Tag: pennsylvania

Terminally Ill Patients Would Be Able To Use Medical Marijuana In Pennsylvania Hospitals Under New Bipartisan Bill

Bipartisan Pennsylvania senators have introduced a bill that would allow terminally ill patients to use of medical marijuana in hospitals.

Similar to a law previously enacted in California, the Pennsylvania legislation from Sen. John Kane (D) and 17 bipartisan cosponsors aims to ensure that cannabis patients with severe illnesses such as cancer retain access to regulated products as an alternative treatment option.

“Hospitals are incredible places where patients receive top notch care,” Kane wrote in a cosponsorship memo in August. “They need guidance and legal protections to provide terminally ill patients with options to manage pain, while providing settings that support family and friends who are saying goodbye to a loved one.”

The policy that’s being proposed in the bill filed on Friday is known as “Ryan’s law,” a reference to Ryan Bartell, a cancer patient who inspired the legislation.

“During his treatments in California the hospital provided him with opioid medications that caused him to be sedated and unable to interact with family and friends,” Kane said. “Ryan and his family wanted to ensure that his remaining days could be filled with visits from his loved ones. So, Ryan moved to a hospital in the State of Washington where he used medical marijuana to manage his pain effectively and allow him to stay awake and alert to spend time with family and friends during hospital visits.”

“Ryan’s law would allow terminally ill patients to use non-smoking forms of medical marijuana in Pennsylvania hospitals,” he said. “Right now, the use of medical marijuana in hospitals is a gray area due to marijuana being a Scheduled I Narcotic, while also being legal for medicinal purposes in Pennsylvania.”

The four-page bill would amend the state’s existing medical cannabis law to make it so terminally ill patients can use non-smokeable marijuana products at hospitals, create storage requirements for the medicine and require health facilities to develop guidelines about the regulated use of cannabis for qualifying patients.

It also stipulates that a “health care facility is not required to provide a patient with a recommendation to use medical marijuana in compliance with this act or include medical marijuana in a patient’s discharge plan.”

Additionally, the measure says that, if the federal government initiates enforcement actions against a hospital regarding the cannabis policy or issues rules expressly prohibiting the medical marijuana allowance, the health facility is empowered to suspend the practice.

However, the proposed law “shall not be construed to permit a health care facility to prohibit patient use of medical marijuana due solely to the fact that cannabis is a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act or other Federal constraints on the use of medical marijuana that were in existence prior to the effective date of this paragraph,” it says.

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Report: PA Dem House Candidate Funneled Money Meant to Help Recovering Opioid Addicts to Bring Kids ‘LGBTQ+ Youth’ Center Offering ‘Medical Transition’ Seminars

According to a disturbing report from the Washington Free Beacon,  Democratic House candidate in Pennsylvania, Bob Harvie, funneled money away meant to help recovering opioid addicts and instead sent them to push an LGBTQ agenda.

According to the report, the funds went to transport minors to an “LGBTQ-youth” center that offers “medical transition” seminars for kids as young as 14.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Bucks County, Pa., Board of Commissioners, which Harvie chairs, approved a $13,500-grant in December to Planned Parenthood Keystone for “Expanding Services and Transportation” to the Rainbow Room, a local center that caters to gay and trans youth. The grant was used to transport high school students to Rainbow Room functions, the Delaware Valley Journal reported earlier this year. Its funding came from the county’s Opioid Settlement Fund, which is due to receive $70 million from drug distributors and pharmacy chains over the next 18 years.

Rainbow Room functions include seminars like “SEX ED NIGHT / M*STURB*TION,” which the center held in May 2024. A pamphlet advertising the event shows a photo of a woman’s hand massaging a watermelon designed to represent the female anatomy. In 2023, the Rainbow Room hosted a “Queer Prom,” where attendees as young as 13 were given goody bags with condoms, lubricant, and dental dams, used to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases during oral sex.

Earlier this week, meanwhile, the center held a “translating transition” seminar meant to teach kids as young as 14 “the basics of transgender identities, social transition, medical transition, and more!” In 2020, it hosted representatives of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Gender Clinic to discuss “transition issues for trans kids.” The hospital has faced intense scrutiny for providing hormone treatments like puberty blockers to young trans children, and for performing “gender-reassignment” procedures, more commonly known as sex-change operations.

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PA Governor Shapiro Says Kamala Harris ‘Is Going to Have to Answer’ for Covering Up Joe Biden’s Rapidly Declining Health

“Loyal” Kamala Harris, who hinted that Joe Biden was racist when she first threw her hat in the presidential race, slammed Biden in her new book and also discussed why she kept quiet about Joe’s obvious, rapidly declining health.

In an excerpt obtained by The Atlantic from her upcoming memoir, ‘107 Days,’ Harris calls Biden’s decision to run for a second term ‘reckless’ and says it should not have been “left to an individual’s ego” or “ambition.”

Writing about her decision not to try to convince Biden to drop out, Harris writes, “’It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness?”

“In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high.”

“This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

He typical word salad was not enough for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) who said Harris “is going to have to answer” for being honest with the American people and letting the public know about Biden’s fitness to serve in the White House again.

Shapiro joined Stephen A. Smith on Thursday.

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91-Year-Old Pennsylvania Woman With Dementia Loses $247,000 Home Over a $14,000 Tax Debt

In yet another example of what is colloquially known as home equity theft, a 91-year-old Pennsylvania woman has lost her home—and all of its worth—over a small tax debt. But the case just outside of Philadelphia is a particularly vivid illustration of a predatory and gruesome practice that the Supreme Court broadly ruled unconstitutional in 2023.

In 2020, Gloria Gaynor (not the disco queen) forewent her yearly trip to the tax office during COVID-19, recounted Jackie Davis, her daughter, to the local ABC affiliate for its excellent report on the story. Gaynor’s faculties noticeably declined around then, according to Davis. Even still, the Upper Darby resident returned in 2021 to pay her property taxes, her attorney said, under the impression that the pause in enforcement meant the government would apply her money toward the previous year. Instead, it went to 2021, and her debt from 2020 remained intact.

As these things go, it continued to grow. Her $3,500 bill ultimately reached $14,419 with penalties, interest, and fees. The government sold that debt to a real estate firm, the CJD Group, which then acquired the deed to the home.

The rub is that the home is worth over 17 times that. Yet Gaynor—who had nearly paid off the mortgage—will not see a dime in equity, despite that she owed the government $232,000 less than what the home is ultimately worth.

Regular Reason readers may be familiar with Tyler v. Hennepin County, the 2023 Supreme Court case that ruled home equity theft illegal. The plaintiff, 94-year-old Geraldine Tyler, fell behind on her property taxes after some unsettling neighborhood incidents prompted her move from her Minneapolis condominium to a retirement home. She subsequently struggled to pay both her rent and her property taxes. So the local government seized the condo, sold it for $40,000, and kept the $25,000 in excess of her tax debt, which included steep penalties, interest, and fees.

“A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. “The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.”

It was a good decision. But Gaynor’s plight highlights one way governments are getting around it: by selling properties for the value of the debt—instead of putting it on the market or selling it at auction—so that there is no excess equity to speak of.

That doesn’t mean, of course, the equity doesn’t exist. It does. It is just now in the hands of a private company, as opposed to the elderly woman who spent the last 25 or so years paying off the mortgage, and nearly finishing.

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Pennsylvania Mayor Sparks Outrage After Saying He Is ‘Glad’ Charlie Kirk Is Dead

Bernville, Pennsylvania Mayor Shawn Raup-Konsavage (D) sparked outrage after posting on social media that he is “glad” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is dead.

“This is what MAGA represents, This is what Trump lowered flags for. If this represents you then I don’t want to hear that you are offended that I’m glad he is gone,” the Bernville mayor posted.

This is not the first time that the mayor has enflamed controversy.

After the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, he posted, “Try harder.”

“That Trump post that he had posted, there was a lot of controversy with that in this town, a lot of hatred towards him after that,” Mark Rodriguez, a Bernville resident, said.

“Me, I really don’t care honestly, but it’s sad when everybody judges this man based on his opinion. He’s done great things for this town; he’s helped a lot and with all this going on it seems like he just shelters himself now,” Rodriguez continued.

Wayne Lesher, the Bernville council vice president, said, “He said what he wanted to on his own Facebook page which is freedom of speech and all that, but I certainly don’t agree with it and I think what he said was terrible. You’re celebrating the death of somebody; that’s nothing to celebrate.”

“It does have consequences. Several people have lost their jobs because of what they said, and you have freedom of speech to say what you want but you can pay for it too,” Lesher continued.

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Man who killed 3 officers in York County was camouflaged, shooting from cornfield: report

New developments surrounding the shooter who killed three police officers reveal he allegedly ambushed officers from a nearby cornfield, according to a report from CNN.

Officials state three police officers were shot and killed while serving a warrant at a residence on the 1800 block of Haar Road Wednesday afternoon. Another two law enforcement officers were injured.

The shooter was reportedly the ex-boyfriend of a woman who lived in the farmhouse on the 1800 block of Haar Road, according to multiple law enforcement officials in communication with CNN.

The ex-girlfriend had previously alerted police about the shooter on Tuesday, saying that he was in a nearby cornfield stalking the residence, according to CNN. Northern York Police then got a search warrant and restraining order for him, but were unable to serve him on Tuesday night.

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Of Buggy Whips And AI Chips In PA

The buggy whip endures. Not, of course, as a commonly used piece of equipment to spur on a steed or two on your daily travels, but as a short-hand epithet deployed in conversations about the need to adapt or perish in the face of technological change and innovation.

“It’s really easy to see, in a big breakthrough, that the horse-and-buggy guys are going to go out of business,” said White House AI czar David Sacks at Sen. Dave McCormick’s historic AI and Energy Summit this past July in Pittsburgh. What wasn’t easy to see, said Sacks, was greater access to affordable housing in the suburbs, new jobs for auto workers and mechanics, and wholly new industries like F1.

Sacks’ comment is in line with how the buggy-whip metaphor has traditionally been used, since it was first entered into the common lexicon in the 1960s in a marketing textbook – as reference to one technology (the personal automobile) quickly subsuming another (the horse and buggy).

The record player, the cassette player, the VCR, the camcorder, the handheld radio, and the dashboard GPS system – buggy whips, all of them, as the home computer and the cell phone consolidated many individual components of consumer technology.

But there’s a problem with this metaphor, which stands on a surprisingly soft foundation of a just-so story about rapid change from horse to car, on two accounts – it ignores both the ongoing change in transportation more broadly (by not giving proper account to the mass adoption of passenger boating and rail in the late 1800s) and just why it was that the automotive industry was built up in Michigan and the Midwest in the early 1900s.

If artificial intelligence is truly going to be deployed at scale, it will be through adoption by everyday Americans and the industries they work in, demonstrating that technology can solve problems in the real world, overcoming the many frictions of daily life in key industries. And as Pennsylvania finds itself at the center of the data center construction boom, it’s worth re-examining the history of Detroit and the auto industry.

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DHS’s New Election Integrity Czar Has Receipts On Pennsylvania’s 2020 Fraud

Left-wing media outlets pounced this week to attack President Donald Trump’s new appointee for the Department of Homeland Security’s election-integrity czar.

Outlets including the Associated Press and ProPublica accused Heather Honey of being an “election denier” for the doubts she has cast over the 2020 election outcome.

However, Honey’s supporters pointed to the fact that she has the receipts to back up her skepticism—including evidence that Pennsylvania, a hotbed for vote fraud by many accounts, finished with 121,240 more votes than voters.

“Heather Honey’s work has never been refuted,” wrote Liz Harrington, Trump’s former campaign spokesperson. “She’s uncovered enough evidence to overturn the fraudulent 2020 election in multiple states.”

Trump could have clinched the election with Pennsylvania and Georgia—another hotly contested battleground state where questions over rampant fraud have yet to be fully resolved.

Left-wing activists, including Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, waged several lawfare attacks on Trump and his allies to ensure that previous efforts to investigate were punished.

Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani was sued for raising questions about the after-hours ballot counting at the Atlanta county’s State Farm Arena following video evidence suggesting that an election official had pulled cases of hidden ballots from beneath a table and scanned them multiple times.

Honey—who worked closely with Trump’s campaign lawyers such as Public Interest Legal Foundation chair Cleta Mitchell—played significant roles in the efforts to challenge Georgia’s final ballot count and the forensic audit of Arizona’s election, which uncovered widespread irregularities.

According to Mitchell, she confirmed more votes than voters in Michigan, as well.

“Her expertise is the study of systems to identify vulnerabilities that could be exploited by potential fraudsters and she was struck by what she saw in 2020 and started applying her expertise to research on election systems,” Mitchell wrote in a post defending Honey following the media smear attack.

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Democrat Lehigh County PA Commissioner Arrested at City Hall In Massive Multi-State Drug Bust

Lehigh County Commissioner and Bethlehem Right-to-Know Officer Zachary Cole-Borghi has been arrested as part of an expansive, three-year, multi-state drug ring investigation.

District Attorney Gavin Holihan revealed Friday, that a sweeping narcotics operation led to the arrest of 22 individuals, including Mr. Cole‑Borghi, reportedly nabbed Thursday, at his City Hall office by the Lehigh County Drug Task Force with assistance from the Bethlehem Police Department.

According to court documents, Cole‑Borghi faces charges of possession of one pound of marijuana with intent to deliver.

He has since posted bail and was released.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Authorities executed 26 search warrants and coordinated enforcement across Lehigh, Northampton, Montgomery counties, and even into New York, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

Daily Voice reported:

“The commissioner is one of more than 20 people charged in a case driven by Lehigh County’s 12th Investigating Grand Jury, which oversaw a probe spanning several years and involving federal, state, and local authorities.

The coordinated operation included arrests across Lehigh, Northampton, and Montgomery counties, as well as in New York, Illinois, and Wisconsin, the DA explained.

In total, investigators executed 26 search warrants, froze 283 financial and cryptocurrency accounts, and seized:

  • More than 2,000 pounds of marijuana
  • Large quantities of THC liquid, cocaine, and MDMA pills
  • Over $100,000 in cash
  • At least 25 firearms, including semi-automatic rifles and ghost guns

Two clandestine laboratories manufacturing illegal THC products were also dismantled by Pennsylvania State Police during the raids.”

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Appeals Court: Pa. mail-in ballots with misdated envelopes cannot be thrown out

A federal appeals court has ruled that Pennsylvania cannot reject mail-in ballots solely because the voter failed to write an accurate date on the ballot’s return envelope.

In a unanimous decision Tuesday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Pennsylvania cannot disqualify mail-in ballots solely because the return envelopes are missing or have incorrect dates.

The court ruled that enforcing this requirement imposes an unreasonable burden on voters’ Constitutional rights with little to no benefit in preventing fraud.

The three-judge panel, in a 55-page opinion, weighed Pennsylvania’s interest in enforcing the rule against the Constitutional right to vote. The judges concluded they “could not justify” throwing out ballots over date issues, a policy that has led to the rejection of thousands of ballots that were otherwise valid.

State law requires voters to add a date on the return envelope of their mail ballot. But many voters misunderstand the rule, either omitting the date or mistakenly writing something like their birthday instead.

GOP leaders insist the date mandate protects election integrity, and they have advocated for a strict reading of the law to disqualify ballots without proper dates. Yet, election officials have argued that the date serves no real purpose in verifying timeliness or eligibility.

The appeals court noted in its opinion that accepting ballots with missing or incorrect dates “will not interfere with fraud detection.”

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