Wows and Scowls
Scowl: As if state Sen. Vincent Fumo’s spending of $73,000 in taxpayers’ money over two years at posh restaurants isn’t wasteful. As if Fumo’s paying one of his aides $1,000 a month of our money to rent a home isn’t scandalous. Here’s what else he’s done. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Fumo, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, also uses $50,000 of his spending account each year to pay a former Philadelphia police inspector turned private investigator.
You might wonder why. So did the Inquirer. Fumo didn’t want to talk about his spending, but his spokesman Gary Tuma tried to explain.
The PI is on the payroll because “sometimes we get tips from people about wasteful spending.”
Go figure.
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Scowl: Connellsville Area School District will run out of money Jan. 16 and shutter its doors if the state fails by then to send a basic education subsidy check. And it won’t be the only school district in the same bind.
The shameful budget debacle in Harrisburg has kept public schools from receiving their first two subsidy checks, as the governor and Senate remain deadlocked. It’s hard to believe the rhetoric that our governor and lawmakers all just want what’s best for Pennsylvania’s children when they’ve failed to send one penny to keep classrooms open.
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Wow: Encouraging news on the use of public access defibrillators that are increasingly showing up at airports, shopping malls, sports arenas, schools and other public buildings. The theory was that for every minute a victim of cardiac failure waited for a paramedic to arrive to administer a shock, the chance of survival dropped by 10 percent.
Putting defibrillators handily in places where people gather was expected to boost survival odds. A study presented this week to the American Heart Association found that defibrillators saved twice as many lives as CPR alone.
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Wow: Infants and children buried in the county’s cemetery will have an angel to watch over them. Friends of the Fayette County Cemetery, after publicizing their effort, received enough donations from the community to purchase and install a praying angel statue. There aren’t many adornments in the cemetery where the bodies of some 7,000 adults and 736 children have been interred over the years. It’s a paupers field with few headstones to mark the deceased.
The friends of the cemetery began a few years ago restoring the formerly unkempt burial ground. Their efforts should be commended.
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Wow: State police this week recognized David Granato, Pamela McClelland and James Beall of Coal Center and Al McCauley of Plum for heroic efforts in saving three California Area High School students who were trapped in a burning car after an April 14 accident.
Beall, the first on the scene, said one driver passed by, ignoring pleas for help. Moments later, McClelland, Granato and McCauley arrived and helped to pull the boys to safety. Although they werebadly injured, the teens’ fate would have been much worse if not for the quick action of their rescuers, who are indeed outstanding citizens.
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Scowl: We admit we were a bit skeptical when first we learned from a letter writer that an aide to U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster was lurking outside his Republican opponent’s home. Would one of our congressmen with a fairly decent record stoop to such unnecessary shenanigans? Were the challenger’s neighbors making much ado about nothing? The aide in question, Joshua Juda, resigned last week saying that Shuster ordered him to monitor Michael DelGrosso’s house.
If this is so it is blatantly wrong. Shuster, though, said that he never told Juda to spy and that he might have failed by not expressly forbidding such behavior. The congressman said he would ask the House Ethics Committee to investigate so that his office can be cleared of wrongdoing. We hope that he follows through with the request and that the ethics committee moves swiftly.