The people of Braddock are fighting to save their hospital from the wrecker’s ball. UPMC, an $8 billion dollar corporation, wants to demolish the Braddock Hospital while building hospitals in wealthy areas. With the help of single payer advocates, Braddock is fighting back with daily vigils at the hospital to stop the demolition.

Originally posted at PoliZeros.

I went to a protest in Philadelphia this past Saturday, and it was more disheartening than anything else. It was against the wars and various other injustices, with a special focus on he recent FBI raids of peace activists and Pennsylvania Homeland Security spying on innocent civilians and activists.

By the end of it, I kind of just felt like going up to the megaphone and asking, “How much moral outrage can one person muster? There are more people handing out fliers here than not, and with this country committing so many disgusting, outrageous acts, I don’t blame you.” I won’t lie, I handed a few out myself. Yet the contrast between the righteous causes featured in the speeches and on the signs and on the fliers and the, as a fellow protester said to me, “complete lack of solidarity” was striking.

By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

A few maps of Pennsylvania’s presidential elections are posted below, for your enjoyment. Each map comes with some brief analysis. Note how in each succeeding election, Democratic margins in the Philadelphia metropolis increase, while their margins in the Pittsburgh corridor decrease.

(Note: Because the Times stopped updating before all absentee/provisional ballots were counted, this map does not fully reflect the actual results. I have corrected the discrepancy.)

After months of intense debate over the Obama administration’s efforts to revamp our immigration system, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has made a decisive, though piecemeal, move on immigration reform by adding the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act as an amendment to the defense authorization bill.

Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures provided in the United States due in large part to the skill and expertise of abortion providers who offer high-quality care. Steven Brigham is not one of these providers.

Written by Vicki Saporta for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

This is the seventh in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country.

I’ve been gone all summer – traveling, gardening, volunteering a bit, and doing some other things – and as much as I had a lot of fun, it is nice to be back. In all that time, some interesting things have happened with what I consider to be one of the better Green campaigns in the nation this year, and one that I’m very involved with, Hugh Giordano’s campaign for state legislature as a Green.

In case you don’t know who Hugh is, he’s a 25 year old union organizer running as a Green in PA’s 194th district, which is mostly in Philadelphia and also a bit in Montgomery County (for locals, it encompasses Roxborough, Manayunk, parts of Lower Merion, and some surrounding areas). He’s been running a great campaign, knocking on doors, holding fun fundraisers, getting in the newspaper, and raising as much money as a typical Green congressional candidate.

Anyway, below the fold is some news from the campaign, including an endorsement from a fairly prominent local Democrat.

The Town That Was

This is the last part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Pennsylvania. The previous parts can be found here.

Conclusions

For many decades, Pennsylvania constituted model of Democratic strength based upon working-class votes. Today that is changing, especially in the southwest. For the moment, nevertheless, the swing state Pennsylvania remains Democratic-leaning. This is more because of an unusually strong Democratic machine than any natural liberalism in Pennsylvania.

This is the fifth part of an analysis of the swing state Pennsylvania. It focuses on the traditionally Republican region between the Democratic strongholds in the southeast and southwest. The last part can be found here.

Pennsyltucky