Sorry, nepotism on the bridge!

Posted on September 14, 2010 by oddmanout215

One of these years, DRPA will finish bike paths

The mission: To get used to commuting by bicycle between Center City Philadelphia and Camden, NJ, using the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Peddling the mile-long stretch takes about 10 minutes, includes beautiful vistas of the Delaware River and is a cheap alternative to driving and public transportation.

The obstacle: The 84-year-old steel suspension bridge, like most thruways in the region, isn’t bicycle-friendly. Only a few hundred cyclists per day and roughly as many pedestrians make the bridge crossing, compared to about 100,000 motor vehicles and 40,000 commuters on the PATCO train line. Cyclists on the Philly side must brave heavy auto traffic on streets that have few bike lanes and don’t directly connect to the bridge’s concrete walkways, which double as bike paths.

The walkways – each is about 12 feet wide at most points – run on either side of the bridge’s seven vehicular lanes and above the PATCO tracks, bordered by steel suspension cables, sturdy metal railings and light fixtures. However, only one walkway is open on any given day, and signs posted by the Delaware River Port Authority, which maintains the bridge, caution that crossings are “At your own risk.”

The Ben Franklin Bridge's south-side walkway/bike path on a user-unfriendly day

The south-side walkway begins on an upward slope that continues for several blocks over Philly’s riverfront, past one of the stone towers built into the bridge to serve as public transportation stations. These were never used for that purpose because trolley use fell off drastically in the ’20s as more and more people began commuting by car.

Midway across the river the walkway slopes downward, passes another tower, narrows by half and then abruptly ends at the top of three flights of metal stairs on the Camden side. The north-side walkway is less frequently used because it narrows near Camden to the width of a cattle chute, so that cyclists approaching from opposite directions must dismount in order to squeeze past one another. One either side, one must carry his/her bike up or down the stairs or “walk” it along awkwardly placed ramps that run next to the stairs.

Biking over the bridge can feel bizarre but is not all that risky, if my two dozen crossings this summer are an indication. On a recent hot afternoon I encountered a dozen or so cyclists and joggers, alone or in pairs; a DRPA policeman in a vehicle just small enough to allow a cyclist to pass at the same time in the other direction; and a man and woman, both nearly naked, huddled next to one of the towers. The woman covered herself and shouted, “Sorry, having sex on the bridge!” This was perhaps to remind me that traffic on the walkways has been light for a long time and will only increase if government puts more money and effort into upgrading it.

John Boyle, research director for the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, recently said that improvements to the walkways are in the works, including a bike ramp to be built in 2012 to replace the stairs on the Camden side. He noted that bicycling advocates already have helped persuade the DRPA to extend the hours during which walkways are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the warmer months and 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the fall and winter. Other proposed changes are listed on the Bicycle Coalition website.

Ed Kasuba, director of corporate communications for the DRPA, confirmed the interstate agency plans to replace the stairs with a ramp. He referred questions about the “At your own risk” signs to the DRPA’s legal department, which could not be reached for comment this week, possibly because it is busy fielding complaints about other matters. The DRPA has been under fire for months for patronage hiring, for providing free train rides and bridge passes to employees, and for spending millions of dollars on projects that have nothing to do with transportation. Maybe some of the money could have been used to improve the walkways.

Boyle’s advice to fans of the walkways: “Contact the DRPA and say I support further improvements. I use the bridge and would like my trip to be easier and safer.” The agency can be reached at 877-567-3772.

Posted in bicycling, Delaware River Port Authority, livable cities, NJ, Philadelphia, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Headless bodies and hapless Democrats

Posted on September 7, 2010 by oddmanout215

Think GOP’s morons can’t win midterms? Think again

Keith Olbermann knows Republican candidates are funny. He airs clips of their boneheaded declarations so that we who lean left can laugh, in an incredulous way, at how grotesque the right wing has become. We are indeed amused, but this year it looks like the morons might have the last laugh.

What rough (and headless) beast... slouches towards Washington, D.C., to be born?

Last week Olbermann mocked Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer for her poor performance in a debate with Terry Goddard, the Democrat running for governor, and for stirring fears about illegal immigration by falsely claiming that headless bodies had been found in the Arizona desert. Watching the show I wanted to say yes, Keith, Gov. Cactus Face is a liar and a bigot, but these facts don’t matter to her fans.

Sharron Angle, the Nevada Republican tea-bagger candidate for the Senate, believes abortion causes breast cancer, defends citizens who might resort to “Second Amendment remedies” (bang, bang) to get rid of federal officials they don’t like, and has opposed use of the color black (it’s evil) in high school football uniforms. She is kooky as well as stupid, and has been justly ridiculed by Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and other liberal commentators. And yet, as of Sept. 3, Angle was still running neck-and-neck with Harry Reid, the Democratic incumbent.

I could pick on many other ridiculous Republican candidates. The point is that supporters of Angle and her ilk aren’t likely to see the light and vote Democratic even if, by some remote chance, they happen to watch Olbermann’s TV show. They’re the same geniuses who think Barack Obama is a Muslim and Sarah Palin is qualified for national office.

More importantly, dissing the wackos isn’t likely to change the minds of so-called independents who are leaning toward not voting or voting Republican. Not because independents think the Republicans are competent, but rather because they want to express their anger at Obama and the Democratic congress for not taking bold steps to fix the economy. As for why independents would let anger get the best of them, to the point where they’d help elect candidates who would make the situation worse… well, that’s as much a mystery to me as it must be to you.

Update: Obama on Labor Day unveiled a $50 billion jobs plan directed at upgrading the nation’s infrastructure. Too little and way too late. If Obama had an ounce of political sense or nerve, he would have announced aggressive jobs creation plans in the first year of his term. He would have repeatedly condemned cynical Republicans who, as a bloc, fought to block any legislation that would have brought down the jobless rate.

Maybe Dems will succeed in salvaging a slim congressional majority by funneling the lion’s share of campaign funds to candidates who have the best chance of winning. I doubt it. This year “the best lack all conviction,” as W. B. Yeats wrote in an oft-quoted poem, and the worst are waiting for their savior.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, immigration, mid-term elections, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

You, sir, are no Lonesome Rhodes

Posted on September 1, 2010 by oddmanout215

Where are the fire-breathing, chest-beating demagogues of old?

I saw clips of Glenn Beck exhorting the crowd to come back to Jesus during his “Restoring Honor” event in D.C. and I wondered, honestly, how this simpering buffoon rose from radio obscurity to become the de facto voice of the Tea Party movement.

About last weekend -- Is this the face of New Age nativism?

Even more puzzling is why some liberals compare Beck to Lonesome Rhodes, the menacingly jovial TV star and front man for fascism played by Andy Griffith in the classic 1957 movie A Face In the Crowd. Can you imagine strong, sexy Patricia Neil being smitten by the Pillsbury Doughboy?

Rhodes was a cross between Huey Long and P.T. Barnum, a born rabble-rouser but also a secret cynic. Beck is the champion of today’s touchy-feely right-wingers — New Age nativists? — who think they’re victims of a government in cahoots with Mexican immigrants, Muslim terrorists and gay solar-power salesmen. He’s graceless and prone to making ugly slurs, but he’s a sensitive demagogue, proud that he publicly blubbers while professing love of country, even if he sometimes fakes the tears (see video of GQ photo shoot, below).

I say bring back the two-fisted, actively alcoholic Joe McCarthy types who snarl non-stop. Better to fight them than some chickenshit ex-drunk who, when he’s not weeping, puts a smiley face on the fascist agenda of the Koch brothers. Beck is pissing off us cinephiles and shaming the Know Nothing tradition even as he demonstrates his devotion to it.

Quotable: “Glenn Beck’s rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected—the Waterworld of white self-pity.” — Christopher Hitchens in Slate.

Posted in economic collapse, mainstream media, Nativism, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Ten signs you’ve slipped into the underclass

Posted on August 30, 2010 by oddmanout215

Here’s how to tell you’ve hit bottom

Make a list that traces your downward mobility. This is the opposite of what you’d do if you were reading “Six signs that you’ve made it to the middle class,” a recent article which states the obvious — the middle class in America is becoming extinct — but then lists items one must have in order to belong.

Can't afford this coat? You're in the underclass.

My list is, I hope, more in tune with the times. You know you’ve joined the underclass when:

1. Five-dollar dress shirts at the Wolf Street thrift shop begin to seem too pricey.

2. “Hey kids, we’re going to the ballgame!” means the softball finals at Palumbo Playground, not the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.

3. You cancel your cable TV subscription because you can only afford channels that show “Three’s Company” and infomercials.

4. The family car has four flats and a 2009 inspection sticker.

5. You live in Philadelphia but the closest job opening in your field is in Bangor, Maine.

6. You see a movie called Eat Pray Love — about the emotional turmoil of a well-off American woman on yearlong holiday — and want to write a sequel called Load Aim Splatter.

7. Your most up-to-date musical gadget is a boom box, not an iPod.

8. Dining out means pizza slices at Lorenzo’s, not a table for two at Amada.

9. Dental insurance isn’t an option, so you decide your chipped front tooth looks ruggedly handsome.

10. You insist that hole in the roof you can’t afford to fix is really a skylight.

I hope this helps everyday people everywhere get their bearings. For a macro version of this list, try “Thirty-six sure signs that your empire is crumbling.”

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Can a daily biking regimen cause homicide?

Posted on August 28, 2010 by oddmanout215

Maybe not, but make sure you look both ways

Exercise might “moderate” one’s anger level, according to a research study reported by the Phys Ed column in The New York Times. Hmm…

In the study, scientists monitored the brain activity of 16 young men as they were shown films of the Ku Klux Klan, kids being fired on by soldiers and other disturbing images. The monitoring devices indicated that “the men were growing angry” as they watched. However, those who rode stationary bicycles after watching the images ”ended the session no angrier than they began it.”

Don't argue with an SUV. It's not worth it.

Brilliant stuff, Phys Ed. Now we know there’s a link between exercise, stress relief and anger management. This is like announcing yes, it’s true, a certain combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms produces a clear liquid substance that quenches thirst.

Notice the research team used stationary bicycles. Would the anger of the subjects in the study have plateaued if they’d ridden bikes on city streets after watching anger-inducing images? My own study, involving personal experience and anecdotes from friends (yes, very scientific) indicates that an hour or two on the narrow streets of Philly’s grid is more likely to fill your head with Buckethead riffs and Road Warrior scenarios than keep your anger in check.

Not that you’re likely to use your bike to chase down and harm rogue drivers who breeze through stop signs, curse and spit at riders, make sudden turns without using signals and honk their horns when they’re directly behind you and speeding to beat a red light. You might picture these drivers in fireballs or crawling through wreckage or hurtling through windshields after high-speed crashes, but you wouldn’t want to play a part in making such horrors happen, perish the thought.

Besides, in that no man’s land between parked cars and moving traffic, who’s more likely to end up as roadkill, the bike rider or the oinker in the SUV?

I’m hoping, like Rodney King, that we can all get along. That bike riders who blow through red lights and ride against traffic will get their act together. That government will fund new ways to do right — more designated bike lanes, bike racks, bike sharing and so on — by the growing numbers of city residents who choose bikes as America transitions, ready or not, from the era of gas guzzlers to the era of livable cities (hmm, that’ll be the day).

Meanwhile, the streets would be a lot worse if it wasn’t for the stubborn advocates at Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, who are sponsoring Bike Philly 2010, a car-free ride on Philly streets, Sept. 12. BCGP works hard to foster peace between irritable cyclists (speaking only for myself, of course) and the spoiled hogs who poison our air and jam city streets, even though half of them could just as easily bike or use public transportation.

I could go on, but I think it’s time to get back on my stationary bike.

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Forget the blog tax, fine Carl Greene!

Posted on August 24, 2010 by oddmanout215

City should sniff out corrupt bureaucrats, not freelancers

The City Paper recently reported that Philadelphia is taxing residents who blog. An online CP follow-up clarified that the tax is on blogs that “make some money or, at least, have the potential to make some money.”

Actually, it's a lifetime tax of $300 or $50 a year

In other words, bloggers who run an advertisement or two and have a Philly address are being taxed. Which sounds more like extortion than taxation. Many of us already pay a business privilege tax for freelance writing and, in good years, a net profits tax, not to mention wage taxes on regular income as well as property taxes and other steep fees. All of this for the privilege of living in a cash-strapped city that puts itself even deeper in debt by paying huge sums to officials like Carl Greene, who can’t even pay his own bills. More on that scumbag in a second.

The blog tax is the sort of squeeze play executed by a city where idiots call the shots. A city that gouges taxpayers because it has a large percentage of residents who don’t pay any taxes. That uses its tax revenues wastefully, often on salaries for drones and cronies and petty dictators like Greene, the Housing Authority chief, who makes $306,370 a year plus bonuses to oversee spending of federal money for public housing in Philly.

Next thing you know the snoops at City Hall will be taxing residents who sell their possessions at sidewalk sales, probably to keep up with city taxes.

City officials diligently pursue residents who are paid, say, $200 for writing a freelance article. I propose that they out the same amount of energy into pursuing and prosecuting well-paid public officials who turn out to be crooks or incompetents. It’s not a crazy idea, not if it’s written into the contracts. Think of how much more efficient and just it would be if Greene had to surrender a year’s salary in return for settlement of sexual harassment lawsuits brought against him. That amount would add more to the tax revenue stream than 6,000 bloggers paying annual $50 usage feees.

It’s annoying that right-wingers all over the country have picked up the blog tax story and are using it as an argument against all taxes, instead of just bad taxes. Or as an argument against regulation of businesses. (If regulations had been in place, the Wall Street banks wouldn’t have been able to wreck the economy.) Way to go, Philly!

Posted in mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, taxes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Hellhound on his trail (prosecutors, too)

Posted on August 22, 2010 by oddmanout215

Roger Clemens’s deal with the devil blows up in his face

Question, sports fans: What does big clunky bully-boy Roger Clemens, the former New York Yankees pitching ace, have in common with blues artist Robert Johnson?

Answer: Both men, after realizing the limits of mortal achievement, sold their souls to the devil in return for magical powers. Legend has it that Johnson went to hell, but not before writing and recording a bunch of immortal songs, including “Hellhound On My Trail.” Clemens might go to jail, a better deal than going to hell if you land in the right jail, but he has lost his bid for immortality.

Testifying before Congress in 2008, Clemens said, “I have never taken steroids or [human growth hormone].” Last week an unconvinced federal grand jury indicted the seven-time Cy Young Award winner for perjury. This is how the situation was summed up on Friday by ESPN.com:

Robert Johnson, circa 1937

“What once seemed to be a he-said vs. he-said dispute between Clemens and his former trainer, Brian McNamee, once the New York Yankees’ strength and conditioning coach, escalated into a federal case. The grand jury heard testimony from McNamee, who gave federal authorities syringes he said were used to inject Clemens with drugs.”

I’d feel sorry for Clemens if he wasn’t such a nasty piece of work. He did what many other athletes do — cheated, that is — because the potential rewards seemed to outweigh the risks. Because he knew he could make many more millions of dollars if he kept winning ballgames in apparent defiance of the aging process. Because he knew the Yankees and Major League Baseball and the TV networks and sportswriters and most fans didn’t care what he and other “superstars” were swallowing or shooting up, so long as they continued to win.

This was obvious in 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in their fraudulent duel to break Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. Both were grotesquely beefed up and hitting moonshots on a regular basis. They looked like pro wrestlers masquerading as baseball players, but everyone kept cheering them on.

In the end, both broke Maris’s record and neither did. In 2009, it was revealed that Sosa had tested positive for steroids in 2003. Early this year, McGwire confessed to using steroids at various times in his career, including the ’98 season. Record keepers don’t really know how to categorize their bogus achievements and they won’t know what to do with Clemens’s stats either.

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Newsflash: Iraq not ready for U.S. pullout

Posted on August 20, 2010 by oddmanout215

The war has cost close to $1 trillion so far. Guess who’s paying for it?

Earlier this week more than 60 people were killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad as they stood in a long line waiting to apply for jobs in the Iraqi military.

The vast sums wasted in Iraq could have been used to boost the economy

There was sick logic to the attack. The jobs queue was long because unemployment in Iraq is anywhere from 30 to 68 percent, depending on whose figures you believe. Unemployment is sky-high because Iraq remains a battleground more than seven years after the U.S. invaded and occupied it, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and creating hundreds of billions of dollars of debt that has been passed on to U.S. taxpayers.

The suicide bombing was like an exclamation point on remarks made last week by Iraqi Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, who thinks it would take another decade before Iraqi forces could operate without help from U.S. forces.

Except that the U.S. literally can’t afford more war in Iraq, where ethnic and religious divisions run even deeper now than when the war began, and where the only real winners have been the corporations that made billions contracting with the U.S. government to supply goods and services and mercenaries for the war effort.

The rationale for the war was based on lies invented by the Bush administration, as was the rationale for maintaining a military presence after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. We had to end the factional unrest and stabilize the government, Bush said.

Iraq is still unstable, so it’s no surprise that the Obama administration, which was stuck with Bush’s mess, is ducking the question of future U.S. military involvement. Much has been made of the departure of the last American combat brigade, but who knows what next year will bring?

The fact is that taxpayer money will continue to prop up Iraq’s dysfunctional government and fund the 50,000 troops who will remain in Iraq in 2011 as “advise and assist brigades,” which means they will become fighting units if and when the situation calls for it. We’ll also be funding thousands of U.S. contractors — that means mercenaries — who will be hired to protect American diplomats from insurgent attacks, which are likely to begin to increase again now that most of our uniformed forces have been redeployed.

The money problems don’t end there. Barack Obama is as gung-ho about the pointless Afghanistan war as George W. Bush was, so billions in tax dollars are being spent there even as our military involvement in Iraq is winding down. And billions more are being spent to prop up the corrupt regime in Pakistan, and to keep Israel from attacking Iran.

Meanwhile the situation in America grows dimmer, with the federal deficit worsening, stimulus money drying up and applications for unemployment benefits on the rise again.

The folly of wasting huge sums on unnecessary wars becomes clearer by the day. The costs of Iraq alone will top out at more than $3 trillion. And yet few people in government are talking about bringing military spending in line with the realities of our rapidly weakening economy.

Bottom line: The war that matters is the war to cut American trade and budget deficits, and we are losing it, partly because of insupportable military spending. China and other East Asian countries are clobbering us without firing a shot.

Quotable: From British historian Tony Judt, who died Aug. 6 — “… the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Iraq war, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dowd for White House press secretary? A good fit

Posted on August 16, 2010 by oddmanout215

D.C. gossip queen has low tolerance for Democratic ‘lefties’

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is a caricaturist who also specializes in insider gossip, semi-clever puns and simplistic assessments of the national mood.

She would make an ideal replacement for White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, whom she recently deemed unfit for the job.

Maureen Dowd would know how to work the White House press corps

Dowd was in her glory in the late 1990s, dishing the dirt about Bill and Monica. Then she spent eight years trying to make light of George W. Bush and his posse. No sex scandals in that dull bunch, so she joked about Bush being a spoiled rich kid who felt inferior to his dad.

Her tone is catty and ultra-casual, even when she’s writing about things like the Bush administration’s dishonest but successful effort to start a disastrous war in Iraq. It isn’t until she gets riled up and tries to make a substantive argument that you notice how welded her opinions are to the status quo.

On Sunday Dowd seemed upset because millions of Democrats are disappointed and/or angry about President Obama’s failure to deliver on meaningful health care reform, Wall Street regulation and other big campaign promises. She agreed that Gibbs should be “yanked” for ranting against Obama’s Democratic critics, but she also wrote that Gibbs was correct, such critics are “lefties” who “won’t recognize the necessity of compromise.”

In a dishonest flourish, Dowd tried to pretend there’s no widespread Democratic criticism of Obama, but rather only a few disgruntled ideologues who — and here she quoted Gibbs — “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.” She compared progressives who’ve lost faith in Obama to right-wing extremists who’ve “co-opted” the message of the Republican Party. The difference is that Republican “radicals” often end up helping their elected representatives — she named the far-right Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl — whereas “Democratic extremes typically do damage to a Democratic president.”

Dowd concluded that Gibbs should be removed not because of his wildly off-base attack on fellow Democrats but rather because he’s doing a poor job of communicating Obama’s message to the press. As if the flaw wasn’t in the message itself — i.e., in Obama’s watered-down legislative initiatives and his lame insistence on working with an opposition party that from the outset dismissed the possibility of compromise.

Obama’s policy failures shine a light on the general failure of Democratic politicians in Washington to adequately represent the interests of their constituents. Dowd’s defense of Obama shows she’s out of her depth when not writing about Bill Clinton’s cigar tricks or George W. Bush’s frat boy mentality.

If only Dowd could persuade Gibbs to quit and worm her way into his job. She could spew the same “centrist” nonsense that she pushes in print but this time verbally, to fellow insiders in the Washington press corps, and then engage them in gossipy off-the-record chats about matters that have nothing to do with the dreary faraway problems that most Americans wake up to every day.

Posted in Congress, finance reform bill, health care, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘Canadian health care?’ We should be so lucky

Posted on August 13, 2010 by oddmanout215

Robert Gibbs is the new poster boy for Dem cowardice

Like many other Democrats, I puzzled for a few days over Robert Gibbs’s scornful remarks about the “professional left.”

Is President Obama’s press secretary just another beefy bureaucrat who lost his temper after catching flak too often, or was his outburst part of a strategy to reassure “moderates” that Obama leans only slightly more to the left than George W. Bush?

This man wouldn't want to hear about real health care reform

If Gibbs’s weirdly right-wing rant was OK’ed by his boss — apparently it was, because Obama had no public comment about it — then we’re looking at a president who’s way out of touch with the core values of the Democratic Party and at an administration that will remain content to offer the poor and middle classes almost nothing in the way of real change.

Some analysts think Gibbs was only jabbing at cable news outlets — specifically, at talking heads on MSNBC. It hardly matters. If his remarks were sincere, he’s barely in the same party with most Democrats. He represents a faction that is Democratic only insofar as it helps prevent reactionaries like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner from running Congress.

Gibbs got my attention when he said the professional left, whatever that is, seeks “Canadian health care.” My guess is that most Democrats think Canadian-style health care — publicly funded, efficiently administered — would be vastly preferable to our country’s current system, which leaves us all at the mercy of health insurance companies that charge exorbitant fees and routinely cheat customers who think their medical costs are covered.

Most of us who aren’t DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) would have liked to see Obama make a real fight for health care reform instead of settling for a bill that was watered down to a thin gruel. We also hoped he’d fight to put the jobless back to work, crack down on Wall Street thieves, pursue progressive conservation policies, scale back America’s futile war in Afghanistan and, in general, make us notice that Dubya was no longer in office.

Democrats want and need representatives who act out of conviction rather than fear. The last thing we need is a spin doctor who goes out of his way to pander to right-wingers and woo an imaginary legion of moderates.

Quotable: A tweet from  David Frum, former speechwriter for Dubya, regarding Gibbs’s outburst — “More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base.”

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, mid-term elections, Obama, Politics, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment