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Archive: February, 2012
One reason House Bill 1077 — which would require ultrasounds before abortions, with the monitor pointed toward the woman — has drawn so much concern from abortion rights advocates is that the legislation, introduced by Rep. Kathy Rapp (R-Warren) has more than 100 co-sponsors. But Rep. Mike O'Brien, a Philly Democrat, says that many of those co-signers had no idea what they were signing up for.
"When somebody puts a bill in, they send a memo around for co-sponsorship," he says. The memo on this one was "deceiving. It didn’t indicate the depth of what this bill would do. So a lot of people signed on to this thinking it was something to do with women’s health and not understanding that it was an anti-choice initiative." O'Brien has been trying to explain to them (he says successfully) that the bill — which has actually gotten more drastic, having been amended to require accurate ultrasounds even for pregnancies under nine weeks, which must be done trans-vaginally — amounts to "governmental rape."
It seems that creating a bill no one can disagree with, and then making it increasingly anti-abortion through the legislative process, has become something of a go-to M.O. in the General Assembly. O'Brien says another recently enacted law, which requires abortion providers to meet the standards of ambulatory surgery centers, also started out innocuously enough. "Regardless of where you are on the choice issue, everyone reacted in horror to [the practices of Philly abortion provider Kermit] Gosnell. it was an awful situation. So when you brought that bill out — and the bill in its original form was crafted by Sen. [Pat] Vance, who’s a registered nurse and had worked with Planned Parenthood advocates — the original form was an agreed-upon bill. But then it got amended and amended, and it got more and more egregious."
Like that law, which is expected to significantly increase the cost of abortions and reduce access to them, the so-called Women's Right to Know Act would add another hurdle to abortion rights in the commonwealth. (Here's one of several petitions.)
Students from Temple University, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel and Haverford will leave their classrooms tomorrow at 1 p.m. to protest cuts in education funding, demand student debt forgiveness and speak out against privatizing education. The demonstration is part of an Occupy-backed National Day of Action for Education.
“We’re not only protesting education cuts, we’re protesting destructive policies," says walk-out organizer Diane Isser, a Temple student. "We’re coming out against nationwide cuts to education and public services to fund prisons and military spending. This is our response to policies that fuck people over. Everyone is coming out together: Labor unions, the teachers' union, laid-off school nurses. We want to bring everyone in Philadelphia together, because this affects everyone.”
That was rather anticlimactic. Judge Jimmie Moore is no longer in the running for U.S. Representative against Congressman Bob Brady and Republican candidate John Featherman. He does, however, have Brady's "support … toward improving the quality of life for our fellow Philadelphians." Which is nothing to sneeze at, since among other things he very nearly has the power to make entire streets disappear. But on to more important matters: Does this mean the "Happy Birthday Judge Jimmie Moore Fish Fry" is canceled? Presser follows:
In a statement released from the offices of Congressman Robert A. Brady and Judge Jimmie Moore:
Today, I, Judge Jimmie Moore, after giving full consideration in an effort to unify the Philadelphia Democratic Party, have decided to withdraw my candidacy for the United States House of Representatives for the First Congressional District, Pennsylvania.
Residents of the Woodlands community of Connoquenessing Township might lose their clean water as of today. Rex Energy, a company that participates in Marcellus Shale gas drilling, had agreed to provide families who say their water was tainted due to fracking with fresh water, shipped in via enormous “water buffalos." Last week, however, Rex sent a letter to the families, alerting them that they’d be losing their water supply.
Marcellus Outreach Butler and community members are holding a water drive tomorrow afternoon, in an attempt to offset the loss. After the drive, there will be a march on Rex Energy’s headquarters to hold Rex accountable.
Organizer Diane Sipe said: “In this area, their water is tainted. The [Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection] did a test and found elevated levels of toluene. When they came back and tested the water again, they didn’t test for toluene.” Toluene, a solvent, smells like paint thinner and can be used as jet fuel. "This is a real hardship. You have a private water supply, and you lose that supply, you lose a lot of property value. Who would buy a house without a water supply?” Sipe says. “They need a long term solution. The water isn’t healthy to bathe in. The people who live here, they drink bottled water and go elsewhere to wash clothes and to bathe.” Families who do use the water supply now have to test their water every six months to ensure their safety, an expensive proposition.
The next few days promise to be full of tantalizing news here on the Naked City.
But first things first.
This author was out for a lovely little walk along the Wissahickon Creek (specifically, toward the northern end of the hiking path east of Forbidden Drive) and happened upon these rather interesting shells on the trail. I ventured down to a rocky bed by the creek to see if I could find a couple more, and did.
The ground in that area, even a distance from the creek itself is actually littered with smaller shells if you look closely (flooding?). But these larger shells were fewer and only near the water.
Like any investigative reporter, I've combined various phrases with the term "Wissahickon" on the ol' internet search engine: "mussels," "oysters," "clams" — but no dice so far, though I did come upon several references to the re-emergence of freshwater mussels in the Delaware being a sign of improved river quality.
So hooray for mussels.
Meanwhile, someone out there's got to know what these are — after all, you readers solved the dilemma of "What kind of meat did Isaiah Thompson just eat," not so long ago.
Cheers.
A weekly series of foulmouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other development and design phenomena in Phlladelphia. Find more stories like this at philaphilia.blogspot.com.
1910 Chestnut Street: This could have been cool.
Two years into a campaign to pressure PNC Bank — the largest financier of mountaintop removal coal mining — to stop funding companies that continue the destructive practice, Earth Quaker Action Team has decided to let activists' money do the talking. Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting has pledged to withdraw $1.9 million from PNC by May 31, and activists hope other PNC customers will follow suit in a new "Green Your Money" initiative.
Earth Quaker Action Team's Walter Sullivan says that after previous protests, "PNC Bank issued a new policy that appeared to distance them from mountaintop removal coal mining, but there's been no tangible, observable change in their financing practice in this area.... They said that they would no longer finance exclusive mountaintop removal coal-mining projects or companies that had more than 50 percent of their activities in mountaintop removal coal mining; since then, they have written loans to four of the five largest companies that account for 47 percent of all mountaintop removal coal mining in the U.S."
Daily News editor Larry Platt may be billing the decimation of Philadelphia Media Network staff as a "better way to bring you the news" and an elimination of redundancies. ("The Inquirer and Daily News can't waste time competing against one another on matters where there is little or no payoff," he wrote in today's column.) But positive spin or no, the "one newsroom" effort, which calls for 37 layoffs and buyouts, isn't widely expected to breathe new life into Philly's beleaguered media market.
Now, it turns out that the "better way" also includes significant cuts to the production and printing departments. CP hears that at least three workers — including VP of Production Laura Parker, John Shimkonis and Ed Smith — were dismissed Friday without notice. Those who received pink slips were not Newspaper Guild members, so Guild president Dan Gross could not comment. PMN spokesman Mark Block said the company doesn't comment on personnel matters, so whether that's the extent of the pain we couldn't say.
“Where are the cars going to go?” That was the rhetorical question posed by Peter Park, who has been the planning director of Milwaukee and Denver, at a forum last night hosted by the Academy of Natural Sciences. Titled “Reimagining Urban Highways,” the event gave six speakers the chance to talk about moving or eliminating highways that run through major American cities. In Milwaukee, for example, Park was the driving force behind a successful effort to get rid of an elevated highway that bisected the city and decreased property values around it. And if you get rid of a highway, where will the cars go? In Park’s words, “They actually may get around better.”
Other examples given at the forum for successful highway-removal projects included a freeway along Portland, Ore.’s waterfront; the West Side Highway in Manhattan; the Embarcadero, an elevated highway that used to run along San Francisco’s waterfront, which collapsed during an earthquake, was never rebuilt, and now that land is a lovely pedestrian park; and highway removals and relocations in Providence.
The local angle? Diana Lind, executive director of Next American City, a Philly nonprofit dedicated to improving urban environments, has a bold proposal: Get rid of the three-mile stretch of I-95 between the Ben Franklin and Walt Whitman bridges. Yep, just get rid of it.
"We do not support the 99% Declaration, its group, its website, its National GA and anything else associated with it,” Occupy Philly voted in December.
Recent articles in the Associated Press and NPR nonetheless falsely stated that the Declaration is “affiliated” with Occupy Wall Street. OWS says “the 99% Declaration and its call for a national general assembly in Philadelphia in July is not affiliated with or endorsed by Occupy Wall Street, and the organizers’ plans blatantly contradict OWS’ stated principles.”
The origins of the 99% Declaration, which will “elect” two delegates from all US states and territories to draft a “petition for a redress of grievances” and then run candidates against politicians who don't support it, are strange ones: the lawyer who is organizing this conference, Michael Pollok, represented two dozen liberal arts students arrested during an Occupy march across the Brooklyn Bridge. He then made note of their political opinions and turned them into a “Declaration.”
Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Philly general assemblies never recognized the legitimacy of his work, or suggested that he in any way represented the movement. And Occupy Philly pointed to a number of troubling details about the convention, which look a lot less like Occupy and a lot more like the system Occupy opposes:
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