First Looks category archive

Josh Marshall:

The ACLU needs your help to try to restore the rule of law to our polity.

Via Brendan.

From an email. Original source unknown:

Retirement Planning

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left.

If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Air Lines stock you would have $49.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer/wine one year ago, drank all the beer/wine, then turned in the cans/bottles for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have had $214.00.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

(Aside: If someone knows the original source, please let me know so I cite it.)

Prepare for your retirement.

Drink liberally tomorrow at Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, 6-9 p. m.

Heck, I might even make it there this week. Fingers crossed and all that.

Some commentary of the single (that is, text), as opposed to multi, media here and here.

Video via Brendan.

Be sure to watch both parts.

Via Duncan.

Over the past year, consumer confidence has deteriorated significantly. Worsening problems in housing, harder-to-get credit, financial turmoil on Wall Street and lofty energy prices have put people in a much more gloomy mind-set. Last April, confidence stood at 85.4. The index is based on results from the international polling firm Ipsos.

And today another airline bit the dust.

But the rich are richer . . . . and isn’t that what matters to a Bushie?

Family:

I guess it was about time. It’s been about six weeks.

No Exit is a play. Sadly, the Bush administration is real.

Though one does get the feeling from time to time that they don’t separate real life from stage craft.

Their legacy, though, is tragically concrete.

Pointless, phony, fraudulent war forever. The little boy has soiled the sandbox and leaves the rest of us to scoop it.

After completing the modest U.S. troop drawdown that’s already scheduled for July, he foresees “a 45-day period of consolidation and evaluation. At the end of that period, we will commence a process of assessment, to examine the conditions on the ground, and over time, determine when we can make recommendations for further reductions.”

English translation: The place is a mess. We have no idea when things might get better. We’re not pulling out any more troops. We’re running out the clock on 2008.

It’s Westmoreland all over again once more redundantly.

Sorry, folks, that’s not a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the reflection at the bottom of the well:

Six months at a time.

Last video via Balloon Juice.

Via Upyernoz.

Here.

Jeez, oh man. What a roster.

Via Phillybits.

By extrapolation, bet this occurs in the voting booth, too:

She and undergraduate Amy Beth Warriner gave 30 students specific words to remember. They found that students who forgot a word were more likely to do so again later if they had spent longer trying to retrieve it.

In other words, they were practicing the error, reinforcing the incorrect pattern of brain activation that originally caused it.

Humphreys’ advice: If you just can’t figure something out, “stop trying; you’re just digging yourself in deeper.”

Who cares.

College basketball went to hell when it instituted the shot clock.

A very long while ago, I wrote about New Jersey’s attempt to invade Delaware with an LNG port.

The Supreme Court has ruled. Delaware’s boundaries are, well, Delaware’s boundaries.

As I mentioned at the time, all New Jersey has to do is more it a couple of miles upriver, and it will be within New Jersey.

Looking for an investment? Here’s a growth industry:

About a year ago, business from foreclosures started to pick up. In the last two or three months, it has become a deluge.

Last month, 7,499 foreclosure actions were filed in Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone.

(Via McClatchy.)

You get to meet nice people like this lady:

All Joanne Keeley wanted to do was help her grandson buy a used car, but she ended up with an expensive mortgage she couldn’t afford.

Walter Sellers, who arranged financing for the car, was moonlighting as a mortgage salesman and dangled a $1,220 monthly payment in front of her until the night before closing last May, she said, when he told her it would really be $1,790.

“He floored me,” she said. It got even worse the next day at closing, when she learned that the $1,790 payment did not include taxes and insurance, which amount to $310 a month.

“I guess if it had been $1,790, I wouldn’t have” applied for the loan, Keeley said recently at her dining room table in Aston, Delaware County, with her 6-year-old granddaughter at her side.

Sellers, who said he could not remember Keeley, declined to comment on her situation.

Why didn’t she run? Read a little further into the story:

“I trusted this man so much. He seemed like my friend,” Keeley said of Sellers, recalling how he sat at her dining room table last April to gather information for the application.

(snip)

“People who are in the business of bait-and-switch marketing know what they are doing,” Ackelsberg said. “They wait to change the terms until the transaction has progressed to a point where they know that it will be nearly impossible, psychologically, for the consumer to say no.”

Meanwhile, back on the preserve

Countrywide Financial’s chief executive and president will receive a combined $19 million in stock next week as part of the company’s pending takeover by Bank of America, according to a regulatory filing.

This cold just won’t go away.

Tomorrow, 6-9 p.m., Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia. Another month and it will be warm enough to dine al fresco, assuming Al shows up, of course.

Stand in for me.

I’m on Day Nine of the Worst Cold I’ve Had in Five Years.

The doctor told me it’s been hanging on as much as three weeks with some people. Sort of like Bush Cheney–just won’t go away even with you are sick to death of it.