BREAKING: Lady Bird Johnson Dead At 94 AUSTIN, Texas — Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady who championed conservation and worked tenaciously for the political career of her husband, Lyndon B. Johnson, died Wednesday, a family spokeswoman said. She was 94. As first lady, she was perhaps best known as the determined environmentalist who wanted roadside billboards and junkyards replaced with trees and wildflowers. She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to beautify Washington. The $320 million Highway Beautification Bill, passed in 1965, was known as “The Lady Bird Bill,” and she made speeches and lobbied Congress to win […]
RIP: Pulitzer-Winning Cartoonist Doug Marlette
NEW YORK TIMES OBIT: Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist who also created “Kudzu,” the popular syndicated strip, died yesterday in a car accident in Mississippi. He was 57. A cartoonist who was unafraid to offend, Mr. Marlette was known for shocking his audiences with his pointed work. “His cartoons would make you stand up when you were reading the paper,” said Mike Peters, a friend and fellow cartoonist best known for the “Mother Goose & Grimm” comic strip. And offend he did. In 2002, when he drew a cartoon showing a man in Arab headdress driving a […]
The Super Plastic Fantastic All-Star Home Run Derby
BY MIKE WOLVERTON SPORTS GUY I’ll admit I haven’t watched the All-Star Home Run Derby in a couple years. It’s kinda boring. But I sat through it last night as a service to you, and because everyone knows that reading about the All-Star Home Run Derby is even MORE fun than watching it, I wrote up this running account. You’re welcome. And here’s what happened: Hosted this year at Candlestick Park AT&T Park in San Francisco, the Derby started with a live performance from (Lord have mercy) Counting Crows, singing their marginal hit “Accidentally in Love.” Sorta undermines the notion […]
KILLADELPHIA: Council To Sue State For Insanity
Philadelphia City Council members Darrell L. Clarke and Donna Reed Miller, stonewalled by the Pennsylvania legislature’s continued apathy on gun control, said they would sue the state today for Philadelphia’s right to enforce its own, stricter firearms laws. In what has been regarded as a legal long shot, the lawsuit will seek to force the state House and Senate to do what they have refused to do: allow the city to force owners to immediately report stolen guns and to set monthly limits for firearms purchases, among other things. INQUIRER: Court-Ordered Common Sense?
GUVNER: Rendell Calls Critic Crazy As A Cannibal
“I think [Rendell] believes he has a mandate to pillage, but he won 61 percent of the vote against an empty suit last year and he didn’t have a clear agenda until June 30,” added Eric Epstein, a Holocaust scholar, nuclear power watchdog and founder of the public interest group Rock the Capital. The comments set Rendell off. He called an Inquirer reporter fuming that the paper gave Epstein any ink at all. “Eric Epstein,” boiled Rendell, “is about as mentally stable as that guy who ate all those people.” It was unclear whether the governor was referring to Jeffrey […]
‘I Am Not A Terrorist, I Just Play One On The Internet’
Mark Reynolds [of Wilkes-Barre] was arrested by the FBI at a snow-covered highway rest stop in Idaho on Dec. 5, 2005, according to the federal government, after going to the spot to pick up $40,000 he believed was payment from al-Qaeda. Reynolds has maintained that he is not a terrorist but rather was pretending to be one online to capture jihadists determined to attack America. In October 2005, Reynolds first caught the attention of Shannen Rossmiller, a former Montana judge who hunts and ensnares extremists on the Internet. Rossmiller testified Monday that Reynolds had solicited help from al-Qaeda on the […]
VIET NOW: This Is A Metaphor
An American soldier tries to feed a starving Iraqi puppy an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) but the dog is so crazed from hunger he won’t even let the GI get near enough to open the package. Does that remind you of anything?
TODAY I SAW…
BY JEFF DEENEY “Today I saw…” is a series of nonfiction shorts based on my experiences as a caseworker serving formerly homeless families now living in North and West Philadelphia. I decided not long after starting the job that I was seeing so many fascinating and disturbing things in the city’s poorest neighborhoods that I needed to start cataloging them. I hope this bi-weekly column serves as a record of a side of the city that many Philadelphians don’t come in contact with on a daily basis. […]
NEWS CLUES: It’s Like Adderall For ADD Newshounds
WORST HARVEY WALLBANGER EVER The trial of a 57-year-old Burlington County, NJ woman charged with murdering her brother-in-law by serving him a concoction of fruit juice laced with antifreeze is underway in Mt. Holly. The Shamong Township woman is charged with preparing a fatal cocktail of fruit juice and antifreeze that resulted in the death, three years ago this week, of 58-year-old Jonathan Neabor of Old Bridge, NJ. During one of two of her taped confessions, she told a state trooper that she wanted only to sicken Jonathan so he would come and live with the family to provide financial […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: This Is Your Radio On Drugs
FRESH AIR Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ranks as one of the U.S.’s leading addiction researchers. She’s helped demonstrate that addiction is in fact a disease — a disease of the brain — and that all addictions, whether it’s to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sex, gambling or even food, are more alike than was previously thought. Volkow, who’s the great-granddaughter of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, grew up in Mexico City — in the house where her famous ancestor was assassinated. PLUS, food scientist Massimo Marcone travels the world’s remotest corners to investigate bizarre food “delicacies”: cheese […]
GOOD RIDDANCE: Dyson Leaves Penn For Georgetown
Michael Eric Dyson, the acclaimed author and noted thesaurus abuser “hip-hop intellectual,” moved on to Georgetown University Tuesday to teach religion, culture, and society, Georgetown University said in a statement. “I am not leaving the University of Pennsylvania as much as I am going to Georgetown,” said Dyson during a phone interview yesterday. Dyson was in New Orleans getting ready to speak at the Essence Musical Festival, a multiday event that attracts rappers and politicians alike. Dyson has become a superstar academic within hip-hop circles and the pop-culture arena. Most hipsters know his name from his 2001 book about rap […]
INSTA-REVIEW: Interpol’s Our Love To Admire
NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO BY ED KING ROCK SNOB I must apologize for buying into the whole Joy Division comparison thing with this band. There were a dozen lesser gloom bands around the time of Joy Division who hit on similar notes. Interpol has more in common with those bands; they’re a pop band dressed in black, not some awkward punk beast like early Joy Division, which was perversely tamed by gifted producer Martin Hannett before their untimely end. That’s OK, and seeing Interpol in this light makes them “Pretty good for this kind of music” rather than a […]