Category: Philadelphia

Tam says that you can’t swing a cat in Knoxville without hitting another blogger. Apparently Philadelphia is quite a bloggy city itself.

Baltimore is pissed it’s getting passed up for Amtrak’s Acela express service between New York and Washington, DC.  The only stop will be in Philadelphia.   Usually, Philadelphia is the city everyone just passes by.  Now Baltimore knows how it feels.

I don’t actually live in “flyover country” myself, living six miles northeast of Philadelphia.   Philadelphia is not part of flyover country.  We’re drive past country.  We’re the city, that if you’re driving through on the way to Washington DC from New York, you made a mistake.   We’re not flyover country, as in people look down on us from afar as they fly between the coasts, we’re “Don’t care country”, as in no one gives a shit about Philadelphia.  It’s the forgotten city.

My alma mater seems to be intent on creating a presence on the west coast.  I was skeptical when Drexel decided to buy a medical college, and then create a law school.  Because I think this seems like a boondoggle, the smart money is on it being radically successful.  It’s a good rule of thumb, I think, that it’s a bad idea to bet against “Taki” Papadakis.  I look forward to being wrong once again.

Small trivia fact.   I’m not the first Drexel guy Bitter has dated :)

Camera’s work if you listen to the Philadelphia media, but the murder rate still seems to be climbing.

This editorial is meant to be a piece about Michael Nutter, but it’s pretty spot on in it’s criticism of our Governor from when he was Mayor of Philadelphia:

 Nutter has the kind of reform agenda that people wrongly associate with Rendell, who entered office with a mandate for change and a city teetering on bankruptcy. Rendell immediately went to battle with the city’s powerful unions, which “hadn’t had a bad day in 30 years,” he charged.

After winning significant concessions, though, Rendell aligned himself with Street, then the city council president. Rendell took care of downtown, which thrived, while Street ran the rest of the city as his private patronage kingdom.

With his eye on higher office and his reputation secure, Rendell chose not to pursue the reforms that other innovative mayors enacted in the 1990s. He opposed welfare reform and did little to fight crime outside of downtown. Despite its beautiful architecture and skyline, Philly’s a city where a 10-minute walk from City Hall leaves you in Third World poverty, danger, and despair.

Friend and sometimes co-blogger Brad has called Ed Rendell the luckiest politician alive, meaning that he made his political career largely by riding the same upswing experienced by every other city in the 90s.   But Rendell never fixed any of the cities fundamental problems, and now we’re paying the piper.

Despite Philadelphia’s out of control murder rate, our criminals at least seem to have the decency to get out of the car before they pop a cap in your ass.