REUTERS: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has opened up a 10-point lead over Republican opponent John McCain two weeks before the November 4 U.S. election, according to Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released on Tuesday. The poll found 52 percent of voters favor Obama compared with 42 percent for McCain, up from a 6-point Obama edge two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported. The 10-point lead is the largest in the Journal/NBC poll to date and represents a steady climb for Obama since early September, when the political conventions concluded with the candidates in a statistical tie, the newspaper […]
WORST OF THE WORST: Bush Passes Buck On Gitmo
LA TIMES: Chalk it up as one last big win for Vice President Dick Cheney and his secretive — OK, that’s redundant when talking about a Cheney guy — chief of staff, David Addington. Remember when the U.S. Supreme Court last June rejected President Bush’s policy of holding foreign prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said the men had a right to seek their freedom before a federal judge? Remember when the president said in August 2007, “it should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantanamo?” (Of course, he added, closing it is easier said than done.) […]
NYT Nails Backstory On Inky Endorsementgate
NEW YORK TIMES: On the same page that the newspaper published a 901-word editorial supporting Mr. Obama, it ran just beneath it a 391-word dissent in support of Mr. McCain. […] So what happened? Brian Tierney, chief executive of the company that owns The Inquirer, Philadelphia Media Holdings, and who sits on the newspaper’s editorial board, would not say. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Tierney would only say, “We don’t talk about what goes on on the editorial page.” Harold Jackson, the editor of the editorial page, also would not discuss the deliberations or vote total, but did say […]
GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK: Bachmann’s McCarthyism Overdrive May Cost Her Re-Election
WASHINGTON POST: Those comments, made to Chris Matthews on “Hardball” last Friday, alleging that Barack Obama held “anti-American” views immediately lit up the blogosphere, energized the campaign of former Blaine Mayor Elwyn Tinklenberg (great name! -Ed.) and turned Bachmann’s race from an afterthought into one of the most high profile House races in the country. Tinklenberg has raised more than $800,000 in the aftermath of Bachmann’s comments and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee communications director Jen Crider has called this a “$1 million mistake” on the part of the Republican incumbent. The DCCC, sensing opportunity, began airing an ad hitting Bachmann […]
SIDEWALKING: Cellphoning It In
PHYSICAL GRAFFITTI: Men’s Room Wall, Drug Court, 1401 Arch St. 3:43 PM [Photo by JEFF DEENEY]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Nobel laureate Paul Krugman believes that increased public spending — akin to the efforts of the New Deal during the Great Depression — is the best way to escape the financial crisis and regain American global leadership. In his Oct. 16 column in The New York Times, Krugman writes, “It’s politically fashionable to rant against government spending and demand fiscal responsibility. But right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold.” Paul Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and the […]
Q&A: The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA If there’s anything missing from Stephin Merritt’s encyclopedic oeuvre — a kitchen-sink catchall that includes everything from wry country twang and sincere synth pop to tortured torch songs and prancing show tunes — it’s Stephin Merritt. A remarkably dexterous stylistic quick-change artist — for my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll pull the Human League out of Cole Porter’s top hat — he’s a master illustrator of character sketches, meticulously cross-hatching two-minute melodramas out of the delicacies and detritus of 20th-century popular song. But for all their rapier-like wit and chameleonic genre-hopping, Merritt’s […]
EARLY WORD: Let’s All Go To The Lobby, The Lobby
And get ourselves some snacks!
INGLORIOUS BASTARD: Meet Lieutenant Aldo Raine, Nazi-Hunting Hillbilly Jew & Dead Ringer For Brad Pitt
WIKIPEDIA: Entering the 21st century, director Quentin Tarantino had been penning several scripts, including one for the World War II adventure film Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino described the premise in October 2001, “[It’s] my bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission film. [It’s] my Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare or Guns of Navarone kind of thing.”[5] The premise had begun as a Western and evolved into a World War II version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly set in Nazi-occupied France. The story changed to be about two maverick units from the United States Army that had “a habit of scalping Germans” before changing […]
OUR DUNGEON IS SCARIER THAN YOUR DUNGEON: Eastern State Penitentiary Voted Scariest Haunted House In The Entire Recorded History Of Scary
[Photos by JAMES G. MUNDIE] PR NEWSWIRE: AOL City Guide has ranked Terror Behind the Walls as the No. 1 Haunted House in America. “To be chosen by America Online as the number one haunted attraction in the country is the pinnacle achievement for a haunted attraction,” said Timothy Gavinski, President of the International Association of Haunted Attractions (IAHAWEB.com). “The AOL list represents the best of the best and this top honor is rightly deserved by Eastern State Penitentiary’s Terror Behind the Walls.” Eastern State Penitentiary, located at 22nd Street and Fairmount Avenue in Philadelphia, has scheduled a Pumpkin Champagne […]
ARTSY: Vlad The Impaler Was A Pain In The Neck
Vlad The Impaler [courtesy of the ROSENBACH MUSEUM] ‘Tis the season of the macabre, what with Halloween right around the corner and John McCain trying to scare as many white people as possible, and nobody was more macabre than Vlad The Impaler, the historic template for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As governor of a region of what is modern-day Romania, Vlad was one of those guys that today we would refer to euphemistically as a ‘strong leader.’ A real hardcore ‘law and order’ kinda guy, Vlad ruled with an iron fist, or, more accurately, a sharp stick. According to Wikipedia: His […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Lee Atwater, the political operative who ran George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign — and introduced the nation to Willie Horton — was a man with a knack for bare-knuckle campaigning and a voracious appetite for life. A “guitar-picking rascal from South Carolina,” in the words of documentary filmmaker Stefan Forbes, Atwater could seem like a conundrum: He could share a nightclub stage with legendary bluesman B.B. King on the one hand while masterminding “vile and racist” political dirty tricks on the other. But these are the well-known things about Atwater: For his film Boogie Man: The Lee […]
HOT DOCUMENT: The Revolution Will Be Digitized
RADIOHEAD: IN RAINBOWS SALES DATA REVEALED Little more than a year since Radiohead’s October 10, 2007 pay-what-you-like self-release of its seventh album, In Rainbows, some conclusive statistics were made available at the recent “You Are In Control” conference in Reykjavik, Iceland.For those who missed coverage of the conference while engrossed in something as trivial as the Presidential Debates or the world economic collapse, the following is a summation of key answers to FAQs:* In Rainbows has sold three million copies thus far, a figure that includes downloads from Radiohead.com, physical CDs, a deluxe 2-CD/vinyl box set, as well as […]