Despite the enthusiasm, I’m the reason why getting 60 percent of 170 million registered U.S. voters out there would be a triumph.

I’m fairly politically aware — even my interests are more in local policy than national — and have been involved in government and campaigning in the past. But, like most Americans, I have an excuse.

I spend most of the time leading up to an election pondering the journalism around it, listening and debating both sides — in short, seeing the election through my own prism (in my case, that means something of a balanced journalist).

I feel like most do just that: see the election as an abstract in one’s own sense of self. So the activism, it seems, is someone else’s work.

I do vote, though not in many primaries because I am registered independent, and I do follow the discourse and prepare ahead of time, but much of my preparation is, like most swing voters like myself, very last minute.

So I decided, if only for me, I’d get together the voting resources I use most and usually spend the Monday before Election Day searching for.

In Philadelphia, the four resources I share with friends the most often and a new one:

• Find your elected officials here — This is for finding out who is marginally affecting your life by voting on legislation that someone else writes.
• Find your polling place here — This is for when you don’t where you even go to vote.
• Register to vote here — This is for coming into a new state or changing an address or party affiliation.
• Find your registration status here — This is for young people who have moved so often in recent years that they don’t even know where they last registered.
• Google Elections here — This is trying to cover all the above information.
• Voting Totals here — Information and links  on voting results in Philadelphia from the Committee of Seventy.

A city-state-federal policing partnership criticized as threatening the civil rights of immigrant populations in Philadelphia was the focus of a short brief I had in today’s Metro, following a brief interview with state. Rep. Babette Josephs following a press conference in City Hall.

Read it here.

I wrote a fairly large profile of Josephs for the Inquirer last summer. Fair or not, a group of self-labeled reformers in Harrisburg called Josephs a mythological three-headed dog.

I was unable to include a brief interview I had with City Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez on the matter, portions of which you can see after the jump, in addition to quotes from Josephs that were cut, more from the Nutter administration, other sources and one interesting concept of the story that didn’t make it into the piece.

Just this week, CityPaper had a more in-depth piece on Secure Communities.

The note announcing the press release can be seen here. Some more perspective from the left, via Young Philly Politics, can be seen here. Some news coverage of the initiative from California here and some from Arizona here.

The federal government gives its take on the initiative here.

Something that the other reports didn’t address, but Josephs mentioned to me, though space prohibited its inclusion:

“We’re also about to do the [national] census, and we count documented and undocumented people so we can really know our country, to get an accurate snapshot. The people who are chilled by this program are hesitant to come forward and be counted. Yet those are the communities that we definitely need to count so we know who is here, for funding roads and schools and lunch programs… A lot of these people come from countries where the police have conduct that is unprofessional, and then they come here and we show them the same kind of thing.”

A few other items from Josephs that didn’t make it into the piece:

• “The real obligation of the federal government here is to do comprehensive immigration reform. … Instead the immigration authorities are reaching into local communities to get them to do the job that needs to be done by Washington. I call on our senators and representatives to start working on a comprehensive approach to this immigration problem.”
• “The city administration can resist. The city certainly has resisted state and federal policy on gun ownership and we’re continuously in court fighting that, and if we end up in court fighting this program, it will be for the better. The city resisting would be the first step. The pressure is on them… to do the right thing. Philadelphia, a city of immigrants, should resist.”
• “We are calling on the city to resist this program, a great port city, and calling on federal authorities.”
• “I’m always optimistic [about the future of federal initiatives]. The president has committed himself to proposing comprehensive overarching legislative. He’s no slouch. We have such a number of voters, particularly from the Spanish speaking world, who want this. The fallout will be the compassionate.”

Some additional perspective from the Nutter administration via spokesman Doug Oliver:

• “This is not a new program. The police have been sharing information with ICE since 2005, but in the past we had to fax that  information… Now it is automatically pooled.”
• “Only individuals charged with a crime will be fingerprinted, not witnesses or victims, so this shouldn’t have a chilling affect on communities who need to come forward to police.”
• “This relationship with the federal government was already standard procedure.”
• What if someone is wrongly accused, I asked? “Well, if you reach the point where you are being finger-printed, the process will take place.”

Some pulls from the few minutes I shared with Councilwoman Quiñones-Sánchez on the phone:

• “First, I am not in favor of people coming here illegally, but there is a big difference between being undocumented and being illegal… Many of the undocumented people we’re talking about are children who were born here so are, in fact, citizens…”
• “We say we’re a city that welcomes immigrants and we know how important they are, but then this, well, this sends a contradictory message about our city.”
• “We shouldn’t be doing this, it’s federal issue and we don’t have the training on our level.”
• No estimate was given on how many people this could affect: “We focused on the spirit this is done, not the numbers,” she said.
• “We’re taking processes that have issues already and creating mechanisms that can’t be used appropriately.”
• “Pennsylvania takes federal money with caveats, and, as a first-class city, Philadelphia has to decide if this is right for us.”
• “Ideally the mayor would say no to the feds in the sharing of this data, until we can really examine the implication,” she said. “I expect him to do so.”
• “We’ve seen ICE be very heavy-handed, clearly this information sharing has an ulterior motive to bad consequences.

Temple students during summer session. Rikard Larma for Metro.

I covered for Metro Philadelphia the political battle between my alma mater Temple University and another alumnus Rep. John Taylor, who is pushing to hold back a $175 million appropriation for the school because of a closed hospital.

Nathaniel Nnadiugwu says he feels like there’s nothing he can do about a political fight between Temple and state lawmakers that threatens to hike his tuition by $5,000.

Read the rest here, or pick up a copy if you’re in the city.

This Page Two story was my second in Metro today. I also had a front page piece. Below see some quotations that didn’t make it in.

Jon DeSantis, a 21-year-old senior, criminal justice major and one of two student body vice presidents

• They took 3,000 letters to Harrisburg.
• His student government organization was using social media to promote the possible tuition hike and showing students, even through Facebook, how to contact legislators and offering example sample letters.
• “I understand the community and Rep. Taylor are upset with the closing of the hospital. He’s upset with job loss, but his proposal is having jobs lost at Temple, so that doesn’t show a clear set of  values
• “At the end of the day, a hospital closure in Port Richmond doesn’t justify a 45 percent raise in tuition for uninvolved people.”
• “The students who had nothing to do with this are going to pay for this.”

Read the Temple University announcement to students here, and the Daily News story that broke the news before I got my hands on it here.

Kudos to my former college paper The Temple News for getting the interview with John Taylor that I didn’t get by deadline.

HARRISBURG — Today state Senate Democrats held a press conference warning of impending utility deregulation that they say will cause electric bills to jump as much as 65 percent per month for some.

I have a story on the subject coming out tomorrow in the Post-Gazette, but it won’t include some of Sen. Vince Fumo’s finer moments.

After a heart attack in March and a looming trial in November, Fumo announced his retirement, surely freeing up the Prince of Darkness to speak even freer than he had in the past.

Today he railed utility companies, their CEOs and lobbyists.

Let’s see [a list of utility company CEOs and their salaries] $13 million, must have been a bad year. [Staff member] who is this guy? I don’t know him, any of them, they aren’t hanging out with me at 15th and Tasker.

He claimed electric deregulation was the real energy crisis in Pennsylvania, and green issues were just to take the focus away from profits made by utility companies.

This is the issue. Not oil, ethanol. I don’t care about off-shore drilling. I don’t care about the caribou in Alaska.

How about this one, not from today, but rather when a tentative budget agreement was reached early Monday morning, after 1 A.M. When asked about fellow Democrat and Gov. Ed Rendell’s role in these late night negotiations, Fumo replied thusly:

Well, we both, what we all know is that he isn’t the easiest guy to get along with this late, when he’s tired.

He loves to talk to media and we love him, especially when he says stuff like that. So, we focus on him tons, like this Inquirer Fumo report and a great Philly mag article on Fumo’s relationship with power lawyer Dick Sprague. …Even if he’s been indicted and has an awfully strong sense of entitlement, he is charismatic, funny and brilliant.

Cartoon courtesy of John Cole of the Scranton Times-Tribune.