Abridged Daily News Columnists

Jill Porter: It’s sad, enough police officers have died recently that we know exactly what the local media is going to write every single time and we don’t have to read it. So this is one of those things.

Elmer Smith: Hey, more fun time news! Carol Campbell died yesterday. Geeze, columnists, can’t you write about something that’s not a total bummer so I have something to mock here? Man, think about me sometimes.

John Baer: Oh, goodie, noted drug warrior Tom Corbett could be governor in 2010.

Michael Smerconish: And, naturally, here’s Michael Smerconish writing about the Flyers, and playing hockey growing up and hour a thousand people paid a couple bucks to see the Stanley Cup. Right.

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Michael Smerconish: “At the end of the day, I was on info overload. So I downloaded the new John Legend CD from iTunes and plugged in my iPod.” This is the both the worst and greatest sentence Michael Smerconish has ever written.

John Baer: Oh, it’s that time of the year again, when Pennsylvania bigwigs gather for a party in Manhattan. You should read Baer today, really.

Ronnie Polaneczky: This, friends, is drama:

Jim asked if I would arrange the meeting, then write about it.

Hmmm, would I?

Well, yes, I bet you did, since you’ve already written a column about it.

Stu Bykofsky: The city might bill the Mummers this year for parade cleanup! Oh, this could end poorly.

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Stu Bykofsky: Because Barack Obama is president, no one should complain about racism anymore. This is pretty much the same thing Bill Bennett said on TV the other night. I would compare Stu to him, but that would be mean. This column is way more upbeat, though.

John Baer: Bob Casey is pals with Barack Obama! What, you mean Obama doesn’t hang out with Pennsylvania’s senior senator, 135-year-old Arlen Specter?

Ronnie Polaneczky: “Two days ago, as I cast my hope for Barack Obama, I didn’t want to leave the blue-curtained cocoon of the voting booth.” That’s the first sentence; I’m not reading any more than that.

Dave Davies: This one is worth a few minutes of your time. It’s a good read!

By the end of the day, “Black Panther” was the second-most- frequently-used search term on Google, and Stalberg was fielding a call from a London reporter asking about Black Panthers’ intimidating white Republican voters at a polling place.

“Basically, it was all horsebleep,” Stalberg said yesterday. “I assured him there weren’t a lot of Republican voters there, and it wasn’t much of a problem.”

Ha, ha. Still a newspaper man at heart, Committee of 70 head Zack Stalberg says “horsebleep” so they don’t have to censor his words.

Michael Smerconish: Two days after the election, political radio host Michael Smerconish is writing about… ways to make the Phillies parade better, of course. I hope Christine Flowers writes about how much she loves Hersheypark tomorrow!

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Jill Porter: This is a Phillies celebratory column probably written before the game was played. Whatever, that’s fine. Let me just quote a little bit of it.

Dingy? Crumbling? In ruin?

This, the next great city in America, glimmering with new skyscrapers?

This, the so-called 6th borough of New York because of the folks who relocate and commute there?

This, a town internationally renowned for its history, its restaurants, its hospitals and universities?

This, one of the few American cities with a thriving, growing Center City?

Ha, ha, all it took was three years for “sixth borough” to be viewed as a compliment.

Ronnie Polaneczky: Convicted felons can vote in Pennsylvania, who knew?

John Baer: Oh, yeah, Obama was on the teevee last night, too. Oh no buying up all the TV ad time for a giant infomercial is apparently Big Brother-ish!

Michael Smerconish: This is the first paragraph of Smerconish’s column:

IT TOOK me only a few seconds of my hairy-eyeball test to conclude that McCain-Palin volunteer Ashley Todd, who said she had been assaulted and branded with a politically tinged scarlet letter, was full of it. It was the same internal alarm that sounded when I first heard of the alleged Duke-lacrosse rape. No way, I thought.

Man, why do we even have courts when we can just get Michael Smerconish to use his “hairy-eyeball test” to decide everything! Also, um, it’s Christine Flowers who needlessly mentions the Duke rape case, Michael, don’t steal her shtick.

Abridged Daily News Columnists

John Baer: A couple days ago, John Baer wrote the best column in the Daily News in a long time. And guess what? Idiots got pissed off at it!

Apparently, many wrote, calling a white person “cracker” is just as offensive as calling a black person a “nigger,” thinking that is way more racist than not voting for Obama because he’s black. I’ll give Baer the mulligan for the “column about reader mail” column just this once, because the first one was solid. But no break on writing “the Daily News has never been a slave to political correctness.” Um, dude? Once I overhead a conversation in the media room at the Palestra where Daily News editors cut a joke about Anna Nicole Smith. If you can’t make fun of her, you guys might as well be in charge of political correctness.

Ronnie Polaneczky: There have been about a million stories about the Phillies in the past week. Pretty much everything has been written about the Phils. Lo and behold, then, when Ronnie Polaneczky ends up writing something different! Apparently, her father (a Franklin Institute scientist) was the one who cost the 1964 Phillies the pennant. Neat. And thanks a lot.

Stu Bykofsky: Everyone wore red on Friday because Stu Bykofsky asked them to.

Michael Smerconish: The research for Smerconish’s column this week involved driving around a couple neighborhoods and counting Obama signs vs. McCain signs. Really I like the fourth comment on his piece better: “White folks never cease to amaze me. You come up with cute little phrases (i.e., The Bradley Effect) to mask the real issue: The inherent racist nature of the European.”

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Ronnie Polaneczky: “The last time we heard of a road-rage incident this bad was in July 2007.” Man, that SEPTA cop who killed that dude in the suburbs sure got off easy even in the sphere of public opinion, eh?

John Baer: Oh, yeah, there was a debate last night. And, hey, guess what: It was pointless, just like all third presidential debates nowadays!

Um, okay, there are two Stu Bykofsky columns today. It’s like Abridged Daily News Columnists Christmas!

Stu Bykofsky: This is about animals and PACCA. Whatever the other one is about Latrice Bryant so I’m just going to read that one.

Stu Bykofsky: Here’s the best line: “Having failed to get any city entity to condemn Bryant’s public display of a hate symbol (KKK) and possible ethnic intimidation of Fox 29 reporter Jeff Cole, who broke the story about Bryant’s off-campus capers, I move from ethnics to ethics.” I still can’t believe that anybody is actually surprised that there are cushy jobs in city government and that City Councilpeople use their positions to benefit themselves. Welcome to politics!

Also, ha ha, yes, there are more racist comments.

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Ronnie Polaneczky: The Daily News columnists can’t stop writing about Wilson Goode’s aide, the one who held up the Fox 29 are racist sign. Yes! Apparently, this is an important story. Polaneczky is upset still because no one got up to grandstand when she held up her stupid signs.

Now she’s decided the city will not prevent hate speech! Of course, one might say the city has no authority to prevent any speech, hateful or otherwise, but Polaneczky is having none of that. The law has “no teeth.” It’s just not tough enough on black people.

And why no one from Council took a stand against Bryant’s actions is baffling. This is the legislative body that, last year, voted to strengthen the prohibition of ethnic intimidation in the city by forbidding the display of three “symbols of virulent animus: a noose; a burning cross; or a swastika.”

Yet they still couldn’t see fit to at least chastise Bryant for making a sign implying that a white reporter belonged to a group that routinely uses these symbols to intimidate blacks and other minorities. [...] Ironically, it seems fitting that a new law with no teeth resulted from an incident that no one can prove even happened.

I won’t quibble with the use of ironically but of routinely. You’d think if the KKK was out there every day routinely putting up nooses, burning crosses and drawing swastikas, it wouldn’t be too hard to find an incident one could prove. Welp, it’s off to jail for me, I believe I just violated a new speech law the Daily News columnists dreamed up.

John Baer: Hey, a Harrisburg aide went against the family!

Michael Smerconish: This column is about Bill Ayers, apparently, and how everyone has friends that do bad things. Smerconish then gives some hilarious examples of his friends who have done bad, such as one person who tried to commit suicide and another who succeeded. He also took G. Gordon Liddy to lunch! Clearly, Smerconish is unfit for duty.

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Stu Bykofsky: Oh, see, Stu doesn’t want Latrice Bryant to go to jail for anything she wrote; he just wants her to get an official reprimand from the Human Rights Commission. And he’s filed a complaint to make it happen! “My case might be the first one heard under the new ethnic-intimidation law.” It’s nice to see our friends at the Daily News are such staunch defenders of free speech.

Jill Porter: Oh, it’s a humor column about Sarah Palin’s moose-dressing skills.

Michael Smerconish: Recidivist thugs!

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Ronnie Polaneczky: Holy shit, Ronnie Polaneczky wants to the city to charge the Wilson Goode aide who held up the Fox 29 are racist sign with a ethnic intimidation. She wants Latrice Bryant to go to jail!

While Bryant didn’t use a noose, burning cross or swastika in her handmade message, she implied that a TV reporter belonged to a group that routinely uses these symbols to intimidate blacks and other minorities. If that kind of hate speech doesn’t constitute an act of ethnic intimidation, the law ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

In her next column, I bet she’ll call for the imprisonment of the guy who played the Soup Nazi.

Michael Smerconish: Ha ha, Michael Smerconish discussed a poll about race on his radio show and people called up and told him that, yes, indeed, they hate black people.

Take Linda, for instance. She told me the word “violent” describes most black people, and cited the lifestyle choices and irresponsibility that has “permeated their culture.”

“First is when they chose the welfare program over marriage. Second, when they embraced this idea that if you’re black and do well in school, you’re a white wannabe. And third is when they embraced gangsta rap . . . There are more, but they are the three main things that ruined the blacks, and they don’t want to admit it,” Linda told me.

Yes, the number three problem in the black community today is most certainly rap lyrics. Rap more like crap am I rite???

Stu Bykofsky: Stu wrote about online commenters in the paper today, and even references the Karen Heller column about commenters that referenced me.

It’s Christmas morning and Santa brought me everything I asked for and more. What an incredible trio of columns. I’ve been doing this feature for damn near three years, and this is the best day of Daily News columns I’ve ever read. I don’t even think it’s close.

Stu takes Heller’s cute closing line and puts it into practice, asking the paper to print everyone’s real name. When told that won’t happen, he says to scrap ‘em entirely. In the comments, there are comments bashing Dan Gross, which is the average Philly.com commenter’s third favorite pastime after racism and misspellings.

Heller wrote: “The blog ‘Philadelphia Will Do’ has noted that Philly.com is among the most racist sites in the region, due to the verbal waste of our posters.” Aw, thanks, guys, you hadn’t mentioned me in forever! I do fear the attention will have the cops hauling me off to prison any day now after receiving a tip from Polaneczky.

Abridged Daily News Columnists

Stu Bykofsky: This column is headlined, “Autistic boy goes to camp, and it changes a family.” I put up with a lot of shit, but you’re going to have to read this one yourself.

Ronnie Polaneczky: Yes, not having health insurance sucks, and sometimes even having health insurance sucks if it doesn’t cover your expensive operations. But apparently Ronnie Polaneczky has nice union health insurance, and she’s doing just fine, thank you.

Michael Smerconish: This column is about what’s on the candidates’ iPods. “Bach or Beck? Franz Schubert or Franz Ferdinand? Moby or Toby Keith? Tell me, and I can size you up . . . in an iPod-nanosecond.” Forget it, I would rather read Stu’s column today than this crap. I like that Smerconish’s references are pretty much all from when people still kinda liked President Bush, though. Fitting!