First Looks category archive

The Earth eclipsing the sun as viewed from the moon.

Via GNC.

Anyone of a certain age will remember the twin stacks.

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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.

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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.

Mr. Swift, following the National Review’s example, offers his list of the 10 best conservative movies. A nugget:

But these lists are not meant to identify every great conservative movie. The real purpose of these lists is to show that conservatives are actually normal people, who love movies and rock music and video games, who talk a lot about hot women and what we would like to do to them if we were able to get any of them in bed and who use a lot of baseball and basketball metaphors just like regular guys.

For a short while, I subscribed to the RSS feed from Patterico’s Pontifications (if you want to read to waste your time, you Google it yourself).

When he posted the obligatory wingnut “because there was a snow storm, therefore global warming isn’t” post today, I couldn’t take teh stupid any more.

All gone. Not wasting the electrons.

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Phawker, via Atrios.

Will Bunch has more.

Read this. All the way through.

The first three were taken about 8 a. m. while the snow was still falling.

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Nice catch by CC.

Here.

What Digby didn’t say:

These people are nutcases.

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

Sane persons talking about sanity.

If the weather forecast holds true, I’ll be there. Otherwise, otherwise.

Hell, your job is going away anyway. What else is there to do?

The forecast is for snow.

Looks like they may be right this time (radar as of 4 p. m.):

The worst snow storms we get in these parts are not the ones Karen sends here from Colorado. They tend to drop most of their snow over the Midwest and the western slope of the Appalachians.

The worst ones are the ones that come up from the south, all full of moisture sucked up from the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay.

Like this one six years ago.

Right now, the prediction is for two to four inches, enough to be annoying.

Yes, we have bread and milk.

D-Day on the failure of (George) Will.

I mentioned the “Watermelon Mayor” here. (By the way, he’s resigned as mayor.)

If you just don’t get what the fuss was about, read this.

Oh, heck. Read it anyway. It’s worth three minutes of your time.

I’ve pretty much stayed away from Nadya Suleman except for one drive-by post, but, honest to Pete, this is worth reading. (This blog lives up to its name.)

Minor Quibbles Below

Jon Swift discusses reaction to his recent post, which I discussed here. A nugget:

Unfortunately, however, some people apparently took offense to referring to Gov. Jindal as a “slumdog millionaire,” such as Amitabh Pal, writing on a website called The Progressive, which claims to have been on the Internet since 1909, which strikes me as being highly unlikely. He wrote that “comments relating to [Gov. Jindal’s] Indian background” are “repugnant” and insultingly referred to my piece as “satirical.”