Showing posts with label Right Wing News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Right Wing News. Show all posts
So who did the conservative bloggers decide were the most annoying left-wing and the most annoying right-wing bloggers?
From The 8th Annual Right Wing News Conservative Blog Awards:
Most Annoying Left-Of-Center BloggerMore awards at the link, of course. I'm just a particular fan of the concept of annoyingness.
3) Matt Yglesias (6)
3) Kos/Daily Kos (6)
2) Charles Johnson (10)
1) Andrew Sullivan (11)
Most Annoying Right-Of-Center Blogger
4) Allah (4)
2) Dan Riehl (5)
2) Debbie Schlussel (5)
1) David Frum (8)
Justice Stephen Breyer on "Fox News Sunday."
Watch here. Chris Wallace does a great job of needling him about things Breyer's written about constitutional interpretation and, Breyer, as I'd expect, rises to the occasion. Breyer literally waves the Constitution around, in tiny booklet form, and figuratively waves around a bigger book, his book "Making Our Democracy Work."
Now, let's rummage through the transcript. Chris Wallace questions him about "just applying the law as written," and Breyer plugs in the expected elementary lesson about the concision of the phrases in the Constitution and the need to apply them in the changed circumstances of the modern world (airplanes! the internet!), and then Wallace displays the text of the 2d Amendment:
If there isn't a right covering this particular subject, then state and local government will be able to legislate the policies that they, as a community, think are best. Yes, it's a policy issue, and — Breyer would say, if he'd gone on — that's why it's appropriate for legislative bodies to make decisions about it. If you don't like those decisions, the great thing about the United States is that you can move around and go to places that have policy preferences that suit your tastes. You have a right to travel and a right to change your residence to another state. And you also have the right to participate in politics, so there's also the alternative of trying to get the law in your state or city changed, so that handguns are not banned. Breyer's approach to the Second Amendment lets the people make the gun control laws what they want them to be and, when they do, they won't get caught up in litigation over the choices they make.
This is what conservatives say all the time about abortion and the separation of church and state (to cite the 2 most glaring examples). But here's Right Wing News — Chris Wysocki — excoriating Breyer for saying "get on the subway and go to Maryland."
But there was, recently, a disagreement about the Second Amendment, and Breyer was on the side that thought there was no individual right. Put another way, Breyer's side of the Court thought that decentralized policymaking could govern. Do you think that's terrible? If you believe that there's a right, then, yes, of course, you do. But think of something else, where you think the Court is wrong about saying there's a right — perhaps, for you, abortion — and then, don't you remember all the times you made the argument that it wouldn't be so terrible because individual states could make their own decisions and people could move (or travel) to the states that gave them what they wanted?
Wysocki continues:
(I have some more things to say about the Breyer interview, but I'll start a new post for that.)
CORRECTION: Sorry, I had "Chris Matthews" in the first sentence of this post. It's Chris Wallace.
Now, let's rummage through the transcript. Chris Wallace questions him about "just applying the law as written," and Breyer plugs in the expected elementary lesson about the concision of the phrases in the Constitution and the need to apply them in the changed circumstances of the modern world (airplanes! the internet!), and then Wallace displays the text of the 2d Amendment:
WALLACE: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms" -- the right of the people to keep and bear arms -- "shall not be infringed." Now, Justice, I understand why, as a matter of policy, in a world with a lot of urban violence and big cities, that some people would say we need gun control, particularly in a big city like Washington, as they have here, and in Chicago. You ruled in both of those cases. And in both cases the court voted twice over your dissent that the founders meant what they said, people have a right to bear arms.Breyer, of course, is ready for this:
BREYER: Yes. Yes. That's a wonderful example because, of course, it's not a matter of policy. It is a matter of what those framers intended. And you saw that first phrase, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." What does that mean, the militia? Historians told us, and the dissenters thought they were right, that what that meant was that James Madison, thinking, "I've got to get this document ratified," was worried about opponents who would think Congress would call up state militias and nationalize them. "That can't happen," said Madison. And therefore, he wrote the Second Amendment to prove it. Now, if that was his motive historically, the dissenters were right.There's some talk about judges acting like judges and how history can't answer some of the details. How do the old words and the old intent apply to new things? Breyer lists machine guns and torpedoes, and then, deviously, handguns. Wallace responds:
WALLACE: I understand. But it certainly didn't provide for a ban, at least that's what the court's decision was, your court's -- it didn't provide for a ban on all handguns as they have here in Washington, D.C.Breyer chooses not to jump on this point, perhaps because he'd have to say things that conservatives say. He'd have to promote federalism. Let me sketch it out.
BREYER: Are you a sportsman? Do you like to shoot pistols at targets? Well, get on the subway and go to Maryland. There is no problem, I don't think, for anyone who really wants to have...
WALLACE: But -- but it's...
BREYER: ... a gun.
WALLACE: ... but that's a policy issue. That's not a constitutional issue.
If there isn't a right covering this particular subject, then state and local government will be able to legislate the policies that they, as a community, think are best. Yes, it's a policy issue, and — Breyer would say, if he'd gone on — that's why it's appropriate for legislative bodies to make decisions about it. If you don't like those decisions, the great thing about the United States is that you can move around and go to places that have policy preferences that suit your tastes. You have a right to travel and a right to change your residence to another state. And you also have the right to participate in politics, so there's also the alternative of trying to get the law in your state or city changed, so that handguns are not banned. Breyer's approach to the Second Amendment lets the people make the gun control laws what they want them to be and, when they do, they won't get caught up in litigation over the choices they make.
This is what conservatives say all the time about abortion and the separation of church and state (to cite the 2 most glaring examples). But here's Right Wing News — Chris Wysocki — excoriating Breyer for saying "get on the subway and go to Maryland."
Mind-boggling really, isn't it? Gee little black girl, do you want to go to the same school as white girls? Well, get on the subway and go to Maryland!Well, no. There is a federal constitutional right covering that point, so you don't get the state-to-state variation. And that's the question: Is it a federal constitutional right or not? When you're arguing that there isn't a right, you're saying the law can vary from state to state. When is that intolerable and when isn't it? We all agree (now) to the uniform resolution of the school segregation problem that excluded decentralized decisionmaking. There is an Equal Protection right.
But there was, recently, a disagreement about the Second Amendment, and Breyer was on the side that thought there was no individual right. Put another way, Breyer's side of the Court thought that decentralized policymaking could govern. Do you think that's terrible? If you believe that there's a right, then, yes, of course, you do. But think of something else, where you think the Court is wrong about saying there's a right — perhaps, for you, abortion — and then, don't you remember all the times you made the argument that it wouldn't be so terrible because individual states could make their own decisions and people could move (or travel) to the states that gave them what they wanted?
Wysocki continues:
So mister, what if you are in a wheelchair? This doctor's office has stairs. If you want to see an accessible doctor, get on the subway and go to Maryland!Whoa! You think the Constitution obliges private citizens, like doctors, to make their buildings wheelchair accessible?! That's so left-wing! Check your blog's name! What's the "Right Wing News" today, that righties have gone all lefty? That would be news!
***
(I have some more things to say about the Breyer interview, but I'll start a new post for that.)
CORRECTION: Sorry, I had "Chris Matthews" in the first sentence of this post. It's Chris Wallace.
That "20 Worst Americans of all time" list compiled by Right Wing News by surveying conservative bloggers.
It's a ridiculous list, as lawprof Stephen Bainbridge points out:
In fact, only 25 of the 43 put Jimmy Carter on their list, and that was enough to put him at #1. Obama was second with only 23 selections. They're easy to think of, so they got on a lot of lists. (Surprisingly few, actually.) More obscure but more evil Americans were less likely to come to mind, but would probably have raked in votes if the surveyed bloggers had been given a list to chose from.
So, tweak the methodology. Have 2 stages where you first take suggestions for who should be on a list, then have the voters pick however many they want from the list. If I have to pick 20, I may need to pad it out with individuals who aren't really that bad. Or give everyone 20 votes and let them pile the votes on their choices in whatever proportion they want. You could dump 15 votes on Obama and 5 on Carter, for example.
By the way, oddly enough, my name appears in the first comment over there at Right Wing News:
If you click over to Bainbridge, you'll see his comments on each of the individuals on the RWN list. Bainbridge also makes his own "Worst Americans" list, with a decided emphasis on traitors. He puts Aldrich Ames and Benedict Arnold at #1 and #2.
Now, for some reason he puts Paris Hilton at #11. Huh? I guess he thought there had to be a female on the list and that was the best he could do. He called her the "personification of the celebrity obsessed culture." Isn't the obsession with celebrities the fault of the people doing the obsessing? (Let's take responsibility for our own faults. It's the conservative way, I've heard.)
In an update, he defends his #11 selection of Hilton "as one of the earliest examples of how it is now possible in our culture to be famous merely for being famous without having any significant merit or worth."
Earliest examples? Earliest examples??!!! If Paris Hilton seems like an early example, you might not know so much about history. The definition of "celebrity" as someone who is "known for his well-knownness" appears in a book that came out in 1962 — "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America" by Daniel J. Boorstin.
Can we think of some earlier examples of famous-for-being-famous Americans? Who was Boorstin writing about in 1962? We had empty celebrities then, for sure. Somebody motivated Andy Warhol to say "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Or is that why we can't remember the empty celebrities of the past? Their fame-time ran out, and we forgot.
And how about giving Paris Hilton credit as an entrepreneur? You try creating a compelling character out of yourself and making money out of that product? The fact is, she's a model and an actress, and the way she annoys people like Bainbridge and seems dumb and pointless is part of the fabulous image-product that has sold so well.
Personally, I find the collated list pretty much of a joke. It reflects the partisan passions of the moment, not anything resembling a serious verdict of history.But it was predictable that the list would be ridiculous, because of the methodology:
All [43] bloggers were allowed to make anywhere from 1-20 selections. Rank was determined simply by the number of votes received.So, if everyone put Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama on the list, he'd come out as the worst person in American history. (The expression "of all time" highlights the silliness of the list. When in history do we start having "Americans"? 1776... 1787... or thereabouts. There were no terrible Americans in the Middle Ages or ancient times. Saying "of all time" makes you sound like a bombastic know-nothing. (It's an expression we've been using jocosely, chez Meadhouse, ever since this happened.)
In fact, only 25 of the 43 put Jimmy Carter on their list, and that was enough to put him at #1. Obama was second with only 23 selections. They're easy to think of, so they got on a lot of lists. (Surprisingly few, actually.) More obscure but more evil Americans were less likely to come to mind, but would probably have raked in votes if the surveyed bloggers had been given a list to chose from.
So, tweak the methodology. Have 2 stages where you first take suggestions for who should be on a list, then have the voters pick however many they want from the list. If I have to pick 20, I may need to pad it out with individuals who aren't really that bad. Or give everyone 20 votes and let them pile the votes on their choices in whatever proportion they want. You could dump 15 votes on Obama and 5 on Carter, for example.
By the way, oddly enough, my name appears in the first comment over there at Right Wing News:
What an [sic] spectacularly ignorant list. I'm a progressive, and I could do a better job of being a right-wing butthole than the people who voted........ whoever they are.
Michael Moore over Upton Sinclair or Lincoln Steffens? Jane Fonda over Paul Robeson? Not one member of the Warren Court? Not Theodore Roosevelt? Where's Daniel Ellsberg or Seymour Hirsch-- or Julian Assange?
This is why we make fun of your lack of intellect, folks-- you can't even identify the people who've done the most damage to your belief system. It would be as if progressives compiled a list of the most vile and bigoted conservatives in history and picked Wally George, John Schmitz, Ann Althouse and Orly Taitz.
If you click over to Bainbridge, you'll see his comments on each of the individuals on the RWN list. Bainbridge also makes his own "Worst Americans" list, with a decided emphasis on traitors. He puts Aldrich Ames and Benedict Arnold at #1 and #2.
Now, for some reason he puts Paris Hilton at #11. Huh? I guess he thought there had to be a female on the list and that was the best he could do. He called her the "personification of the celebrity obsessed culture." Isn't the obsession with celebrities the fault of the people doing the obsessing? (Let's take responsibility for our own faults. It's the conservative way, I've heard.)
In an update, he defends his #11 selection of Hilton "as one of the earliest examples of how it is now possible in our culture to be famous merely for being famous without having any significant merit or worth."
Earliest examples? Earliest examples??!!! If Paris Hilton seems like an early example, you might not know so much about history. The definition of "celebrity" as someone who is "known for his well-knownness" appears in a book that came out in 1962 — "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America" by Daniel J. Boorstin.
Can we think of some earlier examples of famous-for-being-famous Americans? Who was Boorstin writing about in 1962? We had empty celebrities then, for sure. Somebody motivated Andy Warhol to say "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Or is that why we can't remember the empty celebrities of the past? Their fame-time ran out, and we forgot.
And how about giving Paris Hilton credit as an entrepreneur? You try creating a compelling character out of yourself and making money out of that product? The fact is, she's a model and an actress, and the way she annoys people like Bainbridge and seems dumb and pointless is part of the fabulous image-product that has sold so well.
"Why I Denied David Frum’s Website A Spot In The Blogads Conservative Hive."
John Hawkins explains:
Back to Hawkins:
Now, as a general rule, I try to be very open minded about who gets into the Blogads Conservative Hive. If they're generally friendly to conservatives and seem to have a mostly conservative audience, I don't mind having them on board. So, aside from conservative blogs, there are Libertarian blogs in the Hive and there are blogs I'd call center-right. It goes without saying that there are plenty of issues where members of the Hive, myself included, don't see eye-to-eye.I'm in the Blogads Conservative Hive, so I can vouch for that!
Guys like Frum want to have it both ways. Being a "Republican" / "conservative" who tells liberals what they want to hear about the Right is a career niche —and it can pay big dividends....I Googled "epistemic closure" and got, first, "'Epistemic Closure'? Those Are Fighting Words," a NYT article featuring a photo of Frum. So what's that fight all about?
[W]hy is David Frum getting a column at CNN? How is it that Time has a guy like this writing for them? What's the purpose of putting a guy like Frum on TV as opposed to all the genuine conservatives who dwarf his traffic and can obviously draw a bigger crowd?...
[T]he mainstream media loves "conservatives" and "Republicans" who will trash whomever the Left hates most. So, if you're willing to talk about how Sarah Palin is a hick, Glenn Beck is a crank, Rush Limbaugh is bad for the country, and the Tea Party is bad for democracy, the mainstream media will reward you and because conservatives pride themselves on being open minded, they'll all too often give you a pass for your atrocious behavior — especially since the MSM doesn't insist you play their game all the time. As long as you're willing to say what they want about the people they hate the most, they'll reward you with a cover story at Newsweek and then in your off time, you can churn out a few articles to point gullible conservatives towards while you're trying to guilt them into taking you seriously by crying "epistemic closure!"
The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history....
([Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute] said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)Blech. What an ugly phrase and what a pointless and irritating explanation for it. It's pretentious, but the usage is actually inaccurate. How off-putting and unhelpful!
Back to Hawkins:
Long story short, everybody has to make a living. But, I'm not interested in helping people like Frum play this little game where they try to cripple conservatives publicly while coming around on the back end to milk us for money. If Frum wants to be a dancing monkey for the Left, let them come up with the money to pay for the tune.ADDED: "NOTE TO DAVID FRUM: Google doesn’t own BlogAds." Ha. Frum had written: "Hawkins is the person entrusted by Google to determine who may join the conservative blogads cloud." You'd think Frum would figure out the basics of blog advertising before attacking Hawkins. BlogAds is its own company, and Hawkins took the initiative to set up a "hive" that he called "Conservative" to attract buyers.
"[C]oncern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa."
"To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis -- will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means."
From a list of Saul Alinsky quotes selected by Right Wing News.
I also liked this story:
Note how he shifted from the phrase "the philosophy of Saul Alinksy" (the subject of the questions) to the "philosophy or motivations" of Saul Alinsky. He had unique access to knowledge of his motivations, and I wonder how honest he was with himself or in his written answer to the questions about what his motivations were (if that's what a question called for). The teachers might have wanted some critical thinking about Alinsky, while he may have flattered himself.
The author is not the best judge of what is contained in his own books, because it is confused with all the other things he thinks and the things he meant to say but didn't or wishes he had (or hadn't) said.
On the other hand, there's Woody Allen's great fantasy of producing the author to refute some jackass's assertion about what is in a book:
From a list of Saul Alinsky quotes selected by Right Wing News.
I also liked this story:
The difference between fact and history was brought home when I was a visiting professor at a certain Eastern university. Two candidates there were taking their written examinations for the doctorate in community organization and criminology. I persuaded the president of this college to get me a copy of this examination and when I answered the questions the departmental head graded my paper, knowing only that I was an anonymous friend of the president. Three of the questions were on the philosophy of Saul Alinksy. I answered two of them incorrectly. I did not know what my philosophy or motivations were; but they did!I wonder if that is as severe of a criticism of the teachers as he seemed to think. The teachers haed learned and taught Alinsky's philosophy based on what he put in writing, but he had access to his own brain, which was continually creating new material and choosing, when writing, what to include and how to frame things.
Note how he shifted from the phrase "the philosophy of Saul Alinksy" (the subject of the questions) to the "philosophy or motivations" of Saul Alinsky. He had unique access to knowledge of his motivations, and I wonder how honest he was with himself or in his written answer to the questions about what his motivations were (if that's what a question called for). The teachers might have wanted some critical thinking about Alinsky, while he may have flattered himself.
The author is not the best judge of what is contained in his own books, because it is confused with all the other things he thinks and the things he meant to say but didn't or wishes he had (or hadn't) said.
On the other hand, there's Woody Allen's great fantasy of producing the author to refute some jackass's assertion about what is in a book:
"Obscene, but absolutely hilarious."
According to Right Wing News.
Okay, now I know what's right-wing hilarious. And I'm a little scared.
Especially the part that got me thinking about egg salad.
IN THE COMMENTS: The wonderful Bissage:
Okay, now I know what's right-wing hilarious. And I'm a little scared.
Especially the part that got me thinking about egg salad.
IN THE COMMENTS: The wonderful Bissage:
I can’t watch the video right now. I’m probably not the only one, so let’s see if something else might suffice:
Bill Bennett walks into an upscale D.C. nightspot and is surprised to see Pat Buchanan sitting at the bar eating an entire chicken. He watches in amazement as Mr. Buchanan tears into the hapless bird and doesn’t stop until all that remains is one chicken wing.
Mr. Bennett says, “You know, Pat, I can’t help but notice you ate that entire bird except for the right wing.”
Mr. Buchanan wipes the slobber and chicken bits from his face and says, “Well, there’s a reason for that but it has nothing to do with my right-wing political inclinations.”
And with that, the ghost of William F. Buckley appears out of thin air and kicks them both in the balls. They double over in agony and fall to the floor. Mr. Buckley sits down at the bar and orders an egg salad sandwich.
The End.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
