Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.
"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.
Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”
That would be Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland. I suppose on the bright side he left out the normal noun that goes with it.
flynn23 wrote: Comparing her to Obama strictly on the level of experience and she wins.
Decius:
To be perfectly clear, I am talking about comparisons of their overall qualifications for the Presidency. My point is that focusing on "number of years in an executive role" as you do is an oversimplification. I didn't really want lay out what is clearly documented elsewhere as it provides ample opportunity for partisans to continue to stick their fingers in their ears, but here goes:
Palin's background is: 1987 - BS Journalism - University of Idaho 1988 to 1992 - Television Sports Reporter 1992 to 1996 - City Council, Wasilla, Alaska 1996 - 2002 - Mayor, Wasilla 2003 - 2004 - Appointed to Alaska Oil Ethics Board 2006 - Present Governor of Alaska, the 48th smallest state in terms of population, whose largest metropolitan area is less than a quarter of the population of Nashville, Tennessee.
Obama's background is: 1983 - BA Political Science - Columbia University 1985 - 1988 - Director of a community non-profit 1988 - 1991 - JD Harvard, President of the Harvard Law Review 1992 - 2004 - Part time Professor, Constitutional Law, University of Chicago 1992 - 2002 - Lawyer - Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland 1992 - Served on the board of a large number of public interest organizations 1997 - 2004 - State legislature, Illinois (America's 5th most populous state, containing its 3rd most populous city.) 2005 - Present - United States Senator
If you were hiring a business manager, perhaps you might prefer Palin. Obama is a lawyer and like most lawyers has not had large organizations reporting to him. Palin clearly does have more time in an executive role. But thats not what we're doing here. Furthermore, just about any executive at a medium to large sized company anywhere in America would beat out Palin for executive experience. They are not all qualified to be President of the United States. The question is, what qualifies a person to be President.
Chiefly, the President of the United States is responsible for making policy decisions, which is not merely a matter of operational experience in an executive role, but a matter of understanding the long term implications of those decisions and the complicated legal and political context in which they will play out. This requires a deep understanding of our country and of world affairs.
There is absolutely nothing about Palin's background that qualifies her to grapple with the depth of these matters. If she is capable of doing so, nothing about her background indicates it or would prepare her for it. You cannot simply skip from being Mayor of a tiny town in Alaska to being President. The idea that you could hold up this person next to someone who, among other things, has taught constitutional law at one of the top law schools in the country for 12 years, and say their qualification for the Presidency is comparable...
Frankly I can't find words to express this more clearly than to say that I think thats fucking idiotic. In fact its exactly the kind of fucking idiotic thinking that partisans have been foisting on this country repeatedly over the past few years in their cynical power struggles. It is frustrating to me that so many people that I know who are otherwise reasonable and intelligent are willing to buy into something which is so transparently stupid, particularly given the gravity of whats at stake here.
Sure, I'd be more comfortable if Obama had spent time in an executive roll, thats a perfectly valid criticism of his record. But you cannot reasonably hold up Palin and say that her qualifications are comparable to Obama. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
RE: Keep the Cheap Wine Flowing - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
Topic: Society
6:41 pm EDT, Aug 5, 2008
CypherGhost wrote:
The bottom line is that in blind wine tastings, there is a zero or even slightly negative correlation between the ratings of regular people and the price of the wine they are drinking; for experts the relationship between rating and price is positive.
I enjoyed this short article, and the first blog post it links.
When my friend Mark first started exposing me to decent wine I was subject to numerous blind taste tests in which I was asked to select the more expensive bottle. I was consistently wrong when I first started. I am fooled less easily today, but wine is a very complicated thing and it takes a long time, and a lot of bottles, to get good at it and to have a good appreciation for a wide array of variatals. Thats part of what makes it fun. There is always something new to discover. Something else to learn.
There are some potential problems with running these kinds of blind taste tests particularly with two decanters that contain the same bottle. The first is that the character of a wine changes as it oxidates. If you had the same bottle appearing twice in a taste test, and you tried it first, just after it was opened, and then again after it had been sitting out for half an hour, it would taste much better the second time, particularly if it was higher quality or older.
The second is that your perception of wine is contextual. This is why people pair particular foods with particular kinds of wine, and why wine in general goes well with some kinds of food (like pasta) and terrible with other kinds (like hot wings). What you have tasted before tasting the wine effects your perception of how the wine tastes.
My advice is to always drink your cheapest bottle first. (More expensive does not always mean better, but it often does.) You'll appreciate a really good wine after a glass of average wine even more than you would if you started with that good bottle and you had nothing to compare it to. In the blind taste test if you had tried the repeating bottle first, with no context, you might have given it a medicore rating, and then if you tried it again immediately after having tried a cheap wine, you might have found it singing!
Of course, my sister suggests that I am more impressed with the quality of my wines as the evening goes on and I get more drunk. I insist that this cannot be the case. :)
The economist's suggestion, that ignorance is bliss, is a perfect example of why accounting is the opposite of art. I've found getting better at drinking wine to be very fun and rewarding. Really great wine and really great gourmet food can provide an experience that is completely different than ordinary eating -- its not about satisfying hunger but more about experimenting with the range of flavors that you are capable of experiencing... Its worth knowing why cooking can be considered an art, but you can't just roll up to an ex... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
So, doesn't CBS believe in 'journalistic integrity'?
Topic: Society
3:01 am EDT, Jul 26, 2008
So, I'm just going to lay this out very simply, even though in the linked video, Olbermann appears to consider this too distasteful to do more than just touch upon (and indeed, there are bigger fish to fry first).
An "interview" is supposed to be a question and answer session between a reporter and the interviewee, right? So that the reporting is basically saying, "the reporter asked this question, and the person being interviewed gave this particular answer to that question", right?
So, in what lunatic alternate dimension does this become "an interview is a creative reinterpretation of what we think we'd like this person to have said in response to these questions" and make Katie Couric's interview session with John McCain, as airednot a massive breach of journalistic integrity because basically, what they aired showed McCain giving an entirely different answer to the question asked about the troop surge.
In short, what CBS aired was decidedly fiction and "news" is supposed to be non-fiction.
McCain has problems with facts and timelines. Kinda like Reagan in his second term, after Alzheimer's started to effect him.
If you live in or around Atlanta and you don't see this photo exhibit while its open (till October) you have made poor use of your time, as I can think of few things you could do with a Saturday afternoon here that are more important. The American Civil Rights movement is, I think, the last time people gave their lives for political establishment in this country. When I was young I used to think that these things had happened a long time ago... that this was ancient history and that ancient people did abhorrent things. Age changes your perception of time. The sixties weren't very long ago. These people... who were murdered by klansmen in the woods, who were shot at by snipers while marching in the streets, whose churches were bombed, who were infiltrated and spied upon by the government, federal, state, and local, who were brutally attacked, harassed, and arrested primarily because they demanded the right of poor people to register to vote... they were hardly older than my parents.
The threats that exist today to our civil liberties absolutely pale in comparison to what was going on here, in our hometown, just a few short years ago. If you want to know what a real fight looks like, and what real sacrifices are, you need look no further.
The exhibition features work by more than twenty... press photographers and amateurs who made stirring visual documents of marches, demonstrations and public gatherings out of a conviction for the social changes that the movement represented. Key photographs include Bob Adelman's Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, 1963; Morton Broffman's Dr. King and Coretta Scott King Leading Marchers, Montgomery, Alabama, 1965; Bill Eppridge's Chaney Family as they depart for the Funeral of James Chaney, Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1964; and Builder Levy's I Am a Man/Union Justice Now, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968.
Supplementing the photographs are archival documents, newspapers, magazines and posters from the period. These complementary materials demonstrate how, in the hands of community organizers and newspaper and magazine editors, photographs played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion. Documents such as Rosa Parks' fingerprint paperwork and the blueprint of the bus on which she protested are shown alongside related photographs for the very first time. Also included will be several contemporary portraits, by photographer Eric Etheridge, of the young men and women who challenged segregation as Freedom Riders in 1961 and who are now senior citizens. All the photographs and documents in this exhibition will be accompanied by descriptive captions and an audio-visual component to provide deeper historical context.
Don't miss the worksheet near the end of the exhibit listing security procedures for civil rights workers operating in the rural south.
Here's Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They're Banned - washingtonpost.com
Topic: Society
1:08 pm EDT, Jun 17, 2008
The A.P. doesn't get to make it's own rules around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it's clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don't exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.
So here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them, we don't link to them. They're banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.
All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.
Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere.
Geee whiz... ground breaking 'science' from KUSI San Diego.
New York, 1917. "Landship Recruit on Union Square." The U.S.S. Recruit, a wooden battleship erected by the Navy, served as a World War I recruiting station at Union Square from 1917 to 1920, when it "set sail" for Coney Island. This is the first in a series of photographs depicting life around and aboard the landlocked boat. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.
Decius (emperor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Topic: Society
8:13 am EDT, May 27, 2008
Persecutions of Christians
Seeing it as a disruptive force, early in 250 Decius issued the edict for the suppression of Christianity. Exploiting popular hostility as a means of unifying the Empire, the "Decian persecution" famous to Christians began. Another motive for this persecution may have been Decius' religious views and pride in his Empire. He was a Roman of the old style who wished to restore Rome to its ancient glory. However, there were several factors eclipsing this glory: barbarian incursions into the Empire were becoming more and more daring, the ancient traditions were being forgotten, and the Empire was facing a serious economic crisis. To a traditionalist such as Decius, it would seem obvious that these problems were partly caused by the people neglecting the ancient gods. For Rome's ancient glory to return, she would need to return to her ancient religion. Therefore, Decius may have tried to stamp out the Christians because they were daily turning more and more people away from the traditional practices of worship and therefore, according to Decius' religious views, daily turning the gods away from Rome.
