Matt's Excellent Keystone Adventure

A Good Reason to Vote Red and/or Green

Talk about a relapse! A day after swearing off any more Palin tidbits, here I go again.

Letter to the editor in the Philly Inquirer today:

Of course Philadelphia fans booed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin...We booed Santa Claus, and he is more qualified to be president than Palin. Don't forget, the North Pole shares a border with Russia. -- Adam Schwartz, Merion Station

Santa Claus might be good for Homeland Security Secretary as well. He does have a list of everybody! He knows what you've been doing and whether you've been bad or good!

Palin Demonstration in Pittsburgh 10 October

80 degrees here in Philadelphia today. It's Columbus Day. Nary a leaf has turned.

I would be remiss not to post up some video of our brethren in Pittsburgh who had first crack at the Wasilla Wonder on Friday - two videos posted today - the first one is higher quality but the second shows the purple team a little more clearly:

What's kind of hilarious, is today Palin was at a rally and she heard some noisy demonstrators at the back, and gave a snarky ad lib non sequiter (no, I am not pulling a Maureen Dowd) about hoping they at least respected the veterans and troops who fought for their right to protest. Only problem, they weren't protesters -- they were supporters who couldn't hear her and were shouting "louder! louder!" Oh this says so many things. They don't listen for content, do they? Just for the noise level, if that.

I don't mean to make this an all-Palin all the time blog, since I was among the minority of democrats (so it would seem) who wanted to just ignore her as a distraction. But she's proved to be such a mismanaged derailed locomotive (a maverick can also be pretty dangerous if you happen to get in the way of its hoofs, not to mix too many metaphors here) that she keeps cropping up everywhere. We haven't seen Senator McCain recently in these parts, anyway. In any event, I'm hoping this ends up being the last Palin-themed post...wouldn't that be lovely?

Sometimes you et the Polar bar, sometimes the Polar bar ets you.

Anti-Palin Demonstration 11 October 2008

Here's a quick link to my photo album from the Palin demonstration in Philly yesterday. Uncle Wayne, Aunt Jan, and Cousin Andy went to Obama's rally at Vernon Park in Germantown yesterday as well, I'm hoping to link to some of their photos later in the day. I'm frankly jealous but a good time was had by all.

Prose description of the day later...

Update 1

Here's the Philadelphia Inquirer story on Palin's round of boobirding in Philly Saturday. I thought this particular detail seemed to smack a bit of Let-Them-Eat-Cake:

Police said about 400 protesters lined the streets outside the hotel, the same number that organizers expected at the fund-raiser, chanting to each other and to passing motorists. Inside, Palin got her hair and makeup done at Pierre & Carlo Salon & Spa.

(By the by...when did the Philadelphia Daily News get so awful? It wasn't great before, but today all I could find on the big Barack doings yesterday and Palin's boofest was a reference to Obama appearing before "hundreds" of supporters at Vernon Park. Where, the official estimates were there were 10,000 in attendance and 5000 who couldn't get in. We're missing a few digits here...) So, I'll recap what I wrote in the captions for the photo album and a blog entry I did for Daily Kos.

I had driven some folks down to the rally and did my usual thing of finding a free spot on city streets (well, at least a meter spot) and had to run to get back. I found myself stuck on one side of a police line by an alley, and about a minute after I got there the motorcade pulled up. I was at this point looking mostly to rejoin my group but found myself a big stranded. Then, I turned to the second SUV in the procession and saw Palin waving at the crowd. I'm not sure whether this is just game show host face or whether she thought the crowd was actually welcoming her. But she then turned around briefly and looked right at me and waved and smiled. I assure you I did not have a seeing-stars moment. I was mostly appalled and then I remembered the camera and totally missed her (well, except for the blurry back of her head). I assure you this is not going to be a moment of regret in my life when I'm in the old carpetbaggers' home sitting on the rocking chair.

The crowd was very lively, and actually grew during the demo. Half of it was on one side in front of the Bellvue hotel, the other half congregated on the handy median strip on Broad Street. This forced the convoy to go down a gauntlet of protesters, and all the vehicles that passed after that had to come through it as well. We got lots of honks of support, seemingly especially from cabbies, and one limo driver. One sort of amusing thing was the three tourist "trolley" buses that passed by, with visitors to the city on the open air upper deck gawking and taking pictures of us. We got some thumbs down from them, and lots more thumbs up. The demonstrators gave a big cheer every time we got some reaction, and cars honking got a huge whoop.

The highlight for me was when a bridge and groom appeared from one of the hotels nearby, presumably out from their reception, and took their places in the median strip to join the protest. There were some nice media shots of them, I haven't found any in the papers on-line, which is a pity.

There was also a cute kid of 8 or 9 who brought a "Palin = [Flyers logo] Jinx" sign with him, in reference to the puck dropping scheduled for later. (And indeed, the Flyers dropped the game.) He was interviewed on the street and seemed a little bewildered but in a very good way. I like to see the next generation being bumped along.

You will note in the Inquirer story some references to negative behavior from some of the demonstrators. The reportage is vastly outsized to what I witnessed, and I circulated all around several times. There were maybe a half dozen or so of what I'd call "over the top" protesters, including four wearing kind of disgusting t-shirts making anatomical reference to Sarah Palin. I heard one of them defend the shirts contextually, and frankly it was a bunch of art school babble. The other two had somewhat over the edge signs and mouths, but after it was clear they were being ignored, both slunk back against the wall of the hotel. That's it, I was there for 90% of the demonstration and that's all I saw that I would characterize as in bad taste for political discourse.

I was proud to stand with the union members I came with and the many hundreds of other folks who came. The point was not to demonstrate Sarah Palin the person, but to demonstrate against a politics that ignores our problems and divides our interests, which she so ably epitomizes. There was a lot going on in town yesterday, and I am glad people thought it important enough to bring the message that the real America is, indeed, right here, too.

Update 2

I should note parenthetically: I was wearing my "Alaska" baseball hat, and had my Obama shirt covered up with my vest at the time Palin drove by -- it occurred to me later that as a beefy white guy dressed in a dorky baseball hat with a military hair cut, she may have mistaken me for an actual supporter. One shudders.

Sarah Palin Demonstration in Philadelphia and Booing at Flyers' Game - Video

Longer post later, figured I'd share the embed for the raw footage of the video I just uploaded (yes, my camera work, for better or worse, on a tiny digital camera):

Update 12 October

Just in case you haven't seen it elsewhere, sweet footage of Palin being booed at the Flyers' game. Heck, they booed Santa Claus, Palin's got to be a few notches below the old gent in red (not my footage -- I wish!)

What the Puck is Up With That?

Spring is the air today, or was that Indian Summer? Hard to say, as the high temperature and humidity today (in the mid 70s) reminded me of why I hated Philadelphia summers. And it's October frickin' 9th! I can hear crickets out my window as I type this! Fall is definitely later than it was 20 years ago, no question.

However dulcet the weather, though, the fever in the air had a lot more to do with the Phillies than either sweet zephyrs or blasts of hot political air. I went out at noontime today to run a couple of errands that took me across Center City, and whereas normally I'd get some shoutouts for my Obama gear, today it was my Phillies hat that was getting me random (terrorist) fist bumps from passersby. It's not like I was the only person out in Phillies gear, either. (God help me if my Boston Red Sox get in the series against the Phillies.) The hat is not a pander, by the way: I purchased this hat at the last NLCS game the Phils were in to date, which was game 6 of the '93 NLCS against the Braves (Greg Maddux pitched in that game, too). I had it signed and date by my friend Jeff, who took me to the game when his 12-year old (now, um, 27 - to whom I still owe an NLCS game) got violently ill at the last minute.

So, speaking of Sports, the scuttlebutt is that Sarah Palin is going to drop the puck this Saturday at the Flyers' home opener. Surely this has nothing to do with politics, says Ed Snider, owner of the corporation that owns the Phils and donor of $25,000 to the Republican National Committee and maximum contributor to John McCain's Presidential campaign. This clearly defies credulity, especially insofar as Palin was not exactly a household name six weeks ago. Snider claims it's a hockey thing, she's like the world's greatest hockey mom and we're sure Michelle Obama would've been given the same honor if she was the, er, hockey mom type. As for the reaction you can expect from the crowd...well, go to the link above and note the first comment left on the page, if they haven't censored it out by the time you read it. You will note from the picture at left that Billy Penn, as usual, seems to be very excitedby the goings on about town these days.

But...hold on! Barack Obama himself may be coming to Philly on Saturday. Rumors are a flyin' and they're not coming from the sports talk stations. I daren't think he'd be on Broad Street but he may well be a little further north.

Since I'm festooning the blog today with postcard shots of the town today, why not one more (above right): a shot up the Ben Franklin Parkway towards the museum. It seems likely somehow John McCain will be casting himself as Rocky Balboa, fighting his way up those steps (where he may run into Meghan at the Cy Twombly room). The poor schmuck doesn't know he isn't Rocky, he's Sly Stallone. Converse angle below.