One More Reason To Boo The Flyers This Year

It was bad enough watching an inferior team get outrageously lucky and knock my Habs out of the playoffs last season, BUT NOW!

* One more reason to hate the Flyers: Sarah Palin will drop the puck at their opener.

BooMan and Atrios should get some of their Blogging buddies to convene a special Drinking Liberally meeting for that game and boo the hell out of her. And Palin better watch out - judging by the last time she was in Philly - because the Zamboni driver might run her over.

But you really don't have to be a Montreal Canadiens fan to get pissed about this:

Wachovia Corp., a once-thriving financial giant now teetering on the brink of collapse, confirmed today that it was extending an $8 million loan to the cash-strapped National Republican Congressional Committee for last-minute activites to support GOP House candidates.

Wachovia's decision to lend money to the NRCC -- itself reeling from a damaging financial scandal earlier this year -- is sure to draw charges of favoritism, as Wachovia denies credit and freezes assets for thousands of other customers.

Allegations of favoritism are especially delicate for Wachovia, given the company's disproportionate support of Republican campaigns and organizations.

The Flyers play at the Wachovia Center...

Anyways, Attytood has a lot more on the rabid right winger and owner of the Flyers, Ed Snider:

Ed Snider is a man with two missions in life -- one that I wholeheartedly support, and another that I don't, some parts of which I in fact find repulsive. His day job is to bring a championship to Philadelphia with the two teams that he runs through Comcast-Spectacor, the Flyers and the 76ers. Although he hasn't succeeded in 25 years, he tends to be what we want in a sports owner here in Philly, willing to spend money (albeit sometimes foolishly) or shake things up if that's what's needed on the ice or on the hardwood. So far, so good.

In his spare time, he takes the millions of dollars that he's earned with the blessings of the Philadelphia sports fan and used a big chunk of it to promote conservative causes, moving increasingly to the far right with each passing political season. That's his right in a free society, but I also believe that running a pro sports franchise in a big city like Philadelphia is a kind of a public trust. That may explain why state and city taxpayers were willing to lend a financial hand -- $20 million, according to this article -- to help Snider construct the CoreStates/First Union.Wachovia/Citi/Wells Fargo Center back in the mid-1990s.

Sports and politics should not mix, not here and not now, less than four weeks before such a critical presidential election. But that's exactly what rabid GOP supporter Ed Snider will be doing this weekend...

snip

Now, he's making a huge in-kind donation to the McCain-Palin campaign in the arena that we taxpayers kicked in for, giving her a chance to skate her stuff in from of 19,500 mostly upscale male hockey fans from the swing suburbs outside Philly. It will be a warm and fuzzy "hockey mom" event that will make people forget about her ugly and hate-filled rallies of the last week, where she charged that the Democratic candidate for president "pals around with terrorists" as a lynch-mob of an audience hooted and yelled out things like "kill him." (Odd as it sounds, hockey fans are more polite than Palin fans.) (read the whole thing...)