Month: October 2010

Sharron Angle plays hide and seek with the press again.

Drum puts Internet anger in perspective:

I think the blogosphere fools us about this stuff … The big difference isn’t that we’re any more filled with rage than we’ve ever been, it’s just that it’s all so public now. This might very well be a bad thing on its own (or not — who knows, really?), but it’s not because tea partiers are any angrier at Obama than they were at FDR or Bill Clinton. We just have a better view of it these days.

Do not park on someone's privates, I mean lawn.

John Heilemann makes his case:

For many Republicans, a Palin nomination would be a shrieking nightmare—just as for most Democrats, it would be a wet dream. (Asked about the possibility by reporters, David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, quipped, “Something tells me we won’t get that lucky.”) The emotions here are diametrically opposed but based on a shared conviction: that Palin, whose national approval rating in a CBS News poll this month stood at a lowly 22 percent, is irredeemably unelectable, and thus her nomination would essentially guarantee Obama a second term.

Or would it? In a two-way contest, almost certainly. But what if a Palin nomination provoked a credible independent candidacy? What if the candidacy in question was that of, oh, Michael Rubens Bloomberg? What would happen then?

Doug Mataconis is skeptical:

[W]hile the idea of a Bloomberg for President campaign may excite the crowd that rides the Acela, I don’t see it playing anywhere outside the chattering classes, and without a viable third-party candidate siphoning votes away from Obama, there’s no way Palin becomes President.

There is always the possibility that Palin runs as a 3rd party candidate herself, should she lose the nomination. Her supporters are more cult-members than voters weighing policy options. But I want to note one line from John's piece:

She doles out personal, if possibly fictitious, anecdotes that position her, despite the millions she has pocketed in the past two years, as a defiantly downscale girl: that she and Todd drove their motor home from Wasilla to Los Angeles (distance: 3,375 miles) to watch Bristol on Dancing With the Stars.

Here's what I want to know: what process led both John and New York magazine not to confirm whether that 3,375 motor home drive was actually, rather than "possibly", fictitious? With most politicians, journalists actually try to check factual claims with, you know, reporting. But it seems that one of the best reporters I know, has not, in this case. Why? Why is Palin – alone of all national figures – allowed to tell the tallest, most implausible stories in public and never get quizzed on them by the press? Why is she treated differently? Why are the claims of a candidate who is, say, a veteran vetted, but Palin's manifold empirically dubious assertions left hanging as if truth didn't matter any more?

(Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

"I just got done welcoming Sarah Palin to our County. Had a nice chat and gave her a pair of pink underwear," – Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, via Twitter.

Grammar nerd alert. A reader writes:

I'm a longtime copy editor recently retired from the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle doesn't believe in the serial comma, but I personally don't have an opinion about it. (There are more important concerns in style and punctuation.) However, the caption that Weintraub presents as an example hardly makes his case; the copy editor who handled it was clearly out to lunch.

To avoid the confusion Weintraub points to, the cap should have been rewritten to say, "The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were Kris Kristofferson, Robert Duvall and Haggard's two ex-wives." Note that it now works fine without the serial comma.

Another writes:

Here's another good example that I always use with my students: "The $1 million was divided between Mary, John and Frank," is a lot different than "The $1 million was split between Mary, John, and Frank." The former means that Mary would get $500,000, and John and Frank (since they are grouped together as one entity in the list) would have to split the other half ($500,000 split into $250,000 and $250,000). The latter means that Mary, John, and Frank would each get $333,333.33.

If I were either John or Frank, I think that final serial comma is pretty damn important.  In fact, that comma would be worth exactly $83,333.33!

Another:

A similar example is the famous, but probably apocryphal, book dedication, "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." It still cracks me up.

Another:

The original reason the serial comma (a.k.a. Oxford comma or Harvard comma) was "avoided" was to save space in printed materials, particularly newspapers where every bit of space saved meant more room for ads.

I believe that the rules that require punctuation to go inside double quotes, even when it's not part of the text being quoted are for the same reason. For example:

Richard Nixon was nicknamed "Tricky Dick."

vs

Richard Nixon was nicknamed "Tricky Dick".

The former is technically correct, but I think the second makes more sense logically.  Also, when the quoted text DOES have punctuation and it comes at the end of the sentence, you omit the final punctuation:

The small child asked, "Where's my mommy?"

vs

The small child asked, "Where's my mommy?".

I think the second one seems more correct.  The question mark is part of the quote, the period ends my sentence.

There are lots of archaic little rules like this that all derive from the old typesetting days.  I don't see the harm in adding extra punctuation to make a sentence more clear.  Isn't English confusing enough?

“I’m sorry I gave offense. It was a headline I wrote quickly, and I thought the image of Mike Kinsley engaged in an act of violence was kind of funny because Mike is not really the violent sort, to say the least. Anyway, one person’s little joke is another person’s “rage of people who cannot bear to see their sacred ideals profaned,” to quote McArdle… So I will hereby endeavor to avoid any future headlines that would seem to celebrate violence or conceivably endanger the physical safety of Arthur Laffer or anybody else,” – Jon Chait, saying sorry for the image of Mike Kinsley “curb-stomping” Greg Mankiw.

On the other hand, here is what happened outside the Rand Paul-Jack Conway debate last night:

(Hat tip: Josh)

“Homer would have difficulty not eating meat on Friday," – Al Jean, executive producer of The Simpsons, contradicting the claims of L'Osservatore Romano.

(Hat tip: TDW)

Richard Vedder argues that we are "over-investing" in higher education:

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

The lesson Ben Casnocha draws:

For hundreds of thousands of Americans, spending four years and untold amounts of money (and debt?) gets you a job as a waiter, parking lot attendant, or janitor. Yet everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Gates keep pushing a college education as the way to secure one's economic future. That is a view that should be heavily qualified.

Thoreau wants to know why liberal think tanks write little about marijuana legalization:

I just realized this morning that when I read about legalization, any time I see mention of a pro-legalization think-tanker it’s always, always, ALWAYS a Cato person.  Admittedly, I don’t read every single piece of literature on legalization or every single article on Prop. 19, but I do read non-libertarian stuff on legalization, and even the lefty stuff on legalization seems to quote Cato.  Even Greenwald, when talking about Portugal’s experiment, gave a talk at Cato.

Now, Cato is obviously a well-known institution that has spent a lot of time writing about legalization, so there’s one reason for them to get lots of attention on this.  And I do realize that right-leaning and libertarian-leaning think tanks outnumber lefty think tanks (less so than in the past, admittedly), so statistically any time you see a think tank quoted the odds are that it’s not a lefty think tank.  Finally, I admit that I have not personally checked every position paper ever put out by a lefty think tank, so maybe there’s a whole bunch of legalization sentiment that I’m just missing out on.  But, whatever the reason, and however much individuals in lefty think tanks might have pro-legalization views, it’s Cato that gets all the attention.

The above ad is now running in California.