For councilmembers, the Housing Opportunities Made Easy, or H.O.M.E., proposal was altered to prioritize households at the bottom of the income scale, their main demand throughout the process. For the mayor, Council has approved her signature proposal and done so without significant alterations. That means the city will borrow and spend the first tranche of money soon.
Frankly, I’m surprised the income limits for just two of the dozens of programs included in the initiative became such a source of contention. Council is right that the neediest should be prioritized, while the mayor is correct in saying that raising the limits is unlikely to create a flood of interest that will squeeze out lower-income homeowners.
If a house needs modification to facilitate a resident’s physical needs, or has one of the qualifying repairs (like a major roof leak) for the Basic Systems Repair Program, most homeowners with means will address the problem as soon as they can — even if it means spending their own money. Getting help from the city can take months. That’s a lot of time to deal with a leaking roof, crumbling joists, or an inability to access your entire home.
Perhaps the argument suited both sides. For the mayor, arguing with Council about income limits meant not arguing about whether borrowing nearly a billion dollars for her housing initiative is a good idea. It also meant new concepts like One Philly Mortgage or the property-based Shallow Rent Program mostly went unscrutinized. For councilmembers, it was an opportunity to demonstrate their compassion and score a win over a mayor who doesn’t like to lose.
The Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility is a waste-to-energy incinerator in Chester that handles more than a million tons of trash a year.
Burning desire
The biggest controversy during Council’s first session of the year was whether or not the city should continue sending trash for incineration at the Reworld Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility.
Chester residents and 3rd District Councilmember Jamie Gauthier want the city to stop a practice they view as unneighborly, blaming Reworld for poor air quality and medical issues. Reworld says incineration is better than the alternative: landfills. Both options lead to increased local emissions. Which one is considered worse often depends on whom you’re talking to.
One way to reduce the impact of the city’s trash would be to begin a municipal pilot program for composting. While many residents utilize composting services, extending access could lead to a significant reduction in waste. This would mean less impact on the environment and local communities, no matter which option the city ultimately chooses.
The Chester Water Authority, located at 415 Welsh St. in Chester.
Water wars
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Chester Water Authority, a win for advocates of publicly owned water utilities. The financially distressed Delaware County city had claimed ownership of the authority and its assets, based on the fact that it had originally established the agency decades ago. In the meantime, however, the coverage area has spread, even including much of neighboring Chester County.
Despite this, the state-appointed receiver for the city of Chester came to see a sale of the authority as a way to rebalance the books. Chester has been under state supervision since 1995 and was placed into receivership by former Gov. Tom Wolf in 2020. When Aqua America offered more than $400 million for the authority, it was hard for the city, which has around $500 million in liabilities, to refuse — even when the authority’s board opposed the deal.
The court’s ruling ends the push to privatize the authority, which is a win for ratepayers, especially the many who don’t live in the city but still rely on the authority for water. But it leaves Chester City in need of another way out of its long municipal nightmare.
Colin McAndrew, 9, a fourth grader at North Penn, holds a sign that reads “Classrooms not Class Zooms” during a rally held outside of the Montgomery County Human Services Center in Norristown in 2020.
No Zoom school
With Philadelphia expected to receive a huge helping of snow this weekend, I think it is worth reminding regional school administrators that kids deserve better than Zoom school.
Weather models that are much more accurate than the ones they used back in John Bolaris’ day are predicting a foot or more of snow. That could be enough to make getting to class on Monday unrealistic, especially given how many teachers travel in from the suburbs.
Losing a day of school is a challenge, but it doesn’t justify forcing kids to spend the day on their laptops, especially given the growing body of evidence showing that digital learning tools simply aren’t as effective. The National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores, often called the Nation’s Report Card, show that students have regressed across the board, erasing decades of progress.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote a book called The Anxious Generation, which blames a surge in screen time (including for school) and a severe curtailment of unstructured free time for growing teenage anxiety.
Sadly, too many adults who grew up in a time when children were allowed more freedom and spontaneity keep imposing policies on kids that leave them with less of both.
In the sweltering August heat of the West Texas desert, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — through a $1.2 billion private contract that was awarded under some strange circumstances — in 2025 opened up a large tent city detention camp near El Paso to take some of the thousands swept up in Donald Trump’s mass deportation raids.
It took just a matter of days for horror stories to begin leaking out of the sprawling camp on the grounds of Fort Bliss.
A Cuban refugee identified as Isaac, a pseudonym, told investigators from a coalition of human rights groups that guards had violently assaulted him as part of a campaign to convince him and other detainees to be dumped in Mexico rather than tocontest their deportation.
Isaac told the groups’ lawyers in a sworn declaration that “the guards hit my head” and “slammed it against the wall approximately ten times” before grabbing and crushing his testicles, then handcuffing him and putting him on a bus with 20 other detainees that was driven to the border. They were told, according to Isaac, “If we don’t want to go to Mexico, then we would either be sent to a jail cell in El Salvador or Africa.”
This undated photo provided by Jeanette Pagan-Lopez shows Geraldo Lunas Campos with his three children. Lunas Campos died Jan. 3 at an ICE detention facility in El Paso, Texas.
The implication was that if the Trump regime did not act, things at Camp East Montana would get worse.
They did.
Over a 33-day stretch that straddled the arrival of the new year, three ICE detainees at the Texas camp died under murky circumstances. One of the cases — the Jan. 3 death of 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos, also a Cuban immigrant — was on Wednesday ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner, citing efforts by camp guards to restrain him. The medical examiner wrote in his report that Campos died from “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has continued to maintain that Campos’ death was “a suicide,” and that any encounter he had with guards was an effort to prevent him from taking his own life. Two fellow detainees who reported seeing guards choking Campos have now received deportation notices. The mother of two of Campos’ children told the New York Times, “He was being abused and beaten and choked to death.”
The alleged killing of Campos is arguably the worst example of what many critics predicted when Trump won the presidency in 2024, behind supporters waving placards, “Mass Deportation Now.” The squalid, hastily erected tent city in the Texas desert is the flagship of what experts describe as a growing network of concentration camps. And now, one year into Trump’s second term, people are dying in them.
“It’s everything that we warned it would be, even before it opened,” Haddy Gassama, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU who’s been working on the issues around Camp East Montana, told me this week. “I think their goal is still to put 5,000 people in this space with inadequate healthcare, inadequate food, and inadequate recreation.”
The high-profile, increasingly violent immigration raids that have been taking place in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other U.S. cities have swelled the number of detainees in ICE custody to more than 73,000, an all-time record. DHS is currently planning a large-scale 2026 expansion of its gulag archipelago that would even include repurposing remote rural warehouses for holding human beings.
In such a large population of detainees, some deaths would be inevitable, but the current ongoing spike in fatalities has shocked and alarmed experts. The sixth ICE detainee death of 2026 took place on Sunday, which is a rate of one every three days. That extrapolates to more than 120 deaths over a year, which would be more than 10 times the rate in the last year of the Biden administration, when only 11 detainees perished.
Parady La, of Upper Darby, died while in ICE custody in Philly.
That Jan. 18 fatality also occurred at Camp East Montana, when Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, of Nicaragua, died of what government officials called a “presumed suicide.” Unlike Campos, the autopsy on Diaz will not be done by the county medical examiner, but by government doctors at an Army medical center. Diaz was one of many migrants swept up in the current ICE operation in Minnesota.
The third recent death tied to the Texas concentration camp — Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, of Guatemala, who wastaken to an El Paso hospital — was determined by an autopsy to have been caused by complications of alcohol-related liver disease.
That the majority of ICE custody deaths are linked to medical causes doesn’t necessarily exonerate either the agency or its private contractors. A 2024 report by Physicians for Human Rights that looked at 52 deaths in ICE custody from 2017 to 2021, or during Trump’s first term, found that 95% were preventable, or possibly preventable, if appropriate medical care had been provided.
One such medical death occurred here in Philadelphia earlier this month when Parady La, a 46-year-old Cambodian refugee who lived in Upper Darby, died after he was taken from the city’s federal detention center to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. ICE said La was suffering from severe drug withdrawal symptoms, but family members are questioning whether the feds paid enough attention to his illness, or even administered the right treatment.
Human rights watchers insist that the spike in ICE detention deaths cannot be viewed as a coincidence, but as an outgrowth of problems that include not only medical neglect but also squalid conditions, substandard food, rancid water, and patterns of physical and sexual abuse by guards. They say the problems are not new, but have substantially worsened as the Trump regime hastily expands its networks of detention centers and camps.
In December, another Camp East Montana detainee — Thomas, also a pseudonym — told human rights lawyers that “he was beaten by officers so severely he sustained injuries across his body, lost consciousness, and had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance.” Like his fellow detainee Isaac, he alleged guards grabbed his testicles and crushed them.
Today, I was notified of yet another death at Camp East Montana.
This is the 3rd person who has died in the $1.24 billion privately-run facility that focuses on profits instead of meeting basic standards. https://t.co/pZuXwfNS1T
Gassama, the ACLU attorney, said the horrific track record of ICE detention raises all kinds of red flags about its current plans, aided by its $175 billion windfall in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that was signed last year, to house as many as 80,000 detainees in a new network of revamped warehouses. “You can only imagine what a remodeled warehouse would be like to detain people, human beings, long term,” she said.
It’s true that — as right-wing pundits are always quick to point out — the U.S. mass deportation regime offers nothing that comes close to the death camps Nazi Germany established at the end of the Holocaust. But experts like author Andrea Pitzer say the similarities to concentration camps that Adolf Hitler set up for his political enemies after taking power in 1933 are too many to ignore.
History has shown again and again that rounding up masses of people based on their identity strips them of their basic humanity. And that becomes the sick justification for violent abuse, neglect, endemic disease, and, ultimately, death.
The most famous victim of the Nazi Holocaust, the teenage diarist Anne Frank, wasn’t killed in a gas chamber, but died from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was the result of unsanitary conditions and medical neglect.
Now, people are dying in record numbers in “the camps” on sunbaked U.S. soil. This is shameful beyond words.
In this photo provided by the National Archives, Japanese Americans, including American Legion members and Boy Scouts, participate in Memorial Day services at the Manzanar Relocation Center, an internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., in May 1942.
These human rights abuses now occurring at Camp East Montana are also a tragic echo of the longer arc of history of its Fort Bliss location. In 1942, thousands of detainees — mostly Japanese Americans, with some people of German or Italian descent — were shipped from the West Coast to be held in a barbed-wire camp under constant watch by armed guards. Over the course of World War II, some 1,862 Japanese Americans died in the broader network of internment camps, many from harsh conditions.
Shalimar Thomas speaks for many about how Mayor Cherelle L. Parker is doing at the halfway point of her first term.
“I can see the difference in the neighborhood,” said Thomas, the executive director of North Broad Renaissance, a nonprofit that manages the business improvement district along North Broad Street.
Indeed, the big picture shows Parker is delivering on her campaign promise to make the city “clean, green, and safe.” While polls indicate a large majority of Philadelphia residents support the mayor, the reviews from the more than a dozen people I spoke with were mixed.
Ed Rendell, the former governor who is widely considered the city’s most consequential mayor of the last half century, gave Parker high marks for tackling quality-of-life issues, particularly crime.
“What she has done under the circumstances is remarkable,” Rendell said. “The city was demoralized, people had lost faith in government.”
Allan Domb, the real estate mogul and former City Council member who ran against Parker in the 2023 mayoral primary, said Parker’s best decision was to appoint Kevin J. Bethel as police commissioner.
“If the city is not safe, you can’t do anything else,” Domb said.
Under Parker, crime is way down. The city recorded the fewest murders in 60 years in 2025. Enhanced technology has helped police solve homicides at the highest rate in 40 years.
But this is not just a Philly thing. Crime is down across the country, thanks to several factors such as an aging population, a return to work and school after the pandemic, and investments in violence reduction programs.
A former City Council member called Parker’s selection of Kevin J. Bethel as police commissioner the best decision of her tenure so far.
Philadelphia had 222 homicides last year compared with 305 in New York, which has a population more than five times larger. Boston had just 31 murders. San Antonio, roughly the same size as Philadelphia, had 99 murders.
Despite the improvement, Philly remains a laggard when it comes to policing.
Mayor Jim Kenney fizzled out following the pandemic, but other positive trends were set in motion during his administration. The city’s finances are strong, property values are increasing, and job growth is outpacing many other big cities, including tech capitals like Seattle and San Francisco.
Parker deserves credit for working to scrub the city’s negative image as “Filthadelphia.” She launched an effort in 2024 to clean every block in the city. Abandoned cars were towed, graffiti scrubbed, dilapidated buildings were sealed, and vacant lots cleaned.
Parker recently announced plans to clean and beautify some of the busiest roadways in preparation for the more than one million tourists expected this year for the World Cup matches, the MLB All-Star Game, and the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Parker deserves big props for tackling the opioid crisis that has long plagued Kensington. The city has cracked down on open-air drug markets and homeless encampments in Kensington, while pushing those battling addiction to get help.
Crime has dropped in Kensington, and the quality of life has improved. Critics argue that the problems have not gone away since the dealers and many homeless people were just displaced. But overdoses across the city dropped to the lowest levels in a decade.
Even still, some City Hall insiders and political operatives were critical of the day-to-day operations. Several criticized the administration for being slow to return calls or provide basic information. Despite Parker’s often-repeated slogan of a unified “One Philly,” some said the mayor does not respond well to anyone who disagrees with her.
Parker during a news conference in West Philadelphia last month. She recently announced plans to beautify some of the city’s busiest roadways in preparation for the more than one million tourists expected to visit this year.
“One Philly can’t be just your Philly,” one City Council staffer said. “Some of the things Mayor Parker does, Councilmember Parker would not tolerate.”
Like many interviewed, the City Council staffer asked not to be named, so as to speak candidly.
Several pointed to the proposed Sixers arena in Center City as a microcosm of Parker’s inability to compromise. Nearly a year was spent forcing Council to back the deal — despite stiff opposition across the city — only to see it collapse.
“[Council] is still pissed about the Sixers,” the Council staffer said.
Others said Parker’s hard-line stance in the labor negotiations with the city’s trash haulers and other blue-collar union workers led to an unnecessary strike and left bruised feelings among many who are part of her base of support.
“That was a strike that didn’t need to be,” said one political consultant. “After it was settled, there was no need for the victory lap.”
Parker’s signature housing initiative, known as Housing Opportunities Made Easy, or H.O.M.E., has been slow to become reality. After two years of planning, the program remains bogged down in Council.
“It’s surprising how slow out of the gate this has been,” said another political consultant. “She could be halfway through Year Three before it even gets going.”
The plan to create and preserve 30,000 housing units will be funded by borrowing $800 million in bonds — a hefty number with a murky return on investment.
Parker discusses the municipal workers’ strike during a July news conference. “That was a strike that didn’t need to be,” said one political consultant, who took issue with the mayor’s hard-line stance in contract talks.
Some believe the problem is that Parker micromanages her administration and does not empower top staffers to make decisions.
“I think she tries to be too hands-on,” said the first political consultant.
This is where it would have been helpful to hear directly from the mayor, but Parker’s communications team did not make her available for an interview despite several requests.
Rendell, who did not support Parker in the crowded primary, had a simple answer: “You can’t make everyone happy.”
That holds true with the way Parker has responded to Donald Trump’s attacks on cities, migrants, affirmative action, and many other issues.
Rather than push back, Parker has laid low — much to the outrage of those who argue that this is not the time to remain silent. Others argue Parker is wise not to poke the wildebeest.
Trump has not sent National Guard troops into Philadelphia, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have made arrests across the city.
Philly is a tough town, but a poll last summer found Parker’s approval rating at 63%. Despite some setbacks, she is off to a good start.
Crime, poor schools, and high taxes have long prevented Philadelphia from achieving its full potential. Until all three are addressed, lasting improvement will be incremental.
Time will tell if Parker’s strategy is the right one. Or if her tenure will result in substantive change.
To hear the Parker administration officials tell it, moving the Rocky statue from the bottom of the Philadelphia Art Museum steps to the top is a victory for the underdog.
The new location, which received a green light from the Art Commission on Jan. 14, will certainly create a dramatic, Instagrammable moment for tourists, and further elevate the Rocky brand (and value).
But it’s no victory for Philadelphia residents, who remain the true underdog in this saga. Allowing the old movie prop to dominate the Parkway’s iconic vista is simply the latest in a series of decisions that have privatized the Art Museum’s gorgeous, landscaped grounds.
If you walk to the back of the museum, you’ll find the most egregious example of Philadelphia’s zeal for monetizing public space: the sprawling Cescaphe banquet operation at the Fairmount Water Works.
While the main Engine House had been used as a restaurant in the past, the city allowed Cescaphe to take over the entire complex in 2021. Today, the Water Works is surrounded with a cordon of server stations, portable restrooms, and covered walkways.
Since 2021, the historic Fairmount Water Works has been surrounded by a cordon of server stations and covered walkways. A glass party room prevents the public from enjoying the Mill House Deck, a pier overlooking the Schuylkill.
Cescaphe’s presence has drastically limited the public’s access to this historic landmark, a scenic spot where generations have come to stroll and take in views of the Schuylkill. Although visitors are permitted to wander though the Water Works’ classically inspired temples and colonnades when no events are going on, who would know that, given the messaging conveyed by Cescaphe’s formidable barricades?
Preparations for evening events often start in the afternoon, further limiting access. Every spring, Cescaphe installs an enormous glass party room on the pier known as the Mill House Deck. It remains in place until late fall, which means the public gets to use the overlook only during the coldest months of the year.
Rocky already has a good spot
Moving the Rocky statue to the top of the steps might seem like a modest imposition by comparison, but the new location will interfere considerably with the public’s enjoyment of the space.
Since people with mobility limitations will have trouble climbing the 72 steps to the top of the museum’s grand staircase, they’ll need transportation. The Philadelphia Visitor Center — the initial advocate for the new location — has offered to run a shuttle bus around the museum apron every 15 minutes. Better watch out when you’re taking that selfie!
During the recent Art Commission hearings, the city’s two top cultural officials, Valerie V. Gay and Marguerite Anglin, argued that the Rocky statue deserves a higher profile perch because it’s a unique tourist attraction. They noted that the statue has been the subject of books and podcasts and will soon be the focus of a major Art Museum exhibition, “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments,” curated by Monument Lab’s Paul Farber.
Yet, given the added complications, it’s hard to understand what the city gains by changing the statue’s location.
Rocky’s current home — a shady grove at the bottom of the steps — has been a huge success. The statue was installed there in 2006, after years of shuttling around Philadelphia, from the museum to the sports complex and back. In a typical year, 4 million people make the pilgrimage to see Rocky, the same number who visit the Statue of Liberty annually.
The Rocky statue, currently at the base of the Art Museum steps, is easily accessible to visitors and tour groups.
Because the grove is so close to the street, there are no accessibility issues. Tour buses and cars can pull up to the curb, allowing people to jump out for a quick selfie. Sometimes there’s a line for photos, but the mood is always festive, with visitors and locals mingling along the sidewalk. Anyone who wants to reenact the fictional boxer’s run up the museum stairs can do that, too.
Yes, this site occupies a piece of the museum’s grounds. But the intrusion is relatively discreet. Considering how well this location works, why change it? It’s not like there was a huge public clamor to give Rocky more prominence. When Inquirer columnist Stephanie Farr polled readers in September, most respondents said they were happy to keep the statue in its current location — or get rid of it entirely.
Only a single person testified at the Art Commission’s Jan. 14 hearing — and he argued against the move. Several civic organizations, including the Design Advocacy Group (DAG), sent written statements urging the city to reject the proposal.
“All we’re doing is glorifying Sylvester Stallone, who sells merchandise at bottom of the steps,” complained David Brownlee, a member of the DAG board and a renowned University of Pennsylvania art historian who has written a history of the Art Museum.
Those Stallone-licensed souvenirs are sold in the “Rocky Shop,” a metal shipping container that was allowed to encroach on the plaza at the base of the museum steps in 2023. Although the metal structure doesn’t take up as much public land as Cescaphe’s banquet operation, it clunks up the approach to the museum’s elegant stone staircase.
The Parkway Visitor Center & Rocky Shop at the base of the Philadelphia Art Museum steps Jan. 20, 2026. In 2023, the city allowed Sylvestor Stallone to set up the metal shipping container at the base of the Philadelphia Art Museum steps.
Initial reports said the Visitor Center, which pushed for the shop, would get a cut of the sales. Yet when I asked how much money that partnership had yielded, a spokesperson for the independent tourism agency declined to answer. The Visitor Center is now run by Kathryn Ott Lovell, who was parks commissioner when the department signed off on Cescaphe’s 2021 expansion at the Water Works.
The exorbitant cost of moving
What jumped out at me during the Art Commission hearing was the cost of moving the bronze sculpture and setting it up on a new base.
Creative Philadelphia, the city department overseeing the move, originally estimated the job would run about $150,000. Now it says the price could rise to $250,000. Those figures don’t include the cost of operating the shuttle, which will be borne by the Visitor Center.
To put those numbers in context, consider the basepayment the city receives from Cescaphe annually for operating a banquet hall at the Water Works: $290,000.
When Cescaphe was given permission to occupy the Water Works complex in 2021, the city said the arrangement was necessary because the parks department could no longer afford to adequately maintain the property. In addition to rent, the agreement generated about $187,000 annually in concession fees between 2015 and 2022 for the city.
That income isn’t peanuts, but is it really worth severely limiting public access to such an iconic Philadelphia landmark? What’s the point of monetizing our parks if the businesses prevent us from enjoying them?
Except for a few months during the winter, the Mill House Deck pier at the Fairmount Water Works is covered with Cescaphe’s glass party room, making it impossible for Philadelphians to enjoy the space.
The privatization of such beloved sites is the direct result of city government’s unwillingness to properly fund its parks. For years, Philadelphia has spent far less than peer cities on green space. Maintenance declined to the point where some parks became unusable.
Rather than devote more money to this basic public amenity, the city has increasingly outsourced its parks to private managers. Enormously popular destinations, such as Dilworth Park and Franklin Square, are run by independent groups.
Cescaphe, a banquet company, has surrounded the Fairmount Water Works with a cordon of arcades, server stations and portable restrooms since it began holding events there in 2021.
But there’s a crucial difference between those private managers and the likes of Cescaphe. First, they’re nonprofits, not businesses. They exist to serve the public. While it’s frustrating when they close their parks for private fundraising events, all the money they raise goes back into improving the parks for the public’s use.
With the Cescaphe deal, the city has crossed a line. Cescaphe is a money-making business that runs the Water Works for its own benefit. In theory, the rent and concession fees are supposed to be invested in the maintenance of the complex, which was considered one of the wonders of the world when it opened in 1815. But it’s Cescaphe, not the public, that benefits from the improvements.
It’s not even clear that Cescaphe is doing the promised maintenance. The Engine House suffered a serious fire in November, and the company still has several outstanding building code violations.
When asked about the citations, a spokesperson for Parks & Recreation described the infractions as minor. “Cescaphe has been a great partner,” Commissioner Sue Slawson said in a statement.
To be clear, there is a big difference between leasing a public building to a restaurant concession and privatizing public space for the sole use of a single business. Restaurants are open to everyone. They also provide services, such as restrooms, that the public can use. It’s a win-win: The city makes a little money on the deal, and the public gets a nice amenity.
The city had the right idea when it leased the Water Works’ Engine House to a restaurateur in the early 2000s. But instead of finding a replacement when that restaurant shut down in 2015, the city turned the complex over to Cescaphe. This April the banquet company’s lease will come up for renewal. It’s time to go back to the original model.
Wouldn’t it be great to grab a sandwich at a Water Works cafe after a long walk or bike ride along the Schuylkill River Trail? The trail, which just completed a spectacular extension, does not have a single cafe between its new Grays Ferry terminus and the museum, apart from a small snack bar at Lloyd Hall. Philadelphia has plenty of great restaurateurs who would jump at the chance to operate in a prime spot like the Water Works.
People have framed the Rocky discussion as a clash between elites, who object to the glorification of a movie prop as art, and the mass of fans who believe the statue embodies their aspirations.
The reality is, there’s nothing less democratic than turning over the public’s land to private companies driven by their own gain.
An earlier version of this column listed FDR Park as one of several city parks that are run by private managers. The Philadelphia Department of Parks & Recreation operates the park and provides workers to staff it.
This story has been updated to remove the Schuylkill River Trail from a list of private managers because the Schuylkill River Development Corp. has a different type of contractual agreement with Philadelphia’s Department of Parks & Recreation and does not lease the land it oversees.
When it opened in 1815 to provide the growing city with a reliable supply of drinking water, the Fairmount Water Works was a major engineering advance and was considered one of the wonders of the world.
As certainly as Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day awakes to “I Got You Babe” every morning at 6 a.m., every year around this time, PETA calls for Punxsutawney Phil to be retired to a sanctuary and replaced by some perennially preposterous proxy.
This year the animal-rights organization has offered to replace Phil with “a giant, state-of-the-art, 3D projection hologram of a groundhog” like he was Tupac Shakur.
The best part of this proposal is that this year, PETA included an artistic rendering of its idea, which shows that if hologram Phil predicts six more weeks of winter, he will be blue and surrounded by snowflakes, and if he predicts an early spring, he will be pink and surrounded by flowers.
Either way, this would be one mammoth marmot. Hologram Phil’s paws appear to be about the size of a human head, which, if you’ve ever encountered a groundhog in real life, is both an adorable and terrifying prospect.
PETA even says the hologram would come “complete with vocal weather predictions,” which I also shudder to think about. Groundhogs sound like squeaky dog toys, which is perhaps not the best sound to rally a drunken crowd in a small Pennsylvania town at the crack of dawn.
In response to the proposal, Gov. Josh Shapiro — a noted fan of Phil who’s hosted the wondrous whistle-pig at the governor’s residence and has attended Groundhog Day celebrations in Punxsutawney — posted a photo of Phil on X this week with the words “DONT TREAD ON ME.”
I reached out to the Governor’s Office to see if Pennsylvania’s boss hog was serious about his support of the state’s famous groundhog.
“He is indeed very serious about his defense of Phil,” Alex Peterson, a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office, told me.
Prince or a pawn?
PETA’s position, as stated in a letter from founder Ingrid Newkirk to Tom Dunkel, president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle, is that groundhogs are timid prey animals who want to avoid humans at all costs.
“They dislike human smells, fear loud noises, abhor gatherings, and prefer to stay in their burrows,” Newkirk wrote. “Yet every year, this terrified little animal is subjected to loud announcers and noisy crowds and held up and waved around without any regard for his feelings, welfare, or instincts.”
I see their point — Phil never particularly looks happy to predict the weather. Mostly he just seems confused at why he’s being asked to do so and what this life is all about.
Punxsutawney Phil looks bewildered as he’s asked to predict the weather at Groundhog’s Day.
Plus, there are plenty of other Groundhog Day traditions that happen in Pennsylvania and across the country without a real animal. At the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge in Southwest Philly, a puppet named Tinicum Tim pops out of the ground to predict the weather. In Reading, a bucktooth groundhog mascot with a fancy pink bow gives her prognostication atop the Reading Pagoda. And in Quarryville, a mounted taxidermy groundhog gives predictions from the top of a manure spreader called the “Pinnacle of Prognostication.”
Michael Venos, who runs the website Countdown to Groundhog Day and has been to many of the alternative celebrations, said he considers the events “just as fun” and the “predictions just as valid.”
Tinicum Tim, a groundhog puppet, predicts the weather during Groundhog Day festivities at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge in 2024.
Venos said he shares PETA’s concerns for Phil and all prognosticating animals.
“While I’m sure in the past, the animals’ welfare was not the primary concern for the people who organize these events, I believe, and am trusting, that nowadays, the utmost care is being taken to make sure that the animals are safe and well cared for,” he said. “Punxsutawney Phil in particular seems to live a very cushy life and appears to be well taken care of.”
The perks
Phil lives one of the bougiest lives of any Pennsylvania resident, and who’s to say he woodchuck it all away, if given the choice?
According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, there’s only ever been one Phil. He drinks a special “elixir of life” every summer, which has kept him young for going on 140 years. He does not, however, share that elixir with his wife or two kids, a burrowed secret that’s shadier than seeing your shadow on a cloudy day.
When not predicting the weather, Phil lives with his family in a climate-controlled burrow in the town library, which is connected by underground tunnels to a brand-new home the Inner Circle had built for them last year at Gobbler’s Knob.
Two homes and a secret underground tunnel network — in this economy?!? Lucky.
I see both sides of the argument here, but given that our second-most famous groundhog in Pennsylvania is already computer-generated and heavily into gambling, I say we keep the real Phil around for now.
2026 Nissan Murano Platinum AWD vs. 2026 Volkswagen Atlas SEL Premium R-Line: Midsize SUV comparison
This week: Volkswagen Atlas
Price: $56,800 as tested
What others are saying: “Highs: Roomy interior with seating for seven, compliant ride, capable mid-size SUV tow rig. Lows: Leans too heavily on touch controls, interior quality falls short of rivals, lacks overall pizzazz,”says Car and Driver.
What Volkswagen is saying: “With three rows of seats, there’s room for all kinds of adventure.”
Reality: Kinda nice, but one overarching problem.
What’s new: The Atlas last received a major refresh in 2024, with a turbo and a new interior, and this version is all new to Mr. Driver’s Seat.
Up to speed: The 2-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine — whose description sounds suspiciously identical to the Murano’s — creates 269 horsepower, 29 more than the Nissan SUV. Still, despite those extra steeds, it moves the vehicle to 60 mph in about the same time as the Murano, 7.3 seconds, according to Car and Driver. No winner in this department.
Shifty: The shifter is an ugly stepbrother of the Audi toggle, with a flip forward for Reverse, a pull for Drive, and a button for Park. Having the emergency brake button just behind the shifter and the start button just in front of it makes exiting a breeze — press P, pull the brake, and press the button to turn off, all in a neat row, definitely an improvement over the Murano’s console confusion.
On the road: We had a chance to travel hundreds of miles in the Atlas, thanks to a belated holiday visit to Best Friend 1.0’s mom up north.
The Atlas made the trip through Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill valley a pleasant one. It handles highways smoothly and secondary roads with great ease.
On old winding country roads it’s good for a three-row SUV, and you can feel it going where you point it. Six choices among drive modes should satisfy everyone, but sport mode did the job for Mr. Driver’s Seat. Strong advantage Atlas.
The interior of the 2026 Volkswagen Atlas starts out comfortably in the front, but then descends as one moves farther back. But that’s not the most frustrating part about the inside.
Driver’s Seat: The seat is comfortable, with a real sporty feel, not as wide as the Murano’s but grippy and supportive, and the material doesn’t feel cheap at all.
Volkswagen hangs on to its traditional steering wheel buttons, which makes setting the gauge menu info easy.
Friends and stuff: The middle-row captain’s chairs ($695, the only option) in the model tested provided excellent legroom, headroom, and foot room. The seats themselves were not as comfortable as the front and felt a little on the small side. When reclining, both the back and bottom move, and I couldn’t get them set up comfortably. Definitely the Murano wins on comfort and style.
The rear row is nice for a three-row SUV, with plenty of space all around, even for knees, but the seat was smallish and lacked the quality feel so endearing just two rows away.
Cargo space is a cavernous 96.6 cubic feet with everything folded; 20.6 in the back; and 55.5 with the rear row folded.
In and out: Getting in and out for the rear row was less tricky than in most three-row SUVs, allowing passengers to easily maneuver between the seats to the back. The door also opened wide but not so wide that cars next door are in grave danger.
The vehicle height also is good for bad knees and hips.
Play some tunes: The 12-inch infotainment screen handles all the functions, except for a slider control along the frame that “handles” volume, the same way AI “handles” searches, with some hits but many misses.
Sound from the Harman Kardon premium system is good, about an A-, but nothing earth shaking. Still, better than the Murano.
Keeping warm and cool: The Atlas HVAC controls featured ebony sliders with red for warmer and blue for colder worked into the infotainment’s frame. Unfortunately there is no illumination there, so when you hop in at night for an initial journey, you have no idea what to do. And it doesn’t really get better with time.
Fortunately, a couple of temperature numbers on the infotainment display open the full HVAC option screen, as does a button in front of the console. But the icons are so fussy and small I actually considered several times whether it was worth the bother to try switching off the seat heater or change some other setting. This is distressing.
Fuel economy: The Atlas averaged 19 mpg in the long-term average, so it wasn’t just me stomping around.
Where it’s built: Chattanooga, Tenn. The Atlas is made up of 61% parts from the U.S. and Canada, and 28% from Mexico.
How it’s built:Consumer Reports predicts the Atlas reliability to be a 3 out of 5, tying the Murano.
In the end: The Atlas was definitely a nice drive, zooming competently around Pennsylvania and sounding kinda cool doing it. But that HVAC system really killed the experience.
The Outback was going to be my slam-dunk choice, but its controls have gone too far into the touchscreen as well; watch here for a review of the redesigned 2026 model.
Donald Trump now believes he is the master of the universe, not just of the United States and the Americas. This is not hyperbole.
The president’s determination to seize Greenland from Denmark by bullying or force, his threats to NATO allies, his obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize, the ego-driven list goes on. His speeches and posts reveal a man convinced he is the world’s most brilliant leader, who can split control of the world with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and best both.
The madness of King Donald has metastasized to the point where it threatens U.S. and global security — unless GOP members of Congress, sane business leaders, and five sober Supremes move to curb him.
Don’t take my word for how dangerous Trump has become. Take Trump’s.
“We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” he told the press this month. “One way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.” Never mind that taking Greenland would put the U.S. at war with its NATO allies, including the island’s owner, Denmark.
Trump has already pledged to slap new tariffs on Copenhagen and seven European allies who support the Danes.
This is nuts. A 1951 treaty basically lets the U.S. put as many troops and bases in Greenland as it wishes. The island’s government is eager for U.S. investment to mine rare minerals. Yet, the president is ready to destroy NATO, and possibly fight with our closest allies, whose help and Arctic experience are essential to protecting Greenland from Russia and China.
The only ones to benefit from Trump’s Greenland obsession are Putin and Xi, as they sit back and watch him destroy the NATO alliance they have been eager to shred for decades.
Indeed, Russian officials and talking heads are exulting over America’s self-destruction, which shifts attention away from Moscow’s ongoing, massive attacks on Ukraine’s urban centers, trying to destroy all electricity and heating during a brutal winter.
“It would have been difficult to imagine something like this happening before,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists this week, gloating that Trump’s actions diminished the “prospects of preserving NATO as a unified Western military-political bloc.”
In other words, Trump’s Greenland mania is undermining U.S. security at a rapid clip. His foolishness raises the possibility of NATO allies shooting at each other, rather than working together to block Russia’s desire for territorial expansion. The White House is putting America in league with Moscow as an aggressor willing to invade or coerce a neighbor into handing over territory.
And for what reason? So that Trump can boast he has made the best land grab since the Louisiana Purchase?
The president hints at this with a doctored photo on Truth Social, which shows European leaders in his office looking raptly at a map of Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela covered with American flags.
People protest against Donald Trump’s policy toward Greenland in front of the U.S. Consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, on Saturday.
Buoyed by the U.S. military’s kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro (a one-off extraction bearing no resemblance to seizing a NATO ally’s territory), Trump acts as if he believes he can grab anything he wants.
For the 79-year-old president, the signs of dementia — or an ego gone wild — are expanding.
Boiling with frustrated desire for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump wrote the Norwegian foreign minister that Oslo’s decision “not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS” was to blame for his aggression toward Denmark. Due to this insult, the president claimed, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace … but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”
When the Norwegian leader replied that the Nobel was awarded by an independent committee, not the government, Trump insisted this was false. He appeared oblivious to how this churlish behavior makes him and our country look idiotic. All the more so because Trump’s repeated claim about stopping eight wars is a complete falsehood.
Trump achieved several temporary ceasefires in outbreaks of border violence in Africa, the Caucasus, and Asia, but ended no wars. And the best-known of those ceasefires, in Gaza, is already falling apart.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) arrives as members of the Danish Parliament and a Greenlandic committee meet with American members of Congress at the Danish Parliament in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Friday.
Yet, this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president will unveil his putative “Board of Peace,” a proposed group of top global leaders who would preside over an unwieldy, as yet nonexistent series of subordinate structures tasked with rebuilding and setting up a government for Gaza.
This concept was endorsed by the U.N. Security Council specifically to deal with Gaza. But in a bait-and-switch, the White House has crafted a charter that ignores Gaza; instead, this aspirational board appears aimed at replacing the United Nations in dealing with global hot spots. At every turn, according to the charter, its players and committees would be subject to Trump’s final control.
The president has already invited Putin, that great Russian peacemaker, to join the board.
The top level of the group is supposed to consist “exclusively of heads of state and government” under Trump’s leadership. It’s unclear how many will join. Consider that the entrance fee for full membership is $1 billion, apparently creating a slush fund with no visible rules on whether it will be spent at Trump’s sole discretion.
What is clear is that Trump’s war on NATO allies and his embrace of Putin — along with his affection for the dog-eat-dog system that led to two world wars — are the work of a president who has lost all moorings. Add to that the economic blindness of a man who, when warned of the grave cost of subordinating the independent Federal Reserve Bank to his political will, responded, “I don’t care.”
Trump’s behavior is that of a self-appointed Sun King, who is not only convinced that “L’État, c’est moi” but “Le monde, c’est moi.” Unless this madness is checked soon by the other government branches, America may be reverting to the kind of world most of us never imagined we’d face.
I’m Jewish, and like most other Jews I know, I often wonder who else is. When I meet someone at a party, or see a new face on TV, I think: yes or no? It’s a game, and it’s all in good fun.
But when the government does it, it isn’t. It’s a dagger at our hearts.
That’s why so many people at the University of Pennsylvania — where I teach — are up in arms about the Trump administration’s effort to compel the university to identify Jewish students and employees. It’s part of an investigation of antisemitism on campus by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which issued a subpoena demanding the names and contact information of members of Jewish-related student groups, staffers at the school’s Jewish studies program, and anyone who had filed an antisemitism complaint.
Fortunately, Penn said no. The EEOC sued the university back in November for refusing to comply with the subpoena. And last week, several groups at Penn filed their own motion in the case. “Compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history,” they wrote.
Indeed, it does. Going back to the Middle Ages, state officials have tried to establish who is Jewish. And it never ends well.
In 1215, Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews must wear markers at all times that made them distinguishable from Christians. Two years later, in England, King Henry III ordered male Jews to wear a badge on the front of their outer garments.
In England, the badge was shaped like the tablets upon which Moses — according to the Old Testament — received the Ten Commandments. In France, it was a circle of red or yellow felt. Hungarian Jews had to wear red capes. And in German-speaking parts of Europe, Jews were required wear a cone-shaped Judenhut, or “Jew’s Hat.”
The goal of these rules wasn’t simply to identify Jews; it was to segregate, humiliate, and persecute them. Jews wearing badges were mocked by children and attacked by bandits. Badge laws also led to extortion: To receive exemptions from the laws, Jews had to pay large sums to the state.
In the so-called Jewish Emancipation era of the 18th and 19th centuries, when Jews finally received citizenship in the nations where they lived, badge laws disappeared. But they returned with a vengeance in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Nazis required Jews in Germany and the territories it conquered to wear yellow stars.
That helped facilitate their deportation and murder in concentration camps, where a new set of markers developed. Jews who were also political prisoners wore a red triangle, superimposed on a yellow one; gay Jews were identified by the pink triangle, which was later adopted by LGBTQ+ activists as a symbol of pride.
And Jewish camp prisoners often received tattooed numbers on their arms. Again, that was a way to degrade Jews as well as to identify them.
“My number is A-10572. That is what I was, they did not call us by our names,” recalled Holocaust survivor Lilly Ebert, whose TikTok video about the Auschwitz death camp went viral in 2021. “We were no longer humans. We were only a number, and we were treated like numbers.”
Since then, every state effort to count or list Jews has reflected disdain for them. Convinced that Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics were altering employment statistics to undermine him, President Richard Nixon ordered aides to find out how many BLS workers were Jewish. “The government is full of Jews,” Nixon fulminated in a taped 1971 White House conversation. “Most Jews are disloyal … You can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”
An aide scrutinized the BLS employees’ names — never a perfect way to figure who is Jewish — and concluded that 13 of 35 fit the “demographic criterion that was discussed,” as he delicately reported. Less than two months later, two Jewish senior officials were removed from their posts and demoted to less visible positions in the agency. That was “the last recorded act of official antisemitism by the United States government,” as political commentator Tim Noah wrote.
Forcing Penn to cough up a list of Jews would be the next one. It doesn’t matter that it comes as part of a Trump administration investigation of antisemitism. Frankly, I doubt a president who welcomed Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to his home for dinner — and who still refuses to criticize him — cares very much about the safety of Jews on campus.
But even if he does, that’s no reason to count them. When the government does that, it isn’t fun anymore. It’s game over.
On Monday, America — some of it, anyway — paused to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would have turned 97 this month. In one sense, there’s never been a rougher time for the legacy of the slain civil rights icon, with the U.S. Supreme Court perhaps poised to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a president who barely acknowledged the holiday. But thousands of everyday Americans now resisting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are channeling the spirit of the man who said one has “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” Happy belated birthday, Dr. King.
Dems, stop trying to make ICE better. Make them go away.
Aliya Rahman is detained Jan. 13 by federal agents near the Minneapolis street corner where Renee Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer.
Imagine this … and if you watch the daily stream of videos coming from the ICE raids that have roiled Minnesota since the start of the new year, it’s not that hard to imagine.
You’re minding your own business, or maybe picking up your kid at their school, when suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a platoon of masked, armed, camouflaged government agents. One thing leads to another, and in a flash, an agent has wrestled you to the ground, and is brandishing a weapon — maybe a Taser … if you’re lucky.
But what if I told you that lawmakers on Capitol Hill have a solution? They are proposing a brave new world, where now — flat on your back and gasping for air, and perhaps able to bravely manage to free your phone from your pocket — you could scan a federally mandated QR code on the agent’s uniform and find out the identity of the man who is currently pummeling you to within an inch of your life.
You’re probably thinking the same thing I did when I read about New York Rep. Ritchie Torres’ new bill he called the Quick Recognition (get it?) Act, which is his big idea for how Democrats can respond to public anger over the murder of Minneapolis mom Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent, and the raidsthat have led to violent encounters and made a major U.S. metropolis look and feel like a war zone.
A four-word sentence that begins with, “What the actual …?”
“There is nothing the Trump administration fears more than transparency and accountability,” a spokesperson for Torres, who faces a primary challenge, in part, because of his outspoken views on Gaza, said recently.
Really? Is that true? Because everything I’ve seen is that Donald Trump is mainly terrified about a GOP bloodbath in the November midterms, which would surely lead to his impeachment, his eventual disgrace, and even a shot at the real accountability that takes place only behind prison bars. But that’s not going to happen unless Democrats can convince those midterm voters they are serious about dismantling the rotten system that murdered Good — so there are no bad guys left to scan.
It’s tempting to write off Torres’ idea as one stray piece of almost comically misguided legislation. But the truth is that his core idea — that what’s evolved during the Trump era into an American secret police force that folks like Joe Rogan and Bruce Springsteen are openly calling “the Gestapo” can be tweaked into something great — isendorsed by Democratic leaders in Congress and many rank-and-file members.
“Clearly, significant reform needs to take place as it relates to the manner in which ICE is conducting itself,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) told MS Now, bloodlessly. “ICE is using taxpayer dollars to brutalize American citizens and to unnecessarily and viciously target law-abiding immigrant families and communities.”
So you’re going to halt the flow of those taxpayer dollars, right?
Right?
Actually, many key Democrats — facing a Jan. 30 deadline for new appropriation bills — say they are willing to keep the dollars flowing to the embattled and increasingly unpopular agency, but with hopes of leveraging the Minneapolis controversy in return for major reforms. Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), who has been a leading critic of the Trump regime, has suggested banning masks, mandating badges, requiring warrants to make an arrest, and returning Border Patrol agents to the border.
Most critics of ICE, Border Patrol, and any other immigration raiders under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would agree that all of those things should have happened yesterday. But the lack of appetite for utterly dismantling the DHS regime — despite its culture of violence and disrespect for law-abiding refugees — reminds too many voters of the cowardice that branded the Dems as losers in the first place.
Progressive attorney Aaron Regunberg mocked the stance of some mainstream Democrats as: “We are the resistance. We are also negotiating furiously to figure out how to fully fund the Gestapo.” He’s right. Under Trump, with recruitment ads inspired by white nationalist memes, ICE has become a tool of a new American fascism.
You don’t “significantly reform” fascism. You need to crush it. As Andrea Pitzer, who literally wrote the book on the history of concentration camps, noted Monday night, “The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.”
It’s telling that — as often is the case — everyday people are way out in front of the supposedly opposition Democrats. The latest polls show that a strong majority of Americans oppose Trump’s immigration policies — with just 38% approving of them in a new AP-NORC poll, down sharply — and that, for the first time, a plurality would like to see ICE (which has only existed since 2003) eliminated. No wonder the number of Americans who now identify as liberal — 28% — is the highest since Gallup began asking in the early 1990s.
And yes, more Democratic officials are starting to get it than ever before. More than 100 members of the House Progressive Caucus said last week that they won’t vote for any budget bill with additional funding for the immigration raid agencies without an end to their militarized policing. Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, who seemed to tack right on immigration issues in winning a close election in 2024, surprised political observers when he declared this weekend in a CNN interview that “I think ICE needs to be totally torn down.”
Note that he didn’t say “abolish” — a word that causes Democrats to break out in hives. That’s OK. Call it a teardown, or a demolition, but every day, more Americans can see that the United States would function better without ICE — as it did the first 227 years of its history — and with the work that’s actually needed, like arresting the sliver of immigrants who really are violent criminals, given to all new people.
The problem is that Democratic fecklessness isn’t limited to just the future of ICE. Our European allies are disappointed that the opposition party isn’t out manning the barricades and calling for much more forceful action to curb Trump’s bat-guano crazy demand for Greenland, apparently because he feels slighted by not getting the Nobel Peace Prize. And sure, Americans want lower coffee prices, but they care more about not having Captain Queeg with the nuclear football.
Dismantling the ICE regime needs to be the floor, not the ceiling, and any Democrat in Congress who doesn’t get with the program can — and should — be replaced in the primaries to avoid another debacle with alienated or apathetic voters in November. Call your member and find out where they stand. You won’t even need a QR code.
Yo, do this!
I didn’t feel a compelling need to memorialize one year of Trump’s second presidency, since that’s kind of what we do here every week. But M. Gessen, the Russian émigré whose understanding of how authoritarians rule has been a blessing for American readers, did write the piece that captures the fierce urgency of now. Their new New York Times column (gift link) calls on us to use our freedoms before they totally disappear. “The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting,” they wrote. “It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.”
In a month of short, frigidly cold days, with a deteriorating political situation, the Eagles’ one-and-done, and up-and-too-often-down 76ers and Flyers, my main source of pleasure is getting under several blankets and watching football games in which I don’t much care who wins. The NFL playoffs, minus the Birds’ fiasco and one or two clunkers, have been the most compelling drama on TV in years. Don’t miss Sunday’s Final Four: Patriots-Broncos (CBS) followed by Rams-Seahawks (Fox), kicking off at 3 p.m.
Ask me anything
Question: One question that is top of my mind is “does this week feel like a tipping point?” Can’t shake the feeling that it is. — Marguerite Fahey (@margueritefahey@bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Marguerite, I got several variations of your question, so this is definitely on the minds of folks. But while Trump’s bizarre actions surrounding Greenland have raised questions about the president’s fitness to hold office on a level we’ve never seen before, including Watergate, it is less clear what affirmative actions can take place. It’s impossible to imagine the lackeys in Trump’s cabinet, like Kristi Noem, ever green-lighting the 25th Amendment, let alone the 20 GOP Senate votes that would be required to remove the president in an impeachment. An increasingly likely possibility is high-ranking generals refusing a Trump order to send troops to Greenland or Minnesota. Yes, it has come to this.
What you’re saying about …
Sometimes, readers of this newsletter still surprise me. While most of you are righteously appalled at the immigration raid abuses in Minnesota and elsewhere, many still want to see major reforms at ICE and its sister agencies rather than abolishing them altogether. “ICE doesn’t need to be abolished,” Ed Truncale wrote. “ICE is like a child that has lost their way and needs to be disciplined, redirected.” Cathie Cush agreed. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable with ‘Demilitarize ICE’ and ‘Demilitarize the police,’” she wrote. “And make them accountable. And reduce their ranks.”
📮 This week’s question: Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive demands for Greenland have not only threatened the post-World War II global order but raised legitimate mental health questions about the commander of the world’s largest military. But how can Europe, Democrats, and any remaining sane Republicans respond to this? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Greenland response” in the subject line.
History lesson on America’s betrayal of the Hmong
ChongLy “Scott” Thao, a U.S. citizen, sits in his St. Paul, Minn., home Monday, the day after federal agents broke open his door and detained him without a warrant.
A long time ago, on the other side of the world, began what would become a fraught relationship between the Hmong tribal people of northern Laos and the United States, as represented by the CIA. At the dawn of the 1960s, American spies recruited the Hmong to fight communism in their homeland and neighboring Vietnam, which proved a disastrous bet. Thousands died in the next 13 years of combat in Southeast Asia, and more would perish when the communists took over Laos in 1975, while others dodged bullets, swimming the Mekong River toward overcrowded refugee camps in Thailand.
Fifty years ago, the United States was led by people who at least understood our deep debt to the Hmong, forged in blood. Thousands who’d escaped the slaughter were eventually resettled in the United States, and Minnesota — aided by Lutherans and other religious charities and good public housing, and despite its frigid weather — became an unlikely magnet. Today, a population of 94,000 people, with a slightly higher average salary than the state as a whole, and including the mayor of St. Paul, the state capital, makes Minnesota home to the largest U.S. Hmong population.
It’s an immigration success story that makes the events of recent days beyond baffling. In one Minneapolis neighborhood this weekend, a witness reported that roving ICE agents who have flooded the metropolis pulled over a car and asked the driver, “Where the Hmongs at?” St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her said: “We’ve received reports of ICE officers going door to door asking where the Asian people live … I myself have received advice to carry my passport with me because they may target me based on what I look like.”
On Sunday, federal agents broke down the front door of a St. Paul home and took away ChongLy “Scott” Thao, also known as Saly, a Hmong American who was born in a Laotian refugee camp but is a U.S. citizen after living most of his life here. A photo of the man being led out of the house — wearing only boxer shorts and Crocs on a bitterly cold day, a plaid blanket hastily thrown over his exposed torso — went viral on social media. Family members said ICE agents drove Thao around for an hour while they questioned him, but brought him back home when they realized he was a naturalized citizen with no criminal record. Still, the episode was traumatizing, and it epitomized the big question hanging over all of this.
What is this even for? ICE’s harsh and disruptive focus on the Hmong people of Minnesota — people who were brought here because of their support for America in wartime, with the encouragement of the federal government as well as their new prairie neighbors — makes absolutely no sense. A people who suffered in their homeland for their ties to the United States are now facing new torment in their adoptive land — judged not for the content of their character, but for the color of their skin. This is a new, shameful moment in American history.
What I wrote on this date in 2021
Looking back at the dawn of what’s proved to be a painful decade for America can be difficult. Tuesday is the fifth anniversary of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president, and like most Americans, I had thoughts and prayers that the deep stain of Donald Trump’s lawbreaking first term could be erased. On Jan. 20, 2021, I predicted we’d understand “this nation will not have peace without justice. That empathy is empty without accountability. And that American carnage cannot be healed until we can handle the truth.” Yeah, how did that work out? Read the rest: “After four years of ‘American carnage,’ President Joe Biden gets it: Truth must come before healing.”
Recommended Inquirer reading
With so much happening, I did an NFL coin-toss move and elected to defer my Martin Luther King Jr. holiday day off until some warmer, happier time. In my Sunday column, I looked at how economic pressure campaigns against U.S. corporations aiding Trump’s immigration policies, like Avelo Airlines — which halted ICE deportation flights after months of protests and boycotts — are starting to make a difference. With boycotts getting results at firms like Disney and Spotify, can Americans do more to vote with their wallets? Over the weekend, I dug into CBS News and its new Trump-friendly regime headed by Bari Weiss, and how its slanted journalism — including a highly inflammatory and factually dubious story about the Minneapolis ICE shooting — is a bad sign for the future of democracy.
We now know Trump told Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro not to run for president, which normally would be tantamount to an endorsement. But that disclosure — which comes from the governor’s new autobiography, Where We Keep the Light, that is also functioning as a curtain-raiser on Shapiro’s 2028 presidential ambitions — might have been a rare case of good advice from The Donald. The Inquirer’s crack political team is already all over the book and its fallout, including Shapiro’s controversial claim that aides to Kamala Harris — vetting him as a potential 2024 running mate — asked the Jewish governor if he was “a double agent” for Israel. The book is already generating backlash and some TV punditry that Shapiro’s once-rising star has dimmed, but the broader implication remains clear. One way or the other, the road to the 48th presidency runs through Pennsylvania, and the best way to keep up is to follow our in-depth coverage in The Inquirer. Subscribe today and get on the bandwagon.
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I drank in the glamorous high-pitched cattiness of Netflix’s soapy reality TV series Members Only: Palm Beach — starring four women with Philadelphia ties — like a bottomless carafe of mimosas, finishing the eight 45-minute episodes in less than two days.
Members Only debuted in the final days of 2025 on Netflix’s Top 10 list. It gives old-school Housewives vibes and throws a spotlight on the women who live in and around President Donald Trump’s 20-acre oceanfront Mar-a-Largo estate.
Maria Cozamanis and Romina Ustayev in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
The gaudy maxi dresses, overfilled lips, horrible lace front wigs, and the backstabbing. It’s all a hot mess.
Members Only is if Jersey Shore ran into a train wreck. But instead of getting caught up in the mean girl shenanigans of 20-somethings, I was gobsmacked by the ugly behavior of 50+ women acting like petty middle schoolers in the name of preserving high society.
Former Bryn Mawr interior decorator and real estate mogul Hilary Musser, whose fifth wedding to a doorman is one of the ostentatious affairs featured, is the Queen Bee.
Musser now sells million-dollar waterfront mansions in Palm Beach and it’s rumored she joined the rest of the relatively unknown cast to help sell her properties.
Hilary Musser in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
She holds steadfastly to Palm Beach’s strict dress codes. (It’s improper to show cleavage and leg in the same ensemble as a Palm Beach rule). Four-letter words offend her. Crying in public is a no-no. She’s nice only to New Yorker-turned-wellness-entrepreneur Taja Abitbol, partner of former MLB pitcher David Cone and the only non-Philly-affiliated woman in this core group.
The rest of the Philly-connected ladies smile in Musser’s face and grumble behind her haltered and tanned back.
Maria Cozamanis ad Romina Ustayev in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
They are: Maria Cozamanis, a DJ who moved from Philadelphia to Florida. As DJ Tumbles, she worked her way onto the Palm Beach society scene DJing lavish charity events at Mar-a-Largo. Roslyn Yellin is a former Bucks County Zumba teacher and grandmother with Cinderella ambitions. “My morals and values start at home with my family and husband,” she said in the first episode, as if reading from Vice President JD Vance’s family value cue cards.
And finally, there’s Yellin’s frenemy, Romina Ustayev, an Uzbeki immigrant and former home care business and fashion line owner in Philadelphia. She calls herself the Kim Kardashian of Palm Beach.
“I love going to Mar-a-Largo and being in the same room as the president and Elon Musk,” she said, near hysterically, in one episode. “You feel like, ‘Oh my God. You’ve made it.’”
Maria Cozamanis and Romina Ustayev in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
I knew going in that Members Only’s garish opulence and prettied up gluttony was a gold-trimmed Trump fever dream, one where he sits at the center of all things tacky, loud, expensive, and hurtful. (He never makes an appearance in the show, but his name is uttered several times in awe and admiration.)
But the moment Ustayev — an immigrant who is not quite as white as Trump’s favored Norwegian and Danish immigrants — stepped in, I knew I was watching the latest piece of Trump propaganda.
Romina Ustayev, Maria Cozamanis, and Taja Abitbol in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
Members Only is Trump’s ideal vision of America where obscene wealth is valued and the rest of America can eat cake.
Why is this show in our binging rotation now? Perhaps because Netflix is in the midst of finalizing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger, which will give Netflix more than half the streaming market share, needs regulatory approval from the Trump administration.
Thanks to Members Only, the Mar-a-Largo face doesn’t just appear in the context of the White House. Think Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, their plump lips, and heavily Botoxed and made-up faces.
Romina Ustayev and Maria Cozamanis in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
Now we see these faces as we try to relax and binge-watch trash television. There is no escaping.
Members Only‘s arrival on Netflix is the next logical step in the White House’s messaging and shaping of America’s image. Trump started dismantling America’s diverse optics immediately after he took office and proceeded to remove photos of President Barack Obama from prominent places in the White House in an effort to erase evidence of the first Black president’s existence.
In advance of last Thanksgiving’s travel season, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled the Golden Age of Travel campaign, urging airline travelers to dress natty when flying. At the center of the campaign are black and white pictures of white travelers gussied up like the fictional Main Liners in Katharine Hepburn’s 1940 filmPhiladelphia Story.
Rosalyn Yellin in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
And then last summer, Department of Homeland Security used Norman Rockwell paintings in its social media marketing. The images — denounced by Rockwell’s family — show mid-20th-century suburban whites living a blissful white picket fence existence paired with the administration’s anti-immigration slogans “Protect our American way of life” and “DEFEND your culture.”
During a tense moment on the show, Ustayev shares with Yellin and her mentor, New York socialite and Palm Beach grand dame Gale Brophy, that Palm Beach society did not respect her culture, which includes asking for money at birthday parties and eating with her fingers. (Clutching my pearls.)
Brophy’s response: “Go back to your country.”
The inclusion of this kind of xenophobia into pop culture is better than anything Fox News can drum up.
Johnny Gould, founder and president of Superluna Studios and the executive producer of Members Only, insists his show is not political.
He admitted Mar-a-Largo is in the zeitgeist. “After all it is the winter White House,” he said. But he made Members 0nly because he was intrigued with Palm Beach society’s social hierarchy, one of the last in America.
The heart of Members Only, Gould said, is its “private club culture and B & T [Bath & Tennis] Boca Beach Resort, Breakers, and Mar-a-Largo [which] are at the center of social circles and drive societal rules and expectations,” Gould said. “That’s what connects these five ladies.”
Romina Ustayev, Rosalyn Yellin in episode 103 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
The Philadelphia connection, Gould said, was a coincidence.
“I didn’t set out to make a show about Palm Beach featuring Philadelphia society women,” Gould said.
(Good thing, because except for Musser, some of the Philly ladies-who-lunch crowd say they have no idea who these women are, nor do they want to.)
“It was about the chemistry,” Gould continued. “For example, when I went to Hilary’s house and she came sweeping down the stairs in a beautiful gown on a Tuesday, immediately, I was intrigued.”
Romina Ustayev and Hilary Musser in episode 101 of “Members Only: Palm Beach.”
Everything else, Gould said, “fell into place.”
“[Members Only] is not about curing cancer,” he said. “It’s about pouring yourself a glass of wine [and taking] a really fun ride in a place that none of us will ever have access to and a lifestyle none of us will get a chance to experience.”
That’s true.
Of course, these women don’t care about curing cancer. (Trump’s secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is shutting down clinical trials that are meant to find cancer treatments.)
The show sells viewers an “aspirational” lifestyle in Trump’s image. And if Trump has his way, soon we will be living in a society where there will be even more haves and have nots, completely robbing the poor — and the middle class— of upward mobility.
