I honestly had no idea that Billy Joel was this hated. Also,
Anderson Cooper apparently broadcasting hammered:
Archives for 2009
CBS Sunday Morning
I think I may tivo it and just go back to bed.
All in the family
This, from Larry O’Donnell, says quite a lot about how Villagers like himself view the world (from the New Yorker via Ben Smith):
“Paterson has no comprehension of upstate New York, absolutely none, and has chosen someone better at representing cows than people,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of the daughter of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.”
It doesn’t matter that Gillibrand is herself an elected politician while Caroline Kennedy is a school fundraiser. What matters is what their fathers did.
(I included the part about cows because it’s exactly the kind of downstate rhetoric that turns off us upstaters — the fact that he thinks it’s a smart thing to say tells you everything you need to know about his understanding of New York State politics.)
Senior Bowl
Does anyone have any idea how the teams are picked, because some schools that you would think are from the “south” are on the “north” team, and vice versa. Nothing on the website, either.
The “Obama effect”
Sully says this blew his mind. It doesn’t surprise me at all:
In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.
In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.
On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.
The reason this doesn’t surprise me is that it has been well-documented that African-Americans do worse on tests if they are asked to identify themselves by race before their test, so clearly people’s preconceived ideas “race” and “intelligence” influence their performance on these things . And, unlike some, I’ve never been one for half-baked white supremacist ideas about IQ.
To some extent all of this stuff indicates that the notion of using standardized tests to measure “intelligence” (to the extent that such a thing exists and is quanitfiable in the first place) is complete horseshit. And it also goes to something that everyone should just admit: we live in a society that makes blacks feel bad about themselves in a way helps cause them to do poorly on the bogus aptitude exams that we administer in order to convince ourselves that we’re a meritocracy.
All of that said, if there really is an “Obama effect” on African-American performance on standardized tests (the study hasn’t even been peer-reviewed yet, so it’s much too early to say), it’s great news for our society.
Someone Help This Man
Disgraced evangelical leader Ted Haggard’s former church disclosed Friday that the gay sex scandal that caused his downfall extends to a young male church volunteer who reported having a sexual relationship with Haggard — a revelation that comes as Haggard tries to repair his public image.
Brady Boyd, who succeeded Haggard as senior pastor of the 10,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, told The Associated Press that the man came forward to church officials in late 2006 shortly after a Denver male prostitute claimed to have had a three-year cash-for-sex relationship with Haggard.
Boyd said an “overwhelming pool of evidence” pointed to an “inappropriate, consensual sexual relationship” that “went on for a long period of time … it wasn’t a one-time act.” Boyd said the man was in his early 20s at the time. He said he was certain the man was of legal age when it began.
Reached Friday night, Haggard declined to comment and said all interviews would have to be arranged through a publicist for HBO, which is airing a documentary about him this month.
Could someone please sit this poor man down and explain to him those urges he keeps having to engage in sex with other men are not his soul under attack by Satan, and that he is not besieged by demons, but that he is GAY, it is 2009, and there isn’t anything wrong with it. I really feel bad for this guy.
Nothing Has Changed
Remember that CBO report I linked to earlier this week? The one that supposedly said the stimulus package as proposed would not spend fast enough to be stimulus. Guess what. It doesn’t exist (via):
Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.
Funny thing is, there is no such report.
“We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.
Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.
Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.
The CBO numbers were given to a small number of congressional Democrats and Republicans, but were not posted online because they’re not an official CBO product. (Media outlets, while reporting widely about the “report,” have declined to post it online. Here’s the whole thing.) Democratic aides say they are certain that the GOP leaked it to the Associated Press in order to undercut the spending portion of the stimulus.
I promised to myself that never again would I be as gullible as I was during the Bush years, but I really don’t know what the appropriate level of skeptical is for Republicans right now. Even after losing their asses in the last two elections, facing numerous crises, here they are just flat-out making shit up on arguably the most important topic of the day.
From now on, anything the Republicans say I am just going to have to assume is a lie, until proven otherwise. I don’t know how else to handle this, as they simply can not be trusted to tell the truth or do the right thing, regardless what the stakes are.