“Yesterday, a coalition of major city unions, clergymembers, library users, and community leaders stood together to announce a class action lawsuit to halt the shutdown. But to insure that the courts hear lawsuit effective, we need members of City Council join us as plaintiffs. So click here to ask your district and at-large city council members to join in the suit. Under a law that requires council approval for closing city-owned facilities, the Mayor’s unilateral action to close the libraries is illegal.So click here to tell your council members to stand up for their own rights, and for our libraries, […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Path Of The Righteous Man Is Beset On All Sides By The Tyranny Of Evil Men
NEW YORK TIMES: WHEN HE WAS 12 YEARS OLD, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN saw a local production of “All My Sons” near his home in Rochester, and it was, for him, one of those rare, life-altering events where, at an impressionable age, you catch a glimpse of another reality, a world that you never imagined possible. “I literally thought, I can’t believe this exists,” Hoffman told me on a gray day in London early in the fall. He was sitting in the fifth row of the audience at Trafalgar Studios in the West End, where he was directing “Riflemind” (a play […]
WHO WANTS TO KILL A MILLIONAIRE: Fatcats Continue To Lead ‘Life Of Riley’ On Taxpayer Dime
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits in 2007, an Associated Press analysis reveals. The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages. Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the review of federal securities documents found.The total […]
CH-CH-CHANGES: RIAA To Stop Suing Customers, Warner Music To Take The Led Out Of YouTube
WASHINGTON POST: The Recording Industry Association of America is taking a dangerous step with its decision to stop suing suspected music sharers and start cutting off their Internet access instead. While the discontinuation of the lawsuit practice has its merits, the move opens up a whole new can of worms — one that could have serious implications for our future rights as consumers of information. On the one hand, the shift — revealed Friday, initially in a story published in The Wall Street Journal — does mark the end of a troubling and generally ineffective process. RIAA’s past practice of […]
WEEKEND UPDATE: The Good News Flower Hour
The Good News Flower Hour #4 Folks, here’s the latest installment of The Good News Flower Hour, wherein I provide the voice for a flower that reads the news. The debut is HERE and the last couple episodes are HERE and HERE. We are still tweaking the concept and streamlining the production schedule on these — it takes a LONG-ass time to make these little three-minute suckers — but we hope to make this a weekly feature in the very near future. Enjoy.
GAYDAR: Jingle Bells, Batman Smells
[Photos by THOMAS SHEEDER] BY AARON STELLA Some people just get more Christmas than others this year. While the Scrooges of Wall Street help themselves to the bailout buffet, us Cratchets must fight to make ends meat, much less a “Merry Christmas” (and it’s ‘Happy Holidays’ now, by the way). Even the shrewd, business-savvy Jews are barely scraping by; at least that’s the case in the Dumpsta Players’ destitute portrait of the Lipshitz family. This year for Christmas, trash-glitz drag troupe the Dumpsta Players showed their sympathy to the millions going without this Christmas in “A Very Lipshitz Christmas” on December 18th […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward talks about FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt — a.k.a. “Deep Throat,” the secret source who helped Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Felt died Dec. 18 at the age of 95. A long-kept secret, Felt’s identity as Woodward’s source was revealed in the July 2005 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Woodward later detailed his clandestine meetings with Felt in the book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. Woodward’s latest book is The War Within: A […]
CINEMA: Beyond The Shadow Of
DOUBT (2008, directed by John Patrick Shanley, 104 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Producer Scott Rudin has demonstrated a show of faith by putting acclaimed playwright John Patrick Shaley in the director’s seat for the first time in eighteen years to helm the film adaptation of Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning religious drama, Doubt. The Oscar-winner screenwriter of Moonstruck gave up film directing eighteen years ago after directing the cult bomb Joe Versus the Volcano. While placing faith in Shanley’s unimaginative direction may have been misguided, it is not enough to sink a film with a script whose writing is […]
ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN: ‘Deepthroat’ Dead At 95
NEW YORK TIMES: W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif. In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had […]
ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING: Papers Declare Al Franken ‘Projected Winner’ Of Minnesota Senate Seat
HUFFINGTON POST: Democratic challenger Al Franken finds himself on the cusp of winning a seat in the United States Senate after Minnesota’s canvassing board awarded him a host of challenged votes during deliberations on Thursday. As of 8PM ET, the Minneapolis Star Tribune projected that Franken would finish the recount process with a lead of 89 votes, positioning him to become the 59th senator caucusing with Democrats in the upcoming Congress. The gains came as the canvassing board sifted through hundreds of ballots that Coleman had contested during the recount process. On Friday, the canvassing board will consider another 400 […]
MUST SEE: The Three Stooges As Iraqi Journalists
[TheFlickeringWindow: At a news conference with President Bush, three knuckleheads are caught in a custard conspiracy involving pies and cream puffs. The three men are identified as Howard, Fine, and Howard.] * ASSOCIATED PRESS: The investigating judge in the case of the Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at President George W. Bush says the man shows signs of being beaten. Judge Dhia al-Kinani said Friday that the journalist had bruises on his face and around his eyes.The journalist, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, was wrestled to the ground after throwing the shoes during a Sunday news conference with Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister […]
EARLY WORD: CocaineSexJams For The Broke
DAVE P: YES!!! CSS has decided to move their show from the TLA this Friday so that they can play the Making Time $2 Bill Holiday Freakout.This Holiday party will surely be a total RAGER!!! And YES!!! It’s still just $2!!! RELATED: MillerCoors LLC will stop producing and marketing caffeinated alcoholic drinks, including the current formulation of its top-selling Sparks brand, under a settlement with more than a dozen state attorneys general. The beer giant had come under fire from attorneys general and consumer-advocacy groups for allegedly targeting underage drinkers through its marketing of Sparks. “Attorneys general from around the […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Composer Erran Baron Cohen‘s latest CD Songs in the Key of Hanukkah offers a new take on traditional sounds. He talks about the album — and about collaborating with his brother Sacha Baron Cohen on the movie Borat. Recorded in London, Berlin and Tel Aviv, the compilation of songs combines klezmer, reggae, electronica and hip hop as it reinterprets classics. The album even features New York rapper Y-Love rhyming in Yiddish. Erran is a founding member of ZOHAR Sound System and DJ’s internationally and in London clubs. ALSO, you have to be pretty dedicated to your work to set […]