HOORAY FOR US: Phawker, We Make Stars!

Congrats to Phawker alum Tiffany Yoon for getting her photos of Northern Liberties published the New York Times’ T Magazine. Above is one of our favorite Tiffany Yoon shots, taken when Phawker was invited to cover an Air Force One touch down. Phawker, turning intern talent into working pros since 2006. Apply within. Who knows, you might even get to meet the President Of The United States of America.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT: Obama Locates His Inner F.D.R.

POTUS: The only reason this balanced approach isn’t on its way to becoming law right now is because a significant number of Republicans in Congress are insisting on a different approach — a cuts-only approach -– an approach that doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to contribute anything at all.  And because nothing is asked of those at the top of the income scale, such an approach would close the deficit only with more severe cuts to programs we all care about –- cuts that place a greater burden on working families. So the debate right now isn’t […]

ATF Anti-Gun Trafficking Sting Operation Gone Wrong Winds Up Arming Mexican Drug Cartel To The Teeth

FOX: The failed federal anti-gunrunning program known as Operation Fast and Furious got so out of control in November 2009, it appeared the U.S. government was single-handedly “arming for war” the Sinaloa Cartel, documents show, even as ATF officials here kept lying to fellow agents in Mexico about the volume of guns it helped send south of the border. Those shocking allegations are revealed in the latest congressional report investigating the operation. At one point, agents say guns sold under the watch of the program took just 24 hours to travel from a gun store in Phoenix to a crime […]

DIARY OF A MADMAN: Watering The Flowers Of Evil

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: The Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik writes in a manifesto that he acquired some 8,000 e-mail addresses of “cultural conservatives” not just across Europe but North America, Australia, South Africa, Armenia, Israel, and India – ensuring scrutiny of anti-Muslim groups far beyond Europe. Mr. Breivik’s primary goal is to remove Muslims from Europe. But his manifesto invites the possibility for cooperation with Jewish groups in Israel, Buddhists in China, and Hindu nationalist groups in India to contain Islam. “It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as […]

CONCERT REVIEW: WXPN’s XPoNential Festival

[Photos by MEREDITH KLEIBER] BY MEREDITH KLEIBER Yes, the heat was nearly unbearable. Yes, we were all sweating until Rorshach patterns formed on our clothes. But the 2011 XPoNential Music Festival was more than worth it. Having hosted music festivals for the past eighteen years, WXPN has certainly honed their ability to please their festival-goers. There were misting stations posted around the park so that their event didn’t end up like the Warped Tour’s Camden stop. If your preferred cool-down method was in the form of an ice-cold beer, there was plenty of reasonably priced local Flying Fish to go around. […]

HEATASTROPHE:Common Sense Is The First Casualty

INQUIRER: Police say a Southwest Philadelphia man found one way to beat the heat over the weekend – he stole his next-door neighbor’s air conditioner. […] Police could not say what the temperature was in the district holding cell where Kershaw and his accomplice, Roy Nelson, 50, spent the night, both charged with burglary for the attempted air conditioner heist. MORE RELATED: The longest and most-intense heat wave of the season has claimed at least six lives in Philadelphia, the Health Department said this morning. The bodies of four men and two women were found Saturday, and their deaths were […]

PLUTOCRACY NOW: A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

FRESH AIR: Republican legislators picked up 680 seats in state House and Senate chambers in the 2010 elections. “They now hold more state legislative seats than at any time since 1928, the year that Herbert Hoover came to the presidency,” says reporter John Nichols. “They control 25 states [with] both houses of the legislature. There are also 21 states where Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. And in the backroom of politics, that’s what people really want. If you’ve got governor, state House and state Senate, you can pretty much roll through whatever legislation you want.” […]

Amy Winehouse, Lady Who Sang The Blues, Dead At 27

NEW YORK TIMES: With a husky, tart voice and a style that drew equally from the sounds of Motown and the stark storytelling of rap, Ms. Winehouse became one of the most acclaimed young singers of the past decade, selling millions of albums, winning five Grammy Awards and starting a British retro-R&B trend that continues today. Yet, almost from the moment she arrived on the international pop scene in early 2007, Ms. Winehouse appeared to flirt with self-destruction. She sang of an alcohol-soaked demimonde in songs like “Rehab” — whose refrain, “They tried to make me go to rehab/I said, […]

HELTER SKELTER: A One Man 9/11 In Reverse

REUTERS: Police said they were seeking several missing people and the toll could rise to 98, in the worst case. Breivik hated “cultural marxists,” wanted a “crusade” against the spread of Islam and liked guns and weightlifting, web postings, acquaintances and officials said. A video posted to the YouTube website showed several pictures of Breivik, including one of him in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon. “Before we can start our crusade we must do our duty by decimating cultural marxism,” said a caption under the video called “Knights Templar 2083” on the YouTube website, […]

SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: The Abortion Of Justice

[Illustration by IMJUST80] BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” is one thing — not guilty “because I didn’t actually see it happen” is an entirely different matter. More on that later. First, a little background. Why do we seem to be more interested in seating ignorant, uninformed, malleable juries, than in arriving at reasoned, rational verdicts. Why does our criminal justice system place such a premium on seating jurors who know little or nothing about what’s taking place in the world around them? Why does a system that claims to place “fairness” and “equality” on such a […]

CINEMA: Meat The Press

TABLOID (2010, directed by Errol Morris, 88 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Documentary master Errol Morris’ last couple features were such dark tales that the timing seems right for the good-natured naughtiness of his new film, Tabloid. The still-evolving scandal around Rupert Murdoch and the News of the World threatens to give this film a contemporary resonance but no, Tabloid‘s tale of true love gone criminally awry doesn’t reflect on the the doings of the rabid press. Instead, Morris uses his all-powerful Interrotron to examine Joyce McKinney, the one-time sex pot at the center of the 1977 sex […]

EARLY WORD: The Pot Republic

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE. FRONTLINE’s primetime monthly newsmagazine returns with three new stories, leading with a timely report from the frontlines of marijuana legalization in California. The bulk of the marijuana consumed in the United States used to come across the border from Mexico, Canada and elsewhere. Now, more than half of it is believed to be home grown in California, where an enormous black market has emerged under the cover of the state’s medical marijuana law. With more than a third of all states now experimenting with some form of legalization and decriminalization — and several […]