Pennsylvania

Vera Scroggins of Susquehanna County, Pa., will be in court Monday morning.
This time, she will have lawyers and hundreds of thousands of supporters throughout the country. Representing Scroggins to vacate an injunction limiting her travel will be lawyers from the ACLU and Public Citizen, and a private attorney.
The last time Scroggins appeared in the Common Pleas Court in October, she didn’t have lawyers. That’s because Judge Kenneth W. Seamans refused to grant her a continuance.

The oil and gas industry, the nation’s chambers of commerce, and politicians who are dependent upon campaign contributions from the industry and the chambers, claim fracking is safe.
First, close your mind to the myriad scientific studies that show the health effects from fracking.
Close your mind to the well-documented evidence of the environmental impact.
Focus just upon the effects upon the workers.

DCCC will never win back the House until they get Republicans like this out of Democratic seats-- but that means recruiting candidates and fighting to win-- which Steve Israel refuses to doNow that the DCCC has officially launched its Red-to-Blue program, what happened to Steve Israel's vaunted Jumpstart program and the candidates he tapped, many despite primary races back home? The program itself has been "disappeared" from the DCCC website.

When I lived in Stroudsburg, it was part of PA-11 and the congressman was a crooked old Wall Street Democrat, Paul Kanjorski. Back then the PVI was D+5 and Bush only managed to win 43% against Gore in 2000 and 47% against Kerry 4 years later.

Lena Headley lives in in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. She and her husband bought a small farm for their semi-retirement with the mineral rights but not the oil and gas rights. Over the last seven years five gas wells and a transmission pipeline have been put on their land. The effect has been devastating: Pollution of land and air together with destruction of fruit trees and the burning of 10 acres of ground by the gas drillers. Gas wells leak and a spring 200 feet from her house is so rich with gas it can be set on fire.

Today two more important progressive groups, MoveOn and the Philadelphia Chapter of DFA (Philly for Change), joined Blue America and the PCCC in backing state Senator Daylin Leach in his bid for the open congressional seat (PA-13). In the May 20th primary Daylin will face a crowded field of garden variety Democrats, endorsed by Big Money interests.

The DCCC wants you to contribute money to this wealthy lifelong RepublicanPA-06 is a swing district in southeast Pennsylvania, primarily Chester County, with significant pieces of Berks, Montgomery and Lebanon counties. The Republican state legislature skewered it towards the GOP in 2010 by taking out blue-blue Coatesville and putting in some red-leaning parts of the Upper Main Line. It went from being a D+2 district to an R+2 district.

This afternoon, Democrat Tom Houghton announced his candidacy for the 16th Congressional District in Pennsylvania, challenging incumbent right-wing Republican Joe Pitts, who we're very familiar with from the Aryanna Strader campaign in 2012. Once again, Steve Israel is forcing the DCCC to ignore this very winnable (R+4) southeast Pennsylvania seat that President Obama won in 2008. And Tom has also been an electoral winner in this area.

The derailment of a 101-car CSX freight train on a bridge in a densely-populated part of Philadelphia this past week should be yet another warning to politicians who have become cheerleaders for oil and gas fracking.

The Public Banking Institute has announced that its third annual conference will be held in Detroit in 2014. This follows on its conferences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and San Rafael, California. All three sites were chosen strategically, as Philadelphia was where the Constitutional Convention took place, it was the original seat of the U.S. government, and […]