I just want to find Jessica Griffin right now and thank her for this photo in today’s paper (and currently on the front of Philly.com). There’s John McCain and Sarah Palin, apparently doing a cheerleader routine. (Either that, or Palin doesn’t know how to signal touchdown.) Then there’s ol’ Arlen Specter, the only man in America older than John McCain, looking like he just wants to go home and bitch about politics for a while. I can only imagine his thoughts. “I’ve been a politician since the Depression and she gets to be vice president because she hunted a few moose?”
Or maybe he just wants to get this over with so everyone’s Facebook status messages go back to being regular annoying instead of 2008 election annoying.
Who are the only people who will show up to a town hall meeting in York with Sen. Arlen Specter? Simple: Conspiracy theorists and jaded retirees. It must be some sort of cosmic retribution that Specter has to listen to 15 questions of this crap after a life in politics. Actually, I think this is what Arlen Specter’s hell would be like.
Yesterday, Specter fended a question from an old woman about the North American Union, which will apparently combine the U.S., Mexico and Canada and give us one currency, the amero. (Why wouldn’t they just call it the dollar? Weird.) Specter responds, though, with the kinds of tough answers a politician has to give to his constituents every day.
“It’s not gonna happen. We’re not gonna have a union with Mexico and Canada, we’re gonna stick with the good ol’ United States of America.”
I can’t imagine Specter wants to deal with another 6 years of this come 2010, but he is an old white man. Zombie Specter/Zombie Barbaro for president in 2016!
Dan Gross writes on Arlen Specter and medical marijuana, learning that if the drug were legal in Pennsylvania and his doctor recommended it, he’d have a puff.
Gross reports in an ever-so-detailed fashion that when he asked if he would puff even if it were illegal, Specter smiled and said he was “certainly not about to say I would violate the law.” But he’d be okay with breaking federal medical marijuana law if it were legal in Pennsylvania? That’s our Arlen!
Yesterday, former New England Patriots employee Matt Walsh met with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Sen. Arlen Specter to talk about Spygate, the scandal where Walsh and others videotaped other teams and helped the Patriots kick some puppies, beat up dwarves and cheat to several Super Bowl titles.
The NFL says, “Oh, this scandal is all over, sorry everybody.” But Arlen Specter isn’t having any of that! Yes, the man who should be investigating any one of the number of United States atrocities in the name of the wars on Iraq or terror or drugs is content to investigate the New England Patriots.
“They are enormous role models for everybody,” Specter said. “If you can cheat in the NFL, you can cheat in college, you can cheat in high school, you can cheat on your grade-school math test. There’s no limit as to what you can do. I think they owe the public a lot more candor and a lot more credibility.”
Cue your own favorite stolen 2000 election joke up, people!
Anyway, Congress will probably do a hearing or a Mitchell Report-type investigation while President Bush continues to videotape other team’s playcalling signals unabated.
Cheer Ryan Howard
On Monday, I suggested on Angelo Cataldi’s WIP radio talk show that Philadelphia fans should give Ryan Howard a standing ovation every time he comes to the plate. Those cheers would tell Howard that we understand the struggle, that we are with him, and that he still is the same hero in our eyes who won MVP and Rookie of the Year in successive seasons.
On Tuesday, I read that Pat Burrell attributes his success this year to confidence. From my own experience, I can attest that state of mind or confidence are crucial factors in success.
Obviously, Howard has been a big disappointment this year to the fans and to himself (”Manuel sits Howard against Big Unit, guarding progress,” May 7). However, there’s a good chance that a standing ovation and cheers could give him a shot in the arm and the confidence to shake out of his slump.
U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter
Washington
Yes, apparently ol’ Arlen is following in the footsteps of Post Game Live panelist/Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and weighing in on the sports topics of the day. He’s actually involved in all the facets of sports: Spygate, the NFL Network and Comcast, Ryan Howard’s feelings. Aww, let’s all be nice to Ry-Ho so he hits some dingers.
Arlen Specter finally met with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell regarding Spygate. The NFL scandal concerns videotaping of opposing teams by the New England Patriots, which allowed a historically awful franchise and a former Cleveland Browns coach to win three Super Bowls.
Specter met with the NFL commish and said he wasn’t satisfied with the results of his discussion; he’s already planning on holding hearings about the destruction of the Patriots’ tapes of other teams. He’s even thinking of getting rid of the NFL’s antitrust exemption!
In the clip attached to this post, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart discusses how Arlen Specter is an absolutely worthless senator.
Specter says he’s tried to call, but maybe Goodell gave him a wrong number or something. The NFL sez Goodell will meet with Specter in sunny Hawaii, during the Pro Bowl, perhaps? Fortunately, Specter says all of this could lead to Congressional hearings, which is just a-okay with Television Legend Larry Kane who writes on his magical blog that Specter is right and people attacking him are incorrect. He also begins a paragraph like this:
Also, sports fans.
Anyway, if you head over to Larry Kane’s blog, try to be nice and coherent. Inane comments may fly on the blog of a 12-year-old like myself, but Kane is having a little problem with Hitler comments. No, really:
After the football game, I checked my email and was shocked to find some notes that had come through this website. They were from people who listened to my rather tame conversation on the radio earlier in the day. The language was so foul and hateful, it surprised even me, a veteran of 50 years in newsrooms. The reference to my religion were disgusting.
Welcome to the Internet, Larry! That’s all it is: Anti-semites, racists and porn. Ain’t technology grand?
Bunch writes that two of Specter’s biggest donors are Comcast and lobbying firm Blank Rome, who lobbies for Comcast. Comcast, as you know, is in a war with the NFL over the NFL Network. (Isn’t it cute when multi-million dollar corporations fight?) This is probably why Arlen Specter is angry about the NFL’s exclusive deal with DirecTV, yet silent on Comcast SportsNet’s refusal to sell the channel to satellite systems.
Basically, all it means is a politician is screwing you over. But you already knew that.
Arlen Specter revealed today he really just wants to bring a Super Bowl title to Philadelphia. He said he’s going to talk to the NFL to see if they really investigated the Patriots spying on other teams and if they investigated the Super Bowl where the Pats beat the team his constituents root for, the Eagles.
Hey, that’s the team I root for, too! Alright, Arlen Specter. If no team is going to win on the field, then we’re going to make the NFL recordbook look like that year in the Public League where FLC won on the buzzer-beater but were stripped off it later. (Or something like that.)
Specter said he would call NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell just hours after the game, which means he could be on the phone with him now. Arlen Specter will hopefully eventually call for hearings as hilarious as the baseball hearings, where the players all said they never did steroids and it turns out, whoops!, they all did steroids.
“If they were filming the walk-though in 2002 and they were stealing the signals in 2007, what happened in 2005 with the Eagles?” Specter told 610 WIP’s Angelo Cataldi. Yes, really.
I never really thought I’d see anything new from Arlen Specter. He’s been in the Senate since Andrew Jackson was president and I figured he’d be content to simply coast in what is possibly his last term.
Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, secured 25 earmarks providing $882,000 for abstinence education programs around the state.
“There are people who say that abstinence education doesn’t work,” Mr. Specter said, but “I’ve seen a lot of indicators that it does work.” In addition, he said, “I have 12 million people in Pennsylvania, they have a lot of different ideas,” some of them strongly favor abstinence education, and their values “ought to be recognized.”
He’s seen indicators it does work. I can only assume that means he’s traveled the commonwealth checking teenage girls to see if their hymens are still intact. Icky.
