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.
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Rep. Michele Bachman officially threw her hat into the presidential ring on June 27. Since then, the Minnesota congresswoman has emerged as a Republican front-runner, riding on a wave of Tea Party support and national media appearances. New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza spent four days with Bachmann and her staff aboard their campaign jet in mid-June. On Tuesday’s Fresh Air, he talks about his unprecedented access to the congresswoman, whom he profiles in the Aug. 15, 2011, edition of The New Yorker. The piece looks at the writers, beliefs and books that Bachmann has specifically mentioned as […]
CINEMA: Destination Further
Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s MAGIC TRIP is a freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to […]
MASTERPIECE THEATER: Beyond Good And Evil
BY ALEX POTTER With the new Midnight in Paris enjoying generous commercial and critical success, many critics are looking back on Woody Allen’s career and asking themselves when Allen last executed something so well. Crimes and Misdemeanors, originally released in 1989, appears to be the consensus. Crimes is two stories that have nothing but the theme of adultery and a blind rabbi in common. Martin Landau plays Judah, a successful ophthalmologist, and Allen, the unsuccessful filmmaker, Cliff. Both men have reached breaking points in their marriages. Many people may find that the two narratives, which could stand alone as two […]
SIDEWALKING: Under The Boardwalk
Wildwood, NJ, last week by SCOTT COLAN