[Illustration by JOHN COLE] CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: A former juvenile court judge in Pennsylvania was sentenced to 28 years in prison on Thursday for his part in an alleged “kids for cash” scam considered one of the worst judicial scandals in US history. Mark Ciavarella Jr., 61, a former judge in Luzerne County, was also ordered to pay $1.17 million in restitution. Mr. Ciavarella was convicted in federal court in Scranton, Pa., in February on charges that he and a second judge, Michael Conahan, ran the local court system as a racketeering enterprise. The federal indictment says the two judges […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR The human cost of World War I was enormous. More than 9 million soldiers and an estimated 12 million civilians died in the four-year-long conflict, which also left 21 million military men wounded. “Many of them were missing arms, legs, hands, genitals or driven mad by shell shock,” says historian Adam Hochschild. “But there was also a human cost in a larger sense, in that I think the war remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way: It ignited the Russian Revolution, it laid the ground for Nazism and it made World War II almost certain. […]
YOU CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PEOPLE SOME OF THE TIME: But Not All Of The People All Of The Time
Romney tells a crowd of GOP voters that ‘corporations are people, my friends.’ Crowd laughs in his face. You hear that? That’s sound of scales falling from eyes. ASSOCIATED PRESS: One questioner asked the GOP presidential candidate what he would do to strengthen Social Security. The voter didn’t like Romney’s pledge not to raise taxes, and interrupted him. Romney pointed angrily at the crowd and told them to give him a chance to answer. After a minutes-long exchange with Romney and the crowd shouting over each other, Romney said, “If you want to speak, you can. But it’s my turn.” […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Wages Of Austerity
NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Cameron was good at selling people on the idea of cutting costs, but he has failed to make the case for what and how to cut: efforts to increase university fees, to overhaul the National Health Service, to reduce the military and the police, even to sell off the nation’s forests, have all backfired, with the government hedging or simply abandoning its plans. In attempting to carry out reform, the government appears incompetent; it has lost legitimacy. This has prompted some people living on Kingsland Road to become vigilantes. “We have to do things for ourselves,” […]
Activists Storm Wrong Councilman’s Office, Get Loud
PHILLY CLOUT: More than a dozen marchers bee-lined their way up to Councilman Brian O’Neill’s office on the 5th floor with huge signs and a blaring blow horn to demand a meeting. Education advocate Emmanuel Bussie, 45, said the group wanted to meet with O’Neill because they thought he voted against a resolution –introduced by Councilman Darrell Clarke in May –asking the Law Department to represent City Council in a lawsuit against Gov. Corbett, challenging the legality of the funding for public education in Philadelphia. Yet the protesters had it all wrong. It was Councilman Jack Kelly not O’Neill that cast the nay […]
MURDOCHRACY: How To Win Friends And Influence A Justice Department Investigation Of News Corp
GAWKER: News Corp has a much-anticipated quarterly earnings call today, following yesterday’s board meeting. The one (and only) real agenda item is to figure out how to move past the devastating UK phone hacking scandal—which means making sure it doesn’t spread to America. Fortunately, News Corp has something going for it: best friends! MORE TIME: The man tapped by Rupert Murdoch to oversee News Corp.’s internal probe of wrongdoing by the company has some elite qualifications. Viet Dinh went to Harvard and Harvard Law School, clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, served as assistant attorney general early in the Bush […]
SIGN OF THE TIMES: The Prison Industrial Complex
Today we saw an ad on the side of a SEPTA bus advertising a service from Just Talk Communications [screen grab from their web site above] that enables you to receive collect calls from inmates in prison. The ‘you’ is presumably family, friends or lovers, as well as ‘business associates.’ Just Talk would argue that they are providing a valuable service, facilitating communication between prisoners and their loved ones, which may well be true, but we cannot help but feel profoundly bummed that it’s come to this: that incarceration has become such an integral and permanent fixture of life for […]
FIGHT CLUB: Steve Albini Is NOT A Fan Of Odd Future
ELECTRICAL AUDIO: I spent about 40 minutes with these little pricks at the end of May and I haven’t wanted to strangle anybody that much in a real long time. […] My band shared an airport shuttle with them in Barcelona. They piled onto the shuttle late, after finally getting corralled by their minder, who was nursing a head wound with an ice bag wrapped in a towel. They piled in, niggering everything in sight, motherfucking the driver, boasting into the air unbidden about getting their dicks sucked and calling everyone in the area a faggot. Then one of them […]
TOOMSDAY: Toomey Named To ‘Super Congress’
WASHINGTON POST: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday announced their picks for the 12-member super committee charged with tackling the country’s debt problem. Of the nine members announced so far, eight voted “yes” on last week’s debt-ceiling deal — a sign that there exists at least the possibility that the panel will be able to reach a bipartisan agreement. The one delegate announced so far who opposed the debt compromise is Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). The GOP picks have scored mixed reviews from budget experts, many of whom are hoping the new […]
SHIT MY UNCLE SAYS:I Know Obscenity When I See It
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Time for a pop quiz. What do Miller v. United States (1973) and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) and have in common? Give up? They’re both landmark U.S.Supreme Court decisions involving obscenity. Whereas the former was a determination regarding obscenity per se, the latter was just patently obscene. In the former, a divided Court set forth ground rules under which the individual states could essentially determine for themselves what constituted obscenity and what did not. In the latter, four right-wingers and a semi-swinger decided that there was nothing whatsoever obscene about corporations dumping truckloads of their filthy lucre into “independent” […]
Philly Car Share Sold To Enterprise Rental Car
NEWS WORKS: Local nonprofit PhillyCarShare has announced that it has been purchased by Enterprise, the national car rental chain and the world’s largest car rental company. PhillyCarShare faced a debt of nearly $2.7 million in back taxes it owes to the state. The debt made it impossible to acquire new cars and grow the company. Sources say creditors were knocking on their doors, financing for a new fleet was impossible, and few options remained. MORE
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Jeff Deeney Live
Phawker Mean Streets Editor Jeff Deeney will be on NBC10 at 5:30 pm today discussing flash mob violence.