First Looks category archive

The end of our Winter of Discombobulation.

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

The crocuses are in bloom.

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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.

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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.