Free Republic

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on Tuesday reinstated the Gov. Tom Wolf administration mandate requiring students, teachers and staff to wear face masks. The action is temporary, with the court scheduled to hear arguments on the matter on Dec. 8 and decides its fate. The court noted it has taken no position; one justice disagreed with reinstating the mandate. Acting state Secretary of Health Alison Beam, at the direction of the governor, had imposed the state-wide mandate at the start of the school year after most school districts failed to adopt policies mandating masks at the start of the school...

Gov. Tom Wolf highlights maternal health while UPMC Magee-Women's Hospital's long history of horrific experimentation on sometimes live aborted babies goes uninvestigated.Last Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services announced it is joining with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Magee-Women’s Hospital (Magee) to showcase efforts by Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration to improve maternal health services. In doing so, the governor is ignoring serious ethical and legal questions regarding the state’s largest hospital abortion provider’s role in fetal experimentation.I left UPMC in April after reading about a taxpayer-funded study published last year in which the scalps of second-trimester babies obtained...

There is a new date for the end of Pennsylvania’s school mask mandate, and it is Dec. 4. In a follow-up opinion issued Tuesday, Commonwealth Court Judge Christine Fizzano Cannon ordered the end of the mandate effective Dec. 4. Cannon’s order reversed an earlier stay that would have kept the school masking mandate in place as long as Gov. Tom Wolf’s appeal of the court’s initial Nov. 10 order lifting its mask rule was on appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The appeal is still pending before the high court, but plaintiffs in the case had asked for the automatic...

Gov. Tom Wolf apologized on Tuesday for his “honest mistake” in asking his wife to deliver his mail-in ballot for the Nov. 2 election. In a morning interview on the same KDKA radio show where he admitted to a violation of an election law two weeks ago, Wolf apologized. “I’m sorry. I did it. It was an honest mistake,” Wolf said. “But yeah, it was. I guess they say ignorance of the law is no defense, but I’m sorry, I apologize” Wolf admitted he asked his wife Frances to drop off his ballot. “It was my idea. She said I’m...

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) intends to allow school districts to modify or end mask mandates for K-12 students starting on Jan. 17. Wolf’s administration imposed a statewide mask mandate in September, citing the surge of infections and hospitalizations from the highly contagious delta variant of the novel virus, according to the Associated Press. “Now, we are in a different place than we were in September, and it is time to prepare for a transition back to a more normal setting,” Wolf said in a statement on Monday.

In an interview last week, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf said his wife dropped off his Election Day ballot. It is illegal for a person to submit another person's ballot in most circumstances in Pennsylvania. A spokesperson for Wolf said it was an "honest mistake." Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf in an interview last week said his wife dropped off his ballot for him ahead of Election Day, which is illegal and carries possible jail time and a fine. "I didn't show up in person at the polls. We voted a couple weeks ago, actually," Wolf said during an appearance on the...

HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Wolf on Tuesday revealed his wife, First Lady Frances Wolf, dropped his mail ballot off for him, a violation of Pennsylvania election law. State law currently prohibits, in most cases, anyone other than the voter from returning a mail ballot, an act punishable by up to one year in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both. On the “KDKA Radio Morning Show,” host Kevin Battle asked Wolf if he visited the polls to vote in person during Tuesday’s municipal election. “I didn’t show up in person at the polls. We voted a couple weeks...

Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration’s COVID-19 vaccine incentive program launched on Monday has drawn mixed reactions across state government. While the 72,000 commonwealth employees who work under the governor’s jurisdiction now eligible for up to five paid days off or a lump sum equivalent if they get vaccinated by Dec. 31, many government workers who work outside those agencies will not be given the same enticement to get their shots. Neither the Senate chamber nor the House Republicans plan to offer anything similar at this time, spokesmen said. A spokeswoman for the Office of Attorney General said her agency doesn’t plan...

Pennsylvania’s experience with private election grants should be evidence enough for lawmakers across the country to regulate their use.Despite widespread allegations of fraud after the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, I feel confident that fraudulent votes did not decide the election’s outcome. On the other hand, I can say with confidence that the election in my home state was not conducted fairly.Through a series of open records requests, Broad + Liberty, a media outlet I helped found, discovered that the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) targeted counties that vote Democrat with their election grants. Not only that, but...

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Schools across Pennsylvania are still dealing with the low rate of vaccinations for young children, which has increased the need for masks in the classroom. According to Gov. Tom Wolf, getting vaccine shots into the arms of school-aged children remains a roadblock in lifting the mask mandate in schools across Pennsylvania. "I think the key is not so much the date as when the vaccine becomes available to all school children and how fast we can get them vaccinated," Wolf said. The governor's mask mandate went into effect in early September. However, Wolf said he initially planned...

Amid some encouraging news that Pennsylvania’s rate of new COVID-19 cases appears to be leveling off, Gov. Tom Wolf on Wednesday once again drew attention to persistent COVID-19 related health disparities among minority communities. Wolf used the backdrop of one of the region’s largest providers of health care to impoverished communities to once again urge ethnic and racial minorities to get vaccinated. “This is a sales pitch,” said Wolf during a press conference held at the Hamilton Health Center in Harrisburg. The center provides care for more than 20,000 underserved central Pennsylvania residents, the majority of them Black or Latino....

Pennsylvania School administrators are trapped in the middle of the school mask debate and need better communication from the state Department of Health. That was the testimony Thursday during a hearing of the Senate Education Committee that explored the impact of the Department of Health’s order requiring masking of students and children at schools and daycare centers. “Have you ever tried to put a mask on a 2-year-old and have them wear it all day? How about 10-minutes without them touching it? Often times bodily fluids from their nose and mouth soak the mask and it ends up being a...

Former York County state Senator Scott Wagner, never gentle about his politics, is getting some national attention for his latest visual haymaker: A set of highway billboards showing a gun-toting President Joe Biden dressed as an Afghan fighter, beside the slogan “Making the Taliban Great Again!” The billboards, Wagner told WGAL News 8 and the York Daily Record this week, are his way of expressing frustration and anger at America’s rushed withdrawal from its 20-year invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, with the forces of the reactionary Islamic Taliban -whom American-led coalition forces pushed out of power in 2001 - rushing...

Pennsylvania is in the midst of a political civil war over whether or not to hold an election audit.If the Democrats have nothing to hide, why not let those silly Republicans chase their tails?After some heated debate, Pennsylvania’s Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee voted along party lines Wednesday, 7-4, to issue subpoenas to acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid. The move requires her office to provide a cache of recent election information. Democrats are hoping to block the subpoenas in court.“It has been made plain that the Department of State and acting Secretary of State Degraffenreid are not willing to participate...

The state of Pennsylvania is preparing pages of subpoenas related to the 2020 Election. These subpoenas will be voted on tomorrow. The Senate in the state of Pennsylvania is voting on subpoenas related to an effort to get to the bottom of the irregularities in the 2020 Election in that state. A Republican-controlled state Senate panel looking into alleged irregularities in the commonwealth’s elections will meet on Wednesday morning in Harrisburg to vote on whether to slap the Pennsylvania Department of State with subpoenas after the agency took a pass on the panel’s opening meeting last week. The Senate Intergovernmental...

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) on Tuesday made it clear he is inviting Afghan migrants to his state with open arms amid concerns of measles outbreaks and terrorist sympathizers being among them as others commit visa fraud. “Pennsylvania stands ready as a safe, welcoming place for those who seek refuge in the United States. To the Afghan evacuees who just arrived: Welcome home,” Wolf said, retweeting another grand welcome from the Keystone State’s official Twitter account, which declared in all caps that “ALL ARE WELCOME HERE”

The debate over requiring Pennsylvania school children to wear masks in schools and childcare centers continued Tuesday in Harrisburg with a letter from the House Health Committee, challenging Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam’s authority to order masks in schools. In late August, Democrat Governor Tom Wolf asked the General Assembly to return to Harrisburg and pass a mandate requiring all schools and childcare centers to make children wear masks to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. The Republican-led General Assembly leadership refused. Within days, Beam issued an order requiring masks to be worn inside K-12 school buildings, early learning programs, and...

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Gov. Tom Wolf held a news conference Wednesday afternoon at Hancock Elementary School in the Norristown Area School District about getting back to school safely amid the COVID-19 pandemic. "Back to school is an exciting time as many of our teachers and students return to the classroom fulltime," said Gov. Wolf in a prepared statement. "Our goal this year is not just to start the year with kids in school, but to keep them in school all year long. Research shows that learning in a classroom is important, because many students learn better in a classroom. "But...

If he hadn’t already with most people, I think it’s safe to say that with his new mask mandate for kids in schools and day care, Gov. Tom Wolf has finally worn out his welcome as Pennsylvania’s chief executive with the state’s residents. He’s been in over his head for years, and the last 18 months have made that situation painfully clear to anyone with the willingness to look beyond partisan politics and the fear machine created by those who have crippled this state, this nation and the entire world because they, themselves, are afraid – irrationally afraid – of...

After a summer of angry school board debates over mandatory masking at schools, Gov. Tom Wolf stepped up and took the heat himself Tuesday, defending his administration’s new order - and the about-face it took to issue it - to make masking mandatory for all students and staff at all Pennsylvania schools effective Sept. 7. The order by Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam, Wolf said, comes in the face of a new wave of COVID-19 cases, driven by the Delta variant and a huge population of school children who aren’t even eligible for vaccinations yet. In Pennsylvania, the two-week...