First Looks category archive

Richard Blair pins an eloquent essay on the social and economic cost of Republican rule. Here’s a couple of excerpts; please read the whole thing:

In the past, I’ve ranted about how there was a palpable shift in the overall demeanor of big business back in the early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Perhaps I was a bit closer to it (”the shift”) at the time because of the point that I was at in my career – I’d been with the same employer for a couple of years, making a pretty good wage, and I was the sole breadwinner in the family. That was my role; that was the real role in life I thought I was supposed to play. But I could sense, even back then, that something was terribly amiss. I just couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. Something strange was happening in the work place that augured an uncertain future.

(snip)

When consumers stop spending, the economy is going to crash hard. Signs already point to a significant contraction in consumer spending, which is why George Bush today offered up a $140 billion economic stimulus package. The plan tosses a meager bone to those who chose to forgo a new winter coat this year in order to pay the gas or heating oil bill. The theory is that people will see $800 or $1000 from the government as “found money” and go out and buy a new refrigerator or big screen TV, thereby stimulating the economy.

Here’s a news flash for George Bush and his fiscal policy wonks: a lot of people aren’t going to use the cash from his proposed “economic stimulus package” to buy a new big screen TV. They’re going to use the money to catch up on a late car payment. Or pay the electric bill for a month or two without having to figure out which Peter to rob in order to pay Paul.

This is the GOP price of living. And it isn’t cheap or indexed for inflation.

Brendan sums it up. My language might have been a little more circumspect, but that’s just a matter of style. He has the substance:

When people ask me “What happened to the United States? What the fuck happened?” I just tell them, “We gave the stupid people all the power. We gave them the keys to the city, the keys to the kingdom, and things have worked out as you might expect.” It’s a beautiful thing. The stupidity, the vast and deeply prideful ignorance, is a work of art. I cannot wait until these fools are drowning in the rising seas, riddled with tumors from Frankenfoods, and still they’ll blather on denying that even now the water is flooding their homes.

My freshman roommate (6’2″ 210 lb. football player) was from Bergen County, New Jersey. He told me that, whenever he drove through Passaic, he kept on hand on a hammer.

Of course, that was a long time ago. It’s probably worse now.

Especially with missing machine guns and the like.

Police are trying to find a (police-ed.) submachine gun that’s been missing for at least a week.

(snip)

The department noticed the MP5 weapon missing during an inventory of the arsenal.

Passaic County prosecutors are investigating what happened to the weapon. It’s listed as missing or stolen in a national police database.

It’s worth reading.

From Harry Shearer.

. . . it’s because they are brown.

Oh, yeah. And Catholic.

You want to know what’s happening?

Follow the money:

The forces seeking to sharply reduce the number of immigrants coming to America won a stunning victory last June, when nativist anger at an “amnesty” for the undocumented scuttled a major bipartisan immigration reform package backed by President Bush. Many members of Congress were completely unprepared for the flood of angry E-mails, phone calls and faxes they received — an inundation so massive that the phone system collapsed under the weight of more than 400,000 faxes.

They should not have been surprised. The furious nativist tide was largely driven by an array of immigration restriction organizations that has been built up over the course of more than 20 years into fixtures in the nation’s capital.

The vast majority of these groups were founded or funded by John Tanton, a major architect of the contemporary nativist movement who, 20 years ago, was already warning of a destructive “Latin onslaught” heading to the United States. Most of these organizations used their vast resources in the days leading up to a vote on the bill to stir up a nativist backlash that ultimately resulted in its death.

At the center of the Tanton web is the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important organization fueling the backlash against immigration.

Founded by Tanton in 1979, FAIR has long been marked by anti-Latino and anti-Catholic attitudes. It has mixed this bigotry with a fondness for eugenics, the idea of breeding better humans discredited by its Nazi associations. It has accepted $1.2 million from an infamous, racist eugenics foundation. It has employed officials in key positions who are also members of white supremacist groups. Recently, it has promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico’s secret designs on the American Southwest and an alternative theory alleging secret plans to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada. Just last February, a senior FAIR official sought “advice” from the leaders of a racist Belgian political party.

Sadly, this country has a long history of nativism, in which sons of immigrants wish to close the doors to subsequent immigration.

As Raymond so ably demonstrated, today’s immigrants are here because they have something to contribute: their labor is taking the place of the labor of us retiring boomers. They aren’t taking, they are giving.

It is not without reason that the first organized nativists earned the name, “Know Nothings,” though it is certain that they did not realize how ironically accurate that name would become.

Frankly, I think we should go back to the immigration policy of the Ellis Island Days. If they can work and otherwise have okay records, let ’em in.

This nation has grown from expanding opportunities for everyone (sometimes, admittedly, under duress–think “The Civil Rights Act of 1964“).

Contracting opportunity is against everything the United States of America is about.

Well, except for the occasional anomaly.

Pick up the slack for me.

I have a meeting at 7:00 p. m.

I’d much rather be Drinking Liberally.

Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, right behind Jeff, 6:00 p. m. till 9:00 p. m. or whenever.

Twisted double talk untwisted over at Phillybits’s place.

Having worked for the railroad for many years, I know how dangerous this was. Crashing trains is not a good way to get one’s rocks off.

A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents.

The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points, The Telegraph reports. Local police said the youngster trespassed in tram depots to gather information needed to build the device. The teenager told police that he modified track setting for a prank.

. . . seem to be an offense of some kind in Colorado.

Yeah.

Right.

Her first mortgage was with Contrywide:

But coming off a divorce and starting over as a single mother with a middle-class lifestyle, she ran up a chunk of credit-card debt.

Meanwhile, Countrywide sent her a stream of offers for a home equity loan to consolidate her credit-card debt. She said that every time she got on the phone to confirm a payment, Countrywide customer-service representatives badgered her about getting a second loan. In 2005, she relented, taking out a $15,000 home-equity loan. “I thought it was going to save me money in the long run,” she said.

But she did not know that she was only paying interest on the home-equity loan and that the interest rate was climbing, until it reached the 15 percent to 16 percent range, about the same as the credit-card rate.

A Countrywide spokesman could not be reached for comment on the terms of Morgan-Coleman’s loan.

The moral of the story, as far as I can see, is never believe anyone who’s paid on commission.

Not even the clerk in your local Radio Slum.

Then, again, I’ve been a happy Radio Slum customer for years. Their salespersons have never misled me.

Let me reconsider the moral:

Never believe anyone who’s paid to lie on commission.

Wait a minute!

We are in big trouble because of liars who are on salary.

Let me try again.

Never believe anyone.

Nah, that doesn’t work. Occasionally, someone tells the truth.

Let’s try again.

Never believe anyone who owes allegiance to or donates primarily to the Party of Privilege.

Whaddya think?

Please pass the whoopers. From Fact Check dot org:

Another debate, another round of fact-checking. The GOP meeting in South Carolina was the third for Republican candidates in a week, but they haven’t run out of exaggerations or misstatements:

• Romney claimed Massachusetts gained jobs “every single month” he was governor after hitting a low point. In fact the job gains seesawed, with seven of 36 months producing job losses.
• Huckabee escalated his misleading claims about cutting taxes, saying he cut taxes for the first time in the history of the state of Arkansas, which is untrue. Others put through tax cuts before he did. Overall, Huckabee raised taxes.
• Romney falsely claimed to have been endorsed by the Massachusetts Right to Life Association. Actually, he was endorsed by a single chapter of a different group.
• Thompson, accusing Huckabee of Democratic tendencies, said he’d been endorsed by the National Education Association. But he was actually endorsed only by the New Hampshire chapter of that nationwide teacher’s organization.
• Huckabee claimed that highways in Arkansas had gone from the “worst road system in the country” to the “most improved” in the ratings of a trucking magazine. He failed to mention that despite the improvement they remained fourth from the bottom on the “worst” list.
• Giuliani asserted that cutting the corporate tax rate “will get more revenues.” Unlike his earlier supply-side claims, he can point this time to an economic study suggesting that he might be right, but it’s not a certainty.

But City Hall doesn’t fare too well against the phone company (Yes, Virginia, Ventnor is more than a square on the Monopoly game board):

In this age of extreme dependency on phones, faxes, cell phones, iPhones, email, and the myriad of other ways humans find to communicate, doing business with the City of Ventnor in any other way besides in person was impossible for two-and-a-half hours this morning.

The city’s telephone service provider shut off service for non-payment.

But it wasn’t because the city forgot to pay its phone bill for three months that ACC Business, a division of ATT, which provides local and long distance phone service to the city, cut them off, according to municipal administrator Andrew J. McCrosson Jr.

The city had refused to pay a new monthly minimum charge to the company after a previous three-year contract expired in October, putting them on the delinquent list.

(snip)

McCrosson said that over the course of the past year or so the city, which currently spends about $25,000 a year on the service, has dramatically cut its phone costs by implementing new employee procedures and installing a new phone system. When the old contract expired, the city wanted to continue to see that savings reflected in its monthly bill, he said.

“Instead they wanted us to sign a new contract that called for a minimum amount to be paid monthly which we believed would be higher than we are actually currently spending,” McCrosson said. “We’re not happy with that arrangement so we didn’t sign the contract and we haven’t paid the bill.”

I guess the moral of the story is that, if you save on your phone bill, the phone company will want to charge you more.

I run my own little website, including this blog, out of the next room, the one right over there.

The site’s not very big. I certainly don’t need a server farm to run it.

But, by heavens, if it doesn’t work, it’s my problem, not anyone else’s.

Then, again, I’m a lefty. I know the difference between the things under my control and the things not under my control.

Not like the subjects of this post.

Please, someone, get them a copy of Apache for Dummies.

Tomorrow, Tangier, 18th and Lombard, 18;00-21:00, than where I will be, having a tooth extracted and an implant implanted.

Fortunately, I’ve got a bottle of Rushies left over from the last root canal.

In other news, it finally stopped raining long enough for me to drag out the mulching mower and chop of the leaves.

Whoop! Shoulda kept out them immigrants.

US researchers have identified a married couple who sailed from England to the US in around 1630 as the bearers of a genetic mutation which puts their numerous descendants at higher risk of a hereditary form of colon cancer.

Yeah, well, I know it was a mass email:

Dear Frank,

I count the past year of campaigning for the presidency as one of the most rewarding in a career of public service.

Unfortunately, I am withdrawing from that campaign tonight.

But there is no reason to hang our heads this evening — only the opportunity to look towards a continuation of the work we started last January: ending the Iraq War, restoring the Constitution, and putting a Democrat in the White House.

I know a lot of you came to this email list through a shared desire to return our nation to one that respects the rule of law, and I want to make one thing clear to all of you:

The fight to restore the Constitution and stop retroactive immunity does not end with my Presidential campaign. FISA will come back in a few weeks and my pledge to filibuster ANY bill that includes retroactive immunity remains operative.

You’ve been an invaluable ally in the battle, and I’ll need you to stick by my side despite tonight’s caucus results.

So, one more time, thank you for all of your efforts throughout the course of this entire Presidential campaign.

We made a real difference in shaping the debate, and we’ll continue to do so in the coming days, weeks and years.

I’ll never forget you, and what we’ve fought for, together, over the past year.

Chris Dodd

Chris Dodd is the only candidate to whom I’ve ever contributed during a nominating race.

Part of the reason is that I usually haven’t had any money to spare, at least until I got fired by my Previous Employer (Take that! Previous Employer!).

Part of the reason is that he was the only candidate who has put his reputation and influence where his mouth is to defend the Constitution of the United States from the depridations of the Current Federal Administration.

And he learned from his Daddy’s mistakes and stayed squeaky clean throughout his public career.

Fare thee well, Mr. Dodd.

More from Susie.

Eugene Robinson on the Washington biosphere:

There aren’t many people in Washington (the state of mind) who spend sleepless nights worrying about sons, daughters or other loved ones serving in Iraq. Even though there are suburbs within 20 miles of the Capitol where illegal immigration is a passionate, hot-button issue, most in Washington think of the problem in academic terms. And just about everyone in state-of-mind Washington has top-notch health insurance; members of Congress enjoy a comprehensive plan that one might be tempted to call “socialized medicine,” since a large portion of the costs are borne by taxpayers.

Well, dammit, I know what is like to worry about a troop. And not to have health insurance.

Frankly, both situations pretty much suck.

And neither is going to be solved as long as Republicans continue to play with our lives so as to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Phony security gone wild:

A couple were banned for life from a shopping centre – because they were taking photos of their beloved grandchildren.

Kim and Trevor Sparshott were ordered to stop taking photos because they were causing a security threat.

They were thrown out of the centre after they took out a camera to snap the look on the youngsters’ faces when they turned up unexpectedly.

(After mounting a complaint campaign, they got the ban lifted.)

This ranks right up there with confiscating toothpaste and shampoo as a pretending to provide security while doing nothing.

Via Geek News Central.

. . . Fact Check dot org always becomes more active. Today’s crop:

Dems:

Obama’s ad touting his health care plan quotes phrases from newspaper articles and an editorial, but makes them sound more laudatory and authoritative than they actually are.

.

Repubs:

The ad Huckabee said he decided not to run has now appeared at least three times in Iowa anyway. It accuses Romney of being “dishonest” but shades the facts in the process.

In another ad Huckabee claims to have signed the most broad-based tax cut in Arkansas history. But as we’ve noted repeatedly, he signed bigger tax increases than cuts.