First Looks category archive
Bushonomics 0
He’s put the whole damn country in hock (emphasis added):
The 30-year-old bookkeeper stood pregnant, broke and sad under rows of pawned guitars hanging like curing hams from the ceiling of the ragged South Street shop. She got a $20 loan for her $200 Bulova, a gift from the Harley-Davidson Co., where she used to work.
“It feels so weird,” said Dillingham, accompanied by her fiance, Pat Lapetina, 35, an unemployed ironworker doing painting jobs on the side. The couple recently moved to South Philadelphia from Florida to build a life.
“I worked hard for this watch. I’m middle-class, not poor. I can’t believe I have to do this to buy gas.”
(snip)
“People are cleaning out their houses of gold, silver, whatever, to get money just to fill their cars with gas,” said Nat Leonard, 51, whose grandfather opened Society Hill in 1929. “People are pawning out like crazy.”
Business is up maybe 20 percent over last year.
“With this economy, we’re not done yet with bad times,” Leonard continued. “Not even close.”
Things are so awful, he said, he’s getting loads of first-time customers.
(snip)
It’s not just fuel that’s bringing new people to pawnshops. And they’re not all brick pointers.
“Upper-income people are in pawnshops nowadays, needing money right away to meet payments,” said Bill Stull, chairman of the department of economics at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and Management.
“We are in an economy in which many people are living right at the margins, even middle- and upper-income people. They have little savings, they’ve borrowed so much, their credit-card bills are high, and their house values are going down.”
Over at Carver W. Reed & Co., a pawnshop at 10th and Sansom Streets since Lincoln was president, more and more higher-echelon people are filing in, owner Tod Gordon said.
“The upper middle class is feeling the crunch like never before,” he said. “They’re bringing in diamonds and gold to pay for margin calls on stocks. There’s a feeling of despair.
How Low Can He Go? 0
Upyernoz wants to know.
Mission Accomplished 0
Brendan points out that this is the 5th Anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day.
His photomontage does it the honor it deserves.
Meanwhile, at the “accomplished mission,” s(pl)urge ™ is turning to s(pl)at.
Civilian deaths reported by the Iraqi government also reached the highest levels in months as Baghdad experienced intense clashes triggered by an Iraqi government crackdown against Shiite Muslim militias.
(snip)
At least 4,063 U.S. personnel have been killed since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to the Web site.
The level of violence has been inching up since January, after a 60 percent drop in attacks nationwide in the second half of last year, according to U.S. military figures.
Chris’s Pens 9
The pens that Chris made for us arrive today.
They are gorgeous.
(Mine’s the fat one.)
If you want to learn more about his handcrafted pens, visit his website.
Now, I’m just waiting for the fountain pen. I expected it would be more challenging than a ballpoint, but it has turned out to be even more challenging than I anticipated. It’s caused him so much torment that the fun has gone out of watching him.
Transport 0
Opie reflects on gas prices.
As I Watch the Baseball Game, I Am Reminded, “Keep Your Eye on the Ball” 0
Steven D. pulls us back to the issues.
Drink Liberally 0
Tonight, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia.
Festivities start at 6 p. m.
Honor 0
Or not.
Honor killings in the Democratic Republican Republic of Iraq. Follow the link for the details.
Richard Blair asks the questions:
Q: How can “democracy†flourish in this kind of an environment?
A: It can’t.Q: Why is the U.S. government (and many Americans) still supporting this crap?
A:
That Sinking Feeling . . . . 1
The current BoatUS Magazine (BoatUS membership required) has a neat article on personal submarines.
But you can learn all you need to know to buy or build your own personal submarine (no missile silos included) here.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Bushisms 0
From The Nation:
“For the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC to participate but they declined our offer or did not respond.”
John Stauber, coauthor of Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, contended that the Pentagon’s “surrogate” program violated federal law against domestic propaganda and called for a congressional investigation. “This war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign,” he said. Former ABC correspondent Bob Zelnick largely defended the program as standard operating procedure–an odd claim since the administration went to court to prevent its disclosure. Zelnick did concede, however, that news organizations should disclose more about military analysts’ conflicts of interest when they provide commentary.
A Poem, Not by Henry Gibson 0
Remember Henry Gibson? Well, he didn’t write this.
If you can keep running when all about you
Are afraid of losing and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself alone when your party doubts you
And trusts another far more, too,
If you can wait for superdelegates to turn,
Lying will help, there’s no harm in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give a damn about haters,
But don’t hesitate to feign hurt, and sometimes cry:If you can bowl–and not make the blue collar your master,
If you can do shots–and not lose your game;
If you can sit down with both Russert and Blitzer
And charm those two jagoffs to advance your aims;
If you can bear to hear your name cursed
By the best in the the party you claim to love,
And watch that party become rent and broken,
And laugh as you focus on rising above:If you can talk with crowds, yet remember CEOs own you,
Or sit on Wal-Mart’s board, yet charm union bigs
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If you can screw them all just for the top gig,
If you can destroy the progressive movement
With a rank selfishness borne of certainty,
Yours is the donkey and what’s left of its carcass,
And–which is all that matters–you’ll be the nominee!
Seen on the Street 0
Read window decal seen on a car with Virginia tags exceeding the speed limit in Delaware:
Hillary.
Not Then.
Not Now.
NOT EVER.
Tom Hayden, one of my heroes (no, I’m not kidding), on herself (emphasis added):
To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, “Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?”
She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.
Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists”. Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein’s sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)
All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?
It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.
More here from the BooMan.
Decision Tree 0
Over at DelawareLiberal.
Why Ethanol from Corn Is a Fraud 8
Today’s Radio Times:
Go to the website and search the archives for April 24, 2008, or listen here (Real Audio).
Are You a Balloon 1
Become a balloon here.
It’s Capitalism–Everything’s for Sale 0
From the Demon Princess:
image courtesy MoronCowboy.
The lies do get tiresoms.
Why do you put up with them?