Question: Is a game really "sold out" when the Phillies offer to include a ticket to their "sold-out" series with the Red Sox if you buy tickets to six other games?
Name-dropping: Ran into former Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney at Mio Sogno the other night. Timoney is currently the commissioner in Miami. I pleaded with him to come back and offered to pass the hat around for donations if that would do the trick. Timoney just laughed. I wasn’t laughing. I know there are complex reasons for the increase in violent crime in this city, and I also know that one man can’t solve the problem. But I additionally know that we let the best cop in the country get away from us. And I blame Mayor Street. Street was lukewarm at best in his support of John Timoney. He wouldn’t have rehired him in the first place if it hadn’t been a political necessity to defeat Sam Katz the first time around. The current commissioner, Sylvester Johnson, seems like a decent guy, but Timoney is one of those outstanding law-enforcement officials who comes around only once. I don’t think Street liked him getting too much credit. Timoney has gone South. And our city is less safe because of it …
Note of discord: The only off-key note in the wonderful Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure on Mother’s Day were the brochures handed out by the Pro-Life Union of Southeastern Pennsylvania. Their beef: The Komen Foundation provides some funds for mammograms to Planned Parenthood. Go to the Pro-Life Union’s Web site and you find a sketch of Jesus and a photo of the new pope and a "lecture" on preserving the "culture of life."
I defend the Pro-Life Union’s right to dissent, but I’m getting pretty sick of self-righteous diatribes by groups who are supported by those who also preach against the use of condoms to fight AIDS. If they find Planned Parenthood guilty of murdering the unborn, I find their group and others like them guilty of allowing countless babies to die in Africa of HIV because they think the greater sin is using condoms …
Nuts and Bolton: The real objection to putting John Bolton in the United Nations as our ambassador isn’t that he’s rude to his secretary. Bolton is guilty of pressuring agents to distort intelligence data. It’s the very same thing that led to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld justifying an invasion of Iraq for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Bolton isn’t just a rude bully; he’s been wrong on the major issues of his time. In short, he might be perfect for Bush, but that’s the problem. And the Senate has got to reject him …
Those nonpolitical base closings: Back in the late 1990s, they tried to move the old Defense Personnel Support Center (the Quartermaster to you) out of South Philadelphia, where its employees’ city-wage-tax dollars were the lifeblood of our city, to New Cumberland, of all places. It took a mighty effort by a dedicated group of DPSC employees in coordination with the happy circumstance of a Democratic mayor (Rendell) and president (Clinton) to save the installation for the city. Eventually DPSC moved up to the Northeast to combine with another federal agency. That was an example of good politics changing a stupid "nonpolitical" Pentagon decision to funnel money out of a major city for no apparent reason. This time around, the city was spared such nonsense …
Cost-free war: As Matthew Miller pointed out recently in a column in the New York Times, with the latest outlay of $82 billion, the cost of the Iraq War is now at $300 billion. Miller writes that we don’t have to worry because we’ve passed the cost of our folly onto the next generation. In effect, we got the war for no money down and zero payments for the next 10 years. Younger voters can ponder that the next time the President dons his jump suit and lands on an aircraft carrier near you …
Torture, anyone?: My wife and I like 24, the Kiefer Sutherland thriller series on Fox, but there are some disturbing aspects at work here. The show, which depicts an adventure in real time, continually proposes the theory that all you need is one dedicated agent (Sutherland) willing to break all the rules, including the use of torture, and you can save the world from destruction. The overall effect of the show is to create the impression that the only way to fight terrorists is to become terrorists. Actually, according to most accounts, torture has proved to be a pretty ineffective method of extracting information from prisoners. It’s pretty easy to see why – if you place an electrode on someone’s private parts, chances are they’ll make something up if they have to, just to get you to stop. As for out-of-control one-man gangs, I don’t think we should have G. Gordon Liddy as our role model …
