Shortly before his promotion to the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, Larry Frankel,Legislative Director of the ACLU for Pennsylvania, testified before the Speaker's Commission on Legislative Reform, on which I served, on April 26,2007. Here's what he said about term limits:

"The ACLU does not support efforts aimed at reducing the size of the legislature or setting term limits. We believe that both of these "reforms" are misguided attempts that would only result in a loss of wisdom, expertise and years of institutional memory by forcing legislators out of office even though the voters have not ousted them.

Once again, it's time to raise the minimum wage. The election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts has shown the danger to the Democratic Party of appearing to just tackle long-term projects.
We also must deal with things that produce tangible benefits to long-suffering citizens in the short run.

Since 1987, I have been quite focused on minimum wages in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. As active member of the National Conference of State Legislatures, I am proud to have played an important role in making state minimum wages the focus of national campaigns for the first time in our nation's history. Since 1987, when I first began my efforts to raise Pennsylvania's mininum wage, Pennsylvania's minimum wage has risen from $3.35 and hour to $7.25 an hour, up 116%.

The Pennsylvania legislature last voted to raise the minimum wage in 2006. It is time to revisit the issue. The District of Columbia and other states--Connecticut, Illinois, Nevada, for instance-- have minimum wages of $8.25. The minimum wage in Oregon is $8.40. The minimum wage in Washington State is $8.55.

It's time for us to raise the minimum wage in Pennsylvania at least up to the East Coast high of $8.25. If the votes were there, I would favor doing more. Since the passage of our last minimum wage legislation, I introduced legislation raising the minimum wage to $9.35 over time, but, as inflation has declined and no state has approached my number (although Ted Kennedy introduced a bill for $9.50), I am willing to scale down my goal in order to get something actually enacted. A bill is a piece of paper; a law has tangible relevance to the lives of many.

Soundings I made earlier to today with labor and relevant legislators have convinced me that a minimum wage of least $8.25 is a reasonable goal as a part of the solution for the economic distress of 2010. The minimum wage was originally promoted as a federal policy during the Great Depression: when many people are out of work, those who are working have more responsibilities. I would welcome the support of civic activists here and elsewhere.

Woodrow Wilson famously said that America is not a country of people who get their names in the newspapers, and the founding of the founding of the Ogontz Area Neighbors Association in December of 1959 did not get any newspaper coverage at all.

At a house somewhere between Broad Street and Ogontz Avenue, between Olney and Chelten Avenues, an interracial group of African Americans who had arrived in the community relatively recently and white, largely Jewish people, whose roots in the community went back further in time, decided that it was time for people of both races then present to work together to improve their mutual community.

Longtime Pennsylvania ACLU lobbyist and Executive Director Larry Frankel, who in the last year or so has become the lobbyist for the national ACLU, has apparently been found dead in Washington under mysterious circumstances. Larry was 54. This is a breaking news story in which most key facts are still generally unknown.

Frankel was an outstanding lobbyist for the Pennsylvania ACLU in Harrisburg, taking positions on scores to hundreds of bills each year. He was a coalition builder reminiscent of Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate or William Brennan on the U.S. Supreme Court, who agressively reached out to unlikely allies like the National Rifle Association to help persuade members of the legislature that the ACLU was addressing broad concerns.

His aggressive outreach removed the ACLU from the fringes or margins of state policy and moved it toward the center of direct involvement.

The late, great (and, by modern standards, corrupt) Senator from Massachusetts Daniel Webster is perhaps best known today for his oft-repeated quip that "No man's life, liberty, or prooperty is safe when the legislature is in session." Unfortunately, the Pennsylvania Senate, proved the timeliness of that aphorism on Wednesday, August 26, when it passed an amendment to House Bill 1828 that should be a poison bill that kills the bill.

It is going to be a very tough haul to get the House of Representatives to defeat this bill with unanimous or almost unanimous Senate Democratic support of it, coupled with 3 to 1 Republican support of it. Senators are often politically strong enough that House members do not take lightly the task of disputing their judgments. Nor do House members from Philadelphia eagerly dispute the judgments of the Mayor of Philadelphia.

The well-publicized arrest--soon to become a hot national and international civil rights issue--of Harvard Black Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates will bring new attention to issues of race, racism, and police discretion across the country.

Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct after falsely being accused of breaking into his own house in the upscale Cambridge neighborhood where he lives near Harvard University. Harvard, ironically, has received national attention for using its vast financial resources for generous scholarship program in which the average student gets to pay a tuition of only $10,000 out of $47,000, making Harvard one of the more financially accessible universities in America as well as one of the more academically elite universities in the world.

Throughout its tenure, young philly politics has been generally viewed as having fewer readers than phillyblog. There are all sorts of reasons why this is logical: phillyblog has boasts nearly 33,000 members, an endless array of topics covered, and a longer history, having been started at the end of 2002.

But, as of the end of February, 2009, Quantcast.com estimates that Young Philly Politics now leads phillyblog in unique monthly viewers, 8,300 to 6,000. Philadelphiaspeaks.com, the phillyblog spinoff whose existence reflects dissatisfaction with the scale and personalities of phillyblog, is estimated to have under 2,000 unique monthly viewers.

The Philadelphia Metro is floating the possibility of the legalization and taxation of marijuana, possibly as early as tomorrow. The state and city could raise a lot of money from this, they will argue.

The Metro is also floating the possibility of the more limited legalization and taxation of marijuana sold for medical purposes.

Traditionally, the view in Harrisburg has been that marijuana is a gateway drug to the more dangerous drugs of cocaine and heroin. There has been virtually no organized support for the legalization of marijuana at any time.

What do you think about the legalization of marijuana or medical marijuana?

At about 2:00 p.m., Wednesday, March 11,2009, the State Government Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, chaired by Babette Josephs of Center City, passed House Bill 300, banning discrimination in employment against gays.

Each of the 12 Democrats voting voted for the bill, sponsored by Dan Frankel of Pittsburgh along with 77 co-sponsors, and every Republican voting voted against it. The margin was 12 to 11.

The bill goes to the House Appropriations Committee, chaired by Dwight Evans of West Oak Lane, and then to the floor the House, where its fate is uncertain at this time.

The recent debate on Young Philly Politics as to whether or not federal TARP funds should be used for newspapers focused on issues of the value of investigative reporting versus the cost of subsidizing on a paper by paper basis the old and threatened technology of printing newspapers.

I believe that any U.S. support for the fading American newspaper industry has to be content neutral, for both political and constitutional reasons.

The traditional governmental means of helping fading newspapers, suspending the anti-trust laws to allow joint operating agreements between competing newspapers, has run its course, with second newspapers failing in many cities and the vast majority of joint operating agreements no longer in effect.

Mayor Nutter and his devoted loyalists are fond of linking the city budget problems to international financial crises. But they are not really the same thing.

The international financial crises mean that Philadelphians will pay less in interest costs to buy a house than they have ever paid before. Sooner or later, that fact will drive up real estate transfer taxes and property taxes.

The international financial crises mean that Philadelphia workers, facing threats of reduced hours or layoffs, are grabbing whatever overtime opportunities they can and taking whatever jobs are offered. That means that wage tax receipts are in good shape: they would have to decline by nearly 50% in the second half of the current fiscal year to meet the city's doom and gloom predictions.

Just as the battle lines are hardening, newly compiled figures on wage tax revenue growth threaten to end the battle over the mayor's proposed cuts by giving the mayor a good reason to delay them.

For the first five months of the current fiscal year, buoyed by a strong showing in November, wage tax revenues are $24,404,000 OVER projections. Assuming the $4,881,000 per month surplus over expectations continues through the remaining seven months of the fiscal year, the city would wind up with a $58,571,000 surplus above expectations in wage tax revenue for the fiscal year.

That is not the most optimistic way to make the projections. The city is collecting wage taxes at the rate of $125,141,400 a month. Assuming that monthly pace continues, the the city will wind up $342,978,000 AHEAD of its total revenue projection of $1,158,586,000.

As an Obama delegate candidate in Bob Brady's First Congressional District (Button 23, Second Column), I have been closely assessing the Obama campaign's role in the context of Philadelphia politics and Philadelphia history as I have been participating in it.

No campaign has ever had the potential for voter mobilization that this one has.

Ed Rendell set the recent record for driving up voter turunout when he got over 220,000 votes for Governor in 2002, beating Bob Casey by over 3 to 1.

Look for Obama to far exceed Rendell's total, and Clinton to far exceed Casey's total.

This race is going to change assumptions about Philadelphia voter apathy for years to come. It is going to show that if you give people a chance to vote for something meaningful, they will take it.

Shortly after I posted a comment calling for greater education on how to vote for President, I got a call from fellow YPPer and activist Karen Bojar sugguesting I blog on this subject. So here we go.

THE MOST IMPORTANT VOTE TO CAST IS THE ONE FOR PRESIDENT. The number of delegates a Presidential candidate receives in a given Congressional district determines the number of delegates he or she receives. A Presidential candidate who receives 85% of the vote or more--a possibility for Obama in the First and Second Congressional Districts--will win all of the delegates.

In Karen's 2nd Congressional District, represented by Chaka Fattah, nine delegates are at stake, five women and four men. They will be initially apportioned by votes for the Presidential candidate, and then apportioned again by sex. It is both possible and precedented (and for many annoying) that the top vote getters do not necessarily win.

We have not even reached the upcoming Democratic South Carolina primary yet, and already the Presidential withdrawals are mounting.

On the Republican side, former Senator Fred Thompson today joined Congressmen Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter on the Republican side in the withdrawal column. Democratic Senators Joe Biden, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Chris Dodd, head of the Banking Committee, have already withdrawn.

Withdrawals have a cumulative effect, both forcing onetime middle tier candidates into the bottom tier and making withdrawals more socially acceptable and politically predictable.