First Looks category archive
I’ve Been to Lake Eola Park 2
Frankly, it ain’t that great:
According to wftv.com, 22-year-old Eric Montanez was in April this year caught on video camera providing nourishment to a group of the less fortunate in Lake Eola Park in contravention of the ban on “mass feeding in one area”. He was duly cuffed for his trouble.
Neither, for that matter, is Orlando.
DL Tomorrow 0
Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Center City Philadelphia.
The hamburgers won honorable mention at the the Inky, but I like the Fish and Chips.
What Digby Said 0
This is another edition of What Digby Said.
Support the Troops, Bushie Style 0
Yeah, I know it’s an oxymoron.
In this post, I linked to a post by Phillybits about an American soldier’s wife who faces deportation because, by God, she got married.
Check out the follow-up, in which Phillybits discusses the reaction he’s gotten from red-blooded American bigots commenters.
Now it’s time for the Maalox.
Support the Troops, Bushie Style 0
I’m not going to try to summarize.
Just go read it.
And think, think seriously, about why some folks, like the Mark Krikorian quoted in the post, are so full of hate.
Brendan Makes a Phone Call 1
Of course, Joe Biden, who actually is a fairly decent–and extremely smart–guy, has this problem of engaging his mouth before putting his brain in gear, leading to some of the memorable gaffes in modern American politics.
Hoof-in-mouth disease apparently extends to his staff, also.
Complicated by an inability to diagram a simple sentence.
Drinking Liberally 0
Tomorrow, Tangier Restaurant (great fish and chips!), 18th and Lombard, Philly, 6 p. m. till whenever.
I might even make it this time. At least I don’t have to go to the cooling tower place.
Swampwater 0
Dick Polman.
Please read the entire post. It has something the Current Federal Administration does not.
Facts.
Eight days ago, armed guards employed by Blackwater (one of the roughly 60 American firms that have profited from the Bush administration’s unprecedented war-fighting privatization program) were involved in a controversial gun battle in Baghdad. The Iraqi government contends that the Blackwater guards, while protecting a U.S. embassy convoy, got spooked by some mortar rounds that had landed nearby, and had then opened fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding the innocent civilians. Three Iraqi ministries have already determined that the Blackwater’s conduct constitutes “a terrorist action against civilians, just like any other terrorist operation.â€
(snip)
Early last week, the Maliki government, which says that the Baghdad incident was the seventh violent episode involving Blackwater this year alone, was making noises about kicking the North Carolina-based firm out of Iraq. That threat didn’t last long. By Friday, a Maliki advisor was telling the press, “The reality of the matter is, we can’t do that.†One big reason: Order 17, signed in 2004 by American occupation chief Paul Bremer, who unilaterally decreed that all U.S. private contractors shall be exempt from Iraqi law.
In other words, “free Iraq†(as Bush likes to call it) shall be considered free as long as it doesn’t try to meddle with the Bush war-fighting privatization program. When it does try to meddle, it is deemed to be a hostage to U.S. interests; as Maliki said yesterday, the Blackwater case poses “serious challenges to the sovereignty of Iraq.†Meanwhile, Blackwater went back on the job last Friday, guarding U.S. convoys, after just a few days in the dog house.
Support Free (If Inelegant) Speech 2
Steve at ASZ.
Here’s a copy of my email.
Though there is no doubt that the editors of the Rocky Mountain Collegian could have expressed themselves with more grace, the sentiment they expressed was well within the borders of free speech.
And one shared by a majority of the American people.
Including this American person, whose son currently serves in Afghanistan.
General Pollyanna 0
I’ve been out of town all day doing the cooling tower thing, but Brendan has more.
DL 0
Tomorrow, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, just a block off South Street.
I’d much rather be there than at the Cooling Tower Place (for one thing, it’s only 25 miles away, not 79 miles away).
Pick up the slack for me, okay?
Jena 0
The nutcases are coming out to support the DA.
From the SPLC:
“The best crowd control for such a situation would be a squad of men armed with full automatics and preferably a machine gun as well,†is how one person put it on the Web forum hosted by the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network. Added another hopeful VNN poster: “I’m not really that angry at the nogs [a recent variation on an ancient racial slur] — they are just soldiers in an undeclared race war. But any white that’s in that support rally I would like to … have them machine-gunned.â€
As the rally began to unfold this morning, it became clear that it would attract huge numbers of people, perhaps even the 40,000 that some organizers had predicted. They came to protest the case of the “Jena 6,†black youths who were charged with serious crimes for an attack on a white youth not long after white teens who had targeted blacks were let off with a slap on the wrist. White supremacists reacted with a strange mixture of anger and admiration for the organizing behind the rally.
But the dominant response was violent rage. “I think a group of White men with AK rifles loaded with high capacity magazines should close in on the troop of howler monkeys from all sides and compress them into a tight group, and then White men in the buildings on both sides of the shitskinned hominids shall throw Molotov cocktails from above to cleanse the nigs by fire,†wrote “NS Cat†on VNN. Another poster fantasized about a terrorist attack in Jena today: “Wouldn’t that be sweet? Gosh darn, wouldn’t that be sweet? Good LORD wouldn’t THAT be SWeeeeEET? Boom, Boom, no more Coon! Well? A White man can dream can’t he?â€
Via Pam’s House Blend.