[SOURCE: The Onion]

BILL MAHER: People are always debating, is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy: it’s a religion. You’re a religion if you do something as weird as when the Buddhist monks scrutinize two-year-olds to find the reincarnation of the dude who just died, and then choose one of the toddlers as the sacred Lama: “His poop is royal!” Sorry, but thinking you can look at a babbling, barely-housebroken, uneducated being and say, “That’s our leader” doesn’t make you enlightened. It makes you a Sarah Palin supporter. MORE

BY JAMIE DAVIS Flogging molly have been around for a while, so they know how to put on a show. Their shows are like a worship service to Ireland, drinking, and punk rock, and the crowd are there exactly for that. You have never known happiness unless you have cheered on the girl who just took a break from moshing to stand in the middle of a circle and do a jig. Friday night at the way sold-out Electric Factory, Flogging Moly played an epic two hour long set, that covered everything from songs they wrote back in the early nineties, to stuff off of last year’s “Float.” As singer Dave King put it “I hope you all aren’t planning on going anywhere after, ’cause we’re gonna be here for a fuckin’ long time if you know what I mean.” The crowd went wild. The band didn’t get tired either, punting out celtic /punk tune after tune. And of course, these are songs practically written to be played live. During classics like “Drunken Lullabies” or “What’s Left of the Flag,” the entire place turned into a seething mess as the mosh pit decided to consume the entire room. Nothing is better than screaming along with hundreds of other Irish people to a song about Ireland and drinking. And even though after a while one Flogging Molly song can start to sound like another, the show also reminded us of the fact that Dave King is a brilliant singer-songwriter, who can hold his own lyrically and musically. The acoustic portion of the set highlighted this especially, even though by the end of most of the “acoustic” songs the entire band had joined in. Their songs, while mostly just being great to sing along to, also try and go beyond the realms of drinking and women. “Float” for instance deals with old age, a seldom used topic for rock songs. With the beery shamrock power of Flogging Molly, Dave King has built something great, but he still has more to give to us musically, even beyond his band.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jamie Davis is a senior at Kimberton Waldorf High School.  He enjoys Blink-182 more than any Thom Yorke fan should.

BY ADAM BONANNI Playing the first Bioshock was a bit of a painful experience. I liken a playthrough of it to the plight of an English teacher grading the term paper of a promising student; to see a piece of work come so close to achieving what it set out to do, only to dock it for the little mistakes along the way really makes one meditate on what could have been. Unfortunately, you might have to flunk it anyway. The promise of discovering and unearthing the secrets of Rapture, an envisioned paradise of free thought and free will, built under the ocean so its citizens could escape preconceived rules and established ways of life, is one of those scenarios you could dream about for weeks. The setting is so rich, I could spend the rest of the review talking about the world and its inner workings, but there lies part of the problem; a struggle to reconcile a setting hellbent on engaging storytelling with the gameplay to match. So through all this, how did the second entry in the franchise fare? Read on to find out

GAMEPLAY
New Years Eve, 1959. Up until that point, Rapture was thriving; the socialites set in their ways, fathoms under the ocean in their city, free from rule of a government and social constraints. New advances in technology broke through, and it was discovered that a new species of sea slug around the city could be harvested to rewrite genetic information. This rewriting of an individual’s genes, over time, mutated the citizens into stronger, more versatile individuals, but transformed them into drug addicts. Civil war broke out in Rapture between two warring factions attempting to feed the addictions of the citizens, effectively destroying the city. Big Daddies, the heavily armored gargantuan police force of the city, still escort their Little Sisters around to gather genetic material from the dead to keep the wheel of Rapture turning, but for all intents and purposes, you’ve arrived in a ghost town. For the second game, your character is one of those Big Daddies, and for the most part, this doesn’t dramatically change the way the shooting element is handled. As mentioned before, the citizens found a way to modify themselves genetically, and this gives your character a variety of plasmids, as they are called. He can shoot lightning, fire, and telekinesis from his hands, just to name a few of his powers. Some are a little weaker than others, and unfortunately you can find a combination early on that you would benefit from just taking through the whole campaign. For all the variety of weaponry you find, the game doesn’t offer much incentive to put all of it to full use.

Like the first game, the shooting is solid, but unimpressive. Bioshock 2 adds different types of ammo to the guns, but the lack of variety in enemies means you probably won’t put much of it to good use. Battles with the Big Daddies and Big Sisters are more common this time around, and trust me, you can make full use of everything you have to throw at them. This is where the combat shines the brightest, although, even though you’re a lightly armored hulking Big Daddy, this doesn’t feel all that different from Bioshock 1′s fleshy protagonist. Enemies will still run at you stupidly even though they are way outmatched, and you can take roughly the same amount of hits as the human main character from the first game.

There are some traits specific to the role of a Big Daddy that end up rocking. Of course, the entire reason they exist is to protect the Little Sisters as they gather genetic material from corpses from rabid splicers, so expect to be doing this a lot. As soon as you set your sister down, an endless wave of enemies will begin advancing for the time it takes her to finish her job. These scenarios are really tight, action packed shoot outs, and ended up being way better than I thought. They force the player to make use of traps and a bit more cunning than normal, something that was teased in the first Bioshock but never fully realized. Something else that is much more fully realized this time around is the bond between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister. Ferrying her around the level and being charged with her protection makes the player feel for the little girl, and just taking in the deplorable conditions that surround you two, there’s a sense of camaraderie that the two of you are all you have in this messed up city.

That is, if you’re playing the good way.

Also making a return from the first game are the themes of moral choice. You can go through the levels like a complete bastard, murdering the little girls and harvesting them for their full potential, or instead saving them, along with a handful of other choices the player has to make. The problem is that these feel like they have an artificial impact on how the game plays out. It feels like the implications of your decisions are shoehorned into a couple of dialogue quips and scripted events, and aren’t as severe as the game would like to make them out. This is something that had some great potential, and the developers stuck to the safe way they were handled in the first game. Not impressed.

GRAPHICS/SOUND
My return to Rapture was a familiar one, mostly in part to how little the visuals have changed. It really isn’t a bad thing though; Bioshock set up a fantastic atmosphere of a waterlogged, destroyed paradise that had gorgeous fifty’s golden era feel to it. Water looks like it’s gotten a minor upgrade, and since this plays such a huge part to how Rapture looks now, it goes a long way. New is the ability to venture out into the ocean, and this offers a new perspective to the city, seeing it from the outside. Don’t expect anything revolutionary; the outside still is designed as cramped as the inside, but it gives a nice feel of spaciousness. Overall, it is an indisputably better and sharper looking game, but much of the “wow” factor is gone from the first. Level design is often a little scattershot as well. Some areas come off as looking a bit too cramped, and sometimes too much is going on visually, making it hard to take much of anything in. Few areas come off as memorable of some of the locales from the first game, and throughout the entire game, its unfortunate that you don’t stumble across any areas from the first. Just how big is this city? It made me feel like I was exploring a completely different Rapture. The score orchestrated by Garry Schyman, is used sparingly, but really hits moments of great emotional effect. Often feeling like it was lifted from a big blockbuster, it fits the mood quite well. To add to the ambiance, jukeboxes are scattered around the levels playing the oldies, which offered a good subtle reminder of the place that Rapture once was. No complaints about the sound effects, guns sound great, and voice acting is handled very convincingly.

MULTIPLAYER
Don’t bother. Elaborating on that a bit, the quick few rounds I played was an unbalanced, laggy, half baked mess of a mode that performed well within my expectations (which weren’t good). Setting the events as the civil war that brought about Rapture’s demise was a nice touch, and there are moments that really could have worked well, like the ranking system and unlockables. However, it remains fairly unpolished compared to better multiplayer offerings across any platform.

VIOLENCE
Yep, there’s alot. Blood, guts, and psychological horror, the game has it all. However, it never goes over the top just for **** sake, and it is fairly tastefully done. The ESRB rates Bioshock 2 M for Mature for Blood, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language

FINAL GRADE: B

Bioshock 2 retails for $59.99 for the Playstation 3, and Xbox 360, and $49.99 for the PC

FRESH AIR

This week, a new Johnny Cash album — American Recordings VI: Ain’t No Grave — was released to coincide with what would have been the music icon’s 78th birthday. Today, we take a look back at the Man in Black, who spoke with Terry Gross in 1997. Cash began recording albums and performing in the 1950s. His long romance with wife June Carter Cash, celebrated in the 2005 biopic Walk the Line, spanned five decades — from their early touring days to their rise as one of America’s most popular country-music couples. Cash recorded over 1,500 songs in his career, including such classic hits as “I Walk the Line,” “Ring of Fire” and “A Boy Named Sue.” He played several of his most popular songs, including “Folsom Prison Blues,” at that maximum security facility in 1968. The album based on that performance hit the top slot on the country-music charts and revitalized Cash’s career. In the 1990s, Cash worked with rock producer Rick Rubin. The two collaborated on several critically acclaimed Grammy-winning albums — two of which have been released since Cash’s death in 2003.

ALSO, Rick Rubin is perhaps best known for starting the rap record label Def Jam from his dorm room while in college, or for working with hard rock bands like Metallica and System of a Down. But starting in 1993, he entered into a creative partnership with the country legend Johnny Cash that lasted for the last 10 years of Cash’s life. Cash and Rubin called the series of albums that emerged from the collaboration American Recordings. Each album featured original compositions by Cash, traditional songs, and covers, sung by Cash, usually over an acoustic guitar arrangement. Four of the albums came out before Cash’s death in 2003, including American IV: The Man Comes Around, which featured Cash’s cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt.” Rubin has produced three albums that have been released since Cash’s death — the box set Unearthed and the albums American V: A Hundred Highways and American VI: Ain’t No Grave, which was released this week to coincide with what would have been Cash’s 78th birthday. Rubin speaks to Terry Gross about what it was like to collaborate with the country music legend. In addition to working with Cash, Rubin has worked extensively with Linkin Park, Slayer, the Dixie Chicks, Metallica, Russell Simmons and the Beastie Boys.

THE WORLD CAFE

Spoon‘s is not a Cinderella tale, in which a struggling band is plucked from obscurity and releases its bedroom-recorded debut to universal fame and fortune. Instead, the Austin group’s career has required plenty of patience and persistence. Early on, Spoon was dropped from two labels in the span of four years. But after venting its anger with a few vengeful songs, its members turned their focus back to writing tight, ingratiating pop songs — this time to more success. Spoon broke through with its third release, Girls Can Tell, and by its sixth album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, it was hitting the top of the album-sales charts. The band’s latest album, Transference, features a little bit of twang to go with a lot of clean-sounding pop constructs. Spoon will tour from now through May, moving through Europe and returning to the U.S. in time to headline NPR Music’s March 17 showcase at South by Southwest.

With your life coach, A.P. Ticker

THE CRAZIES (2010, directed by Breck Eisner, 101 minutes, U.S.)

BY DAN BUSIKIRK FILM CRITIC

This latest cycle of films about the End Times has no end in sight.  Was it the 2002 film from Danny Boyle, 28 Days Later that got this zombie apocalypse ball rolling?  I can’t remember, its been a blur of flesh-eating zombies and doomy-gloomy conclusions for years now, and hopefully there will come a day when we’ll look back at the genre and it will look as quaint and reassuring as a 1950′s Western.

Taking it on the chin this week is the All-American town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, whose citizens begin inexplicably to become glassy-eyed killers. It all starts when a town drunk turns up on the high school baseball field wielding a shotgun. Timothy Olyphant plays the sheriff who guns him down in front of a bleacher of horrified townsfolk and before he can shake his guilt-ridden conscience one Middle-American after another starts their own mindless rampage.

Haven’t we been here before? You bet. The whole thing is a remake of George Romero’s 1973 film, which itself was a re-working of the seminal zombie text Night of the Living Dead.  But director Breck Eisner’s (son of Disney exec Michael Eisner, btw) lean storytelling and eye for everyday places keeps this zombie holocaust chugging along in its own grimly entertaining way.  Eisner’s remake hints at the political depth of the original by making not just the zombies the enemies, but also the military forces — who are trying to contain the contagion and the local yahoos infected by it — who are spotted whooping and hollering at the chance to shoot and loot.  Dodging all theimpalings are the sheriff and his pregnant doctor wife (the always excellent Radha Mitchell), her cute young assistant (Danielle Panabaker) and his slowly-sickening deputy (Joe Anderson, who played bassist Peter Hook in the Joy Division bio Control).  Where Romero’s film was pointedly about the emotional upheaval of Vietnam, Eisner’s remake lacks the guts to put too fine a point on its analogy.  Sure, you could see the prison camp the townies are rounded up as a parallel on our treatment of Iraqis or you could see it as a paranoid Tea Party fantasy; it’s up to you.  Maybe that’s why the original limped through its distribution while the remake will open to millions.

One other thing about this modern Crazies that separates it from the original is the state of modern special effects.  It’s almost hard to believe watching the original today, that Romero’s films were singled out as being the most violent films imaginable.  Yes, they’re filled with violent imagery yet there is a difference in their effect that is palpable. The gore effects of the 70s were more like theatrical magic tricks, horrifying conceptually yet with a blatant fraudulence that demands the viewer engage their imagination to bring the illusion to life.  With the computer-generated violence of the type shown here, one doesn ‘t take part in that final leap of imagination; a knife slowly being withdrawn from a person’s hand is thrust in your face in a way that is more believable and sadistic without requiring any imaginative input from the viewer.  It is the difference between a game you play along with as opposed to a game that is played against you, and the former can’t help but to be more fun.

But complaining that The Crazies is too disturbingly gory is like trying to scare ants away from a picnic by throwing sugar at them.  If you’re still trying to process all this free-floating contemporary dread, The Crazies is a particularly potent and memorable nightmare of societal collapse.   The horror fan in me is pleased that the zombie holocaust genre still has legs but I can’t but help but hope the needling pressure that keeps the genre popular might abate some day soon.

TMZ: Penn — who runs the Jenkins-Penn Haitian Relief Organization — drove an hour- and-a-half with his daughter Dylan to rescue a woman and child who were trapped in rubble outside Port-au-Prince, possibly from an aftershock. An eyewitness tells TMZ Penn helped extricate the woman, who suffered leg injuries, and the child, who suffered head injuries. Penn drove them in his truck to the University of Miami hospital camp in Port-au-Prince. MORE

RELATED: She’s no George Clooney, but Britney Spears is doing her part for the Haitian relief effort — she’s donating a dress she wore at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards for auction. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: Actor Sean Penn has been charged with criminal battery and vandalism following a violent run-in with a paparazzo. Penn was captured on video attacking the unnamed photographer, who was following him in Brentwood, California, October 2009. It was later broadcast on the website TMZ.com. During the scuffle, the snapper’s camera was damaged. Penn was officially charged with the two misdemeanor counts on Friday, February 19. He faces 18 months behind bars if convicted. MORE

INQUIRER: Wynn Resorts confirmed Tuesday that it had signed a letter of intent to take control of developing and running the struggling Foxwoods Casino project. But the deal is contingent on approval from Pennsylvania gaming regulators. The Foxwoods project is at risk of losing its license for repeated delays since winning one of the city’s two slots licenses in 2006. He only offered a general idea of what he had in mind, saying it would be a one-story casino with two or three levels of parking on either side. Asked how much Wynn Resorts would spend on the waterfront site, Wynn did not directly answer, saying only it would not be “an earth-shaking number.” He said the building “will not look like slots in a box.” “It will have all the bells and whistles of a good-looking casino,” including 3,000 slot machines, table games, a poker room, an Italian restaurant, a steak house, and an Asian restaurant, he said. MORE

NEW ONLINE CASINOS: After the news of a Pennsylvania presence surfaced, investors were not quick to jump on board. On Wednesday, Wynn stock dropped $.33, or .52%. The stock closed at $63.35, still way ahead of other US-based gaming stocks. The move into Pennsylvania by Wynn could further hurt the Atlantic City casino industry. Wynn brings a well-known brand to the area, and they have been competing with the likes of MGM Mirage and other developers that own AC casinos for years. Already, Pennsylvania casinos had higher slot revenue than AC casinos in December, and table games for Pennsylvania casinos were approved by lawmakers in January. With Wynn joining the mix, the road to recovery for the AC casino industry may have just became a lot longer. MORE

BUSINESS WEEK: Wynn Resorts Ltd., the casino company founded by Steve Wynn, reported fourth-quarter earnings that missed analysts’ estimates after Las Vegas room rates tumbled. Excluding some items, profit of 8 cents a share fell short of the 14-cent average of 12 analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The Las Vegas-based company reported a net loss of $5.22 million, or 4 cents, compared with loss of $159.6 million, or $1.49 a share, a year earlier, which included additional tax costs, according to a statement today. MORE

HARTFORD COURANT: A decade and a half ago, Wynn failed in a high-profile effort to bring one of his signature casinos to Connecticut. He spent millions of dollars before losing a political fight to the Mashantucket Pequots – owners of Foxwoods Resort Casino. MORE

[Photo by ARUSHI TERWAY]

BY KISHWER VIKAAS When I first met Urmika Devi, she was a senior at Central High School who was known for both her acting skills in the drama society and her commitment to studying Indian classical dance. Almost ten years later, now a third-year law student at Temple, the 26-year old Devi has veered very little from her original interest in the arts. This Friday and Saturday she brings her dance company, Urmika Devi Dance Collective to Chinatown to present MOVING BEYOND FORM: Explorations in Rhythm & Storytelling in Classical & Contemporary Indian Dance, a show she organized in collaboration with the Asian Arts Initiative. It features Devi’s company along with dancer Annelize Machado and dance company Post Natyam Collective in works inspired by modern dance, ballet, yoga, martial arts and classical Indian dance forms including Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi and Kathak. The collaboration is unprecedented, the first of its kind to feature local dancers performing contemporary Indian dance.

PHAWKER: Tell me a little bit about your dance background. Did anyone else in your family dance?

URMIKA DEVI: I grew up immersed in the arts, thanks to my family. My aunt, who’s an art historian and also involved in the Asian Arts Initiative, would take me to see shows all around Philadelphia. While my grandmother and my mother danced, they were not trained dancers. Dancing is a very Bengali thing. There’s this idea in Bengali culture that everyone must do something creative, so after a dinner party, people sit down and sing or recite poetry or dance.

PHAWKER: When did you start dancing?

URMIKA DEVI: My mom put me in formal dance training when I was four. According to family legend, when I was a toddler, one New Year’s Eve they found me holding on to the coffee table, partying away by myself. That’s when they knew I was a dancer. I took ballet, jazz and tap lesson three days a week for about eight years. In fourth grade, I started studying Bharatanatyam, which is classical Indian dance. I would spend almost three hours every day during high school dancing. I would wake up at 6AM to go to rehearsal and then go again after school.

PHAWKER: Your show, In Dreams incorporates both classical ballet and contemporary and classical Indian dance moves. How would you describe it? Is it fusion? Is it Bollywood?

URMIKA DEVI: I don’t like the word fusion. A soup or salad isn’t fusion food. In Dreams is a 25 minute piece, the longest piece I’ve ever created. Now the movements are not so clear, not so such “Well, this is Indian, this is ballet.” It’s just dance. And it’s not Bollywood – I hate when people think Indian dance is just Bollywood. Bollywood dancing itself is not as pure. Of course when it comes to Indian dance, traditionalists will say I mutilated it since I’m a modern dancer.

PHAWKER: What is In Dreams about?

URMIKA DEVI: In Dreams is a three-part dance depicting the effect of migration on people and centers around the close relationship between a mother and a daughter. The first part begins with the pregnant daughter (played by Abigail Thompson) who has just left her parents’ home in India to move to America to be with her husband. The daughter sleeps and in her dreams, she meets her mother, who she has left behind in India, as well as her unborn child. The second part features an ethereal sequence where the child (played by Ashley Wood) dances. In the last scene the mother (played by Claudia van Poperingen), reminisces with her three maids, who’ve almost become her second family, about the children who’ve gone away.

PHAWKER: How much of In Dreams was based on your personal experience? You were born in India, the child of Bengali parents.

URMIKA DEVI: Well the story of migrants is very real, especially for South Asians whose families have gone abroad. During the school year, I would go to public school in Philadelphia and ride SEPTA around the city. Then I would spend time in India with my grandparents and their maids for six weeks every summer. I got to know the maids really well. They all really worked really hard, sometimes several different jobs, to send their own kids abroad for their education. Those experiences influenced In Dreams.

PHAWKER: Tell me a little about the other performers in the show.

URMIKA DEVI: Annelize is a South Asian from South Africa, who now lives in Texas. She started dancing in her 20s. She studied martial arts, especially kalari, intensively. She’s studied both Bharathnayam and ballet, but she her style of choice is modern dance. Post Natyam Collective has four multi-national members from across America. I met both Annelize and members of the Post Natyam Collective at various conferences for Asians in the arts.

PHAWKER: Currently, you are a third year student at Temple Law. How does your legal education coincide with your dance background?

URMIKA DEVI: Well, it’s definitely hard to be a dancer and a law student. But I think of law school as the ticket to my work in the arts. All of my classes contribute to my work in dance and theater – whether it’s a class about copyright, tax or trademarks. As a producer, you’re basically a lawyer anyway. You deal in contracts, you negotiate. Law makes perfect sense for this work. Artists are crazy, but law is practical. And law and dance intersects where law is not as black and white as it seems. Like law, dance is an imperfect ideal. You stand in front of a mirror, hour after hour, trying to make something perfect and it may not be.

Asian Arts Initiative 
& Urmika Devi present

MOVING BEYOND FORM Explorations in Rhythm 
& Storytelling in Classical 
& Contemporary Indian Dance

Friday, Feb. 26, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, Feb. 27, 4:30 p.m.

Asian Arts Initiative


1219 Vine Street

Chinatown Philadelphia 


Tickets $20 general admission

[Performance photos by Iva Momcheva]

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419), was a missionary and logician. Annie Clark (1982- ), the American singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist who goes by the name St. Vincent, brings a missionary zeal to her current status as indie’s ambassador of goodwill from The Other Side. Likewise, despite all its head-spinning detours and U-turns, her music follows the pristine logic of a flowchart. Such was the case Thursday night when St. Vincent stunned a near-capacity crowd in the sweaty basement of the First Unitarian Church with a flawless recreation of selections from Actor, her just-released and deservedly hyped sophomore collection of otherworldly, asymmetrical pop.

Clark plays all the instruments on Actor, but Thursday night she was backed by a crack four-piece band – a flutist/saxophonist, a violinist, a bassist, and a drummer – that expertly replicated the album’s jigsaw arrangements and dreamy vistas. Clark handled guitar and vocal duties, and proved extraordinarily adept at both. Her guitar playing sounded like some unholy union of King Crimson’s Robert Fripp and the Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary; her singing evoked the dream-pop enchantment of the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, and the whisper-to-a-scream inscrutability of Bjork and Kate Bush. The whole ensemble was strikingly lit like a David Lynch dream sequence, with washes of bordello red and cerulean blue flickering in time with the music’s shape-shifting permutations.

Like the album, the concert opened with the aptly titled “The Strangers” and the quiet desperation of “Save Me From What I Want,” and closed with the climactic coda of “Black Rainbow” and the buzz-bomb disco strut of “Marrow.” In between came the menacing lullaby of “Bed” and the Abba-meets-Elastica “Actor Out Of Work” –  and everything mirrored the dizzying bipolarity at the center of St. Vincent’s music, dramatic and altogether compelling living proof that the shortest distance between the ethereal and the visceral is not a straight line, but a pleasingly crooked one.

The performance concluded with “Your Lips Are Red,” from 2007’s Marry Me, a show-stopping meditation on 9/11. The song began as a sepulchral march, only to split open and reveal what sounded like the world’s most ornery klezmer band, which proceeded to erupt into a sonic approximation of sheer terror not heard since the shower scene in Psycho. Like just about everything St. Vincent touches, it was a potent reminder that the border between dreams and nightmares remains disturbingly porous.

St. Vincent + Wildbirds & Peacedrums  First Unitarian Church  8:00 pm SOLD OUT

PHILLY CLOUT: U.S. Sen. John McCain has a new campaign video up on the web that uses a local attorney to attack J.D. Hayworth, the Congressman turned radio talk show host who is challenging McCain in the Arizona Republican primary election.  McCain’s ad compares Hayworth to Philip Berg, a Montgomery County attorney who unsuccessfully sued in federal court to challenge President Obama’s election, based on the debunked theory that he was not born a United States citizen. MORE

Meet Phil Berg, Alpha Birther Of The Bizarro Nation

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY In the soft twilight of the first Saturday of August, a gray-bearded man in a dark suit stood on the grassy knoll in front of Independence Hall and declared for the benefit of a film crew on hand that we are, as a nation, through the looking glass, people. Black is white, up is down, cats are dogs and the President of the United States is a fraud and a liar, a “usurper,” a foreign-born alien unqualified to hold office and the fact that he currently resides in the White House represents a constitutional crisis on a scale not seen since the darkest hours of Watergate.

The man who said these things was one Philip Berg, Esq., a private practice lawyer based in the Philadelphia suburb of Lafayette Hill, a lifelong Democrat and a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania. The film crew was shooting a sky-is-falling exposé with the working title Fall Of The Republic: The Presidency Of Barack Obama , produced by Austin, Texas-based talk-radio host Alex Jones, whose previous work includes The Obama Deception, which alleges darkly that the president is a puppet of a multinational cabal of corporate oligarchs, and Loose Change, which claims that 9/11 was an inside job.

“Our nation is in jeopardy,” Berg gravely intoned, as clusters of tourists filed past, some doing a double-take when they noticed the cameras, briefly studying Berg’s face for the earmarks of someone recognizably famous and then moving on when he failed to register.

“There are three constitutional requirements to be president: first, you must be 35 years old. Second, you must reside in the U.S. for 14 straight years and lastly you must be a natural-born citizen. And on this last point, Obama fails … ” As Berg spoke, a warm breeze gusted behind him, wreaking havoc on his back-to-front combover. Long strands of hair flapped wildly in the breeze, peaking out behind his ears only to disappear and then reappear on the crown of his skull, creating the disturbing impression on camera that white tentacles were sprouting out of the back of his head.

This simply would not do.

The cameras stopped rolling and the film crew asked Berg to fix his hair. He gamely tamped down the stray hairs, but this would prove to be a fight with the summer wind that Berg wouldn’t win.

“I wish I would have brought some hairspray,” he said, wetting his fingers and plastering down the stray hairs before turning and asking a passing woman if she happened to have some hairspray he could borrow. She didn’t.

“I am doing this for the 1.5 million Americans that have died defending the Constitution,” he said righteously when the cameras started rolling again, only to stop yet again when the tentacles reappeared.

This time the camera crew asked Berg to turn slightly, hoping to angle the tentacles out of the shot.

“I believe Obama is setting himself up to be blackmailed by other countries, and that may explain the reason he has relaxed travel restrictions on Cuba—because they are blackmailing him,” said Berg before the hair-raising breeze returned and the tentacles were back.

Welcome to the bizarro nation, where everything we hold true is in fact a lie, magical thinking trumps scientific analysis, hysterical partisan operatics drown out the low hum of objective connect-the-facts narrative, and a recent survey indicates that nearly 60 percent of registered Republicans openly question whether or not the President of the United States is a natural born citizen. The one prominent Republican naysayer is, shockingly enough, Anne Coulter who publicly called people who question the president’s citizenship “cranks.” Truly, when Ann Coulter is the voice of reason, we are through the looking glass, people. 
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TIMES-TRIBUNE: When Mary Louise Salerno saw Jesus Christ in a bucket of pizza sauce, her instinct was not to alert the media or even to tell many friends. She did not want people descending on her family’s West Scranton pizzeria, and she did not want to invite critics or doubters of what she felt was a clear sign. “To us, it was something special,” Ms. Salerno, 65, of Old Forge said. “God smiled on us that day.” The image of Jesus has a history of unexpected appearances, from rocks and windows to medical X-rays and a tortilla. Add to that a sauce bucket at Brownie’s Famous Pizzeria, a long-standing eatery on Luzerne Street. It happened on the first Friday of Lent. Ms. Salerno was at Brownie’s and talking with her granddaughter, 23-year-old Jackie Krouchick, while she made a pizza. Her granddaughter is a single mother who she said is struggling through tough times. Ms. Krouchick told her grandmother she worried she was losing her faith. As Ms. Salerno poured tomato sauce from a white plastic bucket, she urged her granddaughter to keep believing. That is when she saw it, the image of a man with long hair and a beard in the leftover sauce. MORE

PHAWKER: Sad that in the 21st Century some people are no farther along than the cavemen looking up at the stars and creating imaginary pictures by connecting the dots. Jesus would be so proud.

TALKING POINTS MEMO: The new issue of the Michele Bachmann comic, False Witness! The Michele Bachmann Story, is now out on sale. The producers of the comic appear to be taking a thematic approach in the series, dedicating an issue to a particular area of Bachmann’s right-wing obsessions — and they’ve done a great job of it in this issue. This episode: The gays. As for the treatment of the subject matter, the creators set out to make a serious point: That Bachmann has advanced her career on a platform of singling out a group within society for hatred and ostracism, and that this is a highly dangerous thing to do.The book sets out to illustrate the negative consequences of a demagogue politician singling out a group within society for hatred in order to advance their careers. The book might push the envelope a bit with an invocation of Hitler, but on the other hand hand here is a beautiful example of what can happen when a “satirical” comic is built entirely from real-life quotes of an absurd public figure. This page depicts numerous instances of Bachmann repeating the exact same anti-gay rhetoric, accusing those nasty homosexuals of trying to recruit the children. MORE

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