Brian Tierney’s Stinky Doesn’t Grasp the Concept of “NEWS”
As I’ve noted before, there’s a good reason WHY I don’t read the Stinky, a/k/a the floundering Philadelphia Inquirer: since taking over as publisher, Brian Tierney has presided over what Daniel U-A rightly identifies as “the Right-Wing Hackifying of the Inquirer Op-Ed Pages”. And boy oh boy, did Tierney’s fishwrapper STINK this weekend, publishing noted torture apologist John Yoo, who you can hear in this video explaing the president’s inherent right to crush childrne’s testicles:
Johnny Yoo-hoo had some interesting things to say, if by interesting you mean “totally fucked up and bizarre”. I won’t subject my own mind to such abject stupidity and evil, so I’ll turn the stage over to Joel at the Philly Weekly:
Our new president likes to invoke comparisons to the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. To Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are created equal was a “great truth, applicable to all men at all times.” In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln justified the carnage of the battle with the prospect of preserving the “new nation,” created by “our fathers,” that was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Our nation fulfilled that promise when it amended the Constitution to make clear that the state cannot deny any American the equal protection of the law because of skin color. Immigrants came to our shores because of the promise that they would have equality of opportunity, free from governments that choose winners and losers because of their parents or their race.
Holy crap. I mean: Holy crap.
You know which Constitutional amendment made clear the state cannot deny any American the equal protection of the law for any reason? That would be the 14th Amendment. Which was passed in 1868. Two years later, the 15th Amendment rather more explicitly guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. In 1870.
Apparently our nation fulfilled its promise that all men are created equal about 80 years or so before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, 90 years or so before Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, and 95 years or so before LBJ spearheaded passage of the Voting Rights Act. It’s as though — in John Yoo’s world — Jim Crow never existed.
Unlike Joel, I’m NOT embarrassed for the Inquirer: it’s just another predictable, and predictably stupid, step on the paper’s pathway to oblivion. It’s like watching someone die.
Sad as it is to say, the Inquirer really doesn’t represent the people of Philadelphia. The local news section is crap: the top story online is that NJ city Camden’s finances are a mess, which surely matters to people on the east side of the Delaware River, but not so much to Philadelphians. Something about Elk County, which isn’t Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Flower Show, the price of coffee, and a brawl at a tattoo convention. Matters of huge importance, all.
Meanwhile, some actual news that really DOES matter to Philadelphia is buried, soft-pedaled, and given short-shrift:
PNC slashes dividend 85%
PNC Financial Services Inc., which recently bought troubled rival National City Corp. with the aid of a $7.7 billion federal investment, said today it would slash its quarterly dividend 85 percent to build capital.
The cut, to 10 cents per share from 66 cents per share, is based on “the long-term needs of the company, and not driven by any regulatory action, or any immediate need for additional capital,” the Pittsburgh bank said in a statement.
PNC, which has major operations in the Philadelphia area, also cited the changing regulatory environment as a reason for reducing the dividend.
–Harold Brubaker
What the article doesn’t tell you is that the “$7.7 billion federal investment” is actually TARP funding, which is supposed to be used to make loans and extend credit to consumers, but due to the way the bill is written, is currently being used by large banks tobuy smaller banks. And the first bank to do so? You guessed it: PNC.
PNC Financial Services Group Inc. (PNC: 27.70 +0.36 +1.32%) became the first U.S. bank to make use of the government’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) with its plans to purchase National City Corp. (NCC: 0.00 0.00 0.00%).
Pennsylvania-based regional bank PNC announced today (Friday) that it would purchase Ohio-based National City in an all-stock transaction that values the struggling regional bank at $5.2 billion. Shareholders will receive 0.0392 PNC share for each National City share, or $2.23 per share, 19% less than National City’s closing price yesterday (Thursday).
In order to help facilitate the purchase, PNC will sell $7.7 billion in preferred stock and warrants to the Treasury Department’s bank recapitalization program.
“The acquisition of National City will increase our core deposit base to $180 billion, making PNC the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits. At a time when core funding is key, we see our deposit strength as an important success factor,” said James E. Rohr, chairman and chief executive officer of PNC, in a company statement announcing the deal.
With the funds from the TARP, PNC’s Tier 1 capital ratio, a measure of a bank’s stability, will increase to approximately 10%.
You might figure that when one of the region’s largest banks receives an infusion of nearly $8 billion taxpayer dollars designed to shore up the bank’s stability, and the bank’s dividend STILL crashes, that’d be some news. But not in Brian Tierney’s Inquirer: it’s too busy publishing editorials by discredited wingnuts, paying for syndicated colmnists who know jack-shit about Philadelphia, and printing puff pieces about the price of coffee.
If you have to shut down one of Philly’s newspapers, shut down the Inquirer. It’s a waste of newsprint under its current management.
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
[...] Yoo, Inquirernon-savior I, like several other local bloggers, was struck yesterday by the fact that the front page of the Inquirer Op-Ed section [...]
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:45 am
[...] Melissa wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptBrian Tierneyâs Stinky Doesnât Grasp the Concept of âNEWSâ As I’ve noted before, there’s a good reason WHY I don’t read the Stinky, a/k/a the floundering Philadelphia Inquirer: since taking over as publisher, Brian Tierney has presided over what Daniel U-A rightly identifies as “the Right-Wing Hackifying of the Inquirer Op-Ed Pages&#… Read the full post from Brendan Calling Tags: Media, survival, Philadelphia, TORTURE, YouTube, plain pitiful, calling bullshit, right wing dingalings, big business as usual via Blogdigger blog search for immigration. [...]