BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE It’s the Ides of March, a date that lives in infamy, the day that Julius Caesar was betrayed and butchered by members of the Roman Senate — friends, Romans and countrymen, to a man. That was back in 44 BCE, and it’s been a bad-omen day ever since. But John Fetterman, the hulking lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and, as such, the president of the state Senate, which he’s moments away from gaveling into session, isn’t sweating it. After all, he gets Et tu, Brute’d by the Republican-controlled Senate on a semi-regular basis.

At this moment, he’s posing for a staffer’s camera on the sun-drenched balcony adjoining his office in the state Capitol complex, unfurling a bright yellow Gadsden Flag — retrofitted with marijuana leaves and the motto “Don’t Tread on Weed” — in the yawning chasm between his meaty outstretched paws. The pro-pot flag, along with a half-dozen or so homemade rainbow pride flags that, draped over his shoulders, make Fetterman look like a Roman emperor crossed with Wavy Gravy, were sent to his office by supporters from all over the U.S. and points beyond, one from as far away as Australia. “I don’t want to hang any today just because they’re going to be taken down in an hour,” Fetterman says by way of explanation for the photo session, the pics from which he’ll blast out on social media. “But I do want to thank everyone.”

The flags are replacements for ones that had been hanging from his balcony since his first year in office in 2019. The display so irked the Republican majority of the state legislature that they tucked a provision into a budget bill prohibiting the display of “unauthorized flags” on the exterior of the Capitol. In January, when Fetterman politely refused to comply, maintenance workers, at the behest of Republican leadership, confiscated his array.

“The GOP collectively shrugged when a couple of its members were photographed down in D.C. on Jan. 6th, but my pride and weed flags are a point of outrage for them?” Fetterman complained to a reporter from NBC News at the time. All in all it was just another skirmish in the hyper-partisan forever war currently raging in the ornate chambers of the state capitol.

Though he arrived here today in a black SUV chauffeured by his two-State Trooper security detail, dressed in a sweatshirt, board shorts and running shoes, he has since changed into the crisp, undertaker-black suit and azure tie he wears when he presides over the Republican-controlled state Senate. Of that august body, know that, in the immortal words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “nowhere will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Beneath the towering gilded splendor of the statehouse rotunda is where the rancid sausage-making of the state legislature takes place. It is a nary-splendored thing, a joyless, dreary enterprise, peopled with faceless hacks, bullies, crooks, cowards and bad-haired mediocrities in short sleeves and boxy, traveling salesman-blue suits, hailing from sleepy Pennsyltucky backwaters like Lockhaven and Knobsville, Shickshinny and Hokendauqua, their countenances plastered with the dead-eyed glossy headshot perma-grin of the damned.

Harrisburg is the place where good people go to become less so. Power invariably corrupts and almost everybody leaves this town in tears or handcuffs. This is not hyperbole. The PA General assembly — the largest full-time state legislature in the Union — is ranked the 5th most corrupt in the nation, and 39th for gender diversity by a nationwide quorum of statehouse reporters. Bi-partisanship? We haven’t had that spirit here since 2012, when Republican Speaker of the House John Purzel and shared a prison cell at Camp Hill with Democratic Speaker of the House Bill DeWeese.

Back in January, during a heated dispute about seating a newly-elected Democrat, even though his election had been certified, the Republicans used an obscure parliamentary maneuver to have Fetterman removed from the Senate floor. Just like that that President of the Pennsylvania Senate was rat-fucked out of power — for a day, anyway. As Caesarian back-stabbings go, this would rate a mere flesh wound, but the message it sent was clear: This isn’t a state house where the people’s business gets done, it’s a circus of cruelty.

Small wonder he wants out of the clown car. MORE

PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: It was, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, a day that will live in infamy. When President Donald Trump emerged from his mysterious one-on-one summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July of 2018, the respective visages and body language of the two world leaders could not have been further apart. The Russian president looked smug and sated, like a vampire with a bellyful of peasant blood; Trump looked like a man who’d just received a painful enema. Or, as grizzled, now-banished White House aide-de-camp Steve Bannon describes it in Siege, Michael Wolff’s decadent and depraved follow-up to 2018’s Trumpworld tell-all Fire And Fury, “like a beaten dog.”

Speculation within Trump’s inner circle was that Putin must have something on Trump. The pee tape? Evidence that Don Jr. tried to buy Hillary’s emails? His tax returns? Nah. As Bannon told Wolff, “nobody gives a fuck” about that stuff. But, he wondered, “What if they have his college transcript?”

Ahh, the college transcript. Trump famously graduated from Penn’s Wharton School in 1968 — a fact he reminds audiences of over and over again. (Per Penn’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, he publicly name-dropped Wharton 52 times between June 2015 and January 2018.) But despite all his humblebragging about that Wharton degree, Trump has never allowed his academic performance there to be made public.

“This was a major, major thing with Trump — that people might think he’s stupid,” Michael Wolff told me around the time of Siege’s publication earlier this summer. “The focus of that for Trump is the college transcripts, which are apparently terrible. I’ve spoken to friends of Trump from that time, and this was a guy that was obviously not interested in school and possibly never read a book in his life. For everyone that had known him then and years afterward, the assumption was that he had terrible grades, he was a lackluster student at best.”

In truth, Trump’s Wharton GPA is just one of many mysteries surrounding the 45th president’s relationship with Penn, Philadelphia’s most powerful private institution, which, unwittingly or not, helped unleash Trump on the world. Over the years, there have been rumors about how Trump might have gotten into Penn in the first place, and how much — or how little — he’s donated to the school as an alum. There are tales about Trump’s social life as a Penn undergrad — did he, in fact, have a fling with Candice Bergen? And there are stories — including one particularly juicy one — about the Penn careers of Trump kids Don Jr., Ivanka and Tiffany, all of whom followed in their old man’s red-and-blue footsteps.

Perhaps the biggest reason for this shroud of mystery is Penn itself; the school’s sphinx-like reticence about its most famous alumnus plays at times like a silent scream. For instance, Penn has never had Trump deliver a commencement speech or conferred an honorary degree on him. In the wake of his election, Penn tour guides were discouraged from bringing up the T-word and issued simple instructions for handling questions about Trump’s tenure at Penn: Keep it short and sweet — “Yes, he graduated from Wharton in 1968” — and leave it at that. Tell Penn you’re writing an article about Donald Trump’s time there, and you’ll get the academic version of name, rank and serial number: “Donald J. Trump earned a B.S. in real estate, which was awarded on May 20, 1968,” says Ron Ozio, Penn’s director of media relations, declining my request for an interview. Which is peculiar, given that most universities make a lot of marketing hay out of an alumnus in the White House — and Trump is Penn’s first.

So what is the truth about Trump and Penn? What’s the reality behind all those rumors? Because Philadelphians deserve answers, and because I’ve made a career out of lost causes and thankless jobs, I went on a hunt for the facts. MORE

PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: Because hell hath no fury like a mildly inconvenienced middle-aged Caucasian lady, the Internet gave this genus of white privilege a name: Karen. In Internet memes, she is invariably pictured with a South Philly mom cut — think Kate Gosselin’s kicky cowlicked bob gone rogue. Current mood: She would like to speak with the manager, please. Lately it seems like the Karens have gone wild in America, as you’ve no doubt seen all over the Internet: freaking the fuck out at Red Lobster and Trader Joe’s, calling the cops to report flagrant BWB (barbecuing while Black), calling the cops to report a Black girl selling water on the sidewalk, calling the cops to report a Black, Harvard-educated science editor in Central Park for having the temerity to ask her to put her dog on a leash as required by law.

And now the Karens are armed and dangerous. Just last weekend in St. Louis, a husband-and-wife team of personal-injury-lawyer Karens emerged from their gilded palace of slip-and-fall — wild-eyed and barefoot, with guns drawn and itchy trigger fingers trembling — and literally took aim at a group of Black Lives Matter protesters who had gate-crashed their private street on their way to the mayor’s house. (Yes, males can be Karens, too. I can’t think of a more ignominious death than to be gunned down by a couple that one wag on Twitter dubbed Guns N’ Rosé.) “I was terrified that we’d be murdered within seconds, our house would be burned down, our pets would be killed,” Mark McCloskey, who is brandishing an assault rifle in video of the incident, breathlessly told an interviewer afterward.

This was a new plot twist: Usually, Karens don’t lock and load; they call the cops. Karens love to call the cops; it’s their go-to move. Their idea of dispute resolution is to dial 911 and — usually through a veil of fake hysterics and crocodile tears — falsely report that whichever Black person(s) she is currently arguing with is in fact threatening her life. Karens are at least woke enough to know that bad things tend to happen to Black people when the cops show up — which is, of course, why they call them. The Bonnie and Clyde of the Brooks Brothers set notwithstanding, Karens don’t personally inflict violence on their perceived enemies; they order it over the phone, like a pizza. MORE

Photo by Salvatore Laporta/KONTROLAB/LightRocket via Getty Images via PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE Here’s to the COVID quitters, who have grown bored with this lethal pandemic, who are done with Netflix binging, mac ’n’ cheese and Zoom sex, who have places to go, things to buy, crowds to join, haircuts to get.

Here’s to the quitters, who have fearlessly cast off the dystopian chains of medical science, epidemiology and other big words, who are striking a blow for freedom where it is currently making its last stand: at the nail salon and the Red Lobster.

Here’s to the quitter-in-chief, who’s decided that competently managing the pandemic with masks and social distancing and shared sacrifice to minimize the loss of life is just too hard and that 200,000 dead Americans by October is a justifiable cost of getting the Dow back to a re-electable number.

Here’s to the quitters, who’ve stormed the statehouses with their long hard guns and their beer guts, their bitchin’ camo pants and Travis Bickle mohawks, who rabidly screamed themselves red in the face at security guards and cursed out nurses in surgical scrubs until their states were liberated from the tyranny of public safety and common sense.

Here’s to the quitters, who fought for the right to blow racist dog whistles and do the “Lock! Her! Up!” cheer in an indoor MAGA rally without some goddamn socialist gimp mask muting the sweet, sweet venom of the moment. MORE

Photo by BRYAN SHEFFIELD via PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE

PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: The fact that Philadelphia barrister Francis Alexander Malofiy, Esquire, is suing Led Zeppelin over the authorship of “Stairway to Heaven” is, by any objective measure, only the fourth most interesting thing about him. Unfortunately for the reader, and the purposes of this story, the first, second and third most interesting things about Malofiy are bound and gagged in nondisclosure agreements, those legalistic dungeons where the First Amendment goes to die. So let’s start with number four and work our way backward.

At the risk of stating the obvious, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let the record show that “Stairway to Heaven” is arguably the most famous song in all of rock-and-roll, perhaps in all of popular music. It’s also one of the most lucrative — it’s estimated that the song has netted north of $500 million in sales and royalties since its 1971 release. Malofiy’s lawsuit, cheekily printed in the same druidic font used for the liner notes of the album Led Zeppelin IV, alleges that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant — Zep’s elegantly wasted guitarist/producer/central songwriter and leonine, leather-lunged lead singer, respectively — stole the iconic descending acoustic-guitar arpeggios of the first two minutes of “Stairway” from “Taurus,” a song with a strikingly similar chord pattern by a long-forgotten ’60s band called Spirit. At the conclusion of a stormy, headline-grabbing trial in 2016 that peaked with testimony from Page and Plant, the jury decided in Zep’s favor.

When the copyright infringement suit was first filed in Philadelphia by Malofiy (pronounced “MAL-uh-fee”) on behalf of the Randy Craig Wolfe Trust — which represents the estate of Randy “California” Wolfe, the now-deceased member of Spirit who wrote “Taurus” — people laughed. Mostly at Malofiy. The breathless wall-to-wall media coverage the trial garnered often painted him as a loose-cannon legal beagle, one part Charlie Sheen, one part Johnnie Cochran. “Everybody kind of dismissed me as this brash young lawyer who didn’t really understand copyright law,” he says, well into the wee hours one night back in December, sitting behind a desk stacked four feet high with legal files in the dank, subterranean bunker that is his office.

Hidden behind an unmarked door on the basement floor of a nondescript office building in Media, the law firm of Francis Alexander LLC is a pretty punk-rock operation. The neighbors are an anger management counselor and a medical marijuana dispensary. “I think of us as pirates sinking big ships,” Malofiy, who’s 41, brags. Given the sheer number of death threats he says he’s received from apoplectic Zep fans, the fact that mysterious cars seem to follow him in the night, and his claim to have found GPS trackers stuck to the bottom of his car, the precise location of his offices remains a closely guarded secret. Failing that, he has a license to carry, and most days, he leaves the house packing a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson.

While most lawyers are sleeping, Malofiy is working through the night to defeat them, often until sunrise, fueled by an ever-present bottle of grape-flavored Fast Twitch as he chain-chews Wrigley’s Spearmint gum and huffs a never-ending string of Marlboro menthols. We’ve been talking on the record for going on eight hours, and Malofiy shows no signs of fading; in fact, he’s just announced the arrival of his third wind.

Talk turns to the distinctly pro-Zep tenor of the media coverage of the “Stairway” trial. “I was a punch line for jokes,” he says, spitting his gum into a yellow Post-it and banking it into the trash for, like, the 42nd time. Nobody’s laughing now, least of all Page and Plant. Nor, for that matter, is Usher. Back in October, at the conclusion of a dogged seven-year legal battle marked by a bruising string of dismissals and sanctions, Malofiy won a $44 million verdict — one of the largest in Pennsylvania in 2018 — for a Philadelphia songwriter named Daniel Marino who sued his co-writers after being cut out of the songwriting credits and royalties for the song “Bad Girl” from the R&B heartthrob’s 2004 breakout album, Confessions, which sold more than 10 million copies.

Also, in late September of last year, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Malofiy’s appeal of the 2016 “Stairway to Heaven” verdict and ordered a new trial on the grounds that the court “abused its discretion” when the judge refused to allow Malofiy to play a recording of “Taurus” for the jury. (Members were only allowed to hear an acoustic-guitar rendition played from sheet music.) The retrial is expected to begin in the next year, and Page and Plant, along with bassist John Paul Jones, are again anticipated to take the stand. Copyright experts say Led Zeppelin — which has a long history of ripping off the ancient riffs and carnal incantations of wizened Delta bluesmen and only giving credit when caught — should be worried.

Malofiy, who calls Zep “the greatest cover band in all of history,” will go to trial armed with reams of expert testimony pinpointing the damning similarities between the two songs — not just the nearly identical and atypical chord pattern, but the shared melodic figurations, choice of key and distinctive voicings. He’ll also show the jury that Page and Plant had ample opportunity to hear “Taurus” when Zep opened for Spirit on their first American tour in 1968, two years before they wrote and recorded “Stairway.”

“Most big companies rely on the concept of wearing you down, forcing you to do so much work it literally drives you broke,” says Glen Kulik, a heavy-hitter L.A.-based copyright lawyer who signed on as Malofiy’s local counsel when the Zep case was moved to federal court in California. “If you have any chance of standing up to them, it’s going to require an incredible amount of persistence, confidence, and quite a bit of skill as well, and Francis has all those things in spades.” And Kulik would know, having successfully argued a landmark copyright infringement case before the Supreme Court in 2014 that paved the way for the Zeppelin suit.

Ultimately, Malofiy doesn’t have to prove Led Zeppelin stole Spirit’s song; he just has to convince a jury that’s what happened. Assuming the trial goes forward — and that this time, he’s allowed to play recordings of both songs for the jury — there will be blood. Because contrary to his hard-won rep as a bull in the china shop of civil litigation, Malofiy possesses a switchblade-sharp legal mind, an inexhaustible work ethic, and a relentless, rock-ribbed resolve to absorb more punches than his opponents can throw. He’s a ruthlessly effective courtroom tactician with a collection of six-, seven- and eight-figure verdicts, not to mention the scalps of opposing counsel who underestimated his prowess. “I don’t plink pigeons; I hunt lions and tigers and bears,” he says. The big game he’s targeted in the past decade include deep-pocketed transnational corporations like Volvo (an epic seven-year case that ended in an undisclosed settlement) and Hertz (against whom he won a $100,000 verdict).

In the arena of civil litigation, where the odds are increasingly stacked against plaintiffs, Malofiy claims to have never lost a jury trial, and that appears to be true. “I have lost twice — in the Zeppelin case and a lawsuit against Volvo — but got both decisions reversed on appeals,” he says, unsheathing a fresh stick of Wrigley’s. “Now, the same people that were asking me for years why I’m doing it are asking me how I did it.”

If Malofiy prevails in the coming “Stairway” retrial, he’ll completely shatter the Tolkien-esque legend of the song’s immaculate conception — that it was birthed nearly in toto during a mystical retreat at a remote Welsh mountain cottage called Bron-yr-aur, to which many a starry-eyed Zep disciple has made a pilgrimage once upon a midnight clear when the forests echo with laughter. It will be like proving that da Vinci didn’t paint the Mona Lisa, that Michelangelo didn’t sculpt David. Barring a last-minute settlement, many legal and copyright experts predict that Malofiy may well emerge victorious, and credit for the most famous rock song in the world will pass from the self-appointed Golden Gods of Led Zeppelin to some obscure, long-forgotten (and not even very good) West Coast psych band, along with tens of millions in royalties, effectively rewriting the sacred history of rock-and-roll. And the man who will have pulled off this fairly miraculous feat of judicial jujitsu is the enfant terrible of Philadelphia jurisprudence. MORE

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILLY POST Somebody’s got to say it: The media has been asking all the wrong questions about the unfolding Peyton Place-like Petraeus saga. As I type this the FBI is raiding Paula Broadwell’s home and it’s been revealed that the just-appointed Supreme Allied Commander of NATO is under investigation for “inappropriate communications” with Jill Kelly, the local girl made good who dragged this whole sad story out into the light when she told the FBI that she was being cyber-harassed by Broadwell — so stay tuned. But I’m willing to bet Mitt Romney $10,000 that when this is all said and done we will be shocked — SHOCKED! I tells ya — to learn that powerful men have extramarital affairs, the FBI is now in the catfight referee business and everyone loves a good Zippergate amongst the high and mighty. And not much more.

Instead of asking who Petraeus has been fucking — that’s between him and his family — we should be asking who’s really getting fucked? I would argue the fucked list includes: The truth, the Sunnis, the 800 American soldiers that died in The Surge in Iraq, the thousand-plus American soldiers that have been KIA in The Surge in Afghanistan, along with the thousands of innocent civilians — read women and children — killed in both operations, and the American people who suffer through cop-cutting, firemen-firing, teacher-trashing austerity in a moribund economy while untold bajillions disappear down the worm hole of fear, lies and state-sponsored slaughter.

General Petraeus’ carefully cultivated celebrity is the end product of the media’s unholy deification of the avatars of the military-industrial complex. Petraeus was not just the architect and prime enforcer of both surges, he was also both their tireless cheerleader, employing the full force of his celebrity to disarm media skepticism and conscript public opinion to move the White House across what was once a bridge too far. Which is proof that the Pentagon now has the power to not just to prosecute wars, but also persuasively promote their escalation and endless perpetuation. That should scare the hell out of everyone that loves democracy and civilian rule of the military as dictated by Article II of the United States Constitution.

Instead of asking whose Operation Anaconda was going All In who, here’s five questions that the media should be asking:

1. What was the fucking point of the Iraq war? Arguably we’ve left the country 7,000 times more fucked than we found it, or more accurately, broke it and then bought it — at a cost of roughly $800 billion, 5,000 American dead and 120,000 to 655,000 dead Iraqi men, women and children. Can anyone please tell me what we got for all that blood and treasure? Anyone?

2. What have we accomplished in Afghanistan? We are about to leave Afghanistan pretty much as fucked as we found it — which is roughly 7,000 times more fucked than most countries. We ran off al-Qaeda back in 2001 and for the life of me I can’t figure out why we stayed another 11 years. Pretty much the only thing we’ve accomplished is making Afghanistan the world’s leading producer of non-pharmaceutical opiates (read: heroin) and cannabis. Which, when you stop to think about it, is a curious way to wage a war on drugs.

3. Why does the Pentagon spend nearly $5 billion annually on public relations, i.e. propaganda? According to the Associated Press, in the last five years, Pentagon spending on propaganda has increased by an astonishing 64 percent. Propaganda is actually the nice word for it. I prefer the more accurate term for it: Bullshit. Five billion worth of bullshit can bury a lot of inconvenient truths and wash a lot of brains. Personally, I think the money would be better spent immunizing children, heating the homes of the indigent elderly or buying school books for cash-poor school districts. Cuckoo for coco puffs, I know, but I’m funny like that. MORE

[Artwork by HUGGIE!]

PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: Who can blame Michael Nutter, though, for […] bristling at the fact that he was — again — being forced to publicly defend his authenticity as a black man?As the Mayor puts it to me, in an interview in his office a few weeks after the party, “I’m fully secure and clear about who I am, where I came from and what my life experience has been as an African-American.” Then he adds, “The fact of the matter is, neither you nor anyone else has walked into Ed Rendell’s office and said, ‘Are you white enough?’” There is no question that John Street’s remarks were deliberately inflammatory. He made them, he says, to try and gin up an opponent for Nutter in this May’s Democratic primary. But however calculated the comments, they highlight a real problem for Nutter: Support for the Mayor among African-Americans is tepid at best. Last February, a Pew Charitable Trusts poll found that while 65 percent of white Philadelphians approved of Nutter, only 43 percent of African-Americans did. In August, a Municipoll survey found that 42 percent of black voters thought Nutter was a “good” or “excellent” mayor, compared to 53 percent of whites. More telling was the survey’s finding that in a hypothetical Democratic primary between Nutter and former Republican Sam Katz, only 38 percent of blacks were sure they would vote for the incumbent, with 26 percent claiming they would vote for Katz. When Katz ran against Street in 2003, he earned hardly any black votes — in fact, some post-election analyses put his share at about two percent. MORE

As we reported last week, the new issue of Philadelphia Magazine, which comes out tomorrow, will feature a juicy story about governor Ed Rendell’s alleged extramarital affairs, but it may not be what you think. The latest buzz is that the story will actually quash rumors of infidelity, not foment them.

PREVIOUSLY: We have been hearing talk that the July issue of Philadelphia Magazine, which hits newsstands next Friday, will feature a story about the extramarital affairs of Governor Ed Rendell. We called up Philly Mag Editor Larry Platt and asked him to confirm or deny and he said the following: “We do have a story on the governor in the July issue, but beyond that I don’t discuss the content of stories before they are published.” Hmmm. We will let you, dear reader, decide how much to read between the lines, but as a wise man once said, ‘It don’t take a weather man to know which way the wind blows.’

PREVIOUSLY: POWER APHRODISIA: Hanky Panky In Harrisburg?