Pennsylvania Families Association has seen the hardships that children and parents find when dealing with a false allegation of abuse. We have opened a low cost legal clinic to provide for this need. We started this in Lancaster county, PA and we are in the process of adding York, Dauphin and Lebanon County office to handle these PFAs [Protection From Abuse orders ] and burdensome custody cases at a very low cost for children and patents.

Our Lancaster office is located at 228 W. Orange Street. We now have one staff Attorney and we are looking to hire three more in coming weeks to service the great need for protecting the truth in Lancaster County.

Make an appointment to have your case review by calling 717-397-1740 now;  don’t wait a PFA will destroy your life along with your children’s lives.

Children have the right to be raised by both of their good parents. False allegations of abuse must end and 50/50 custody will begin with the passage of house bill 463 on October first

By Dan Cohen

“The Informant!,” directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon is as irritating as it is interesting. But it’s still worth seeing.

Based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, an executive who cooperated with an FBI investigation of price fixing at the behemoth Archer Daniels Midland company, it suffers from the kind of identity crisis that keeps it teetering on the edge of disaster. You come away from it scratching your head, wishing it had been better, but still glad for having seen it.

The TV ads make “The Informant” seem like a high spirited comedy. There’s even an exclamation point in the title. The producers, and perhaps the studio, have gone to great lengths to sell it as a romp. That may be because the prevailing Hollywood wisdom holds that to attract a large audience a movie has to fall into one of the easily categorized genres. Comedy, action, horror; one of those. The execs know from bad experience what happens when a film confuses people. And these days the word “drama” is the equivalent of box office poison. But this time, in spite of their efforts, the result is a truly confusing movie.

First, a little about the story. Mark Whitacre was hired by the huge biochemical company Archer Daniels Midland in 1989. He was the youngest division manager in its history. ADM was, and still is, the foremost manufacturer of high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener used in a zillion food products, that positively trumps sugar in terms of cost effectiveness. We don’t grow much sugar in this country, but we produce abundant corn. ADM has taken full advantage of this. Beyond that they have successfully lobbied congress to artificially prop up the price of sugar, both here and abroad. So they keep their competition in check.

Whitacre had Fortune 500 experience before coming to ADM. He went to Cornell. He had lived in Germany, spoke fluent German, and had traveled extensively through Asia. He appeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine as a likely candidate to run the entire corporation. He was a heavy hitter.

In the early 90s he cooperated with an FBI investigation regarding global price fixing. The FBI’s probe went on for three years. When things got hot, Whitacre confessed to having embezzled at least 9 million dollars from ADM. As the truth continued to emerge his story kept changing, until he became a principal suspect.

He ended up spending eight years in federal prison. More than the several others who were convicted. He has variously been described as a criminal, a hero, bi-polar, insane, a victim of corporate skullduggery and a pathological liar.  Amazingly, after all those years locked up, he became chief operating officer of a big biochemical company, Cypress, that does important research on cancer. He got the job only a short time after being released.

At least two books have been written about the guy, one by a New York Times reporter, and another by a lawyer. The books take very different views of his behavior. You’d think there would be a fascinating movie in this. Somehow the result is tepid.

The script is partially to blame. It’s painfully straightforward. At bottom there’s nothing daring or outrageous about the writing or the direction, and in fact, the movie fails to depict many of the crazier things Whitacre is alleged to have done, like using a gas powered leaf blower to clear his driveway during a thunderstorm, at 3 AM. It hints at his madness without really exploring it.

The events are accompanied by Whitacre’s narration, which is a lot more interesting than the dialogue. Still, for most of the movie he and his colleagues are portrayed as dimwits, to the point where they are almost singularly uninteresting.  Surely these men, (Whitacre included) were not village idiots. Then, more than halfway through the movie, as Whitacre’s own indiscretions come to light, it’s revealed that he is an altogether different character than the one we’ve been listening to all along.

Suddenly, a guy who’s been portrayed, as an ordinary fool, is shown to be a lot more complicated.  It turns out that we have been duped, but not in a way that challenges us, in a way that makes us wonder whether the creators of this movie ever had a sense of what they were trying to do with the story. So the movie is a schizoid as its lead character.

Several talented comics, Rick Overton, Allan Havey, and Patton Oswalt, take important roles. Scott Bakula, an actor who’s often shown an ability to play irony, is the FBI man leading the probe. But their lines are mostly perfunctory; and mostly humorless. Melanie Lynskey, a fine actress who has appeared regularly in “Two and a Half Men,” has a thankless, one dimensional role as the wife. The score, which sometimes sounds like it was borrowed from a childrens’ film, is used to milk humor from scenes that lack a comic edge, both in their writing and directing.

The saving grace here is Matt Damon, who put on 30 plus pounds to play the lead, and clearly took every underwritten moment and worked it for all it was worth.  His inspired performance keeps the movie alive when all else fails. And then there’s the story, which is so interesting it somehow rises above the banal treatment.

It’s hard to see what the prolific and proficient Steven Soderbergh actually contributed beyond a coherent narrative flow. But whatever it was, it lacks passion.

Soderbergh’s best work as a director has been in polished, high-end entertainment, like “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Erin Brokovich,” and the movie adaptation of the British TV miniseries, “Traffic.” He also directed the under rated and under loved classic, “King of the Hill,” which you need to see on DVD!

But his more free form projects, like “Bubble,” “Full Frontal,”  and “The Girlfriend Experience,” have not measured up to his ambitions as an author of original work. It’s odd, but when given a free hand he’s failed to deliver the sort of daring movies he seems driven to make. He has often delivered more in terms of inspired filmmaking in his commercial projects.

Another problem: As he has in many of his projects, Soderbergh served as Director of Photography, under the assumed name of Peter Andrews. Most of the time, his double duty has served his projects well. This time it doesn’t. “The Informant!” has a murky, under-lit and sometimes monochromatic cast that seems to suck the visual energy out of it, underserving the actors. Why?

The material in “The Informant” was ripe for daring and imagination. With insanity nipping at its character’s heels it offered the promise of Kubrick’s “Strangelove,” or, had it gone in another direction a Billy Wilder farce like “One Two Three.” Why didn’t the material reach higher? Was somebody—the producers, the studio, the writers—standing in its way? You really wonder. See it anyway.

The second in a series by Cliff Lewis

Jon Mitchell’s role as athletic director not only demands that he oversee all sports programs at McCaskey, it requires thoughtful coordination of every school-sponsored athletic program within the School District of Lancaster—from elementary school to high school, and from students to coaches. Although this may seem a daunting jurisdiction, Mitchell is confident that a holistic approach is the surest route to substantial reform.

In observing McCaskey’s poor performance in recent years, Mitchell looks to the health of the District’s programs in their earliest manifestations: “Why do we tend to be competitive at some of our younger ages and then we are not as competitive at the high school?,” Mitchell rhetorically asked, “Is it because we don’t have enough continuity throughout our whole program where…we don’t have feeders at all, and they need to be created?”

Mitchell cited the District’s swimming program as an example of the need for such “feeders,” or pre-high school programs and clubs that prepare young athletes for the varsity level. With few nearby swimming clubs and no middle school swimming team, Mitchell said, “We have kids coming out for our [high school] swim team that do not know how to swim.”

Mitchell is now seeking ways to introduce swimming to the physical education curriculum, perhaps even down to the elementary school level. Also, Mitchell said, the District may partner with the Lancaster Aquatics Club to provide middle and high school students with additional practice opportunities, as well as experience with the swimming club’s professional trainers. According to Mitchell, such out-of-school training is foundational to most successful swimming programs:

“Swimming is an interesting beast. I’m starting to find that many of the kids that swim on their high school teams really only train with their high school teams a couples times a week. And the rest of the time they’re training with their club teams.”

Mitchell has also been encouraging varsity-level coaches to more frequently visit and engage with their corresponding pre-high school programs. For head football coach David Given, this meant hosting a special football camp for middle school students. Investing in these relationships is actually written into the job description of every varsity coach, serving to introduce young students to later opportunities and to advise the coaches of these youth programs, who are usually nonprofessional volunteers.

The varsity coaches are now being provided with learning opportunities, as well. According to Mitchell, this summer’s professional One On One soccer camp “provided instruction for both our kids and our coaches.” Mitchell said that the football coaching staff has already expressed interest in supplemental training of this kind, reflecting an attitude that Mitchell is encouraging among all coaches: “The biggest thing to me is the…willingness to listen to someone else… You cannot gain the knowledge if have the belief that you already have all the knowledge.”

In the midst of striving to comprehensively improve SD of L’s athletics, Mitchell draws satisfaction from students’ recognition of his unwavering commitment to all facets of the program: “The thing that I’m probably most proud of so far—and the kids understand this as well—is that every sport is important to me, and I’ll never be an athletic director who only looks at football and basketball.”

News article: “Numbers crunch: How can city and Manheim Township be so far apart in bids to police Lancaster Township? Warm up a calculator.”

Editorial: “Bargain Basement? It’s hard to say who won or lost in the Lancaster Township police contract bidding, but cheaper can prove costlier”

WATCHDOG: Three wags of the tail!

This is a first class job of reporting, with this second in a series providing sufficient raw data so that experts and amateurs alike can perform their own analysis. Clearly Associate Editor Gil Smart dug deep and burnt the midnight oil to generate such comprehensive and perceptive coverage.

The editorial is equally as thoughtful, posing the proper question as to whether Manheim Township has underestimated costs and thus underestimated in order to obtain the contract. The Watchdog has been surprised at the lack of apparent concern by MT taxpayers concerning the risks due to the huge pricing discrepancy—about $700,000—and the acknowledgment by their officials that there is no margin for profit (thus no margin for loss!).

We believe there will be at least one loser from this arrangement, perhaps two, and conceivably all three.

We also believe that the City and surrounding townships are all losers due to their failure to create a regional police force. Costs would be significantly reduced and services improved.

Thirty-eight years ago, Lancaster Township supervisors under the courageous leadership of Bob Fish chose the benefits of consolidation. But egos of officials in other townships fostered by a misguided notion of local ‘exceptionalism’ rather than concern for economy and public safety have prevented the process from spreading.

Fragmentation of municipal police services, county libraries and possibly other services is an inefficiency that needs to be eliminated if we are to properly cope with these tough times.

In Gil Smart’s column “Government can get it right”, he opens with “The e-mail from a conservative reader was short and sweet: ‘Can you name three major programs that the U. S. government has managed that has [sic] run successfully…not fraught with fraud, on time and on budget?’”

WATCHDOG: Smart could and he does. Plus he throws in a bunch more just for good measure. A wag of the tail!

Interesting, in an article about hotel taxes, not a single hotel owner or operator was interviewed, quoted or mentioned…only the two guys whose organizations get to spend the proceeds.

Please respond to Senator Patrick Leahy’s request by signing and submitting the attached letter form to our Senators and Representatives proposing that the health insurance carriers be subjected to the same anti-trust laws that every other business excepting baseball is required to adhere.

There must be an end to the monopolistic practices that cause the health insurers to remain free from effective competition and suck up 31% of our health care dollars in such functions as just-say-no claims offices and lawyers to back them up, lobbying of congress and paying exorbitant salaries and benefits to their executives.

One of the ultimate ironies is that when I was President of —————– in Philadelphia and we wanted to band with other hospitals in the Delaware Valley Hospital Organization to be able to conduct joint negotiations with Independence Blue Cross, which virtually controls the health care scene in Philadelphia, we were threatened by Blue Cross with prosecution by the Justice Department for attempting to combine in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and we could not even obtain a so-called “no action letter” from the Justice Department that would have enabled us to conduct such negotiations still under threat of private antitrust litigation by Blue Cross.

“The McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945 exempts health insurance companies from the antitrust regulations that apply to nearly every other industry, rules that protect consumers from anti-competitive business practices like price-fixing.

Passing health care reform with an effective public option is one key way to promote competition in the health insurance marketplace, but we must also eliminate this unjustified and unnecessary antitrust exemption currently enjoyed by insurance giants.

That’s why I urge you to support the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act, S. 1681 and H.R. 3596.

This legislation, which has been introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy in the Senate and Rep. John Conyers in the House, will eliminate the outdated insurance industry antitrust exemption, and force health insurance companies to compete fairly — like virtually every other business in America.

Thank you for supporting S. 1681 and H.R. 3596.”

(Editor’s note: The following was received from the Law Office of William J. Cluck. The application includes the following representation among many other revelations: “In 2010 Franklin and Marshall College will spend $144,000,000 on the College of Nursing and Medical Sciences and campus expansion.”)

I am forwarding to you the application submitted by the Lancaster County Transportation Coordinating Committee (LCTCC) to the feds for $81M in stimulus funding for the Harrisburg Pike projects. The application includes an additional $7.5M to cleanup the existing Norfolk Southern Dillerville Rail Yard (on top of the cleanup of the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority [LCSWMA] dump). [Couple this] with the pending capital budget request that would provide $150 million for Norfolk Southern projects in Pennsylvania funded by state and federal taxes. None of this has been reported.

The application is rather cynical in its suggestion that now in addition to reducing air pollution by removing 55,000 trucks it will also be energy efficient (the new buzz word for getting fed funds). Also, these projects will create thousands of new jobs especially for the city of Lancaster which is economically distressed and will provide jobs for minority and women owned business enterprises and the disadvantaged. Really, that is one of the key points of emphasis, not that most of the work will be in the largely white, affluent suburbs and will primarily benefit a private college, private developer, private hospital, private railroad, etc.

The economic benefit analysis is a good read at appendix 3. Here is an excerpt you might find newsworthy—it seems that F&M is going to have a medical school.

From Appendix 3:

“There are a number of major follow-on stimuli that will be made possible from this initial investment, as previously discussed, and are the 96 acre industrial park, the F&M development, and the Crossings retail project.”

“The transportation improvements expenditures take place in 2010, 2011, and 2012. The capital investments are $200,000; $36,450,000 and $89,653,392 respectively of which $86,250,388 come from the TIGER grant.”

“In 2010 Franklin and Marshall College will spend $144,000,000 on the College of Nursing and Medical Sciences and campus expansion. This investment will also create annual additions to output which is represented by the operational impacts.”

“In 2012 the hospital will invest $24,000,000 on the same site. This investment will also create an annual operational benefit beginning in 2013.”

“Also in 2012, construction on the State Road housing project will begin with an investment of $60,000,000. No operational impacts are created by this investment.”

“In 2014 a $19,000,000 investment in the Woodcrest Villa will take place and no operational impacts will result.”

“Also in 2014, a direct investment of $81,000,000 on the industrial park will begin. This investment will generate new permanent jobs and therefore is estimated to provide an annual operational benefit beginning in 2015.”

“In 2011 and 2012, a direct investment of $30,000,000 per year will take place on the Crossings. This investment will also generate new permanent jobs and therefore an annual operational benefit as well.”

By Cliff Lewis

After the traffic-laden transition from Fruitville Pike to North Prince Street, one may easily zip past the intersection of Prince and Liberty without taking notice of the quaint little shop that sits on its northeast corner. But for the shameless lover of classic metropolitan fare, the Sandwich Factory is not one to miss. This decade-old establishment not only serves up the traditional hoagies and burgers that one might expect from a deli or steak shop, but has also developed an assortment of clever variations on popular favorites.

Inside, the atmosphere is cool and casual, without the rugged griminess that many patrons have to come expect from any place that serves a good cheese steak. The shop feels fresh and organized, with green and yellow décor that evokes a mild beach-town aesthetic. At lunch, the service is efficient, but not frantic.

The menu includes customary staples (soup, salad, sandwiches, cheese steaks, char grilled chicken sandwiches, etc), but the true highlights are found among the shop’s “Factory Hoagies”—a delicious collection of unique Sandwich Factory originals.

The Cuban includes “homemade slow roasted pork & ham, topped with Swiss cheese”; the Sirloin Cheese Steak uses provolone and the obvious variation of meat. One simple-yet-appealing item is the Reuben Hoagie, working the usual contents into a friendly new format. The Factory Fish, with a hearty filet of beer battered Hokey Fish and a fresh Kaiser roll, puts most other fish sandwiches to shame—even though it is the only seafood on the menu.

The one dessert offered at the Sandwich Factory keeps with the shop’s theme of subtle variation. The Cheesecake Wrap deliciously rolls a rich cheesecake filling into a lightly sweetened, fried shell. It may not be the healthiest snack ever devised—but, then again, this probably is not the place for a calorie-counter.

The Sandwich Factory is located at 45 West Liberty Street, on the intersection with North Prince. For more information, including a complete menu, please click here.

If it is true that “Loss of Lancaster Township contract will benefit city”, then why was the Mayor so aggressively pursuing the contract with Lancaster Township? Isn’t his responsibility to the residents and taxpayers of the City of Lancaster to manage the city’s resources responsibly?

It would also seem that Gray’s threatening and bullying tactics effectively eliminate the city from any discussions of a county wide police force. Why in the world would any township or county leader want to deal with someone who utilizes the tactics Gray did? And where was the Chief Sadler during these negotiations? Shouldn’t he, and not the mayor, be the voice of the police department?

Finally, I suggest all surrounding township police departments calculate the costs of having their officers respond to calls for backup from the city. There have been several recently, the most notable the incident in the area of N. Queen and Lemon. Mayor Gray, break out the checkbook!