There’s been some news coverage recently of President Obama’s upcoming trip to Africa. The mainstream media, no less, has questioned the projected cost of the First Family’s vacation to the continent this month: Seems the estimate runs close to $100 million for one little summer getaway.
Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, claims that it’s a working vacation. The President will meet “with a wide array of leaders from government, business and civil society, including youth, to discuss our strategic partnership on bilateral and global issues.” Does that sound like gobbledygook to you? No names or agenda, just enough info to make it sound like the price tag is worth it.
The Obama Family’s Outrageous $100 Million Vacation
How can the president justify taking Sasha and Malia to Africa when so many Americans are struggling?
Can Christianity and Gay Marriage Coexist in America?
My conservative, Christian friends don’t think so. They’re wrong: We can all live in freedom.
In the world I’d love to see five years from now, two — seemingly oxymoronic — things will be true:
• My gay and lesbian friends will be perfectly free to marry the person they love, have kids, and grow old together.
• My conservative Christian friends will be secure enough in their First Amendment freedoms to gripe about that.
Edward Snowden Proves That White Guys Finish First
How else can you explain a dropout hacker with suspect ties to the Chinese becoming a folk hero?
Somehow, Edward Snowden — aka “The Most Interesting Man in the World” — has managed to place himself in a long line of Hollywood whiz kids who take on The Man in fantastic hacking battle scenes from such long-gone classics as War Games, Hackers and (yes, let’s wager on it) The Matrix. Fashioning himself as the new “Neo,” Snowden skipped town and did a hopscotch routine halfway across the world into Hong Kong, of all places, suggesting that the stuffy urban isle is a spectacular democratic oasis of free speech and human rights — a civil libertarian's dream resort where any self-respecting cause célèbre government watchdog would want to hang out.
But when you think about, this is where the story should have stopped cold and fishy, like a rotted jade perch hooked in the South China Sea. Cleverly pitching his wolf tickets, Snowden conveniently left out the part about Hong Kong being in China, the U.S.'s global sparring partner in the Pacific and emerging economic beast that each year hacks billions of dollars' worth of American intellectual property and military secrets. He, of course, had to have known this. There should be no look of surprise on Snowden’s face the moment chain-smoking Chinese intelligence dudes knock on (or kick down) his door in a bid to tap the globe-trotting big mouth for more secrets. And that’s if he went to Hong Kong not realizing that in the first place.
The State the 21st Century Forgot
No matter what the polls say, when you’re talking social change, "inevitable" has a different meaning in Pennsylvania.
More than 50 percent of Americans favor same-sex marriage, and almost 75 percent say its legal recognition is "inevitable," says a recent Pew survey.
As a tax-paying Narberth lesbian with a wife of 20 years, three grown children and two dogs, why aren’t I rejoicing? Because I live in Pennsylvania, the state that the 21st century forgot.
In fact, Pennsylvania is so primordial, so narrow minded, so enragingly intransigent, it could well be the 50th state to recognize gay marriage. You heard it here first.
Jeb Bush and the Fear of “Fertile” Immigrants
The undeclared 2016 GOP contender talks economics and family values, but his intended audience hears the real message.
In a world filled with endless uncertainty, it is a comfort to know that we probably won't have to endure another Bush presidency.
Jeb Bush, son and brother of George I and II, respectively, has assured us of this with his recent comments about immigrants.
Speaking to a group of conservative activists in Washington about immigration policy on Friday, he said, "Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population."
When Bill Clinton Called Barack Obama a “Total Wuss”
Why the former president is wrong for using schoolyard taunts to send America to war in Syria.
Back in the 1990s — when the U.S. was about 20 years past the horrors of Vietnam, and still a few years off from the horrors of post-9/11 combat — officials in the Clinton administration were contemplating a military intervention of their own to help bring an end to the war and suffering in Bosnia. Some of the president’s advisers were ready to attack; others, like Gen. Colin Powell, were reluctant.
Then-U.N. Secretary Madeline Albright would have none of it. “What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about,” she snapped, “if we can't use it?”
The Unpaid Internship Era Is Finally Coming to an End
And rightfully so—it’s an exploitative, outdated system that does nothing but burden both employer and intern alike.
If you were to come into the Philly Mag offices today, you’d find that the editorial side of things is lousy with interns. They sit by the art department, clustered together like workhorses in a stable, cranking out the fact-checking of endless lists. Virtually the entire day, depending on the magazine content that month, you can hear our intrepid interns clacking away at their keyboards and phone pads, pressing some poor schlub we interviewed about whether their name is, indeed, spelled that way or some other.
As is common across the media and entertainment industries, these wide-eyed young kids—each one hopeful for a future employment opportunity—will be paid in experience. Which, apparently, is just as good as money—that is, until you try to pay your rent that month with the things you learned while fact-checking. The exchange rates don’t quite match up to the landlord. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)
Fortunately, though, this modern-day indentured servitude looks like it’s drawing to a close. And as someone with three unpaid internships under his belt (and one paid), the end can’t come fast enough.
No, Let’s Not Go to War in Syria
The use of chemical weapons crossed President Obama’s "red line." Here’s why we should stay out, for now.
Well, we’re a little closer to war with Syria than we were 24 hours ago.
Why? Because the United States has determined that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the rebels in that country’s awful, grinding, ongoing civil war. And because President Obama once promised that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” that would demand greater U.S. involvement in that war, on the side of the rebels. Maybe we'll just furnish them with more lethal weapons; perhaps we'll start enforcing a no-fly zone.
Oh, look. The controversy of unpaid internships has come up again, with a federal judge ruling against Fox Searchlight in a case filed by unpaid interns who worked on the movie Black Swan. The Atlantic speculates that the "court ruling could end unpaid internships for good," and Time has declared that it's "the beginning of the end of unpaid internships."
Some unpaid interns have been complaining about unpaid internships for as long as unpaid internships have existed. And as a former unpaid intern, I am here to tell you that they need to shut up.
I have been trying, diligently, to develop a strong reaction to the NSA controversies that rattled the Obama administration this week.
I’ve done so, in part, because we’d hardly absorbed the unsettling revelations about the NSA’s phone record collection and PRISM program before outrage about the lack of outrage crept into the blogosphere.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniel J. Solove wrote a treatise against what he called the “nothing to hide” argument: “Privacy is often threatened not by a single egregious act but by the slow accretion of a series of relatively minor acts … Although society is more likely to respond to a major oil spill, gradual pollution by a multitude of actors often creates worse problems.”
President Obama Owes George W. Bush an Apology
If his predecessor’s wartime policies were so bad, why is President Obama continuing and expanding them?
A little embarrassingly now, the last time I remember putting on a tie was on Inauguration Day 2009. I didn’t go anywhere special—just the office—but after eight years of George W. Bush, the inauguration of Barack Obama seemed portentous. After years of war (and a year of increasingly terrifying economic news) the ascendance of our first African-American president seemed to hold out the promise of good things, at last, to come.
I watched President Obama on a computer in my office. I saw him take the oath, and then I saw him spend much of his inauguration basically spitting in his predecessor’s eye—all while that predecessor sat there on the dais, forced by tradition and protocol to just take it.
I kind of loved it.
Five Tiger Traps for Woods to Avoid
While the celeb golfer’s in town for the U.S. Open, he should skip the top 10 Philly-area restaurants for philanderers.
Perhaps you, like me, heard that the U.S. Open was coming to Ardmore and thought, “Ooh, tennis.”
Then you heard it was a golf thing and thought, “Oh, I can ignore that because golf is just people walking around carrying bags of sticks.”
But you can’t. Because the U.S. Open is what people who don’t fall asleep watching golf call “a major tournament.” And Tiger Woods, the only golfer TMZ has ever bothered to cover (on account of famously cheating on his now-ex-wife, Elin Nordegren), is playing in it. Woods will likely have his new girlfriend, bombshell Olympic skier Linsdey Vonn, in tow. And he’s classily handling the racially insensitive remarks of knuckleheaded golfing Spaniard Sergio Garcia by shaking hands and refusing to become engaged in discussion about said remarks.
The Jersey Woman Who’s a Cory Booker Threat
Sheila Oliver isn’t going to make this easy for him.
Conventional wisdom gives the telegenic Newark Mayor Cory Booker the edge, the most recent poll looking much like a rabbit-and-turtle race where Booker nabs more than 50 percent of the vote compared to comical single digits for the competition. Coughing up the dust of Cory’s Road Runner advantage are longtime Congressmen Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Rush Holt (D), each receiving 10 percent and nine percent respectively in a Quinnipiac University Poll and a flatulent nine or … these numbers aren’t even worth mentioning because they barely register.
What If President Obama’s Massive NSA Spying Is Keeping Us Safe?
Is this just the price we pay for security? Why should we trust the President for saying so?
So wait a minute: What if this massive NSA spying project is necessary? What if it’s really keeping us safe?
That’s what a friend of mine—a lawyer, smart, somebody pretty well acquainted with Democratic Party politics—asked me to consider last week while I was busy declaring that President Obama had completely betrayed the cause of civil liberties. Maybe, he said, President Obama came into office intending to follow the ACLU line on domestic spying—but after hearing a few briefings about the nature of terrorist threats facing America, perhaps, decided that wiretapping, well, everybody was the only way to keep us safe.
“I'm against all the things you're against,” my friend said. “I'm also against Philadelphia being blown up. Someone has to balance those things.”
Maybe Sarah Murnaghan Shouldn’t Get a Lung Transplant
Why messing with the rules for allocating organs is a bad idea.
I don’t have a critically ill child, and I don’t usually read articles about people who do. It’s not that I’m heartless. It’s just that nothing points up the unbearable unfairness of life like a sick child. I’m sure that Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old with cystic fibrosis who’s been in the news of late because the arcane rules of transplant lists made her ineligible for a transplant of more readily available (though still mighty scarce) grown-up lungs, is a great kid. Just about all kids are great kids. And it sucks, it really sucks, that kids get sick and sometimes die.
President Obama’s Betrayal of Civil Liberties Is Complete
Your (Verizon) phone records, your Internet history: It’s all the government’s. America stands at a crossroads.
I was wrong.
Last fall, I decided to vote for President Obama's re-election. I did so even though I had deep concerns about his administration’s record on civil liberties issues important to me: the assassination of American citizens abroad, his apparent squeamishness on defending the First Amendment in the face of riots overseas, his willingness to defend companies accused of illegally participating in the government’s “warrantless wiretapping” program of a decade ago. Yes, Obama was “imperfect,” I wrote for Scripps Howard News. But Romney, I said, would be worse.
On Monday, political commentator David Frum announced he is taking an extended break from his blog at the Daily Beast to focus his attention on personal matters related to the recent death of his father.
If you're not already familiar with him, Frum cut his teeth as a speechwriter in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he distinguished himself as a vociferous supporter of the Iraq War (a position he still appears to hold, albeit less vociferously) and gained notoriety for coining the phrase “Axis of Evil”—which Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address to describe the perceived tripartite threat of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
12 Most Mind-Blowing Fast Food Menu Items
If we are what we eat, then America is a monster-combo of meat and cheese.
This week, the nation braces itself for the premiere of the Dunkin' Donuts' new Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich. The “savory and sweet breakfast treat” features bacon and fried eggs nestled between two halves of a glazed donut—a whimsical, boundary-pushing menu addition. I'm offering $5 and a roll of Tums to any officemate who's willing to give it a go.
But in the realm of fast food monstrosities, Dunkin' Donuts is hardly breaking new ground. Just yesterday, Foobooz reported on a disturbing (but apparently popular) "burger dog" from the Broadway Bar in Delco. In anticipation of the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich, here are 12 of the most mind-blowing fast food monstrosities to ever hit value menus:
Michele Bachmann’s Legacy Is Much Scarier Than Her Eyes Ever Were
What the retiring congresswoman leaves behind.
History may very well look back on Michele Bachmann's political career with much amusement. She was the conservative Republican congresswoman with the ever-present off-kilter look in her eyes, who spoke with an accent straight out of Fargo, told ridiculously intricate and laughable whoppers, mounted a quixotic 2012 presidential bid, and is married to a gentleman whose resemblance to Cameron from Modern Family has been noted by more than one comedian.
Court’s DNA Ruling Shows Antonin Scalia Isn’t All Bad
Yes, he’s the justice liberals love to hate. But Antonin Scalia can surprise you sometimes.
Believe it or not, Antonin Scalia doesn’t always suck.
Yes, the conservative Supreme Court justice has plenty of retrograde ideas, and yeah, he’d like to read the Constitution as if time stopped somewhere around 1789. But his prickly, eccentric readings of the law of the land sometimes—more often than you’d think, in fact—bring him down on the civil libertarian side of a case.
It happened again this week. Scalia sided with the minority in Maryland v. King, in which the court ruled that police can take DNA samples from anyone they arrest for a “serious” crime—then check to see if that genetic material matches evidence from unsolved “cold cases” awaiting resolution around the country.
