It’s not law yet, however. The State Senate still has to pass the bill before Gov. Rendell, an announced supporter of the wage increase, gets to sign it. Be sure to remind your State Senator to help pass HB 257 when it comes up for a vote soon.

When enacted, the new rates would make Pennsylvania the 20th state to set its minimum wage above the federal level.

Young burger-flipper exception: The bill as passed allows employers to pay newly hired teenagers a “training wage” of $5.15/hr for two months. And to protect the integrity of this exception, it forbids employers from firing regular employees just to substitute them with low-paid trainees.

Several Republican members of the Appropriations Committe who had voted against the bill in committee, switched and voted in favor of it when it reached the Assembly floor. Shades of the Kerry campaign: They voted against the minimum wage, before they voted for it!

Companion legislation, a bill to set future automatic COLAs (cost-of-living adjustments), didn’t make it out of committee. Without COLAs, expect the struggle to re-emerge in several years as inflation nibbles away at the new wage rates.

Other legislative news: As he had publicly pledged, Gov. Rendell last month vetoed the anti-voter bill. Under that law, passed with strong Republican backing, Pennsylvania voters could be turned away at the polls if they failed to bring proper identification. It would have replaced the current system in which voters sign a registry and have their signature compared to an older version already on file.

The Bill, sponsored by a whopping 87 Assemblymen, would help pull low-wage workers above the federal poverty level, raising the hourly rate to $6.25 this year and $7.15 in 2007, with annual cost-of-living raises thereafter.

Rep. Mark Cohen, a leading advocate of the bill and House Democratic Caucus Chairman, says he expects the Dems will make motions to bring the legislation up again next week. He calls Feese’s actions –moving to reconsider the bill and then accepting his own motion, all done after the Committee had adjourned– “an unprecedented parliamentary trick.”

Take action:
• Contact Brett Feese (717-787-5270 email), urging him to report the bill to the full Assembly for a final vote.
• Contact your own State Assemblyman to enlist support.

The winner of the May 16 primary will face NeoCon Rick Santorum in the general election next November.

According to the AP report,

He believes such a mandate is unconstitutional and would disenfranchise some of the state’s most vulnerable residents. People including nursing home residents and poorer citizens might not have proper ID and thus could lose their right to vote under the legislation, Rendell said.

“At a time in our nation’s history when voter participation is dropping to alarming levels, the government should not be taking action that will turn away bona fide voters from our polls.”

This from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Seated in front of a dozen of the city’s African American leaders, Democrats all, Rendell said at a news conference that House Bill 1318 would have the effect of denying some people their right to vote.

The legislation, he said, would discourage voting at a time when “we should be doing everything we can to increase voter participation.”

Meanwhile, Lynn Swann, Rendell’s likely Republican opponent next election, seems worried that without the new law not enough Democrats will be turned away from the polls. “The idea that presenting a form of identification would somehow disenfranchise people is as ridiculous as it is untrue,” his campaign dissembled.

The governor’s website lists 22 organizations urging a veto of House Bill 1318. Still to come: Even though passed by the legislature last Wednesday, the bill has yet to cross the governor’s desk allowing his formal veto.

The legislation, if signed by Gov. Ed Rendell, will make for longer, slower lines at the polls. Expect angry scenes as voters, accustomed to the current convenience of the matching-signature rule, get turned away due to the new technicalities. Y’know, voting’s becoming too much of a hassle. I’m gonna just stay home. Tuesday nights … American Idol’s on at 8.

Or maybe I’ll tell the Governor that erecting barriers to voting is bad law, and he should veto H.B. 1318. These two sites have lists of ways to contact him: first and second.

State Rep. Babette Josephs of Philadelphia is a vocal critic of the bill, for both the damage it will do as well as the needed electoral reforms is fails to address. She says,

I am working on real problems that have occurred in recent elections: unworkable statutory deadlines which led to military ballots being received too late to be counted; long lines at polling places; widespread intimidation of minority voters; coordinated efforts to mislead voters as to the date of the election or the location of polling places, and phony voter registration drives where registrations of one party were discarded.

The new rate, a pitiful $7.15/hr, is a substantial hike from the current $5.15 and is in line with new rates in New York and New Jersey. Blocking the bill from consideration is a way for the Republicans to maintain the current wage rate without members actually going on record as voting against the hike.

Two House Republicans defected from their party by voting in favor of considering the bill. In a message to supporters, Democratic House leaders Mike Veon and Mark Cohen say they see this move as a small but significant change; only ten more defectors will give the Dems the majority they need to finally bring the bill to an up-or-down vote. A number of Republicans have quietly assured constituents that they support the wage hike.

What you can do to help:

• Call your Republican Assemblyperson and urge their support for the (barely) livable new wage rate.

• If you’re in a Democratic district, you can contact Republican Rep. Brett Feese, chair of the Appropriations Committee, urging a floor vote.

Not sure who your Assemblyperson is? Use the “Find Members By” search block at the Pennsylvania General Assembly home page.

Rep. Mark Cohen, sponsor of the bill, is the son of recently deceased Philadelphia City Councilman-at-Large David Cohen, a long-time supporter of workers’ issues.

A good place to start in Philadelphia is the position of Ward Committee Member– no experience is required, and there are almost 7,000 openings!

Here’s how it works: The City has 66 Wards which are divided into a total of 1681 Divisions– what are often called Precincts in other jurisdictions. Your Division is your immediate neighborhood. Each Division has just a single polling place (sometimes shared with neighboring Divisions), and the Democrats and Republicans can each have two Committee Members serving a few hundred voters registered in the party.

Committee Members actively support party causes and candidates for higher offices. They’re the link between the neighborhood and the larger political world and have some say in selecting local party leadership. Committee Members often help neighbors interact with City bureaucracies– it’s the essence of retail politics.

All Committee Members are chosen in the May Primary. To run, you must be 18+ and registered in the party. You’ll need signatures of 10 supporters (call 215-686-3460 for forms), collected between Valentine’s Day and March 7. Now’s the time to get moving. Make a difference!

Other offices up for grabs this spring: State Committee Member (100 signatures required) and State Assembly Representative (300). Call 717-787-5280 for forms.

No vacancies? Note that none of the current State Assemblymen from Philadelphia have said that they won’t be running again.

The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled, but that they aren’t on the list for the new program. More than two dozen states have taken emergency action.

At first, federal officials were oblivious. “This is going very well,” a Medicare spokesman declared a few days into the disaster. Then officials started making excuses. Some conservatives even insist that the debacle vindicates their ideology: see, government can’t do anything right.

But government works when it’s run by people who take public policy seriously. As Jonathan Cohn points out in The New Republic, when Medicare began 40 years ago, things went remarkably smoothly from the start. But this time the people putting together a new federal program had one foot out the revolving door: this was a drug bill written by and for lobbyists.

…

Mr. Scully had good reasons not to let anything stand in the way of the drug bill. He had received a special ethics waiver from his superiors allowing him to negotiate for future jobs with lobbying and investment firms – firms that had a strong financial stake in the form of the bill – while still in public office. He left public service, if that’s what it was, almost as soon as the bill was passed, and is once again a lobbyist, now for drug companies.

Meanwhile, Representative Billy Tauzin, the bill’s point man on Capitol Hill, quickly left Congress once the bill was passed to become president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the powerful drug industry lobby.

Go read the entire thing over at Eschaton. Krugman wonderfully ties together the threads of this debacle and the political machine that is at the center of the Abramoff and Delay scandals. He concludes with an important question.

So I have a question for my colleagues in the news media: Why isn’t the decision by the White House to stonewall on the largest corruption scandal since Warren Harding considered major news?

“Not only has Rick Santorum accepted more money from lobbyists than any other senator this election cycle, he is also the leader of the notorious K Street Project,” wrote Jay Reiff, Campaign Manager for Casey.

The K Street Project is the nefarious Tom Delay/Jack Abramoff plan to place “their hand picked Republican friends into the very lobbying firms that Santorum is now being asked to regulate. The K Street Project and Santorum’s selection to lead ethics reform are indicative of an arrogance of power in Washington that needs to change.”

Meanwhile, the Casey people have mounted a petition drive against the selection of Santorum.

I wish this was surprising. I wish this still made me angry. I wish things were different, but this is George Bush’s America we live in and there’s only one thing the Republican leadership cares about: fealty to their corporate overlords.

The AP says:

The House voted to encourage U.S. oil companies to build new refineries Friday in a raucous roll call that Republican leaders extended 40 minutes while they buttonholed their own members to avoid an embarrassing defeat.

Democrats crying ”shame, shame” — and some GOP moderates — called the bill a sop to rich oil companies that would do nothing to ease energy costs including expected soaring heating bills this winter.

ThinkProgress has the video. I’m not a big Pelosi fan, but she’s been handling things well recently.

I know some of you are probably tired of the recent trend of all politics all the time here. So here are some links that I check out when I’m trying to get away from the pain of reality.

• Phil Sheridan’s Q&A Forum
• del.icio.us/popular
• Gizmodo
• memepool.com