masks during the school day after the holidays, according to Fox 29 News.
The School District of Philadelphia, the eighth-largest school system in the county, is implementing a mask mandate for two weeks once classes resume from the holiday break, according to Fox 29 News. Superintendent Tony Watlington announced the mandate for all educators and students on Wednesday as a “proactive measure” because many will be “involved in quite a few social gatherings over the next few weeks.”
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Pennsylvania state Representative Clint Owlett (R-Wellsboro) on Tuesday announced he will reintroduce legislation to guarantee school choice to students in the state’s most poorly performing school districts.
Under Owlett’s proposed law, families of such students could also use the new “lifeline scholarships” to pay for textbooks, special-needs services and other qualifying expenses.
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On Friday, a judge ruled that the historic statue of famed European explorer Christopher Columbus will not only remain in its place in Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza, but that a plywood box used to cover up the statue over the previous two years must be taken down so the statue can be seen once again.
As reported by Fox News, the statue was one of many that had been targeted by far-left domestic terrorists starting in the summer of 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter riots. Statues that were vandalized and even destroyed during this period include monuments to the Founding Fathers, statues of abolitionists, and memorials to Confederate soldiers, among other symbols of American history.
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It’s still unclear which party controls the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and the courts may have to settle the question.
Democratic Leader Joanna McClinton, D-Philadelphia, arranged last week to be sworn in as House leader when it’s unclear who is legally the majority party. Over the weekend, Republicans filed a lawsuit to overturn McClinton’s scheduling of three special elections to fill House seats on February 7.
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Philadelphia man who was charged with impersonating a postal worker and mail theft was also found to be in possession of over a dozen stolen mail-in ballots, officials says.
While pretending to be a USPS Mail Carrier, Zachkey James, 27, stole undelivered mail from a collection box near the Kingsessing Post Office, in Pennsylvania, in July, the Justice Department said last week.
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Pennsylvania is missing young workers and the problem is one that won’t simply go away.
While the commonwealth isn’t the only state struggling with a shrinking youth population, state-to-state comparisons are difficult to make due to data issues. What’s clear is that Pennsylvania has had a significant drop in its labor force participation rate. Rather than a story of older workers retiring, the majority of missing workers are under 45 rather than over.
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Pennsylvania former House Speaker Bryan Cutler (R-Quarryville) this weekend announced he filed a lawsuit in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania over Representative Joanna McClinton’s (D-Philadelphia) assertion of House majority-leader status.
McClinton has used her title as majority leader to schedule special elections to replace one deceased member and two retired members of the state House of Representatives. State law calls on the House speaker to determine special-election dates for that chamber and vests the House majority leader with that power if the speaker cannot perform that duty.
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A Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled that Philadelphia must uncover a statute of Christopher Columbus that the city has been attempting to remove from a park due to racial injustice demonstrations.
Senior Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt ruled Friday that the City of Philadelphia’s plywood box covering the statue must be removed after the Friends of Marconi Plaza filed a request for the cover to be removed, NBC Philadelphia reported.
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The School District of Philadelphia will review language it proposes to be formally included in its existing policy that allows students to pick the gender of the team for which they want to play.
The agenda for the Dec. 15 school board meeting has new language under “Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Student Participation” policy for interscholastic activities that states, “Students participating in interscholastic athletics may participate on the team of the gender with which they identify.”
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In Philadelphia, one gas station owner has taken matters into his own hands when it comes to addressing the city’s rising crime wave.
The New York Post reports that Neil Patel, owner of a Karco gas station, has hired armed security guards brandishing AR-15s and shotguns, and wearing bulletproof Kevlar vests. Patel told local news outlet Fox 29 that he hired the guards from the private security firm SITE in response to the worst crime wave he has seen in his 20 years in the city. Patel said that he recently witnessed a gang completely ripping out and making off with his store’s ATM machine.
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Natural gas prices are climbing, but overall production in Pennsylvania has lagged year-over-year.
The latest report from the Independent Fiscal Office says prices in the third quarter of 2022 jumped almost 95% compared to the same period last year. Nor will prices drop soon, either. The Pennsylvania average price was $6.89 per million BTU, compared to $3.54 in 2021.
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Pennsylvania’s struggles to fully staff police departments extend statewide, from the biggest departments to rural areas losing population.
While Republicans and Democrats on the local and state levels have boosted funding for police departments, as The Center Square previously reported, the bigger issue has been a lack of police recruits.
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Pennsylvania just completed its third year of no-excuse mail-in voting, with Democrats scoring major victories in statewide and legislative offices. According to a political strategist from the state’s southeast, one factor affecting the Democrats’ 2022 success was its engagement in a legal form of “ballot harvesting” in the suburbs west of Philadelphia.
Athan Koutsiouroumbas, a managing director of the Harrisburg-based consultancy Long Nyquist and Associates, refers in a Monday commentary for RealClearPennsylvania to Democrats’ efforts to encourage mail-in voting in Delaware County. He called the effort a “completely legal ballot-harvesting juggernaut.”
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Pennsylvanians’ electric bills rose by an average of nearly three-quarters over the last two years and policymakers have only made the problem worse, according to the Harrisburg-based Commonwealth Foundation (CF).
State residents served by Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL) have seen their rates go up by just over half since December 2020. Customers of the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) have meanwhile experienced a doubling of their power costs during that time. All other providers have also risen their rates considerably.
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Pennsylvania’s tax revenues are $129 million short of expectations, though overall collections remain above initial estimates in the latest revenue update from the Independent Fiscal Office.
Even though the November collections were 4.5% less than anticipated, the fiscal-year-to-date revenues are about $732 million above estimates, an almost 5% increase.
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Deer hunters in Pennsylvania have donated their harvest for three decades, providing millions of servings of food to Pennsylvania families in need.
Hunters Sharing the Harvest, created in 1991, is a venison donation program run by the Department of Agriculture and Pennsylvania Game Commission. In total, more than 2 million pounds of venison have been donated. One deer, HSH noted, provides about 200 servings of food.
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Pennsylvania’s new House Freedom Caucus announced its initial leaders this week, with state Representative Dawn Keefer (R-Dillsburg) to chair the new organization and Representative David Rowe (R-Mifflinburg) to serve as vice chair.
Keefer and Rowe were among the 20 GOP members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to vote against this fiscal year’s budget, a compromise between the majority-Republican General Assembly and Democratic Governor Tom Wolf which increases state spending by 16.6 percent to $43.7 billion. In remarks to the press, the new caucus’s leaders complained of the extent to which government is growing in the commonwealth and promised to pursue zero-based budgeting as well as regulatory reform.
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Culture, bias, diversity, inclusion and prejudices are buzzwords punctuating new guidelines being put in place to certify educators in Pennsylvania.
The changes to and implementation of the new certification process has been nearly five years in the making, inclusive of legislative committee endorsements and public comment.
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Evidence of learning setbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic era for Pennsylvania students is reflected in Monday’s release of the state assessment scores.
In both reading and math, respective students in grades 3-8 had fewer proficient and above scores, were marginal in relation to mastering the basics, and had increases – some significantly so – for percentage of students below the basic level.
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Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf (D) on Wednesday joined a number of state, federal and city officials to celebrate the awarding of $2.5 million in taxpayer funds to a gay and transexual activity center in Philadelphia’s “Gayborhood.”
Wolf said the money from the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) will go toward several major renovations envisioned for the William Way LGBT Community Center just south of City Hall. The grant comes in addition to $1 million the center received from the state in 2019 to improve the property’s heating, ventilation and cooling systems as well as to remodel the building’s front area.
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A former coal power plant in western Pennsylvania has one of the most contaminated coal ash sites in the nation.
That’s according to a new report, “Poisonous Coverup,” published by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice. The environmental groups argue that, across America, “nearly all coal plant owners are ignoring key requirements and employing common tricks to avoid mandatory cleanup” of coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal that has various contaminants.
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Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County has failed to certify the results of the Nov. 8 midterm elections by the Monday deadline.
The Board of Elections split 2-2 on certifying the results, with one abstention. The county attracted national attention after it ran out of paper ballots on Election Day. Two Republican board members opposed certification, while two Democrats backed it, and one Democrat abstained, the Epoch Times reported.
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Natural gas prices are hitting levels not seen for more than a decade, and electric bills will go up across the commonwealth – though not equally.
Natural gas spot prices will hit $6.09 per million British thermal units for the winter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is “the highest real price since winter 2009-10.”
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State Senator Lisa Boscola (D-Bethlehem) is asking colleagues to support legislation to create a prison-to-jobs pipeline for nonviolent inmates in Pennsylvania.
Boscola bemoaned Pennsylvania’s status as among the worst states in the U.S. in terms of ex-prisoners reoffending; it has a 41-percent recidivism rate. In a memorandum announcing her measure, she posited that rate will go down if the commonwealth proactively advances many prisoners toward employment as they prepare for life outside of jail.
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The Pittsburgh School District unanimously passed a resolution against legislation that would bar teaching Critical Race Theory or any other concepts that regard one race as superior to another.
The resolution, which passed on Tuesday, states that the board will defy “harmful legislation,” including HB 1532, formally referred to as the Teaching Racial and Universal Equality Act. The bill was proposed by Republican State Rep. Russ Diamond.
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Pennsylvania state Representative Christopher Rabb (D-Philadelphia) this week proposed a bill to establish an “Election Integrity Board” that would monitor politicians rhetoric regarding electoral matters and “combat” what the panel deems “disinformation.”
In a memorandum seeking cosponsors for his legislation, the far-left lawmaker who represents Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy neighborhoods lamented the nomination in the 2022 primary of over 100 individuals he considers “election-denying candidates.” He blasted them for asserting what he insists are “unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud” and opined that “our elections are highly secure.” He suggested that politicians and hopefuls who raise concerns about such issues create unnecessary doubt in the minds of the electorate.
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A tight job market in Pennsylvania is good news for workers, but employers still struggle to find enough people to fill the available jobs.
That struggle remains a stubborn one for business owners, as shown in the latest economic update from the Independent Fiscal Office.
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