Little Rock, Ark. — As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee aggressively pushed for the early release of a convicted rapist despite being warned by numerous women that the convict had sexually assaulted them or their family members, and would likely strike again. The convict went on to rape and murder at least one other woman. In 1996, as a newly elected governor who had received strong support from the Christian right, Huckabee was under intense pressure from conservative activists to pardon Dumond or commute his sentence. The activists claimed that Dumond’s initial imprisonment and various other travails were due to […]
NEWS CLUES: It’s Like Adderall For Your Eyeballs
Italian Court Orders Tweety Bird, Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck Testify ROME, Italy (AP) — Tweety may get a chance to take the witness stand and sing like a canary. An Italian court ordered the animated bird, along with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and his girlfriend Daisy, to testify in a counterfeiting case. In what lawyers believe was a clerical error worthy of a Looney Tunes cartoon, a court in Naples sent a summons to the characters ordering them to appear Friday in a trial in the southern Italian city, officials said. The court summons cites Titti, Paperino, Paperina, Topolino […]
NEWS CLUES: It’s Like Adderall For Your Eyeballs
Supremes Say City Council Has NO Say Over Casino Built In, Um, The City SugarHouse has won a major victory in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in its fight to build a casino on Philadelphia’s waterfront. The high court has ruled in favor of SugarHouse Casino in its battle with city council over zoning and other necessary approvals. Councilman Frank DiCicco has led the casino fight in council. His spokesman is Brian Abernathy: “We were surprised – maybe not shocked, but certainly surprised. More than anything, I think we’re outraged by the court’s decision.” Abernathy, who says he interprets the high […]
PAPERBOY: Bowlers, Bugs and Bullets Edition
BY AMY Z. QUINN We know how it is: so many words to read, so little time to surf for free porn. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you, freeing up valuable nanoseconds that can now be better spent ‘roughing up the suspect’ over at Suicide Girls or what have you. Every Thursday 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 you towards the gooey caramel center of each edition. Why? Because we like you. ON THE COVER CITY PAPER: […]
SECOND OPINION: Being I’m Not There
BY CARRIE RICKEY INQUIRER FILM CRITIC Much as I admire [the] performances, and much as I respect Haynes’ attempt to create something deeper than the standard movie biopic, I left the theater scratching my head, thinking, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, “There’s no there there.” It’s an enigmatic movie about an enigma — not unlike a boring song about boredom. Thankfully, Haynes successfully avoids replicating the biopic’s standard arc of struggle/flameout/phoenix rising from ashes, the cliche of every VH-1: Behind the Music episode. While structurally ambitious, his six actors in search of one character — or actors representing different […]
HOT DOCUMENT: HOW COULD ANY MAN WITH THIS MANY FRIENDS BE AN ENEMY?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: BILAL Press Release for Journalists Tuesday, November 27, 2007 Today over 1850 professional photographers and journalists from over 90 countries sent once again a petition to the U.S. Government demanding the immediate release of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein. Bilal Hussein was detained by US Forces in Iraq on April 12, 2006, and has been held in prison ever since without charges. This week, the US Military informed The Associated Press that they plan to seek a criminal complaint against Bilal before an Iraqi court on Nov. 29. Despite the fact that the US Army had said […]
WHY BEING TIME’S ‘PERSON OF THE YEAR’ MAKES YOU A HERO TO MOST BUT DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME
The sad, slow self-inflicted deflation of Time’s Joe Klein: Thus, for now, I just want to ask that everyone ponder the extreme lack of professionalism and corruption required for someone like Klein to write the article that he did accusing Democrats of wanting to give Terrorists the same rights as Americans (therefore showing, as always, that Democrats can’t be trusted on national security), and then — once he is exposed for having spewed outright falsehoods — he announces that he really isn’t interested in bothering to find out (and isn’t even capable of determining) if anything he wrote was accurate. […]
HOT DOC: The Free Press Needs Your John Hancock
FROM ATTYTOOD: The cool graphic comes from a Web site urging that Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer Bilal Hussein, detained by U.S. forces in Iraq for 19 months, be released unless he can be charged and tried under American standards of criminal justice. The site is called FreeBilal.org, and you can sign a petition calling for Bilal’s release. I have signed it, and I urge anyone else who cares about a free press that is keeping Americans informed, and about the applying the rule of law to all people, to sign it as well. The head of the Associated Press, Tom […]
Public Service Announcement: The Naked & The Dead
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MEDIA: When Is A Hamster Just A Hamster?
Last Monday, we called foul on PW’s Holiday Guide cover depicting vermin dressed up as an orthodox Jew. PAPERBOY EXTRA: Separated At Birth? Bad ideas have a way of making friends in low places, but shit like this shoulda never made it up the ladder. The image on the right is easy enough to find, just Google “rats” and “Jews”; the image on the left is the cover of this week’s PW. Frankly, we think it should have been the euthanized before it got beyond “Hey, what if we…” stage. Given the long and well-documented history of vicious anti-Semites — […]
MEDIA: Mayor Nutter Butter Meets The Gray Lady
Michael Nutter, who takes office in January, offered plans to declare crime emergencies in Philadelphia’s most violent areas. BY IAN URBINA OF THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: November 23, 2007 PHILADELPHIA — The day after Michael Nutter won a landslide victory to become this city’s next mayor, he put on a charcoal gray suit and drove to his first public event: the funeral of a police officer shot in a brazen daytime robbery. Two nights before he announced his choice for police commissioner, two more officers were shot and wounded. When Mr. Nutter takes office on Jan. 7, he will […]
WORTH REPEATING: Squandering The Peace Dividend
BY JOHN BRUHNS We watched as legislation that had no substantial impact on ending the war was debated. There ARE anti-war resolutions still floating out there that call for a real end to the war, but the groups I worked for wouldn’t spend one dime to promote legislation considered out of the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Any genuine anti-war message was filtered through media consultants who provide politically correct “talking points” to veterans for them to carry out a phony message that is beneficial to the campaign. We threatened Republicans with “political extinction” if they didn’t change their votes […]