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Charles M Gibbs, Esq., the attorney who represented patronage employee and Blondell Reynolds Brown campaign manager John McDaniel — who admitted to stealing from a PAC he ran and from Brown's campaign — has a history of serving the city's political class during its legal tribulations. An attorney with the politically connected Bowman & Partners LLP since graduating from the Widener University School of Law in 2010, Gibbs also, unsurprisingly, has a long history of personally rubbing elbows with powerbrokers in Philadelphia.
In addition to representing McDaniel during his guilty plea, Gibbs in 2011 also presented himself as former Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller's attorney while her office was being raided for evidence related to alleged ethics violations, according to news archives. Two of Miller's staffers were ultimately fined for conducting political activities within her office.
A couple of Easton Area School District (EASD) middle school students, Kayla Martinez and Brianna Hawk, made national news in 2010 when their school banned breast-cancer-awareness bracelets bearing the phrase “I ♥ Boobies! (Keep A Breast),” sold for $4 each by the Keep A Breast Foundation. Today, their case was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, after Judge Mary McLaughlin of the federal district court issued an injunction against the ban.
American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania represented the girls, seeking an emergency injunction and an end to the girls' punishment, which includes barring them from extracurriculars.
Mary Catherine Roper of the ACLU told the court that the students' freedom of speech had been violated, and that the school district appeared to be manufacturing a sexual meaning to rationalize its ban on something with which administrators were uncomfortable. John Freund, attorney for the school district, said the issue was not "viewpoint discrimination" but rather "a dress-code violation." He said schools need to be able to preserve "the civility of discourse in the classroom," and that a ruling against the district opens the school to a flood of "cause-based marketing laced with sexual double entendres."
This, in turn, led to a frank discussion of "boobies," of the likes not often seen in a courthouse.
Whether "I ♥ Boobies!" is even a double entendre was a matter of some discussion. One judge queried Freund, "Where is the double entendre? Boobies are breasts." He added that the students appeared to be "trying to get us to the point of intelligent discourse" on the importance of breast self-exams. And given that the school was in fact marking breast-cancer awareness day, another judge added, "If breasts are not a problem, what makes boobies a big problem?"
Freund indicated that there might be a slippery slope attached to allowing such messaging. "This case is simply trying to avoid throwing a match into a cauldron of boiling hormones."
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John Baer dedicated today's Daily News state politics column to praising Kahlil Byrd, the president of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst education reform group and past CEO of something you've never heard of called Americans Elect. (A copy editor apparently missed that "StudentsFirst" does not, contrary to English grammar norms, put a space between what appear to be two words)
As Baer notes, Byrd markets himself to Daily News readers as a master of "disruptive politics" — of an independent, nonpartisan variety. But, as I reported at Salon last year, the vast majority of candidates that the pro-charter and union-busting outfit supports are, surprise, Republicans. StudentsFirst's donors include Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge fund managers, and the Walton Family Foundation. In Pennsylvania, StudentsFirst hired Ashley DeMauro, former Department of Education government relations chief under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.
Step aside, Paws and Gentry. There's a new PSA campaign in town. It's a snarky attempt to get Philadelphians to stop, well, acting like idiots.
"It's road safety. Not rocket science," is the tagline of the "Ride Right Walk Right Drive Right" campaign just rolled out by Philly's Mayor's Office of Transportation and Utilities (which has in the past tried to meld humor with road safety by painting a distracted walking lane on the sidewalk near City Hall for April Fool's Day). Messages include things like "Thank you for not running pedestrians over" and "Objects in mirror appear only when looked at." The campaign cost $125,000, and is running on buses and bus stops. It will last for 10 weeks or longer. The funding came from a state grant.
Andrew Stober, chief of staff at MOTU, says PSAs are an accepted part of traffic safety practices: "We talk about the three 'E's of traffic safety: engineering, enforcement and education." At $125,000, education is clearly the most affordable to address, given tight budgets for police and transportation infrastructure. Stober says a pedestrian is hit by a car on average once every four hours in Philly. "All of these ads are targeted at the hghest-risk behaviors."
"Hopefully a little bit of snarkiness will engage people and get them to take that extra moment to think abou it," he says. "We just want people to get home safe at the end of the day and hopefully have a little smile on their face."
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The 2010 video went viral on Youtube quickly: Philadelphia Police Officer Jimmy Leocal beating Askia Sabur repeatedly on West Philadelphia's Lansdowne Avenue. In the video, Leocal then pulls his gun on the alarmed crowd.
The beating sparked an uproar, local and national media coverage, and was discussed during City Council hearings on police brutality. But busy reporters moved on, and Sabur spent the last two years in jail awaiting trial for the charge of assaulting Leocal's partner, Officer Donyul Williams.
Today, a jury found Sabur not guilty of aggravated assault, disarming a law enforcement officer, simple assault, recklessly endangering another person and resisting arrest.
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
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| From the Hutchinson Street side. |
139 N. 10th St. & 100 Block of North Hutchinson Street -- Here's another Chinatown lot that doesn't make any goddamn sense. Though it's actually three lots combined, the center property on this location has been a surface parking lot for more than 70 years. Though mostly hidden by buildings, any empty space in Chinatown becomes extremely conspicuous, due to the rest of the neighborhood's crowded nature.
The earliest known development on this site was from 1809. The First Dutch Reformed Church was one of several churches that had purchased land on Franklin Square from William Penn's greedy descendants for use as a burial ground. In 1795, the city finally put its foot down and took back the public squares from private ownership. The churches that were holding bodies there were all given new plots on city-owned land and the corpses were moved. A plot in the middle of the block bounded by Cherry, 10th, Race and Elwyn (now North Hutchinson) streets was given over to the First Dutch Reformed Church. It took until 1809 to get all the bodies moved. Almost immediately, the church hated the new burial plot. The land was wet and full of clay. Only family members of the bodies that were moved there contributed new corpses to the graveyard. In all, 614 people were interred there between 1809 and 1857.
As debate over raising the federal mininum wage begins in Washington, a bill, applying the city's "21st Century Minimum Wage and Benefits Standard" to airport workers and others employed by companies that have concessions or leases from the city, passed out of City Council committee this morning. The living wage standard is $10.88 per hour; many airport workers make the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour or less.
The Mayor's office is supporting the bill, and no one from the airport showed up to speak against it or suggest that it would lead to a loss of jobs, a common argument against minimum-wage hikes. Supporting the bill were airport workers rounded up by Fight for Philly to put a face on what they're calling "poverty wages."
"I work fulltime, but I'm hungry," Tara Russell told the committee. Russell has been working as a wheelchair attendant at the airport for four years and still makes $6 per hour. Theoretically, she also works for tips, but "the last two weeks, I got nothing. ... So how do I survive? I don't. I borrow $20 here and $20 there. I get $300 in food stamps but I'm broke." She told Council: Please make sure that no one at the airport goes hungry working fulltime."
Philly City Council members — and residents at large — are only beginning to absorb what the full impact of new property tax assessment figures released by the city on Friday will mean in Philadelphia's neighborhoods. But Councilman Jim Kenney is upset enough by the numbers that he's promising to take on the administration to ensure residents don't get driven out of their homes, which he now sees as very real possibility. "We're looking at everything from legislation to suing. I'm not just going to turn my back on these people after all these years. ... We're exploring every possibility and it will be a militant effort."
Kenney and Councilman Mark Squilla are planning to educate and organize residents about the new assessments, which were generated as part of the Actual Value Initiative (AVI).He says that will probably include "busing in whole entire streets at the same time" to submit appeals. Kenney says he's also heard that Councilman Kenyatta Johnson, Councilman Bobby Henon, Councilwoman Cindy Bass and Council President Darrell Clarke share some concerns about the assessments' impacts on poor and working-class neighborhoods from Port Richmond to Whitman. Squilla told the Daily News the assessments were unfair, and he'll be challenging their accuracy. How he'll be able to do that through legislation is unclear.
Kenney also wasn't sure yet about the legal grounds for suing the city over the assessments. (Individual homeowners do have a couple ways to appeal their assessments.) But he said Council is not out of options: Possiblities include looking to roll back the "temporary" tax increases that Council made permanent last year, or forcing the administration's hand by refusing to match its revenue goals. "If I can't get any cooperative relief, I'm not voting for anything over 1.0-percent millage rate," he said.
Most people who dislike bandit signs — those ugly and illegal posters urging passersby by to sell their house, hire a roofer, or enjoy cheap diabetes meds based on ads stuck to utility poles and fences around Philly — simply tear them down. Huggie has a different idea: he coopts the messages for his own twisted, artistic purposes. The latest — a take on the ubiquitous "I will buy your house in 10 seconds. Those other guys won't" signs — is an homage to Philly's Actual Value Initiative. (OK, so it's been several years in the making, not 10 seconds, but we'll let it slide this time, Huggie.)
More such hijinks are at GorillaUpskirts.com, where "ads" for other offerings do include fliers for "gorilla upskirts."
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