First Looks category archive
Foxy 1
No fox in this henhouse.
Score One for the Good Guys 0
This is what can happen when you follow the money:
The $2.5 million verdict will likely cripple the Imperial Klans of America, which has 16 chapters in eight states.
Support the SPLC here.
Telling People Not To Do It Just Doesn’t Do It 0
“Abstinence education” is a fraud and a sham that promotes STDs and out-of-wedlock pregnancy and wastes public money:
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.
Drinking Liberally 0
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.
Beyond the Palin 2
Praised with faint damns: she’s no Margaret Thatcher (not that being one is any kind of accomplishment). Michael Stickings in the Guardian:
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 . . . .
Year in Review 0
Uncle Jay reviews the news of 2008:
H/T Nancy for the link.
“Back from the Shadows Again” 0
(With apologies to the Firesign Theatre.)
I have returned from my Secure Undisclosed Destination. Shortly after I got there, the local intranet crashed, so I was unable to irritate persons in public.
But I’m back.
I Hadn’t Read This Column Yet 0
Fortunately, Steve saved me the trouble.
“The Kinetic Fallacy” 0
Tim F. explains it here.
Swift Responses 0
Jon Swift has posted his Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves).
Read it.
Now.
Why?
He may well be the best writer on the innertubes. His thumbnails of the entries are a hoot.
(Plus I’m right near the top because I happened to be sitting here when his email requesting a submission came in.)
Drinking Liberally 0
Tuesday, Triumph Brewing Company, Chestnut between Letitia and Second, Philadelphia, 6 p.
If all goes well, I’ll be somewhere else.
Hoist one for me.
The Republican Party Breaks New Ground in Stupid 0
(Yeah, I know this is going to be blogged to death and no one will notice my little rantings back here in the last row, but, as my mother would have said, “Honestly!“)
Lead* from The Hill:
Gunnar Myrdal said that “the Negro problem in America is a white man’s problem.”
Clearly, these Republicans do have quite a problem.
I will not pretend to understand the dynamics of contemporary race relations in the United States. I will claim to understand a lot of the history of them, because I’ve studied it. And I have lived through major changes in them, from growing up under Jim Crow to living, these days, thankfully, not under Jim Crow.
Anyone who would argue that racial prejudice–not to mention religious prejudice, sex (“gender,” by God! is a grammatical concept–it has to do with words, not persons) prejudice, and other types of prejudice are not part of American society is a fool or a self-justifying bigot or a combination thereof.
Now, I’m not arguing that the “Barack the Magic Negro” guy is personally a bigot. I don’t know the gentleman and, fortunately, hope never to meet him.
I will argue and have argued that the Republican Party made itself the party of bigotry with the odious “Southern strategy.” Whether or not individual party hacks leaders were personally bigots is immaterial; the party set out to take advantage of bigotry for electoral gain (in much the same way as it cynically recruited fundamentalist right-wing Christians with its phony-baloney “family values” rhetoric).
I will say this with great certainty: Anyone who’s lived through any part of the 60 years of the current civil rights struggle and hasn’t figured out what he can’t say (or do) in public without getting into trouble is too stupid for words.
(That, of course, eminently qualifies him for RNC Chairperson.)
Steve has more over at ASZ. A nugget:
(The Hill via Huffington Post.)
______________________
* It’s “lead,” as in the “lead into the story,” not “lede,” dammit. Misspelling a word does not make it more important or more special.
Drinking Liberally 0
Tuesday (St. Servulus Day), Triumph Brewing Company, Chestnut between Letitia and Second, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p.
Dick Polman on Darth Cheney 0
The whole analysis of the uber veep is worth a read.
Here’s a nugget (emphasis added):
Nor did he (Cheney–ed.) bother communicating, at least in ways that approximated the truth.
The Bush administration went into free fall for a host of reasons – such as its documented incompetence in Iraq and New Orleans – but it can fairly be argued that, at some point, a landslide majority of Americans simply decided that the White House was telling too many lies. And Cheney was a prime offender. No leader, even a legendarily skillful infighter like Cheney, can repeatedly insult the public and get away with it indefinitely.