Clout: Cops had flash-mob news conference well covered
MAYOR NUTTER announced this week that "rapid response" police teams would be ready to roll in response to violent flash mobs that have rocked Center City since December.
M
AYOR NUTTER
announced this week that "rapid response" police teams would be ready to roll in response to violent flash mobs that have rocked Center City since December.
Their first assignment? Backdrop for a Wednesday news conference on the strategy at Headhouse Square in Old City.
PhillyClout counted 36 police officers on hand for more than an hour at the news conference, which started 25 minutes late and ran for 38 minutes. That doesn't include the police commissioner and his deputies.
We wondered why the cash-strapped city would use valuable resources like that. Did the city fear a flash mob might spring up at the news conference called to talk about flash mobs?
We asked Doug Oliver, Nutter's press secretary, how much it cost to staff the event with cops, where they had been transferred from, if they were being paid overtime and whether that was the best use of their time.
"I appreciate the question, but I'm not going to spend any time trying to track down all that, nor will I ask anyone else to," Oliver responded via e-mail. "In my humble opinion, that's the absolute worst use of time."
FYI: He's talking about his City Hall staff there, not the cops.
Oliver said the officers assigned to stand behind the mayor's podium during the news conference had not been paid overtime "and were meant only to underscore the seriousness with which the city is addressing the 'flash mob' challenge."
Finger-pointing politics
Tea-party darling Pia Varma preaches the politics of personal responsibility. Just don't expect her to practice it.
Varma decided to move back to Philadelphia this year to challenge U.S. Rep. Bob Brady.
But Varma was booted from the Republican primary-election ballot Monday, after a judge ruled that she didn't have the required 1,000 signatures from GOP voters on her nominating petitions.
Why did Varma botch the very first step in her campaign?
She blames local Republican leaders, saying they led the effort to collect most of her signatures. Varma concludes the local GOP is either incompetent or colluded with Brady against her.
Tell it to the judge, you say?
Varma didn't show up in court, later claiming she hadn't been served with a legal notice. She went even further, saying a process server who testified that he had served her "obviously perjured himself."
But then Varma backed off those claims, saying she could not recall five days later if she had been served with the legal notice.
And finally, Varma decided her candidacy itself was the fault of the local GOP, posting this on her Facebook page Tuesday: "I am young and naive and childish. So, why would they pick me to challenge Robert Brady? Makes no sense. This is not about blame and [it's] not about getting elected to Congress. This is about exposing the way it all works."
Unsafe in any court
Ralph Nader just can't catch a break in Pennsylvania courts.
Nader, the presidential candidate tossed off the 2004 Pennsylvania ballot, demanded three weeks ago that state Attorney General Tom Corbett investigate Reed Smith LLP, the law firm that worked with state Democrats on that legal challenge.
A Harrisburg jury was pondering whether Democrats in the state House used tax money to pay for the effort. The jury decided this week that three of four defendants broke the law, but not on the charges involving Nader.
Reed Smith responded to Nader's claims with a statement saying the firm had no knowledge of state money being used to pay legislative staffers to work on the challenge. The firm added that it had been assured that those staffers had worked as volunteers.
Quotable:
"In fact, when I called the mayor's communications office and told one of his press aides I was working on a story about Brady, the aide went negative for a couple of minutes, tearing into a guy who has been an awfully valuable ally, before asking that the entire conversation be off the record."
- Steve Volk in a new Philadelphia magazine story on the relationship between Nutter and Brady.
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