Complaints About the Republican Party IV

[Paradox]

StoneGold points out:

Except he's wrong. So are you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%...adability_test

This is what the eighth grade level thing refers to. It's about a formula that just measures words in a sentence and syllables in a word. Because you can't empirically grade content.

I stand corrected...and more than a little appalled. That seems a really bad way to judge readability.

[Paradox]

StoneGold leaves an opening:

And just for the record, apparently it was a thing that the last state of the union address was also at an eighth grade reading level.

Well, he was addressing Congress...so maybe 8th grade was overestimating the audience a little.

[the4thpip]

For all those who think the term "American Taliban" is an exaggeration:

Democratic candidate Richard Becker on Thursday blasted comments made by Rep. Nan Hayworth’s (R-NY) official campaign spokesman.

On a Facebook discussion board maintained by local Democratic activists, Jay Townsend mockingly suggested throwing acid on female Senators who supported the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act but paid their male staffers more than their female staffers.

“Listen to Tom,” he wrote Saturday, in reply to another Facebook user who had criticized Republicans. “What a little bee he has in his bonnet. Buzz Buzz. My question today…when is Tommy boy going to weigh in on all the Lilly Ledbetter hypocrites who claim to be fighting the War on Women? Let’s hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators who won’t abide the mandates they want to impose on the private sector.”

Acid attacks have notoriously been used against women who violate social traditions in Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/3...atic-senators/

[dupersuper]

For all those who think the term "American Taliban" is an exaggeration:



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/3...atic-senators/

1 asshole on the internet is supposed to make me take the term American Taliban seriously? If we go by internet comments, the Republican party is officially the KKK...

[Paradox]

And Congress is full of filthy communist Democrats.

[the4thpip]

1 asshole on the internet is supposed to make me take the term American Taliban seriously? If we go by internet comments, the Republican party is officially the KKK...

He is not exactly "one asshole on the internet."

“This isn’t some obscure supporter or no-name right wing provocateur, and we’re not playing ‘six degrees of condemnation,’” he added. “This is Nan Hayworth’s official campaign spokesman saying some truly disturbing things on her behalf. The people of this district deserve to know whether Nan thinks what her spokesman is saying is ok – and if not, what she’s going to do about it.”

[Paradox]

He's a blustering douchebag, not a terrorist. There's kind of a big difference.

[the4thpip]

He's a blustering douchebag, not a terrorist. There's kind of a big difference.

He is suggesting terrorist techniques to an increasingly irrational and rabid base.

[worstblogever]

Gotta say, I was pretty disgusted with the voter purge being performed by Florida Governor Rick Scott, throwing thousands of people off the ballot who just so happened to have the nerve to be not-white, and/or registered Democrats en masse, similar to what Catherine Harris did prior to the 2000 election. Federal authorities have ordered them to halt it.

For a party who loves to call liberals "a bunch of commies who hate democracy", the current GOP sure does like to suppress the vote that is, by its nature, democracy, however they can, to try and claim victory.

[Paradox]

the4thpip overreacts:

He is suggesting terrorist techniques to an increasingly irrational and rabid base.

With all the seriousness I would suggest we ram hot pokers up George W. Bush's ass. It's wrong and stupid, but no more egregious than the whole "target" business the Republicans used on the Democrats a while ago (less so, actually). It's assholish behavior, but it's nothing like terrorism.

[Shawn Hopkins]

North Carolina Republicans didn't like the fact that scientists are predicting that the sea level in coastal counties will rise by more than a meter. That's a bit inconvenient for developers who want to build things that would be kinda soggy if those predictions are true. So they introduced a law making accurate prediction of sea level rises illegal.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-rise-illegal/


http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/05/...hting-sea.html

Yep, that'll fix the problem.

It really seems like Republicans are getting even more anti-science and anti-intellectual lately, but just wishing things away and ignoring reality won't work. My theory is that a large bunch of them think they're either going to get raptured or die anyway before they have to deal with the messes that they're making, so they just don't care.

[Paradox]

Oh, for...



"They'll never find me if I can't see them!"

[mikekerrIII]

I stand corrected...and more than a little appalled. That seems a really bad way to judge readability.

It is reliable and objective, What other way to you objectively measure reading level?

[Nick Soapdish]

It is reliable and objective, What other way to you objectively measure reading level?

It's objective and it's easy to calculate, but I'm not sure about reliable. It's just counting sentence length and syllables. One Mary Poppins song comes in at a 15th grade reading level. (Obviously, I've carefully selected my example to play up the silliness.) Above, I gave another example from a children's learning website that parents were recommending for 4th-5th graders, but is "officially" rated as being at a 9th grade level.

[Darrell D.]

A Pennsylvania county making Arizona look like the bastion of tolerance:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...tee/?mobile=nc

Republicans in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania have elected Steve Smith, a lifelong white supremacist with close ties to neo-Nazi groups and groups like Aryan Nations, to the county’s GOP Committee.

The elections, which took place in late April, were certified by the committee two weeks ago, and Smith notified supporters of his victory last week by posting a message to the online forum White News Now.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented Smith’s participation with known skinhead organizations like Keystone State Skinheads, (now Keystone United) which he co-founded in 2001. And his racist activism extends far beyond violent rhetoric as well, into actual violence:

In March 2003, he and two other KSS members were arrested in Scranton for beating up Antoni Williams, a black man, using stones and chunks of pavement. Smith pleaded guilty to terrorist threats and ethnic intimidation and received a 60-day sentence and probation.

Smith is also an active member of local Tea Party groups, a network that he used to gain support for his bid for the committee seat. According to the SPLC, Smith referred to the Tea Party as “fertile grounds for our activists.”

Luzerne County is hardly a small rural county either. According to the 2010 census, over 320,000 people live in Luzerne, many in the county seat of Wilkes-Barre, a large city of over 40,000 people. And in an interesting juxtaposition with the election of an anti-immigrant bigot, Luzerne County saw the nation’s largest county-level increase of Hispanics between 2000 and 2010.