In Harrisburg, a lame-duck Gov. Rendell fails to achieve much of his progressive agenda. An inert legislature can't finish elements of a budget due last July (new gambling to provide new revenues), and its leaders seem to serve only as fodder for prosecutors looking to bigger careers. Think former U.S. Attorney/congressional candidate Pat Meehan and state Attorney General /gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett. (And, perhaps you noticed, prosecutors were just elected governors of New Jersey and Virginia.)
In Philly, Mayor Nutter, elected to bring the city "a new day, a new way," is mired in the same old union/pension/budget woes. This week he told the Daily News that he hears lots about his "tough job at the worst possible time."
Meanwhile, attempts at solutions draw examples of intervention by special interests.
The New York Times reports that lobbyists for the biotechnology firm Genentech got 42 members of Congress - 22 Republicans, 20 Democrats, including Philly Democrat Bob Brady - to put company health-care talking points into the Congressional Record.
This isn't unusual, illegal or restricted to Washington. Back in 1989, Philly Republican John Perzel (perhaps you've heard of him) got caught submitting an auto-insurance-reform proposal that he claimed was his that turned out to be a word-for-word plan from lobbyists for the state trial bar.
The Rendell administration this week announced layoffs of 300-plus state workers, bringing the total this year to 769. The same year that lobbyists for gaming, natural gas and tobacco spent $4.5 million, according to the Inky, to expand gambling, prevent a natural-gas-extraction tax and stop a tax on smokeless tobacco.
Are we ungovernable? I think Pennsylvania's hopeless. Nationally, I have my doubts.
