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Tell Senator Specter you support the economic recovery package and health care reform!

  By Health Care

The Economic Recovery Package that passed the House last week is now before the Senate. The Republicans are planning a filibuster. Some Democrats are wobbly. And so we are going to need at least two and possibly more Republican votes. The right-wing is going all out to defeat the bill, thinking that if they beat President Obama now, they can derail his entire domestic program. We can’t allow them to succeed. Continue reading

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Aggressive police patrolling on the drives!

  By Health Care

Stop speeding on the drives! Remember how the city demanded that the state police replace the city police in patrolling the Expressway, just as they patrol interstate highways in the rest of the state? Well it happened with interesting consequences elswhere anyone who live in NW Philly should know about. The police officers who formerly patrolled the Expressway have no been reassigned to East (Kelly) and West (ML King)River and Lincoln Drive. The officers who used to be assigned to the drives have been reassigned to the districts. This is a good thing in a few respects. It in effect gives us more police officers on patrol in the city. And the reassigned Expressway officers are taking their job a lot more seriously than the old timers they have replaced. Wednesday morning, for example, seven people had been stopped and warned or ticketed for speeding by 9:30 in the morning.… Continue reading

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Be There For Health Care: greet Obama supporters in Philly on Saturday

  By Health Care

Submitted by Marc Stier on Mon, 01/12/2009 – 3:34am. Be There for Health Care! Welcome people on Saturday, January 17th as they line up to hear President-Elect Barack Obama at the first stop of his train trip to Washington before his inauguration As a volunteer greeter on Saturday January 17th, you will be part of the largest mobilization of health care for all advocates Philadelphia has ever seen! Volunteers will: ·Work in pairs signing up folks as they wait on line to enter the speech venue. ·Ask everyone to sign a post card to Senators Specter and Casey – Calling for guaranteed, quality, affordable health care for all. – Endorsing the Obama / Health Care For America Now principles of health care reform that call for every American to be able to choose affordable health insurance either from their current insurer, another private insurance plan or a public plan open… Continue reading

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Library closings: they've never been mainly about the budget crisis

  By Libraries, Philadelphia

The hard thing in making the case against closing eleven branch libraries is that the fiscal crisis of Philadelphia is not a mirage. That’s why it is important to understand that the branch library closings have never fundamentally been about the budget crisis. The Mayor and Siobhan Reardon are misleading us when they keep insisting that we had to close libraries because of the city’s budget troubles. I’m not sure I fully understand what the library closings are about. But this is what I’ve managed to piece together from talking with librarians here and elsewhere in the country as well as with people familiar with some of the inner workings of the library administration. The proposal to close branches came from the library administration The library administration has wanted to close branch libraries for years. They proposed doing so under Mayor Street, when then Councilman Nutter along with Councilman DiCicco… Continue reading

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The Nutter administration (and us) at the crossroads

  By Philadelphia, Political Organizing, Progressive Politics

Originally posted at YPP The Nutter Administration stands at a crossroads. And so do we activists. It is not because the judicial decision barring the administration from closing libraries is an existential threat to the necessary powers of the Mayor. That claim, as I’ll explain in another post is nonsense. What is really at stake is whether, at this critical moment, the Nutter administration will decide to fix the broken political culture of our city or whether it will continue to work within it. What we do as activists may help determine the result. Continue reading

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Hallwatch faxbank on libraries

  By Libraries, Philadelphia

Ed Goppelt has graciously agreed to set up a faxbank at his hallwatch website, so that you can contact your district council member and all the at-large members in one step asking them to join the lawsuit seeking to block closure of the libraries. http://www.hallwatch.org/faxbank/save_our_libraries I’m going to spare you the hard sell. If YPP readers don’t already know why closing 11 branch libraries is a horrible and unjust step, nothing I add here will convince you. I’m just going to ask all of you who share that opinion to go, NOW, and contact your council members. While having a member of council as a plaintiff on the suit may not be strictly necessary from a legal point of view, it might help overcome any challenge to the standing of the others bringing the suit. Continue reading

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Best practices on city taxation in a recession: a proposed project for YPP

  By Philadelphia, Taxation

Most of us here, and to judge from the poll Ray and Dan sponsored, most of the city, believes that we should not be cutting taxes when our services are being reduced so much. We should be, at least temporarily, delay the wage tax cuts. But what do you do when the strong mayor of our city totally disagrees and when the members of City Council who, in addition to having the usual disinclination of politicians to raise taxes, are also disinclined to pick a fight with the Mayor in his first (of most likely eight) years in office. Where do we get the leverage to move the debate in the city. The poll helped, but what do we do now? For one thing, we can keep pointing out that the rationale for cutting taxes–to influence the location decisions of businesses and residents–is substantially less important when businesses and residents… Continue reading

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More on Facebook pictures and their consequences

  By Photography

Since I posted a blog post, and an accompanying note on Facebook, about how Facebook pictures shape the way we look at ourselves and others, I’ve been thinking on and off about how photographs shape our experience of life. For example, how much of what we remember of people’s faces is a product not of what we see of them in the flesh but of the pictures we see of them? Continue reading

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Can the articles about teen-age blow jobs be far behind?

  By Love and Sex

Tension between generations undoubtedly goes back to the time when extended families or tribes became part of larger communities, thereby giving young people the possibility of forming attachments and loyalties outside their own tribe. It got a new source of energy when companionate marriage arose to challenge the right of parents to marry off their children as they saw fit. It intensified again when adolescence and a distinctive youth culture was created in the early twentieth century. And it took its contemporary form in the fifties and sixties when rock and roll and the pill made sex (and drug and rock n roll) panics the preferred manner in which the older generated condemned the behavior of the younger generation. The latest sex panic article appeared in the op-ed pages of the New York Times yesterday. A piece by Charles M. Blow reports that dating appears to be dying among young… Continue reading