Month: July 2010

Linguist Mark Liberman lays into Kathleen Parker for calling Obama "our first female president":

What's her evidence for this lack of "rhetorical-testosterone"? Along with a lot of vague stuff about how Obama is "a chatterbox" who shares with "Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton" (!) the ability to "assume feminine communication styles effectively", the column includes exactly one relevant fact:

Obama's [oil crisis] speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

… The first thing to say is that there isn't the slightest evidence that passive-voice constructions are "feminine". 

Women don't use the passive voice more than men, and among male writers, number of passive-voice constructions doesn't appear to have any relationship at all to real or perceived manliness. The "passive is girly" prejudice seems to be purely due to the connotations of (other senses of) the term passive, misinterpreted by people who in any case mostly wouldn't recognize the grammatical passive voice if it bit them on the leg. …

I don't have time this morning to try to figure out how Mr. Payack [of the Global Language Monitor] derived his passive percentages, if any information about this is available — I'll have more to say when I've looked into this further. But I did just make a quick analysis of president George W. Bush's post-Katrina address to the nation. I count 142 sentences, 25 of which contained one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That's 17.6%. Doing the same thing with Barack Obama's post-oil-spill address, I count 135 sentences, 15 of which contain one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That's 11.1%.

Alyssa Rosenberg posts the trailer to the next season of Jersey Shore. When will Snooki run for Congress as a Republican? She seems to have all the necessary credentials.

"Let’s just disengage ourselves from the myth that Ronald Reagan never raised taxes. He did. And here are four big ones. So I hope this will clear the air for some of the groups today. In 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, that rolled back about a third of his ‘81 tax cuts, raised corporate tax rates, and to a lesser extent income tax rates. Raised taxes by almost one percent of GDP, which at that time was the largest percentage in peacetime increase ever. 1982 gas tax increase, 1983 Greenspan commission raised payroll taxes…Then there was the 1984 deficit reduction tax…Then there was the Railroad Retirement Revenue Act, Consolidated Omnibus Budget of ‘85…So there were a lot of them. Just thought I’d throw that in," – Alan Simpson, reality-based conservative.

If you want to cut the debt, you will have to raise taxes. Letting all the Bush tax cuts expire is a start. Ending an unsustainable tax cut is not a tax hike. It is simply financing the government through taxation rather than borrowing from the Chinese.

Allahpundit notices:

[Obama] once told “Meet the Press” (again, back in 2007) that while raising the retirement age is “not the best option,” he’d listen to all arguments in the interest of restoring long-term solvency to the program. Why the left thinks he wouldn’t be willing to deal with a Republican Congress on that point is beyond me; as he’s shown repeatedly, first and foremost during ObamaCare, he’s happy to compromise on progressive sacred cows like the public option in order to get something passed. There’s already talk from unlikely quarters about investing a chunk of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market. Why would the retirement age be off limits if that isn’t?

I think this will be the dynamic of the second two years – calling the Republican bluff on spending, debt and entitlements. I cannot wait. In that sense, a GOP takeover in one chamber would end the current Republican game of nihilism. They'd have responsibility – and might be forced by Obama, yes, Obama, to walk the walk of their own alleged fiscal conservatism – something they haven't done in a decade and a half.

Then watch Obama's ratings with Independents …

Bernstein acknowledges that we don't know how far to the left she is:

Scott Lemieux notes that what we know now is what we knew going in, that Kagan is "liberal in a broad sense" but that where she sits on the a spectrum "from Larry Summers to Thurgood Marshall…is likely to remain a mystery."  He's right — but I don't think that's a problem with the process.  We don't know, because as she approaches a twenty year career on the Court, give or take twenty years, even Elena Kagan probably doesn't know.  She's going to evolve and change as she adapts to her new role.  And how that happens will be in part her general approach now, in part her specific ideas now, in part unknowable changes in her over time, and in part unknowable reactions between her, the specific cases that the Court will deal with, and her colleagues over time.  If we had a nominee with, say, a record of speeches and law review articles stating clear positions on many of the things on which Kagan has no record, the unknowns would still swamp the knowns.

A reader writes:

As a woman and a mother I am deeply offended by your reader's suggestion that Sarah Palin ought to be given privacy about whether she really gave birth to Trig because "women lie about pregnancy/birth/parentage all the time." Give me a frickin' break. If a woman lies to her mate about whether she's carrying his child, that's between them. But if Sarah Palin lied about giving birth to Trig and then goes around talking about his birth in her book and in speeches, that's a public matter.

"E]ven if you prove what is likely true – that she is lying – it is neither unique nor crazy." Well, it may not be unique to fib about a pregnancy, but it is crazy to build an entire political identity on what even this reader thinks is almost certainly a lie.  If Palin can blatantly lie about something this big, and keep lying and embellishing the story, then how could we possibly trust her in public office? This is why it matters to voters.

I am sick and tired of this sexist bullshit. She's a politician. She made it part of her identity.  It's fair game.

Amen. Another adds:

The crux of the controversy about the Trig/Palin issue is quite simple. If Trig is her biological son she should offer proof. PERIOD.

She should do that so that she is worthy of a position of influence within our society. If she can’t do that because she has lied and lied and lied about the circumstances of Trig’s birth and has not only lied, but has exploited the lie to further her personal ambition, then quite simply she has no place in our society that demands trust and accountability. PERIOD.

There is no gray here. The media giving her this ‘so-called’ pass is abhorrent. There are no ‘passes’ here for lying and exploitation just because she is a woman. None at all.

But you think the NYT will re-examine its own on-faith elaboration of Palin's story? Not if the powerful don't want it. I reiterate my commitment to publishing in full any evidence that Palin provides to prove that her story does make sense. I want to be proven wrong. I have begged to be proven wrong. It is insane that the MSM won't clear this up – out of the same cowardice that led them to their Orwellian circumlocutions about torture.

Mercede responds to Bristol's Facebook musings:

I am also NOT on food stamps! And that was an unnecessarily ugly thing to say.

I should add that this is not always on one side of the political equation. This story – about a gay journalist infiltrating a private therapy group in order to out and expose a conflicted minister – is just as disgusting a violation and should not have been published, in my view. Why? Because if a twelve-step group's confidentiality is violated, then all bets are off. No hypocrisy was involved. But if the paper also offered a reward for others to infiltrate such counseling sessions in order to persecute gay ministers, it would be at the Breitbart level. The rest I leave to Rod:

If this had been an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and a reporter had gone there with the agenda of outing a pastor who preached teetotaling, but who privately struggled to stay sober, wouldn't you be appalled — not at the pastor, but at the reporter? The idea that the Cause, whatever the Cause, justifies destroying the basic rules of civilized life, and with it a man's character, is barbarism.

David Frum fears that Paul Krugman's doubts about the strength of the recovery are justified. But David is not convinced that a second stimulus is the answer:

If Krugman’s direct government expenditure is not a very good policy answer, his dire economic warning remains a haunting policy question. What can we do to accelerate economic growth and job creation? For those of us on the free-market side of the debate, the question is even more haunting: What’s our countervailing idea? And if our countervailing idea is tax cuts, what is our reply to the obvious rebuttal that the Bush tax cuts have been in effect through the whole of this crisis, seemingly without effect?