A Million Stories

All the news we care to print.

by Jeffrey C. Billman and Holly Otterbein

Evan M. Lopez

In what ass-backward place do the Green, Constitution and Libertarian parties all have the same goal? Pennsylvania, of course! The Center for Competitive Democracy (CCD) — those three bad boys and a bunch of others — filed a federal lawsuit in April challenging the state's less-than-open ballot-access laws. The CCD takes issue with the fact that many counties don't tally write-ins. (Damn! Santa Claus and Jesus are never gonna win.) It also argues that Pennsylvania's threshold for being a major political party — claiming 15 percent of registered voters —is insurmountable. But here's the really interesting wrong that CCD's suit was trying to right: Pennsylvania is the only state in which third-party candidates, after having their nomination papers successfully challenged, have to pay the litigation costs of the folks who challenged them. It first happened in 2004, when the court ruled that Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader had to pay about $81,000 of his challengers' fees. Then, in 2006, when Carl Romanelli ran as the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, he got slapped with a similar fee.

"These fees create a chilling effect," says CCD attorney Oliver Hall. "The entire reason for being a third party is to recruit candidates and run them." He points to at least three third-party candidates in Pennsylvania who were running in '06, but dropped out because they feared being hit with such fees.

Last week, however, Judge Lawrence Stengel threw out their case, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the state's assessment of court costs. In other words, the CCD isn't Nader or Romanelli — the guys who actually got screwed — and thus can't claim injury. The CCD will likely appeal.

But if the third parties ever win this thing, do they expect to, y'know, get candidates elected in Pennsylvania? " My gut feeling is no," says Steve Baker, a Green Party member. "But regardless, all candidates should stand before the public without interference."

Surely, somewhere within the depths of your beer-swilling, Marlboro-puffing, pretzel-dog-munching soul lies a smidge of sympathy for those poor bastards whose job it is to enforce this state's byzantine liquor laws. Right?

No? Well, maybe you should. The Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement (BLCE) is but an arm of the state police; still, they're the guys who end up going Elliot Ness on gastropubs that dare to serve craft beers that aren't properly registered with the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) — the gall! — storming the joints with armed agents and carrying away kegs of sweet, sweet beer to rot in faraway police storage facilities. And like the good drunkards we are, last week we were pleased as punch to read that a state House committee read the booze cops the riot act.

Not as pleased as we would have been if the committee was, say, abolishing the PLCB, but, hey, small victories.

In a hearing about the early March raids on three Philly bars — as it turned out, at least some of the confiscated beer from the Memphis Taproom, Local 44 and Resurrection Ale House was, in fact, on the PLCB's list — state Rep. John Taylor took after Maj. John Lutz, the BLCE director, thusly, according to kyw1060.com: "To have four armed agents go into a small establishment about this kind of violation is an overuse of manpower."

To which Lutz responded: "With all due respect to these three bars, there are a lot of bars that we go into that may not have that particular clientele, and there is a danger."

That got our antennae twitching. Could beer policing really be that dangerous? We searched newspaper archives looking for incidents in which BLCE agents had to draw their guns or fend off assailants, but found nothing. So, we called Lutz and asked him. "What I tried to point out was, when we go into these bars, we're no longer undercover," he says. In a crowded bar, full of people who are, by definition, drinking, it's possible that some half-cocked douche will attempt to play heroic beer-saver. We'll give him that. We'll also let him point out that the cops' guns weren't drawn, and they weren't carrying axes. And, we'll acknowledge that, if you're going to haul a bunch of heavy kegs out of a bar, it might be wise to have more than one cop on scene. It still seems a little heavy-handed to us, considering these aren't bars where frat boys pound Bud Light Golden Wheat or whatever Anheuser-Busch is crapping out these days — but cops will be cops.

Anything else you'd care to tell us, Major? "I don't write the laws, I enforce them." Those laws, he continues, " can be somewhat complicated. ... I go back to the fact that I don't write them. But I have to enforce them." And, he continues, his officers play by the same rules as the rest of us — at which point you begin to wonder if maybe he thinks we should scrap this ridiculous system, too.

Sadly, at that same hearing last week, the lawmakers all agreed that the registration system was basically fine. Sigh.

Evan M. Lopez (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Say you work for The Philadelphia Inquirer or the Daily News. And say, because you are human, you have a Facebook account with which you share the meaningless minutia of your daily life: how cigarettes and Diet Coke make for an acceptable breakfast; how your editor is a jerk-face who doesn't appreciate your beautiful words; how your kid threw up all over the carpet last night.

Well, your bosses at Philadelphia Newspapers LLC (PNL) would like you to know that they're watching. Last week, mediamatters.org posted a memo that PNL sent to all of its employees regarding a new social-networking policy, which — at least the version posted online — doesn't tell us too much of anything about what the actual policy is, but does make explicitly clear that PNL understands what a social-networking site is. And that's important.

Says the memo: "[PNL] encourages its employees to interact knowledgeably and responsibly socially online where such use supports the goals and objectives of PNL. ... These guidelines are intended to help you make appropriate decisions about work-related blogging, personal websites, postings on video and picture-sharing sites, in the comments or responses you make online on blogs and elsewhere on the public Internet, and other social-networking activities in which you may engage."

We ran PNL's statement through the A Million Stories Corporate-Speak Decoder (patent pending), which conjured up this Confucian translation: "Don't embarrass us."

Seems simple enough — unless you're Bill Ross, head of the Newspaper Guild Local 38010, which represents newspaper employees. In a letter posted on the Guild's website (local-10.com), Ross, who didn't return our phone calls, told PNL: "To the extent the policy applies to non-work-related activities of our members, it is overly broad and improperly and illegally interferes with our members' lawful right to express their personal views. To the extent the policy seeks to subject our members to discipline/discharge for work-related activities, the employer does not have the unilateral right to impose such terms and conditions of employment without bargaining in good faith." We'll keep you posted.

This week's report by Jeffrey C. Billman and Holly Otterbein. E-mail us at amillionstories@citypaper.net.