Two shining examples of what's wrong with this town...

Exhibit A:

In recent weeks, high-ranking business leaders in the region have received calls asking them to donate to a charitable education organization that would then contribute funds to help buy out Philadelphia School Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman's contract, sources said.

According to the sources, the money would be funneled through the Philadelphia's Children First Fund, a charitable nonprofit set up in 2003 to support the School District. Ackerman is listed on the fund's website as a board member, as is Robert L. Archie Jr., the chairman of the School Reform Commission.

Exhibit B:

Another left wing Commie pinko:

"The economy doesn't function with market self-regulation, but needs an ethical rationale to work for mankind. Man must be at the center of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by maximization of profit but rather according to the common good."

Answer to come. Here's a hint: It wasn't Rick Santorum.

UPDATE: It was indeed Pope Benedict XVI, or as free-market zombie Republicans are probably callling him, Pope Benedict Arnold. I believe that Philadelphia's new archbishop, Charles Chaput, would agree with his boss, but I still don't get why "gay marriage is the issue of our time" -- and not this.

And there goes any chences of winning a Republican primary.

Tweets Huntsman: "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."

You're not crazy, Jon -- just the GOP. (By the way, the evolution thing is a reaction to the latest Rick Perry escapade.) I actually think Huntsman blew a massive opportunity here. I realize that running for president as an independent is usually seen as a fool's errand -- Ross Perot got a pretty amazing 19 percent in 1992, yet didn't win a single state, after all -- but 2012 could have been an exception.

There's a lot of moderate voters out there -- including sizable minorities within both parties as well as independents -- who don't want to vote for Obama but think the GOP front-runners are bat-guano crazy. The candidate that would appeal to these millions of unhappy voters would -- in my warped opinion, anyway -- be spmeone center-right on econmic issues, with some actual business experience, but center-left on social issues like climate change and gay rights. Huntsman mostly fits that bill (I think New York's Michael Bloomberg fits it better..if he wasn't so arrogant and annoying).

If Huntsman had started early in the game with an independent campaign, he might have pulled some moderate Republicans out of the primary vote and ensured the nomination of a right-wing extremist like Rick Perry or even Michele Bachmann. Do you think Huntsman could win a Huntsman-Bachmann-Obama election in 2012? I do. Instead, Huntsman is a GOP 1 percenter. Go figure.

If Rick Perry gets the GOP nomination, he'll be the first pedal-to-the-metal climate change denier to occupy the Oval Office (although Bush 43 might as well have been one.) In going off on the subject in New Hamphire today, the wild-eyed Texas guy did manage to say something I agree with, though:

In his stump speech, Perry referenced "a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects."

I assume Perry was referring to this:

The world's largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published "misleading and inaccurate information about climate change."

Or this:

Now Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat who served as chairman of the powerful House Committee on Energy and Commerce and co-sponsored the bill, is demanding answers on whether the scientist misled the committee on the sources of his financing.

Along with his written testimony for the 2009 hearing, Dr. Michaels submitted to Congress a document detailing roughly $4.2 million in funds he has received for his scientific work. Only 3 percent of the funding listed came from energy-sector sources.

After the hearing, Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont — citing reports that Dr. Michaels had received substantial funds from the coal, oil and gas industry — questioned him on the record about what he received from the energy sector, but he declined to amend his statements.

Or maybe Perry meant this?

One of the world's most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.

Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions, and that polar bears are not primarily threatened by climate change.

But according to a Greenpeace US investigation, he has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001, receiving money from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Insitute and Koch Industries along with Southern, one of the world's largest coal-burning utility companies. Since 2002, it is alleged, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.

Wow, I hope none of those climate-change phonies set foot in Perry's Texas. I hear they can treat people pretty ugly down there.

I've always heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. Here's another one: Doing the exact same thing that's just been tried in Europe, which failed miserably:

We all know about the weaknesses in Europe's "periphery" -- Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But the drop in Europe's core is dizzying. Germany grew at an annualized rate of just half a percent last quarter, down from 5.5 percent in the first quarter of the year. France didn't grow at all.

What's going on in Europe's core? Partly it's a loss of confidence due to debt crises in the periphery. But that's hardly all. Europe depends on exports -- especially to Asia, India, Latin America, and the United States. But exports to China and other emerging markets have been dropping. China, worried about inflation, has pulled in the reins on its sizzling economy. Brazil has been pulling back as well. And as the United States economy sputters, exports to America have been slowing.

But chalk up a big part of Europe's slowdown to the politics and economics of austerity. Europe -- including Britain - have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They've been cutting public spending just when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending. The United States has been moving in the same bizarre direction.

Bizarre indeed. Of course, as noted here last week, policy makers on both sides of the pond overlook the lessons of the 1930s, when America roared back in the early part of the FDR's presidency, which he took a stimulus-oriented approach to government spending, only to contract in 1937 and 1938 with a shift toward (duh-duh-DUH) deficit reduction, The ultimate cure was World War II, but I really don't think we want to go through that solution again, do we?

On a very loosely related point, I heard most (but not all) of an interesting debate about the Obama presidency on WHYY's "Radio Times" yesterday between liberal critic Drew Westen (who wrote this much ballyhooed op-ed) and blogger Matthew Yglesias, who's more willing to cut POTUS 44 some slack. Yglesias said something I'd not heard before -- that the reason the Obama administration never made a big deal about the tax cuts in the 2009 stimulus package because if it was tangible -- i.e., like that check that George W. Bush sent you in the mail in 2001 -- people would have just saved it or paid down their credit card, but if they had a few extra dollars mysteriously in the bank every week they might start spending more, which would boost the recovery.

You know, the Obama people get accused of being "too smart for their own good," and here's a classic example. They got bludgeoned in 2010 by voters who mistakenly thought Obama had increased taxes. Proof there's something to be said for doing things the simpler, old-fashioned way, no?

Talk about irony. The summer of 2011 will be remembered as a moment that Glenn Beck left the national stage -- or moved to its fringe, anyway -- and Texas Gov. Rick Perry stepped up front and center, becoming the instant frontrunnerin a muddled GOP primary field for the right to challenge President Obama.

What's the irony? For most of the last two-and-and-a-half years, the rise of Perry and Beck in the national conversation, along with the Tea Party Movement that both men helped spawn, were all about as intertwined as fishing lines on a boatload of first-time anglers. Beck's ability to book the governor of America's second-largest state gave the former "Morning Zoo" jock some cred as a political host, but quickly it was clear that the Texas Republican needed Beck and his at-the-time-growing influence even more.

Today, you might think of Beck as the guy who increasingly brought "tha crazy" in his 29-month run on the Fox News Channel, who hyped conspiracy theories like "FEMA camps" and the coming "caliphate" in the Middle East (along with overpriced gold coins), who lapsed into anti-Semitism on more than one occasion and who famously charged that Obama has "a deep-seated hatred" for whites.

But at the height of all that, Rick Perry called him something else: Honorary Texan -- an honor the governor bestowed on the right-wing media icon at a Beck event in Tyler, Tex., held last year.

But as Perry surges to the head of the GOP pack, it's important to see how the governor's ideas and his rhetoric were radicalized in tandem with Beck's. 

The story starts in April 2009, three months after Obama was inaugurated and after Beck launched his FNC program. The two seemed to become fast friends after Perry appeared on Beck's program that month for some right-wing tough talk on undocumented immigration. A few days later, Beck said that he and Perry would be appearing together on April 15 at a newfangled series of rallies called "tea parties" slated for Tax Day.

That didn't exactly happen. The organizers of the rally that Beck hosted and broadcast from (something of a journalistic conflict, some pointed out) the Alamo in San Antonio decided to bar politicians from speaking, and so Perry took his act to three other incarnations of the tea parties that were so heavily promoted on Fox.

It was at one of these Fox-fueled rallies that Perry famously -- in response to chants from the seminal Tea Partiers and then to reporters' questions -- seemed to endorse the idea that Texas could secede from the Union, stating that "if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that." Perry had a quick learning curve, apparently, when it came to the new fast-moving backlash fueled by Beck, his Fox cohorts and the Tea Party that they'd stirred up.

He had to. It's easy to forget in the 24/7 cable news stampede but while Perry may be measuring the drapes of the Oval Office in 2011, in 2009 he was fighting for his political life. One of the biggest names in Lone Star State politics, GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, was getting ready to challenge Perry in the 2010 primaries, amid the sense that Perry had worn out his welcome after more than two terms in Austin. Perry latched onto Beck's growing popularity on the far right and to the Tea Party as his lifeline.

Eventually Perry was going back on Beck's show and mangling the U.S. Constitution along with the host, claiming that "the idea that they’re telling us how to educate our children or how to deliver health care or how to, for that matter, clean our air is really nonsense."

By then, Perry arguably owed his political fortune to Beck. As the 2010 primary approached, Perry -- having shored up his ultra-conservative support and portraying Hutchison as a Washington insider -- was on the brink of victory when an expected problem cropped up. A Ron Paul acolyte named Debra Medina -- backed by even more extreme groups like the Oath Keepers -- was surging in the polls and undercutting Perry's right flank.

Beck asked Medina on his radio show for what her followers thought would be a soft interview; instead, Beck uncharacteristically ambushed Medina, asking her if she was a 9/11 "truther." Her non-denial all but sunk her campaign, and some cynics couldn't help but notice that one of Perry's largest donors, having contributed nearly $300,000 over a decade, was the CEO of Clear Channel Communications. whose subsidiary syndicates Beck's radio program nationally.

Not long after the primary was when Beck came to Tyler for a "Taking Back America" town hall meeting, and Perry was one of the speakers and featured guests, awarding Beck with that honorary citizenship. One of the other speakers was a Texas state rep named Leo Berman who said "I believe that Barack Obama is God's punishment on us today, but in 2012, we are going to make Obama a one-term president."

Neither Beck nor Perry seemed to object to that remark. In fact, Perry told reporters before that event that Beck was leading a movement to take back America and that "I consider myself proud to be in that army." The two men have remained close ever since; in Beck's final month on the Fox program, when his ratings had plummeted and some even in the GOP establishment had come to see the media figure as something of a lunatic, Perry made an unannounced cameo appearance to get Beck to draw his picture on his chalkboard of GOP White House hopefuls. Coincidentally, it soon came out that "honorary Texan" Beck is moving to Dallas.

It should be noted that Beck gave a tentative endorsement of Michele Bachmann on his radio show last week, but he was very quick to add that he was only covering announced candidates, a list that did not include Perry at that time. Already just today, Beck has taken to his radio show to defend Perry's comments on succession and back up the Texas governor's disturbing comments about the Fedand its chairman Ben Bernanke. Clearly, with Beck's radio show still listened to by millions of conservatives of the kind who vote in GOP primaries, their relationship should help Perry in the coming months.

So why does Rick Perry have a Glenn Beck problem? Because in flying in tandem so far to the right, Beck has helped to take an unremarkably conservative Texas governor who might once have had a story to tell (albeit a misleading one) on the real issue in America, which is jobs, and render him all but unelectable in a general election. Yes, it's true that hitching his star to Beck and extreme right-wing views on the Fed, the 10th Amendment and the Fed that have been incubated in the toxic labs of talk radio helped Perry win re-election and could well carry him to the 2012 nomination. But Perry is going to have a lot of explaining to do when moderate voters emerge from their political cocoon in about 13 months or so. If Obama becomes the first president to win re-election with 9 percent employment, he might actually want to thank Glenn Beck!

Meanwhile, here's something disturbing to ponder. Beck's extreme act eventually caused his TV ratings to nose-dive and led even the conservatives like Roger Ailes who run Fox News to yank him off the air before his contract expired. Yet in mimicking Beck, Rick Perry has soared to the top of the political charts, at least the right half of them. Even America's news media makes more sense than our politics these days.

And then there's Michele Bachmann, for whom every day is a happy gaffeday! (See below.)

Meanwhile, you may be surprised (I was) at who wrote The King's 1977 obit for the New York Times. Your liberal media at work!

You can slash their student loans and hand them a labor market with no jobs...but if you really want the angry youth of America to take to the streets, then just start messing with their cell phone service:

BART temporarily closed all four downtown San Francisco stations tonight - Civic Center, Powell, Montgomery and Embarcadero - after protesters gathered to express anger over the transit agency's decision to cut underground cellular phone service for three hours Thursday evening in an effort to quell a protest.

As of 6:30 p.m., the Civic Center, Montgomery and Embarcadero stations had reopened. At the Powell station, passengers could exit trains but not board them.

The closures began at 5:25 p.m., when protesters were kicked out of the Civic Center station, then began marching toward the other stations. That prompted BART to close them, one by one.

If you haven't been following this story, it began last week when in response to a planned protest of a shooting by a BART officer earlier this summer (the latest in a history of controversies involving the transit cops there), BART went all Mubarak and shut off all cell phone service within the transit stations

In my opinion, and in the view of many others, there's no difference between the Egyptian authorities shutting down the airwaves -- and thus free speech -- which provoked global condemnation this spring, and the undemocratic actions by authorities right here on U.S. soil. It doesn't matter whether you agree with one cause (overthrowing a dictattor) or disagree with another (protesting alleged police brutality); what BART did is the first greasy step down the slippery slope that could lead to wider assaults on social media -- as debated in Britain -- and against free speech in general.

And so I'm thrilled to see the people of the San Francisco Bay aren't letting this nonsense go unchallenged.

Last year, I told you about the deep involvement of Flyers' owner and Ayn Rand accolyte Ed Snider in funding a TV network and website called the RightNetwork. The basic scheme was to launch a new cable channel that would appeal to conservatives but in ways that would be more entertainment oriented (conservative comedy...I hear this guy is available, game shows, people shooting guns, etc.) and less news oriented than Fox News Channel, as epitomized by its glib frontman, Kelsey "Fraser Crane" Grammer.

Nobody could have predicted that such a great idea would have such a hard time getting off the ground:

RightNetwork, the conservative media outlet that launched less than a year ago with great fanfare -- and investors that included actor Kelsey Grammer -- appears to have stalled for more than a month.

RightNetwork.com, which features video and other content, has not been updated since late June, and the network's Twitter feed and Facebook pages have been stagnant since May 31.

RightNetwork President Kevin McFeeley claims it is "business as usual," an answer he gave several times when asked specifically about a lack of new programming and web items, as well as about the status of the network's future funding.

Meanwhile, Snider seems more eager to distance himself from this right-winger than he was from Jeff Carter and Mike Richards:

Asked for comment, his office referred questions to McFeeley, stating in an e-mail that Snider "is merely an investor and would prefer to have Kevin speak about the network."

Snider also was a funder of the recent movie based on Rand's best-known novel, "Atlas Shrugged." Instead, America shrugged, and the film tanked at the box office. Now this. Maybe 18 percent of the U.S. population isn't enough to drive a hit movie or a successful TV network. Yet it seems to be enough to drive the nation's politics into a ditch.

Is this a great country or what?