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2/19 Ups & Downs

No Kane second term, Scalia causes Toomey trouble and a battle erupts between the Donald and the Pope. See who made this week’s list!

Down ArrowKathleen Kane. The Attorney General finally had to face reality on Tuesday. Kane held a press conference and announced that she would not be running for re-election. The AG cited the familiar cast of villains to explain her decision as well as a desire to spend more time with her kids. Immediately, those candidates trying to become her successor sought to throw in their two cents. A few days later, Terry Madonna and Michael Young identified the four character traits that hampered her success. While the post-mortems continue, however, this saga is far from over as it now appears there could be some connection to the Rob McCord case. The past week has only been the latest chapter in this long-running drama.

Up ArrowBrian Fitzpatrick. The Fitzpatrick campaign continues to steamroll the competition in the GOP PA-8 primary. Their latest coup was earning “Young Gun” status from the NRCC, which cements Fitzpatrick as the front-runner after former favorite State Rep. Scott Petri was pushed out of the race. Finally, the DCCC went after Mike Fitzpatrick’s young brother when they heard the news, the best indicator of all that they expect to face him in November.

 

Down ArrowPat Toomey. The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia put a number of Senators in a bind, specifically those seven Republicans seeking re-election this year in blue states. The GOP obviously doesn’t want the President to name a new Justice who will shift the balance of the Court, but that reasoning won’t work for candidates like Sen. Toomey. Initially, then, it made sense for Toomey to say (as many Republicans have) that the next President should get to decide so that the electorate will get a chance to weigh in. Yesterday, though, the Senator hurt himself by arguing against any confirmation hearings and seemingly admitting that this was about more than the candidate’s qualifications. His assertion that an 11-month vacancy on the Court would not be “that big a deal” was a gaffe that his opponents are already capitalizing on and one that they will likely bring up innumerable times throughout the year.

Up ArrowStephen Zappala. The Allegheny County DA’s chief opponent in the AG Democratic primary is Montgomery County Commissioner Josh Shapiro. In order to prevail, Zappala must prevent an east/west divide from emerging as he’ll be on the side with less Democrats. Therefore, the endorsement of Philadelphia’s own Mike Stack was an important victory for the campaign. Furthermore, the Lieutenant Governor is Zappala’s highest ranking supporter and helps even the scales with Shapiro, who has the backing of former Gov. Rendell and is also a close ally of Governor Wolf’s.

Down ArrowDonald Trump. Evangelicals have been a critical Republican constituency since at least 1980. Donald Trump, however, has proven he doesn’t much care for the traditional rules and norms of politics. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a Pennsylvania religious group has some serious concerns about The Donald. When he refused to meet with them, they posted a blistering open letter to the candidate, questioning his bona fides. This was all before Trump found himself in a feud with none other than His Holiness Pope Francis yesterday. It’s in Trump’s interest to sincerely try to bridge this divide but he does not come across as the most humble of people.

It’s not often that a tweet generates its own story but this entry was so good that we couldn’t resist. The Philadelphia Police Department is quickly becoming the MVP of this feature.

https://twitter.com/PhillyPolice/status/700325266468564992/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

20 Responses

  1. Hello best up n down is Lt Gov Mike Stack supports zappala . This is almost hysterical . Stack just helped Josh. Does Gov Wolf even acknowledge Mike?

  2. Mr. Snyder – please tell me you aren’t going to ignore this article like you ignored the one about the Superior Court throwing out most of the charges in the Penn State case.

    http://mobile.philly.com/beta?wss=/philly/news&id=369750491

    This adds fuel to the rumor that Dougherty was involved in the framing of Kathleen Kane. The reporter who printed the story (Brennan) is alleged to frequent Dougherty’s bar and get free drinks. Dougherty and McCaffery are tight.

    And now Williams is refusing to prosecute John Dougherty. This is absolutely absurd.

    Seth Williams has been trying to take down Kane since he hired the sexist, racist creeps that she exposed through their e-mails. He hired them, he said, because he wanted to investigate corruption. How can you prosecute corruption if you can’t prosecute people who gave you money. The “text” nonsense is just a smokescreen. That is in no way grounds for a “conflict.” Complete BS.

    BTW – Williams must have believed Fina when he promised that the e-mails would never come out. He under-estimated Kane. Don’t get me wrong – Frina tried very hard to keep his e-mails a secret. He got Court Orders from his buddies who were judges. He entered his e-mails into evidence at a grand jury so they would be “protected.” He got the rest of the Clown car on board to rail-road Kane the way he tried to rail-road the Penn State administrators.

  3. Speaking of Dougherty, it seems Seth Williams is afraid of him. Williams just punted Dougherty’s assault case. And guess where he punted it to — the AG’s Office.
    I guess Dougherty can buy his way out of criminal prosecutions too. If Williams has to punt because he took money from Dougherty, then Kane will have to punt too. Because she too took money from Dougherty. Then there will be no one left to prosecute him. How convenient. Williams is a coward.

  4. Seth Williams has other issues. LOTS of them.

    When Kane won, but before she took office, Frank Fina finalized his “unjust” plea deal with Tyron Ali. Bruce Beemer called it “unjust.” Fina dropped all the charges. Fina let Ali keep the $430K in taxpayer money he stole from a non-profit set up to help children. Seth Williams picked up that case and made Fina his new best friend.

    Con-man Ali’s lawyer is Bob Levant. Fina negotiated that sweet deal, in the 11th hour (right before Kane was set to take over) with Levant. The taxpayers of PA suffered.

    And now Fina is suing the AG’s Office (and the taxpayers of PA) for more money. And guess who one of his lawyers is? Yep — Bob Levant.

    Rumor has it that Levant has also helped Seth Williams with the FBI’s criminal investigation into Williams.

    Now – Seth Williams has just created a new position at the DA’s Office – “General Counsel and Chief of Staff.” It’s a high paying job. The person he hired just walked off the street into that job. Her name is Kathy Martin and she has zero general counsel experience and hardly any prosecutorial experience.

    But – she is Bob Levant’s wife. Is Williams paying his lawyer (through his wife) with taxpayer money?

    It’s no wonder that Williams refuses to fire Fina. They are in bed together. Levant and Martin are on that stinky mattress too. Something is rotten at the DA’s Office.

  5. It’s not even close to the lowest of the low. Not even in the same zip code as framing someone ruining their career in order to cover up racist mysogonistic emails of attorneys that would appear before these Justices and cover up child sex abuse at penn state
    Has Eakin resigned yet. Did Shameless McCaffery give the money back his wife made on the consultant fees ? Has Seth fired Fina ?

  6. Kathleen Kane was a huge disappointment with her incompetence and double standards. Promoting her sister and letting her off the hook for sending discriminating emails… Lowest of the low.

  7. Expect a big, fat down arrow for Fina and Corbett next week after Michael Smerconish’s recent Opinion piece for the Inquirer. It included the following:

    Moulton’s 339-page report chronicled how nearly two years after a 15-year-old boy first reported being abused by Sandusky, the investigation was “stalled,” according to the prosecutor assigned to the case. Victim No. 1 was a ninth-grade boy known only by the initials A.F. His mother first made a report to his school’s administrators in November 2008. County officials eventually referred the matter to the Attorney General’s Office in March 2009. As Moulton’s report revealed, at the time the Attorney General’s Office was “heavily invested in . . . Bonusgate,” a political-corruption prosecution. That same month, Attorney General Tom Corbett announced he was exploring a run for governor.

    Three months later, A.F. testified in front of a grand jury that he had engaged in oral sex with Sandusky. In November 2009 – one year after his mother’s initial report – he returned to the grand jury because prosecutors wanted to gauge his ability to describe the crime on his own rather than in response to a prosecutor’s leading questions. He passed the test. Still, Sandusky was not arrested, even though the senior deputy attorney general believed she had sufficient evidence.

    As the months passed, the boy’s mother and the grand jurors grew restless with the delay. A July 2010 memo from the senior deputy attorney general to several colleagues [including Fina] noted: “The grand jury asked me again, as they have for the last four months, why we don’t have that particular presentment for them. They are very anxious to approve it. Likewise, I continue to get calls and mail from the victim’s mother and therapist. Can someone please tell me what the holdup is?”

  8. Good point on Graci.

    This is a joke. PA is not going to just ignore this nonsense because Kane has agreed not to run again.

    The system is corrupt. It is broken. It needs to be fumigated. It needs to be fixed.

  9. What about Graci? When does his law license get suspended?
    And Cynthia Baldwin, incompetent as always, still sucking down a Penn State salary?

  10. What has happened to transparency?

    What is being done about the Eakin fiasco? Not his e-mails – but his corrupt cover-up attempt. When is confidence on the system going to be restored?

    Getting rid of Kane while allowing guys like Fina and Eakin to march on will send the wrong message. Kane needed to go. Now that has been accomplished, it is time to turn out attention to the people in the system who have eroded public trust.

    No two people have done that more than Frank Fina and Michael Eakin.

  11. Way too cozy, Ha3. Way too cozy. Word is that Williams forced out his 1st Assistant (career prosecutor Edward McCann) because he refused to “get in line” re: Fina and his pals. McCann resigned rather than deal with the corruption there.

  12. “When you fish only in black pools, you tend to only catch black fish.”

    Ask Philadelphia ADA Frank Fina. He called his sting investigation the “Black Caucus” investigation. Only Blacks got arrested. When it came time to arrest people for the Salvation Army collapse, Fina gave the white guys immunity and went after the Black guys.
    And, then there is the e-mail we now know he sent to his white male buddies:
    https://www.flickr.com/photos/zadock1/3580634808

    How friggin’ racist is Frank Fina? Only Seth Williams seems to have trouble figuring out the answer.

    And now he has doubled down on his commitment to racist, pervert woman-hating creeps. He has hired Fina’s lawyer’s wife to a newly created position. She has zero qualifications. And she has a motive to prop up Fina. She stands to profit from Fina’s $$$ driven lawsuit against the AG’s Office.

  13. Exactly, Elroy. They tried unsuccessfully to destroy the evidence. And then Kane found it.

    I don’t believe she deserves a 2nd term; but that has nothing to do with the criminal case they manufactured against her.

    The next AG better be someone who will clean house. The corruption can be smelled for miles.

  14. William Ryan, as acting AG following Corbett’s election as Governor, ordered the destruction of 20,000,000 emails from within the Office of the Attorney General. Ryan is currently serving on the state Gaming Control Board.

  15. I agree with Pat Unger, who agrees with me, because we’re the same unemployed loser who keeps posting the same thing over and over and over.

  16. I am sure most lawyers have figured out by now that YOU CAN’T TRUST FRANK FINA AND HIS CRONIES

  17. Hey, at least Governor Wolf had the good sense to fire John Hanger. Why he took on Hanger in the first place is beyond me, but good move getting rid of the guy. Hanger is smart but has absolutely no social skills. Maybe we’ll get a budget now.

  18. Many in PA are not seeing the forest through the trees. The people she has the goods on (evidence of corruption included) are the ones who are responsible for the criminal charges and the temporary license suspension.

    They went on the attack as soon as they figured out that the e-mails they tried to delete were not deleted – and had been found by AG Kane.

    She is not perfect. But she is definitely being rail-roaded.

  19. Anyone who tries to separate Kane’s problems from the people behind them is disingenuous.

    Kane can be all the things listed above: inexperienced, poor temperament, etc. But that doesn’t change the fact that she was targeted by a corrupt bunch of creeps who were motivated by self-preservation.

    Kane won an election. In a landslide. She may be stupid. She may be naive. She may have been in over her head. But, what she found when she did what she promised to do while campaigning was a disturbing network of people who seemed to think the rules don’t apply to them. They used their State computers to distribute vile, racist material. Their attitudes towards minorities, women and homosexuals is very disturbing. The fact that they shared the material with Judges they appeared in front of is even more disturbing. They created a group of people who all had the goods on each other. People that shared the same racist, woman-hating attitudes. And, once you were part of that group, the other members had a hammer they could hold over you.

    Frank Fina was one of the prosecutors in this group. He prosecuted people for mis-using their State computers. And then he used his State computer on this:https://www.flickr.com/photos/zadock1/3580634808. That is but one example. There are many others.

    The person who is allegedly at the center of the e-mails is Seamus McCaffery. He was a Supreme Court Justice. His brother is currently a Judge in Philadelphia. He was once tight with Kane.

    When Kane won, but before she took office, Fina finalized his “unjust” plea deal with Tyron Ali. Bruce Beemer called it “unjust.” Fina dropped all the charges. Fina let Ali keep the $430K he stole from a non-profit set up to help children.
    Con-man Ali’s lawyer is Bob Levant. Fina negotiated that sweet deal, in the 11th hour (right before Kane was set to take over) with Levant.

    And now Fina is suing the AG’s Office for money. And guess who one of his lawyers is? Yep — Bob Levant.

    Rumor has it that Levant has helped Seth Williams with the FBI’s criminal investigation into Williams.

    Now – Seth Williams has just created a new position at the DA’s Office – “General Counsel and Chief of Staff.” It’s a high paying job. The person he hired just walked off the street into that job. She has zero general counsel experience and hardly any prosecutorial experience.

    But – she is Bob Levant’s wife. It’s no wonder that Williams refuses to fire Fina. They are in bed together. Levant and Martin are on that stinky mattress too. Something is rotten at the DA’s Office.

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