DAILY GRINDER: Bill Would Allow Online Voter Registration

I'm registering to vote...and tumblring.
Senator Lloyd Smucker of Lancaster County, who, with a name like that, has to be good, has introduced a bill that’d allow state residents to register to vote online—and, if you can believe it, Smucker’s fellow Republicans seem to be on board. “Based on the experience in other states, online voter registration would save the Commonwealth and its counties a significant amount of money,” Erik Arneson, Sen. Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi’s spokesman, told PoliticsPa. The Department of State says the commonwealth is already working on plans to do this and Common Cause says with modern technology essentially taking on SkyNet-like powers, this idea is cool.
Mayor Nutter and other city officials will be at the groundbreaking of a new Fraternal Order of Police office at 11630 Carolina Road later on today. That’s up in Northeast Philly, in case you want to go check it out. It should be awesome.
Nutter will also announce today—along with Jay-Z—that Philadelphia will host the “Budweiser Made in America” music festival which is expected to garner support for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign bring 28 musical acts to Fairmount Park.
The publisher of the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer stepped down on Friday. He’ll stay at the company, though, as an adviser on digital strategies and advertising sales.
Here’s a Philly.com article with some sweet, sweet bicycle safety tips for bikers! Stuff like, “Don’t ride on the sidewalk” and “wear lights,” and “Use your arms when switching lanes” to keep in mind when you ride. Oddly, “Don’t go through red lights” is left off this list, probably because the writer knows no biker would ever, ever follow that rule.
This coming Friday is National Bike to Work Day, where the claim that Philadelphia is the most biked major city, per capita, is put to the test. Or not.
And speaking of which, why should there be a day to celebrate biking to work? That seems like something you either do or you don’t. Do people not understand there are bikes and you can use them to get places? Like…work?
Construction workers are expected to be back on the job today at the Goldtex Building, after the city lifted its stop-work order it’d placed there. The developers who own the site, brothers Matthrew and Michael Pestronk, have been fighting some of the city’s building unions for using non-union labor and were accused of hiring workers without business privilege licenses and other official documents. They presented the information to the city on Friday. The brothers are suing the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council, too, claiming intimidation. They have set up PhillyBully.com, a website dedicated to exposing the supposed union bullying of their projects in Philadelphia.
There will be a referendum on November’s ballot which will allow voters to decide on whether the city should establish an “independent body to regulate charges for water and sewer services.” The idea for the bill was passed 16-1 in Council, with Republican at-Large member Dennis O’Brien the only dissenter.
Some Pennsylvania residents are saying that the state’s health department isn’t doing a good job responding to their complaints about gas drilling causing health problems. Which is weird, because it was also recently reported that the health department hasn’t been getting too many complaints from residents.




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