BY PATRICK BERKERY About six weeks ago, I’m on tour with the Pernice Brothers. I’m in the lobby of a hotel outside Eugene, Ore., watching some AFC game on a rainy Sunday with Kevin, our merch guy. We’re discussing the rapidly approaching twilight of Donovan McNabb’s career, guesstimating that if he doesn’t bring home a ring this year or next, he’s the Jim Kelly of the ’00s — just with a higher Q rating. Then they cut to footage of McNabb being helped off the field in Tennessee with a grimace on his face that says “See you in 8-to-12 […]
INCONVENIENT TRUTH: Global Warming & Rampant Tooth Decay Puts Polar Bears On The Endangered List
REUTERS: White House Says Polar Bears Face Extinction From Global Warming, If It Exists, But The Rest Of Us Will Be Just Fine! So Have A Coke And A Smile! RADIO TIMES: “Is global warming killing off the polar bears? We talk with KASSIE SIEGEL, staff attorney and director of the Climate, Air, and Energy Program at the Center for Biological Diversity. Her organization filed a petition that has led to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to propose Federal protection of the polar bears. We?ll also hear from KIM LANGEL, Vice President of Conservation at the Philadelphia Zoo, on […]
First Immutable Law Of Probability — The Obvious Answer Is Usually The Right Answer — Points To Penn Game Theorist In Wife’s Brutal Bludgeoning
Ellen Robb, 49, was bludgeoned beyond recognition in the kitchen of her home in Wayne. The wounds were so severe that veteran detectives thought she had been shot until an autopsy proved otherwise. The Robbs, long estranged but still in the same house, were on the verge of separating, according to friends and relatives quoted in the affidavit. Ellen Robb had retained a divorce lawyer, they said, and was planning to move into a $1,500-per-month apartment by New Year’s Day. According to a real estate agent who had met with her, Ellen Robb said she expected to receive $4,000 in […]
GUILD MEMO: 71 Inquirer Employees Given Pink Slips
By now you know the very sad news that the Company laid off 71 of our colleagues from the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom earlier today.The Company met with most of the victims of its layoff. Those who were laid off also met with consultants who described their pension and health benefits as well as a job counseling service hired by the company. In the immediate future the Guild is seeking more people who will volunteer to be laid off. Volunteers who are accepted by the Company are entitled to full severance, accrued vacation and personal and holiday time. Their health coverage […]
Why Being TIME’S PERSON OF THE YEAR Makes You A Hero To Most But It Doesn’t Mean Shit To Me
BY THE EDITOR: In the 90s, William Kristol was one of those Scaife-funded right-wing ankle-biters, part of the same pathological Clinton Hater cabal that helped Gingrich kill health care reform dead. Nice guys. They got what they had coming when the got their subpoenas caught in the rusty fly of impeachment. Since 9/11 Kristol’s morphed from Fox New’s avuncular pro-war Guy Smiley to shrugging quagmire apologist to one of those guys insisting the way to lower the body count is to send in more bodies and somehow remains gainfully employed as a right-wing talking head. Here he is back in […]
GOD & MAN: Dad, Was Thomas Jefferson A Jihadist? No Son, He Was A READER — Big Difference
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he’d take his oath of office on the Koran — especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values. Yet the holy book at tomorrow’s ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We’ve learned that the new congressman — in a savvy bit of political symbolism — will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson. […] Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed […]
Beloved LCB Booze Boss Resigns In Protest Of Fast Eddy’s Double Cross, Turns Out Harrisburg Is A Sleazy Speakeasy Of Backroom Deals And Bullshit As Usual
The man credited with revolutionizing the way Pennsylvania sells alcohol is quitting his job. Jonathan Newman, who took the state-run monopoly and brought it into the modern era with a series of customer-friendly moves, is expected to submit his resignation this morning at a meeting of the Liquor Control Board. Newman’s exit comes just a few weeks after he publicly disagreed with Gov. Ed Rendell’s decision to name a new chief executive officer at the LCB. Former Sen. Joe Conti [NOT pictured, left] was tapped for the $150,000 a year job. Newman makes a little more than $67,000 a year. […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
Novelist Robert Stone Discusses Prime Green: Remembering The 60’s On Today’s Fresh Air FROM PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: It’s a long, strange trip that’s navigated in this engaging memoir. Novelist Stone (A Hall of Mirrors) recounts his salad days from a stint in the navy in the late 1950s to a desultory trip to Vietnam as a correspondent during the disastrous 1971 invasion of Laos. Stone largely sat out the civil rights and antiwar movements and cops to no ideology beyond “ordinary decency.” His bailiwick was the relatively apolitical counterculture, which dawned for him when he took in Coltrane, Lenny Bruce and […]
FOX AMERICANA: When You Just Need To Go Some Place Warm And Get Away From Stone Cold Reality For A While
In another incident that month, interrogators wrapped a bearded prisoner’s head in duct tape “because he would not stop quoting the Koran,” according to an FBI agent, the documents show. The agent, whose account was corroborated by a colleague, said that a civilian contractor laughed about the treatment and was eager to show it off. The reports amount to new and separate allegations of religiously oriented tactics used against Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. After an erroneous report of Koran abuse prompted deadly protests overseas in 2005, the U.S. military conducted an investigation that confirmed five incidents of intentional and […]
ALL POLITICS IS LOCO: Perzel Gets Punk’d In Soft Palace Coup
Suddenly, swiftly, without warning, the veteran Northeast Philly lawmaker is positioned to impact reforms in Harrisburg, kids with disabilities and the relationship between his city and his state. Thanks to a strange cascade of events, O’Brien, a 30-year Republican incumbent first elected to the House at age 23, now runs it. Even though the House is Democratic. And his election came outta nowhere. In an unprecedented political turn of the screw, he became House speaker yesterday by a 105-97 vote, ousting the wily John Perzel, a fellow Northeast Republican with whom he’s had an arm’s-length relationship for years. He ascends […]