Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Reading the Supreme Court Tea Leaves


The NY Times discusses the recent ruling on a Christian student group and what it says or doesn't say about how the Court might rule on gay marriage:



Lawyers for couples challenging California’s ban on same-sex marriage wasted no time in offering the judge hearing their case a translation of Justice Ginsburg’s sentence.

“The Supreme Court definitively held that sexual orientation is not merely behavioral, but rather, that gay and lesbian individuals are an identifiable class,” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. wrote the next day to Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the Federal District Court in San Francisco.

Ben Folds' Tribute to Levi Johnston


From Mediaite:
The chorus actually borrows directly from Johnston’s now-defunct MySpace page that became popular after Sarah Palin was announced as the GOP VP nominee. This is a pretty classic hook – but it makes it even better that it came from Levi himself:

I’m a fuckin’ redneck, I like to hang out with the boys
Play some hockey, do some fishing, and kill some moose.
I like to shoot the shit and do some chillin’, I guess.
Ya fuck with me and I’ll kick your ass.

Well, now the proposed reality show has a theme song…


Expanding the Political Lexicon, One Tweet at a Time



Juan Cole's must-read on the Palin-Shakespeare-Twitter kerfuffle:
There are many things wrong with the original tweet. “Refudiate” is, of course, not a word, and a case could be made for making Ms. Palin pay her parents back for all the money they spent on her education.

The phrase ‘stab you in the heart as it does ours’ should be ‘stab you in the heart as it does us’– she has incorrectly switched from a direct object of the transitive verb ‘to stab’ to a possessive modifying heart; in the first parallel phrase, ‘heart’ was the the object of a preposition.

The further errors in the tweet have to do with substance. A tiny fringe cult destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, not Islam in general (a religion of 1.5 billion human beings which could well be the religion of 3 billion human beings by mid-century). A monument to Usama Bin Laden or al-Qaeda would be in poor taste. A mosque, built anywhere in the United States, is not.


The #shakesplain hashtag on Twitter is hours of entertainment and you can play along!

Time's Joe Klein weighs in on the benign AND evil aspects of Palin's latest 140-character misstep:
Palin poses a potential gold-rush of neo-Americanoid language.
Little Green Footballs points out Palin used "refudiate" in an interview with Sean Hannity last week. It comes at the end around 2:35 in the clip.



The Guardian has an article and puts out a challenge to readers to coin their own new words. The comments below the article are worth the read including this:
Palindrone = the meaningless noise that comes out of Sarah Palin's stupid face.