First Looks category archive

I missed the excitement this week, being distracted by the panic up the road a piece where, apparently, the world came to an end under a blanket of snow.

But I didn’t miss much. The FDIC seems to be running out of banks to shut down; they caught only one this week:

1st American State Bank of Minnesota, Hancock, Minnesota

Dick Polman, on the teabaggers:

Some of those groups, as well as hundreds of local groups, are genuinely bottom up. But some of those groups are top down – in other words, they’re fake grassroots. They’re “AstroTurf” groups fronting for big business and the Republican Party. FreedomWorks is a Washington operation run by ex-GOP House insider Dick Armey, who is bankrolled by his corporate clients. Tea Party Express is run by a pair of veteran Republican strategists, who reportedly have steered tea-party donations into their consulting firm – thus prompting some Tea Party Patriots to assail Tea Party Express as “the AstroTurf Express.”

There is no percentage in just being agin’. Until they have something to be for, they will continue to be grist for the corporatist mill.

Rereading the Hound of the Baskervilles in William S. Baring-Gould’s The Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

‘Tis a shame Baring-Gould is out of print. Young pups will not know the joy of the footnotes.

The game is afoot.

I haven’t followed this closely, though I have read the newspaper stories and I listened to this (which, although titled “U. S. Auto Industry,” turned into a discussion of Toyota’s Pintos), but, frankly, it is easy to wonder there might be more to this than floormats and friction:

Toyota first blamed loose floor mats for instances of unintended acceleration that one analysis has linked to more than 800 crashes and 19 deaths since 1999. Last month, the company added that some of its vehicles also could speed out of control because of sticky gas pedals.

But Tuesday, U.S. officials joined outside experts in suggesting that a third factor may be to blame in some cases: a so-far-unidentified failure in the vehicles’ electronic throttle systems.

Toyota Motor Corp. and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) say they have explored that possibility and come up dry.

“We have investigated every type of possible interference with the electronic throttle controls and have found nothing – nothing with the electronics or the computers – that could lead to unintended acceleration,” said Toyota spokeswoman Cindy Knight. . . .

But outside experts on automobiles, computers, and electronics welcomed a renewed focus on the possibility that something other than errant floor mats and sticky pedals could be at work.

Here.

What makes it Grade A is the truth embodied therein.

From ye olde country.

On Pennsylvania’s on favorite promoter of gambling halls.

I wonder how much of Ed Rendell’s support for casino gambling comes from his notion that it is a painless cure for ailing tax revenues (it’s not–think how much money gamblers have to lose so that casinos and racetracks can pay those taxes governments want so much) and how much comes from his love of a bet?

Very pretty swimming round . . .

Well, geese, actually.

For contrast, here’s picture taken from about the same position about three days ago.

And a detail from today:

in which he espouses an excellent idea.

If Ed Rendell must force casinos down Philadelphia’s throat, put one in the S. S. United States.

Afterthought: Apparently the favorable reception surprised him.

Great balls of fire:

“That building went up so quickly that we knew it had to be an accelerant in there,” Loyle, 82, said yesterday in front of the charred Loyle Lanes Bowling Center, a local landmark that would have celebrated its 50th anniversary Feb. 10.

Investigators yesterday confirmed Loyle’s suspicions about the Jan. 11 blaze and shocked the community with news that a business rival, the owner of the only other bowling alley in Cumberland County, had been charged with arson.

A geologists explains the Haiti Quake at Scientific Blogging.

Sauce for the goose.

This really is overreacting to a twit.

The CairnGorm Mountain ski centre in the (Scots–ed.) Highlands will be closed for the day – because of too much snow.

After a two-day blizzard, the operators have had to bring in huge caterpillar vehicles and snow blowers to try to clear the approach road and the slopes.

Climate change deniers, don’t get your hopes up. Extreme weather is a predicted result of global warming as changing temperatures disrupt established weather patterns.

(with apologies to Santayana) are Republicans:

This is why the GOP in its current state cannot be allowed to govern. There is for them . . . no disaster so great that it can penetrate the armor of received wisdom that passes for the best of “conservative” thought by our friends across the aisle. If you don’t need to prove what you know is true, then there is no reason to check to see if the policies that flow from that “knowledge” actually, you know, work.

(snip)

The GOP approach to public life has not changed in a generation: lower taxes, less regulation. That’s it. But, as everyone with a pulse knows, we tried that for the Bush years. It left us, as we know, with a catastrophic economic crisis, an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich, wars dishonestly begun and incompetently managed and all the rest.

Up the road aways, there has been one of those periodic kerfuffles about self-important blowhards inflicting meaningless empty invocations on an inattentive public opening public meetings with prayer.

A summation from a letter to the editor.

This is the warship that was built with steel salvaged from the World Trade Center.

At least it’s still under warranty:

Less than three months into its operational life, the dock landing ship New York must undergo repairs to replace faulty engine parts, the Navy said.