David Spett’s Blog

HARRISBURG (Oct. 9) - Amid this week’s Bonusgate hearings and the wrangling over rate caps, health insurance, nurses’ overtime and other hot-button issues, three bipartisan bills passing the House and Senate and receiving the governor’s signature with less fanfare will regulate the massage therapy industry, improve air quality and transform procedures for local disaster relief.

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HARRISBURG (Oct. 8 ) - The House and Senate passed an amended energy bill Wednesday afternoon that will change the way electric utilities buy power and impose new energy conservation regulations. Gov. Ed Rendell has pledged to sign the measure.

“We have put a tremendous amount of time into making this bill good for ratepayers and good for Pennsylvania, but our job is not finished,” said Sen. Lisa Boscola, D-Northampton.

The unfinished work she mentioned deals with electric rate caps, which are set to be phased out in 2010 and 2011. As recently as Tuesday evening, Boscola and other senators were trying to introduce amendments to the bill, House Bill 2200, that would either continue the rate caps or phase them out more gradually.

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HARRISBURG (Oct. 8 ) - House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Greene, shot back at his former chief of staff, Michael Manzo, late Wednesday afternoon, calling Manzo’s remarks “absolutely false” just hours after Manzo testified in court that DeWeese knew Democratic legislative staff received illegal taxpayer-funded bonuses for conducting campaign work.

“He [Manzo] has lied to his wife, he’s lied to his girlfriend, he’s lied to investigators, he’s lied to me,” DeWeese said. “His motives are suspect and his opinions are just not credible.”

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HARRISBURG (Oct. 6) - Pennsylvania’s business climate is only average, and the state ought to do better, according to a report released Thursday from the Pennsylvania Business Council.

The organization, which represents commercial interests in the state, has released a study that gives Pennsylvania a letter grade of “C” for its business climate, compared to those of other states.

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HARRISBURG (Oct. 2) - “Blatant demagoguery” by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has increased his lead in recent polls, Colonel Tom Moe said Thursday morning at the Republican Party’s state headquarters in Harrisburg.

The demagoguery could lead to an event as serious as the Holocaust, he said.

A Republican campaign surrogate, Moe was imprisoned with John McCain, now the Republican presidential nominee, in Hanoi, North Vietnam. The two lived in cells about ten feet from one another, Moe said.

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Among the millions of Americans watching Friday’s first presidential debate will be 2,000 with cell phone or computer mouse in hand.

Those viewers are part of a new system that embraces text messages and Web questions as a way of polling voters on the fly. Traditional polls are conducted by telephone interviews.

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MIDDLETOWN TOWNSHIP, Delaware County | Joe Biden came out swinging here Tuesday, blasting Republican presidential nominee John McCain for being “profoundly out of touch” with a middle class increasingly under siege.

The Democratic vice presidential nominee accused McCain of abandoning his maverick streak in favor of parroting the Bush administration line on issues ranging from the economy to health care and the Iraq war.

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After years of debate, Pennsylvania will establish new standards for assisted-living centers next year, but just how strong those rules will be is an open question.

Two opposing forces - consumer groups and the assisted-living industry - are wrangling over details such as staff training, room sizes and wheelchair accessibility in hopes of swaying state regulators.

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HARRISBURG - Federal highway regulators on Thursday shot down Pennsylvania’s application to turn Interstate 80 into a toll road, dealing a serious blow to the state’s efforts to raise billions of dollars for badly needed highway repairs and cash-strapped mass transit agencies.

After months of review, officials at the Federal Highway Administration rejected the state’s application to convert the 310-mile highway into a toll road because it doesn’t meet the technical requirements of a federal pilot program authorizing such tolls.

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LANCASTER | Seventy-five hundred people crammed into a gymnasium on the campus of Franklin & Marshall College today to get an up-close look at Palin and GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

The speeches, first from Palin and then McCain, were similar to others the duo has given in the week since the Republican convention.

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(Photo courtesy Don Fisher/Morning Call)