Feds Not Saying Dick About Old City Porn Raid
INQUIRER: The Old City headquarters of a lucrative web of companies providing Internet sex videos and telephone sex chat was raided Wednesday by federal and state authorities. Law-enforcement agents descended on the offices of National A-1 Advertising and National A-1 Internet at 106 S. Seventh St. in the morning and did not leave till after 8 p.m. A U-Haul van was backed up to the entrance of the building and box after box of evidence was handed from agent to agent into the van until they reached a box labeled “#81.” Some of the boxes were labeled “operator/chat logs.” Others […]
TEA FARTY: Joe Miller Drops To Last Place; O’Donnell Is Melting…Melting; Olberman Lowers The Boom
POLITICO: After several rough weeks on the campaign trail, a new poll out of Alaska shows Republican Joe Miller has fallen to last place in the three-way Senate race. A Hays Research Group poll released Thursday showed write-in candidates, presumably meaning Sen. Lisa Murkowski, in the lead with 34 percent, Democrat Scott McAdams with 29 percent and Miller with 23 percent. Murkowski is waging a write-in bid since losing the Republican primary to Miller. Miller’s plunge in the new poll comes on the heels of several misfires in the local and national press. Most recently, Miller’s employment records from […]
ARRESTED: For Drinking Coffee While Democrat
HUFFINGTON POST: A Democrat was arrested by local police at a public meet-and-greet event for Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Monday, with three men pulling him out of the building and pushing him to the ground for allegedly causing a disturbance in the coffee shop. Jon Taylor, the man at the center of the controversy, said he was “manhandled” by police from Louisa, Va. He and three other Democrats — including his wife, who held a sign promoting Cantor’s Democratic opponent Rick Waugh — went to the event with the intent to ask Cantor questions since he has refused to […]
Iverson Signs $4 Million Deal To Play Ball In Turkey
NBC PHILADELPHIA: Longtime 76er Allen Iverson has agreed on a two-year, $4-million contract with the Turkish team Besiktas, reports the Associated Press. He’s expected to officially sign with Turkey this week, according to the AP. The 35-year-old, 11-time all star struggled to remain in the NBA but with no team wooing him, he’s found himself ready to suit up for the Turks. The Besiktas are considered third among the three most powerful franchises in the Turkish first division and start league play over the weekend. Besiktas have a strong following in Turkey, and team officials believe Iverson could be an […]
56 S. Philly Cars Vandalized In Overnight Acid Attack
NBC PHILADELPHIA: The vandalism happened around 3 a.m. leaving resident with a rude awakening Tuesday morning as they found that dozens of cars on the 200 and 300-blocks of Jackson and Wolf Streets in South Philadelphia were damaged. Paint-rotting acid was dispensed on driver and passenger sides of each car by two teens or young men believed to be using squeeze bottles out the side of a car, cops said. The vandals were brazen considering that a police van was parked on one corner, said police. Police had no suspects or motive as of Tuesday night. They were however focusing on two white teens or young […]
REALITY CHECK: Follow The Mysterious Money
[Click To Enlarge] NPR: They have ambiguous names, like the 60 Plus Association and Americans for Job Security. They style themselves as independent, grass-roots organizations. But many of the groups behind this year’s political attack ads are tightly interconnected. MORE RELATED: A year ago, two top Republican strategists sat down for lunch at the venerable Mayflower Hotel, five blocks from the White House, calculating how to exploit the voter anger they had seen at Democratic town hall meetings that summer. Today, the money-raising success of the GOP-allied attack led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Karl Rove-inspired American […]
The Corporate Takeover Of The Supreme Court
THINK PROGRESS: In an unfortunate interview with Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr, Justice Stephen Breyer rejected the notion that the Roberts Court is unusually pro-corporate because business interest “have always done pretty well.” Yet a new empirical study by the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center demonstrates that Breyer is mistaken. The study compares the right-wing Chamber of Commerce’s win-rate since Justice Alito joined the Court in January of 2006 to their win-rate twenty-five years ago, and the results are clear and undeniable. […] Significantly, this ideological shift in favor of corporations appears to be driven entirely by the Court’s conservative members. While a […]
RIP: Paul The Octopus Dead At Two
[Illustration by CHRIS MOOLAY] YAHOO: Paul, the oracle octopus who shot to fame in the World Cup this summer for his uncanny ability to predict the results of Germany‘s soccer matches, has died at his home in Oberhausen at the age of two. English-born Paul made headlines across the globe after he correctly forecast how Germany would fare in seven matches, before his psychic powers were tested again for the final. After Germany’s semi-final defeat, Paul tipped Spain to beat the Netherlands in the final, which prompted one news agency to report he had spurred a jump in demand for […]
REALITY CHECK: 8 Commonly Held Voter Fallacies
[via TRUTHOUT] 1) President Obama tripled the deficit. Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion. 2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy. Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been. 3) President Obama bailed out the banks. Reality: While many people conflate the “stimulus” with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry […]
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: Shari’a And The Law
STANLEY FISH: Law professors Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney have now put together a volume, to be published in 2011, under the title “Shari’a in the West,” a collection of learned and thoughtful essays by some of the world’s leading scholars of religion and the law. The volume’s central question is stated concisely by Erich Kolig, an anthropologist from New Zealand: “How far can liberal democracy go, both in accommodating minority groups in public policy, and, more profoundly, in granting official legal recognition to their beliefs, customs, practices and worldviews, especially when minority religious conduct and values are not congenial […]
PLUTOCRACY: The Useful Idiocy Of The Tea Party
MOTHER JONES: It’s unfathomable why a conservative, but still mainstream, business magazine would publish something so reckless, false, and bigoted? For a clue to the answer, consider a data point from the Congressional Budget Office (PDF). If you are in the bottom 80 percent of American households, you’ve gained essentially no economic ground in the past three decades. Those of you lucky enough to be in the top 20 percent ($100,000+) might be heartened by the trajectory of the red line on the chart at right—but sorry: The vast majority of those gains have actually gone to the top 1 […]
SPORTO: It’s Not Easy Being Green
BY MIKE WOLVERTON SPORTS GUY Sometimes you’ve got to envy the bandwagon fans, the ones that come along in the playoffs and manage to feel (or at least display) almost as much joy from success as the diehards. Their great advantage is that they really don’t care as much about the losses, since they aren’t that emotionally invested in the first place. These kinds of fans were able to look at the TV schedule this weekend, take a look at the weather outside and decide to enjoy one of the last quality weekends of the year. The diehards holed […]