News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Republican candidate for the US Senate, Sam Rohrer, will hold a town hall meeting, 7 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 1 at Knights of Columbus Mater Dei Hall, 327 N. Newtown Street Road, Newtown Square, PA 19073 in Newtown Township.
For information or to RSVP, please contact Dale Kerns at
kerns4office@gmail.com
The House Committee on State Government, yesterday, Jan. 24, voted overwhelmingly to send to the House floor a bill that would cut representation in Harrisburg.
The bill, HB 153, would cut the number of representatives in the State House from 203 to 153. It would leave the membership of the state Senate unchanged at 50.
The bill would also mandate that counties, municipalities and wards not be divided in forming a senatorial or representative district which would be about the only bright side of this wealth and power grab.
The argument for the bill is to cut cost since the base pay for a Pennsylvania legislator is $$82,026, and, yes, fewer legislators would mean spending less money. Of course, if saving money was really the motive, maybe they would have first thought of cutting their extremely generous pay and benefits rather than representation.
In fact, I am certain we could get high quality citizen-legislators who would be willing to serve for no material compensation just as we get high quality people willing to serve as volunteers as ambulance drivers, and firefighters and Little League coaches and on church boards and on charities.
In fact, I am certain they would be an improvement.
HB 153 is sponsored by House Speaker Samuel Smith (R-66). Among the co-sponsors is Bill Adolph (R-165) of Delaware County.
The only GOP State Committee members voting nay were Lynda Culver and Jerry Stern. The only Democrat members voting aye were Eugene DePasquale, Florindo Fabrizio and Steve Santarsiero.
I tried, but when the President started his speech tonight saying the bad economy was Bush’s fault and that things are just getting good, I found myself spending more time with an old rerun of Cold Case.
Switching back I caught snippets about how he is going to raise taxes on companies that ship jobs overseas — hey, is General Electric included — and keep trying to pick winners and losers here. I heard him say how he’s going to send everyone to community colleges and high-tech and innovation and buzzwords and hey, kids let’s put on a show. Or something like that.
I heard him say natural gas is going to supply us for 100 years and that he’s going to protect our intellectual property so those threats from Hollywood about his SOPA stance apparently had some affect.
So anyway, Cold Case ended and I saw he was still rambling on about something, well, nothing after I listened to it for a bit, so I came up here and wrote this up.
Addendum, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels provided the GOP response to the President’s address and showed that he gets it. Daniels noted that middle class cannot be maintained on government programs financed by ever-increasing borrowing as the President sincerely appears to believe is possible.
He noted that debt causes nations to fall and that there is only a short time to get our house in order.
He said simple arithmetic shows that Social Security and Medicare will soon fail. Rather than asking that the tax rate on the wealthy be increased, he wondered why they continued to receive safety net benefits along with breaks in the tax code.
You think he might see a chance to be the Republican presidential nominee?