Allentown Afterthoughts

Allentown Good News on the new (or at least relocated) Jamaican restaurant that opened today at 921 Hamilton, in the old Spooners space. A menu in prose:

beef, chicken or veggie patties (with or without Coco bread), jerk chicken, fried chicken, curry goat, oxtails, ackee & saltfish, fish (escoveitch fried fish, steam, brown stewed, or any way you request it) roti dishes, stew beef, ital stew (vegetarian), coconut curry shrimp, jerk chicken salad, summer-fest salad (Veggies/Fruits) and much more!

I’m hoping that Tyrone Richardson at the Call’s Retail Watch will cover the opening. At the moment he’s a little preoccupied with Hooters.

LV Independent on the purported “Callahan Coverup”:

Looks like the “Callahan Cover-Up” turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. Where’s the cover-up? Where’s the favoritism?

LV Independent’s Jon Geeting is pointing to the Express-Times story–a seeming exoneration of Callahan and his staff. Unless there’s some new evidence as-yet unearthed, the Dent campaign will be left with some undercooked egg on its face.

Sometimes when there’s smoke there really isn’t any fire.

Eric Epstein on PA’s disastrous energy deregulation:  

PPL ratepayers now enjoy the “choice” of choosing between  a 20 percent to 30 percent generation rate increase, and face a 5.3 percent distribution  rate increase next year.   These numbers are staggering and coincide with the  deteriorating health of Pennsylvania’s shrinking middle class.  The promise of deregulation leading to  more jobs, lower taxes,  and affordable prices has turned out to be a profitable illusion for a select few.

Via Lehigh Valley Independent

Bill White on the Jake Towne debate shut-out, post-Pokerface:

And if [Dent] declines [to allow Towne to debate], don’t be gullible enough to believe it’s about his outrage over some scruffy antigovernment rock band. It’s about protecting his picnic.

The Call’s excellent education reporter, Steve Esack, on Allentown’s new superintendent, Gerald Zahorchak:

There is a plan for 18,000 students behind the words and gestures of the new superintendent of the Allentown School District. Zahorchak has such faith in his objectives that he is willing to put his job and the job of other administrators on the line.

“For some of the schools I want to be called out,” Zahorchak said Monday in an interview with The Morning Call. “Like for Central Elementary if we don’t get 80 percent of kids in third-grade at grade level — where only a very, very small percentage of Central Elementary kids are — three years from today, then you should fire the superintendent. That should be the first thing you do.”

Before taking the ASD job, Zahorchak was the state’s secretary of education, and has a good reputation. I’m excited about him, and the future of the ASD.

Zahorchak has plans to internally divide the city’s two high schools:

Citing national research, he said, the high schools will be broken down and “humming” into mini-academies of no more than 600 students. That number allows staff to get to know each child by name and understand their home life situation and their classroom performances. That breakdown is occurring now as Allen’s and Dieruff’s principals break their incoming freshmen classes into teams of teachers who will work in the schools’ new wings that have been built.

One way to answer the challenge of theme-based charter schools would be to develop these academies along thematic lines, creating the equivalent of magnet schools. ASD is the state’s third-largest district, after all; Pittsburgh and Philadelphia both have well-developed magnet systems.

One of the city’s major challenges is the perception (and, to a far lesser extent, the reality) of its schools. Middle-class families avoid the district, or move out when their kids get to school age. They have their reasons–some legitimate, some less so–but if the city hopes to regain a mixed-income population downtown we all have to double-down on the district. My own kids will be attending ASD’s Cleveland elementary when they’re old enough. One reason is Zahorchak.

The Dent campaign is already a laughingstock on this issue: No one can retain a shred of intellectual honesty and claim with a straight face that Dent is refusing to include third-party challenger Jake Towne in debates because an anti-Semitic band will perform at a Towne campaign event. For one thing, Dent’s campaign had already planned to freeze Towne out before this issue arose. And for good reason: Towne’s right-wing voters are likely to come out of Dent’s column in November.

The Callahan campaign, which favors Towne’s inclusion, is not operating on some high-minded principle of inclusion. It wants Towne in for the same reason Dent wants Towne out.

This morning LV Ramblings, passing along Dent campaign materials as usual, accused Callahan of condoning anti-Semitism. That is, to use an appropriate metaphor, beyond the pale.

Speaking of the Tribune Co., the company had some very bad news yesterday, according to the Chicago Sun-Times:

An examiner probing Sam Zell’s buyout of the Tribune Co. in late 2007 has found evidence of “dishonesty” in the deal’s latter stages, a conclusion that could throw the company’s 20-month-old bankruptcy case into turmoil.

Kenneth Klee, appointed by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to review the Tribune deal, said in a report submitted late today that fraud may have occurred in late 2007. That’s when the Chicago-based Tribune finalized $3.6 billion in financing to complete the $8.2 billion acquisition that came overwhelmingly from debt.

The Wall Street Journal interviews the newish CEO of the Tribune Co., Randy Michaels. The bankrupt Tribune is parent, of course, to the Call.

[Michaels] is also looking for revenue boosts in unconventional places, such as renting out part of Tribune’s headquarters for the filming of a “Transformers” movie for more than $200,000.

Good luck with that. Perhaps gimmicky band-aids like a rent-a-headquarters are explained by Michaels’ previous career:

As a radio personality before becoming an executive at Clear Channel and elsewhere, Mr. Michaels was known for colorful on-air stunts, including faking a frog being pureed in a blender.

The Call makes it into the interview. Amid a flurry of softballs, the WSJ asks Michaels why he has combined foreign and national news production.

Mr. Michaels: Stories [are] laid out in modules — standard sizes with collections of headlines, content, images [reducing the need for layout and copy editors]. If you pick up the Allentown [Pa.] Morning Call, the foreign news was written in Los Angeles and the national news was written in either Chicago or Washington. It’s probably higher quality journalism than a local paper that size is going to be able to afford.

What I’d like from the Call is high quality local news. Given its skeleton staff, a handful of Call reporters do an often heroic job. That’s in spite of Tribune Co. and the Call leadership, not because of it.

Michaels should take that money he’s saved laying out national news in Washington and plow it into local reporting.

From today’s LV Ramblings’ update post on the Bethlehem police story:

I call this the “Callahan Coverup” because someone in his administration obviously made sure this story never reached The Express Times or Morning Call.

The deduction that “someone in [Callahan's] administration obviously made sure this story…” isn’t enough–not nearly enough–to call this the “Callahan Coverup.”

It turns out that Bernie O’Hare, at LV Ramblings, was right about Ed Pawlowski’s missing basement renovation permit, and even had an inside source all along to confirm the story. Pawlowski himself has acknowledged the need for a permit, since he acquired one in the days since O’Hare’s original post.

Compliments to O’Hare for a real investigative coup. The failure by Pawlowski to secure a permit until the original post made the issue public is inexcusable. We haven’t heard his side of the story yet–and there should be a Call follow-up with this and other details–but the sequence of blog-post, followed by a hasty permit acquisition makes it unlikely that there’s a valid excuse. I am also troubled by the seeming abuse of open-records laws, in order to make time to obtain a permit.

I stand by my criticism of the tone of O’Hare’s original post. I am also mystified by his omission of the anonymous city source in his first post, and also his failure to make a case for the necessity of the permit (since much repair work doesn’t require permitting). Instead, he could only point to the LC assessors’ office, which wasn’t watertight sourcing for the claims he was making. Apparently, the inside city source was there all along, and it’s unclear why O’Hare didn’t cite him or her too.

Still, I came out swinging too hard. It was good reporting, and produced a very troubling story.