First Looks category archive

What Digby said.

It’s not a great picture: the sky was cloudy at 6:30 this morning, and I couldn’t get close to them, but here are my companions for my morning cup of coffee, behind the fence, trying to figure out how to eat my roses:

Phillies 4, Braves 3.

Radio Times had a great interview yesterday with a veteran of the WWII women’s league and a player in the new women’s National Pro Fastball League. From the website:

We talk about women playing professional baseball and softball from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball league in the ‘40s and ‘50s to the current National Pro Fastball League. Marty talks to RUTH HARTMAN who played professional baseball during WW2 and AMY HARRE (Harry) who pitches for The Philadelphia Force.

Go to the website and search for June 5, 2008, or listen here (Real Audio).

What Digby said.

Mired in Iraq forever!

Delaware Liberal finds a bright side. We can be a colonial power.

Finally. I was afraid that America would never be a colonial power. But now, word comes from a report leaked to The Independent that there is a deal to keep US troops in Iraq indefinitely, irrespective of what the results of the election in November.

(Aside: Of course, Bush is late to the game. The United States has already been a colonial power. Just ask the folks in the Phillipines and Puerto Rico, just to pull two names out of the hat.)

Via kos.

Bush lied.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

Duncan has a thought.

It is difficult to conceive of a hate crime more hateful than this. I want to launch into a tirade, but words fail me.

But the story speaks for itself:

The latest in a series of wicked acts of vandalism – one aimed to harm toddlers at play outside a synagogue – has rallied neighbors in the city’s Mount Airy section to step forward.

Rachel Gross, executive director of the Germantown Jewish Center, stood in a toddlers’ playground at the synagogue at Lincoln Drive and West Ellet Street, and pointed to a half-dozen foot-wide holes dug in the sand.

Shards of glass had been hidden inside.

“Glass was buried all over,” said Gross. “It was clearly intentional. There is no other conclusion than someone did it on purpose, and they did it to hurt children.”

She said the playground has been shut since April 15, when the glass shards – most about two to three inches long – were discovered. The perimeter of the 40- by 35-foot playground is surrounded by yellow caution tape and orange netting to keep children out.

This weekend, members of the community will be joining together to clean up the playground.

Kos reports that he has a copy of Senator Obama’s planned speech for tonight.

The U.S. Army on Thursday said suicides among active duty troops in 2007 had reached the highest level on record, due partly to the stress caused by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army announced that 115 soldiers, including 22 National Guard and Army Reserve troops, killed themselves last year. That marked a 12.7 percent rise from the 102 suicides recorded in 2006. There were 85 Army suicides in 2005.

It was the highest number of actual suicides in the military force since record-keeping began in 1980 and Army officials said the rate has remained at about the same level since, with 38 confirmed suicides recorded for 2008 as of last Monday.

The Army also said there were 935 suicide attempts in 2007.

(snip)

But officials acknowledged that stresses caused by wartime Army operations were taking their toll on soldiers including in their personal relationships, the breakup of which was cited as a catalyst in 50 percent of cases.

They can go bonkers.

But God forbid they should go to college.

’bout time they got one right:

Employees who complain of racial bias in the workplace and then face retaliation can sue under a post-Civil War-era law barring discrimination, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

In a second similar decision, the high court ruled that a provision of the federal law barring age discrimination prohibits retaliation against a federal government employee who complains of bias.

Steven Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union hailed both rulings, saying, “Today’s decisions are appropriately grounded in the realities of the workplace. The court has protected workers and respected congressional intent.”

Check out this site for grins and giggles.

This is my favorite. Maybe because First Son is Airborne.

Back in my corporate days, I was showing these to the class over lunch and people were coming in from the offices wanting to know why we were laughing so hard.

Dr. Ira Katz, chief of mental health services for the Department of Veterans Affairs, sent an e-mail to a VA colleague this past February that read:

“Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before somebody stumbles on it?”

Unfortunately for the government, somebody did “stumble” on it. Dr. Katz lied about the numbers before the House of Representatives Veterans’ Affairs Committee, grossly understating the number of such suicide attempts. He testified that the number for all of 2007 was 790. He also neglected the Army’s own “Suicide Event Report,” which disclosed that 2006 saw the highest rate of military suicides in 26 years!

Come to Drinking Liberally, Tuesday, 9 p., Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, to discuss how the Bushies support my son the troops and other stuff.

News story courtesy Brendan.

Phillybits just published some more great pictures of the town he is one of the bits of–or something like that. Check them out here.

In related news–related to his photographs, that is–summer weather is around the corner. According to todays paper, tomorrow God will flip a switch and we’ll be going from highs in the mid-60s to highs in the high 70s and low 80s.

I joined a Methodist Church quite by accident.

No, not that much by accident. I knew what Methodists were and all that.

But I was not looking for a denomination. I was looking for a congregation that had the low-key but friendly feel of the little Baptist Church I grew up in.

And there are some things about the United Methodist Church that drive me a little buggy, such as their relentless drive to rewrite hymns.

Or how, in the Apostles’ Creed, where the word “catholic” appears, they footnote it. The footnote points out that “catholic” means “universal.” Why, I asked my pastor, don’t they just change it to “universal”? “I don’t know,” he said. (Ya know, you just can’t complain about an honest answer.)

Of course, whenever you gather several million persons together in one outfit, there are bound to be areas of disagreement, even though most of those people believe fundamentally the same things.

Nevertheless, this counterbalances any little gripes I might have:

Earlier this month, at the United Methodist Church’s (UMC) Quadrennial General Conference, the UMC’s governing body, voted overwhelmingly — 844 to 20 — to refer a petition to its South Central Jurisdiction. The petition urges the rejection of President Bush’s presidential library which is set to be housed at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

A Methodist University is not a fitting site at which to memorialize a liar.

Well, actually, no legitimate university is.

Now, there’s this room that’s no longer used at the Borgata that would be just perfect . . . .

Via the Booman.

Buy the book here. I just did.

Will Bunch tears up the argument that someone who talks good and knows a subject from a predicate is somehow a conceited self-important asshole.

Ya know, my mother used to have a saying about persons who had nothing to offer to a discussion and who therefore resorted to ad hominem attacks.

“All they are doing,” she would say, “is tearing down.” The other side of that, which she usually would not say, is that they do not desire nor have the capability to build anyone, or anything, up.

You know, if the definition of “elitist” or “snob” has become someone who loathes any form of racism and who wants a nation where people have full access to education and where people highly desire that access, and who wants a democracy where both voters and the media work together to keep people rooted in facts and not in rumor, then, God yes, I am an elitist. But I never thought that’s what it meant to be an elitist. I always thought that was what it meant to be an American. Forgive me if I am mistaken.

Tomorrow, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, 6 p.

Finding parking is a lot easier with the sun still out.

I’ll have–oh, I don’t have to order. The waitress knows what I want.

And since my attendance is so sporadic, all I can say is she’s a damned good waitress.

Several years ago, our dog Beau, a black lab, died.

He lay down on the back porch and didn’t move for days. When we took him to the vet, he didn’t make it.

Animals, unlike most people, know when their time has come. Also unlike people, they know that death is not an unnatural occurrence.

One of the most power lines I have ever read was in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. Now, Burroughs was pretty much the pre-eminent hack writer of his time. I have read most of his stuff. It’s about as profound as a hotdog, and, frankly, just as much fun to read as a hotdog is to eat at a summer barbecue.

But in that one book, he wrote this line: “Tarzan considered death to be something to avoided, but not feared.”

We could all be guided by that.

Why all this drivel?

In today’s local rag, Lisa Scottolini wrote of the death of her dog.