philly

PA Senate Debate: Lancaster 2

Montville Mayor and Chuck Pennacchio supporter Connie Guy took the stage and gave a wonderful speech about changing America, getting Sen. Man on Dog out and voting in Sen. Pennacchio.

Editor and Publisher of OpEdNews.com Rob Kall got up to speak to the crowd. The same man behind the PA Zogby poll which broke ground as the first poll commissioned by a progressive organization about a Senate race. Kall spoke of change as well and backed it up with the stats from the Zogby/OpEdNews poll; when voters know the stances on the issues, Pennacchio comes out on top.

Just about everyone there had on a button, but this guy's flat brim old-schoolie with "Outsource Santorum" bumper sticker stuck onto the front was a nice creative twist.

Chuck closed out the rally and got the crowd riled up with a call for us citizens to take back our country. He noted that he didn't want to get too hyped up just yet so that he could save his energy for the long debate which was to start only thirty minutes later. I haven't seen him run out of energy yet. It's quite amazing being this close to a candidate and to the heat of the campaign to see him day in and day out heading to event after event after event just about every day now. This marked his 297th event on the campaign trail since the 2004 election. Number 296 was yesterday morning as he accepted the endorsement of the grassroots organization Neighborhood Networks at a press conference in Rittenhouse Square.

Some more shots from the rally in a flickr set.

PA Senate Debate: Lancaster 1

Yesterday's pre-debate rally, the debate and the post-debate gathering with the college Democrats were all great. Aside from the über slow start to get out to Lancaster [traffic was crawling on the turnpike so we had to detour to 202 and then 30 to get out there], everything went pretty smoothly.

Once at Frankline & Marshall's campus [that's where the debate was], we unpacked ourselves from the car. I can't recall the last time I was in a 4-door sedan with five total people. The trip wasn't bad though, the company was great and I got to whine about how I hate baseball, don't think [professional/MLB] baseball players are real athletes, how I hate golf and my liking of peanut butter, but the extra chunky, not that smooth crap. Rivalvies were made with my fellow backseat carmates.

There was already a sizable crowd out at the rally at about 4.30p. The crowd grew to about seventy-five or 100 soon afterwards. We weren't there alone though. By the entrance, there was a group of what looked like the nastiest of the nasty, college-aged young Republicans. I don't understand them. And not only were they pro-Santorum, they brought out their stupid PA-Sen mascot "Bobby the Duck" - probably the lamest move I've seen from the Right since the idiots who dressed up as foam flip flops when Michael Moore came to Philly to speak at Temple in October of 2004. Sad. So sad. It almost makes me feel sorry for them, but then I remember who they're supporting and I don't feel so bad anymore.

On a side note, oh how I loved that horrible 1986 movie Howard the Duck. I don't know how many times I watched that on WPIX channel 11 in NY back in the day, maybe as many times as the Johnny 5 series. My favorite exchange during the movie: When Howard sleeps with the human woman the next morning the woman picks up a handful of feathers from the bed and asks: "What's this?" Howard looks to her and says: "Souveniers" — oh the hilarity. I swear, only Austin out in Chicago will get this. If not him, nobody.

The parking lot was filled with cars like the one above. Anti-W. Anti-Sen. Man on Dog. Pro-Chuck. It was quite awesome.

A band came on stage to entertain the crowd before several speakers and then Chuck Pennacchio came up there to speak for a few minutes to get the crowd going before we filed inside to get some good seats. The band was great and the guy on the mouth harp [can't see him, he's behind the lead singer/guitarist on the right] was sweet. I love me some harp.

PA Senate Debate 7p

I'm headed out to Lancaster today to attend the second Democratic PA senate primary debate. It's on tonight at 7p on PCN [channel listing]. They livestreamed it on the PCN TV website last time and they may very well do so again this time around. I'll be there early for a Chuck Pennacchio rally and I'll be rooting for Chuck during the debate. Hopefully I'll get some nice shots along the way.

Factesque and PoliticsPhilly will be livebloging the debate. eRobin's liveblog of the first debate. The first debate in full — that's a 214MB file of good quality QT format video clocking in at 1.5 hrs so don't save that file unless you're on broadband.

McClellan Resigns, Bush Looks Forward to Reminiscing

White House Press Secretary Scott "Flounder" McClellan has resigned. Dubya had these idiotic words:

Bush said McClellan had "a challenging assignment."

"I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity," the president said. "It's going to be hard to replace Scott, but nevertheless he made the decision and I accepted it. One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas and talking about the good old days."

The fucking "good old days" — holy shit. Doesn't that sound just bat-fucking-shit insane?

Yeah, remember those good old days where we raped the world for billions? How we lead the world to war on false pretenses? How we caught that guy, what's his name, oh wait... we never did catch that what's his name guy did we? How we killed the middle class of America? How we liberated all those Arabs? How we saved all those people during Hurricane Katrina? How we... what were we talking about? Oh yes, the "good old days" that's right...

Resegregation in Omaha

Okay, I've had a large glass of wine tonight and I'm up late reading the NY Times. Am I seeing things or does this article actually say that the Omaha, NE school districts have been resegregated to white, black and hispanic and that the measure has been signed into law by the governor.

The law, which opponents are calling state-sponsored segregation, has thrown Nebraska into an uproar, prompting fierce debate about the value of integration versus what Mr. Chambers [Nebraska's only black state senator] calls a desire by blacks to control a school district in which their children are a majority.

Civil rights scholars call the legislation the most blatant recent effort in the nation to create segregated school systems or, as in Omaha, to resegregate districts that had been integrated by court order. Omaha ran a mandatory busing program from 1976 to 1999.

Yes, this can be seen as blacks and hispanics taking back control over their school districts in a predominantly white city. But I see this with national reprecussions where it will be used as a tool to resegregate.

Remember in 1948 when Strom Thurmond was nominated by the States Right Democratic Party standing on the platform that:

We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race...

The same Thurmond who gave a rousing speech during that 1948 campaign stating

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

The same Thurmond who spoke for over twenty-four hours in the longest filibuster [the old school way of just blowing hot air] ever on the Senate floor to try to derail the Civil Rights Act. Who will use this Omaha school districting to be our generation's Strom Thurmond? Will it be Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel?

And as a side note, did anyone know that former Nebraska Cornhuskers football coach Tom Osborne is a Republican Congressman from NE-03?

First PA Senate Debate Video

Head on over to the PCN Podcasts page and download the full video of the Slippery Rock debate from Saturday night.

It is a whopping 214MB, but it is the full hour and a half and it some good quality video.

Here's the direct link. Right click on that [Option + click for the Mac users, right?] and save it to your computer. You'll need Apple's QuickTime or compatible to watch it.

Pass it along to your friends! Let them all see for themselves.

One Gig of Classified US Military Info: $40

Flash drives are wonderful things. I don't have one myself, but use other people's flash drives to transfer files here and there. It's a hell of a lot quicker than just about anything else. Apparently some people in the US Military also find them useful. Unfortunately, an almost full 1GB flash drive was apparently lost and later sold at an Afghani bazaar outside a US air base, the LA Times reports. Shit.

The flash memory drive, which a teenager sold for $40, holds scores of military documents marked "secret," describing intelligence-gathering methods and information — including escape routes into Pakistan and the location of a suspected safe house there, and the payment of $50 bounties for each Taliban or Al Qaeda fighter apprehended based on the source's intelligence.

The documents appear to be authentic, but the accuracy of the information they contain could not be independently verified.

On its face, the information seems to jeopardize the safety of intelligence sources working secretly for U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan, which would constitute a serious breach of security.

The names of secret operatives, the names of their families, diagrams, documents on base security, photographs of informants, cell phone numbers, informant pay scales...

Information used to be encrypted. Remember that whole Enigma thing? The article states that most of the documents were "neither locked nor encrypted" holy shit.

I've read articles as recently as last month on how there are still enigma codes being broken; now that's one hell of a complex cipher. Passwords on documents can be broken easily, encryption is another thing. The article states that there were some password protected documents, but most of them weren't fucking encrypted?!

Now, this could be a hoax with fake info on the drives, but if it isn't, Chroist.

Campaign Pseudo-Rock!

From the April 10th sheet in my America: The Book by The Daily Show daily calendar Lady got me...

Ten Songs Your Campaign Can't Do Without
"Simply the Best" Tina Turner
"Right Now" Van Halen
"Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)" Fleetwood Mac
"Born in the USA" Bruce Springsteen
"Proud to Be an American" Lee Greenwood (Republican)
"Free to Be You and Me" Marlo Thomas (Democrat)
"Takin' Care of Business" Bachman-Turner Overdrive
"Small Town" John Cougar Mellencamp
"Sweet Home Alabama" Lynyrd Skynyrd (Alabama only)
"The End" The Doors (concession night only)

It's so true, you always hear the same songs year after year after year.

Immigration Rally Philadelphia: Photos

I was out today with 10,000 or so of my fellow Americans, all immigrants or descendents of immigrants, legal and illegal. It was incredible to be out there.

Sí se puede! was the chant of the day. Over and over everyone was screaming it. Everyone of every color was behind it. Yes we can!

A round up here on Philly Future.

Below are a few of my favorite shots from the day. Follow this link for the initial cull in a flickr set. 173 down from 340 or so. A tighter edit is to come.

***Final edit***
part one
part two
part three

Immigration Rally Philadelphia

During this afternoon, Monday April 10th, hundreds of thousands will be marching across the United States. From Boston to New York to Philadephia to DC to Tampa to Chicago to Houston to Omaha to Los Angeles to Seattle. Some seventy cities in all betwen Sunday and Monday.

There were 500,000 in Dallas on Sunday afternoon. Another 500,000 in Los Angeles two weeks ago. 300,000 in Chicago a couple weeks before that. PhillyIMC is doing their part in organizing the rallies here in Philly and they'll have audio and video, hopefully throughout the day?

More info on the day of action can be found at April10.org and locally at the PhillyIMC resource page and Day Without an Immigrant. I'm sure there will be plenty of posts on Philly Future throughout the day bringing together posts from the Philly blogs.

I'll be out in the fray as well. I'll have my bag o' camera gear with me. I don't plan on taking my laptop for live blogging though, too much to carry around. I also brought back with me from NY my micro cassette recorder. I'm gonna bring that with me. Maybe capture some audio of the rally. Talk to some people see why they're there. Too bad I don't have one of them fan-cay digital recorders. Those things are boss.

The Philadelphia rally will take place from Noon to 2p in Love Park. If you'd like to take a nice leisurly lunch hour in the nice crisp fall-ish weather, come on by and show your support!