A story appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, written by reporter Steve Goldstein, about Arlen Specter meeting with Altoona, PA residents, holding a Q&A session about a host of topics (the Iraq war was number one on the list, as it should be).

Now I definitely have issues with Specter, including his recent repugnant defense of Larry Craig, but I have to give it to him; if I make it to be his age and survive his surgeries, I hope I'm able to accomplish what he can.

However, there's something else in Goldstein's story that I want to highlight, and that's the real "takeaway" from this post.

It seems that, according to Goldstein, Ed Snider, chairman of Comcast-Spectacor which owns the Philadelphia Flyers, 76ers, and many other cable and business interests, has contributed to the group Freedom's Watch, the organization that is lobbying members of Congress (primarily Republicans) to support the Iraq war (they have spent $15 million on this effort).

To merely say that such an act by Snider is utterly unconscionable as far as I'm concerned is sugar-coating the matter. His contribution is blood money to perpetuating the carnage in a country that was never a threat to us, had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, and possessed no link to al Qaeda before we invaded. The conclusion is inescapable that Snider and the other Freedom's Watch miscreants want the human misery in Iraq to continue as an ancillary benefit of sorts to the state of Israel, involved now and possibly forever with the Palestinian conflict.

With all of this in mind, I'm letting you know that I am going to try and organize a boycott of Comcast-Spectacor. Yeah I know, good luck with that (especially when content linked to this site is hosted by Comcast). It's going to be tough, since there are so many ways that Comcast impacts our lives.

However, one way we could do this without affecting our TVs or computers (if we can do that, all the better) is to simply not hand over any of our money to an event at the Wachovia Center (particularly for the Flyers and the Sixers) as well as the Wachovia Spectrum (Phantoms hockey and I'm not sure what else). One exception that I can think of right off the bat is the Flyers Wives Fight For Lives Carnival; I would never suggest doing anything to hurt that great cause.

If anyone is interested in publicizing or committing to this, please let me know in the comments or Email me (I can be reached from the home page through a link at the bottom right hand corner). If you are interested, I will link to you from this site and publicize your efforts, and I will do so with thanks.

It is long past time to punish anyone who has done anything whatsoever to perpetuate the Iraq war, and Ed Snider, through his contribution to these fiends, now merits this punishment, and we have a not-too-difficult way to send him a message. Believing in an exclusionary, corporatist orthodoxy that exalts himself above others is one thing. Openly supporting a human tragedy that has led to the slaughter and maiming of thousands, to say nothing of having stirred up the unholy stew of sectarian violence and militant jihadism that has also spawned the worst refugee crisis in the world, is something wholly other.

(Note: Since I do not believe hyperlinks are supported here, they are not included. However, if you read this entry cross posted at my blog - liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com - they do appear to provide further information.)

My, what a soap opera of a season it has been for your Philadelphia E-A-G-L-E-S.

All-pro defensive lineman Corey Simon holds out for more money, and instead of trying to meet his demands, they let him walk, and the Indianapolis Colts (who are currently undefeated) say "thank you very much" and sign him (without a "Plan B" to replace him with an equal-caliber player, which is a tall order indeed...I know sports salaries are ridiculous also, but Simon is an elite player). Also, they let go of another fine defensive lineman, Derrick Burgess. They let Hollis Thomas go also, but through no fault of his own, the guy was injury prone. Hugh Douglas has lost a lot over time, but even though they need veteran leadership, they let him go as well. Also departed from last season is special teams standout Ike Reese, who was a fine backup linebacker also.

Meanwhile, on offense, Brian Westbrook attempts to re-negotiate his contract, and the Eagles blow him off, even telling our lapdog sports media that they're trying to bring in washed up Travis Henry from the Buffalo Bills as a possible replacement (Henry signs with the Titans, and I believe he is either injured at the moment or unable to play for some reason). Now, Westbrook is angry and will probably not sign and exit at the end of this year.

And you just knew I was leading up to Terrell Owens, didn't you?

Should the Eagles have re-negotiated his contract? As far as I'm concerned, you can go either way on that (and yes, I know I took a shot at Owens awhile back). But here is the difference - this organization of neophytes which apparently has a hopelessly inflated image of itself (messrs. Lurie and Banner, chiefly) have been "pumping the ether" every way they can to drug the media and football fans around here to the point of thinking that they may actually return to the Super Bowl on the cheap with the team that they currently have. As far as I'm concerned, you should spare absolutely no expense if that is truly your goal.

So anyway, as we know, Owens ends his holdout and appears in training camp, is sent home, returns to finish camp, and then plays and is genuinely productive (even to the point where Andy Reid actually says that he's "a joy to coach," for whatever that's worth). So things roll along basically fine with Owens to the San Diego game which this team stole due to a special teams miracle, and Owens catches his 100th touchdown pass. The Eagles do nothing to recognize that.

Yes, we know Owens is a prima donna and a spoiled, egotistical baby. But he happens also to be an elite position player on this team's offense, possibly the finest wide receiver in football. When you have someone like that on your team, you massage his ego and play along with him as long as he delivers.

So Owens gets his feelings hurt and says some things he shouldn't. He then apologizes, though maybe without a lot of contrition.

Well today, the Eagles suspended him anyway (and I don't care about what the supposed football experts at ESPN have to say; dislike Owens if you want, but it's all about winning, baby).

That tells me that the Eagles' clueless front office is more concerned with settling scores than winning football games. And if I'm a ticket holder for home games, let me tell you how I respond to that.

The Eagles next home game is Monday night November 14th against Dallas.

I don't show up. And if substantially more people do that, there will be a whole lot of empty seats being shown on national TV.

But no, all of you "Joe Sixpacks" out there won't do that, will you? Of course not.

And make no mistake - Lurie and Banner know that too, and that is why they pull all of their penny-pinching crap.

Is Owens worth all of the aggravation? Probably not, but let me remind any Eagles fan out there who may be reading why I feel this way.

Do you remember who the Eagles' starting wide receivers were before Owens got here?

Todd Pinkston and James Thrash.

Pinkston is a solid, steady supporting player, not a marquee, go-to guy on offense. James Thrash is a fourth or possibly fifth receiver and punt returner on special teams.

Hey, if I were trying to get a glee club going, Thrash is one of the first people I'd call. He's a person of character. However, he does nothing to intimidate NFL defenses.

I remember the NFC playoff game against the Carolina Panthers in January, and Thrash was beaten up and manhandled all over the place. At least one pass from McNabb hit him in his shoulder pad, bounced up into the air, and landed right into Ricky Manning Jr.'s hands, and he laughed as he ran back the interception.

On another play, Pinkston ran a pass route, and the entire Carolina defense ignored him and went after McNabb. That was the most unbelievable show of disrespect to an offensive player that I'd ever seen.

When the Eagles got Owens, all of that ended in a hurry. He brought instant recognition and opened up other opportunities for Pinkston, Greg Lewis, and L.J. Smith, among others.

THAT is what I care about. Not some pissy, whiny background noise because Owens isn't as solid of a person as Andy Reid would like him to be (like Jevon Kearse, for example).

But no - we have to have the continued distractions as this organization continues to peddle the fertilizer that this team will actually advance in the post season.

They wish.

Not unlike a little kid trying to sneak one last cookie from the jar before dinner when our back is turned, our august legislators in the state of Pennsylvania voted themselves a pay raise at 2 AM this morning, shortly after they finally passed a state budget (weeks overdue again, as is the case just about every year).

The percentage of the raise? Anywhere from 16 to 34 percent, depending on whether or not you are a newly-elected legislator or a senior member of a high-profile committee.

As the Bucks County Courier Times opined this morning:

“The early morning vote hiked salaries from $69,647 to slightly more than $81,000, making them the second-highest paid legislators in the nation behind California. Not bad considering the average Joe earns $38,000 a year in PA and gets maybe a 3 percent pay hike.

But regular people don’t get the kind of perks lawmakers get: $129 in expense money for every day they’re in Harrisburg; up to $650 a month or $7,800 a year to lease a car; fully paid health insurance valued at $13,000 a year; and a fully paid pension.

The increasing cost of health insurance alone has wiped out the salary increases most people have seen in recent years. In all likelihood, millions of Pennsylvanians are taking home less than they were a few years ago.�

The following are excerpts from the keynote speech of the Honorable James C. Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), which he gave to open the BIO Conference recently held in Philadelphia on Monday, June 20th.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending this year’s biotechnology conference held in my hometown. For those of you who don’t know this, Philadelphia has been ranked third in a national study measuring the strength and impact of the life sciences industries, behind Boston and the San Francisco Bay area, according to a published report in the Inquirer.

That study originated from the Milken Institute, a non-profit organization headed by a former financier who improperly induced insurance companies to purchase his junk bonds in vast quantities. For those of you who don’t know, junk bonds are speculative finacial instruments that yield a higher rate of return because of a higher default rate. Anyway, when the artificially-inflated junk bond market collapsed in the 1980s, this left policyholders (including employees of many companies who had replaced their pension systems with annuities purchased from the corrupted insurance companies) holding worthless paper.

I realize that what I just said has nothing whatsoever to do with life sciences, but I firmly believe that you can never have too much information.

I think it is commendable that you were able to negotiate your way into this building past the reckless, hedonistic horde of skateboarding, color-coded protestors who blocked your entry. Suffice it to say that we are blazing new trails of entrepreneurial riches while they wish to continue latching onto the government teat and sucking away like your Mom’s broken-down Hoover that’s missing half of its hand-held attachments while it’s trying to ingest the shedded coat of her Springer Spaniel. Un-freaking-believable!

Speaking of animals, I think that ties in nicely to the primary subject I wish to address, and that is the development and maintenance of healthy food sources. We here face, what is in part, a public relations battle to sell the benefits of genetically modified foods. All over the US, UK, and many parts of Europe, people are choosing to avoid the products we are developing for the new century. Boy, talk about head-in-the-sand time!

One of the leading companies developing new food products is Monsanto, which has produced genetically modified potatoes for Russia. However, the yields produced by Russian farmers with these new potatoes have only reached about a third of what the yield would be if the farmers had used real potatoes instead. Hey, go cry in your vodka, comrade! We’re talking a new age of science here!

Oh, and please don’t remind me that Monsanto was also the company that produced the chemical defoliant Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War, which has been linked to chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a disease marked by fatigue, shortness of breath, weight loss, or frequent infections. None of us are virgins here. You read me?

In this country, the McDonald’s Corporation has continued their experiments with synthetic chemicals to produce a chicken that has three breasts instead of two. As a result of this, we can all ingest more genetically modified poultry that contains chicken bums, pee pees and possible excrement and take our chances. And don’t you talk to me about carcinogens. Try proving it, bucko! Hey, we’re talking about birds with boobs big enough to fit into a C cup. Ol’ Mc Donald never had it so good!

In closing, let me say this. I am not a scientist. I am not an investor. I am not a businessman. What I am is a politician who played the game for as many years as I could and put up with all manner of petty day-in-day-out niggling, all in the name of providing constituent service to the eighth congressional district, including all of the whining babies complaining about funding shortfalls for their favorite entitlements, road construction on their streets when it was time to run little Johnny or Jill to soccer practice, or my inability to grant any favor they wanted at a moment’s notice.

However, rest assured that I will use my hard-earned clout in a way that is beneficial to ourselves and our industry. Namely, I will spare no effort on behalf of tort reform that absolves us of any and all liability for our actions.

I now and always pledge my undying gratitude to and toil on behalf of the Biotechnology Industry Organization for their forward-thinking vision, boundless promises of a better tomorrow for one and all, and my $650,000-a-year salary.

Thank you, and I hope you have a great conference.�

(smile)

Let me guess: if I had to enroll now, I couldn't get in? (from today's Inky)

In the last five years, Temple has morphed from a commuter college known as "Diversity University" into an institution far more academically selective - with a 34,000-member student body that is whiter, wealthier and more suburban than ever.

"The old shibboleth 'Temple who?' is anathema to us," said Howard Gittis, chairman of the board of trustees. "To make it a truly great institution... means pushing the administration, pushing the faculty, and, yes, looking for better students."

Yet as Temple works to catapult itself out of the mediocre "third tier" in US News & World Report's rankings, there is deepening concern that it will leave behind the constituency for which it was founded in 1884: the urban working class.

"We're trying to become a different kind of institution, and, frankly, that saddens me," said William Nathan, a mathematics professor for 33 years who has held many administrative posts. "Do I like that we are getting better students? Sure." But, he continued, that carries "far too high a price."

I would say so.

Given the recent base closing announcements, I should mention that the Willow Grove Air Show ended a minute or two ago at the Willow Grove Air Base. As you may have guessed, the base is on the closing list.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Air Show, I should point out that it is spectacular, highlighted by the performance of the Blue Angels. The Air Show is an all-day event, where kids, adults, and every age in between can meet with the pilots and sit inside the plane cockpits, check out the machinery, listen to the pilots tell stories of their flight careers, etc. There's food, drinks, and other recreational activities. The show truly is a tradition that is passed on from generation to generation.

Events such as these are part of our way of life, and when the base is closed, it (and the show) could end up going the way of the Horn and Hardart Automat, Lits Department Stores, the Ford Fairlaine automobile, and the two-speed Schwinn bike (yes, I know I'm really dating myself).

Nobody lamented those losses too much, but maybe the fact that the Air Show could disappear is a wake-up call (I think it is, anyway). We lose more and more of what we're all about as a community, a nation, and a free people, and the saddest part is that this is taking place because of our overall indifference and neglect and the crass incompetence of our political leadership.

Here is recap of the hardly-shining accomplishments of U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (8th District, Bucks County, PA) so far:

• Concerning House Congressional Resolution 95, which approves the budget submitted by President Bush and sets federal spending and revenues for the next five years, he approved a continuance of the Republican tax cuts through 2010 and a projected budget deficit of $376 billion for 2006.

• Concerning House Bill S686, otherwise known as the Terri Schiavo Act, he approved intervention by Congress on a legal matter in the state of Florida by granting jurisdiction to the U.S. District Court in that state to hear Schiavo’s case and render judgment.

I have a question for anyone living in PA riding around in a vehicle with a “Support Our Troops� sticker on it who may be reading this: How many of you voted in yesterday’s primary elections?

If you didn’t, then you’re really not, “supporting our troops�, are you? You’re not doing your duty as a citizen to participate in the most critical responsibility you have to ensure the continuation of our way of life which they are defending.

Actually, I think Bill Moyers said it best in a speech he recently gave to defend himself from Kenneth Tomlinson, Bush's hit man recently put in charge of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Here is what Moyers recalled saying on a broadcast of NOW before the start of Iraq War II about all the "Support Our Troops" decals and jacket/dress pins:

I suddenly think back and ask myself this question: has it really been 20 years?

I was working for one of my more forgettable employers at the time, having graduated a few years earlier from Temple’s school of communications and theater with a journalism degree, thinking I was ready to bust loose and show this small, highly cliquish and ultimately incompetent Department of Defense consulting firm in Willow Grove how well I could write proposals to help them win government contracts, not realizing I would be sabotaged some months later when my management mentor bailed out. While some of these thoughts knowingly and/or unknowingly swam in my head, one of my co-workers told me that there was a standoff between the Philadelphia police and MOVE at a home on Osage Avenue in the Powelton Village section of the city. My first reaction was “Good. Now they’re going to deal with Ramona Africa and all of these other characters who have been disrupting their neighbors by shouting through megaphones from the rooftop of that place at 3 AM in the morning, dumping garbage everywhere and drawing rats and all kinds of other animals, etc.� It all started around mid-morning, as I recall.

I didn’t hear anything about it for a little while, maybe an hour or so, when my father called me on the phone after lunch and asked me if I’d heard about the fire (we were living in Philadelphia at the time). I said no, I hadn’t heard anything. He continued and told me that, apparently, the police had tried to shoot their way into the house to apprehend some of the MOVE people (using the term "people" loosely, regarding the adults anyway) since the cops were trying to serve them a warrant and they resisted, with the MOVE people having fortified their house with bunkers, guns, and ammunition. While the cops engaged MOVE on the ground, a chopper flew overhead and dropped some C-4 explosive onto the roof, which eventually set off an explosion when it combusted with the stores of ammunition inside the home.

(By the way, I’m trying to be especially careful about how I explain the original explosion. I worked with a conservative years later who became enraged when you mention MOVE because he said that the TV stations deliberately edited the footage to make it look like the explosive caused the explosion right away, when it reality it took longer to combust with what MOVE had in their home already, and that the way they edited the film showed liberal bias against the police – yeah, you’re right; the guy was a total nimrod).

When the fire started, our illustrious former mayor, W. Wilson “Wife Beater� Goode watched it unfold on TV and thought the fire was snow on his television (I swear, I don’t think “The Simpsons� could make up stuff like this). He, managing director Leo Brooks and police chief Gregory Sambor decided to let the fire burn.

By now, word was starting to spread around the office that the entire city block was becoming engulfed, and no one in the city administration was doing anything to stop it. I checked back with my father for periodic updates to confirm this - he had started watching live coverage on TV (which, on the local CBS affiliate station, ran all day) the moment he heard that there was a police shootout going on, and it was truly riveting TV. This was so partly because local news reporter Harvey Clark arrived on the scene and started reporting back to local TV news anchor Larry Kane in the studio. Clark reported for hours and hours, talking to everyone he could find in an effort to piece the story together (he would later receive a well-deserved Emmy award for his coverage – it was a career-defining moment for him). Eventually, somebody at work found a TV and put it into one of our human factors testing labs (and I’m using that term very loosely also, since it had been the “brown bag� room a few days before), and people stopped in and out to watch an entire city block in West Philadelphia burn (the overhead helicopter shots from the local TV news stations left me dumbstruck in a way that I hope I never have to experience again).

Eventually, fire commissioner William Richmond interceded with his crew and I don’t know how many other companies to put out the blaze. I think it took two days to extinguish it. I believe he testified to the MOVE Commission during the hearings later that he acted on his own without any authorization because he couldn’t stand it any more, but I’m not sure. Between Goode, Sambor, Brooks, and Richmond, the fire commissioner was the only one who showed, to me, any competence or understanding of what it was that was going on.

We would find out other stuff in the coming days and weeks that made Wilson Goode look historically incompetent, such as the fact that, if the city had paid any attention at all to what the neighbors were trying to tell them, they would have known that MOVE had a pattern of how they came into and left the home, and the police could have gotten into the home and rescued the children (five of whom died) before they raided the house. It also came out later that the decision was made to drop the C-4 and let everything burn so the police could avert a lengthy shootout with MOVE, since the cops had clashed with MOVE in 1978 and Officer James Ramp was killed.

It was truly a surreal experience to watch “The Bombing of Osage Avenue� unfold and witness the subsequent aftermath (when I got home from work, along with my mom, I immediately started watching the coverage). For this and other reasons, I believe Wilson Goode should be made to wear ashes and sack cloth and never show his face in public again.

Hello,

I am glad to be a part of this community. Please visit my site at http://home.comcast.net/~kwbazmat/
for more. I will try to post as frequently as I can to this location. Take care.

LDSYR