First Looks category archive

Unlike cake knives, this is the kind of stuff that warrants school authorities coming down like a ton of brickhouse (with apologies to Mr. Brickhouse, who was my mother’s principal for 15 years of teaching):

A student first spotted a handgun magazine and a gun in a classroom at about 10:30 a.m. The student sent a text message to a student at another high school, who notified that school’s resource officer. The resource officer notified authorities.

Students were taken out of the classroom and searched, but nothing was found. Newark police and school officials then searched the classroom, where they found the magazine with three 9 mm bullets on a desk under some papers and a 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol in a bookbag. The gun had one bullet in the chamber, police said.

Off to drink liberally.

At least with a plugged nickel you can get a penny Tootsie Roll:

AIG, still on the hook to pay back the government $173 billion, is attracting interest for its asset-management units, lining up a half-dozen potential buyers, the Wall Street Journal reports today, leading off its coverage. That’s the good news. The bad news is “the sale of the $100 billion portfolio has become complicated by client withdrawals and declines in asset prices,” which value the units potentially hundreds of millions of dollars below what AIG had hoped to get for them, the newspaper adds. The aim is to sell off the units by May, the newspaper adds, but the stricken insurer could pull out of the auctions altogether if it believes the bids are too low.

In other news, William Black tells Bill Moyers that the federal government is afraid to tell the truth about the banks’ insolvency because

. . . they (the government–ed.) are scared to death. All right? They’re scared to death of a collapse. They’re afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we’ll run screaming to the exits. And we won’t rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it’s foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, “We just can’t let the big banks fail.” That’s wrong.

H/T Brendan for the link to the William Black story.

Q. What was it Susie didn’t say?

The Booman washes the dishes.

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In Republicanland, “strict constructionism” means “rulings we like.” “Judicial activism” means “rulings we don’t like.”

Dick Polman, writing about the gay marriage ruling in Iowa, explains “strict constructionism” (emphasis added):

The judges’ reasoning can be easily summarized: They looked at the 1998 state law which bars gays from getting civil marriage licenses, they compared the language in that law to the equal-rights language in the state constitution, and they came to the obvious conclusion that the former did not square with the latter. And since the state constitution is the ultimate arbiter (“the cornerstone of governing in Iowa”), out went the law.

. . . The Iowa judges explain those workings with a minimum of frills: They start by citing the state constitution’s Bill of Rights (“Equal protection of the law is one of the guaranteed rights”), noting that those rights “are declared and undeniably accepted as the supreme law of this state, against which no contrary law can stand,” and they underscore the preeminence of the state document by quoting the exact words of the document. (From Article XII: “This constitution shall be the supreme law of the state, and any law inconsistent therewith, shall be void.”)

You know how conservative critics of the courts always say that judges should be “strict constructionists” who accept the constitutional language precisely as it is written? Well, that’s what the Iowa judges did.

Aside: My position on gay marriage is a resounding “so what.”

(A never-ending series of paranoiac nightmares from the reality-challenged).

Oliver Willis.

Phillygrrl.

There is nothing more to say.

On Tuesday, Triumph Brewing Company, three blocks east of the Second Bank of the United States/Old Customs House on the other side of Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p.

Good food, good drink, good company.

And I thought H. P. Lovecraft crafted craziness.

Wingnuts make Cthulu seem like a marshmallow and Nyarlathothep, a boy scout.

The Booman on the murder of the policemen in PIttsburgh:

We keep saying it can’t happen here, that we will never see a movement among certain members of our society to kill fellow Americans simply because of their political beliefs or status “government employees” or immigrants, or gays, or blacks, etc. We keep saying this country is not like Cambodia, or Rwanda, or other places where mass violence has erupted because of the hateful propaganda preached by a few power mad demagogues. And yet . . .

And yet these deadly incidents keep happening. And evil media clowns like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and even politicians like Michelle Bachmann keep screaming their twisted diatribes of hate over the airwaves, ratcheting up their deceitful, mendacious and dangerous rhetoric to levels we haven’t seen since the days when the Klu Klux Klan dominated vast regions of this country in the twenties and thirties. Days when lynchings were common. Nor do we need to look that far back. It was only 14 years ago, during the administration of another centrist Democratic President that we suffered the worst act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by another crazy bastard who swallowed the far right lies hook line and sinker: a bastard named Timothy McVeigh.

It embarrasses and shames me that the people who do this stuff almost always loudly proclaim themselves to be “true Americans” and “Christians.”

It should embarrass and shame us all, American or not, Christian or not, who understand either the ideals of America, the ideals of Christianity, or both.

End the politics of hate.

Opening Day.

Fruitcakes. All fruitcakes.

Fiduciary smiduciary.

Disregard market value. Just make stuff up:

U.S. accounting rule makers made it easier for banks to limit losses, but in an unexpected move they bowed to critics and backtracked on one proposal that would have let companies ignore market prices in some cases.

The vote by the Financial Accounting Standards Board followed a debate in which members of Congress pushed for steps to help banks weighed down by troubled assets, while some investor groups warned that the plans would allow executives to cover up losses. The rules change spurred Thursday’s stock-market rally.

From an interview I heard on Marconi’s Magic Box this morning, but which I cannot find to cite (I’ll keep looking):

“My only hope is that it does less damage than it’s going to do.”

“You’re (persons who ignore market value–ed.) disguising reality.”

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Taxes are the fees for living in civilized society.

Prem Sikka in the Guardian on corporate tax dodgery (emphasis added):

To generate wealth, at the very least, three kinds of capital need to be invested. Shareholders invest finance capital and expect to receive a return. Markets exert pressure for this to be maximised. Employees invest human capital and expect to receive a return in the shape of wages and salaries. Society invests social capital (health, education, family, security, legal system) and expects a return in the shape of taxes. Over the years, corporate tax rates have been reduced, but the return on social capital is under constant attack by tax avoidance schemes. The aim is to transfer the return accruing to society to shareholders. Companies have reported higher profits, not because they undertook higher economic activity or produced more desirable goods and services, but simply by expropriating the returns due to society.

None so far tonight.

MalkeH talking about his or her father’s reaction to Fox News. Note that the father, having grown up in Germany before World War II, had been raised as a Hitler Youth, though he later outgrew the indoctrination.

Godwin’s Law does not apply, because it is a historical reference, not invective:

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WATB want a do-over.