Thank you, Fat Tony. However, in the future, I would prefer my taxpayer-funded street money in a nondescript briefcase to the sack with a dollar sign on it.

So I may have gotten a little ahead of myself yesterday when I wrote that City Council would be holding hearings about public financing of municipal political campaigns.

I thought maybe, just maybe, they would take the matter seriously. We'd have an end to the countless newspaper stories that (a) seem to be nothing more than balance sheets telling us how much money candidate x has raised and how much "cash on hand" he has and (b) tell us who got a sweet deal from the city followed by how much he or she contributed to the mayor.

Visions danced in my head of an election utopia in which all candidates are on a level financial playing field and are actually judged by their records and/or their visions and plans for the future. I admit it. I was high on idealism but thankfully City Council staged an intervention to get me off that.

In this radio story by WHYY's Brad Linder, we discover the major stumbling block to publicly financing campaigns isn't the First Amendment or pre-emption of the state constitution but the threat to Joe Committeeman's $100 on Election Day.

In Councilman Goode's defense, he's not defending this practice as much as he's giving us a dose of reality. With over 3000 Democratic committee men and women having a stake in the multimillion dollar campaigns of everyone from President down to City Councilperson, there's little chance that the current power structure would allow such a thing to happen. Afterall, that's a lot of mouths to feed. His primary concern, however, seems to be that if public financing becomes a reality, the "public" might not be too thrilled to learn that their money is essentially being turned over to ward leaders in the form of small, non-sequential bills in unmarked envelopes.

How hard could it be to prevent that? Included in the laws governing public campaign financing, you include a provisions detailing exactly what the money can be used for (billboards, posters, television ads, office staff, events, etc.) and you specifically include prohibitions against those types of payoffs. Other cities have figured out how to do this and frankly, the whole, "we're Philadelphia, we're not like other cities" excuse is starting to wear thin.