elections

PA Commonwealth Court Rules against State Zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling

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Court throws out state zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling

July 26, 2012 10:47 am
By Laura Olson / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

HARRISBURG — A Commonwealth Court panel this morning threw out Pennsylvania’s attempt to establish statewide zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling, setting up a likely appeal to the state’s top court.

The appellate court ruled that the state cannot require local municipalities to allow gas drilling in areas that would conflict with their zoning rules, as several towns argued was the outcome of the Legislature passing and the governor signing Act 13 in February.

That law enacted a sweeping set of changes for how the oil and gas drilling industry operates within Pennsylvania, including creating an impact fee and, most controversially, dictating what municipalities can and cannot do regarding standards for gas drilling. Any municipality that did not follow those state-issued zoning guidelines stood to lose its share of the impact fee revenues and was liable to legal challenges.

Continue reading PA Commonwealth Court Rules against State Zoning for Marcellus Shale drilling →

elections

Second judge rejects Wisconsin voter ID law

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A second judge on Tuesday declared Wisconsin’s voter identification law unconstitutional, further guaranteeing that the ID requirement won’t be in place for this fall’s elections.

Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan ruled that the state’s requirement that all voters show photo ID at the polls creates a “substantial impairment of the right to vote” guaranteed by the state Constitution.

In March, Flanagan issued an injunction temporarily blocking the law, finding that the groups challenging the ID requirement — the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera — were likely to succeed in their arguments. He made that injunction permanent in Tuesday’s 20-page decision.

Another Dane County judge, Richard Niess, permanently blocked the voter ID law in March in a separate case brought by the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. Voter ID proponents would need to get both orders lifted to get the law reinstated.

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elections

Pennsylvania’s strict voter ID law faces ACLU lawsuit

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Below is today’s coverage by the Los Angeles Times of the ACLU lawsuit against the voter restriction law passed by PA Republicans.

A state-wide coalition of voting rights and civil rights activists is holding a rally at the state Capitol on Tuesday July 24th to express the public’s support for the lawsuit against voter restriction.

Buses leave the IBEW Hall in Vanport, PA at 6:00am on Tuesday the 24th and will return at 3:00pm after the rally. There is no charge. Please call Progressive Democrats of America chairperson Tina Shannon at 724-683-1925 to reserve a seat.

Buses leave Philadelphia from 1619 Cecil B. Moore Ave. at 9:00am and return at 3:30pm.  To reserve a seat from Philadelphia call John Jordan, Director of Civic Engagement for the PA NAACP at 215-978-7500.

Pennsylvania’s strict voter ID law faces ACLU lawsuit

The law could stop hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them minorities, from casting ballots despite their efforts to obtain an ID. The outcome may affect the presidential election.

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau
Los Angeles Times

July 18, 2012, 5:00 a.m.

PHILADELPHIA — At age 93, Viviette Applewhite proudly lives on her own in a high-rise apartment just a few blocks from where she was born. A widow, she has never driven a car, but she has had many jobs, including work as a welder during World War II. She marched withMartin Luther King Jr. in Georgia.

She cast her first vote for PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt. On election day four years ago, Applewhite went across the street to vote. “I was waiting there when they opened the door,” she said. “I didn’t vote for [Barack] Obamabecause he was black. I voted for him because he was a Democrat.”

But her record of faithfully voting for Democrats will be more difficult to maintain, thanks to a strict voter identification law adopted this year by Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature. Now she is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the new law.

Applewhite is among more than 186,000 registered voters who lack a valid driver’s license in this heavily Democratic city. Many of them are minorities. And to vote in Pennsylvania in November, they will need to produce a government-issued ID or driver’s license.

Continue reading Pennsylvania’s strict voter ID law faces ACLU lawsuit →

2012 Election, elections, PDA, Right Wing, Voting Rights

Defend Our Voting Rights!

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BUSES FROM BEAVER TO HARRISBURG on July 24

By Tina Shannon

At time when we need to increase the number of people voting, our State legislature has passed a law that will turn voters away from the polls.

Although there are no cases of voter fraud in PA, the Republican controlled legislature is requiring a picture ID to vote. This is part of a nation-wide Republican strategy to reduce the vote in order to defeat Obama.

John Jordan from the Pennsylvania NAACP will be in Beaver County on July 11th to explain the Voter Suppression Law, along with details of the rally and petition for injunction. Please join us for this important public meeting.

Public Meeting
John Jordan

PA NAACP Director of Civic Engagement

July 11th at 7:00 PM

USW Local 8183

1445 Market St, Bridgewater

Sponsored by a coalition of labor, civil rights, and community organizations

In a recently speech Republican Representative Mike Turzai said: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer: “More than 758,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania do not have photo identification cards from the state Transportation Department, putting their voting rights at risk in the November election, according to data released Tuesday by state election officials.”

The NAACP, ACLU & League of Women Voters have petitioned the Commonwealth Court for an injunction to stop implementation of the Voter ID Law. This will give their lawsuit time to make it to court to see if this law is constitutional. It would be a travesty to allow this law to decide the Presidential election only to later have it ruled invalid. 

A rally will be held at 1:00 PM on the steps of the Capitol in Harrisburg on July 24th, the day before the Court holds the hearing on the petition.

Continue reading Defend Our Voting Rights! →

2012 Election, elections, GOP, Voting Rights

Oppose the GOP Attack on Voting Rights!

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Links to Flyer below

Full Text of NAACP Letter, click HERE

PDF File of this Flyer, click HERE

elections

Civic Groups Urge Corbett to Delay Voter Restriction Law

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Saturday, July 7, 2012
Civic groups urge delay in

Pennsylvania’s voter-ID law
By Bob Warner
Inquirer Staff Writer READER FEEDBACK

Pa. says 758,000-plus voters lack PennDOT photo ID
 
Groups appeal for delay on voter ID; Corbett refuses
 
Voters without PennDot ID: 9.2%
 
Voter ID law may hit more in Pennsylvania
Spurred by the disclosure that 758,000 registered voters do not have Pennsylvania drivers’ licenses, six civic groups called on Gov. Corbett on Friday to delay implementation of a new voter-ID requirement for at least a year. The administration immediately rejected the request.
“Our goal since the law was signed is to reach out to all voters to make them aware of the law so all eligible voters are able to get ID if needed and cast ballots in November,” said Ron Ruman, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, in charge of the state election machinery.
Ruman said Corbett did not have authority on his own to delay the photo-ID requirement and would not ask the Republican-controlled legislature to change the law, passed and signed by the governor in March.  “The administration supports the law,” Ruman wrote in an e-mail, “because it protects the integrity of every vote and voter by giving Pennsylvania for the first time a reliable way to verify the identity of each voter at the polls. This will help detect and deter any illegal voting.”

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Organizing, trade unions

Needed: Worker Organizing and Education

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There is No Substitute for Organizing:

How Unions Might Help Win Future Battles

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Jane McAlevey
Beaver County Blue via The Nation

July 3, 2012 – Before Wisconsinites voted down the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker, and certainly since, principled progressives inside and outside of unions have disagreed on whether or not the campaign should have happened. In fact, between the two of us, we don’t fully agree about whether or not the recall was the correct tactic.

But with the defeat in the rear view mirror, two clear lessons can be drawn from Wisconsin: unions need to reinvest in mass participatory education—sometimes called internal organizing in union lingo; and, unions need to stop focusing on “collective bargaining” and actually kick down the walls separating workplace and non-workplace issues by going all-out on the broader agenda of the working class and the poor.

Once you get past the reports that Walker outspent the Wisconsin workers by 7:1, the next most startling fact is that 38 percent of union households voted to keep the anti-worker Governor. That’s slightly more than one third, and had the pro-recall forces held the union households, Walker would no longer be Governor.

With major media outlets drubbing us with the 38 percent number, the liberal political elite seem stuck on a rhetorical question: why do poor people and workers vote against their material self-interest? Actually, in our own experience, the poor and working class don’t vote against their self-interest—but there’s a precondition: we have to create the space for ordinary people to better understand what their self-interest is, and how it connects with hundreds of millions in the US and globally.

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Environment, Green Energy, Marcellus Shale

‘Fracking’: Myth Meets Realties

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A natural gas rig side by side with homes in Washington County, PA | B. Mark Schmerling

Fractured Lives

Detritus of Pennsylvania’s Shale Gas Boom

By Edward Humes

Progressive America Rising via Sierra Club

The supple hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, once known for their grassy woodlands, red barns, and one-stoplight villages, bristle with new landmarks these days: drilling rigs, dark green condensate tanks, fields of iron conduits lumped with hissing valves, and long, flat rectangles carved into hilltops like overgrown swimming pools, brimming with umber wastewater.

Tall metal methane flaring stacks periodically fill the night with fiery glares and jet engine roars. Roadbeds of crushed rock, guarded by No Trespassing signs, lie like fresh sutures across hayfields, deer trails, and backyards, admitting fleets of tanker trucks to the wellheads of America’s latest energy revolution.

 
This is the new face of Washington County, the leading edge of the nation’s breakneck shale gas boom. Natural gas boosters, President Barack Obama among them, have lauded it as a must-have, 100-year supply of clean, cheap energy that we cannot afford to pass up. However, recent data suggest that supplies of shale gas may last for only 11 years and that the extreme measures needed to recover it may make it a dirtier fuel than coal. But that hasn’t slowed the dramatic transformation of gas-rich regions from rural Pennsylvania to urban Fort Worth, Texas.

Driving this juggernaut is the amalgam of industrial technologies collectively known as "hydraulic fracturing," or "fracking," which releases the gases (the main component of which is methane) hidden deep within layers of ancient, splintery shale. With five major shale "plays" concentrated in eight states, and more under development, America has been transformed from a net importer of natural gas into a potential exporter.

Perched atop the 7,000-foot-deep Marcellus Shale formation, which undergirds most of Appalachia, Washington County not only boasts enormous reserves of methane but also leads the state in producing far more frack-worthy "wet gas" products: propane, butane, ethane, and other valuable chemicals that can mean the difference between a money pit and a money gusher. Although central Pennsylvania has more wells, this wet gas makes Washington County, in industry parlance, a "honeypot."

The lure of million-dollar payouts has led many farmers, homeowners, school boards, and town commissions to lease out their subterranean energy wealth. Royalty payments on leases so far have topped half a billion dollars statewide–money that, for some, is literally saving the farm.

"An unprecedented economic impact," Matt Pitzarella has called it. He’s spokesman for the leading driller in this part of the state, Texas-based Range Resources, which in 2004 fracked the first successful Marcellus Shale wells–at the time a shot in the dark and now believed to be tapping the second-largest natural gas field in the world. Pitzarella ticks off stories of poor families who hit the gas-lease lottery and are now able to afford college tuition, new cars, and home makeovers.

But unlocking half-billion-year-old hydrocarbon deposits carries a price, and not everyone shares in the bonanza. For every new shale well, 4 million to 8 million gallons of water, laced with potentially poisonous chemicals, are pumped into the ground under explosive pressure–a violent geological assault. And once unleashed, the gas requires a vast industrial architecture to be processed and moved from the wells to the world. Imagine the pipes, compressors, ponds, pits, refineries, and meters each shale well in Pennsylvania demands, planted next to horse farms, cornfields, houses, and schools. Then multiply by 5,000.

Continue reading ‘Fracking’: Myth Meets Realties →

2012 Election, GOP, Voting Rights

GOP Rep Lets the Cat Out of the Bag

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Pennsylvania Republican: Voter ID Laws Are

‘Gonna Allow Governor Romney To Win’

 

By Annie-Rose Strasser
ThinkProgress.org

June 25, 2012 – This weekend, Pennsylvania Republican House Leader Mike Turzai (R-PA) finally admitted what so many have speculated: Voter identification efforts are meant to suppress Democratic votes in this year’s election.

At the Republican State Committee meeting, Turzai took the stage and let slip the truth about why Republicans are so insistent on voter identification efforts — it will win Romney the election, he said:

Continue reading GOP Rep Lets the Cat Out of the Bag →