First Looks category archive

Before the television show, there was the band:

Updates here.

Frankly, Douglas should be the model for a Supreme Court justice.

Douglas was strongly libertarian in his opinions, distrustful of establishments of all types, and considered himself a voice for the voiceless and powerless. Along with Justice Hugo Black, he was an absolutist on the Bill of Rights. He was well versed in corporate law (including antitrust) matters, which was his specialty as a law professor. He wrote his opinions quickly, which sometimes meant they were poorly crafted.

But Sotomayor seems to be a decent sort.

It’s kind of fun watching the righties make stuff up.

An “activist judge,” in wingnut parlance, is ipso facto any judge that does not agree with wingnuts.

Scott Lemieux writes at the Guardian:

. . . I hope that President Obama and Democrats in the Senate will use the confirmation process to push back against the fallacious received wisdom that progressive judges engage in “judicial activism” while conservative justices believe in “judicial restraint” and are more likely to defer to the elected branches.

Deborah White discusses the Republicans’ bigoted reactions here.

And Mad Kane immortalizes the whole shebang in poetry here.

This has been the first edition of What Noz Said.

Phishers invade Twitter. Like most phishing schemes, this one relies on the failure of persons to pay attention to what they are doing.

From the Toimes:

The scheme appears to have begun Thursday with the creation of bogus Twitter accounts, which the scammers used to “follow” other users, says Rik Ferguson, a senior security advisor at security-software maker Trend Micro. If these users checked out the profiles of their new followers and clicked on the Web addresses there, they were redirected to a fake Twitter site where they were prompted to hand over their passwords. In a smooth move, the site’s address was tvviter.com (notice the double “v” and single “t”), likely an effort to reassure anyone who glanced at the address bar.

Travel day.

Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa, Tuesday, 6 p., just a hop, a scotch, and a soda from Penn’s Landing.

It’s safe this week. I’m on the road.

Details here.

And what’s that rustling noise?

Cattle ranching is a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States and cattle theft is a small but growing problem as a recession bites and thieves realize that stealing cows is a relatively easy way to raise a quick buck.

Stolen cattle are often loaded onto trailers and taken straight from their farm or ranch to auction at a stockyard, according to detectives involved in tracking thefts.

Identifying those cattle not easy since many are not branded and detectives and owners need to act fast to retrieve the animals before sale — a task made doubly difficult if they have been transported across state lines.

Texas, the nation’s biggest cattle state, reported thefts virtually tripled between 2007 and 2008 to 6,404 head of cattle, according to Carmen Fenton, spokeswoman for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

An update on the crazy from James Wolcott.

BankUnited, FSB, Coral Gables, Florida, is no more.

Huffington Post says it’s the biggest failure since IndyMac.

Afterthought:

It’s Thursday. They usually wait until Friday for these announcements, so they have the weekend to take care of the details. This one may have been really messed up.

According to the press release, rather than being given over to another bank, as is the usual practice (it says something that one can write “the usual practice” about a bank failure and have it seem natural, but that’s Republican Economic Theory for you), it’s been reborn under a new, but similar, name. This is truly screwy.

It appears that thinking the whole swine H1N1 flu thing is over may be a mistake:

A novel flu likely circulated in Philadelphia in April and May of 1918, causing mild illness and going largely unnoticed. It returned in September, eventually killing more than 16,000 people in the city and 500,000 nationwide.

While the public may be over the initial scare from Mexico last month, it is the longer-term scenario – a version of 1918 would be the most extreme – that keeps pandemic experts up at night. A seeming resurgence of swine flu in New York over the last several days and its continuing spread worldwide haven’t helped.

“This one may or may not come back in September or October. It may or may not come back in December. It may or may not come back at all,” said Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan and author of When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed.

Q. How are hot dogs made?

Read more »

Regulars on the Arthur Godfrey Show:

After all, aren’t these the same folks who were going to save Chrysler?

Daimler is taking a 10 percent stake in Tesla Motors, a U.S. based electric car start-up, as it expands its green auto business, the head of Daimler’s research department said on Tuesday.

Off to drink liberally.

Find a chapter near you.

The Philadelphia Shrinquirer does its part.

First, John Yoo, who gives me the vapors, and now, for the vapors, Aye, there’s the rub.

What rub?

Why, the Vicks, of course.