I think it was the very next day after was discharged from the Veterans administration Hospital in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

I was driven there by my wife from our home in Easton, Pennsylvania, a journey that by car takes abouts and hour and a half.

My primary doctor at the VA clinic in Allentown tentatively diagnosed an attack of gallstones that might require surgery, a procedure the clininc was not equipped to perform.

I was admitted, and the doctors quickly verified my primary doctor’s diagnosis. I did, in fact, have gallstones, and many of them. But in the course of their examination they discovered that I had colon cancer.

Because of complications, the surgeon delayed an operation until these had been managed and brought under control. I was dischared shortly after Easton and returned home.

My discharge was fortuitous. The very next day I drove to Philadelphia, about 60 miles south of Easton, to participate in a rally that a group calling itself PACleanSweep organized.

This group had sprung into existence in protest of “a 2005 middle-of-the-night decision by the legislature to grant pay raises for all three branches of government.

That pay raise continues to roil state politics.

If the midnight pay raise sparked the PACleanSweep group, it was fanned by another group called No Casino Pennsylvania, or NCPA.  It was born of protest against slot machine gambling in stand-alone casinos and casino-gambling placed at race tracks - the later giving rise to a newly coined term, racino.
After midnight and before dawn on July 4, 2004, the legislature met  and enacted Act 71, legalizing gambling.

Present at the rally I attended in Philadelphia wer Bucks County Assemblyman Paul Clymer; Diane Berlin of the National Coalition Agaist Legalized Gambling (NCALG); Russ Diamond, a founder of PACleanSweep and announced Independent Party cindidate opposing Governor Edware G. Rendell in the 2006 gubernatorial election; and a friend of my family, Meredith Warner, an organizer in the residential Fishtown neighborhood, a site selected for one of two casinos in Philadelphia.

I first met Meredith through my older daughter Sarah Parker-Givens when the two were classmates at Philadelphia’s Temple University.

Meredith and I have opposed Act 71 from the beginning.  It started with me on January 3, 2005, when I attended a Northampton County Council meeting and urged to to conduct public hearings on a casino planned for construction in their jurisdiction.

As I suspected, and predicted, on December 20, 2005, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) selected Bethlehem as the site and the Las Vegas Sands Casino of Sheldon Adelson as the owner and operator.

I have been fighting the Sands BethWorks Casino LLC since that January 3, 2005, when I addressed county council, held that evening in downtown Easton’s historic Jacob Bachmann Tavern, site of the county’s first courthouse.

I mentioned my cancer at the outset of this post because I, t like Russ Diamond, announced my Independent Party candidacy opposing Governor Rendell.

That was toward the end of February 2006.

When I learned in April 2006 that I had cancer, and faced lengthy treatment including surgery, I ended my candidacy.

Winning would have been a long shot (no pun intended), or course, but I felt that with the computer and Internet that I could collect the number of names needed to get on the ballot.

And I was confident that I had a winning issue, and I still do.

The site chosen for the Sands casino, on 126 acres of the former Bethlehem Steel Corporation has still not been remediated of its toxins.

The site is also in the 100-year flood plain of the Lehigh River.

The four huge sump pumps that the U.S. Corp of Engineers constructed in 1964 following the devastating flood of 1955 are no longer operable.

They are the only such pumps where such safeguards are used in Pennsylvania that do not work.

Bethlehem and Sands officials have not completed traffic studies and the Sands still does not have a Highway Occupancy Permit (HOP) from PennDOT.

Finally, the Bethlehem and the Sands have not met Pennsyvania’s statute controlling stormwater runoff, Act 167 of 1978 and amended in 1984.

2005