POLITICO: Pennsylvania state House Republican leader Mike Turzai [pictured, below right] said this weekend that the state’s new voter ID law will “allow” Mitt Romney to win the state in November, according to a report. “Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done,” Turzai said at Saturday’s Republican State Committee meeting, according to PoliticsPA.com. Pennsylvania Democratic Party spokesperson Mark Nicastre told the website that the Republican House Majority Leader’s “admission that Voter ID only […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: Being Alec Baldwin
Photo via Men’s Journal FRESH AIR Alec Baldwin stars in two movies this summer — and they couldn’t be more different. In Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love, Baldwin joins an ensemble cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Roberto Benigni and Penelope Cruz as they romp around the Eternal City — running into trouble, weathering existential crises and falling in — and out — of love. Meanwhile, in Adam Shankman’s Rock of Ages, the big-screen adaptation of the jukebox Broadway musical, Baldwin dons long locks and joins Tom Cruise, Russell Brand, Bryan Cranston, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in homage to ’80s […]
EXTRA! EXTRA!: Mr. Phawker Goes To Washington
DAILY NEWS: We’re surprised he cleared Secret Service security, but Phawker.com editor Jonathan Valania was at the White House on Friday interviewing President Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, about his love of indie-rock veterans Guided By Voices. The interview is to appear in the October issue of Magnet. Like the local music magazine, which had been on hiatus, Guided By Voices is also back, after more than five years apart, and plays the Trocadero (1003 Arch) on July 6. Carney revealed his affinity for the Ohio-based Robert Pollard and his GBV cohorts last year. The interview was rescheduled a […]
MAN VS. BABY: Steve Volk Gets Pregnant
PHILLY MAG: The plan was to drink a few beers and listen to a couple of friends talk about fatherhood. Both had new babies, around nine months and four months old, respectively, and I hoped the conversation would confirm my own, slowly blooming desire to be a father myself. “So, let’s hear it,” I said, after we sat down and ordered our first round. “Tell me all about the joys of fatherhood.” One friend, who is dark by nature, averted his eyes and stared at the table. The other snorted derisively. And over the next half hour they talked about […]
DEENEY: The Antivirals Of Violence
BY JEFF DEENEY FOR THE NATION CeaseFire works through aggressive peer-led street outreach by ex-offenders with deep ties to the community, who gather intelligence on gangs in order to spot potential conflicts. Such conflicts are then mediated by the program’s famed violence “Interrupters.” At its peak, CeaseFire Chicago employed fifty outreach workers and fifty Interrupters, chosen from pools of candidates screened by professional and community panels to ensure they’d left the hustling life. Statisticians analyze the data gathered by outreach teams alongside data tracking violence collected by law enforcement, identifying up-to-the-moment crime hot spots, and focusing the program’s resources […]
EARLY WORD: Still Sicko After All These Years
Join filmmaker Michael Moore, whistleblower and Deadly Spin author Wendell Potter, and American SiCKO’s Donna and Larry Smith, Reggie Cervantes, Billy Maher, Julie Pierce, Lee Einer, Dawnelle Keys, Adrian Campbell Montgomery, and others. Celebrate how SiCKO changed the conversation on health care reform in America and hear the latest on the movement for health care justice from leaders around the country. Minimum donation $40.00. All proceeds to benefit the health care reform efforts of Vermont’s Public Assets Institute and Healthcare-NOW. Questions? 802-223-6677 or sarah@publicassets.org. MORE Saturday, June 30, 2012 Plays and Players Theater 1714 Delancey Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 7:00pm […]
CINEMA: This Time It’s Personal
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER (2012, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, 105 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I guess we all had a chuckle back in 2010, when we heard the title Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith’s follow-up to his previous literary re-fashioning, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Sustaining that chuckle through a summer blockbuster is a tall order, even for the statuesque rail-splitter from Illinois. While the great man was able to heal the nation, sadly Lincoln can’t bring together this surprisingly straight-faced mash-up of historical fact and fantasy fiction. We all know part of the story: […]
OUT ON ASSIGNMENT: Redacted
I’ll be out of the office all day on assignment. Something crazy f*cking cool is going down, but I can’t talk about it yet because I promised Dan Gross an exclusive. You’ll find out on Monday.
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Uruguay Legalizes Marijuana To Fight Crime And Fund Rehabs
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Uruguay is planning a novel approach to fighting rising crime: having its government sell marijuana to take drug profits out of the hands of dealers. Under the plan backed by President Jose Mujica’s leftist administration, only the government would be allowed to sell marijuana and only to adults who register on a government database, letting officials keep track of their purchases over time. Profits would reportedly go toward rehabilitating drug addicts. MORE LATINO FOX NEWS: Uruguay’s government has opted for the “regulated and controled legalization” of marijuana in the South American country as a crime-fighting measure […]
HOT DOC: Statement From Radiohead
>STATEMENT FROM RADIOHEAD Hello everyone, As you will probably have heard the roof over the stage collapsed at our show in Toronto killing crew member Scott Johnson and injuring three other crew members. The collapse also destroyed the light show – this show was unique and will take many weeks to replace. The collapse also caused serious damage to our backline, some elements of which are decades old and therefore hard to replace. Whilst we all are dealing with the grief and shock ensuing from this terrible accident there are also many practical considerations to deal with & consequently we […]
OK, Who Broke Twitter? You Are In BIG Trouble!
Just realized that Tweeting about Twitter being down is like the sound of one hand clapping. Weird, innit? MERCURY NEWS: Twitter, the popular microblogging service, experienced technical difficulties Thursday morning that kept users from posting or accessing the site. The San Francisco company posted a message on its Status blog around 9:30 a.m. Pacific time that read “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.” The site began having issues about 9 a.m. Pacific time Thursday morning, timing out for those attempting to access the website. Just after 10 a.m., users in […]
CONCERT REVIEW: The Hives @ The E-Factory
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER The Hives aren’t an arena rock band, they just play one on stage. All faux-bluster, comic petulance and winking self-aggrandizement, they evoke the high dudgeon of Diver Down-era Van Halen upon having learned that the brown M&Ms have not been exiled from the backstage banquet. But unlike Van Halen, they play it strictly for laughs. The prime driver of these immensely entertaining delusions of grandeur is the band’s sassy, boyish front man, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, a born entertainer with lungs of leather, a certain Jagger-ian grace, and large expressive eyes that could have […]
Win Tix To See Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy @ The Troc
Will Oldham remains an elusive figure, but the show is a gentle reminder of why he is often cited as one of the finest singer-songwriters in contemporary American music. Oldham was a student of music history, clearly, but he never sounded studious. He had an eerie, strangulated voice, half wild and half broken. And he sang vivid and peculiar songs, which sometimes sounded like old standards rewritten as fever dreams or, occasionally, as inscrutable dirty jokes. These days, he calls himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and his music is a little bit easier to love and a lot harder to […]