The Spark

Pennsylvania has undergone some major changes politically in the last 20 years. That’s the broad description of the findings of the Franklin and Marshall College poll that examined trends in voters’ registration, ideology, how Pennsylvania identify themselves politically, and on two major social issues – gun control and abortion.

Berwood Yost, Director of the Center for Opinion Research and the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College appeared on The Spark Friday and said the surface results of the poll like whether Pennsylvanians identify themselves as conservative, liberal or moderate haven't changed much. But Yost indicated that looking below the surface there have been major shifts,"In 2000, about 49% of Republicans said they were conservative. About 37% said they were moderate and 9%, believe or not, said they were liberal. Fast forward 23 years to today. It is now 70% of Republicans who identify as conservative, only 24% as moderate and 2% as liberal. So, you've seen a huge movement to conservatives, the conservative ideology, far fewer moderate Republican voters than there used to be. On the Democratic side, you have more folks identifying as liberal. They went from 31 to 40% and fewer as conservative at 9% with most Democrats, however, remaining moderate. And so, one of the, I think, interesting changes and one of the points that I make out make in this article is that the the battleground in Pennsylvania, in battleground Pennsylvania is really among these moderate voters. They are the state's single largest ideological group."

The research also showed that on two major social issues -- gun regulation and abortion -- voters in the two parties have diverged significantly. In 2000, 51% of Republicans strongly or somewhat favored creating more laws to regulate gun ownership. Today, 29% of Republicans strongly or somewhat support new gun laws while 68% strongly or somewhat oppose. Democrats went from 66% strongly or somewhat supporting new gun laws in 2000 to 83% now. On abortion, Democrats support for abortion being legal under any circumstances went from 27% in 2000 to 52% now. Republicans support for abortion legal under certain circumstances went up from 54% in 2000 to 65% in 2022. 23% of Republicans said abortion should illegal in all circumstances compared to 4% of Democrats.

Voter registrations changed based on geography. Yost pointed out the Democrats have essentially lost western Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh while flipping the suburbs around Philadelphia from Republicans to Democrat.

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Most drug overdose deaths in the U.S. involve fentanyl, which is a hundred times more powerful than heroin. Now, Fentanyl is being mixed with the animal tranquilizer Xylazine known on the street as "Tranq." It's a tranquilizer that is usually used on large animals like horses.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported two weeks ago that the monthly percentage of illegally manufactured fentanyl-involved deaths with Xylazine detected increased 276% between January 2019 and June 2022.

Just this week, the White House released a National Response Plan that addressed the “emerging threat of fentanyl combined with Xylazine."

Dr. Asif Ilyas, President of the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute Foundation for Opioid Research & Education was on The Spark and explained what it is and why it's being mixed with fentanyl, "It's not your traditional opioid and sedative. It can be found and purchased as well as produced illicitly. It has a powder and a solution form. It is mixed with fentanyl, which is typically in a powder form. So you can't tell by looking at your your fentanyl whether it has it or not, but it's being mixed together because it does a couple of things. It prolongs the euphoric effect of fentanyl. So fentanyl is a typically short, euphoric event."

Xylazine can do major damage to the human body, including leaving drug users with severe skin ulcers, soft-tissue wounds and necrosis — sometimes described as rotting skin — that can lead to amputation. Dr. Ilyas said the wounds can be difficult to treat,"It's acidic, so there's a burning component to it too. It's a vasoconstrictor, so there's less blood flow to an area where you inject. So when you inject an area, most often arms and legs like forearms and legs, the area around where you inject it essentially necros. And there are some absolutely gnarly wounds that people are showing up with in the emergency room. And those who continue to keep injecting can advance to the point where there's muscle necrosis, bone necrosis, bone loss. And obviously, the need for amputation. But what's really challenging is when patients present with these wounds from Xylazine and fentanyl, what do you do? Because the treatment is to do breed and skin graft, which is sounds simple, but it's fairly involved. There's multiple stages of surgical treatment and extensive wound care. But if the individual continues to inject, all of those resources are spent and wasted and the ultimate graft and all the work done can be lost."

Dr. Ilyas said there are more overdoses of fentanyl laced with Xylazine across the country. He added that policy makers on both the state and federal level are taking action.

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Major League baseball just played in annual All-Star game Tuesday night and but if you’re looking for a chance to watch the game in its purest form, go to Gettysburg this weekend.

The Gettysburg National 19th Century Base Ball Festival will be played Saturday and Sunday with 30 clubs from all over the country competing in a field on a family farm.

Bruce Leith, President of the Gettysburg 19th Century Base Ball Festival, described the festival on The Spark Thursday,"The best way to explain it is it would be like watching the Gettysburg Battle reenactments. But instead of using fake bullets, we would actually be using real ones. They're going to be playing baseball by the same exact rules that we played that was played in 1864 in the Adams County area. Baseball was going on there. We're going to be using the same style of uniforms and equipment and playing by the same rules and customs as as you would have seen back then, in the mid-19th century."

Leith was asked what some of the differences are between base ball in 1864 and today's game,"The ball is going to be coming in underhanded. It's not going to be thrown at a hundred miles an hour. Back then, it was it was made to put up there almost on a tee so that people could hit it. It was a hitter's game, not really a pitching game. So the ball come in underhanded. But the the pitcher's mound that we know today was really a flat spot. It was only 45 feet away, instead of 60 feet away. And it's 12 feet long. So a pitcher can stand anywhere inside that box to throw the ball. The bats will be, for the most part, they're hand turned bats that a lot of people make themselves. Or there's a couple special companies that make them, but that's the style that they had back then. It's a little bit thicker handle, a little bit different barrel, but they're all be wood bats. And then what one of the other big things you'll see is you can get an out, you can get it on one bounce. So if you hit the ball 400 feet in the air, it bounces once and the outfielder gets underneath it and catches a bounce, you're out. Same thing when you foul tip the ball back to the catcher who doesn't have any equipment on. You know, it's just his bare hands. None of us have any kind of equipment whatsoever. There's no catcher's equipment, no gloves, nothing like that. So if you tip the ball back to the catcher who's standing probably about ten feet behind you, he can catch on one bounce. So there's little things like that that fans will see. You can't over run first base. If you do, you can get tagged out."

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Most cities have cemeteries with unmarked graves, where people who died and had no family or couldn’t afford a funeral. York is no exception.

A group of York College history students worked on a project called Penny Heaven to identify those buried in the unmarked graves and research their lives.

Katie O'Neal was one of 18 students who worked on the project and told us on The Spark Thursday,"I think it is very important to memorialize these people who didn't get a voice in death. So what we did was we got a list of people who we knew were buried there and we researched them, we researched stories, researched why they were buried in the field? And now just who are, they trying to give them their life story instead of just saying there's some random, nameless person in a field somewhere."

O'Neal said the student used newspaper and military records to learn more about the people buried in the graves.

She indicated there were many fascinating stories including the one about "The Figi Cannibal." O'Neal told us there was a made-up story about the man, who was part of P.T. Barnum's traveling carnival and died in York,"(Barnum claimed) It was a strange man they found in Fiji who would eat human flesh. That's the only thing he ate. And P.T. Barnum paid the media when he died to say that when they walked into to see his body, two of his, other performers, were eating his corpse. Obviously, that's not true at all. I believe he was from Connecticut or he's from the United States, is not from Fiji or anywhere. But they made this entire story up."

The students' work is now an exhibit at York College’s Center for Community Engagement.

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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled two weeks ago that Lancaster County mail carrier Gerald Groff was exercising his religious rights when he said he didn’t want to work on Sundays because it is a day of rest and a holy day. The decision is seen as making it easier for employees to seek religious accommodations from their employers.

Groff’s case actually was ordered back to a federal appeals court for further litigation and as LNP investigative reporter Brett Sholtis told us on The Spark Thursday, "We actually had a unanimous ruling where we had the most liberal justices on the court agreeing more or less. And this was one case where everyone agreed on one thing, which was that they needed to clarify a rule around a previous ruling that happened in 1977."

That means Groff's case isn't in the clear just yet since the Court clarified what religious accommodations an employer must provide,"(In 1977) They interpreted undue hardship to mean anything that was more than a minimum inconvenience. So, that basically gave employers a real broad slate to say, no, this is inconveniencing me because it's going to cost money or it's going to cost time or are going to cost workers. And so as a result like that was it was for the longest time in favor of employers. Well, now, after the Groff ruling, this definition is changed from a minimum standard to a substantial hardship. So now it's not enough for an employer to merely say, well, this is going to cause me an inconvenience. And so we're not going to meet your accommodation."

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Pennsylvania will be receiving $1.16 billion in federal money to expand high speed internet access to thousands of homes and businesses. The announcement late last month of the amount of funding coming to the state was hailed far and wide.

The Federal Communications Commission estimates that 300,000 or 6% of all registered service areas are unserved. The FCC identifies an unserved area as an area or address that lacks access to broadband speeds of 25 megabits per second for downloads and three megabits for uploads.

Local areas were given the opportunity to question the FCC maps of where unserved or underserved customers are located, but some still aren’t confident in their accuracy and that has a direct impact on the money the state gets.

On The Spark Wednesday, Sascha Meinrath, Director, X-Lab Palmer Chair in Telecommunications Penn State University, says the $1.16 billion should be a down payment because it's not nearly enough to provide high-speed internet to all the Pennsylvanians who don't have it. Here's how he described what that money would do,"We're looking to provision a lot of medium speed connectivity, which because right now we have abysmal speed connectivity and (the new connectivity) looks great. But the reality is also that the the necessity, the capacities that we will need over this next decade require us to think in terms of next generation connectivity, infrastructure. And right now, we're not, for the most part, doing that. It is expensive and time consuming and disruptive, right? You have to lay fiber, dig up roads, do all this work. But we have to do that. We either pay the billions today or we pay far more in terms of the opportunity costs and by opportunity cost."

Meinrath estimated the state would need $4 billion to $5 billion to do that.

Meinrath said that one of the problems Pennsylvania faces is the federal government's maps of where internet service is needed aren't accurate,"We need to do our own broadband mapping systematically to identify the reality of broadband connectivity in the state, because the official maps are hyperbolically ridiculously overstating of the extent of connectivity in this state. And because they overstate connectivity, we receive less funding than we should receive to bridge the digital divide, because officially people that don't have service are already served. That translates to the loss of several hundred million dollars, according to our assessments that the state should have received but didn't get because we didn't accurately assess how woeful our own connectivity realities are."

Meinrath said costs to consumers is another huge issue,"We've seen some really fascinating and fascinating and kind of disconcerting way research from folks like John Horrigan, Pew Center, etc., that's documenting that the richer areas pay less than poorer areas for broadband service, which is to say you've got this really regressive reality where those that are on the wrong side of the economic divide end up on the wrong side of the digital divide because they are facing higher prices for the same service than their richer constituents, often within the same community. Some of the pricing work we did a bunch of analysis with Consumer Reports and we found that on the same street. We were seeing pricing differentials for the same service by upwards of 40%. But which is to say, imagine if you went and bought gas and your neighbor was paying 40% more or less than you were because none of the pricing at the gas station was transparent."

Meinrath is one of the founders of Measurement-lab or M-Lab that provides free data on internet service and performance that anyone can use.

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There are almost 9 million Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide but many know Jehovah’s Witnesses mostly by their door to door visits but today we’ll dive beneath the surface and learn more about their beliefs and practices.

Robert Hendricks, National Spokesperson for Jehovah's Witnesses joins us on today’s Smart Talk to provide some insight on that.

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Listen to Smart Talk every weekday at 12 p.m. and 8 p.m. on WITF 89.5 & 93.3. You can also stream WITF radio live on our website or ask your smart speaker to “Play WITF Radio.” [/box]

Higher credit scores are benefiting consumers and borrowers but there are 35% of Americans who do not know their credit scores and are unaware of how it affects their purchasing power.

26 million adults are considered credit invisible, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Shelley Peterson, Director of the Housing and Financial Education program for Community Progress Council and Rebecca Gramuglia, Top Cash Back Consumer Expert joined us on Wednesday's Smart Talk to discuss credit and tips on how to improve it.

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Fly fishing has never been the most popular type of fishing, but over the years it has consistently grown. According to the Outdoor Foundation, about 6 to 10 million people go fly fishing ever year.

James Widmaier, Senior master fly tying fly fisherman, joins us to provide some insight on fly fishing and fly tying, and his extensive career in the sport.

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