SEIU-Organized Plant To Close In Pa

A St. Louis mail-order drug-distributor  announced, Oct. 8, that it will close a warehouse facility on Marshall Lane in Bensalem, Pa. on Dec. 16 and the union which represents the workers has responded by basically saying “Oh Yeah! Better not!”.

The union contract expires Dec. 15.

What was actually reportedly said by union organizer Bill Ragen at a
rally last night in Trevose was “We have to make it more expensive for
them to shut it down than for them to keep it open.”

The company is the quite profitable Express Scripts . The union is a local with  Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Losing their jobs will be 365 of its members.

The warehouse and a nearby processing center on Street Road along with a small facility in New Mexico are the only unionized facilities managed by Express Scripts.  The future of the Street Road facility is also in doubt.

Express Scripts  had sought $8.8 million in concessions from the SEIU but the union only agreed to $8 million.

CAFe Fest To Feature Music, Kid Art Classes

CAFe Fest To Feature Music, Kid Art Classes — CAFe, the community arts festival hosted by InLiquid, is 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 17 at the Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American St., Philadelphia.

InLiquid is a non-profit organization serving artists. Among its features is an extensive online collection of work by local, national and international artists.

Sunday’s family-friendly art fest will include fun kids art classes and education concerning environmental matters.

Participants include Art Star, The Clay Studio, Greensgrow Farms, and Please Touch Museum.

There will be  live music and food vendors from across Philadelphia.

Proceeds will benefit youth art programs around the city, like The Cruz Recreation Center in Fishtown and ArtsRising’s new “ArtsZone” hubs at middle schools throughout the city.

CAFe Fest To Feature Music, Kid Art Classes

Opinion From the Bottom — Marcellus Shale Process Poisoning the Water

By Dr. John Gilmore

I went to a bed and breakfast in Upstate PA.  Nearby they were just beginning to mine marcellus shale.  There have been several reports about the pollution of fresh water that takes place during this process.  Heavy metals, cancerous agents, and even radioactive elements have been found in the drinking water of many residents around areas who feel they need to suddenly have access to marcellus shale.  On one video a man actually set his water on fire to show how polluted it was by the process done to separate the gas from the shale.  The inn keeper at the bed and breakfast almost panicked when my wife told him of the dangers.

“I don’t care!  We’ve got to do something!” He said.  “We have to put up with some of the inconveniences or we’ll be destroyed!  What can we do?  They say everything is wrong.  We have to do something!”  Come on.  A couple of decades ago we didn’t even know how to get the oil from shale.  Since they discovered how to in Canada and are making a fortune suddenly we have to do this or be destroyed.
A combination of solar energy, wind energy, title energy and geo-thermal energy would easily supply us with the energy we need well into the future, and poisoning all of the fresh water in aquifers is not an inconvenience it is totally stupid.  Van Jones, the great Green advocate who was targeted with a slur campaign and forced out of the Obama administration put it well when he said that our nation is like a group of crack heads addicted to oil  The only thing we know is drill and consume.  We don’t care about our friends, our families, the next generation, anything, as long as we get our next fix.  It is time to change this behavior and build for the future and future generations.
Put solar cells on roofs, put wind turbines and title energy turbines in the ocean, use the geothermal energy from volcanoes and use oil for what we can’t use the others for until we increase the efficiency of the clean energy.  Use the same power lines we use now to move the energy from those sources to where it is needed.  That seems to make sense to me.  Yet again, the people with interest in all the oil might not like that.  They have to make every penny possible off of the oil that they can at peak oil  prices.  They are making a killing and many of us are getting killed.

Toomey Polls Biggest Lead Says Ras

Republican Pat Toomey  holds a 10-point lead over Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey of likely voters. This has caused Rasmussen to move the race  from leans GOP to solid GOP in its  Balance of Power rankings.

The survey of 750 likely voters taken Oct. 12 shows Toomey preferred 49 percent to 39 percent. Two percent wanted another candidate while 10 percent were undecided. The margin of error was 4 percent.

This is Toomey’s largest lead since the nominations. Two weeks ago he led 49 percent to 40 percent. A month ago he led 49 percent to 41 percent.

Meanwhile, the Delaware County Daily Times, which is the daily for most of Sestak’s 7th District, reported their  favored candidate to be preferred over Toomey 44 percent to 42 percent with the headline “Sestak leads Toomey in recent poll “.  They cited the Garin-Hart-Yang poll conducted by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.

GOP Can Get Black Votes

GOP Can Get Black Votes — Commentator Larry Elders has some wise advice to Republicans about how to break the monolithic support black voters give to the Democrat Party.

“Republicans need to ask blacks, ‘Are you better off?’ Are blacks better off sending their children to assigned government schools — as demanded by the teachers unions and the Democratic Party?” he said at FrontPageMag.Com .

He said politicians from both parties treat blacks like children.

“When a Republican addresses a black audience, you can make book on how long it takes before he refers to Martin Luther King Jr.,” he said.

He said  Republicans can never win a referendum on empathy.

“Nobody can “feel your pain” like a spread-the-wealth, entitlement-expanding, “close-the-inequality-gap”leftist,” he said.

Elders said the struggle for civil rights is over and the good guys won.

“The battle now is against wrongheaded ‘compassionate’ policies,” he said. “But the most important issue — by far — is education.”

He noted that black and Hispanic inner-city voters supported a unsuccessful school choice referendum in California.

Recent movies like The Lottery and Waiting For Superman show his thinking is on solid ground.

Elders is a reluctant Republican. He was registered in California as “declined to state” until 2003 when he moved to R to support the War on Terror.

“I am a Republican with a capital ‘R,’ and a libertarian with a small ‘l’,” he has said. “I have a party membership as a Republican, not because they have any principles but because that’s the way I am the most useful and have the most influence.”

Sounds like a reasonable outlook.

Oh, and for those who don’t feel like clicking the link , Elders is a black guy.

 GOP Can Get Black Votes

Opinion From the Bottom — More Foreclosures Due Soon

By Dr. John Gilmore

A woman dials 911 from behind her locked bathroom door because someone is kicking down her door and entering her home.  Later she discovers that it was someone hired by the bank in order come in and change her locks in order to foreclose on her house.  The problem–the house has not been foreclosed on.  According the here attorney things like this have been happening all over the U.S.  People are being hired to break in and intimidate people who are a few months behind on their rent or who have made a bargain to pay a reduced payment on their mortgages because of the bad economy.  I am beginning to wonder what the problem is with this country.

 
Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative–these are all just labels.  We watch them arguing and fighting in public only to find that the legislation that hurts us, We the People, the most, continually get passed and leadership in both parties continue to get big donations from corporate dollars and lobbyists.
 
We are at a time period in this country where we are being forced to come together and work together for the benefit of everyone.  The arguing and splintering between races, classes, genders, republican and democrat and all the other things are no longer helpful.   We are all fighting over a piece of drift wood or a lifeboat while a very small percentage of the people are sailing away on The Queen Mary.  I wonder what you descendants will think when they look back at us and our time in history.  Do you think they’ll be generous in their opinions of a nation that has squandered almost every possible resource because they couldn’t get passed all of the isms and work together?  I hope so, because i wouldn’t.

Woodrow Wilson, Democrat Hero

Judith McGrane of Springfield submitted this about women demonstrating for the right to vote outside the White House were treated in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate,

Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their food, all of it colorless slop, was infested with worms.
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

The above is from an email that has been circulating around the internet for some time. Snopes rates it as true.

What makes this especially interesting is that Woodrow Wilson, the man who gave us the income tax and Federal Reserve Board, is almost deified by progressive liberals. Wilson was a Democrat albeit not of the Jefferson-Jackson mold. He was an academic who at one time taught at Bryn Mawr College. He made his bones as president of Princeton University from where he was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910 followed by his election to the presidency in 1912 beating a divided Republican Party.

Wilson sympathies lay with the Jim Crow south and he was baldy racist. He segregated federal office buildings for the first time, praised the Ku Klux Klan and told a delegation of blacks objecting to his policies  “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen .”

In other words, he was a typical, manipulative progressive, liberal, big-government Democrat.

 

Farewell Sam Rohrer

Farewell Sam Rohrer — Sam Rohrer who has represented the 128th District in the Pennsylvania House since 1993 is stepping down with the end of this year’s session, Nov. 30. He  gave his farewell address on Oct. 5, which can be found here .

He was  one of the good guys.

Godspeed, Sam.

Jerry Coyne Shows How Faith Ruins Science

USAToday, today, in the tradition of Jacques-René Hébert gave a half-page of its not-so-valuable-anymore space to biology professor Jerry Coyne to describe the ways in which science is superior to faith.

Coyne, besides teaching evolution and ecology at the University of Chicago, is an outspoken atheist who believes the religious inhibit the progress of man, a view shared by many men of history like Hébert and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot.

Coyne’s article is filled with irony.

“Science operates by using evidence and reason. Doubt is prized, authority rejected,” he says.

Unless one questions global warming or, cough, cough, evolution, of course. Don’t you teach evolution and ecology, Jerry? That would make it a double score for irony.

One could also describe as ironic the remarkable ignorance Coyne expresses in the name of enlightenment and reason. “Jews see Jesus as a prophet . . .,” he says. Really? Anything but.

But the most delicious irony is when he says this: “Science and faith are fundamentally incompatible” and, yes, he is right. So when he asserts  “we now know that the universe did not require a creator”, which is apparently  an appeal to the authority of physicist Stephen Hawkins who recently claimed such a conviction of a thing not seen, Coyne is expressing a blind faith. Such unreflective faith only ruins science by undermining the credibility of those who practice it properly.

Or as Coyne ironically cites physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Francis Bacon, the founder of modern science, addressed the same tired complaints of atheists 400 or so years ago in his essay “Of Atheism.” If Coyne should want to read it it can be found here .

And a final point: Coyne says the Holocaust is something that should make a Christian lose his faith. Hitler, Mengele, and the rest of the Nazis were on your team, Jerry.  They wanted to destroy Christianity and they were the ones who accepted evolution . To find what Hitler believed about it do a search at the link for the word “evolution” with a space in front of the “e”.

An Upset In Pa13?

A Public Opinion Strategies Poll of voters preferences in Pennsylvania’s 13th Congressional District showed the voters leaning towards the Republican 44 to 42 percent.

The poll was conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 1 but released Oct. 7 by GOP challenger Dee Adcock, a small business-owner. The seat has been held by very liberal Democrat Allyson Schwartz since 2005, who succeeded very liberal Democrat Joe Hoeffel who took office in 1999. Hoeffel beat Republican Jon Fox who won his seat from very liberal freshman Democrat Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky in 1994 after voters became enraged at her for casting the deciding vote on the 1993 budget that significantly raised taxes.

Before her, the seat had been held by Republicans since 1916.

According to the poll, support to re-elect Ms. Schwartz is at 41 percent while 37 percent say it is time for someone else. Adcock says, though, the poll indicates he moves ahead 40 percent-39 percent  after a brief introduction.

The poll surveyed 300 likely voters and has a margin of error of 5.66 percent in 95 out of 100 cases.


Ms. Schwartz managed the Elizabeth Blackwell Center, a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Philadelphia, from 1975-1988 before successfully running for state senate.