First Looks category archive

Mad Kane:

When paying my taxes great pains
Always shoot through my muscles and veins.
But for once there’s relief
From an oft taxing beef:
Schedule D won’t show capital gains.

Via Skippy.

It’s what’s good for the country is good for business.

Read the full story for some of the subtleties, contradictions, and eddy currents in the possible (and likely temporary) realignment.

“It’s interesting how a sinking ship unites all crew members,” said Massa, 49, brandishing the group’s statement to deflect charges of fiscal irresponsibility. “If I’m a tax-and- spend liberal, they better ask the Chamber of Commerce.”

Even as a powerful lineup of business groups, including the chamber, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Restaurant Association, supported Obama’s stimulus plan, only three Republicans, all of them in the Senate, voted for it.

How two galaxies merge, from Scientific Blogging:

Oh Noes.

President Barack Obama ordered federal agencies to get legal reviews of statements that his predecessors, including George W. Bush, used to challenge parts of new laws they viewed as unconstitutional.

Obama, in a two-page memorandum he issued yesterday, also preserved the right to rely on the so-called signing statements to make similar challenges.

(snip)

Obama said he would attach signing statements to legislation “only when it is appropriate to do so as a means of discharging my constitutional responsibilities.” He also laid out a set of principles that will govern his use of signing statements.

Signing statements should “not be used to suggest that the president will disregard statutory requirements on the basis of policy disagreements,” Obama said in the memorandum.

Aside: It does sort of look like a “have cake, eat it too” stance. On the other hand, as an ex-professor of Constitutional Law, Mr. Obama can be expected to have a clue or two about what “constitutional” means.

The Philadelphia Shrinquier reviews Will Bunch’s book. An excerpt:

Bunch’s book is a lively, overdue, and slashing rejoinder to the lengthening list of pro-Reagan hagiographies that have appeared over the last decade. Tear Down This Myth reveals that the right’s lionization of Reagan is part of a far-reaching campaign to build up Reagan’s image for posterity’s sake. Reagan’s supporters envisioned, for example, that his death would be an opportunity to create “a legacy-building event,” in the words of one former aide; upon that death in 2004, they used the weeklong funeral observance to showcase to the nation that Reagan was “a man who won the Cold War” and revived “America’s faith in itself.”

The hero-making has moved in other directions as well. Supporters have tried to add Reagan’s face to Mount Rushmore, while congressional Republicans backed the bill that renamed the former Washington National Airport “Reagan National.” Admirers have sought to put Reagan’s face on the dime. In California, Bunch reports, there is a Ronald Reagan Freeway near Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley. The state also now has Ronald Reagan elementary schools, a Ronald Reagan Park, Ronald Reagan government office buildings – even a Ronald Reagan Community Center.

Bunch has crafted an intelligent and relentlessly anti-Reagan polemic that succeeds in taking Reagan’s presidency down several pegs. Admirers have applauded Reagan for consistently sticking to his anti-big-government convictions, but Bunch shows that Reagan’s actual record is much more complicated than conservatives like to admit.

Full disclosure: Will Bunch writes for the Daily News, which is part of the company that owns the Shrinquier. Having read the Shrinquier for years and having my share of beefs about it, I am confident that that relationship did not influence the review.

This is neat.

Over at Mithras’s place:

. . . it’s telling that premeditated violence is the hallmark of human-like behavior.

The end of our Winter of Discombobulation.

The winter part, that is. The discombobulation will continue.

The crocuses are in bloom.

Read more »

Gene Weingarten looks at what happens when a parent forgets a baby in a car to die in the heat:

Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.

The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world.

Read the whole thing. And, for discussion, tune into Tuesday’s chat.

H/T Karen for the link.

Triumph Brewing Company, Chestnut just east of 2nd, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p., Tueday.

Don’t know whether I’ll make it this week.

If I don’t, hoist one for me.

If I do, buy one for me.

One so far.

Via Atrios.

CC sums it up.

Down the drain.

The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair, in a letter to bank chief executives dated March 2, defended the FDIC’s plan to raise fees on banks and assess an emergency fee to shore up the fund and maintain investor confidence.

Bair acknowledged the new fees, announced Friday, would put additional pressure on banks at time of financial crisis and a deepening recession, but insisted they were critical to keep the insurance fund solvent and protect.

“Without these assessments, the deposit insurance fund could become insolvent this year,” Bair wrote.

Via Susie.

The Earth eclipsing the sun as viewed from the moon.

Via GNC.

Anyone of a certain age will remember the twin stacks.

Read more »

In . . . a . . . world . . . where working persons get fair treatment, all . . . bets . . . are . . . off.

Coming soon to a letter to your Congress persons.

I spend my junior college year abroad in England.

One of the places I made sure to see was the Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London, where tradition held that anyone could rant about almost anything without interference.

When I visited Hyde Park, shortly after arriving in London and before catching the train to Exeter, an older gentleman was holding up an empty toilet paper roll and ranting about toilet paper’s being the fundament of all evil.

He was most passionate.

Apparently, the speaker’s message lives on.

Read more »

Fox News, upholding its usual standards. Colbert comments (warning: double-entendre galore):

So has sung the real estate industry for decades.

The flaw in that statement is that someone’s primary dwelling–house, condo, coop, whatever–is first a place to live. Any “investment potential” is a nice side-effect. Persons who allow themselves to be deluded into thinking of their houses as “investments” to be day-traded err grievously.

The brokers who sold the houses, with no or minimal down payments and funky time-bomb mortgages, promising “investment returns,” knew this. But left it out of the sales pitch.

More than 8.3 million U.S. mortgage holders owed more on their loans in the fourth quarter than their property was worth as the recession cut home values by $2.4 trillion last year, First American CoreLogic said.

An additional 2.2 million borrowers will be underwater if home prices decline another 5 percent, First American, a Santa Ana, California-based seller of mortgage and economic data, said in a report today. Households with negative equity or near it account for a quarter of all mortgage holders.

Off to drink liberally.