Brady needs only 35 votes from the 69 ward leaders to be re-elected as chairman and he has those votes. Once selected by the elected committeepeople in June, the ward leaders vote for the party's chairman, vice chairman, treasurer and secretary.

The bad blood between Brady, the DCC and Dougherty stems from Dougherty's attempt to run union members for committee seats in various divisions. That wouldn't be so bad if the seats were vacant, but many were not. Some took the move to mean Dougherty was trying to edge out Brady. Dougherty has some allies in ward leaders who say the party often infights before the primary but reconciles for the general election to beat Republicans.

"I hope the two get back together, the party needs them both," said a ward leader with a patronage job who feared for his position if he took sides.

While the Dougherty situation was a topic of conversation at the fundraiser -- even though his spokesman Frank Keel said, "That's nothing but talk; Dougherty's raised more money for the party than any other treasurer"—Brady stumped for Casey along with James Carville, who exhibited his classic sneer along with a diatribe on the evils of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum and the Republican Party. Casey continued collecting checks Monday night at a private VIP reception and a larger fundraiser at the Wyndham at Franklin Plaza with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Both Casey and Albright called the British memo detailing a meeting in the White House between President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair less than two months before the invasion of Iraq, "incredibly disturbing." (The New York Times reported Monday that the memo describes Bush as assuming that WMDs wouldn't be found, but hell-bent on a war anyway.)

"People were not told the facts, it was cherry-picked," Albright said. "Where was Congress when all this was going on?"

Added Casey, "Santorum didn't ask tough questions about Iraq. He's just a rubber stamp for Bush."

Should trials be televised? What makes a case "high profile"? These were some of the topics March 22 at the Philadelphia Bar Association's Federal Courts Committee meeting titled, "High Profile, High Publicity Trials: Observations from the Bench and the Press."

Panelists were District Court Judge Michael Baylson, who presided over former city Treasurer Corey Kemp's corruption trial, and Judge John Jones III, who ruled in last December's Kitzmiller v. Dover School District that teaching intelligent design in a public school science curriculum violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Veteran Inquirer crime journalist and author George Anastasia provided the media's point of view on a panel that agreed heightened public interest is what makes a trial high profile.

Anastasia said that as a reporter, he looked for the human-interest element in a trial. He cited the Thomas Capano trial as an example. (The human story was Capano murdering his girlfriend, Anne Marie Fahey, stuffing her in a cooler and dumping her in the ocean off the Jersey shore.)

From there, Federal Courts Committee Chair Steven Bizar asked, "Are cameras in the courtroom a bad thing?"

Jones said he turned down a request for Court TV to televise the Kitzmiller trial. In retrospect, he wondered if it was the right thing to do. Anastasia said cameras should be allowed.

How can a judge ensure that a juror won't look at local news reports that may sway his or her opinion during a trial other then sequestering? Sequestering, by itself, can hinder the juror selection process since potential jurors know they will be shut away during a trial.

Baylson said he instructed Kemp trial jurors to look only at national news; he thought the jurors were diligent.

He added that the most important thing for a judge is to have control over his courtroom unlike California Judge Lance Ito in the chaotic O.J. Simpson trial.

On judge bashing, Jones said he received threatening hate mail after his Kitzmiller ruling resulting in U.S. Marshal protection for him and his family. Negative remarks made publicly by pundits only fuel the fire, he said, referring to Republican mouthpiece Ann Coulter's declaration that someone should put rat poison in U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' crème brûlée.