​As a lobbyist, it's important to know where you and your issue stand. From where I am, me and fracking look promising. This year and last there has been a lot of legislature and protests about my topic, getting involved now would only be a matter of contacting the right people. 

In Pennsylvania's senate are people who are on my side. A few of these are Daylin Leach, Camille George, and my representatives I mentioned in my 2nd blog post. They and other members of PA's government have created laws such as Resolution 110686 and HB 2754. Fracking has also recieved a lot of media attention. The documentary "Gas Lands" by Josh Foxx (now an important and influential activist against fracking) was one of the original cries for help, but newspapers have covered fracking numerous time. They recently linked the recent earthquake activity with hydraulic fracturing. Marcellus Shale protests are now not uncommon, including an Occupy Pittsburgh in protest of fracking. While this is a good first step for my cause, it is also important to recognize the power my opponents hold in government. 

CEO's of gas companies have, for many years, held influence in our governmental policies. One example is Alan Walker (who I discussed in my 2nd blog post) he has been given authority over Economic Development- the making of jobs for energy. Walker was once the CEO of Bradford Energy. Another example is T Boone Pickens, who pushes for the United States to be independent from foreign oil, but at what cost? These men, and many others have mixed oil and gas with politics and politicians cannot find their way out. 

Regardless of powerful opponents, the little people have to press on. There are politicians in the PA government that I could work with to change the course of fracking. I personally know Daylin Leach, who is a member of the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee. He is in the minority in that particular committee. But even the chair, Mary Jo White, has brought legislation about tightening hydraulic fracturing standards. These are the people that I would work with concerning my issue. Additionally, I would coordinate with lobbying groups. The Sierra Club is an activist group with a branch in Pennsylvania. They have been strongly opposing fracking. 

Below: Daylin Leach at a Fracking Protest

In terms of timing, no big legislation has been proposed recently, but that doesn't mean that time is not the essence. I can still work, participating in protests and sending letters to the politicians who can help me with my endeavors. An upcoming event is a No Fracking Protest on November 30th.    

These factors all add to the knowledge a young lobbyist like myself needs. I now know who to coordinate with, who are my opponents. More significantly, I know who I can influence and what that means for my issue. 

This is a good year for my lobbying topic. In fact, I am hopeful that the Safe Chemicals Act will be passed this year. There are a few reasons for this optimism. Firstly, I found my topic through an article in Scientific American, which means that the bill has been in the news. The article made some suggestions for the improvement of the bill, but was definitively supportive. Secondly, my bill has strong allies in the Senate, where it currently awaits a vote. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey first introduced legislation related to toxic chemical control in 2005, and has been fighting for the idea continually. 

On the 17th of November, there was a hearing about the bill. I was able to find the video of the hearing online. Lautenberg opened with remarks about the bill's history. He explained that he'd talked to Republicans about making the bill bipartisan, and talked to Chemical Industry companies about their suggestions, too. He also said that most of the Democrats on the Committee for Environment and Public Works have become cosponsors of the legislation. There are 12 cosponsors in total. In fact, OpenCongress does not list any organizations currently opposing the bill! Despite all this, major chemical companies are not in full support of the bill. In the November 17th hearing, American Chemistry Council President and CEO Cal Dooley talked about his problems with the Safe Chemicals Act. He said that the bill "remains very similar to the bill which was introduced in 2010, which we consider unworkable." Most of his problems with the bill hinged on the tough standards for data and regulation, many of which would be difficult for the EPA and chemical industries to meet. However, he seemed to be willing to work with Lautenberg and other senators to make the bill more workable.

I know a lot about the history of the Toxic Substances Control Act, which the Safe Chemicals Act would override, and know that the chemical industry played a large part in writing that bill. I am worried that the Safe Chemicals Act could go the same way as it's predecessor, and end up as a basically useless measure. For this reason, I need to advocate for the bill in its current, strong form.

Although there are twelve senators cosponsoring the legislation, none of those senators are from Pennsylvania. I can write to Bob Casey and ask him to cosponsor the bill, or at least to pledge his support. I could also write to Pat Toomey, but I am doubtful that he will support the legislation. I recently saw an advertisement of his that was paid for by the petroleum industry. I was not able to find the ad online, but did find an article about the American Petroleum Institute's advertisements for Toomey and various other candidates. This makes me think that Pat Toomey cares more about big companies and industries than environmental or citizen health. I can still write to him, and explain my position.

When I first started to research the Safe Chemicals Act, I found the website Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. This site is an effort to pass legislation like the Safe Chemicals Act, and they have a sign-up for interested citizens. I already gave them my email, so I will be receiving updates on the bill's progress and opportunities to help. I also can write a letter to my Senators through their website. The website even has their own celebrity: Jessica Alba is working to push the Safe Chemicals Act through Congress!

One of the features on their website allows visitors to send a message to senators Casey and Toomey. I have not decided whether to send the senators a message through the website, or whether to send them one on my own. Either way, I will certainly be adding my voice to the many who call for the Safe Chemicals Act to be passed. 

I was not able to find any upcoming dates for meetings, committee hearings, deadlines, or anything like that. However, during the November 17th hearing, Senator Lautenberg said that he would be calling for a vote in the Senate soon. Because of this, I need to act now! At the moment, the only person I can influence in particular is Senator Bob Casey, by asking him to cosponsor the bill. I think that, with enough pressure from Pennsylvanians, Casey would support the bill. Pat Toomey, on the other hand, will probably not. I can still send him a message, to show my beliefs.

Curtis Jones jr. represents me because I live in the fourth district, he is also the person who drafted and sponsored the “Growing Greener” movement that has made Philadelphia cleaner in projects dealing with parks and recreational things. My representative Mr. Jones is not just interested cleaning parks and recreational places but he also is big into other stuff like transportation and public utilities. He has interests that are lengthily and important to keeping Philly a good city. According to this site from the Philadelphia city council, Curtis Jones jr. is a member of a broad number of topics that he fights for everyday. What Mr. Jones and I both have in common is the interest of parks, recreation, the disabled and the handicapped, the environment and a working knowledge of housing and the homeless. From all that I have read I can tell that the councilman really loves Philadelphia and really does want to change it for the better.

More sources

More sources

I am lobbying for the clean up of all Philadelphia parks. Parks get dirty, it is what they do but within that dirt is glass and cigarette buds from careless, thoughtless people, this is harmful to children when they play on it and it is unacceptable. My motivation for this project was my recent visit to the doctors office to get a tetanus booster when I cut my hand on rusted metal when I was in a park local to my house. According to this site, everybody in the city council was up for helping the “green” plan, which included open spaces i.e., parks so he had no opposition in getting support. The city council of Philadelphia has made this into a resolution that has already gotten funding to make it happen.

​  I am a member of the 8^th district in Philadelphia and I am represented by Congressman Chaka Fattah. Congressman Chaka Fattah attended Overbrook High School where he graduated from and then went on to the Community College of Philadelphia and then the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government where he later received his MGA in the year 1986. Fattah has been a member of the Pennsylvania HOR for 5 years and he has served as the State Senator for 6.

Congressman Chaka Fattah supports many things and has sponsored 6 Bills that all support a different thing but when looking through all of the things Chaka Fattah has supported I see that he is all about children and equality

When it comes to the topic of the electoral college Congressman Chaka Fattah was one of the co-supporters in the Bill H.J.RES.36: “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to abolish the Electoral College and provide for the direct election of the President and Vice President by the popular vote of all citizens of the United States regardless of place of reside”

When it comes to things we have in common there isn’t much between Chaka Fattah and myself. We both went to schools in the Philadelphia School District, we share the same religion which is a Baptist Christian and we are both democrats that reside in the city of Philadelphia.

 Sources:

http://fattah.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=18

http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/bills.php?cycle=2012&cid=N00001746&type=I&spon_type=sponsor&cong=112

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaka_Fattah 

I live in the 2nd District and it is represented by Anna C. Verna. Anna Verna made history in 1999, she was the first woman to achieve council presidency in philadelphia's 300 years history. Verna was born on April 15, 1931. She joined City Council in 1975. She represents the 2nd district which covers most of South Philadelphia and western end of Center City. Verna has been a strong supporter of the tax reform and has fought for affordable housing in various parts of her district. From 1991-1998 she was the Chair of the Finance Committee, She was trying to restore fiscal stability when philadelphia was on a edge to bankruptcy. Not only she was a great supporter in the tax reform but she also fought crime. President Verna successfully fought for 6 billion dollars in funding in the city's operating budget for an additional 100 police officers and has been a strong supporter of curfew center.  President Verna has made the renovation of housing stock in neighborhoods and affordable housing a top priority. She has worked with many community-based organizations to build hundreds of affordable homes throughout the Second Council District and was honored by the Pennsylvania Association of Non-Profit Homes for the Aging as their statewide “Public Official of the Year” for her work in providing affordable housing for senior citizens.

Click here for my awesome benchmark!

Reflection
I chose this bill because I saw that it was passed very quickly and I thought that it would make for an interesting topic but I also saw that it had a then and now focus because it was made into a law in 1996 but Obama brought it up during his presidency to discuss and argue about. I chose the particular presentation format of a wiki because I was familiar on how to work it and how to make it click out to different pages when the hyperlink was clicked. In wiki I chose a notebook format because I thought it would be ironic with a laptop school and an online project in a "notebook." Some of the challenges for this project was time management and internal destruction. I was so over whelmed with the first quarter and not getting all my benchmarks at the same time, that my planning for doing the benchmark was way off my original plan. My internal destruction was myself telling me it had to be better so do not turn it in yet and my forgetfulness in that the project flew out of my mind. If I were to do this project again I would defiantly make the poem longer and put it on a different site where instead of entire pages dedicated to a couple explanatory sentences I could have little blocks like the comment stickie on googledocs pop up. My research told me that getting a bill to become law can go either way in getting there fast or slow and it all depends on the biase of the Congress people. I can not say that the research was hard but at the same time I can not say that it was easy, somewhere in between is where I stand.

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In my district, Councilman Brian O'Neill represents me and my district (district 10). My legislator hasn't voted in the past because it has not come up yet. 

Brian O'Neill is a Republican Council man who represents the 10th, and only the 10th district of Philadelphia. He was born on December 23, 1949 (making him 62 years old). O'Neill acquainted the "Philadelphia blunt ban," which bans any item that suggest the seller to be doing drugs. This bill (No. 060345) was "adopted and signed by the mayor." This bill included the ban of feather hair clips, which could be used to hold a roach (the small end of a blunt) to smoke marijuanna from. He's been serving since 1980. 

O'Neill went  to Saint Joe's University and graduated from Widener University School of Law. Brian was very much interested in Politics and he is a Chairman of the Board of The Public Technology Institute . He is also chairs the Northeast Airport Advisory Council. He's very much involved within his district and makes sure that things are going over smoothly. 

My motivation is reading on Facebook so many of the kids in my neighborhood's statuses about going out to kegs in the woods, at the "Halloween Spot," which is basically an area on the train tracks behind the local cemetery. I feel as if the legal drinking age was lowered, the teens in my neighborhood wouldn't go out and drink in dangerous places because they needed to hide from adults and police. They could drink in the safety of a friend's house or even at their own, where there could be much less a risk of getting physically hurt. If the drinking age was lowered, adults would be able to moderate their teen's drinking, if they were to drink, so they wouldn't over do it and wind up harming their selves.  

​The Supreme Case I was assigned was Perry V. New Hampshire

The situation behind this case is that in an apartment building there was a hijacker that had been robbing cars for a while and one night an elderly woman looked outside of her window and saw a black man standing between cars talking to a police officer in the parking lot. The elderly woman, when questioned told police that he had been the man breaking into cars at night, when the elderly woman was asked to identify the man from an array of photos she could not do so and the only problem the Court agreed to look over was whether or not the absence of any police manipulation of that witness was reliable enough to bring before the jury to be used against the conviction of Barion Perry. 

The constitutional question in plain English  is “In a case should a court be required to exclude eyewitness identification evidence whenever the identification was made under circumstances that make the identification unreliable?”

            The Constitutional Provision involved in my case is The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Which states that “No State shall ... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1.

The Fourteenth Amendment is applicable to unreliable eyewitness identifications regardless of whether the identification was orchestrated by the police.

After the case was argued The Supreme Court decided that it wasn’t their job or place to decide whether or not the evidence in the case should be used and that the decision of permissible evidence would be left up to the jury. The conviction of Barion Perry still hasn’t been decided mainly because of the evidence debate. 

I’m not to sure how to predict the outcome of this case because it could go in either direction. I personally don’t believe this evidence should

Be used against Perry because I feel like the evidence is unreliable. The witness didn’t see Perry take anything and she was not able to identify him when she was asked. The conclusion of this case is strictly dependant upon the jury so at this point and time this could end either way.