How pathetic can you get, Pee Dee?

The Downtown Cleveland Alliance (DCA), the Plain Dealer reports with  a straight face, has installed about a dozen meter boxes into which you may drop coins to help the homeless. Laugh now.

I wonder how long these containers of coins last on the streets of downtown Cleveland.

DCA director Joe Marinucci – salary $210,000, plus $10,945 benefit package, plus $7,500 in expenses and allowances – wants to keep you from putting those quarters or dimes into the hands of someone begging on downtown streets.

“Those” people upset today’s yuppies.

“Downtown yellow meters raise money for homeless” says the Pee Dee headline for an article by Joe Guillen. As if that’s what it’s this is all about. Helping the homeless. No doubt, huh?

Joe, please tell us weekly how much money is going to the homeless from this pathetic idea. Tell us how many pennies are collected.

That’s an assignment your editors won’t give you.

“I’m not trying to get nothing but something to eat right now,” Guillen quotes one panhandler.

The Pee Dee wastes more than 30 inches with this Metro page one piece of crap journalism.

With the skimpy offerings, bolstered by blaring headlines, photos and graphs that the Pee Dee gives us, this is a waste the newspaper can’t afford.

Shouldn’t the story’s headline be: “Marinucci, DCA want to keep street guy from getting a bite to eat!?”

If we had newspapers that told the truth, newspapers that didn’t speak constantly – always – favorably about the needs of business and its “non-profit” agents. Then we might get some true information. The “non-profit” Downtown Alliance has $4.4 million budget (all figures from 2007 IRS returns.)

Let them buy an ad if they want to propagandize. You need the money, Pee Dee.

“This is not meant to be a financial windfall,” said Marinucci. With a straight face? Really? No kidding, Joe?