First Looks category archive

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.

(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.

Fortunately, Steve saved me the trouble.

Tim F. explains it here.

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.)

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 season of hope.

Footnote here