If armies run on their stomachs, blogs run on their big fucking mouths. We’re no exception. But we’d like to think that, on a good day, we put all that hot air to good use when interrogating visiting dignitaries in advance of their triumphant arrival into the City Of Brotherly Love. We’ve never pretended to have all the answers but we do know all the right questions. And we’ve never settled for easy answers to hard questions. Sometimes feelings get hurt and sometimes new connections are made. Sometimes painful truths emerge and sometimes we actually learn something. And sometimes we […]
SMUS: A Confederacy Of Thieves And Whores
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY You pretty much know that morality, ethics, and even the faintest of hopes for universal fairness in this country are on ventilators when one of our most “respected” newspapers becomes willingly complicit in (a) the final auction gavel on the American electoral system, and (b) facilitating a national financial crisis so cataclysmic as to make the last one look like a rent check overdraft. How interesting it is that the Boston Globe should feel that getting an omnibus spending bill passed — ANY kind of omnibus spending bill — is worth caving in to the treacherous, money-grubbing interests of America’s premier purveyors of […]
GUNS N’ ROSES: Viva La Normalización!
Artwork by SHEPARD FAIREY NEW YORK TIMES: Alan Gross was the obstacle that would not be moved — the American contractor whose imprisonment in Cuba kept relations between the United States and Cuba locked in place, as paralyzed as a seized transmission. Now, in both Washington and Havana, the obstacle has been removed as the rusty gears of Cold War diplomacy have begun to move. Mr. Gross’s release on Wednesday, in conjunction with the release of three convicted Cuban spies held in the United States, amounts to a collective break from more than 50 years of distrust, anger and inertia. […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: The Benjamin
Artwork by WORKBYKNIGHT BY WILLIAM C. HENRY On November 18th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the complete destruction of the home of the Palestinian man who on October 22nd had driven a car into an Israeli crowd resulting in two people dead and several injured. None of the man’s surviving family members who occupied the house were in any way suspected of involvement in the attack. Who knows, maybe Elohim privately beseeched the “Minister” to add a bit of crushed brick and mortar now and then to offset all the calf and lamb fat. Too profane for your palate? Somehow I doubt the surviving family […]
BECAUSE REALITY HAS A LIBERAL BIAS: Q&A W/ Comedian & ex-Totally Biased Host W. Kamau Bell
Illustration by GARY TAXALI© BY JONATHAN VALANIA Comedian W. Kamau Bell has been fighting the good fight in the stand-up comedy trenches of San Francisco since the phat pants ’90s. It was there that Chris Rock discovered him and eventually brokered a deal with FX for Bell to have his own TV show. In 2012, Totally Biased, a much-buzzed-about late night sketch comedy show starring Bell and produced by Rock, debuted to strong reviews and a big enough viewership to justify a second season until its ill-advised migration from FX to FXX, subsequent plummet in audience share and ensuing cancellation […]
SMUS: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
Artwork by POASTERCHILD BY WILLIAM C. HENRY The pundits all crowed that the Republicans won a sweeping victory in the just-passed mid-term election, but in fact the REAL winners on November 4th were, in no particular order: self-defeating no-nothingness, sociopathic obstructionism, irrational fear of the other, bald-faced misogyny, seething homophobia and above all else, abject racism towards the nation’s first black President and First Lady. Yep, that’s what won out on November 4th. I’d congratulate the American Kakistocratic party (you can call them Republicans if you like) if there was even the teeniest of reasons for doing so, but, uh, well, you get the […]
WORTH REPEATING: Citizen Pierre
Illustration by MATTHEW WOODSON NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Earlier this year, Greenwald, Poitras, and a third comrade in arms — former Nation writer Jeremy Scahill — launched a website called the Intercept. It is meant to be the prototype for a fleet of publications funded by Omidyar’s flagship company, First Look Media, to which Omidyar has initially committed $250 million. “We have the luxury of doing something different because we have this kind of infinite-resource backer,” Greenwald told me on the phone from Brazil, where he is based. “We’re thinking about how to do journalism structurally differently.” At the time of […]
MALALAGATE: The New ‘Freedom Fries’
BY JONATHAN VALANIA So, the National Constitution Center went and did a dumb thing. They went and told 14-year-old Ayla Potamkin [pictured below, far right] that her love-letter-in-song to America would be featured in last week’s Liberty Medal award ceremony. More accurately, they told her rich-man father, he of the Potamkin auto dealer empire. Or even more accurately, her rich-man father’s proxies, consigliere-to-the-powerful Ed Rendell and advertising exec Elliott Curson, no doubt completing the circle of some unspoken quid pro quo started years ago, presumably when Rendell was still a political actor. But, to be clear, that’s just speculation. The […]
THE GOOD SHEPHERD: A Q&A With Globe-Trotting New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Last week we got New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on the horn to discuss his new book, A Path Appears, co-authored with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, which extols the innovative but largely un-heralded efforts of a dedicated few to leave the world a better place than they found it. Just a few days prior, Kristof had been at the center of a cultural storm that erupted in the wake of his appearance on REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER along with Ben Affleck and Sam Harris, so we gave him an opportunity to clarify some points […]
STREET POET: Meet SEPTA’s Walt Whitman
Or maybe he’s the William Carlos Williams of SEPTA. Or the Carl Sandburg of SEPTA. Either way, his name is Mark Fuller and he gives mass transit rhyme and reason. From Scrapple TV, our partners in new media crime.
SMUS: Tax Inversion = You Pay Our Share
Illustration via FINANCIAL TIMES click HERE to enlarge BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Yet another tax-avoidance tumor is metastasizing in the belly of the corporate beast. The perps themselves refer to it as “tax inversion” (truth be told, they’d really prefer that the matter not be referred to at all) but please feel free to recognize it for what it really is: Big Greed’s most brazen effort to date to avoid its patriotic responsibility and shove the nation’s tax burden even farther up the ass of a dwindling middle class! Corporate apologists like to point out that America has the highest corporate tax rate (35%) on the planet, but what they don’t say […]
This Land Is My Land, This Land Is Your Land
“I Love You But…” by BEN HEINE BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Here we go again. The Israelis and the Palestinians. The “chosen” and the forsaken. The “sovereign” and the scorned. And the beatdown goes on. OK, so what’s the problem this time?! Why can’t these Gazan goat ropers accept their lot in life? Hell, what’s so bad about life in a concentration camp? You know, what with the Israelis being only too familiar with “attempted extermination,” you’d think they’d be at least somewhat, or maybe marginally, or how ’bout just a teeny weeny bit, shall we say, “ill-disposed” to the degradation and misery of others. Apparently […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Six Years A Slave
Illustration via ETHAN PERSOFF* BY WILLIAM C. HENRY So the leader of the haven’t-done-a-goddamn-thing klan is gonna sue the President for actually getting something done because the leader of the haven’t-done-a-goddamn-thing klan wants to make it look like he and the klan are actually doing something regardless of how maliciously racist and/or utterly moronic that something may be. Confused? Don’t be. The only “something” Boehner wants to get done is to pile another layer of elephant dung on a black President in order to shore up the Republican base’s intolerance and divert attention away from the party’s ongoing abhorrent Congressional do-nothingness. While the overall storyline of this immorality play entails […]