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The national media has packed up its encampment at the Criminal Justice Center. Philadelphia will, once again, somehow make do without its fickle attention.
Out of-town reporters, of course, made this rare visit to America's fifth largest but most ignored big city after conservatives accused the mainstream media of failing to cover Dr. Kermit Gosnell's rogue abortion clinic on Lancaster Avenue.
The liberal media, conservatives alleged, were concealing Gosnell's horrors from the public because they reflected poorly on abortion. This was perhaps surprising to local reporters who had covered every step of the case from the grand jury indictment on. It was likely also a surprise to abortion rights supporters, like Drexel professor Rose Corrigan who told me in 2011 that "because of the Medicaid ban on abortion funding and state restrictions, poor women in the state and in Philadelphia really face horrific choices about what to do if they have an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy."
Abortion rights activists were from beginning eager to talk about the reproductive healthcare services denied to low-income women. The national press, however, was only interested in covering the trial once the right had successfully turned the entire episode into an extended version of those blow-up pictures of disfigured fetuses they carry around at protests.
Decarcerate PA rallied today near City Hall to announce a march to Harrisburg demanding that Gov. Tom Corbett and the legislature cut prison funding and invest in education and social services.
“A lot of legislators talk the talk about all the things they’re going to do," said Decarcerate PA’s Joshua Glenn, describing the 113-mile trek. "But when they’re in office, they never do it. We’re walking the walk to show legislators how serious we are about ending mass incarceration."
Advocates are particularly incensed about the Corbett Administration's construction of two new prisons in Montgomery County, set to replace SCI-Graterford in the Philly suburbs. Decarcerate PA, which received a 2012 City Paper Big Vision Award, is demanding that Corbett halt the $400 million-plus project.
Speakers at the rally included City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson and representatives from the ACLU of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Student Union, Human Rights Coalition, DreamActivist PA, Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools, and the office of state Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown.
The speakers, some of whom donned yellow construction hats to symbolically “break ground” on the campaign, charged that the upcoming closure of 23 Philadelphia public schools was evidence that Corbett prioritizes corrections funding over the public good.
“The annual cost to incarcerate an individual is about $32,000, while the annual cost to educate a child is about $11,000," said Councilman Johnson. "You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that there is far greater value in investing in education over incarceration.”
The march kicks off with a rally on Saturday, May 25th at noon in LOVE Park and will pick up supporters along the way, ending with a June 3rd rally at the Capitol building.
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In recent months suburban and typically white victims of mass shootings in Colorado, Connecticut and Arizona have galvanized the United States to think critically about gun violence, mental health, and gun control. As they should have.
But Sunday's broad-daylight shooting of a largely-black New Orleans second line parade, which left 19 people injured, including three critically, merited just a six-paragraph AP story tucked into the bottom corner of A11 in The New York Times. The Mother's Day bloodshed evidences a jarring disjuncture in how violence is treated in the media: Americans killed by Muslims or in white suburbia merit non-stop coverage while the victims of everyday bloodletting on the streets of New Orleans, Philadelphia and Chicago are typically rendered a footnote.
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Funding for SEPTA and other public transit is "subsidizing a minority of our population’s bus fare, which is just more welfare," said state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler), according to an e-mail discussion obtained by the Capitolwire news service (subscription only).
Metcalfe's comments were sparked by an e-mail sent out by Rep. Tom Killion (R-Delaware) citing "a new report [that] showed 27 percent of the state’s transportation funding went to southeastern Pennsylvania – Bucks, Philadelphia, Delaware, Chester and Montgomery counties – while that region had 32 percent of the state population and 40 percent of the state’s economic activity."
The Econsult report, Understanding SEPTA's Statewide Economic Value, comes as Gov. Corbett and the legislature attempt to find a long-term fix to transportation funding--and as SEPTA faces a potentially devastating budget shortfall. City Paper examined the roots of SEPTA's funding crisis last June.
Rep. Rick Saccone (R-Washington) joined Metcalfe in criticizing Killion, saying that "the core point is that opponents don't believe the taxpayers should be funding a mass transit operating fund in the first place...They are fed up with, as they most often say, ‘pouring money down a black hole of inefficiency, patronage and corruption.’ If these investments are necessary then the private sector should and will invest in them. I have had five town halls in the last two weeks and people are disgusted with mass transit funding."
Metcalfe and Saccone did not respond to the evidence presented that SEPTA, like roads and bridges, are critical to the state's economic health. Public transit investment can also save taxpayer money by curbing suburban sprawl that forces inefficient infrastructure and service spending.
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Two men from the Azerbaijan Embassy in Washington D.C. visited right-wing Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler) last week. And yes, this is a set up for a bad joke. But it has nothing to do with bars.
"The catalyst for the meeting was a resolution proposed by a Philadelphia Democrat legislator," Metcalfe wrote to his email list. "The two gentlemen asked to meet with me because the resolution had been referred to the State Government Committee. They explained that the resolution was offensive to an ally of the United States of America. It was an interesting and educational meeting and one not expected normally at the Pennsylvania State Capitol."
Metcalfe, the State Government Committee's chair, pledged to block the legislation and went on to discuss pension reform. He did not, however, say what the legislation was. I asked around, and it turns out that the Azeri Embassy was angry about a "non-controversial" resolution introduced by Rep. Michelle Brownlee (D-Phila) "supporting Nagorno-Karabakh's right to self-determination and efforts to develop its democracy."
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The ACLU today filed a lawsuit challenging a Norristown, Pa., municipal ordinance that "punishes innocent tenants and their landlords for requesting police assistance" — including victims of domestic violence. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Lakisha Briggs, who "was threatened with eviction under this policy after she called the police for protection from her abusive ex-boyfriend."
The ordinance, according to the ACLU, "penalizes landlords and encourages them to evict their tenants when the police are called to a property three times in four months for 'disorderly behavior,' including responding to incidents of domestic violence."
Norristown, the seat of Montgomery County, is no stranger to civil rights controversies, drawing protests from advocates who accuse local police of detaining undocumented immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). More on the immigration controversy from WHYY's Emma Jacobs here. The ACLU press release is below.
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The long-awaited Inquirer.com and PhillyDailyNews.com are online this week, liberating the dailies from the bikini-and-gossip-coated digital stinkpit of Philly.com and locking content behind pay walls, where readers will finally have to pay for it. Sort of.
Philly.com, which like the papers is owned by Interstate General Media (IGM), continues to provide the dailies’ print content for free. When management made the newsroom announcement, some reporters were stunned — and, being reporters, started asking hard questions. “That was very different from what we’d been told in the early days of the run-up, which was that Philly.com might take ‘some’ stories but other copy would be ‘teased’ or hidden behind the pay wall,” says one newsroom source. “What was the point of the pay wall if people could one way or another find the stories for free?”
Some sites have a "hard pay wall" that places all content beyond non-subscribers' reach while others, like The New York Times, have a "soft" or "metered" pay wall that gives you a taste of access before asking you to pay. The Inquirer and Daily News seem to be doing something entirely different.
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"If you smell something stinking … it's Ill-Adelphia Because We're The Shit!"
That's what the shirt, with an image of a big steaming pile of poo underneath, announces to passersby — people walking by City Hall, like me. And I bought one.
Sekou Davis, 38, grew up in Wilmington, and "moved here from Los Angeles to take care of my father, and had to do something to generate money. So that's where the t-shirts came from." Davis, who now lives in West Philly, believes that many things are the shit, beginning, of course, with himself.
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I was walking through the City Hall SEPTA concourse a few days ago and saw this guy.
His sign reads: Capitol Hill, Ezekial 20:29, which, according to the online King James Bible is: "Then I said unto them, What is the high place where unto ye go? And the name thereof is called Bamah unto this day."
Guy's got a staff and some characters in a language I am not familiar with on his jacket.
I know I'm supposed to be the reporter here, but I was in a rush to catch my trolley and didn't have time to chat.
I think this means something about politicians turning away from God. Any Bible scholars out there have some insight?
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Today's City Paper includes an in-depth look at how Comcast flexes its political muscle at all levels of government, from City Council to Pennsylvania’s General Assembly to the U.S. Congress.
The company declined interview requests and asked CP to submit written questions, which we did last week. On Monday, we were still waiting, and so I called Comcast corporate communications executive director John Demming to check in — would they be responding to the questions they asked me to send them?
"I don't think so," Demming told me. Then why did you ask me to submit written questions? "Yeah, but I don't think we're going to be able to. We wanted to see what your story was about. We just, there's no need to reply. We don't have a comment. I just don't think, we're just not going, we don't have a response to them. I don't know if ... I don't know what to say."
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