First Looks category archive
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?
Bushonomics 0
The national average price for regular gasoline is up 23 percent from a year ago, according to AAA, the automobile club.
Some analysts expect it to approach $4 a gallon this summer, when demand is at a peak.
On my way home from the jobsite today, I passed a local Shell station–the one where I refill my propane tank–advertising $3.36.
They had a line. Actually, three lines.
Drink Liberally 0
Tomorrow, starting at 6 p. m., Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, just a block from where the hippies meet on South Street, Philadelphia.
Barring a relapse, I might actually be there.
Not that that’s any kind of a draw.
Probably more like a threat.
Bushonomics 0
Over at the Group News Blog.
Your Government at Work 0
From the Booman Tribune. Follow the link to see the answer to the question at the end of the excerpt. And ask yourself, “Why didn’t they do this in a neighborhood of poor white folk?”
Of course, patriotic white Americans do tend to forget a few minor problems with this narrative. Minor things like slavery, the Klu Klux Klan, lynching and the infamous Tuskegee experiments when poor black men with syphilis were left untreated for decades just to see what course the disease might take, even though there were treatments available to them. They weren’t even told they had syphilis, merely that they were being treated for “bad blood.” In fact, they were unknowing and unwilling participants in a study to see how bad their symptoms would get before they died from the disease the good doctors conducting the study refused to inform them they suffered from.
Those days are long gone, fortunately. These days the federal government researchers would never deliberately lie to black people in order to get them to participate in an unethical scientific study. Not in the 21st century! Or would they? (Tip of me hat to the field negro and Francis Holland)