Adam Lang testified at the Mayor's Advisory Task Force on Ethics and Campaign Finance Reform on January 10, 2009. Attached are the several ethics and campaign finance bills Councilman Rizzo submitted which was the focus of the hearings.

The fault of the current budget crisis facing Philadelphia is not fully on the shoulders of the national economy, but on the shoulders of Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter.

This is good news because it means that Philadelphia can control its own destiny by implementing fiscally responsible budgets that are resilient to fluctuating national economies.

To start, we need to understand why this is a budgetary problem and not a national economic problem and then we can look at how to fix it for the future.

Whenever someone speaks about modernizing and reforming part of our City Charter it always draws my interest because there is much of the Charter that needs tuning up. So, when I heard Councilman Goode had proposed modifying the structure of City Council it got my attention.

Unfortunately his attempt at reform is nothing more than a blatant attempt at a party-based power grab that does a disservice to his fellow Democratic council members.

When Michael Nutter was elected mayor he declared "New Day, New Way" for Philadelphia. He should have sent a memo to his fellow politicians because they are still operating on the "Old Day, Old Way" politics by ignoring ethics and the law. In this new instance it revolves around judicial misconduct of Common Pleas Court Judge Dan Anders and Municipal Court Judge Pat Dugan and other contributing politicians.

DA Lynne Abraham has confirmed what many of us have been saying about the gun legislation passed unanimously by City Council and signed into law by Mayor Nutter: "They are, on their face, illegal acts." She will not enforce them. Mayor Nutter’s “New Day, New Way” Philadelphia is resembling “Old Day, Old Way” by continuing the tradition of making race a divisive topic, rewriting history, ignoring real solutions to crime problems and thinking he is above the law he has sworn to uphold.