What’d you do? John McCain made his priorities clear, making kissy-face with the Foreign Minister of Iraq and stressing the necessity of a 100-year lease on American military bases in Iraq while Obama filled sandbags to help save an American city.
TRAGIC: Cops Seize 52 Pounds Of Harmless Vegetation
By STEPHANIE FARR Philadelphia Daily News Six men who were busted with 52 pounds of marijuana in Upper Darby on Saturday are finding that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. [Obligatory bad drug pun in the lede, because, hey, pot busts ARE FUNNY, setting up law enforcement source for…] “They’re in a black hole,” said Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood. [ …the punchline. Good one, Mr. C.] Upper Darby narcotics detectives, state police and members of the Delaware County Drug Task Force were overcome by the stench of $90,000 worth of marijuana [NOT pictured, above] when […]
KILLADELPHIA: Wouldbe Teacher Snuffed In S. Philly
INQUIRER: Beau Zabel, 23, came to Philadelphia from Minnesota six weeks ago, eager to experience urban East Coast living and to become a math teacher in the city school system. He found a place to live through roommates.com in South Philadelphia near the Italian Market, and took a temporary job at the Starbucks at Fourth and South Streets.He recently updated his page on myspace.com, which proclaims his optimism: “Just waiting for life to begin.” But his life ended at about 1:30 a.m. today, when police said Zabel was ambushed as he walked home from the midnight shift at the coffee […]
THE AMERICAN GULAG: McClatchy Publishes Hard-Hitting Overview Of Gitmo, Who’s There, How They Got There, And Why Most Shouldn’t Be
BY TOM LASSETER OF MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens and perhaps hundreds of men whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments. McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees along with a number of local officials, primarily in Afghanistan, and reviewed available U.S. military tribunal documents and other records. Most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals, the McClatchy investigation found. At least seven […]
WORTH REPEATING: Riddle Me This
Reckoning ÷ Crooked Rain Crooked Rain = Around the Sun? BY JONATHAN VALANIA Twenty-four years ago — let’s just pause and think about that for a sec, 24 years ago! — R.E.M. released Reckoning. It was the much-anticipated sophomore release by the underground’s then-favorite sons of the South. The album made good on the kudzu-crusted promise of the band’s bewitching and ultimately confounding debut Murmur, radiating a murky but hopeful aura to an alt-world grown weary of punk’s safety-pinned doom and goth’s spider web of gloom. “I’m the sun and you can read,” they sang, or at least that’s what […]
MAILBAG: What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?
DEAR PHAWKER, I spent a month in the medical unit at George W. Hill. I did not see the sun the entire time. We were only allowed out of our cells for showers and phone calls. We were supposed to be allowed to go to the gym once a week, which happened once the whole time I was there. While in custody I became suicidal and the psychiatrist at the prison said that “I could cost the prison 1 million dollars if I was successful”. There was a gentleman who screamed 12 hours a day. The guards would let him […]
PHENO BARBIE DOLL: Cindy McCain’s House Of Pain
[Illustration via 23/6] SALON 1999: GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s wife Cindy took to the airwaves last week, recounting for Jane Pauley (on “Dateline”) and Diane Sawyer (on “Good Morning America”) the tale of her onetime addiction to Percocet and Vicodin, and the fact that she stole the drugs from her own nonprofit medical relief organization. It was a brave and obviously painful thing to do. It was also vintage McCain media manipulation. But both of Cindy McCain’s staged, teary drug-addiction confessions have been vintage John McCain. His MO is this: Get the story out — even if it’s a […]
FLAG DAY: If Betsy Ross Worked At Staples
DESIGN & INNOVATION: What do you get when you combine Flag Day, the home of America’s most famous flagmaker and 8,000 Post-It® Super Sticky Notes? The world’s largest American Flag made of Post-it Notes, say officials at Philadelphia’s Betsy Ross House — and you can be a part of the action. This Flag Day, Saturday, June 14, the Betsy Ross House will be the site of a Guinness World Record attempt. The Post-It Note flag will be assembled on panels that will then be laid out to form the traditional “Betsy Ross Flag” with 13 stars arranged in a circular […]
ACQUITTED: The Last Temptation Of R. Kelly?
NEW YORK TIMES: CHICAGO — It took more than six years for prosecutors to get the R&B star R. Kelly into court on charges of child pornography. It only took a few hours for a jury to declare him not guilty on all 14 counts. Mr. Kelly had been accused of making a 27-minute sex tape with an under-age female. But a high-powered defense team convinced the jury of nine men and three women that the identity of the girl was not conclusive. As the verdicts were being read on Friday, the singer started crying and whispering “Thank you Jesus, […]
IOWA: Wake Of The Flood
ASSOCIATED PRESS: CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) – Hospital patients in wheelchairs and on stretchers were evacuated in the middle of the night as the biggest flood Cedar Rapids has ever seen swamped more than 400 blocks Friday and all but cut off the supply of clean drinking water in the city of 120,000.
All Of This Happened While You Were Sleeping
FAMILY CIRCUS: The Ellen Powell Tiberino Memorial Museum, Last Night.[Photos by ROZA FRYKOWSKA]
ROMEO VOID: Never Say Never
Circa 1983. Might like you better if we slept together? Genius, pure genius.
CINEMA: WTF Is Happening?
DEADLINE HOLLYWOOD: Also beaten up badly has been the other newcomer this weekend, M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated horror thriller The Happening from 20th Century Fox. The Mark Wahlberg starrer started out No. 2 Friday even after film critics and writers alike seemed intent on reviewing the writer-director-producer instead of the movie. (Only 11% positive on Rotten Tomatoes.) With a nasty tell-all book and several film flops behind him, Shyamalan no longer is the popular suspense moviemaker celebrated for his early hits like The Sixth Sense and Signs. Instead, he’s been branded as the hopelessly arrogant has-been, with media outlets […]