Most of this post is built from an email i just shared with another blogger, betting him that the Democrats will be unable to pass tax cuts for the middle- and working-classes only:

Hamsher’s line about “it’s christmas for god sakes” really hit me hard.

From 2005-2008, I worked at a human services organization here in Philly that, among other things, runs a homeless shelter for women and children escaping domestic violence. Part of my job was doing the toys-for-tots run, as well as obtaining, wrapping, and distributing specific gifts requested by the moms for their kids. I will NEVER forget the gratitude in those women’s faces at something as miserable as a plastic Sponge-Bob doll or a stuffed animal, anything so their kids would have something to smile about on December 25th. I’m getting all upset just writing about it.

I mean, these women had fucking nothing, NOTHING, and were living in a shelter built into a 150 year old church that had nearly collapsed the year before I accepted the job. I still go there on MLK Day to volunteer my services in any way I can, whether it’s folding clothes or helping to paint the halls a little brighter. You know what the proudest day of my life was? Helping some poor beaten-to-shit woman get a donated moving trailer from U-Haul so she could escape the fucking asshole that was abusing her.

Not one of those goddamn motherfuckers in the Senate has EVER been hungry. Not one of those privileged fucks has ever had to tell the kids, “Sorry, but your christmas present is that the heat stays on this month.” Not one of them is poor, and not one of them (with the exception of Joe Biden) has ever BEEN poor.

For all her faults, which my colleagues on the left like to remind me of, Jane Hamsher is right: these people ARE bastards. It’s fucking Christmas (I’m not even religious), people can’t feed their kids, and they’re on the verge of losing their unemployment. And rather than fight for them, the Democrats led by Obama are going to fuck up a tax cut for working people. because God forbid the Republicans throw a hissy fit, god forbid the millionaires, who hate the Democrats and will never stop hating them no matter how may millionaire dicks the Dems suck, don’t get even MORE money.

David Dayen has more if you can stomach it.

You can watch the whole thing here.

and call me a firebagger all you want: jane hamsher has passion and grit that you rarely see anywhere else.

Me, January 25, 2010:

I have a proposal to save the rotting hulk of the United States.

No, no, I don’t mean the country. I mean the S.S. United States, that glorious liner that’s decaying slowly on Pier 82 off Columbus Boulevard, where it’s been dry-docked for over a decade. It was the fastest ocean liner ever built, and although it was never used for military purposes, it was capable of transporting 14,000 troops per trip and traveling up to 10,000 miles non-stop. The ship’s history is Pennsylvania’s history, made of steel from Coatesville, designed by Philadelphia native Francis Gibbs, and included on the Pennsylvania Register of Historic Places. Nothing has been done to restore this national treasure, though and it may be sold for scrap.

Butit looks like the state is determined to shove casinos down our throats, and I say make lemonade from lemons. Sell the ship to Foxwoods and open it as a casino!

While I was only half-joking, that article got a LOT of positive comments. Apparently, someone took it seriously, because the Philadelphia Inquirer reported today, November 22, 2010:

Drawn by repeated distress signals from the Foxwoods Casino project, the preservation group at the helm of a historic ghost ship, the SS United States, is offering to sail upriver with a novel alternative.

The proposal: Move the derelict cruise liner about three-quarters of a mile north from its resting place at Pier 82 in South Philadelphia and place it next to a new 10-story garage with two floors of gaming.

Cut a dock into the 16-acre site and slip the bow in, facing Columbus Avenue. Renovate and refit the 58-year-old vessel – an estimated $150 million to $200 million job – with gaming floors, restaurants, event space, a museum, and, possibly, a boutique hotel.

“We can place the SS United States into the Foxwoods property in a way that showcases a national treasure and makes it a tourist draw,” said Ken Smukler, an adviser to the SS United States Conservancy.
[...]
The conservancy has approached Harrah’s and the local Foxwoods investors about making the ship the centerpiece of the casino plan, according to Smukler. But by Friday, he said, neither the Las Vegas gaming giant nor the locals – Philadelphia Entertainment and Development Partners (PEDP) – had responded.
[...]
However, Mayor Nutter, briefed on the proposal in recent weeks, described it Friday as “certainly one of the most unique, dynamic, and exciting plans for a casino anywhere in the United States of America.”

Although long a critic of using waterfront land for big-box casinos, he noted a prestige factor in “having a casino in one of the largest ocean liners ever built.”

As my buddy Scott joked, I should be getting a 1% finder’s fee, and due credit in the local fishwrapper newspaper.

Now, how to save the equally ironically decrepit SS Olympia: the steel cruiser which helped give birth to the United States as an empire is now, much like the United States, rotting away from years of neglect and misplaced priorities.

It’s 8:40 in the morning and I should be getting ready for work. Instead, I’m running late because I was listening to WHYY’s Sue Phillips do a fantastic piece on today’s auction, which will see the bankrupt Philadelphia Media Holdings sold off to the highest bidder. There’s a lot of worry that the papers will be gutted, the web presence further degraded, and even more concern that the Daily News may be shut down for good.

So you’d think this would be front page news, right?

Here’s a screenshot of philly.com that I took while listening to Phillips’ piece:

No mention, unless you scroll down:

OK, so maybe sports is the big focus at philly.com: if my survival was at stake, I’d make a bigger issue of it, but I’m not the paper’s web editor.

Here’s the Daily News:

Nothin’. Although Christine Flowers’ opinion piece on “Bill Clinton’s Boogeyman” is sure to be a barn burner, but only if you’re a right-wing cuckoo bananas stuck in the 1990s.

Here’s the Inquirer:

Nothin’. And if you scroll down…

Nothin’.

It’s hard to care sometimes…

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.

So here is a partial list of the programs that republicans think America doesn’t need (and I will say that there are alternative proposals by House republicans, including one by my own odious Representative, Scott Garrett, that consists of cuts to corporate and capital gains tax rates instead):

* An increase in the maximum benefit under the former food stamp program (now called the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP);
* An expansion of broadband internet access to rural areas of America;
* Programs to improve infrastructure and develop rural communities;
* Improvements to the criminal justice system;
* funding for science and technology research;
* Funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services;
* Funding to repair, maintain and renovate the Department of Defense (DoD) facilities;
* Energy efficiency projects and modernization of heating/cooling and electrical systems at the DoD;
* Improving Army barracks;
* Energy related research and development (renewable energy programs and expansion of existing weatherization activites);
* Funding for the Army Corps of Engineers (remember the levees in New Orleans that weren’t funded?;
* Modernization of the nation’s electrical grid;
* Construction and repair of Federal facilities;
* Funding for clean water programs and water infrastructure projects;
* Capital improvements and maintenance for Forest Service and National Park Service, the Superfund program and wildland fire management;
* Funding for the Department of Health and Human Services;
* Funding for labor and employment training programs/Department of Labor;
* Renovations to elementary and secondary schools;
* Pell Grants and other student financial assistance;
* Educational programs aimed at elementary and secondary education;
* Defense construction projects – including hospitals, barracks and day care centers;
* funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to be used on maintaining VA medical facilities and cemeteries;
* Funding for Information Technology projects at the State Department;
* Funding for highway construction;
* Funding for housing assistance programs administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development;
* Grants to states and cities for community development;
* Refundable tax credits for middle and lower income families;
* Increase tax credit for higher education;
* Extension of tax credit for renewable energy production;
* Increase the earned income tax credit for lower income families with three or more qualifying children;
* Increased funding for emergency unemployment benefits for those who exhaust the amount of benefits they collect;
* Temporary increase in amount of unemployment benefits;
* Assistance to states for spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program;
* Extension of Medicaid coverage to certain unemployed workers;
* Assistance with COBRA premium payments for certain unemployed workers; and
* Incentives for health care providers to use “health information technology” which would reduce health care costs for providers and lower premiums.

Granted, this is not something that I would expect anyone to memorize, but if you look at these programs, they are geared towards jobs, education, infrastructure and emergency assistance to lower and middle income families. This is what republicans voted against. This is what the republicans feel is not as helpful to American families as capital gains and corporate tax cuts.

And this is why Obama, the Congressional Democrats and Americans should (if they already don’t) realize that the republican party is negotiating in bad faith. They would have voted against this bill regardless of what was in it or not in it. They simply do not care about helping American families. As Rush Limbaugh said, they want America to fail.

Exiled conservative Andrew Sullivan asks How’d you like to be a Republican member from Michigan or Indiana or Ohio, where the unemployment rate is climbing steadily?

or Maine, which voted for the Democrats, facing its highest unemployment since 1992? think Olympia Snow and Sue Collins need THIS on their constituents’ TV?

They are between a rock and a hard place: support Obama’s plan, and the mouth-breathing ideologues at Club for Growth and the Sean Hannity show will eat them for breakfast. Rebuke the plan, and face the voters, who no doubt “will be stunned to learn their member of Congress voted against [saving or] creating 4 million jobs” :

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the lawmakers will have to answer to their constituents.

“I do believe that there will be people in districts all over the country that will wonder why, when there’s a good bill to get the economy moving again, why we still seem to be playing political gotcha,” Gibbs said.

The conservatives and their standard bearer have laid it all out on the table: they want Obama to fail, and by extension for America to fail. that’s because for Republicans and conservatives, the Party is more important than the nation. They have no class, no patriotism, and no sense besides.

It’s going to be a fun four years. All they have is complaining and spitballs, and very little in the way of ideas beyond tax cutting.

You lost. WE won.

D-E-A-D-B-E-A-T-S!
If Jeff Lurie and the Eagles won’t settle the team’s debt, the mayor, everyone on city council, every paper in town, and every fan from every neighborhood should be screaming bloody murder until they do.

The Daily News has printed one single editorial about this. To the best of my knowledge, the Inquirer has said nothing (I would be happy to be corrected). I’ve been trolling philly.com’s sports pages calling attention to the Eagles’ debt, and every day my polite comments are deleted by the administrators. Anyone seen today’s Daily News? Front and back covers celebrating the Eagles, including an egregious picture of Andy Reid with the headline “We Owe You Run” . Yeah, you owe us something alright, and it’s substantially more than bad puns in honor of a corporate deadbeat that’s benefited so much the city

Meanwhile, the Mayor is too busy going to Army-Navy football games and changing his vanity plate to meet with library supporters. I have personally written the mayor twice, and published those letters here, to no response whatsoever. At Saturday’s well-publicized rally at the Main Branch, only two members of council showed up, and only two state representatives.

As for the fans, if the news isn’t telling them that the Eagles are stiffing our communities and kids, how will they know to speak up?

Make sure you pass this video along: our city bleeds green, but the Eagles are bleeding US dry. Make your voice heard! Call the Philadelphia Eagles at 215-463-5500. Call the Mayor’s action center at 215-686-3000. Find your representative on City Council, and ask them why communities have to suffer for the Eagles’ greed and whether they have plans to publicly shame this corproate deadbeat into meeting its obligations to our city, our community, and our kids.

Please visit Phawker and Philly Bits for more.

A public-private partnership is stepping up to save three city skating rinks whose futures were on thin ice.

Mayor Nutter and Ed Snider, chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, announced yesterday that the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation would take over operation and programming at three rinks that officials said were targeted for possible closing amid the city’s budget troubles. Comcast-Spectacor owns the Flyers.

At a news conference at the Rink at Simons Recreation and Teen Access Center at 7200 Woolston Ave. in the West Oak Lane section, Nutter hailed the partnership with the foundation.

“This is the kind of partnership we’re looking to replicate in a number of ways,” Nutter said, adding that the partnership means that each of the city’s five ice rinks will be open this winter.

The foundation will provide free hockey instruction and leagues at the three rinks, including all equipment and homework, and academic help for students there, for one year, Nutter said.

The Recreation Department will retain overall responsibility for the activities and maintenance at the rinks, officials said.

This begins to make up for the Sarah Palin puck-drop.

Comcast and Verizon continue to shirk their corporate responsibilities, while Sunoco and the Philadelphia Eagles continue to stiff the city and our kids.

I’ve never written that much about gay rights issues. I have a few gay friends, but it’s never been a major focus of my political consciousness. In the wake of Proposition 8, I’m seeings quite a bit differently. I don’t like bigots. I especially don’t like religiously motivated bigots who try to shove their views down other people’s throats.

The Mormons are the truly bad actors here, although there are all sorts of people to blame for voting for this truly monumental piece of shit. So if you’re at Broad and Market on Saturday, head down to Dilworth Plaza at City Hall, across from LOVE Park: protest starts at 1:30. I’m going to try and make it but might be late.

My neighborhood is getting hit hard by the Mayor’s cuts: we’re losing a pool, a sprayground, and the historic Kingsessing Library, which is shceduled to be closed and sold. This is a step too far: the senior citizens in my neighborhood depend on that library. It’s a resource and a benefit for a struggling community. To take the library AND the pools? That’s just cruel, kicking people who are already down in the face.

And I say that as someone who’s trying to help: I wrote the mayor this week with funding suggestions I’ve written about here the blog.

There’s a rally to save the Kingsessing Library tomorrow starting at 2:00 PM.

If you can, do both rallies. I’m going to try. It’s not right that children, senior citizens, individuals and families should lose their library due to the financial mismanagement of our national economy. It’s not right that religious bigots strip my friends and neighbors of rights they earned through decades of struggle. That shit ain’t right, and someone’s gotta say so.

Hope to see you tomorrow!