Joel Mathis

Top LCB officials said to take gifts, favors from vendors : "The report names LCB chief executive officer Joe Conti, board member Patrick J. "P.J." Stapleton III, and marketing director James Short as having accepted gifts and favors, including wine and tickets to sporting events and golf tournaments.  It says one LCB vendor secured a round of golf with a pro for Stapleton during a tournament at Aronimink - and sent two employees to serve as Stapleton's caddies." It seems to me that this is the kind of back-scratching behavior that goes on all the time among private business executives—maybe slightly unseemly, if that, but never rising to the level of outright bribery. What makes this report newsworthy is that it's not private business executives taking the gifts: It's state officials. And that's something different . Saving liquor execs from charges of graft isn't really a reason to privatize Pennsylvania's system of state liquor stores—i

I'm a trend-setter : "Nationwide, the number of stay-at-home dads has more than doubled in the past decade, as more families are redefining what it means to be a breadwinner. There were only about 81,000 Mr. Moms in 2001, or about 1.6 percent of all stay-at-home parents. By last year, the number had climbed to 176,000, or 3.4 percent of stay-at-home parents, according to U.S. Census data." Of course, that's still a very small trend.

Me today at The Philly Post , writing a letter urging President Obama to hire Mayor Nutter away from us: "You can probably sympathize with the mayor because he, like you, has found his time in office derailed by a cratering economy and the desperate, flailing need just to keep the ship afloat. Neither of you get the credit you probably deserve for the fact that our city and nation simply haven’t burned down in the last four years. Still, Mr. President, you at least got a version of health care reform enacted. You ended Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. You ended the war in Iraq. These have been mostly good things, substantive stuff that improves lives. Mayor Nutter’s had a harder time coming up with a signature achievement. The AVI failure is most recent, but it’s not been so long since he failed in his attempt to impose a tax on sugary drinks. Has any Philadelphia mayor so routinely failed to get City Council backing for his initiatives?" Head over to PhillyMag to read the whole

I hadn't heard from my most-loyal correspondent in quite some time. Never fear, he's still tracking me: Hey joel,thats the first time in 3yrs you kinda told the truth.whats wrong giving up on your marxist ideas?that hope an change not working out like you thought?ps. Its been 3yrs he had to work on it NOT 27 months.your a joke As is often the case: I have no idea what he's talking about. But it pleases me to receive Billy's emails. It really does.

Back when Citizens United was decided, I suggested that we'd soon see a movement toward keeping campaign donors secret: "The effects of corporate money flooding campaigns can be somewhat counteracted by know who is spending the money and where it’s going to. Soon, though, we might not even have that. And what we’ll have is millions upon millions of dollars being spent to sway voters without those voters having any understanding of how the system is really working. That’ll be good for corporations and the candidates they support. But it won’t be so good for the rest of us — or for our democracy." And I said it because that was the clear aim of the big-money advocates . I mention this because, in a rare bit of vindication for my political prediction abilities, that's precisely what has come to pass. Fred Hiatt gives the overview today : Republicans always dangled this apple in the most alluring way. Political money will find a path, they would insist. Give up! Give

In Philadelphia, a homicide detective falsifies his time sheets and gets fired—and his supervisors are reprimanded. FOP President John McNesby is on the scene : "The murder rates in Philadelphia are through the roof, and guys like Kenny Rossiter clear the murder rates," McNesby said. "If I had a relative who had been murdered, I would want somebody like Kenny Rossiter on the case, whether he's home, whether he's at the office, or whether he's in North Wildwood." We all love movies featuring hard-bitten detectives who have deep, compromising flaws. In real life, Kenny Rossiter effectively (and, perhaps I should say, allegedly ) robbed Philadelphia taxpayers of money. And that's a problem: We can't find any homicide detectives who don't cheat their employers? I sometimes wonder if I give McNesby too hard a time: He very often shows up in the paper when some bit of police malfeasance in the news, and it's his job to provide a defense t

Via  Radley Balko , we see that the ACLU is defending (PDF) a student who wore an anti-gay-marriage shirt to school Read the whole thing. And as always, I ask: Would the righty American Center for Law and Justice take similar action on behalf of a gay student? No. No it wouldn't.

NYTimes.com : "Congressional Republicans were more pointed in their criticism, but they too were careful not to oppose some kind of solution to the problem of young people who are in the country illegally but who are productive, otherwise law-abiding residents. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, denounced it as “possibly illegal” for essentially bypassing lawmakers. Mr. Rubio said the announcement would be “welcome news for many of these kids desperate for an answer,” but that by going around Congress, the president had made it “harder to find a balanced and responsible long-term” solution. " (Emphasis added.) Poppycock. The reason the president took action is that a "balanced and responsible long-term solution" has been impossible to come by in Congress. President George W. Bush tried and failed to achieve sane immigration reform when his party had control of Congress—but his party also has too many nativists who take a hard line against any p

Torture advocate John Yoo—who believes that the president has the legal power to order the testicle-crushing of a suspected terrorist's child and maybe even to suspend the First Amendment —believes that President Obama exceeded his power by saying he won't deport the children of illegal immigrants: "So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support." This is actually completely consistent of Yoo, for one reason: President Obama didn't use "war" as the justification for the policy. But Yoo's history indicates there are virtually no limits on a president's powers if war-making is the justification. So Yoo would be conceivably be helpless—unless, of course, he's merely an opportunistic hack—if President Obama

A conservative friend recently told me that President Obama needs to be replaced with someone "who can work with Congress." But it's not entirely Obama's fault that Congress has been so unworkable. Michael Tomasky explains:  "On the night of Obama's inauguration, Draper writes, about 15 GOP legislators from both houses--along with Newt Gingrich, journalist Fred Barnes, and pollster Frank Luntz, who arranged the evening--got together at a Washington restaurant.  They were not necessarily the party's official leaders, but they were the emotional leaders of the new breed--Jim DeMint, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy--which is to say, the cohort to whom many others were looking for leadership; indeed, if you know anything about Mitch McConnell, to whom the leadership was looking for leadership. They talked for four hours about what their posture should be.  They agreed that night: oppose everything in completely unity. Show, Draper writes, "united and unyield

Maybe a little late, Ben and I discuss President Obama's comments in our Scripps Howard column . My take: Obama was wrong: The private sector isn't doing fine. It's doing astoundingly great -- better than ever, in fact. No, really. How do we know this? Because corporate profits now comprise more than 10 percent of America's gross domestic product. As Reuters' Felix Salmon noted, that number has never been that big, ever. For comparison's sake, corporate profits topped out at just under 5 percent of the GDP at the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Instead of investing those profits and creating new jobs, which has been the usual pattern after previous recessions, corporations are sitting on the cash and hoarding the money. That's their right, but nobody should think that the private sector is doing poorly, and it belies the notion that Obama is running an anti-business administration. It's the rest of us who aren't doing so well. Corp

P hiladelphia Police are going to experiment with a new system that attaches cameras to cops and lets them record incidents from their point of view. John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, is naturally outraged : ""We're 500 cops below where we should be, so I'd be totally against it until they hired those officers, repaired every police station and put decent cars on the street," McNesby said. "When they finished that, I'd be more than willing to discuss putting cameras on officers."" In other words: Never. You can have your accountability never. Now: We all want police to have the best possible working conditions. But "best possible working conditions" shouldn't be necessary to ask police for some accountability. In any case, it's pretty obvious that  even if City Hall met McNesby's named conditions, he'd just move the goalposts a bit. The goal here to let police act as they will without interf

Back in 2001, I attended a national gathering of Mennonites in Nashville that brought two strands of the church together into the new Mennonite Church USA . It was a weird week—one that both made me thrilled to be a Mennonite, but also helped set my path out of the church. The official gathering was on the grounds of the Opryland Hotel . But across the street from that, there was a second gathering—of gay and lesbian Mennonites . While individuals were allowed into the main gathering of Mennonites, the group itself wasn't allowed to put up a booth or display in the convention hall. So they met separately, sharing stories and worshiping together. I made the trip across the street, and doing so permanently transformed my feelings about the church and its treatment of gays. It was meeting two gay middle-aged Mennonite men—one of whom had nursed the other through a heart attack—that I found compelling. They shared a real love, one that allowed them to serve each other in a real a

There are a few problematic things about Luigi Zingales's proposal to privately finance the college education of bright young students —starting with the fact that if you have to pre-emptively explain to readers that "this is not indentured servitude," it's probably indentured servitude. But what really bothers me about the proposal is the assumption underlying this entire statement from Zingales: "This is not a modern form of indentured servitude, but a voluntary form of taxation, one that would make only the beneficiaries of a college education — not all taxpayers — pay for the costs of it." This presumes that only the recipient of a college education is the beneficiary, and that's not even close to true. One reason the feds underwrite student loans—and why states still pay for public universities, even if that commitment is diminshing—is that the country benefits hugely from having a better-educated workforce. Those trained minds help create in

Hmmm. Looking at my posts today, I wonder if people will think I'm turning conservative. I'm not. I just believe in a liberalism that meets the world as it exists--and that world has lots of people who aren't liberals. It's tough to get much done without securing their assent—or, at least, the assent of enough of them.

I don't think they have to be, but it appears they are in New Mexico : "In 2008, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission found Elane Photography, an Albuquerque photography studio co-owned by Elaine Huguenin and her husband, Jonathan, guilty of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for refusing to photograph Vanessa Willock’s same-sex “commit ment ceremony.” The court ordered the business to pay $6,600 in attorney’s fees. If it was little surprise that the commission found in favor of Willock, it was a shock when, last month, the New Mexico Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. The three-judge panel rejected Elane Photography’s claim that forcing the business to photograph the same-sex ceremony against its conscientious objections constituted “compelled speech” in violation of the owners’ federal and state rights. It also rejected the Huguenins’ claims to protection under the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause and the New Mexico Religious Freedom Restoration

I think Atrios is right to keep pounding away at the idea that our elites love to bail out banks and leave austerity to the poor masses. But I think he's wrong that liberals should love California's High-Speed Rail project , even though there are massive cost overruns and questions about its utility: "My point is, on the rare occasion that the government is considering giving us some nice things, we should probably just stand up and applaud, even if we can imagine even nicer things that the government should give us but won't. The choice isn't between HSR in California and What Atrios Wants To Spend Money On, the choice is between HSR and, you know, more high tech killing machines, money for war contractors, and tax cuts for rich people." Not really. There will always be money for high-tech killing machines, war contractors, and tax cuts for the rich. So liberals really need to prioritize what they want to do with a not-limitless pot of resources—particularl

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner kinda-sorta confirms my theorizing about how Depression-era generation helped create the never-grow-up culture that followed it: "One of my things is that human behavior doesn't change, but certainly the manners change, and what you're watching is the manners changing. And I use it in every aspect of the storytelling. And it's a very fine gradation, and it's hard to do, but I think the audience felt that there was this kind of precipice, and Don feels it, too. It's not just about people saying exactly what they want. When Megan's going to follow her dreams, because that's what she wants to do, and Roger says, "My father told me what to do," and Don says, "I grew up in the '30s; my dream was indoor plumbing." We take it for granted that you can choose what you want to do. That's all part of a new generation, and very soon there's going to be a generation doing whatever it wants, and they&#

The kiddie football league limits full-speed collisions —but only in practice. In games, it'll still be legal to watch your child get his block knocked off: "Dr. Matt Grady, a pediatric sports medicine specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the new rules, while a good start, did not go far enough, and that the emphasis in football for players who have not yet reached high school should be on developing skill and technique, not learning how to tackle. “Playing tackle football at 10 years old doesn’t translate to being a pro athlete,” he said. “I think the ability to catch and run and throw translates to being a pro athlete. Players should develop these skills, and then we can add in the collisions later.”" As I think I've said before, it's going to be increasingly untenable for most parents to let their kids play tackle football as it becomes more and more clear that the game takes a huge toll on their bodies. That'll dry up the supply of

The leader of Philadelphia Catholics urges Harrisburg to pass vouchers, or he'll have to close schools : "What I noted in February is even more pressing today: Without new scholarship tax credits and school vouchers to relieve costs, more archdiocesan schools will close soon, and more of the financial burden of educating young people will fall on the public." But even under Chaput's solution, more of the financial burden of educating young people will fall on the public.  Students whose education isn't currently publicly subsidized would be for the first time, a likely hit to taxpayer wallets over time. Conservatives who balk at auto industry bailouts will be amenable to Chaput's proposal. But it's worth considering the idea that Catholic schools are failing of their own accord: Philadelphia church pews aren't as full as they used to be, certainly, so it makes sense that the population of students for church schools would also be in decline. Chaput