First Looks category archive

From Kiko’s House:

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who knows a thing or two about personal wealth, once said that Republicans are about supporting efforts to generate it while Democrats are about finding ways to share it.

That, it seems to me, is a central contradiction of today’s GOP, and while it might have been a winning formula during the Reagan Revolution, that political movement was never what it was cracked up to be and has long had a stake through its heart despite the frequent evocation of the Gipper by party elders longing for the good old days. In other words, winning elections.

I would take things a step or two further than Gates and suggest that today’s GOP is not just about generating personal wealth, but about keeping it from anyone who does not march to its own beat. These include a strangled middle class, people who lack the resources to get well when they fall ill, and that rising immigrant class, many of them illegals.

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has revealed the Republican Party at its most crass, hypocritical and vulnerable.

Second Son turned 21 today.

I expect his friends will pour him through the door sometime this evening.

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Boat runs.

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Via the Coyote’s Byte.

Not.

John Cole on rage with guns.

I will add that this act, though some would describe it as “terrorist,” doesn’t seem to have been done with any political goal in mind and, baring additional information, fails the definition of “terrorism.”

Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce,

Scientific facts don’t upset us . . . .

Without approval of the parent company, a franchisee has it his own way:

Would you like a side order of climate denial with your flame-broiled Triple Whopper? If so, then you need to get yourself over to Tennessee where a number of Burger King franchises in the US state that gave us Al Gore have been displaying “Global Warming is Baloney” signs outside their fast-food restaurants.

(snip)

Memphis Flyer readers have been contacting the paper since the story first appeared to say that they have noticed other restaurants across Tennessee displaying the same sign. It appears that they are all owned by a company called the Mirabile Investment Corporation (MIC) that owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, as well as a handful of Popeyes and All In One franchises.

Track them from 1880 to the present at the New York Times’s Interactive Immigration Explorer.

Here.

TVGuide dot com tells me that the Da Vinci Code is already on cable telly vision.

I tried to watch it once on On Demand and didn’t last 30 minutes.

Toxic Avenger was a better movie (warning, enough nudity that when Second Son walked in, he stayed for 15 minutes).

Indeed, Toxic had a better hairstyle than Tom Han–oh, never mind.

Tuesday, Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p.

Plenty of parking on Front.

Come discuss how rightwingers baspheme by committing murders in churches. (There is, of course, nothing new about that.)

Fair warning: I’m back from Virginia Beach and intend to be there.

At Marie Reed’s place.

The symbol of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is the seagull:

More Pictures below the Fold

At the Arden Gild Hall, about two miles from here, where Second Son has appeared in several community theatre plays, at a Memorial Service that I did not attend for someone I did not know:

So, it was at this low-key, but very moving, memorial service, as one speaker put it, “Part Irish wake, part Quaker meeting”, that the Vice President of the United States got up and spoke from the heart about his longtime friendship with Bob Cunningham. He talked about their exploits together in Arden, where Bob spent many of his formative years and where Biden lived briefly. He talked about how Bob was there in the family’s darkest moments and proudest triumphs. For 30 minutes, he eulogized Cunningham and told many stories, some humorous, some touching, and some both.

StevenD:

Facts are for Liberals.

Read the whole thing.

Brendan comments on newspaper column.

And all heck breaks loose.

His laptop died.