Can we call this the first twist (of presumably many) of the Fumo trial? As was reported yesterday evening, Judge Yohn was hospitalized this weekend, and the proceedings have been postponed for a week until Monday, Sept. 22. So hang tight, people.

In the (long) meantime, here’s a quick look at what was tossed around in the media today and this weekend:

• Here’s the Daily News and Fox 29 postponement stories.

• The Inquirer has an interesting (and well-needed) profile of Ruth Arnao, Fumo’s co-defendant and executive director of Citizen’s Alliance for Better Neighborhoods. She’s painted as an upwardly-mobile person who is fiercely loyal — a key distinction between she and Fumo’s two former computer techs who were once charged and are now government witnesses. Her alleged actions will play a very large part in this trial, as the Feds allege that she was essentially the executor of Fumo’s abuse of taxpayer money.
  
  Here’s two sections of the piece:
  

  While Fumo grew up prosperous, a banker’s son, Arnao had a tougher climb.

  A Pittsburgh native, she moved to Philadelphia in the late 1970s. She was a single mom, having had a son and a daughter by the time she was 18.

  In the 1980s, by then married for a second time, she fell into Fumo’s orbit. After working on a campaign for the Democratic senator, Arnao joined his legislative staff at his office on Tasker Avenue in South Philadelphia in 1984.
  
  …

  In 2001, Arnao served as campaign manager when Wendy Pew won a seat on the Municipal Court bench.

  “She had my whole schedule down. We ran from one end of the city to the other,” Pew said last week. “She worked me like a dog, but it paid off.”

  Pew added: “My sense of Ruth is that she’s extremely loyal. She cares about people, cares about issues.”

• More from the Inky: columnist Daniel Rubin, who also authors Blinq, managed to compare people’s lack of awareness of both Fumo and the McCain/Palin ticket. Check it out here.
  
  A few thoughts on this. Rubin’s overall point is dead-on: we live in “Low-Information America,” where a local politician can be charged with millions of dollars of fraud and a vice-presidential candidate can outright lie to the masses, and no one notices.
  
  Rubin, though, didn’t really make clear that the majority of these possible jurors aren’t represented by Fumo in Harrisburg. They may very well know who the local elected officials are, and didn’t get a chance to show that because this is a politician from Philly, not Chester, Montgomery, or Lehigh counties. Does knowledge of the Fumo case change a person from a Low-Info American to a Medium-Info American? I’m not sure.
  
  What took me by complete surprise were the many jurors who’ve never heard of Fumo but still considered themselves well-informed about the issues. (They actually said so in the juror questionnaire: “Do you consider yourself a close follower of Pennsylvania politics?” Many responded yes, but claim to have never have heard of Fumo.) To me, thinking you know what’s happening in the region/world around you, when you really don’t, is what creates uninformed biases and is truly more dangerous than saying, “look, politics don’t interest me, so I have no idea what’s going on.” That, I think, is where the Low-Info America connect between Fumo-Palin is strongest.
  
  Moving on.

• Fumo gets a shout-out on PolitickerPA’s winners/losers column.

• Overlawyered.com points out that Fumo once strongly opposed a group’s plan to issue ratings of judges across the state.

See anything else? Post it in the comments or e-mail it over.

And as we await Yohn’s hopefully speedy recovery, I’ll update you on any new developments, keep the regular features going, and hopefully do some analysis/predictions as we anxiously wait, again, for opening statements.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under BRIEFING. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.