Winners and Losers for the week ending March 31

No offense to anything emanating out of the nation’s capital, but the nadir reached this week by politicians and politics in the commonwealth deserves top billing. And no doubt,  there will still be time enough anon to delve into heavy-rotation hits like what Michael Flynn knew, when he knew it and who he told about it; the endlessly entertaining ways US Rep. Devin Nunes can manage to debase himself, his Intelligence Committee and the American people through his kabuki of Trump apologia; and the “find the lady” Trump administration assault on everything from women’s health care and family planning to internet privacy (more on this gem below).

How bad was it this week? Well, why not start with a depressingly detailed compendium of Keystone State corruption?  Then you could enjoy the international attention brought to Philadelphia by Vice asking the question: “Is Philly the most corrupt big city in America?” (Points off to the usually hep-cat daddy-o’s at Vice who led the article off with the most laughably egregious misuse of “jawn” to date.) And for the “Back to the Future” entry this week, check out the state GOP’s craven re-introduction of bills to make it easier for gun advocates to sue municipalities over their gun laws – just as the good Lord the NRA intended.

And yet … there are still enough L’s to go around:

WINNERS

Richard Ireland: the Chester County businessman walked out of court a free man after a federal judge ruled that prosecutors failed to prove their case that Ireland tried to bribe former PA Treasurer Rob McCord – despite McCord’s wearing a wire.

Ryan Costello: Bucking his president and party, the Chester County US Rep. is leading a group of 17 GOP Congressmen in an effort to get the party to recognize that climate change is really a thing (!) and enact legislation to combat global warming.

Stephen A. Zappala Jr.: The Allegheny County district attorney made the hard – and correct – choice to order a review of some 600 cases where evidence was handled by a medical examiner’s employee with a possible drug problem.

LOSERS

Scott Wagner: the state senator and GOP gubernatorial hopeful made plenty of headlines this week when he keynoted a gas industry conference and discussed, among other things, how climate change is being caused by human body heat and the Earth moving closer to the sun each year.

Al Lord: When you can see the finish line in a bruising, horrifying, costly trial of a case that has come to negatively define your university for years, what do you not want your trustees doing? Evidently, Penn State’s soon-to-be former public relations employees never got around to asking Lord how he would respond to the guilty verdict brought against former university president Graham Spanier in the Jerry Sandusky case. If they had, maybe Lord, a member of the board of trustees, wouldn’t have said that he was “running out of sympathy” for the “so-called victims” of Sandusky’s crimes.

Your privacy: Thanks to a gut job by the Republican Congress – including US Sen. Pat Toomey and 12 PA Republican Congressmen – of an Obama-era rule, your internet service provider is now free to sell your browsing data to advertisers. One small bright side to this sellout move: Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin has launched an all-out effort to buy and publish the browsing histories “of every congressman and congressional aide.”