First Looks category archive

Criswell predicts mass retirements from the Supreme Court over the next year.

Read the comments here.

I marvel at the commenters’ restraint.

And, do not forget, it wasn’t just Bush.

It was the whole rotten Republican necon cabal.

It was, in short, conservatism triumphant.

Good riddance, and how much more damage can they do in four days?

We shall see.

No doubt, we shall see.

As I remarked to someone in an email today, I have not yet been disappointed by expecting the worst from George W. Bush and his crew.

Addendum:

Ian Williams in the Guardian:

So what is his greatest political achievement, putting to one side the ethical dimension and the incompetent governance thing? Surely he deserves an Oscar for his performance as a statesman, which was so convincing that most of the American media bought his lies and grovelled to him, and maybe a Golden Globe for persuading “Yo Blair” to play best supporting actor next to him for so long – even at the expense of his own career.

And his subsidiary achievement? Making Bill Clinton look good. Now that’s impressive.

John Cole:

What Has Been Seen Can Not Be Unseen

Dick Polman analyzes Tim Geithner’s tax problems as regards his nomination for Secretary of the Treasury.

I can’t say I hold a great brief of Mr. Geithner, nor for anyone who has been in any way associated with the Fed or Wall Street, even tangentially, within the past eight years.

I can, nevertheless, request some clarity in the discourse:

Apparently, what Geithner failed to pay was the self-employment tax.

That is separate from the income tax that we all know and love.

Persons who are self-employed or who are contractors who do not have tax withheld must pay the self-employment tax in addition to the income tax. It covers the social security and medicare taxes that would have been withheld had they had employee status, as well as the employer’s contribution to those taxes. For most contractors and self-employed persons, it is equal to or greater than the income tax itself.

I first encountered it about 12 years ago, when I did a little consulting gig on the side of my regular job. I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t just stumbled over the requirement. I had completed my 1040, then read something and realized, gee, there’s a whole nother form I have to fill out. (Technically, it’s the Form 1040 Schedule SE.)

I have a friend, a person of good will, who failed to pay it for several years when he first entered “contractor” status, even as he faithfully paid his income tax. Now he’s in audit hell as a result.

Why? He didn’t get lucky the way I did and stumble over it, and no one told him about it.

Yeah, I know, that’s not an excuse. It is, however, a reason, and, in my friend’s case, a quite legitimate reason. I assure you, he sincerely wishes he had known about, realized about, and paid the self-employment tax.

Especially when his caller ID says, “We’re from the IRS. We need to talk.”

Apparently, IMF considered Geithner to be in a contractor status and did not withhold Medicare and social security taxes.

If Geithner did his taxes himself, he can be condemned for being stupid.

If he had a tax advisor (and at his pay level, he certainly ought to have had one), he needs to see about getting several dozen refunds of his fees. Keeping clients out of trouble is what tax advisors are for.

The point I’m making is this: Some persons are talking about this as if Mr. Geithner failed the file his 1040s.

It’s a little more subtle and a little more complicated than that.

(Aside: When my mother went back to teaching, she learned somewhere along the line that she had to pay social security for the cleaning lady. I remember her stuggling with the forms every quarter. Wonder how many tax evaders out there aren’t paying the social security and medicare taxes for their home help?)

The first official Presidential portrait taken with a digital camera.

Via Phillybits.

Andrew Sullivan talks about meeting Mr. Obama.

Please. Just. Go. Away.

President George W. Bush will give a farewell address to the nation Thursday night, billed by the administration as a chance to reflect on his tenure and welcome Barack Obama without fighting old battles one last time.

Afterthought:

Dan Froomkin, responding to a question in his chat earlier today (emphasis added):

Dallas: Hey Dan, The whole “disappointment” that there weren’t weapons of mass destruction in Iraq seems to me to be pretty perverse. I mean, shouldn’t we be glad that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction? I think the disappointment should be directed towards the decision to go to Iraq based on the false assertion of WMD (or, with Bush spin applied) the intelligence indicating that there were WMD in Iraq when there weren’t. Has that struck you as odd?

Dan Froomkin: Odd, yes. I think it’s Bush shorthand for “I’m disappointed that we were wrong about the WMD.” But even that doesn’t cut it. For one, there is a powerful argument to be made that, as the Downing Street Memo said, the intelligence was being fixed around the policy. And then there’s the fact that he won’t say that, had he known there were no WMD, he wouldn’t have attacked anyway. So what’s he disappointed about?

The answer is that, like the Mission Accomplished banner and not landing Air Force One in Louisiana, he’s just sorry things looked bad. He doesn’t seem to have any genuine regrets at all.

The Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie. From the Guardian:

All Bush did was take Iraq from fragile to hellish and back to fragile. From 2004 until 2006, the civil war germinated as Bush and his Green Zone team told us Iraq was “stabilising” through elections. By February 2006, Baghdad faced mass ethnic cleansing. The capital was rapidly partitioned into mini-Green Zones, each neighbourhood walled and surrounded by militia checkpoints. Iraq’s civil war peaked in September and October 2006, when over 7,000 Iraqis were killed in two months. The 2007-2008 surge provided additional security in the capital and later co-opted the former Sunni insurgency.

Bush did not win Iraq. The surge merely stopped bleeding from a self-inflicted wound. Current Iraqi politics are more akin to “Shakespearean drama than to nascent democracy,” according to the New York Times. Each political party has its own militia. Terrorism is down, but hardly gone – bombs killed 50 last week. . . .

I have always had problems with basing the polity’s budget on gambling. This pretty much sums up why. From Philadelphia City Paper:

The slot parlor of Harrah’s Chester does not have music. Instead, there is only The Sound. The Sound is incredible. It is at once many noises, the whirring of a thousand machines at once, and yet also one single note, high and dreamy. That note never stops playing, but within 15 minutes, I couldn’t hear it anymore.

As I walked past the glowing machines, I saw a strange sight: A man, maybe in his 60s, had gotten off his stool and was standing between two machines in a kind of half-squat, his arms banging the buttons on either side like two flippers. As the reels spun, he stared between the machines, at nothing.

The night before, I had gotten a call from Les Bernal, executive director of Stop Predatory Gambling, which he runs out of his kitchen. I told him I’d be going to Harrah’s Chester the following day.

“Tell me this,” he said. “The gambling industry talks about slot machines as being entertainment, as being fun. Tell me if anybody you see looks like they’re having fun.”

He was right. There were a few exceptions — a couple talking while they played, for example — but most of the players in that vast room sat alone at their machines, smoking and tapping buttons, their faces blank.

Tomorrow, Triumph Brewing Company, 117 Chestnut, Philadephia, Pa, 6 p.

I’m taking a by. After spending all last week on my back, I ain’t pushing my luck.

So hoist one or three for me.

Jon Swift reviews everything that George W. Bush has done to for the nation.

(Man, I wish I could write that good!)

McClatchy:

Congressional Republicans have an identity crisis: Should they position themselves as bulldogs-in-waiting or as gentle opponents willing to offer some support to a popular Democratic president-elect?

Natch, we all know what it’s going to be.

The Party, not the people.

It has to do with using ideology to deny the Real World. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

No fox in this henhouse.

This is what can happen when you follow the money:

The Southern Poverty Law Center . . . won a crushing jury verdict against one of the nation’s largest Klan groups for its role in the brutal beating of a teenager at a county fair in rural Kentucky.

The $2.5 million verdict will likely cripple the Imperial Klans of America, which has 16 chapters in eight states.

Support the SPLC here.

. . . John Cole talks sense:

In all seriousness, I wish Democrats, progressives, and gay rights activists would do what every every kid is taught at their first soccer practice–don’t watch their feet, follow the ball.

Criswell Jon Swift predicts.

Oh, yeah. Vote for Mr. Swift. Early and often.

“Abstinence education” is a fraud and a sham that promotes STDs and out-of-wedlock pregnancy and wastes public money:

Research has shown that teens who take virginity pledges are just as sexually active as those who do not.

Now a new study has found that pledgers were less likely to protect themselves from disease or pregnancy by using condoms or other birth control methods. Moreover, five years after taking the pledge, 82 percent of pledgers denied ever having done so.

The issue is not that abstinence until marriage is bad. It is, by and large, a good thing. It is also, by and large, unheard of in real life.

Relying only on counseling abstinence to kids, without also teaching them what to do if they find themselves intentionally or accidentally no longer abstinent, is foolish.

Tirade below the Fold

Tuesday, Triumph Brewing Company, Chestnut a block and a half from Front St. there on the north side of Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p.

The meters are cheaper on Front than they are on Chestnut.

Come get in touch with your inner sane person.

Praised with faint damns: she’s no Margaret Thatcher (not that being one is any kind of accomplishment). Michael Stickings in the Guardian:

There is no denying that Palin is plucky and driven, and perhaps likeable to some, but she is also, as she proved throughout the campaign, arrogant, ignorant, un-self-conscious and seemingly unaware of much of the world around her. Thatcher was never a genius, but at least she had a keen and perceptive mind . . . and possessed a genuine curiosity about the world. She went to Oxford, lest we forget, where she studied chemistry before embarking on an almost three-decades-long climb up the Conservative ranks before finally reaching the very top in 1979.

Palin, for her part, spent a few years meandering around post-secondary institutions in Hawaii, Idaho and Alaska before settling in as a local sportscaster, cozying up to the extremist Alaskan Independence party and entering local politics, first in Wasilla and then squeaking past the corrupt leadership of the state Republican party in Juneau, where she was discovered by Kristol et al, anointed by James Dobson and the Christian right and dumped onto the national ticket to arouse the lethargic, anti-McCain base.

Thatcher was not sublime, despite the best efforts of the right-wing publicity machine to portray her as a British Reagan (also not sublime–Will Bunch q. v.), but Palin is, indeed, ridicuous.

Pay close attention. Watch as she fades away . . . .

Uncle Jay reviews the news of 2008:

H/T Nancy for the link.