The Middle

How Columbia's 'Illegal' White-Only Scholarship Disappeared

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:17:23 -0400

How Columbia's 'Illegal' White-Only Scholarship Disappeared:

A few weeks ago, JPMorgan Chase filed a curious affidavit with the Supreme Court of Manhattan, requesting that seven clauses outlining a graduate-student fund it oversees at Columbia University be struck down, because the scholarship doesn’t exist anymore. While most of the clauses in question are dry and very procedural, one in particular stuck out: a requirement that the scholarship, currently valued at $840,000, “shall only be awarded to persons of the Caucasian race.” On Tuesday the New York Daily News reported that a Columbia official had joined JPMorgan’s case, thus suddenly revealing that an Ivy League university had awarded a racist scholarship for 77 years.

As it turns out, the school may have known about the race restriction all along — even though its recipients did not, including an awardee in the last year the Lydia C. Roberts Graduate Fellowship was handed out (1997) who told The Atlantic Wire that the white-only clause “is news to me.” Now that Columbia says it’s trying to get back the money for “a diversity of students” — a university official admits that “the illegal and anachronistic racial” clause was one reason they can’t award it right now — several questions remain: Did Columbia actually heed the “Caucasian” clause? If not, why did they stop awarding the money? And why is this only coming up in 2013?

» via The Atlantic

Race baiting? Yes. Anything to get the public mind divided against each other.

"Even before Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice controversies started heating up, the..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:07:29 -0400

“

Even before Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice controversies started heating up, the economy had consistently taken a back seat to issues such as immigration and gun control.

“The economy is by far the most important issue for voters,” says Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s not unusual for Washington preoccupations to be different than those of the public.”

She says that the public is skeptical that Washington can provide economic answers at this point. Politicians themselves seem a little dubious.

”

- Whatever Happened To The Economy? (via npr)

Exactly.

mediamattersforamerica: A handy guide to the most basic myths...

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:01:46 -0400

mediamattersforamerica:

A handy guide to the most basic myths and facts about Benghazi. But with the mainstream media now shilling the Fox-created myths, you can expect a whole lot more.

Ahem, while MediaMatters claims to be progressive, you should know this as spin from David Brock aprominent Democratic political operative.

Benghazi was a failure of the State Department on every level. It could have been avoided, it could have been mitigated on the ground, and it should have been reported honestly. But none of those things were done. Citizens on both sides are and should be outraged.

Gundamentalists and Gundamentalism: Some Questions for Your Adherents

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:04:24 -0400

Gundamentalists and Gundamentalism: Some Questions for Your Adherents:

1- Which part of ‘… background checks…’ does not abide in accord with ‘…well regulated…’?

2- Why is it that you bow to the altar of the Constitution? It is not a sacred text, and it isn’t divinely inspired, and it no where approaches the importance of Sacred Scripture. And yet you treat it as though it were, and did.

3- Why are you so willing to waffle in the application of texts? By this I mean that, for instance, many gundamentalists are opposed to gay marriage on Scriptural grounds and yet when it comes to such lofty teachings as ‘they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself’ and ‘they will know you are my disciples because you have love for one another’ and many such, you abandon Scripture in favor of a thoroughly human text?

Labels: they get you no where. Right Sheeple?

"For far too long, conservatives have failed to coalesce around a long-term vision of what a..."

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:04:23 -0500

““For far too long, conservatives have failed to coalesce around a long-term vision of what a free-market healthcare system should look like. Republican attention to healthcare, in turn, has only arisen sporadically, in response to Democratic initiatives.””

- Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy, “The future of free market healthcare” for Reuters Opinion. [Read the full piece] (via reuters)

Oh, look, here are some people using arms against there tyrannical government

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:02:46 -0500

Oh, look, here are some people using arms against there tyrannical government:

Their government fires on peaceful civilian protestors, imprisons it’s citizens, and tortures them in prison, after which it claims those opposed to this violence are insurgents, terrorists, and mercenaries.

Might not want to drop the 2nd amendment quite yet, fellow citizens.

How High Could the Minimum Wage Go?

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:23:48 -0500

How High Could the Minimum Wage Go?:

A 70% minimum-wage hike is the biggest one-time increase that U.S. businesses can absorb without cutting jobs, but it’s not the end of the story. In the future, the minimum wage can inch further upward. For example, it could rise in step with the expanding productive capacity of the U.S. economy, as it did in the 1950s and 1960s. A $12.30 minimum wage today rising each year with worker productivity would reach $17.00 in just over ten years (in 2011 dollars). This wage would be high enough so that a single parent with one child could support a minimally decent living standard. We would finally begin transforming the minimum wage into a living wage for all workers.

Policy discussions around the minimum wage need to move past the debate of whether or not it causes job loss. The evidence is clear: minimum wages, in the range of what’s been adopted in the past, do not produce any significant job losses. Now it is time to focus on how we can use minimum wages to maximally support low-wage workers. Can we raise the minimum wage rate to a level we can call a living wage? By my reckoning, we can.

the evidence is clear: minimum wages, in the range of what’s been adopted in the past, do not produce any significant job losses.

Just keep saying it, it will make it more true, right?

kohenari: In his piece at the New Yorker, Teju Cole laments...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:15:48 -0500

kohenari:

In his piece at the New Yorker, Teju Cole laments that something terrible seems to have happened to President Obama, our country’s “reader-in-chief”:

The recently leaked Department of Justice white paper indicating guidelines for the President’s assassination of his fellow Americans has shone a spotlight on these “dirty wars” (as the journalist Jeremy Scahill rightly calls them in his documentary film and book of the same title). The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will.

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

Alan Jacobs responds:

The idea that the reading of literature is somehow intrinsically ennobling is something I have been fighting against for a long time, but people always find this strange, and invariably, when I have popped off on this subject, someone says “Well, why are you a literature professor, then?”

I could simply say that I find literature immensely interesting both because of its aesthetic qualities and because of the insights it yields into the cultures from which it arises. And that would be enough. But in fact I do believe that literature can have a significant role in a person’s moral and even spiritual development: it just is highly unlikely to have a leading role. It has an ancillary role in character formation: what readers can get from literature largely depends on other, more powerful forces.

For my own part, I find myself agreeing with Cole — and through him with some of the excellent authors he cites — about the transformative potential of literature. As someone who teaches human rights and great works of literature for a living, I have a vested interest in the argument; I very much want it to be the case that literature can be transformative for most of us … even if the upper eschelons of power somehow manage to undo much of the great work that reading can do.

Note, though, that I used the word “potential” in the above paragraph. It isn’t necessarily the case that reading great works of literature will expand one’s moral imagination or that, once expanded, one’s moral imagination will rule the day. In this sense, Jacobs has a point. One could read literature and be inspired to care about others … but only to a point.

This is where my reading of the philosopher Richard Rorty comes in. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes:

Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves.

Rorty here is describing his ideal type, the liberal ironist, who benefits from reading great and challenging works of literature because it enables her to gather as much information as possible about the suffering of others and about the language in which they express their beliefs, fears, and highest hopes. The liberal ironist is an ideal because she not only “faces up to the contingency of … her own most central beliefs and desires [but also] include[s] among these ungroundable desires [her] own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease” (xv).

The trouble for President Obama, for Cole, and for me is that we are liberals, insofar as we care about minimizing the suffering of others, but we are not ironists, at least not publicly. Indeed, Rorty’s ideal of liberal irony is fundamentally a private one rather than a public one; he writes, “I cannot go on to claim that there could or ought to be a cuture whose public rhetoric is ironist. I cannot imagine a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization” (87).

As Cole notes, “Any President’s gravest responsibilities are defending the Constitution and keeping the country safe.” He goes on to ask, “What makes certain Somali, Pakistani, Yemeni, and American people of so little account that even after killing them, the United States disavows all knowledge of their deaths?” The answer, of course, is that these people are perceived as threats to American citizens and to the United States, as standing directly in the path of “keeping the country safe.” It’s the point at which our private ironism that allows us to see the problems with this way of thinking runs headlong into the necessity for us to be publicly unironic about things like security and thus to think of ourselves different from those who might harm us.

Of course, we don’t know whether or not President Obama is at war with himself about these drones strikes, but it’s certainly important for me to imagine that he is, that he is deeply disturbed by them or at the very least that he doesn’t undertake them lightly. This allows me to cling to the image of Obama as our deeply-conflicted reader-in-chief, someone who cares about the suffering of others because he has read “the sort of long, sad, sentimental story that begins, ‘Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers,’ or ‘Because she might become your daughter-in-law,’ or ‘Because her mother would grieve for her’” (185).

Whether or not Obama is conflicted, ultimately, doesn’t much matter for the people whose deaths he has ordered or for those who were merely nearby. But I think it does matter a great deal for us. This isn’t, after all, really a debate about the transformative potential of literature; it’s a debate about our public beliefs and opinions with regard to the suffering of those who are different from us and who might (but also might not) threaten us in some way. We must ask ourselves, how we will treat those people and how our thoughts on the matter reflect our understanding of ourselves as political liberals.

While waxing academic, let’s not forget the whole point of not having a puppet dictator: personal responsibility. Puppet dictators do what they are told, and either are ignorant of the reasons surrounding the orders they sign, or cannot afford to care.

Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:49:21 -0500

Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people:

These early writings would be forgotten had they not formed the ideology that shaped a generation of conservative politicians, including Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Goldwater, the movement’s first national leader, “was by no means the obvious man for the job,” Rick Perlstein notes in his book Before the Storm. “He had gone to the 1952 convention as an Eisenhower delegate, had voted for a higher minimum wage and to extend Social Security, and had voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills.” But then, partly under the influence of NR, Goldwater had become more ideological, a champion of states’ rights, which he defended in terms that echoed the nullifying passions of the antebellum period. In 1959, he electrified an audience in Greenville, South Carolina, when he said the Brown decision, because it was “not based on law,” ought “not be enforced by arms”—an overt reference to Little Rock. Goldwater’s manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), written by Buckley’s brother-in-law (and NR columnist) L. Brent Bozell, had chapters on both states’ rights and civil rights, elevating the first above the second whenever they came into conflict: “I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence of course, to preserve their rightful powers over education.”

In July 1963, Goldwater joined with Dixie senators in attacking the Pentagon’s newly announced policy of shunning segregated businesses located near military bases in the South. A year later, he joined the Dixie contingent again when he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed with a large bipartisan majority, including 27 out of 33 Senate Republicans. “It is at least conceivable that Goldwater would have welcomed an opportunity to vote with the majority,” Richard Rovere wrote, in puzzlement, after the bill was passed. “But for Goldwater the opportunity had been all but foreclosed by Brent Bozell—or some other hand guided by the ‘guiding hand’—in The Conscience of a Conservative. In that book, Goldwater allowed himself to be committed to a states’-rights position that Jefferson Davis could hardly have found acceptable.”

By this time, Goldwater stood on the verge of the Republican presidential nomination, thanks to the work of campaign strategist F. Clifton White and NR’s publisher, William A. Rusher. Together, they plotted a new Southern route to electoral victory—not by explicit race-baiting (which could be left to hard-core racist Democrats), but by high-minded appeals to affluent whites “in the southern cities and suburbs, where the tides of social change are tending to run fastest,” as Rusher wrote in NR. The politics of defiance, tinged with nullification, might hold the seeds of an eventual majority.

But Goldwater was only one herald of a new racially driven politics in 1964. Another was the Democrat George Wallace, the Alabama governor who had become the voice of a white-supremacist populism. With his cry of “segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever” and his promise of “rebel” protest against “communistic amalgamation,” Wallace entered Democratic primaries in Indiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin, and did shockingly well, especially in cities where there were inter-ethnic conflicts over schools and “fair housing,” and where Wallace’s promise to stand tall against what even liberals were calling “the Negro revolution” spoke directly to the anxieties of Northerners. When he ran again in 1968, this time on a third-party ticket (shades of Thurmond’s Dixiecrats), he burnished his appeal with the “constitutional” language so favored by nullifiers and adopted by later GOP insurgencies.

Wallace captured five Southern states in 1968, and 13.5 percent of the popular vote, meaning Kevin Phillips’s majority was an election away. Yet he presciently saw where it would come from: defecting Democrats. Whites “will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party,” he predicted. “Wallace is helping, too—in the long run.” The axis of the realignment, based on the politics of nullification, was settling into place. “[W]atch us in [nineteen] seventy-two. Our tabulations and techniques will be perfected by then; we’ll have four years to work on them, and all the resources of the federal government. I’d hate to be the opponent in that race.” It was George McGovern, who absorbed one of the worst drubbings in history.

This kind of continuious race baiting from publishers like Chris Hughes (online coordinator for Obama campaign) is my biggest complaint about the democrats and the skewed liberal propaganda they call “journalism”.
My America is one that needs to be united. My America moved on past racism in the 50’s and 60’s.

azspot: What if Obama spent like Reagan? 1. He can’t we...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 03:14:29 -0500

azspot: What if Obama spent like Reagan?

1. He can’t we don’t have the revenue (GDP). 2. We don’t have the credit. 3. We aren’t facing the cold war buildup.

Sam Harris Neglects The Most Important Evidence About Guns

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 08:58:59 -0500

Sam Harris Neglects The Most Important Evidence About Guns:

I worked briefly as a prosecutor before serving in elective office. Harris’ statement about himself is ironic given the stark realities law enforcement faces when dealing with vast numbers of people. Does Sam — or Joe or Jim — think he’s “stable” when he buys a gun? Of course. We all think that. But in the real world — it’s later when the gun gets drawn. Men, often drunk, get in fights. Men, often drunk, become jealous or want to control women. As anger or jealousy boils “stability” and “commitment to safe handling” can change — and do change — often – and often very quickly — into a dangerous and often lethal rage.

Harris devotes space to discussing his positive experience at target practice than the ugly reality of gun-related carnage. This fails to capture the ocean of drunken rages that — in America distinctly — are supercharged by guns. (And, though more rare, let’s consider: do maniacs who engage in mass shootings deem themselves “stable”? It’s a silly question of course. They can get guns in this country just as easily as intellectual authors and just as easily as an otherwise normal man, who, sparked by circumstance or pre-disposition or both, flies into a blind range.

Harris drags out the Swimming Pool Canard. You’ve heard this canard: Children are more likely to die in pools than by getting shot. Therefore children dying by gun violence should be dismissed as…just one of those things. Similar reasoning works like this: “Women are about eight times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than by breast cancer, so all that concern about breast cancer is overblown.” Please. It is entirely reasonable that society can, and should, work to address breast cancer – and cardiovascular disease, hospital hygiene safety (Harris raises this chestnut too) and handguns. The either/or choice is a rhetorical trick, not a reasoned argument.

In fact we can and must in public policy balance issues not by comparing swimming pools to handguns – but on their own merits — the pluses and minuses unique to each — based on evidence. For example, the Swimming Pool Canard: What are the advantages and disadvantages of pools? How many Michael Phelps are produced? Very few. How many people live healthier more pleasurable lives? Millions upon millions. How many save themselves from drowning because they learned to swim in a pool? Many, myself included. Swimming pools, you will concede, have positive attributes, indeed healthful attributes, that benefit millions. But to follow twisted NRA logic we must utterly ignore the positive value of pools.

Now, what positive is offered by guns? The pleasure of target practice? Perhaps…but the risk of death, much more common than in other nations, the widespread terrorizing of women, I would submit, far outweigh the pleasure of shooting at a pretend paper body on a target. As the data make clear, the mythological self-defense argument is far outweighed by well-documented domestic violence, accidents, and suicides that exist in much smaller percentages in other developed nations.

Silly Dawkins, everyone knows guns are used most often for terrorizing handycapped black lesbian women.

"I understand the reflexive establishment posture, which suggests partisan observations are..."

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:55:38 -0500

“

I understand the reflexive establishment posture, which suggests partisan observations are necessarily wrong, but consider recent events: the fiscal talks have broken down because Republicans won’t compromise and accept meaningful concessions; the farm bill and the Violence Against Women Act are stuck because Republicans won’t vote on them; efforts to reduce gun violence face extremely long odds because Republicans are beholden to the NRA; a U.N. treaty on disabilities was killed because Republicans believed extremist conspiracy theories; the process of filling President Obama’s second term cabinet is stalled because of Republican smear campaigns; and another debt-ceiling crisis is underway because Republicans are threatening to hurt Americans on purpose unless Democrats pay a steep ransom.

It’s not “both their fault.” One side is being reasonable; the other side is being nihilistic. One need not be partisan or biased to see what is plainly true.

”

- It’s not ‘both their fault’ (via wilwheaton)

Republicans are douches with decidely polarized idealogies, but this is propaganda to cover the Democrats who simply take power and ignore the people.
- Democrats write bills and slip in items that take away rights and empower themselves and corporations. (example)
- Democrats support military spending, violence, and the ever growing prison systems. (defense) (civil liberties) (prison reform)
- Democrats are just as partisan and have an equally long record of filibusters, and want to stop only the opposition from using them. This is not about getting along, this is about taking power. (here)

Obama did not win for being a great president in the first term, he won because people voted against the Republican party.

It’s time we start voting in independents and libertarians who will influence the agenda’s of both these insane power and money greedy parties.

Let’s Get M.A.D.D. About Guns

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:44:18 -0500

Let’s Get M.A.D.D. About Guns:

One absurd argument some gun extremists are already making is that, instead of tightening gun laws, we should go in the other direction, and start packing heat. That way, you see, we can mow down the bad guy before he gets us.

In Michigan, a bill to allow concealed weapons to be brought into public schools, day-care centers and churches has been approved by the Legislature and is awaiting the signature of that state’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder. In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg argues that the country is so “saturated” with guns — some 300 million — that it’s pointless to try to put controls on gun ownership. Besides, he says, “people should have the ability to defend themselves.” A Texas congressman, Louie Gohmert, said that if only the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School “had an M4 in her office,” she could have stopped Adam Lanza, the Newtown gunman.

But the experience of other countries puts the lie to that argument. In Australia, in 1996, a man killed 35 people in the course of an afternoon rampage. Australia soon went from having relaxed gun laws to having tough gun laws, including such common-sense measures as character witnesses for people who want to own a gun, and the purchase of a safebolted to the wall or floor. There are still plenty of hunters in Australia, but it hasn’t had a mass killing since.

Ahem, Australian crime rates went up by 40% and a huge trade in illegal gun running exploded. Most Aussie’s say it has been the worst thing the country has ever done and now feel unsafe in their homes.

South Africa may be an even better example. For many years, South Africa was a country every bit as gun-soaked as America. I have a friend, Greg Frank, a hedge fund manager in Charlottesville, Va., who lived in Johannesburg during a time when it had become so crime-ridden that people felt the need to own guns to protect themselves. He, too, owned a gun as a young man: “I made the excuse that I needed it for self-protection.”

The guns didn’t make anybody safer. People who were held up while waiting at a red light rarely had time to pull out their guns. And the fact that so many homes had guns became an incentive for criminals, who would break in, hold the family hostage, and then order that the safe with the guns be opened. “Everyone knew someone who had family or friends who had experienced gun violence,” he said.

Ahem, war torn countries are different than stable democracies.

laboratoryequipment: Apple to Produce Line of Macs in the...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:45:59 -0500

laboratoryequipment:

Apple to Produce Line of Macs in the U.S.

Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company will produce one of its existing lines of Mac computers in the U.S. next year. Cook made the comments in part of an interview taped for NBC’s ‘‘Rock Center,’’ but aired this morning on ‘‘Today’’ and posted on the network’s website.

In a separate interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he said that the company will spend $100 million in 2013 to move production of the line to the U.S. from China. ‘‘This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money,’’ Cook told Bloomberg.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/12/apple-produce-line-macs-us

I am glad some businesses are choosing to be self governing, since the $&@% fed has entirely failed to manage US workforce issues, by taking payoffs to send our jobs overseas. Feels. They are so strong.

"I don't want to go on Facebook today."

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:40:16 -0500

inothernews:

This is what I’ve seen quite a few of my friends and followers saying last night and today, apparently afraid of the vitriol they’ll see in regards to the re-election of our President.

No.

Don’t not go on Facebook today. Don’t not go on Twitter today. Don’t not go on Tumblr, or to the comments section of newspapers. Hell, don’t not watch Fox “News” or worse yet, their website.

Don’t not go.

Because what you will find there — at least, in that vitriol you’re so afraid of seeing — is what America soundly rejected last night.

America soundly rejected the likes of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.

America soundly rejected massive ad buys made by Crossroads GPS painting the president in very insidious tones.

America soundly rejected the party that itself rejected measures taken by the president and his cabinet to help save the economy; to help save American jobs; to help guarantee the right to affordable health care.

America soundly rejected racism in the form of birth certificate searches, voter suppression tactics and immigration crackdowns.

Americans soundly rejected unequal pay for women and the anti-marriage equality movement.

Americans soundly rejected the tattered remains of the now-defunct Tea Party and their ilk.

Americans soundly rejected corporations being people and Citizens United.

And above all, Americans soundly rejected the phoniness of Mitt Romney.

So go to those websites. Delve into social media, and absorb all the vitriol you can.

And know that those voices of ad hominem hate have been, and will continue to be, drowned out by reason, by rationale, and yes, by democracy.

Speak up against the spewers of that vitriol. It will really, really annoy them, and Barack Obama will still be our president.

And theirs.

1.2% is not soundly rejected doofus. And Obama is just as much part of Citizens United as Romney. But go on keep smoking the hope bong.

a-fifth-cooler: asuperfluousman: So when Obama gets re-elected and doesn’t have to...

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:29:32 -0500

a-fifth-cooler: asuperfluousman: So when Obama gets re-elected and doesn’t have to...:

(via asuperfluousman)

So when Obama gets re-elected and doesn’t have to worry about votes anymore

are you guys going to start criticizing him for

expanding executive power
more wars
drone strikes
his administration’s horrible record on transparency
warrantless wiretapping
corporate…

Romneyism

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:21:50 -0500

Romneyism:

By now, in these last remaining days before the election of 2012, we have learned enough about the beliefs of the Republican presidential candidate to see them as a worldview all its own – a kind of creed that explains Mitt Romney. Those who say he has no principles are selling him short.

Despite its contradictions and ellipses, Romneyism has an internal coherence. It is different from conservatism, because it does not intend to conserve or protect any particular institutions or values. It is also distinct from Republicanism, in that it is not rooted in traditional small-town American values, nationalism, or states’ rights.

Desperate? Vote Romney to maintain the corporate state. He’ll do nothing for the people. Or let’s just keep sliding off a cliff with America’s favorite puppet president, who has a better propaganda machine.

"Before asking why they will vote, I asked why most young people won’t. They told me that many of the..."

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:19:46 -0400

“Before asking why they will vote, I asked why most young people won’t. They told me that many of the issues they care about — climate change, civil rights, the war on drugs, immigration, prison reform — are not discussed by Democrats or Republicans. That there is such a gulf between what candidates say they will do, and what they do, that it’s impossible to trust anyone. That apathy is actually supported by the evidence. Voting is a leap of faith. Calling it a civic duty is not enough. Either you believe that the system is both changeable and worth changing, or you don’t — and most new voters are not convinced.”

- The filmmaker Errol Morris speaks with young Americans about the merits of voting and why some resist, from apathy to awkward family dinners. (via mehreenkasana)

ericmortensen: stevewoolf: kenyatta: jeffmiller: There is...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 02:17:01 -0400

ericmortensen:

stevewoolf:

kenyatta:

jeffmiller:

There is nothing weirder than Barack Obama’s official campaign Tumblr. It’s primary purpose, it seems, is not to galvanize voters on the issues, or coordinate grassroots efforts, or inform voters about policy. No, it’s primary purpose is celebrate how cool President Obama is. The man can drain three-pointers, even at 7 am. He brought donuts—DONUTS!—to a firehouse. And he said: If you’re not going to sleep, “you might as well be in Vegas”—how terribly clever. Plus, here’s a billion pictures of people adoring the man. The whole thing is a fanboy worship site, which would be fine if it were a fanboy worship site, but it’s the official campaign tumblr. And that makes it a little Kim Jong-il. A similar Romney site would be mocked endlessly by those on the left. But every Obama tumblr post gets reblogged several hundred times. This is weird.

Kim Jong-il? lol. The Barack Obama Tumblr isn’t weird. Mitt Romney’s Tumblr made it weird.

The Romney Campaign Tumblr has been criticized in the past — and rightfully so — for not engaging with the Tumblr platform.

Where the Obama Tumblr uses the language and tools of Tumblr to draw people in to their mission and message, the Romney Tumblr barely lifts a finger with relatively unengaging, shilly attempts at using the format of image macros and the occasional photo filter. Following their Tumblr is like following a Twitter feed of auto-populated PR headlines.

And this is a shame as there seems to be a sizable conservative userbase on Tumblr. There just isn’t anybody to organize them yet.

For well-run conservative Tumblrs, check out Mark Coatney’s recommendations of Heritage Foundation Tumblr and the RNC Research Tumblr.

Hear, hear! Kenyatta knows his shit, folks.

If you don’t like Obama and you don’t understand Tumblr, you should probably steer clear of Obama’s Tumblr.

Frankly, I found Obama tumblr creepy. But I didn’t know Romney had one.

"eastafrodite: liberalism believes a muslim woman’s biggest oppressor is her hijab and not military..."

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:54:58 -0400

“eastafrodite: liberalism believes a muslim woman’s biggest oppressor is her hijab and not military intervention, drone strikes, institutionalized sexism/misogyny, capitalism, imperialism, u.n. enforced sanctions, etc.”

- Morning Dew