To get started definitely Python. Once you get all the object oriented goodness and functional programming abstracts you can add verbosity and do the same in Java. (Python fan here, forced to learn Java years ago) As for me, I stick with Python.
How ironic, I was forced to learn Python to take on work and then 8 months into the project, I started playing with Java and GWT on a side project and enjoyed it so much that I made a complete switch away from PHP, perl and Python to the Java side.