This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

The Sixers’ season hasn’t even started yet, but co-owner David Adelman has already scored a win: Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker announced this week that she is supporting the team’s proposed $1.55 billion Center City arena project, 76 Place, for which Adelman is lead developer. The news makes it much more likely that Adelman, the CEO of Philadelphia-based Campus Apartments – a national student housing outfit – will realize his most ambitious real estate project yet.

State Sen. Camera Bartolotta received national attention this week when she pushed back against claims from the conservative “Libs of TikTok” X account that the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris bused 2,000 Haitian migrants into the borough of Charleroi, a municipality that Bartolotta represents. In a response to the post, Bartolotta said the claims were not true: “The business owner provides transportation for workers to get to & from his facility. These are not immigrants being bussed in by Kamala,” the senator wrote. The exchange gives new meaning to the phrase “owning the libs.”

This commonwealth attorney has been recognized as a tenacious fighter for government accountability. Paula Knudsen Burke, an attorney who has advised news media outlets throughout Pennsylvania on media law issues, has been awarded the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association’s 2024 Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence. Burke, a local legal initiative staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has also worked as an investigative reporter and editor for the watchdog publication The Caucus for the LNP. 

Philosopher, activist and political gadfly Cornel West lost his shot at being Pennsylvania’s 2024 presidential election spoiler when the state Supreme Court this week ruled he was ineligible to appear on the commonwealth’s ballots. West, who is running as an independent, is a scholar of philosophy whose long association with Harvard University ended when he decamped to the Union Theological Seminary a few years ago.

A libel lawsuit filed by state Sen. Dan Laughlin over a 2022 opinion article in the Erie Reader took a new turn this week after Laughlin reportedly dropped a claim that the op-ed damaged his sex life, according to new reporting from the Erie Times-News. According to the outlet, after lawyers for the Erie Reader looked to compel Laughlin to provide medical records to back up the claim, Laughlin withdrew his assertion that the op-ed – which sought to link him to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election – harmed his sex life with his wife.

The GOP primary saga in Luzerne County looks to be nearing a resolution. The county elections board officially confirmed Jamie Walsh as the winner of the Republican primary for the 117th House District – months after Walsh seemed to narrowly defeat incumbent state Rep. Mike Cabell in the April primary. The state Supreme Court settled the last remaining question of which ballots should be counted, voting without dissent to certify Walsh’s four-vote victory over Cabell, who asked for a recount. Cabell was awarded one additional vote – but not the five needed to flip the result.