Pennsylvania

Franklin thought college education should be available to people in Pennsylvania ... He ... wrote a pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania ... In 1749, Franklin was elected the first president of this new Academy, helping to recruit trustees, raise money, rent a house, and hire teachers. The Academy prospered and went on to become the University of Pennsylvania ... By the time Franklin had become famous for his experiments on electricity, he was in the thick of Pennsylvania politics. He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in August 1751.

[The] Pennsylvania Constitution was scarcely a program for democratic despotism ... all local officials were to be elected by their communities, and not appointed by the state ... a comprehensive bill of rights was established in the state constitution to limit the government's power over the people ... in a fascinating provision unique to Pennsylvania, a council of censors was supposed to meet every seven years to review the actions of the state government in the preceding years and to see whether and where it had exceeded its constitutional powers, from which a new ... convention to correct these excesses might be chosen.

When Bush came to the Pittsburgh area ... retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a [protest] sign ... The local police, at the Secret Service's behest, set up a "designated free-speech zone" on a baseball field ... a third of a mile from the location of Bush's speech ... Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested ... Pennsylvania district judge Shirley Rowe Trkula threw out the disorderly conduct charge against Neel, declaring, "I believe this is America. Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'?"

In Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives is working to "put the 'public' back in public policy," said President Sean Duffy. [It] was founded in 1988 "to generate new ideas and policy changes that encourage a reliance upon private initiative and democratic citizenship," he said ... Commonwealth ... "will continue to grow in size, scope, and effectiveness," Duffy said. It "will be on the cutting edge of the policy debate in Pennsylvania" by taking on new issues like technology and e-commerce regulation in addition to taxation issues, education policy, and the environment.