Philadelphia, that scrappy red-headed stepchild of a town between navel-gazing New York and bureaucratically dull D.C., was beaten down again. But this is nothing new. The nation’s disdain of Philadelphia, and the evolution of “Philly” into a near-epithet adjective along the lines of “ghetto” or “rough,” is a wrong that deserves to be remedied (probably like the word “gay”).

Who is to blame here? Let’s start with the makers of the 1993 film Philadelphia. Their clumsy sort of parallel symbol — the juxtaposition of a struggling post-1970s milieu of urban decay with a man slowly dying of AIDS — demeans the city. Director Jonathan Demme and stars Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington all have a lot of blood on their hands. The main problem, one of several, is that the real-life subject of the film had no connection with Philly — so for Oscar-whoring Hollywood types, Philadelphia’s pre-Rendell city setting served as an appropriate milieu for Tom Hanks to suffer from a terminal illness and eventually die. Low-hanging fruit. Total assholes.

Speaking of artists mining real-life trauma for their namby-pamby “storytelling,” Bruce Springsteen is another slum-porn asshole. His “Streets of Philadelphia” takes the film’s lame symbolic co-optation of Philadelphia even further, using “wasting away on the streets of Philadelphia” as a facile image standing in for “the end of the line.” Go ahead — say it, jackass: Philadelphia is where all the total down-and-out hobos go to die.

Bruce is disgusting, and doesn’t deserve Philadelphia. Should Bruce actually play that horrible song next week at the Spectrum, I hope Philadelphia partisans fight back with a giant vat of Cheez Whiz. My fear, however, is that the well-intentioned locals may believe that Bruce is actually praising their city — which would be unsurprising, seeing how good Bruce is at misleading people — he may be the most imprecise songwriter around, a smoke-and-mirrors charlatan.

If Bruce does play “Philadelphia,” it may set back Philadelphia’s redemption from the Springsteen-Demme Cabal and everyone else who “Phillied” Philly. This redemption, by the way, in my view, came when Brad Lidge struck out Tampa Bay’s Eric Hinske last October and Lidge fell to his knees in religious exultation not to Jesus but rather generation upon generation of beleaguered Philly fans. Don’t let Bruce undo that. Get the vat of Whiz ready.

As for me, I vow from here on out not to “Philly” Philly . . . until I hear about another case of vigilante justice, that is . . .

• Do you think the U.S. is fair and decent?
• Should the U.S. pay more attention to its allies or vice versa?
• Does the U.S. have a free market system or less than a free market system?
• Something about overregulation . . .
• Does regulation hurt big businesses or small businesses more?
• Something about how the economy is going today . . .
• Is the U.S. fair & decent to someone or other, maybe immigrants or
  minorities or who knows . . .
• Should immigrants adopt the culture of the U.S. or should they not bother?
• Do you want more services and higher taxes or fewer services and lower taxes?
• Are the U.S.’s best days ahead of us or behind us?
• Something about whether the U.S. and its allies are cooperating with each other . . .
• Who do I trust more, the people or the leaders?
• Has the federal government turned into a sort of “special interest”?
• Something about government working.

They also asked right track/wrong track as well as whether I approved of the job Obama is doing.

I answered “not sure” for a lot — especially stuff like this “Has the federal government turned into a sort of ‘special interest’?” question, which I didn’t understand at all.

So here is what I think is the writeup of the poll (it doesn’t appear to be a permalink, so be careful if you look this up down the line).

As for the poll, it was a “national telephone survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports April 23-24, 2009. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.” I’m not a statistician — and maybe I’m an outlier, and maybe my answers were automatically omitted anyway — but actually having participated in the poll, I don’t know that I would be that confident it its results.

For starters — just for me but I wonder how many others are like this — I honestly don’t know if I’m “very liberal,” “somewhat liberal” or “moderate” (I tuned out after “moderate”). For the record, I chose “somewhat liberal,” but I don’t know what this means. Maybe I had a flash of Cynthia McKinney in my mind and automatically reached for the number 2 on my phone. I don’t really remember. And that was one of the easier questions!

Anyway, here’s the lede:

Americans appear more upbeat about the direction the country is taking in the short term but are growing more pessimistic about its long-term future.

While an increasing number of Americans say the United States is heading in the right direction, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 47% now think America’s best days have already come and gone. That negative assessment is up six points from a month ago, twelve points since Inauguration Day, and is now at the highest level of pessimism since May . . .

OK, so America’s best days have come and gone. Hrm. Let me go back and figure out what I thought . . . I don’t remember what I said. I’m pretty sure I would have said “not sure” because, duh, that’s one of those things that you can’t be sure about! I think my mental image was Frank Sobotka on the The Wire saying, “You know what the trouble is, Brucie? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.” Poor Sobotka! A tragic figure! Days gone!

But then I’m thinking, well, wow, I read Thomas Friedman — well, most of the time . . . or I guess some of the time — and I read his “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” — America rules! Days ahead!

So what do you tell them — er, I mean which button do you push? And the thing about these polls is that they go fast. And these are questions that you could debate for hours. If you were so inclined. I’m not.

Here’s the other thing: The barrage of questions over the course of the poll. Are you wanting America to bend over for its allies? Should immigrants have to learn the culture? Is the federal government just a special interest? By the end I felt all riled up, like I was watching Glenn Beck or something. Hell no, I will never bend over for our allies! America’s allies bend over for us! Has Nate Silver or Mark Blumenthal ever discussed the questions around the questions (versus just focusing on specific questions) because there’s this rapid-fire talk radio kind of vibe that goes along with it all that you can’t help but think affects the poll’s outcome.

And then there’s this:

Just 39% now say America’s best days are in the future. The nation’s Political Class is much more bullish about America’s future — 94% of that elite group say the country’s best days lie ahead. Among those who hold a more populist or Mainstream View, just 29% offer such optimism.

Uh oh. So am I part of “the nation’s Political Class” or am I — perish the thought — more “populist” and “mainstream”? And here’s what they determined:

The Political Class and Mainstream classifications are determined by the answers to three questions measuring general attitudes about government. Most Americans trust the judgment of the public more than political leaders, view the federal government as a special interest group, and believe that big business and big government work together against the interests of investors and consumers. Only seven percent (7%) share the opposite view and can be considered part of the Political Class.

. . .

On many issues, the gap between Mainstream Americans and the Political Class is bigger than the gap between Mainstream Republicans and Mainstream Democrats.

To create a scale and calculate whether someone belongs to the Mainstream or the Political Class, each response to one of the three questions earns a plus 1 for the more populist answer, a minus 1 for the political class answer, and a 0 for not sure.

Those who score 2 or higher are considered part of the Mainstream. Those who score -2 or lower are considered to be aligned with the Political Class. Those who score +1 or -1 are considered leaners in one direction or the other.

In practical terms, if someone is classified with the Mainstream, they agree with the mainstream view on at least two of the three questions and don’t agree with the Political Class on any.

So I remembered these questions . . . I know I said “not sure” when asked whether I viewed the federal goverment as a special interest, mostly because I was like “what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” And I’ll admit that I think I pulled the populist trigger on the “trust political leaders or the people” question, though I was similarly baffled and in retrospect probably wouldn’t have pressed the button I did. I think I had an image of Michael Bloomberg in my head, and this week I’m like fuck him. I honestly don’t remember what I pushed when asked whether I believed that big business and big government work together against the interests of investors and consumers . . . sometimes they do, right? Other times they don’t. And other times I see black helicopters and prepare my survivalist cache. Suffice it to say, it’s the type of question that washes over you like the cable news in general. I wouldn’t be surprised if I pushed 1, 2 or 3.

And for that I’m exiled from the Political Class?! Fuck you, asshole!
Give me my independence back!

I know it’s just a poll. And beyond that I know it’s just a Rasmussen poll. And yet . . . and yet . . . isn’t it still possible to wean ourselves from the dichotomous, binary political milieu we seem to be trapped in? We should take a survey and find out.

MS. COOPER started at WaMu in 2003 and lasted three and a half years. At first, she was allowed to do her job, she says. In February 2007, though, the pressure became intense. WaMu executives told employees they were not making enough loans and had to get their numbers up, she says.

“They started giving loan officers free trips if they closed so many loans, fly them to Hawaii for a month,” Ms. Cooper recalls. “One of my account reps went to Jamaica for a month because he closed $3.5 million in loans that month.”

…

One loan file was filled with so many discrepancies that she felt certain it involved mortgage fraud. She turned the loan down, she says, only to be scolded by her supervisor.

“She told me, ‘This broker has closed over $1 million with us and there is no reason you cannot make this loan work,’ ” Ms. Cooper says. “I explained to her the loan was not good at all, but she said I had to sign it.”

The argument did not end there, however. Ms. Cooper says her immediate boss complained to the team manager about the loan rejection and asked that Ms. Cooper be “written up,” with a formal letter of complaint placed in her personnel file.

Ms. Cooper said the team manager told her to “restructure” the loan to make it work. “I said, how can you restructure fraud? This is a fraudulent loan,” she recalls.

Kerry Killinger is a douchebag.

Fans here had waited 25 years for a championship parade down Broad Street. The Phillies gave them one Friday, and so many fans showed up that they nearly shut down the city.

. . .

The parade drew fans from beyond the region, too. Greg Packer, 44, of Huntington, N.Y., drove in for Game 5 of the World Series and stayed for the celebration. He arrived on Broad Street near City Hall at 5 a.m. to secure what he considered the best spot.

“In New York right now, we have no Mets, no Yankees, no stadiums,” he said. “I came here to represent and cheer our neighbors.”

But even worse than a hack Greg Packer quote — one of zillions — is that the hack Times writer missed the true quote of the day. Lame!

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

They’d listen in on phone calls from aid workers and members of the military — U.S. citizens, mind you — calling home from overseas. Then they’d carelessly pass around the audio to their co-workers and laugh about it.

Think about this… it took what, 6 months since the wiretapping legislation (FISA) passed congress for this kind of abuse to start? Where will we be in 6 years?

And look, before you dismiss it by saying, “well, they’re just listening to my phone calls, who cares?” Don’t think it stops there. I try not to be hyperbolic about these things, but when you put the pieces together, the legal precedents the Bush administration has assembled over the years (Padilla, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld), the collected impact is truly scary.

Y’know, just because he’s black, and Obama’s black, and so… all “Sister Souljah moments,” all the time! Or something.

Anyway, it looks like the esteemed Washington Post editorial page, in the voice of Richard Cohen beat Hannity and O’Reilly to the punch on this one. He uses Farrakhan, not Sharpton, but the basic idea is the same: Obama’s church honored Farrakhan. Farrakhan is an anti-semite. QED, if Obama doesn’t renounce his own church, he’s also an anti-semite!!

Of course, if he does renounce his church, well, then, it just proves that he’s not a real Christian and all those “Muslim” emails I keep getting must actually be true!

To read the articles about Amanda Knox, you would think that all American students are hash-smoking party girls with little memory of their weekends.

This makes the foreign immersion process so much more difficult. We college students come here to learn Italian, study new things, live on our own outside the American cocoon, experience the culture and form relationships with the people and the country. And Bologna should be the perfect place for this. Umberto Eco is a professor here, at what claims to be the world’s oldest university, and Prime Minister Romano Prodi lives down the street in a rather typical ochre-colored Bolognese house. Plus, a pizza margherita, at under three euros, is one of the most affordable eating pleasures in the world.

In a lawsuit and a consent decree filed yesterday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission backed accusations by workers that Daniel Boulud denied them promotions at his restaurant Daniel because of their race and ethnicity and retaliated against some who complained about it.

But in settling those discrimination charges, the agency said, Mr. Boulud set up a promotion policy that was a model for the industry.

The settlement of a federal discrimination lawsuit filed last year by seven Latin American and Bangladeshi busboys and runners, who take dishes from the kitchen to the dining room, was announced on Monday.

Yesterday, the federal agency announced details of the decree, which settled a lawsuit it filed simultaneously against Mr. Boulud in federal court, accusing him of discrimination.

In the decree, Mr. Boulud denied the charges, but agreed to pay $80,000 in damages to seven plaintiffs as well as an eighth worker who had filed a complaint with the employment commission. Mr. Boulud also agreed to a formal promotions policy that gives the E.E.O.C. and the state attorney general the right to monitor promotions and even review résumés and interview applicants, to ensure that no racial or ethnic discrimination takes place.

“This promotion policy will be a model for the restaurant industry,” said Lisa D. Sirkin, a lawyer for the agency.

The new promotion policy at Daniel, Ms. Sirkin said, “is as, or more, comprehensive as other industries, and unheard of in restaurants.”

“Restaurants do things very informally,” she said. “When you walk in you don’t see people of color in the front.” Under the plan, she said, “People will no longer just be hand-picked because they look good.”

The workers had said that the restaurant promoted white French workers to be waiters ahead of nonwhite workers, even those who were more experienced.

The restaurant world may rival the illicit drug trade in its lawlessness — what with hiring illegal immigrants, generally screwing over its waitstaff and now outright racism. The idea that Daniel’s hiring practices will be monitored by the EEOC is frankly awesome.

The cutting edge of the NYPD’s antiterrorism efforts, though, is David Cohen’s Intelligence Division. “We’re looking at ‘clusters,’ at how and where people get together, what they do and where they go, how they raise funds,” [Police Chief Ray] Kelly says during an interview at One Police Plaza. “This analytical work is not being done anywhere else in government. It’s all about prevention.”

Before September 11, the Intelligence Division mainly developed intelligence on narcotics and violent crimes, and sought to protect visiting dignitaries to the city—a glorified “escort service,” Kelly once scoffed. Now, its personnel devote 95 percent of their time to terrorism investigations, the PERF report concludes (and sources confirm). Kelly says that the division has 23 civilian intelligence analysts, with master’s degrees and higher from Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities; some have come from leading think tanks, even from the CIA—giving the force a capability, he says, “that exists no place else.” The division’s “field intelligence officers,” one assigned to each of the NYPD’s 76 precincts, keep tabs on people, crimes, and arrests that might have terrorism links. “Core Collection” officers develop confidential informants, who could give early warning about people being radicalized by militant associates or websites.

Cohen’s division also supervises undercover agents who infiltrate potentially violent groups. The identities of these covert warriors, and other details of the program, remain fiercely guarded secrets. But information occasionally turns up in federal prosecutions, such as the NYPD’s use of an undercover agent in helping to foil the June JFK airport conspiracy, and of both a Bangladeshi undercover officer and an Egyptian-born confidential informant in disrupting a 2004 plot by Islamic terrorists to bomb the Herald Square subway station. “I want at least 1,000 to 2,000 to die in one day,” one of the accused told the informant in the subway case, a stunned New York jury heard last year. Though the men had not acquired explosives, police arrested them shortly before the Republican national convention in August 2004, after nearly two years of surveillance. The key plotter, Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 22-year-old Pakistani, recently received a 30-year sentence. “This is the kind of homegrown, lone-wolf case that starts way below federal radar,” Cohen says. “But had these two guys acted on their intentions”—to “fuck this country very bad,” as Siraj threatened on tape—“a lot of New Yorkers would have died and been injured.”

Undercover work capitalizes on the NYPD’s 870-plus civilian and uniformed speakers of Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Pashto, Turkish, and Urdu—more linguists than the FBI’s New York field office employs. Of the 470 or so in uniform, more than 200 are “master linguists” in high-priority languages. The latest police academy class boasted graduates hailing from 65 countries, Cohen notes. Some will doubtless work for the division’s Cyber Intelligence Unit, a 25-person group situated in unmarked headquarters in a Chelsea industrial building; others may wind up in the Prison Intelligence program at Rikers Island, where they will work with officials from probations, the New York State Police, and other agencies to monitor the spread of militancy.

Richard Falkenrath, a counterterrorism expert who worked in the Bush White House and succeeded Deputy Commissioner Sheehan last year, says that New York’s intelligence efforts are “awe-inspiring,” beyond anything he’s seen at the local, state, and even federal levels. “New York is far more action-oriented than the feds,” he says, “partly because it’s a lot easier and faster to take action.”

Aren’t there some scary downsides to allowing a local police force to go so far beyond its local purview? The threat of bad people infiltrating the system, for example? The overly aggressive sting operations — some of which seem awfully close to entrapment (check out the Herald Square case cited above where the idea for bombing the subway station actually came from the informant!)? The TV show 24 isn’t so much an outlet for torture fantasy scenarios as it is a fantasy about a military-strength federal unit that has the power to act on U.S. soil — something that, if I’m not mistaken, is against the Constitution. Ray Kelly’s NYPD is moving towards that capability big time — and somewhere sometime they’re going to make a bad, nasty mistake that will make people question why a local police force has personnel stationed in London and Israel. Do we want to get to a point where the NYPD is practicing the black arts? Where’s the Congressional oversight?

In the wake of an appeals court’s decision not to delay the imposition of a new, expensive royalty scheme, Internet radio broadcasters got an unexpected bit of good news from an unlikely source. During a Congressional roundtable initiated by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), SoundExchange executive director Jon Simson said that the licensing group will not enforce the new royalty scheme. Instead, the rate hikes will be postponed indefinitely while SoundExchange and the webcasters attempt to hammer out a more equitable rate schedule.

Right after the court’s decision was announced, SoundExchange released a statement saying that the ruling meant that “recording artists and content owners can move forward confident that they will receive fair pay for their hard work in producing music for all to enjoy.” There was no inkling that the licensing group would do anything other than go forward with the concessions it had previously offered—concessions that were heavily criticized by webcasters.

The specter of Congressional action in the form of the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007, along with Rep. Markey’s unexpected roundtable meeting, which fell under the aegis of the Small Business Subcommittee instead of the more copyright-friendly Judiciary Committee, apparently forced SoundExchange’s hand.

Webcasters large and small are pleased with SoundExchange’s change of heart, and one webcaster said that the outcry from fans of Internet radio was a major factor. “This is a direct result of lobbying pressure, so if anyone thinks their call didn’t matter, it did,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren told Wired blog Listening Post. “That’s why this is happening.”

And by the way, douchebags — I distinctly remember Al Gore being one of the main advocates for toppling Saddam. Add the PMRC to the mix, and he’s got real blood on his hands**.

*September 13, 1993, as per.

**Which is to say, I’m a heavy duty Obama supporter — Hillary in a crunch.

(Yeah, so the F what if I read him?)

The response also alleges that the case should be thrown out because even looking into the issue could violate state secrets, of course, but a much longer section of the response tries to make the case that Verizon has a First Amendment right to “petition” the government. “Based on plaintiffs’ own allegations, defendants’ right to communicate such information to the government is fully protected by the Free Speech and Petition Clauses of the First Amendment,” argue Verizon’s lawyers.

This seems like an “everything but the kitchen sink” argument, since Verizon seems to suggest that the company sought out the government on its own, hoping to find someone to accept the phone records that they desperately wanted to hand over. It’s a novel argument, but suggests that Verizon is nervous about the Judicial’s continued acceptance of the state secrets argument.

Plus three points for chutzpah, minus eight for quality of logical reasoning, and a fifteen yard penalty for lack of class.

I browsed some other candidates sites and none seem to feature such an extensive recipe collection, so let’s chalk it up to a uniqueness of Mrs. McCain herself and not some broad indicator of retrograde pandering.

On the other hand, I would be completely okay with Hillary Clinton’s site featuring her husband’s brownie recipe.

Losing Halberstam, on the other hand, is a shock. I was hoping that he would produce a book on the Bush wars as incisive as this one and this one. If you haven’t, buy them, read them, and loan them to your friends.

Salon has posted some retrospective interviews, which are also worth the time.