CalJunket |
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Campus personalities present and past Rebecca C. Brown and Tommaso Sciortino tackle the issues. This week on a very special CalJunket: Rebecca learns not to chew with her mouth open and Tommaso finds out his best friend is addicted to no-doze. Site feed: caljunket.blogspot.com/atom.xml
AIM Rebecca:
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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” syndromeBallon Juice is generally an enjoyable blog but today John Cole writes something that just makes me mad.I am not so sure about the end of the ‘revolution,’ considering I don’t think [Tom Delay and other Republicans] have been behaving like Republicans for a while now.Isn’t that great? To Cole, the definition of “Republicans behavior” is divorced from “the behavior that Republicans exhibit”. I think that’s pretty much sums up the standard line I keep hearing from Republicans: Don’t judge us by what we do, Judge us by our slogans. Hopefully, this kind of denial is a stage in long trip to accepting that the conservative god has failed. A commenter on the post above made the parallel between communism and American Conservatism thusly: It looks good on paper, but it doesn’t account for actual human nature. Sure, you can make a coalition between the Social Security haters and the tax dues haters and the fag haters and the worker’s rights haters and the diplomacy haters and the any-government-unlesss-its-usefull-to-me haters but you know what? When they get their guy elected it turns out that there’s nothing the conservative coalition can do without destroying itself. You can’t cut Social Security without upsetting the bigots, you can’t cut Medicare without upsetting the grannies (in fact you have to make it bigger though in the least efficient way possible!), you can’t cut farm subsidies without upsetting big business, you can’t actually pass a anti-gay-family bill without making the libertarians nervous that they may have to lift a finger to protect the rights of people who aren’t rich. This isn’t something that’s going to be hashed out in some back room somewhere: Major parts of the coalition are going to have to be cut lose for the other ones to get what they want and that would cause them to lose elections. The Republicans were able to buy time with massive deficit spending but unsustainable borrowing can’t be sustained, nor can they fix it without destroying their coalition. You know, we Democrats can be feckless at times, but damn, the Republicans bring new meaning to “ineffective”. This isn't a broken party: it's a party that never worked in the first place and can't be fixed. Let me add that the whole idea of basing your coalition ideology on “government should be small” is silly. I might as well form a coalition to further the ideology of “the economy should be good”. If you don't have an agreement on how to achieve it, it means absolutley nothing. Both liberals and conservatives want to make government smaller, all things being equal. Both have government programs that they love and can’t live without. It’s just that conservatives have been duped by people like DeLay into thinking there’s a party that can provide what they want. Just don’t get into the specifics. Update: Matt Yglesias has a post with much the same theme. The Republicans are a party permenetly without an agenda... besides complaining about liberals that is. (43) comments |
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I'm a Liberal American: a Democrat!
You are a
Social Liberal
(76% permissive)
and an...
Economic Liberal
(33% permissive)
You are best described as a:Democrat
Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
(9) comments
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Ignorance, Intellegence, and the Bell Curve
JAMA can be forgiven for misunderstanding the point I was trying to make about the Bell Curve. He has probably listened to too many fools try to discredit SAT and standardized tests altogether. He probably assumed that when I said tests don’t measure innate intelligence that I meant that it doesn’t measure intelligence. So let’s go over this slowly so that if JAMA still doesn’t understand, we can be sure that it’s because he is dumb. Standardized tests work. They are good at testing people’s intelligence. What they can’t do however, is measure how much of that intelligence is due to genetic factors, and how much is do to culture and upbringing. After all, if I took the world’s red-headed population and whacked them on the back of the head with a baseball bat, they might do more poorly on standardized tests than average, too.
Blacks in general do more poorly on standardized tests. But then, according to FAIR: “sociologist Jane Mercer has shown that supposed racial differences in IQ vanish if one controls for a variety of socio-economic variables”. (Have you read Jane Mercer’s work, JAMA? No?)
So let’s recap. If you take the average poor black person, and compare her to an average white person with the same income, they magically turn out to have the same IQ on average.
You are an intelligent person, JAMA. So you will point out like the authors of the book* that if you assume our society is perfectly fair than of course people of the same income will be equally intelligent. As a corollary, we can add that Black people are dumb and the proof is that they’re poor. QED. In return, I will point out that if your racial “logic” is based on that *assumption* there really isn’t much to separate you from a simple racist. And I’m not saying that to shut down the conversation. I’m saying that because I think it’s true and I look forward to hashing out this issue with you.
I have a personal connection to this old racist line because my great-grandfather, Gioacchino Sciortino, was a poor Italian immigrant and at the time Italian immigrants didn’t test so well on the standardized tests either. Neither were they rich. And the men who owned everything explained that since the standardized tests showed Italians were less intelligent, then it must be because Italians were genetically inferior. You should head down to the main stacks and check out the newspaper clipping of the time.
The punch-line is that as Italian-Americans got more opportunities (in part through things like turn of the century Affirmative Action in police hiring) and became more successful, their IQ’s went up. And it wasn’t because of some kind of amazing natural selection pressure - it was because good schooling, a stable home life, and good pre-natal care can do a lot to raise standardized test scores. I suspect that once Blacks get out of the poverty trap, you will find their test scores shoot up as well, just like the scores of those Blacks who have already succeeded. But there’s no hard proof one way or the other with the current information, so any book that claims to do so (unless they introduce some amazing new research) is clearly wrong.
I'm finishing up Harry Potter right now, but when I'm done I will be checking out The Bell Curve and I'll be going over it on my site. Many other sites have done so, but apparently, every one in the whole world will have to do it to satisfy JAMA.
* FAIR: “the authors [of the Bell Curve] reject her method because their theories assume that low IQ causes people to be poor, rather than poverty causing low IQs”
(15) comments
Saturday, September 17, 2005
I'll blog when I FEEL like it!
[Stomps foot. Pouts lower lip.]
Yes, I've been off in my own little world as of late, and for some inexplicable reason haven't felt like posting or giving the internet any confirmation that I exist in the past many weeks. I'm healthy and mostly happy, but I'm still adjusting to the life of the full-time-working, food-and-wine-talking-about, college-existence-ignoring proto-yuppie.
The primary reason for my absence has been that I in fact do work at work these days. I've been integrated into my organization as a bona fide full-time employee, replete with benefits (that I've waived because I get better ones through my mommy), monthly business trips, and 5 weeks' paid vacation every year. I've also been saddled with what we in the industry call "responsibility," meaning that I have to remain self-motivated, and also meaning that I have very little free time while enjoying my office's T3 line to rant about whatever's on my mind.
I've also been increasingly turned off by internet-bound political discussion lately. It's fairly repetitive, and usually devolves into "liberals do this, whereas conservatives do this!" rather quickly. I'm not impressed with the few main characters who dominate the Berkeley blog comments, and recently have been favoring face-to-face political debates over cyber arguments.
This too shall pass, and by next week I will undoubtedly be spewing my wacky leftist claptrap all over the web for my colleagues to make fun of again.
When I do get back into the groove, however, I can promise you that I will almost never write about campus issues. The hibernation period of my interest in my alma mater hasn't passed yet, and for now I'm just annoyed at college students who dress cooler than I do and jaywalk across Telegraph when I'm trying to drive my shitty car. I haven't read CalStuff in ages, and the last time I tried to read the comments on that site I think my brain turned into chewy delicious nugat.
I don't care what CNN tries to convince me when they have nothing else to report on; blogging is not an amazingly wonderful medium that everyone should shit his or her pants over. Not yet at least. There are too many losers and ineloquent morons dominating it right now to make it my main source of entertainment.
Instead, as of late, I've become addicted to weekly advice columns and nerve.com.
I look forward to writing more productively as soon as I get my head out of my ass and remember what it's like to care about the rest of the world. I miss you guys.
(1) comments
Friday, September 16, 2005
Student Newspaper Articles BAD doesn't have time for
I thought I'd help BAD out by picking a newspaper article to make fun of. This one comes from The Daily Tar Heal and seems to revolve around the idea that, if only everybody would talk about racial profiling, surely we would all agree with her when she says:
I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.
Now, let's not get into the fact that she seemed to misrepresent herself to the Arabs she "quotes" as supporting her views. And let's not mention how she seems to conflate Arab foreigners, who already face higher security restrictions, and Arab-Americans. Let's actually talk about racial profiling and whether it provides any defense. I think Yglesias pretty much sums up my thinking on the subject:
Someone probably knows how to tell a Chechen from an Armenian, or a Malaysian from a Thai on sight, but it sure isn't me, and it almost certainly isn't your local cop, either. And if you can't see why the idea of law-enforcement personnel spending their times consulting old phrenology texts to pick up on the fine-grained differences, you must be brain-dead. Leaving 8-year-olds out of strip searches is probably a good idea, but in my experience, airport security personnel, at a minimum, do this to anyone.
You see, the problem isn't that we Americans have some kind of Victorian aversion to discussing race (Conservatives sure don't and some Liberals talk about it even when it doesn't make sense) the problem is that it's just an unworkable idea. Conservatives have done a great job pushing their ideas into the mainstream. Hell, thanks to Michelle Malkin we've discussed it to death. We've even discussed internment! (But of course Malkin would never suggest that for Arabs, she just wants to defend it in general for no good reason).
(0) comments
Bad Arguement / Good Argument
A good argument requires that you understand your opponents views. Here we can learn from nagative example:
...#2, for all you liberals out there not only is society objectifying a woman’s body but they’re making money on it in a very VERY capitalist way. It caters not to an indidvidual’s sense of beauty but what a male-driven capitalist’s view of beauty should be. If you’re any sort of progressive this should bother you just a tad bit.
You may be surprised to know that Capitalism doesn't bother Liberals one bit. It's an awesome way of distributing goods and services and though it oft doesn't work perfectly, there's certainly nothing inherintly wrong with it. That's why American liberals saved Capitalism under FDR.
And what's wrong with something being driven by "male capitalism's" view of beauty. Don't males want to look at porn? Why should we stop them? And unlike most of advertising which is also driven by capitalistic male impulses, pornography is honest about what's it's selling. There's certainly a lot of bad porn out there that is degrading to women, but it does no more to objectify women than football does to animalize men.
Did you mean to address this argument to communists perhaps? I have the phone number of the last one in the United States. He lived next door to me in the Co-ops.
(66) comments
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Propaganda vs. getting the message out
I wanted to respond to something the Thinker said in passing about why Republicans have had an edge in the last couple elections. I don't think it's useful to call the right-wing noise machine a purely propaganda outfit. Though there's certainly a lot of lying and misdirecting going on at Fox news and Rush Limbaugh, that's not the reason why they've achieved so much. In short: they have done a good job of arguing for their conservative goals and ideals.
I don't mean to imply that they have good arguments - far from it- but there is something persuasive to having someone on the radio or television arguing for a policy or perspective every single day. People can relate to it and even if they don't agree with every little thing Hannity says, they tend to appreciate his perspective and subconsciously pick up the prejudices of the host.
From radio and television, people get a sense for that conservatism is cohesive and makes sense even if they don’t agree with it. This is especially important when you compare it to the Democrats main way of getting the message out: Candidates and office holders. While I appreciate Obama just as much as the next guy, politicians doesn’t have the freedom to take an unpopular stance just to be intellectually honest like a talk show host does.
I suppose this is all a roundabout way of touting liberal blogs, Air America
(23) comments
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Where's Rebecca at?
As someone has asked Rebecca's taking some time off from the blog. I assume this is to focus on her job. I don't know when she will return.
(0) comments
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Conservatism isn’t innately bad
I do poke fun at Republicans and the conservative movement that spawned them a lot on this blog so many of you might get the impression that I think such ideology innately foolish. Far from it: there is nothing wrong with being “on the right” and under the right circumstances (say, if I lived in communist Russia Now, a lot of the commentors on this site seem to make a big distinction between conservatism and Republicanism. Though they certainly aren’t the same thing, that paradigm usually serves to let conservatism off the hook for Republicanism’s faults. The fact is, Republicans didn’t appear out of nowhere. George Bush and Tom Delay weren’t voted into office by a mysterious band of independents and flying monkies: conservatives voted for them. And trying to say that what they do should not reflect poorly on conservatism is like saying that Ford is a good car maker, even though every individual car that they make is a lemon.
And that’s the real issue: I think American conservatism, because of the odd histories of the parties – specifically how they only recently split into ideologically homogenous units with the demise of the Rockefeller Republican and the Dixiecrats –have been put in a bad position. This article which got me thinking about the issue explains better than I can. It’s difficult for them to get elected unless they 1) pander to the far religious right and 2) contribute big time to corporate cronyism and corporate irresponsibility. Both of these things are contrary to what American conservatives constantly claim their goals are: small government that gets out of people’s lives and the preservation of the free market.
So as I see it, American Conservatives (unlike their Christian Democratic cousins in Europe ) find themselves in the awkward position of saying: Yes we want to be in power (of course) but no we don’t want to do it like the Republicans. This is like saying “Yes we want to drive off a cliff. No, we don’t want to hit the ground.”
Liberalism may have lots of faults (it does) but I agree with the policy prescriptions and observe that when they have been in power they have tried to follow through.
(31) comments
Friday, September 09, 2005
Self-fulfilling ideology
This kind of stuff is amazing. It's always been clear that Republicans don't believe in efficient government but it's really amazing when they start to take their own incompetence as proof. They are like the guy you have to do a class project with who keeps insisting that it's impossible and so doesn't do his part of the work and thefore ensures that it's impossible.
Well, what do you expect to happen when you vote for a president who puts a guy in charge who has no experieince and a resume thinner than than Dick Cheny's war record? (The kicker is, with all the resume padding he did, he still couldn't fake anything relavent to saving lives.)
Now of course there's a lot of things that government is bad at. Most things even. But history affords us lots of instances where disasters were handeled much better by government and lots of lessons about how private charities never manage to do as much. Not to mention the fact that coordination, which is vital in the early days of a disaster, is pretty much impossible without having someone with whom the buck stops. Ussually this is the president though modern Republicans seem to act as if lots of people who work in Bush's office (like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Micheal Brown) just kinda showed up without the presidents approval or anything. If only Batiushka, the little father, the Czar knew!
At any rate, I certainly wish the fine men and women of RedState would stop calling liberals "human filth" long enough to actually look at the issue and compare the federal response to other disasters. Disasters where people who believed in sound government were in charge. It's funny that conservatives didn't dare admit that government has no obligation to people that were dying by the thousands then. Probably becuase an idea so stupid wouldn't pass the giggle test unless the government had failed as badly as a only a modern Republican government can.
Oh! If we got government out of the rescue business does that mean that we get to turn down the offer's of aid from other governments too?
Update: This argument against privatized disaster relief is much better than anything I could write.
(28) comments
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act
Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.
(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)
Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.
Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.
Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.
(38) comments
Thursday, September 01, 2005
The "Blame America First" Crowd
They just make me sick.
Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.
(27) comments
Ignorance, Intellegence, and the Bell Curve
JAMA can be forgiven for misunderstanding the point I was trying to make about the Bell Curve. He has probably listened to too many fools try to discredit SAT and standardized tests altogether. He probably assumed that when I said tests don’t measure innate intelligence that I meant that it doesn’t measure intelligence. So let’s go over this slowly so that if JAMA still doesn’t understand, we can be sure that it’s because he is dumb.
Standardized tests work. They are good at testing people’s intelligence. What they can’t do however, is measure how much of that intelligence is due to genetic factors, and how much is do to culture and upbringing. After all, if I took the world’s red-headed population and whacked them on the back of the head with a baseball bat, they might do more poorly on standardized tests than average, too.
Blacks in general do more poorly on standardized tests. But then, according to FAIR: “sociologist Jane Mercer has shown that supposed racial differences in IQ vanish if one controls for a variety of socio-economic variables”. (Have you read Jane Mercer’s work, JAMA? No?)
So let’s recap. If you take the average poor black person, and compare her to an average white person with the same income, they magically turn out to have the same IQ on average.
You are an intelligent person, JAMA. So you will point out like the authors of the book* that if you assume our society is perfectly fair than of course people of the same income will be equally intelligent. As a corollary, we can add that Black people are dumb and the proof is that they’re poor. QED. In return, I will point out that if your racial “logic” is based on that *assumption* there really isn’t much to separate you from a simple racist. And I’m not saying that to shut down the conversation. I’m saying that because I think it’s true and I look forward to hashing out this issue with you.
I have a personal connection to this old racist line because my great-grandfather, Gioacchino Sciortino, was a poor Italian immigrant and at the time Italian immigrants didn’t test so well on the standardized tests either. Neither were they rich. And the men who owned everything explained that since the standardized tests showed Italians were less intelligent, then it must be because Italians were genetically inferior. You should head down to the main stacks and check out the newspaper clipping of the time.
The punch-line is that as Italian-Americans got more opportunities (in part through things like turn of the century Affirmative Action in police hiring) and became more successful, their IQ’s went up. And it wasn’t because of some kind of amazing natural selection pressure - it was because good schooling, a stable home life, and good pre-natal care can do a lot to raise standardized test scores. I suspect that once Blacks get out of the poverty trap, you will find their test scores shoot up as well, just like the scores of those Blacks who have already succeeded. But there’s no hard proof one way or the other with the current information, so any book that claims to do so (unless they introduce some amazing new research) is clearly wrong.
I'm finishing up Harry Potter right now, but when I'm done I will be checking out The Bell Curve and I'll be going over it on my site. Many other sites have done so, but apparently, every one in the whole world will have to do it to satisfy JAMA.
* FAIR: “the authors [of the Bell Curve] reject her method because their theories assume that low IQ causes people to be poor, rather than poverty causing low IQs”
(15) comments
I'll blog when I FEEL like it!
[Stomps foot. Pouts lower lip.]
Yes, I've been off in my own little world as of late, and for some inexplicable reason haven't felt like posting or giving the internet any confirmation that I exist in the past many weeks. I'm healthy and mostly happy, but I'm still adjusting to the life of the full-time-working, food-and-wine-talking-about, college-existence-ignoring proto-yuppie.
The primary reason for my absence has been that I in fact do work at work these days. I've been integrated into my organization as a bona fide full-time employee, replete with benefits (that I've waived because I get better ones through my mommy), monthly business trips, and 5 weeks' paid vacation every year. I've also been saddled with what we in the industry call "responsibility," meaning that I have to remain self-motivated, and also meaning that I have very little free time while enjoying my office's T3 line to rant about whatever's on my mind.
I've also been increasingly turned off by internet-bound political discussion lately. It's fairly repetitive, and usually devolves into "liberals do this, whereas conservatives do this!" rather quickly. I'm not impressed with the few main characters who dominate the Berkeley blog comments, and recently have been favoring face-to-face political debates over cyber arguments.
This too shall pass, and by next week I will undoubtedly be spewing my wacky leftist claptrap all over the web for my colleagues to make fun of again.
When I do get back into the groove, however, I can promise you that I will almost never write about campus issues. The hibernation period of my interest in my alma mater hasn't passed yet, and for now I'm just annoyed at college students who dress cooler than I do and jaywalk across Telegraph when I'm trying to drive my shitty car. I haven't read CalStuff in ages, and the last time I tried to read the comments on that site I think my brain turned into chewy delicious nugat.
I don't care what CNN tries to convince me when they have nothing else to report on; blogging is not an amazingly wonderful medium that everyone should shit his or her pants over. Not yet at least. There are too many losers and ineloquent morons dominating it right now to make it my main source of entertainment.
Instead, as of late, I've become addicted to weekly advice columns and nerve.com.
I look forward to writing more productively as soon as I get my head out of my ass and remember what it's like to care about the rest of the world. I miss you guys.
(1) comments
Friday, September 16, 2005
Student Newspaper Articles BAD doesn't have time for
I thought I'd help BAD out by picking a newspaper article to make fun of. This one comes from The Daily Tar Heal and seems to revolve around the idea that, if only everybody would talk about racial profiling, surely we would all agree with her when she says:
I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.
Now, let's not get into the fact that she seemed to misrepresent herself to the Arabs she "quotes" as supporting her views. And let's not mention how she seems to conflate Arab foreigners, who already face higher security restrictions, and Arab-Americans. Let's actually talk about racial profiling and whether it provides any defense. I think Yglesias pretty much sums up my thinking on the subject:
Someone probably knows how to tell a Chechen from an Armenian, or a Malaysian from a Thai on sight, but it sure isn't me, and it almost certainly isn't your local cop, either. And if you can't see why the idea of law-enforcement personnel spending their times consulting old phrenology texts to pick up on the fine-grained differences, you must be brain-dead. Leaving 8-year-olds out of strip searches is probably a good idea, but in my experience, airport security personnel, at a minimum, do this to anyone.
You see, the problem isn't that we Americans have some kind of Victorian aversion to discussing race (Conservatives sure don't and some Liberals talk about it even when it doesn't make sense) the problem is that it's just an unworkable idea. Conservatives have done a great job pushing their ideas into the mainstream. Hell, thanks to Michelle Malkin we've discussed it to death. We've even discussed internment! (But of course Malkin would never suggest that for Arabs, she just wants to defend it in general for no good reason).
(0) comments
Bad Arguement / Good Argument
A good argument requires that you understand your opponents views. Here we can learn from nagative example:
...#2, for all you liberals out there not only is society objectifying a woman’s body but they’re making money on it in a very VERY capitalist way. It caters not to an indidvidual’s sense of beauty but what a male-driven capitalist’s view of beauty should be. If you’re any sort of progressive this should bother you just a tad bit.
You may be surprised to know that Capitalism doesn't bother Liberals one bit. It's an awesome way of distributing goods and services and though it oft doesn't work perfectly, there's certainly nothing inherintly wrong with it. That's why American liberals saved Capitalism under FDR.
And what's wrong with something being driven by "male capitalism's" view of beauty. Don't males want to look at porn? Why should we stop them? And unlike most of advertising which is also driven by capitalistic male impulses, pornography is honest about what's it's selling. There's certainly a lot of bad porn out there that is degrading to women, but it does no more to objectify women than football does to animalize men.
Did you mean to address this argument to communists perhaps? I have the phone number of the last one in the United States. He lived next door to me in the Co-ops.
(66) comments
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Propaganda vs. getting the message out
I wanted to respond to something the Thinker said in passing about why Republicans have had an edge in the last couple elections. I don't think it's useful to call the right-wing noise machine a purely propaganda outfit. Though there's certainly a lot of lying and misdirecting going on at Fox news and Rush Limbaugh, that's not the reason why they've achieved so much. In short: they have done a good job of arguing for their conservative goals and ideals.
I don't mean to imply that they have good arguments - far from it- but there is something persuasive to having someone on the radio or television arguing for a policy or perspective every single day. People can relate to it and even if they don't agree with every little thing Hannity says, they tend to appreciate his perspective and subconsciously pick up the prejudices of the host.
From radio and television, people get a sense for that conservatism is cohesive and makes sense even if they don’t agree with it. This is especially important when you compare it to the Democrats main way of getting the message out: Candidates and office holders. While I appreciate Obama just as much as the next guy, politicians doesn’t have the freedom to take an unpopular stance just to be intellectually honest like a talk show host does.
I suppose this is all a roundabout way of touting liberal blogs, Air America
(23) comments
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Where's Rebecca at?
As someone has asked Rebecca's taking some time off from the blog. I assume this is to focus on her job. I don't know when she will return.
(0) comments
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Conservatism isn’t innately bad
I do poke fun at Republicans and the conservative movement that spawned them a lot on this blog so many of you might get the impression that I think such ideology innately foolish. Far from it: there is nothing wrong with being “on the right” and under the right circumstances (say, if I lived in communist Russia Now, a lot of the commentors on this site seem to make a big distinction between conservatism and Republicanism. Though they certainly aren’t the same thing, that paradigm usually serves to let conservatism off the hook for Republicanism’s faults. The fact is, Republicans didn’t appear out of nowhere. George Bush and Tom Delay weren’t voted into office by a mysterious band of independents and flying monkies: conservatives voted for them. And trying to say that what they do should not reflect poorly on conservatism is like saying that Ford is a good car maker, even though every individual car that they make is a lemon.
And that’s the real issue: I think American conservatism, because of the odd histories of the parties – specifically how they only recently split into ideologically homogenous units with the demise of the Rockefeller Republican and the Dixiecrats –have been put in a bad position. This article which got me thinking about the issue explains better than I can. It’s difficult for them to get elected unless they 1) pander to the far religious right and 2) contribute big time to corporate cronyism and corporate irresponsibility. Both of these things are contrary to what American conservatives constantly claim their goals are: small government that gets out of people’s lives and the preservation of the free market.
So as I see it, American Conservatives (unlike their Christian Democratic cousins in Europe ) find themselves in the awkward position of saying: Yes we want to be in power (of course) but no we don’t want to do it like the Republicans. This is like saying “Yes we want to drive off a cliff. No, we don’t want to hit the ground.”
Liberalism may have lots of faults (it does) but I agree with the policy prescriptions and observe that when they have been in power they have tried to follow through.
(31) comments
Friday, September 09, 2005
Self-fulfilling ideology
This kind of stuff is amazing. It's always been clear that Republicans don't believe in efficient government but it's really amazing when they start to take their own incompetence as proof. They are like the guy you have to do a class project with who keeps insisting that it's impossible and so doesn't do his part of the work and thefore ensures that it's impossible.
Well, what do you expect to happen when you vote for a president who puts a guy in charge who has no experieince and a resume thinner than than Dick Cheny's war record? (The kicker is, with all the resume padding he did, he still couldn't fake anything relavent to saving lives.)
Now of course there's a lot of things that government is bad at. Most things even. But history affords us lots of instances where disasters were handeled much better by government and lots of lessons about how private charities never manage to do as much. Not to mention the fact that coordination, which is vital in the early days of a disaster, is pretty much impossible without having someone with whom the buck stops. Ussually this is the president though modern Republicans seem to act as if lots of people who work in Bush's office (like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Micheal Brown) just kinda showed up without the presidents approval or anything. If only Batiushka, the little father, the Czar knew!
At any rate, I certainly wish the fine men and women of RedState would stop calling liberals "human filth" long enough to actually look at the issue and compare the federal response to other disasters. Disasters where people who believed in sound government were in charge. It's funny that conservatives didn't dare admit that government has no obligation to people that were dying by the thousands then. Probably becuase an idea so stupid wouldn't pass the giggle test unless the government had failed as badly as a only a modern Republican government can.
Oh! If we got government out of the rescue business does that mean that we get to turn down the offer's of aid from other governments too?
Update: This argument against privatized disaster relief is much better than anything I could write.
(28) comments
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act
Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.
(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)
Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.
Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.
Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.
(38) comments
Thursday, September 01, 2005
The "Blame America First" Crowd
They just make me sick.
Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.
(27) comments
Student Newspaper Articles BAD doesn't have time for
I thought I'd help BAD out by picking a newspaper article to make fun of. This one comes from The Daily Tar Heal and seems to revolve around the idea that, if only everybody would talk about racial profiling, surely we would all agree with her when she says:I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.
Now, let's not get into the fact that she seemed to misrepresent herself to the Arabs she "quotes" as supporting her views. And let's not mention how she seems to conflate Arab foreigners, who already face higher security restrictions, and Arab-Americans. Let's actually talk about racial profiling and whether it provides any defense. I think Yglesias pretty much sums up my thinking on the subject:
Someone probably knows how to tell a Chechen from an Armenian, or a Malaysian from a Thai on sight, but it sure isn't me, and it almost certainly isn't your local cop, either. And if you can't see why the idea of law-enforcement personnel spending their times consulting old phrenology texts to pick up on the fine-grained differences, you must be brain-dead. Leaving 8-year-olds out of strip searches is probably a good idea, but in my experience, airport security personnel, at a minimum, do this to anyone.You see, the problem isn't that we Americans have some kind of Victorian aversion to discussing race (Conservatives sure don't and some Liberals talk about it even when it doesn't make sense) the problem is that it's just an unworkable idea. Conservatives have done a great job pushing their ideas into the mainstream. Hell, thanks to Michelle Malkin we've discussed it to death. We've even discussed internment! (But of course Malkin would never suggest that for Arabs, she just wants to defend it in general for no good reason).
(0) comments
Bad Arguement / Good Argument
A good argument requires that you understand your opponents views. Here we can learn from nagative example:
...#2, for all you liberals out there not only is society objectifying a woman’s body but they’re making money on it in a very VERY capitalist way. It caters not to an indidvidual’s sense of beauty but what a male-driven capitalist’s view of beauty should be. If you’re any sort of progressive this should bother you just a tad bit.
You may be surprised to know that Capitalism doesn't bother Liberals one bit. It's an awesome way of distributing goods and services and though it oft doesn't work perfectly, there's certainly nothing inherintly wrong with it. That's why American liberals saved Capitalism under FDR.
And what's wrong with something being driven by "male capitalism's" view of beauty. Don't males want to look at porn? Why should we stop them? And unlike most of advertising which is also driven by capitalistic male impulses, pornography is honest about what's it's selling. There's certainly a lot of bad porn out there that is degrading to women, but it does no more to objectify women than football does to animalize men.
Did you mean to address this argument to communists perhaps? I have the phone number of the last one in the United States. He lived next door to me in the Co-ops.
(66) comments
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Propaganda vs. getting the message out
I wanted to respond to something the Thinker said in passing about why Republicans have had an edge in the last couple elections. I don't think it's useful to call the right-wing noise machine a purely propaganda outfit. Though there's certainly a lot of lying and misdirecting going on at Fox news and Rush Limbaugh, that's not the reason why they've achieved so much. In short: they have done a good job of arguing for their conservative goals and ideals.
I don't mean to imply that they have good arguments - far from it- but there is something persuasive to having someone on the radio or television arguing for a policy or perspective every single day. People can relate to it and even if they don't agree with every little thing Hannity says, they tend to appreciate his perspective and subconsciously pick up the prejudices of the host.
From radio and television, people get a sense for that conservatism is cohesive and makes sense even if they don’t agree with it. This is especially important when you compare it to the Democrats main way of getting the message out: Candidates and office holders. While I appreciate Obama just as much as the next guy, politicians doesn’t have the freedom to take an unpopular stance just to be intellectually honest like a talk show host does.
I suppose this is all a roundabout way of touting liberal blogs, Air America
(23) comments
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Where's Rebecca at?
As someone has asked Rebecca's taking some time off from the blog. I assume this is to focus on her job. I don't know when she will return.
(0) comments
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Conservatism isn’t innately bad
I do poke fun at Republicans and the conservative movement that spawned them a lot on this blog so many of you might get the impression that I think such ideology innately foolish. Far from it: there is nothing wrong with being “on the right” and under the right circumstances (say, if I lived in communist Russia Now, a lot of the commentors on this site seem to make a big distinction between conservatism and Republicanism. Though they certainly aren’t the same thing, that paradigm usually serves to let conservatism off the hook for Republicanism’s faults. The fact is, Republicans didn’t appear out of nowhere. George Bush and Tom Delay weren’t voted into office by a mysterious band of independents and flying monkies: conservatives voted for them. And trying to say that what they do should not reflect poorly on conservatism is like saying that Ford is a good car maker, even though every individual car that they make is a lemon.
And that’s the real issue: I think American conservatism, because of the odd histories of the parties – specifically how they only recently split into ideologically homogenous units with the demise of the Rockefeller Republican and the Dixiecrats –have been put in a bad position. This article which got me thinking about the issue explains better than I can. It’s difficult for them to get elected unless they 1) pander to the far religious right and 2) contribute big time to corporate cronyism and corporate irresponsibility. Both of these things are contrary to what American conservatives constantly claim their goals are: small government that gets out of people’s lives and the preservation of the free market.
So as I see it, American Conservatives (unlike their Christian Democratic cousins in Europe ) find themselves in the awkward position of saying: Yes we want to be in power (of course) but no we don’t want to do it like the Republicans. This is like saying “Yes we want to drive off a cliff. No, we don’t want to hit the ground.”
Liberalism may have lots of faults (it does) but I agree with the policy prescriptions and observe that when they have been in power they have tried to follow through.
(31) comments
Friday, September 09, 2005
Self-fulfilling ideology
This kind of stuff is amazing. It's always been clear that Republicans don't believe in efficient government but it's really amazing when they start to take their own incompetence as proof. They are like the guy you have to do a class project with who keeps insisting that it's impossible and so doesn't do his part of the work and thefore ensures that it's impossible.
Well, what do you expect to happen when you vote for a president who puts a guy in charge who has no experieince and a resume thinner than than Dick Cheny's war record? (The kicker is, with all the resume padding he did, he still couldn't fake anything relavent to saving lives.)
Now of course there's a lot of things that government is bad at. Most things even. But history affords us lots of instances where disasters were handeled much better by government and lots of lessons about how private charities never manage to do as much. Not to mention the fact that coordination, which is vital in the early days of a disaster, is pretty much impossible without having someone with whom the buck stops. Ussually this is the president though modern Republicans seem to act as if lots of people who work in Bush's office (like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Micheal Brown) just kinda showed up without the presidents approval or anything. If only Batiushka, the little father, the Czar knew!
At any rate, I certainly wish the fine men and women of RedState would stop calling liberals "human filth" long enough to actually look at the issue and compare the federal response to other disasters. Disasters where people who believed in sound government were in charge. It's funny that conservatives didn't dare admit that government has no obligation to people that were dying by the thousands then. Probably becuase an idea so stupid wouldn't pass the giggle test unless the government had failed as badly as a only a modern Republican government can.
Oh! If we got government out of the rescue business does that mean that we get to turn down the offer's of aid from other governments too?
Update: This argument against privatized disaster relief is much better than anything I could write.
(28) comments
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act
Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.
(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)
Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.
Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.
Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.
(38) comments
Thursday, September 01, 2005
The "Blame America First" Crowd
They just make me sick.
Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.
(27) comments
Propaganda vs. getting the message out
I wanted to respond to something the Thinker said in passing about why Republicans have had an edge in the last couple elections. I don't think it's useful to call the right-wing noise machine a purely propaganda outfit. Though there's certainly a lot of lying and misdirecting going on at Fox news and Rush Limbaugh, that's not the reason why they've achieved so much. In short: they have done a good job of arguing for their conservative goals and ideals.
I don't mean to imply that they have good arguments - far from it- but there is something persuasive to having someone on the radio or television arguing for a policy or perspective every single day. People can relate to it and even if they don't agree with every little thing Hannity says, they tend to appreciate his perspective and subconsciously pick up the prejudices of the host.
From radio and television, people get a sense for that conservatism is cohesive and makes sense even if they don’t agree with it. This is especially important when you compare it to the Democrats main way of getting the message out: Candidates and office holders. While I appreciate Obama just as much as the next guy, politicians doesn’t have the freedom to take an unpopular stance just to be intellectually honest like a talk show host does.
I suppose this is all a roundabout way of touting liberal blogs, Air
(23) comments
Where's Rebecca at?
As someone has asked Rebecca's taking some time off from the blog. I assume this is to focus on her job. I don't know when she will return.
(0) comments
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Conservatism isn’t innately bad
I do poke fun at Republicans and the conservative movement that spawned them a lot on this blog so many of you might get the impression that I think such ideology innately foolish. Far from it: there is nothing wrong with being “on the right” and under the right circumstances (say, if I lived in communist Russia Now, a lot of the commentors on this site seem to make a big distinction between conservatism and Republicanism. Though they certainly aren’t the same thing, that paradigm usually serves to let conservatism off the hook for Republicanism’s faults. The fact is, Republicans didn’t appear out of nowhere. George Bush and Tom Delay weren’t voted into office by a mysterious band of independents and flying monkies: conservatives voted for them. And trying to say that what they do should not reflect poorly on conservatism is like saying that Ford is a good car maker, even though every individual car that they make is a lemon.
And that’s the real issue: I think American conservatism, because of the odd histories of the parties – specifically how they only recently split into ideologically homogenous units with the demise of the Rockefeller Republican and the Dixiecrats –have been put in a bad position. This article which got me thinking about the issue explains better than I can. It’s difficult for them to get elected unless they 1) pander to the far religious right and 2) contribute big time to corporate cronyism and corporate irresponsibility. Both of these things are contrary to what American conservatives constantly claim their goals are: small government that gets out of people’s lives and the preservation of the free market.
So as I see it, American Conservatives (unlike their Christian Democratic cousins in Europe ) find themselves in the awkward position of saying: Yes we want to be in power (of course) but no we don’t want to do it like the Republicans. This is like saying “Yes we want to drive off a cliff. No, we don’t want to hit the ground.”
Liberalism may have lots of faults (it does) but I agree with the policy prescriptions and observe that when they have been in power they have tried to follow through.
(31) comments
Friday, September 09, 2005
Self-fulfilling ideology
This kind of stuff is amazing. It's always been clear that Republicans don't believe in efficient government but it's really amazing when they start to take their own incompetence as proof. They are like the guy you have to do a class project with who keeps insisting that it's impossible and so doesn't do his part of the work and thefore ensures that it's impossible.
Well, what do you expect to happen when you vote for a president who puts a guy in charge who has no experieince and a resume thinner than than Dick Cheny's war record? (The kicker is, with all the resume padding he did, he still couldn't fake anything relavent to saving lives.)
Now of course there's a lot of things that government is bad at. Most things even. But history affords us lots of instances where disasters were handeled much better by government and lots of lessons about how private charities never manage to do as much. Not to mention the fact that coordination, which is vital in the early days of a disaster, is pretty much impossible without having someone with whom the buck stops. Ussually this is the president though modern Republicans seem to act as if lots of people who work in Bush's office (like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Micheal Brown) just kinda showed up without the presidents approval or anything. If only Batiushka, the little father, the Czar knew!
At any rate, I certainly wish the fine men and women of RedState would stop calling liberals "human filth" long enough to actually look at the issue and compare the federal response to other disasters. Disasters where people who believed in sound government were in charge. It's funny that conservatives didn't dare admit that government has no obligation to people that were dying by the thousands then. Probably becuase an idea so stupid wouldn't pass the giggle test unless the government had failed as badly as a only a modern Republican government can.
Oh! If we got government out of the rescue business does that mean that we get to turn down the offer's of aid from other governments too?
Update: This argument against privatized disaster relief is much better than anything I could write.
(28) comments
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act
Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.
(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)
Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.
Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.
Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.
(38) comments
Thursday, September 01, 2005
The "Blame America First" Crowd
They just make me sick.
Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.
(27) comments
Conservatism isn’t innately bad
I do poke fun at Republicans and the conservative movement that spawned them a lot on this blog so many of you might get the impression that I think such ideology innately foolish. Far from it: there is nothing wrong with being “on the right” and under the right circumstances (say, if I lived in communistNow, a lot of the commentors on this site seem to make a big distinction between conservatism and Republicanism. Though they certainly aren’t the same thing, that paradigm usually serves to let conservatism off the hook for Republicanism’s faults. The fact is, Republicans didn’t appear out of nowhere. George Bush and Tom Delay weren’t voted into office by a mysterious band of independents and flying monkies: conservatives voted for them. And trying to say that what they do should not reflect poorly on conservatism is like saying that Ford is a good car maker, even though every individual car that they make is a lemon.
And that’s the real issue: I think American conservatism, because of the odd histories of the parties – specifically how they only recently split into ideologically homogenous units with the demise of the Rockefeller Republican and the Dixiecrats –have been put in a bad position. This article which got me thinking about the issue explains better than I can. It’s difficult for them to get elected unless they 1) pander to the far religious right and 2) contribute big time to corporate cronyism and corporate irresponsibility. Both of these things are contrary to what American conservatives constantly claim their goals are: small government that gets out of people’s lives and the preservation of the free market.
So as I see it, American Conservatives (unlike their Christian Democratic cousins in
Liberalism may have lots of faults (it does) but I agree with the policy prescriptions and observe that when they have been in power they have tried to follow through.
(31) comments
Self-fulfilling ideology
This kind of stuff is amazing. It's always been clear that Republicans don't believe in efficient government but it's really amazing when they start to take their own incompetence as proof. They are like the guy you have to do a class project with who keeps insisting that it's impossible and so doesn't do his part of the work and thefore ensures that it's impossible.
Well, what do you expect to happen when you vote for a president who puts a guy in charge who has no experieince and a resume thinner than than Dick Cheny's war record? (The kicker is, with all the resume padding he did, he still couldn't fake anything relavent to saving lives.)
Now of course there's a lot of things that government is bad at. Most things even. But history affords us lots of instances where disasters were handeled much better by government and lots of lessons about how private charities never manage to do as much. Not to mention the fact that coordination, which is vital in the early days of a disaster, is pretty much impossible without having someone with whom the buck stops. Ussually this is the president though modern Republicans seem to act as if lots of people who work in Bush's office (like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Micheal Brown) just kinda showed up without the presidents approval or anything. If only Batiushka, the little father, the Czar knew!
At any rate, I certainly wish the fine men and women of RedState would stop calling liberals "human filth" long enough to actually look at the issue and compare the federal response to other disasters. Disasters where people who believed in sound government were in charge. It's funny that conservatives didn't dare admit that government has no obligation to people that were dying by the thousands then. Probably becuase an idea so stupid wouldn't pass the giggle test unless the government had failed as badly as a only a modern Republican government can.
Oh! If we got government out of the rescue business does that mean that we get to turn down the offer's of aid from other governments too?
Update: This argument against privatized disaster relief is much better than anything I could write.
(28) comments
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act
Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.
(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)
Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.
Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.
Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.
(38) comments
Thursday, September 01, 2005
The "Blame America First" Crowd
They just make me sick.
Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.
(27) comments
Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act
Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)
Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.
Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.
Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.
(38) comments
The "Blame America First" Crowd
They just make me sick.
Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.
(27) comments