Political Language

"A Tennessee congressman who supports billion of dollars in cuts to the food stamp program is one of..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:31:49 -0400

“A Tennessee congressman who supports billion of dollars in cuts to the food stamp program is one of the largest recipients of federal farm subsides, according to new annual data released by a Washington environmental group. Using Agriculture Department data, researchers at the Environmental Working Group found that Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican and a farmer from Frog Jump, Tenn., collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012….During debate on the farm bill in the House Agriculture Committee last week, Mr. Fincher was one of the biggest proponents of $20 billion in cuts to food stamps in the legislation. At times he quoted passages from the Bible in defending the cuts.”

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- NY Times, Farm Subsidy Recipient Backs Food Stamp Cuts

The worst.

"When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:39:07 -0400

“When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne?”

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Former Conservative Party chairman/disgruntled old person Norman Tebbit, speaking in opposition to the British marriage equality bill.

Artificially inseminated lesbian queen. Band name. Called it.

(via ccindecision)

Best response to this quote:

An artificially inseminated lesbian Queen would make a mockery of our current system of handing power down based on magic blood.
— Nick Doody (@NickDoody) May 21, 2013

ccindecision: Photo via Lynn Sweet Son, we live in a world...

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:02:34 -0400

ccindecision:

Photo via Lynn Sweet

Son, we live in a world that has rain. And that rain has to be stopped by men with umbrellas. Who’s gonna do it? You? Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me holding that umbrella. You need me with that umbrella.

"Trek has a very particular take on what it means to be human. Part of what it means, the franchise..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:16:57 -0400

“Trek has a very particular take on what it means to be human. Part of what it means, the franchise teaches us, is participating in an ongoing progressive project of building a utopian society. Even though the bulk of Trek comes from the ’90s, the franchise launched in the mid-’60s, and the now-anachronistic spirit of midcentury optimism has remained at the heart of the franchise throughout.”

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Yglesias on Star Trek.

nemomynameforevermore: GUYS I WAS AT THE LEAFS GAME WHEN THIS...

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:03:21 -0400

nemomynameforevermore:

GUYS I WAS AT THE LEAFS GAME WHEN THIS HAPPENED I WAS CRYING

You figure he’d at least know some sex stuff by now.

ccindecision: In this episode of Newt Gingrich Ideas, our...

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:50:47 -0400

ccindecision:

In this episode of Newt Gingrich Ideas, our favorite space-visionary/white-haired hippopotamus expresses these deep thoughts while holding up a smartphone:

1. What you simpletons “probably think is a cell phone” is not a cell phone.

2. “If it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone.”

3. “If you can get Wikipedia or go to Google, that’s not a cell phone.

4. We need a new name to describe this miraculous device that lets us listen to Newt Gingrich’s ideas on Youtube.

Apparently, Newt did not get the GOP memo about calling it an Obamaphone.

"Look, we have an intensely polarized political system, and in Congress, at least, party affiliation..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 14:36:00 -0400

“Look, we have an intensely polarized political system, and in Congress, at least, party affiliation is basically all that matters. When Massachusetts voters chose Scott Brown because he seemed like a nice guy, they were being idiots….Maybe, just maybe, you can make a case for choosing the right person for governor, regardless of party. But when you’re sending someone to Congress, all that matters is the R or D after that person’s name. It seems that conservative voters understand that; liberals and moderates should, too.”

- Paul Krugman, on why South Carolina Republicans were right to vote for Mark Sanford, given their political preferences. He’s right.

People who say they vote for “the person, not the party” are either lying or 100% naive about how politics works.

Legislative majorities not only determine what policies are enacted, they decide what gets discussed.

This applies to state legislatures as much as it does the US House and Senate. Elect a Republican assembly and the agenda will be voter ID laws, abortion restrictions, Planned Parenthood defunding, school vouchers and tax cuts.

And if these are the things you want from your legislature, it is totally alright to vote Republican.

But don’t believe you bear no responsibility for this kind of retrograde agenda just because you sent some nice, “moderate” reformy Republican to represent you in the state capital, instead of some hackish/corrupt/unsavory Dem. The most important vote that moderate dude takes will be during the chamber’s organizational session, when he will vote for the GOP leadership to assume the speakership and take control of the committee chairmanships. From then until the majority flips, it’s nothing but Medicaid cuts and hearings about Obamaphones.

I can’t really imagine the case for voting for the “right person” over a party label until you get to municipal government.

There, transposing the views of national parties onto local political actors is a fools errand because the issues are totally different. Most growing metro areas have competing political cliques along the lines of Let the Developers Build All the Things Party versus the Only Existing Residents Are Allowed to Have Nice Things Party and since members of these cliques don’t align perfectly with the views of national parties, you actually have to study the issues to make an educated choice in a local election.

tl;dr I’m a NY Democrat who votes for complete assholes all the time, so I totally get where SC Republicans get off voting for Mark Sanford.

"In 1871, a Harvard medical-school professor was pressed to give students written examinations as a..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:14:00 -0400

“In 1871, a Harvard medical-school professor was pressed to give students written examinations as a graduation requirement; he said that it would never work, because fewer than half his students could write.”

- Rivka Galchen in The New Yorker. 19th century medical education sucked.

lateralsymmetry: “Exercise update: Today I saw some cheese...

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:30:55 -0400

lateralsymmetry:

“Exercise update: Today I saw some cheese without eating it.”

— Joseph Scrimshaw

Maybe one day. Today is not that day.

ccindecision: Great timing, Capitol Hill Daily. On the same day...

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:26:27 -0400

ccindecision:

Great timing, Capitol Hill Daily.

On the same day the Dow Jones climbed above 15,000, the small-time conservative publication sent a message to the Citizens United listserv, accusing Obama of destroying the stock market with his Sharia socialism.

But c’mon: You can’t manufacture an eye-rolly scandal without a catchy name. How about Stockyndra? Stockghazi? Fast and Portfolious? Be creative!

(h/t ThinkProgress)

This is funny. But sweet tap dancing baby Jesus, the Dow Jones is still a really dumb indicator.

It’s calculated by adding up the stock prices of 30 companies (why just those 30? Shut up, that’s why) and then dividing the ensuing figure by the “Dow divisor.” The divisor is a number — 0.130216081 — that no matter what Wikipedia says about it, I’m pretty sure was created on the principle of “numbers with lots of figures after the decimal point sound scientific.”

Dumber still is the way the Dow weights its 30 components based on the absolute price of their shares:

This causes all sorts of oddities. ExxonMobil, for example, divides its value into nearly five billion lower-cost shares, while Caterpillar has around 650 million more expensive ones. Therefore ExxonMobil, one of the largest companies in history, pulls less weight on the Dow than a company less than a fifth its size.

TL;DR The DJIA should never be mentioned and yet I still wrote a post about it because everything is terrible.

"No one is saying that Charles Ramsey isn’t worthy of the “hero” mantle. He helped..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:10:46 -0400

“No one is saying that Charles Ramsey isn’t worthy of the “hero” mantle. He helped save three women who were held captive — brutally — in his Cleveland neighborhood for over a decade. But the Internet’s instant meme-ification of this man — a lower-income black man talking about a horrible crime, played on repeat at the expense of stereotypes and with the blinders fully up about the truth — it’s all a little gross, no?”

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Conor Simpson, Charles Ramsey Is an Internet Hero for All the Wrong Reasons

Mixed feelings on this.

It’s more than a little gross that a story about rape and modern-day slavery is immediately turned into a meme about a funny-sounding dude, BUT it’s also pretty clear to me that Ramsey was trying to be funny. Can’t speak for anyone else, but I was laughing with him.

When he says, “I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. DEAAAAD giveaway,” that’s the man telling a joke. Don’t think we’re disrespecting him by laughing at it.

"Not everything I told you was false."

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:01:16 -0400

“Not everything I told you was false.”

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NY State Senator John Sampson to FBI agents, after he was invited to revise his less than truthful statements.

Voila, the motto of New York State politicians.

(via ccindecision)

Members of the NYS Senate should get this as a tattoo.

cosmarxpolitan: Cosmarxpolitan, Issue 6 8 steps to make extra...

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:14:27 -0400

cosmarxpolitan:

Cosmarxpolitan, Issue 6

8 steps to make extra pounds (and enemies) disappear

The only tumblr you need for May Day.

Here’s a survey, reported by The Daily Beast, in which 29%...

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:39:20 -0400

Here’s a survey, reported by The Daily Beast, in which 29% of Americans (44% of Republicans!) agreed with the statement “in the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary to protect our liberties.”

For obvious reasons, this gets reported as “29% of Americans Think We’ll Soon Need Armed Revolt” but it happens to be a case in which the percentage of Americans tell a pollster a certain thing almost assuredly doesn’t equal the percentage of Americans that actually believe such a thing.

It’s analogous to the surveys that ask voters whether Obama is a Muslim and lo and behold a disproportionate percentage of conservatives tell the pollster that indeed he is indeed not a Christian. That’s because these poll questions give respondents a chance to express their symbolic beliefs.

In the case of “is POTUS a secret Muslim usurper?,” voters reinterpret the question to mean “how much do you dislike the president?” And the answer, for conservatives, is that they dislike him very, very much. In the context of a survey question about his religion, they way to express that belief is to say the president is not the Christian he claims to me.

I think a similar scenario is playing out here. These people aren’t really thinking about armed rebellion against the United States. They’re reinterpreting the question to mean “is the United States on the right track?” For the Republicans, the way to announce their answer as “hell no, everything under Obama is terrible” is to respond positively to this armed rebellion question.

I’m pretty sure the same phenomenon was at work during the Bush administration. In 2007, when asked whether George Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, only 39% of Democrats said “definitely not.” If you take this literally, it sounds like a lot of Democrats were completely unhinged. More likely, a plurality of Democrats were using this survey question to say, “Bush is a terrible president and he sucks at everything and we hate him. so. much.”

If I’m right about this, it doesn’t mean that no Americans believe Obama is a foreign-born Muslim or Bush had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks or an armed revolution might be coming to America. But many fewer Americans actually believe these things than surveys would indicate.

Of course, if I’m wrong, then the crazyfication factor in American politics is a lot higher than 27%.

"I’m not a Marxist. But I worry that political conservatives are going to turn me into one."

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:03:41 -0400

“I’m not a Marxist. But I worry that political conservatives are going to turn me into one.”

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Matt Yglesias, May Day: Should We All Become Marxists?

"President Obama has been adamant about curbing law-abiding Americans’ access and opportunities to..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:34:42 -0400

“President Obama has been adamant about curbing law-abiding Americans’ access and opportunities to exercise their Second Amendment rights. One way the Obama Administration is able to do this is by limiting what’s available in the market with federal agencies purchasing unnecessary stockpiles of ammunition.”

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- Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), suggesting that the feds are attacking gun ownership by buying up all the ammo.

Hopefully the Department of Homeland Security isn’t also buying all the aluminum, or Sen. Inhofe will never be able to make his hat.

(via ccindecision)

This is the greatest business model. Paranoid people buy ammo, cause a temporary shortage, blame the shortage on the government, bring about another round of paranoia, precipitating more ammo purchases.

ccindecision: Countdown over! In the category of derpiest...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:31:20 -0400

ccindecision:

Countdown over! In the category of derpiest comment about NBA pro Jason Collins’ coming out, the winner is Breitbart.com’s Ben Shapiro:

So Jason Collins is a hero because he’s gay? Our standard for heroism has dropped quite a bit since Normandy.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro)

April 29, 2013

Hmm, who DOES meet Shapiro’s awfully high Nazi-killing standard for heroism?

@adamcarolla is my hero: hotair.com/archives/2011/…

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro)

December 2, 2011

Fact: Newt is a hero for speaking truth on the Palestinians. We need a president who is willing to do that, despite OPEC.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro)

December 11, 2011

On the phenomenal @marklevinshow tonight to discuss ‘Bullies’! Very excited. Mark’s a hero. amazon.com/Bullies-Cultur…

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro)

January 10, 2013

Ben Shapiro’s standard for heroism has risen quite a bit since three months ago.

"I remember when buzzfeed was just something I did in college around 2AM."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:58:40 -0400

“I remember when buzzfeed was just something I did in college around 2AM.”

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President Obama at WHCD.

“Haha, ha. ha.” - the 94,000 federal prisoners and 240,000 state-confined inmates being held for drug offenses.

"Your mother showed me some of your landscapes and animal paintings — they were great!"

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:55:24 -0400

“Your mother showed me some of your landscapes and animal paintings — they were great!”

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Bill Clinton to George W. Bush at the Bush Library dedication.

Also, a father talking to his 6 year old.

(via ccindecision)

ccindecision: Flying 58 combat missions over Pacific gets you...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:49:08 -0400

ccindecision:

Flying 58 combat missions over Pacific gets you to certain privileges. Number one of these? Rocking pink socks without shame.