First Looks category archive

New location: We are still checking out locations to find a place with a good mix of menu, location, and layout.

Fun and fellowship for liberals. Join us.

When: Wednesday, August 25th, 6 p

Where:
The Jewish Mother
600 Nevan Road (Map)

Yesterday, the smell of fire was as strong as if it were next door.

“We saw smoke out there, so we knew we had a fire,” Craig said.

They didn’t know, however, that it would become the largest fire since the swamp became a national refuge in 1974, swelling to roughly 6,000 acres, or more than 9 square miles, and costing nearly $4 million, so far.

If you don’t want to believe the scientists, believe your fellow inhabitants of the planet:

Animals and plants are shifting their natural home ranges towards the cooler poles three times faster than scientists previously thought.

In the largest study of its kind to date, researchers looked at the effects of temperature on over 2,000 species.

They report in the journal Science that species experiencing the greatest warming have moved furthest.

Weather is not climate, but I know that it is hotter now in this part of the world than it was when I moved away 35 years ago.

Paul McMorrow, writing at the Boston Globe, considers the upcoming civil suits against the banksters and their three-card mortgage monte. A nugget:

Trillions of dollars of bad loans went through Wall Street’s mortgage bond pipeline, and they’ve exploded at astounding rates. Deals where half the mortgages went bad are common. One Goldman lawsuit lists a loan pool where 71 percent of the mortgages failed. Wall Street’s defense so far – that sophisticated investors should have known what they were getting into – is tantamount to saying that investors should have known better than to believe SEC filings.

It’s not a defense that inspires confidence. Wall Street soaked the American populace for everything it had, and then the bankers took their bailouts and bonus checks and slunk off toward the Hamptons. Wall Street titans aren’t in jail, but their reckoning is coming to civil courtrooms, and it’s going to be brutal.

Chancey de Vega states what is obvious except to those who don’t want look. It is not for nothing that Doug J. started referring to the Republicans as the “Confederate Party.”

This is but a bit of a much longer post (emphasis in the original):

While deeply concerned by the federal government’s failure to resolve the long-term structural weaknesses in the economy, Standard & Poor’s was clear about what drove its auditors to lower the credit rating of the United States: the politics in Washington D.C. are dysfunctional and broken; and a mature and reasonable solution to the debt ceiling debate, one that grew out of normal politics and not economic terrorism, would have likely averted this most unfortunate, but wholly predictable, of outcomes.

As the pundit classes try to make sense of the debt ceiling-credit downgrade political drama, they are overlooking a central element in the Tea Party GOP’s almost mouth-frothing resistance President Barack Obama since his landslide election in 2008.

While the black blogosphere (and even Twitter) has been bubbling with this issue for some time, the mainstream media has been dancing around a fact which remains hidden in plain sight. Just as they did with their poor coverage of the Birther issue, and out of fear of a Conservative backlash, the mainstream media is loathe to speak truth to power and point out the obvious: racial hostility is one of the primary forces driving the opposition of the Tea Party GOP to President Obama. This has been evident during the debt ceiling debate and on policy matters across the board. To fail to understand this most basic of realities is to fail to understand American politics in the Age of Obama.

Follow the link to see him identify, then connect, the tea three elements of the strategy,

. . . They ain’t necessarily so, as scholars at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University are verifying:

Bible Project scholars have spent years combing through manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek translations on papyrus from Egypt, a printed Bible from 1525 Venice, parchment books in handwritten Hebrew, the Samaritan Torah, and scrolls in Aramaic and Latin. The last member of the original team died last year at age 90.

The scholars note where the text we have now differs from older versions.

For example, the Book of Jeremiah is now one-seventh longer than the one that appears in some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some verses, including ones containing a prophecy about the seizure and return of Temple implements by Babylonian soldiers, appear to have been added after the events happened.

When I read the latest from Andy Borowitz, I needed a minute to remember that the opening line was parody:

News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch blasted the British rioters today, telling reporters, “These people are criminals. If you don’t believe me, listen to their voicemails.”

Off to drink liberally.

Drinking Liberally is a support group for liberals, where you can realize you are not alone.

When: 6 p., Wednesday, August 10.

Where:
The Boot
123 West 21st Street
Norfolk (map)

Details here.

Four teenagers are accused of stretching clear industrial-strength plastic wrap across a highway, where it was struck by a motorcyclist.

The motorcyclist was not harmed.

I think the most illegal thing I did when I was their age was climb the local fire lookout tower and enjoy the view.

The fun stuff came later.

More rap about wrap and other uses for that stuff that sticks to everything except what you want it to at the link.

The new theme is up. If you like it, credits are at the bottom the page.

Don’t know whether I’ll mess with this thing again today.

If you observe any whiftiness, please use the “Contact” link at the top of the sidebar or leave a comment to this post to let me know of it, including as much detail as possible (what you were looking at, what you clicked on, etc.). A screenshot may be attached to an email if you think it would help.

I’m going to stick this to the top of the page for a few days.

I do have a question: The font size looked just fine to me when I was testing this on my local computer–in fact, I scaled it down a bit–but it appears a little small now. Please let me know if I should make it larger.

Addendum:

I went ahead and increased the font by 3 points. Feedback welcome.

Note:

As I add the finishing touches, I may play peek-a-boo themes from time-to-time.

This post, from The Economist blog, is a must read for those who believe that there is anything coherent in Teabaggery.

I’m not even going to try to summarize or extract it. Just click and read.

Many thanks to Thoreau for finding it.

Hanlon, who I normally find muy sympatico, does not think that Congressman Lamborn’s characterizing President Obama as a “tar baby” was racist.

I must disagree.

Unfortunately, in a new bug-not-a-feature, Hanlon’s blog now requires me to create a user name and password with some service called “LiveFyre” (not with his blog, which I would quite happily do) and I’m not going to do that, so I cannot comment directly. It’s not worth the annoyance.

So I will disagree right here, because I have a website and I can do that thing.

Hanlon quotes Lamborn, then says

Honestly, this is like using “niggardly” in conversation. Yes, it sounds bad, but his intention was clearly non-racial and even made sense. Okay, bad choice of words and honestly who even says “tar baby” any more, but this guy ain’t a racist. Settle down.

It’s nothing at all like using “niggardly.” Niggardly is a word with a long history that has nothing to do with race or racial slurs. Those who attribute racism to its use display their own ignorance.

He identified the primary reason I disagree when he wrote this:

honestly who even says “tar baby” any more . . .

There is one group who says “tar baby” any more.

And it ain’t, to quote the immortal Bugs Bunny, Wendell Wilkie.

I’m a Southern boy.

I can decode the damned code.

Excerpt:

It’s not government that doesn’t work. It’s when Republicans run government that doesn’t work.

The sidebar disappears from the normal view in my regular theme, but reappears when select an individual post to view.

While I trouble-shoot it, there will be no only a few new posts. Posts already in the queue will continue to appear. I hope.

No idea when it will be fixed, but I’ll be happy if I’ve figured it out by Monday.

The problem appears to be local to my theme, so, for the duration, I’m reverting to a different theme.

I’m going to download everything to a local computer and trouble-shoot on my own server, rather than trouble-shoot across the innerwebs.

Updates will be added below the fold:

Read more »

OhMyGov! reports that, although Twitter does not require its users to register as male or female, that analyzing tweets can be revealing:

. . . there are certain “buzzwords” that can often be found by analyzing the output of female tweeters. Phrases such as “chocolate” and “shopping” are among the most repeated for women tweeters. The most popular phrases for men, you ask? “Http” and “Google”…hey we never said either gender was more interesting than the other.

In other news, they found a nest of twittering twits.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Via McClatchy.