Fables of the reconstruction

Local Programming: Drinking Liberally Playoffs Football

Saturday, January 9th, 7:30 - 11 p.m.
Football Playoffs with Drinking Liberally Philly at Jose Pistola's
It's deja vu all over again as the Eagles go to Dallas again for the wild card round of the NFC playoffs. Join us as we watch the game in the upstairs bar at Jose Pistola's, 263 S. 15th Street (between Locust and Spruce), Philadelphia, PA 19102. We'll start around 7:30 p.m., kickoff is at 8 p.m.

War Is Boring #31

You should be reading David Axe and his webcomic:

And that's life out on the edges of the empire.

Wholesome and Bizarre

This will either make you laugh or feel like you're high, I guarantee:

Fire Arlene Ackerman

I agree with Bunch. The Philly schools superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, has behaved horribly in her handling of the racially-motivated attacks on Asian students by black students at South Philadelphia High School.  Her response has been to belittle and marginalize the victims of the attacks and to deny that race played a role in them. Instead, she'd circled the wagons and brought forward mostly black students who were not involved in the incidents as the "real" face of South Philly High, implying that the victims who were beaten and threatened weren't.  This is at least a dereliction of her duty to protect all the children in the school system, bordering on actual malfeasance.

Arlene Ackerman needs to go.

Local Programming: Philly for Change + Greendrinks Tonight

Wednesday, January 6th
6-9 p.m.
Greendrinks Delaware Valley
greendrinks.delaware valley is a monthly social gathering of all things green, ecological, environmental, organic, renewable, regenerative, and restorative. We meet 1st Wednesdays of every month from 6-9 pm at 5 great locations in the greater delaware valley area to help connect more green communities and to cut down on commuting while still having a great time each month. The locations are:

• Standard Tap, 2nd & Poplar St. Philadelphia, PA 19123
• PJ Whelihan's, 1854 E. Marlton Pike Cherry Hill, NJ 08034
• Kildare's Irish Pub, 18-22 West Gay Street, West Chester, PA 19380
• Earth Bread + Brewery, 7136 Germantown Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19119
• The Iron Hill Brewery 30 East State Street Media, Philadelphia, PA 19063

7 - 9 p.m.
Philly for Change December Meeting
Philly for Change is the place to meet new and old activists and citizens in Philadelphia who want to make progressive change. Our regular monthly meetings are held on the first Wednesday of the month at 7:00 PM. On the agenda in January: The PFC Governor endorsement vote by PFC members, the U.S. Senate campaign discussion, and updates on Philadelphia libraries , the Marcellus Shale gas extraction fight, and utility rate caps. We hold our MeetUp at Tritone, a bar located at 1515 South Street. Tritone has a full dinner menu and is easy to access for people with disabilities with a ramp, instead of stairs, at the entrance.

Local Programming: Drinking Liberally Center City Tonight 6-9 p.m.

Tuesday, January 5th, 6 - 9 p.m.
Drinking Liberally Center City
Center City DL meets from 6 p.m. - 9 p.m. every Tuesday in the upstairs bar of Triumph Brewing Co., located at 117 Chestnut St. (between Front and 2nd Streets), Philadelphia, PA 19106. There are $3 beers, $4 wine, $5 well drinks all night as well as happy hour food specials including half-price burgers.

Triumph Brewery is conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (5, 25, 47, 57). Driving directions are here.

Pocket Car

It's a single-seat Volkswagen, they say it's crashworthy, it gets 258 mpg, and it costs $600. Available initially in China. Frank says it's not a car, "It’s a motorcycle with a roof and rollover capability." Actually, that's clever and interesting, but unfortunately federal regulations say that a motorcycle can have only three wheels at most. No way this passes current U.S. car safety standards. But although abandoning the wheel-count method of distinguishing automobile from motorcycle is probably not feasible, I wonder why you can't say that any motor vehicle capable of transporting only one person is a motorcycle no matter how many wheels it has?

There's a New D.A. in Town, But Not That New

Seth Williams was sworn in today as Philadelphia District Attorney. Local "progressives" backed Williams and are pleased with his election. He's the first African-American to hold the job and he's promised to institute some good ideas. One of them is community courts, an idea that has not been fully fleshed out but involves having the same judges deal with the defendants in a particular neighborhood who are repeatedly arrested. The other is an idea that I am more enthusiastic about:

Williams said he will not immediately make wholesale changes in the operation - 300 assistant prosecutors, 250 support staff - that he will inherit Jan. 5. But he does want to quickly replicate the "best practices" he observed on recent visits to the prosecutors' offices in San Francisco and San Diego.

The San Diego experience, he said, shows "the critical importance" of improving Philadelphia's charging unit, where assistant D.A.s take the details from police arrest sheets and write them up as criminal charges.

More than half of the felony cases pursued by the Philadelphia D.A. are dismissed at preliminary hearings, Williams said. He contended he can improve on that score by assigning accomplished prosecutors to the charging unit, which now often is staffed by the least experienced.

This may sound arcane, but it's really important. Usually, the youngest assistant district attorneys are put in the charging unit. They are constantly faced with the question of what charges to bring against defendants and with what degree. Their inexperience means they either are less able at reading the file and determining the relevant facts or don't have the best breadth and depth of knowledge of the criminal code. The end result is that defendants are sometimes charged incorrectly,  either accused of things they did not do or not prosecuted for things they did do, or the wrong grade of the offense is assigned. The San Diego prosecutor's office, which I have read about elsewhere, has really had great success with making the charging unit a senior prosecutor's gig.

But while Williams is a reformer and perhaps will have a better rapport with the African-American community (which definitely had problems with Lynne Abraham), "progressives" shouldn't get their hopes up too much. Williams is a prosecutor, and in order to succeed in the D.A.'s office and win the top job, you need certain constituencies on your side. So when Williams says:

"Four years from now, we won't have the lowest conviction rate in the country," he said. [Instead, he said he] wanted "to make Philadelphia the safest big city in America ... ."

You have to hear those words through a white, blue-collar, cop-friendly Philly filter. We've seen repeatedly that the Philly police like to enforce the law their own way, whatever the civilians think. And for the conservative white people who live in Northeast and South Philly, law and order is about kicking ass, primarily black.

During the campaign, there were several cops who were murdered in the line of duty, and Williams sent out a Facebook message saying that anyone who murdered a cop, judge or prosecutor should face a mandatory death penalty. Williams knows full well that mandatory death penalties are unconstitutional and have been for a long time. What he was doing there was either reacting viscerally or playing to his police and law-and-order constituencies. Either way, it will serve him well. I think one of his first tests will come in the case of Officer Tepper, who was just fired after killing an unarmed civilian. Outgoing D.A. Abraham and the FOP chief McNesby have effectively thrown the matter into Williams' lap; unless I am very wrong, the grand jury will exonerate Tepper and Williams will then publicly announce he is satisfied with the outcome. I think he will have to in order to start off on the right foot with the FOP. And soon enough, I predict Williams will be going for the death penalty against black defendants at a rate similar to that of Abraham's.

Philly Cop Who Killed Civilian to be Fired

Back around Thanksgiving, I wrote:

This past Saturday, an off-duty cop with a history of repeatedly flying off the handle and waving his gun around charged into a fight in the street outside his house to break it up. Witnesses say he was drunk. At some point, the cop claims he was attacked and fired his gun in self-defense. He shot and killed an unarmed 21-year-old neighbor who was also trying to break up the fight. Despite that, the cop is free and, while he's under investigation, I don't expect him to be charged with anything.

The police commissioner has now decided to fire him. That's good. I still doubt he'll be charged:

Last month, then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham opted to let a grand jury decide if Tepper, 43, should face criminal charges for the Nov. 21 incident. The grand jury has not yet made a ruling in the case.

Fraternal Order of Police president John McNesby said the city's new district attorney, Seth Williams, might want to review the case before the grand jury makes a decision.

D.A.'s lead grand juries around by the nose. I'm guessing McNesby is signaling support for the firing but would oppose prosecution, and the FOP almost always gets its way.

Your Mother

I've had arguments like that.

Intended Consequences

Christians in action:

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.” 

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior. ...

 The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill. 

“I feel duped,” Mr. Schmierer said, arguing that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledged telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality. 

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

The missionary Lively actually met with the Ugandan members of parliament and went over the bill with them. Lively says now he's "very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh." What? 

This is an exact parallel to the rightwingers who call abortion murder. Do they mean it? Do they even understand what it is they're saying? Some of them may be too stupid to realize that when you label something "an evil institution", some people might take you seriously. Others, though, know exactly what they're doing.

Local Programming: Drinking Liberally Football Sunday

4:00-7:00 p.m.
Football Sunday with Drinking Liberally Philly at Jose Pistola's
Having beaten the Broncos, the Eagles steam into Dallas to decide who wins the division. Join us as we watch the game in the upstairs bar at Jose Pistola's, 263 S. 15th Street (between Locust and Spruce), Philadelphia, PA 19102. We'll start around 4 p.m., kickoff is at 4:15 p.m.

01/02/2010

Happy Palindrome Day!

2010 Starts Well

Congrats to Booman and CabinGirl:

 

Delivered at home.

Happy New Year