The Larry Kane Report

Green. Go green. Everybody is green now. Companies are green in commercials and ads. Get on the green bandwagon. Almost everybody has. But almost everybody has a short memory.

It was 1979 when Jimmy Carter took us through the long, longer gas lines during the famed Middle East oil boycott. Gas prices were long, tempers were short, and everybody, from Congress to town clerk was calling for energy reforms. Congress held hearings. That’s a surprise. Politicians called for less reliance on oil. Detroit and Tokyo put out tiny little cars that gave you 45 mpg and a chance of getting crushed by a tractor trailer. The eighties came, and everybody forgot. Bigger cars were built. Faster cars hit the road.

This same scenario was present during the Nixon years. That was 44 years ago. The Carter gas crisis was 28 years ago, We had a lot of time to fix the problem, but in that period, the Saudi’s were stroked by our government, along with the Emirates, and even for a time, Saddam was a favorite of the first Bush, before Kuwait was invaded.

As you pump your three dollars a gallon gas, if you get it that cheaply, do you think about some of the knuckleheads we put in Congress over years the ones who need a reality sandwich, the same ones who ignored initiatives over the years to fix the problem.

Now, as I said, everybody is greener than you can believe. But will our children and grandchildren be looking bach 20 years from know and wondering who was in charge.

Of course, these last seven years, have been banner years for the oilmen from Texas. Even Midland, the home of POTUS, is, other than anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan’s stays there, having a wonderful financial life.

And then there’s the nut case in Venezuela. The dictator exports oil to American companies. That oil from that vicious lunatic winds up in your pump. You pay him indirectly while he connives how to allow America to deteriorate.

If that, along with the failure of government over the last four decades doesn’t bother you, then you have two choices. Ignore the problem and buy a gas-devouring SUV. Or, take some action, ride Septa, or even buy a bike.

When gasoline reaches 4 bucks a gallon, and it wrecks the economy, maybe we should demand changes at the top first.

Final advice: Beware of “greenies” with empty slogans, and few ideas.  Some of them are so deep in cow chip, they need hip boots.

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The death of Hy Lit marks a remembrance of the day when Top 40 radio was king in Philadelphia and across the nation. I never worked with Hy Lit, but in the mid 1960’s, I worked with the great people at WFIL Radio in a battle of radio giants. WIBG was the competition and Hy Lit was the star.

Stars fade, but Hy Lit never ceased to wonder. In the mid 90’s, I joined him for an interview on the KYW TV Bulletin Show. He had already been feeling the effects of Parkinson’s, but it never dampened his spirit. On the air, the voice never wavered and neither did the knowledge. He was so cordial and so excited to reminisce about the ups and downs of his career and his love for Philadelphia. There were obstacles along the way, but he was determined to stay on the air, even innovating on the internet at the end.

One of the most fascinating talents of Hy Lit’s career was his expansive knowledge of the music. Every time I listened to him, there was a sense that we were being taken into a time capsule, not just listening to nostalgia, but hearing the ageless voice of the man who brought us the hits when they happened back in the day. Now that was rally traveling back into yesterday.

What most of you don’t know is the impact Hy Lit had on inspiring a generation of broadcasters who could spin the story as well as the hits.
I first met him while touring with the Beatles. It was 1967 at the old Convention Hall. When he took the stage to introduce the Beatles, the kids in the audience screamed in shouts of admiration.

He was a pleasure to watch, to listen to, on air, and in person.

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Some awesome contradictions in policy have recently made another appearance among our public officials. They should not pass without, as they say, attention being paid.

First, a not-so-pleasant message to the President and Congress. Pro-life politicians and pro-choice lawmakers are failing our children. This is a big time human disaster. As the efforts continue to battle abortion, many of the same legislators who are on either side of this battle have voted to reduce spending for adoption resources around the country. It’s pretty simple. Adoption is a wonderful alternative to abortion. Yet, major adoption agencies have had their federal aid cut back by millions. If politicians were really concerned about children, they would kill the pork (projects) and put their money where there promises are - in pursuit of programs to unite children with a home, with a parent or parents.

There’s an irony here. Only a few of our so-called conservative lawmakers have fought hard for adoption resources — ex-Senator Rick Santorum, the man who replaced him, Bob Casey, and Tom Delay, the divisive and formerly powerful Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. House. Where are the other voices.

And then we move the issue to Philadelphia. For almost thirty years I have been doing a feature along with the National Adoption Center, a premiere organization in the field of finding homes for children. It started out as Thursday’s Child at Channel Ten, continued as Sunday’s Child at Channel Three and is run weekly know as Wednesday’s Child on KYW Newsradio 106o. The Adoption  Center is a national clearinghouse for sometimes difficult-to-place-children. It is the best agency of its kind in the nation. In recent years, the children that we have featured on KYW Newsradio have been mostly from New Jersey and Delaware. Children from Philadelphia, where the needs are great, are not featured on-the-air because DHS, the agency designed to help these children, refuses to cooperate with the National Adoption Center! It is government at its worst. An opportunity is there to help children get adopted, but DHS, which has a sad record of protecting this community’s children, doesn’t want to work on it.

Mayor-elect Nutter has promised to look into this.

Both Channel Ten’s TV feature and our radio feature’s producers have tried hard to get Philadelphia children on air. They are being cheated out of the exposure by an agency in crisis that is not paying attention!

It is amazing how hypocritical politicians can be, especially when it comes to our first priority -children.

All children deserve parents. Adoption is a magnificent alternative to the challenges of poverty. child abandonment and abuse, and of course, abortion.

Will the elected officials wake up to the needs of thousands of children who are hoping for a home.

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Larry Platt, one of the few Philadelphia Magazine editors to survive for years at the post , is being wooed, wined and dined and promised everything but the Capitol Dome to run as a Democrat for Congress in the sixth district of Pennsylvania.

Platt is a fascinating guy with a record of solid reporting and the courage to take the magazine into a new level of activism, shedding the reporting that sometimes, years ago, brought the magazine to a new level of “who can we savage” next. But this past year, the scathing article on Tom Knox, coupled with an endorsement of Michael Nutter, opened the way for Nutter to move ahead.

Platt tells me he is taking a serious look at running against Jim Gerlach, whose district includes Chester, Berks, a portion of Montgomery which includes Lower Merion, and a piece of Lehigh County. How serious? Serious enough to be pondering strategy and finding sources of campaign cash, and serious enough to be talking with national Democratic party leaders.

What is Platt like? He is one of the more interesting journalists in town, one that is not afraid to go to the edge, but always remembers that a sense of fairness is what prevents you from going over the cliff. Can he make it in politics? Yes, but only if he’s willing to take risks by letting voters know how he feels about issues, without dodges or tricks. His best chance is to hire Ken Smukler, arguably the area’s best political manager. Smukler is tough and has a knowledge base of local politics that is even better than mine. (I am so humble.)

Larry Platt is not a household name, although among the “newsies” and power elite. he is very well known. If he enters a Congressional race, he will find a world of deception, betrayal and viciousness that defies the imagination, not unlike the traits of some magazine journalists.

So, will Larry Platt go “splat”, my favorite word for taking chances? Or will he instead keep his passion between the covers - the covers of his glossy magazine?

You’ll know soon.

I can just see the cover of the October, 2008 Philadephia Magazine. A huge picture of the smiling Platt appears on the cover. The headline reads: “I’m Larry Platt and I am endorsing myself.”

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As Philadelphians still reel from the death of Officer Chuck Cassidy, and government gets more determined to deal with people who shoot at police, there are short memories in the history department.

Since I’ve been here, and that would be 1966, I’ve been reporting on the daily dangers facing police officers, the haunting tasks of chasing suspects through dim-lit streets and alleyways, and the never-ending and frustrating job of trying to keep up with the bad guys.

People in government have always appreciated the job of policing a big and vast city like Philadelphia, and the people in the neighborhoods understand the reality of living in constant fear. For those who live in safer areas, and members of the intellectual elite who actually view police officers sometimes as tyrants, it is a different story. Some of them live in a fantasy world and so far away from the real thing.

In the 1970’s, the intellectual elite, some of them journalists, were more concerned about alleged police abuses than they were about people being wounded or shot. In this last campaign, the always-in-touch Mayor-elect Michael Nutter said, very defiantly, about citizen’s rights, “I have a right not to be shot.”

Nutter may become the law and order man of his era, understanding that nothing happens unless the streets are safe.

This problem, lawlessness and the toll it takes on police officers, has been around for a long time. But sometimes it takes a tragic killing of a police officer to wake the idle observers up from their sleep.

In times like these, while honoring and respecting the rights of individuals, people who fear police authority should be ones who want to hurt people, not the well intentioned protectors who would limit police power while turning a blind eye to the reality of the streets.

Sometimes, it takes a murder to wake up those among us who are still dozing off in a world of righteous platitudes when it comes to the simple facts and law and order. There is no law without order.

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