HUFFINGTON POST: New York City police used unnecessarily aggressive tactics and excessive force against peaceful protesters and illegally suppressed press freedoms during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, an eight-month investigation by a group of attorneys found. Those conclusions were based on hundreds of hours of video footage, detailed witness interviews, and extensive firsthand observations of the protests, according to the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, which detailed the findings in a nearly 200-page report released Wednesday. The group, which includes attorneys from Harvard, Stanford and Rutgers law schools, called on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to launch an independent […]
TELEVISION: This Just In
BY DAVID CORBO When it comes to well produced, oft-times intelligent, edgy and entertaining television, HBO has proven itself to be a prime purveyor of fine goods. Now the cable network has teamed with Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Moneyball) to produce The Newsroom, an inside look at a cable news station’s attempt to crawl out of the ratings fray and win back its integrity by disseminating the truth and debunking the lies, a la Don Quixote. Populated with a cast that includes Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterson, Emily Mortimer and Jane Fonda the series, now in its sixth week, […]
DRUG WAR HYPOCRISY: Reason #37 Why We Will Be Voting For The Green Party This Time Around
ABC NEWS: Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama never tried to say he didn’t inhale. In his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.” He would smoke it here and there. He would smoke it anywhere. Now a soon-to-be published biography by David Maraniss entitled “Barack […]
PUNCHLINE: Man Paid $144 Million To Throw Ball
YAHOO SPORTS: The Philadelphia Phillies have agreed to give Cole Hamels so much money that he won’t even bother to file for the expected bonanza that comes with free agency. For a sum of $144 million over six seasons, Hamels becomes the second-richest pitcher in major-league history after CC Sabathiaof the Yankees. Hamels’ deal, first reported by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, will be made official Wednesday at an afternoon press conference in Philly. At $24 million a season starting in 2013, Hamels will make as much annually as teammate Cliff Lee, who is signed through 2015. When you […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Kristin Hersh @ WCL
Artwork by JAMES ORMISTON Kristen Hersh is a renaissance woman – singer, rocker, writer, mother, photographer, storyteller, business woman and chronicler of lost ballads. The last few years have produced Crooked, one of her best solo albums and her fascinating head trip of a memoir Rat Girl – a year in the life of an edgy teen on the dual cusps of indie-rock stardom and motherhood. A musical chameleon and one of the most underrated guitar players of the last 20 years, Hersh is equally at home interpreting old time murder ballads, performing solo folky-stylee or fronting one of two […]
WORTH REPEATING: Splendor In The Grass
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE Back in the 20th century, the capacity to present classical music concerts free-of-charge in publicly-owned civic spaces under starry summer skies was one of the primary determinants of a municipality”s level of civility. It’s what separated us sophisticated city folk from the tin-eared heathens of podunk. Usually this gratis dispensation of high culture to the lumpen proletariat was the providence of an impresario who was able to move heaven and Earth and marshal the resources of both City Hall and the swells that made it all possible. In Philadelphia, it was one Frederic […]
State Admits Voter ID Is A Law In Search Of A Crime
NPR: When Pennsylvania officials begin their defense of the state’s new voter identification law in court Wednesday, they will do so after agreeing to abandon a central argument for why such laws are needed. In a Pennsylvania court filing, the state says it has never investigated claims of in-person voter fraud and so won’t argue that such fraud has occurred in the past. As a result, the state says, it has no evidence that the crime has ever been committed. The state also says it won’t present “any evidence or argument” that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur […]
GUNCRAZY: The Banality Of Evil*
Illustration by ALEX FINE “I wanted to draw something more to do with Holmes’ mental illness and less to do with Batman so I came up with this image. It just struck me how normal he looked as a teen and how — with the way the gun lawa are currently structured — seemingly normal people can buy assault weapons and kill you any time they feel like it. And, according to the latest Gallup Poll, we like it this way”. — ALEX FINE THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS KILLED BY GUNFIRE SINCE 9/11: 281,757 [SOURCE: Politifact] THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS […]
BOOKS: Q&A w/ Jim Knipfel, Ex-Slackjawed Local
BY MIKE WALSH Jim Knipfel came to Philadelphia in the late 80s with no job prospects, little ambition, and zero professional writing experience. But he did have a wicked sense of humor and a mocking distaste for everything held sacred in modern day America, and he soon found a way to leverage that nihilism into a column he wrote for six years for the now-defunct Welcomat (which morphed into the Philadelphia Weekly) called Slackjaw. By the early 90s he’d moved to the Big Apple and the column started running the New York Press and it would continue to do […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Wilco @ The XPoNential Fest
Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER It has often been said that Wilco is the American Radiohead — an edgy 21st Century rock band whose audience only seems to grow the more they challenge it. But less remarked upon is the more obvious fact that they are also the new Grateful Dead — populist guarantors of the heartland verities of cosmic Americana. So it makes perfect sense that Wilco should headline the second night of the XPoNential Music Festival, curated by WXPN, a radio station that has astutely bridged the divide between edgy and crunchy and, […]
CINEMA: Apocalypse Wow!
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012, directed by Christopher Nolan, 164 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC When word came that director Christopher Nolan was filming the latest installment of the Batman franchise amidst the Occupy protests outside of Wall Street last fall, the mind reeled. The best blockbusters, and that surely includes Nolan’s own entries into the genre, have found a way to divine the hopes and fears of our national id, because how else are you going to charm hundreds and millions of dollars from the public anyway? With the national narrative of the 2008 financial collapse still […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Let Them Eat Cake
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY “And that’s all they’re going to get.” Quoth the man who would be President upon being asked by a reporter about his lack of customary disclosure of several years tax returns as well as his reaction to criticism of the conflicting paper trail surrounding his involvement with Bain Capital, plus his failure to explain in any up-front manner the justification for his ownership of off-shore bank accounts in the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Never before in the annals of presidential campaigning has a major-party candidate so blithely shot such a tall and rigid […]
HELLFIRE & BRIMSTONE: As The Candle Burns
Goodnight Mr. Burns, wherever you are.