MOTHER JONES: Here’s a chart showing the trajectory of non-defense discretionary spending over the past 50 years. This is basically the spending that’s left over after you take out Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Pentagon, and interest on the national debt. MORE THE ECONOMIST: Here’s a fun fact: non-defense discretionary spending was equal to 3.6% of GDP in 1963. It was also equal to 3.6% of GDP in 2008. It is not behind the increase in government spending as a share of the economy over that time period. It has not made government any less affordable. It is not projected […]
CINEMA: Prairie Home Companionship
CEDAR RAPIDS (2011, directed by Miguel Arteta, 86 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC If you can’t wait for The Hangover 2, Ed Helms has returned to the screen with a solo hangover, playing a child-like insurance agent partying for the first time in Cedar Rapids. Consistently amusing, if too familiar to feel truly inspired, Cedar Rapids pushes the outrageousness, yet never catches you by surprise. Cedar Rapids is directed by the Miquel Arteta, who wrote his acclaimed debut, Star Maps, in 1997. Since then, Arteta has since made character-driven comedies with others scripts, most memorably Mike White, […]
Radiohead Moves Up Release Date Of King Of Limbs
Radiohead have moved up the digital release of their new album “The King Of Limbs” by 24 hours with the album now being sent to those who pre-ordered it earlier this week. It is also available for new orders through www.radiohead.com at a fixed price of $9 for MP3, $14 for WAV. With everything ready on their website, the band decided to bring forward the release rather than wait until the previously announced date of Saturday, Feb 19 to deliver the music. Orders for “The King Of Limbs” “Newspaper Album” special edition are also still being taken at www.radiohead.com . The […]
Ginned Up Wisconsin ‘Budget Crisis’ Is The Gulf Of Tonkin In The GOP’s War On The Middle Class
TALKING POINTS MEMO: Wisconsin’s new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker’s collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times. The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures — service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money — rolling back worker’s bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker’s doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately. Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state’s fiscal bureau — the Wisconsin equivalent […]
COMING ATTRACTION: Next Week, Get Blotto
EDITOR’S NOTE: Next week Phawker will begin publishing installments of Lance Doily’s gonzo memoir BLOTTO: The Outrageous Misfortunes Of A Jersey Beer Truck Driver. We will run a new one every day next week to give readers a sense of what it’s all about and then a new one every Monday after that. Now, here’s Deeney with some of the backstory on Mr. Doily and how his screamingly hilarious memoir came to the attention of Phawker… BY JEFF DEENEY The first question people generally ask me about Phawker’s newest contributor/ Jersey beer truck driver Lance Doily is how the fuck […]
INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO: How To Be A Lobbyist
Hint: When preparing bribes gifts for public officials, always wrap them in cold, hard cash!
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
Sunlight Turning Van Gogh’s Sunflowers Brown
TIME: It would appear that in this instance Vincent van Gogh’s art is imitating life. Conservationists have long been interested in finding the reason why some of van Gogh’s paintings of vibrant, yellow sunflowers have been turning brown over time and they seem to have a made a breakthrough. It seems that van Gogh occasionally mixed his yellow paint with white powders in order to brighten the hues. Unfortunately, since the white powders were sulfate-based, over time, the addition had a reverse effect. As the Guardian reports, “The researchers found that sunlight kicks off a chemical reaction that ultimately turns […]
Jury Begins Deliberations In ‘Cash For Kids’ Case
ASSOCIATED PRESS: A jury began deliberating Wednesday in the public corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania juvenile court judge accused of taking millions of dollars from the builder and owner of youth detention centers, a scandal known as “kids for cash” that resulted in the dismissal of thousands of convictions Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella, 61, faces a 39-count federal racketeering indictment that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. A prosecutor said in his closing argument Wednesday that Ciavarella violated the public trust by taking $2.8 million in kickbacks and extortion payments, using youth […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Dan Dunn, Playboy’s The Imbiber
BY LAURA WESTERMAN Hunter S. Thompson once said “there is no honest way to explain [the Edge] because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” For Playboy “Imbiber” columnist Dan Dunn, these words are both a cautionary warning and an irresistible dare. He’ll be in town on Thursday to promote his new book Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour, a heady cocktail of booze expertise and sexual misadventure. His tales of drunken hook-ups, barroom brawls in Ireland, all-day benders and Bible-driven mosh pits […]
WTF: Your Daily Dose Of ‘I Can’t Believe It’s News’
—Delco mom duct tapes baby to chair, takes picture (SEE left), shows police who don’t think it’s so funny –Half of all Phils’ home games could be sold out by Friday —Scott Brown reveals to 60 minutes that he was repeatedly sexually abused by a camp counselor when he was 10 —Steve Jobs screws the pooch on tablet-based publishing subscriptions — Prison officials dispute USA Today claim that O.J. Simpson was severely beaten in prison by white supremacists for bragging about bedding white women —Justin Bieber says what no U.S. politician has the balls to say: American health care system […]
SUMMER FICTION: Throw Your Arms Around Me
PREVIOUSLY: Gimme Fiction
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR In March, Twitter will turn five years old. The microblogging service — which now has an estimated 200 million users worldwide — has been used by heads of state, astronauts in outer space and protesters in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia trying to disseminate information after news media crackdowns in their respective countries. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins Fresh Air’s Terry Gross on Wednesday for a wide-ranging discussion about the service, including how it was used recently in Egypt to help organize the revolution and how it has been used to spread democracy movements in other countries. “How a […]