Friday deluge

No time, so here's a quick dump.

• Some would-be slots parlor owers donated to Rendell near the end of the year. Look for more of this as gambling gets more widely established. All in good fun, of course.
  
  
• Also related to gaming, two license applications have been rejected in Harrisburg even before the final selection, based on insufficient evidence of funds. One was in the Lancaster area and the other in Pittsburgh; there are 22 remaining contenders for 14 eventual licenses. Yawn.
  
  
• Philly Mayor Street calls for a new anti-crime initiative, dubbing it "Safer Streets" (to follow on the original Safe Streets program): Inquirer and DN stories. He hopes, in part, to involve religious institutions in encouraging nonviolent solutions to conflict.
  
  
• Philadelphia's anti-smoking hopes, considered on ice, may be revived by Councilwoman Tasco's reintroduction of a bill similar to the one that Nutter and Street have been griping about -- Inquirer and DN stories. Perhaps the political egos will be sidestepped by this "neutral" sponsorship of the measure.
  
  
• Pennsylvania and New Jersey are among a number of states looking ahead to an October deadline for moving welfare recipients into job training and other programs, due to the budget slashes just passed by Congress. If they fail, they lose a big chunk of federal block grants targeted at the poor, doubly penalizing those already on the losing end of the economy.
  
  
• In the GOP gubernatorial primary race, Lynn Swann just picked up Bucks County, coming closer to guaranteeing that he'll get the official party endorsement next week.
  
  
• A group of smaller PA political parties argue that election regulations discriminate against them. They need close to 30 times as many petitions to get on the ballot this fall as do major party candidates. heh, another thing to blame Casey for, heh.
  
  
• I don't know why these three strike me as a group, but there it is:
  
  
  
  1. Philadelphia's new City Controller promised to make financial reports for major candidates publically available, and he has dutifully posted them on the web.
     
     
  2. Camden, long-suffering its designation of Most Dangerous City, answers back with a 29% drop in homicides. take that, Philadelphia!
     
     
  3. Florence Cohen takes "the people's paper" to task for supporting Street's suggestion to roll back scheduled tax cuts for Philadelphia's poorest workers. And rightly so.