ABC NEWS: Do not try to look up “Internet Censorship” or “SOPA” or “PIPA” on Wikipedia, the giant online encyclopedia, on Wednesday. SOPA and PIPA are two bills in Congress meant to stop the illegal copying and sharing of movies and music on the Internet, but major Internet companies say the bills would put them in the impossible position of policing the online world. Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, says his site will go dark for the day on Wednesday, joining a budding movement to protest the two bills. “This is going to be wow,” Wales said on Twitter. “I hope […]
AUDIO TAPE: Captain Fled In Lifeboat While Passengers Drowned On Sinking Ocean Liner
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Five more bodies were pulled Tuesday out of the crippled cruise ship off Tuscany, and a shocking audio emerged in which the ship’s captain was heard making excuses as the Italian coast guard repeatedly ordered him to return and oversee the ship’s evacuation. Prosecutors have accused Capt. Francesco Schettino of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship before all passengers were evacuated during the grounding of the Costa Concordia cruise ship Friday night. […] Schettino has insisted that he stayed aboard until the ship was evacuated. However, a recording of his conversation with Italian Coast Guard Capt. […]
COLBERT SUPERPAC: Mitt Romney Is A Serial Killer
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Colbert Super PAC Ad – Attack In B Minor For Strings www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive ABC NEWS: The harshest attack against Mitt Romney to yet hit the South Carolina airwaves is coming not from his GOP rivals, but from comedian Stephen Colbert , whose Super PAC is up with a 60-second spot accusing Romney of being a “serial killer.” The harshly-worded ad spares no drama, showing a butcher carving up a carcass and a limp pair of feet being ominously dragged around a […]
DEENEY: On Race, Sobriety And The Good Lord
BY JEFF DEENEY: Susan was a crack addict and prostitute whose life was saved by Jesus Christ. That’s what she would say when you met her; she had no compunction about sharing details of her sordid past because the Lord cleansed those sins from her. Christ may have removed the sins but he left much of Susan otherwise unchanged after she got clean; at 35, she looked at least a decade older, her graying hair matched by a haggard expression—all testimony to her many years on the Philadelphia streets. She still had a hot temper and a foul mouth lacing sentences with […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: The New Jim Crow
FRESH AIR Under Jim Crow laws, black Americans were relegated to a subordinate status for decades. Things like literacy tests for voters and laws designed to prevent blacks from serving on juries were commonplace in nearly a dozen Southern states. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. She says that although Jim Crow laws are now off the books, millions of blacks arrested […]
KILLADELPHIA: Brutes Bash Temple Grad’s Brains Out On The Steps Of The Second Bank Of America
INQUIRER: Just before 2:25 a.m. Saturday, Kless and two female friends were walking on Chestnut Street near Fourth Street when he tried to hail a cab. The bars had just let out, and the three had just left Lucy’s Hat Shop Restaurant & Lounge a few blocks away. The cab’s rooftop lights were on, signaling it was available, but there were passengers inside, and the taxi didn’t stop. Police said Kless yelled, “Turn off your f-ing lights. A maroon Mazda with four men inside drove up behind the cab as traffic likely slowed briefly. The people in the Mazda may […]
LIFE LESSONS: The Cure For Sweat Shops
AP Ticker explains how a GLOBAL MINIMUM WAGE would put an end to sweat shops and the migration of fairly paid labor to places on the planet where the poor and the uneducated (which often means CHILDREN) are made de facto slave laborers for the United States and Europe.
SIDEWALKING: F*ck Art, Let’s Dance
Zoe Strauss 10 Years Dance Party, Philadelphia Museum Of Art, 11:19 last night, by PETER CRIMMINS PREVIOUSLY: Wowie Zoe
GONE FISHIN’: Be Right Back
[Artowrk by JASON SEILER] We’re heading down to Nashville to hang out with the Black Keys — more on that later — we should be back in business Monday, God willing and the creeks don’t rise.
SIDEWALKING: She Was A Fast Machine
Springdale Road, Cherry Hill, 8:02 AM by JEFF FUSCO
EARLY WORD: Wowie Zoe
South Philly photographer Zoe Strauss has come a long way since she received a camera as a gift in 2000–so far, in fact, that an exhibition of 150 of Strauss’s photos (titled Zoe Strauss Ten Years) opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this Saturday night. Despite the amazing achievement of a museum show for Strauss, she also convinced the museum and Clear Channel to finance the placement of 54 of her photos around Philly on billboards, substituting the unreal optics of advertising with the real thing. PMA managed to bring her inside, but in the process, Zoe managed to […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: I, Misanthrope
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY A question from a friend (to whom I attribute perhaps unwarranted powers of observation) following a recent discussion on the sorry state of Republican politics got me to wondering just how my true sentiments concerning that cauldron of cacophony, callousness and cowardice should “properly” be categorized. The question was, “When did the symptoms of your misanthropy first appear?” Well, although momentarily taken aback, I quickly realized that perhaps an opportunity “too good to refuse” had just been dropped into my proverbial absence of a lap. So, with albeit a little skirting of the issues now and then, and […]