News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Chocolate poisoning nearly doubles in December for dogs. There were 3,542 reported in December 2018. The next highest month last year was November with 1,947. The low month was June with 1,201.
For what it’s worth, milk chocolate is far less dangerous than unsweetened. It has to do amount of the theobromine and caffeine. All chocolate is bad for the pup, though.
Michael Malinowski William Henderson Remembered —The Joe Billie for Congress campaign has sent us the following statement. We are grateful that at least one political figure remembered these public servants.
Joe Billie for Congress would like to give condolences to two men who had dedicated their lives to protecting Delaware County who died this month.
Morton-Rutledge Volunteer Fire Capt. Michael Christopher Malinowski died of an appartent heart attack, Dec. 3. He told fellow firefighters that he wasn’t feeling well shortly after returning from a call the day before regarding downed wires and trees.
He fell ill at work the next day and died shortly after arriving at the hospital.
He was 40.
Mr. Malinowski participated in training and fundraising at the department and used his carpentry skills to fix areas of the fire station including the company’s firefighter memorial.
He is survived by his wife and five children.
On Dec. 14, Dectective Lt. William Henderson of the Ridley Township Police Department died while on duty of natural causes. He also served as chief of the Vauclain Fire Co.
He was 64 and is survived by his wife and two children
May these heroes not be forgotten.
There is no significant difference between the DNA of domestic cats and cats in the wild.
Soros crosses the line — It seems George Soros, the vile European mastermind who just got a pro-criminal elected as district attorney in Delaware County, Pa., has finally met his match. Go get him Taylor Swift.
The first hit in Major League Baseball history was on April 22, 1876 by Jim O’Rourke for the Boston Red Stockings. O’Rourke, at age 54, also became the oldest player to ever appear in the National League when he took the field for the New York Giants in 1904. He remains the oldest player to hit safely in a major league game.
The most popular variety of banana for more than a century was the Gros Michel banana. Panama disease nearly wiped it out in the 1950s and made it impractical to grow in Central America hence just about all bananas exported to the United States became the Cavendish variety, which has a significantly different taste.
So what did Gros Michel taste like? Exactly like any artificially flavored banana confection. When synthetic fruit flavors were developed in the 19th century, the banana one was based on the Gros Michel. Flavor makers never saw the need to update it.
Frankly banana candy always seemed tastier to us than the real thing.
Did you know that Wilmington, Del. is the major banana port in North America? Sure you did.
It was famed American company International Telephone and Telegraphy that had controlling interesting in famed German aircraft maker Focke-Wulf just before World War II broke out.
Most Leftist Governor Is Tom Wolf Says HuffPo
By Lowman S. Henry
In 1992, then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton ran for president as a centrist Democrat with an eye toward capturing what was at the time a much larger moderate section of the electorate. It worked. He won. He declared “over” the era of big government.
Today the era of big government is alive and thriving and his party has moved into a full embrace of socialism although they attempt to soften its image by calling it “democratic socialism.” Bill Clinton’s brand of moderation would not stand a snowball’s chance in today’s Democratic Party.
Here in Penn’s Woods, where once Democrats positioned themselves as champions of the working class, ultra-Left wing give-away programs have replaced economic advancement as the principal focus of the party’s policy agenda.
Governor Tom Wolf, crowned by the Huffington Post as the “most liberal governor in America,” has certainly lived up to that reputation. In just the last year he has taken steps to embroil Pennsylvania in a draconian multi-state agreement purporting to address so-called climate change, proposed restrictions on Second Amendment gun rights, unilaterally overspent the state budget, and vetoed legislation protecting unborn babies with Down Syndrome.
But the governor is not alone in taking a hard Left turn: the state’s big city mayors are right there with him pandering to the party’s radical base while proposing job crushing policies, violating constitutional rights and abandoning common sense.
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto stoked the crowd at something called the Climate Action Summit by announcing his opposition to any additional petrochemical cracker plants in the region. Setting aside the fact neither the plant being constructed in Beaver County nor any contemplated plant would be built in the City of Pittsburgh, Peduto railed against fracking and the perceived evils of carbon based fuels.
The problem is the plant currently being built by Royal Dutch Shell, as with development of the fracking industry as a whole, have literally created tens of thousands of family sustaining jobs for the blue collar constituency formerly courted by Democratic politicians.
The damage done by Peduto’s comments drew a rare rebuke from Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald who told KDKA radio: “No city has benefitted more from the shale revolution than the city of Pittsburgh. Not just the county, the entire region.” A number of area labor leaders, whose members are experiencing the best jobs of their lives from shale-related development, also joined in denouncing Petuto’s comments.
Peduto, along with his Pittsburgh City Council allies, also has made headlines for the effort to violate the constitutional Second Amendment rights of city residents. In the wake of the tragic shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue last year, council pushed through and Peduto signed three controversial measures into law. The laws were immediately challenged in court where defenders of Second Amendment rights correctly argue they are unconstitutional.
In what could be considered an electoral rebuke of Peduto’s far Left policies, and the rush to socialism within the Democratic Party, the counties outside of Allegheny in the Pittsburgh media market turned bright red in last November’s general election. Republicans flipped control of county courthouses in Westmoreland, Washington, Greene, and Armstrong counties, while Fayette, Butler and Beaver remained in the GOP camp.
Meanwhile, across the state, Philadelphia Mayor Bill Kenney literally flies the flag for socialism. In “celebration” of the 70th anniversary of the coming to power of Mao Zedong and his Communist Party in China the Chinese flag was hoisted at City Hall. This was done in fealty to “diversity,” although how honoring a brutal regime that has murdered millions celebrates diversity remains a mystery.
The far-Left tilt of Pennsylvania’s two big city mayors underscores the growing geographic and ideological chasm in the state’s political landscape. Our urban areas have politically become socialist enclaves, while more rural areas grow more conservative. Leading Democratic Presidential candidates include outright socialists, while Donald Trump’s economic populism prevails in the Republican Party.
Thus the upcoming presidential election is not just your typical battle between Republicans and Democrats; it will pit democratic socialism against capitalism in what will be a pitched battle for the economic soul of America.
Mr. Henry is chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly Lincoln Radio Journal
Headache? How long for the aspirin to work? The relief starts between 20 to 30 minutes but full effect isn’t reached until about 100 minutes. It’s about the same for Ibuprofen and and Tylenol.
Fortune Magazine Ignored OPT Flaws
By Joe Guzzardi
Michael Goodwin, a New York Post columnist who began his journalism career at The New York Times, last month wrote a two-part commentary that chronicled the long, steady erosion of reporting integrity. Although Goodwin focused on the Times, his observations that bias has become common in the mainstream media easily applies to many publications. Editors who could once be counted on to, as Goodwin wrote, veer copy toward the middle, gradually became as much of a problem as the reporters whose work they review.
Nowhere is journalism bias more blatantly on display than in immigration stories. Even though polling shows that at least half of all Americans want less immigration, most stories tell only the expansion side, and in the process leave their readers under-informed.
Case in point: Fortune Magazine, the respected, 90-year-old business publication, recently did a story about one of most controversial programs that’s hurtful to U.S. tech workers, the Optional Practical Training program. In brief, OPT allows international students on F-1 visas to remain in the U.S. and work for at least a year, and longer if they have earned degrees in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM).
Although there are multiple reasonable arguments that can be made in opposition to OPT, none of them appeared in reporter Nicole Goodkind’s article. Among OPT’s flaws that Goodkind omitted are that OPT is not congressionally approved, yet it has ballooned into the nation’s largest guest worker program.
OPT is a voracious American job killer. Department of Homeland Securitydata shows that, since 2015 and through May 2017, nearly 500,000 students received OPT, and another 150,000 have STEM extensions. That’s 650,000 good jobs being held now by foreign nationals versus qualified American workers. There’s a powerful incentive for tech companies to hire OPT foreign workers. A 15 percent discount has allowed multinational corporations to evade at least $20 billion to $30 billion in FICA taxes over the years. The OPT worker doesn’t pay FICA either, and therefore doesn’t contribute to Social Security or Medicare.
In her 1,200-word article, Goodkind glowingly cited five pro-OPT sources, including major corporations, that profit from the program. Among them are Google and immigration advocacy groups like the Mark Zuckerberg-founded FWD.us. Goodkind wrote that an amicus brief FWD.us filed supporting OPT read like: “a who’s who of Silicon Valley. Tech giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Bloomberg, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla, Twitter, Uber, and Zillow….”
Yet Goodkind quoted only one critic, John Miano, a lawyer and expert on the effect of foreign labor on technology workers. Miano has worked on behalf of workers and pro-American worker organizations and for more than a decade has challenged OPT in federal court. Goodkind assassinated Miano’s character and that of his associates. Goodkind quoted Miano after she had inaccurately and wrongly marginalized him.
Miano told me, however, that if Goodkind had done the due diligence once considered honest journalism’s bedrock instead of lazily relying on FWD.usshe would have seen that the money trail explains everything. “The tech industry spends tens of millions of dollars each month lobbying for more foreign labor and to preserve their ability to replace working American with that foreign labor,” said Miano.
Fortune once was a highly respected magazine that would never have allowed slanted copy like Goodkind’s to get past the first editorial layer, let alone get published. By passing over OPT’s damaging effects on American workers, Goodkind abandoned the principals that journalists themselves established years ago. The 110-year-old Society for Professional Journalists’ ethics code warns reporters to “avoid advocacy,” advice which Goodkind ignored. As former Washington Post ombudsman E.R. Shipp wrote in her column “In Pursuit of Fairness,” no story is fair if it omits facts of major importance and significance. Goodkind disregarded that basic, most obvious rule.
Reporters like Goodkind need to remember that the full story – he said, she said – is always more compelling than a cheerleading story that quickly becomes tedious.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
