DAILY GRINDER: City Council Passes Resolution Supporting ‘Clean Air Act’
"Global warming just never stopped!"
Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution yesterday supporting the use of the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. We’re now the 24th city in the United States to call on the EPA to work to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. According to CommonDreams, “Climate change in Pennsylvania will cause more heat-related deaths and an increase in ground-level ozone, which is linked to higher incidences of respiratory disease and death, according to a 2009 report from the Environment and Natural Resources Institute at Pennsylvania State University.”
Frank Tepper, a Philadelphia police officer who killed his 21-year-old neighbor in 2009, is in prison, but the city of Philadelphia may still be liable for the death. As told by Courthouse News Service: “ According to a federal suit filed in October 2010, the city allowed Tepper to carry deadly weapons even though he repeatedly engaged in “abnormal and outrageous conduct.” That conduct, the parents say, included an incident that occurred in the early morning of April 19, 1995, when Tepper, off-duty at the time, left a bar and took offense to comments made to his fiancé by a motorist.”
What’s today’s date? May something? Well, either way City Council and Mayor Michael Nutter have to reach an agreement on a budget by June 1, and by objective measurements, that means two weeks—assuming today is, in fact, May Something.
And May Something means it’s Bike To Work Day—because for some reason or another!
A couple were shot to death on Monday night and it’s recently emerged that the man had testified in a murder case. Councilman Curtis Jones, Jr. spoke of the murders at Council yesterday, and noted, “There is no justice without witnesses being protected…We’re losing justice. We’re losing witnesses. And we’re losing them right on their front porches.”
Councilman Bill Green had proposed three new ways to fight parking tickets: On the phone, through the mail and on the Interwebs. Mayor Michael Nutter wants to get rid of the phone option.
Councilman Jim Kenney, without the help of his social media consultants, has proposed an idea: Use prison inmates to clean up the city. He says they’d be paid and picking up your trash in Rittenhouse Park would show them what good, clean, hard work is all about, because until slaving in the hot sun for minimum wage, they had no idea. The city, he continued, could go to foundations to offset the cost of the program. And to think he wasted his One Great Idea video with part-time retired police officers.
Volunteers found 583 homeless people living throughout Philadelphia on Wednesday night.
The judge in the Philadelphia priest abuse case has dismissed a conspiracy count against Msgr. William Lynn and Rev. James Brennan, though the more substantive charges—that Brennan tried to rape a child and Lynn endangered children by letting Brennan roam free—are sticking.
