Times Square after dark by JEFF FUSCO *** BONUS: Sidewalking, The Movie by JEFF FUSCO
AS IT WAS WRITTEN: Rick Perry & The False Prophets
[Illustration by MARIO ZUCCA] TEXAS OBSERVER: Is Rick Perry God’s man for president? Schlueter, Long and other prayer warriors in a little-known but increasingly influential movement at the periphery of American Christianity seem to think so. The movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation. Believers fashion themselves modern-day prophets and apostles. They have taken Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on ecstatic worship and the supernatural, and given it an adrenaline shot. The movement’s top prophets and apostles believe they have a direct line to God. Through them, they say, He communicates specific instructions and warnings. When mankind fails to heed the […]
THE WAR ON DRUGS: Baby Missiles
The War on Drugs “Baby Missiles” from Secretly Jag on Vimeo. The new album, Slave Ambient, comes out Tuesday on Secretly Canadian, they play JBs on Thursday and we’ll have our super-sexy stoner-iffic Q&A with them up on Wednesday!
S&P: Tea Party Assholism Triggered Downgrade
POLITICO: A Standard & Poor’s director said for the first time Thursday that one reason the United States lost its triple-A credit rating was that several lawmakers expressed skepticism about the serious consequences of a credit default — a position put forth by some Republicans. Without specifically mentioning Republicans, S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji said the stability and effectiveness of American political institutions were undermined by the fact that “people in the political arena were even talking about a potential default,” Mukherji said. “That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable,” he added. “This kind […]
“I am a Floridian. Born and raised in Seminole County. I have a huge crazy family. I’m 28 but act like I’m 17 most of the time. I love to farm and shoot guys and wreck cars. I’m a redneck and proud of it. I like milk and German engineering and causing mayhem with my siblings.”–Lee Grace Dougherty*
ABC: Lee Grace Dougherty, the Florida stripper who led her two brothers in a cross country manhunt, told police after she was wounded and captured, “I deserved to get shot.” Lee Dougherty, the oldest of the trio of heavily armed siblings, appeared in court today by video along with her two brothers, Ryan Dougherty, 21, and Dylan Dougherty Stanley, 26. They were ordered held on $1.25 million bail each. They were captured in Colorado on Wednesday after a 20 mile car chase with speeds up to 120 mph with one of the Doughertys allegedly firing an AK-47 assault rifle at […]
JACKIE OH: The President Killed My Husband
DAILY MAIL: Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal. The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him. She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy. Texas-born Mr […]
PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX:Judge Gets 28 Years
[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 […]