The earmarks story is a peculiar genre of journalism wherein you focus on how much government spending is directed to legislator-specified projects–generally without pointing out what a tiny fraction of total spending this is, or that without the earmarking this money would be spent anyway, on some project chosen by the executive branch. Then you rattle off a list of earmarked projects, often provided by a partisan source, which are generally chosen not for their inherent wastefulness but for their comedic potential.
Thus NBC Nightly News‘ Kelly O’Donnell on December 14:
Senator McCain’s staff pointed to a few examples they call unnecessary spending: $208,000 for beaver management in North Carolina, $235,000 for noxious weed management in Nevada, $413,000 for peanut research in Alabama, and $247,000 for virus-free wine grapes in Washington state.
Now, all these are locally important agricultural products and/or problems, which would seem to be natural candidates for earmarks. But they are actually good candidates for mockery, given some basic laws of humor:
- Beavers are funny because animals are funny and because, well, you know.
- Peanuts are funny because peanuts are funny. (Substitute “wheat research in Kansas.” See, not funny.)
- Wine grapes are funny because wine is funny–it makes people drunk! And drunks are funny.
For the life of me, though, I don’t understand why noxious weed management is supposed to be funny. Maybe Nevada is funny?
“Noxious weed” is funny because it sounds like it could be a marijuana reference. Weed makes people stoned! And stoners are funny. (Note: when referring to the “noxious weed” phrase as “funny” what I really meant was “not funny.”)
Jim, I think Geoff’s sussed this, but I’d add that the term “noxious” is in itself supposedly humorous, as it appears to be out of place in this context.
Where it isn’t out of place is in a description of how the corpress performs its function as propagandist to the powerful, wouldn’t you say?
Noxious is funny by association. For example, noxious gases. And gases are funny. But I also think you should point out in the blog that the point of this comedic code has an underlying message that appeals to conservatives and libertarians everywhere. The underlying assumption is that government is wasting our hard-earned tax payers dollars on frivolous projects. Which of course implies we need less government. Which, again, deflects attention away from mega profits reaped by the private sector.
Plus “noxious” has a k sound in it, and k sounds, as comedians have long noted, are funny:
http://www.burningdoor.com/dick/archives/000211.html
I guess I was overthinking that one.
John, you’re absolutely right that these bogus stories have a right-wing agenda. They’re literally about turning government into a joke.
Virus-free grapes are funny because everyone knows only people get viruses. And computers, of course.
This has been going on for decades. I remember the Church (as in Sen. Frank) Golden Fleece Awards. He gave the award once to a government-funded project to “study the sex life of the bedbug.” Sounds hilarious, until you find out that the research yielded a way to get rid of the cotton boll weevil without using poison. Any cotton farmer will tell you the boll weevil is NOT funny.
Blather! The point is that right wingers so rarely have a sound argument, other than greed and selfishness, that they resort to misrepresentation. And so much the better if that misrep. can have a laugh line attached. Anyone who expects anything other than a shallow report form Kelly O’D is smoking some really noxious weed. [Is she related to the witch of Delaware?]
Earmarks are intrinsically a bribe based system.It is a government grab bag.Good ol boy nod and a wink.A fleecing of the treasury for political hierarchy.Part and parcel with the lobbying situation.President needs the line item veto.Once met a senator who told me his job was to secure all the “booty”he could for his constituents.And any legislator that was not doing the same was not doing his job.Well that may be true.But i felt like i needed a shower afterwards.The stink of Washington
Anything vaguely science-y is fully because Real Americans don’t need no damn eggheads to tell them how to do their job. Not even if slight improvements could save billions. Intellectuals are elitists and that’s just a step away from communist. Drrrr
Tyro that paragraph is in itself elitist.This nonsense that all those on the right are anti science….religious “nuts”….anti intellectual,who hate anything “scienc-y” is like the racist statements concerning the intelligence(or lack there of) of minorities.Yes all of us holding doctorates in medicine and such ,are really gap toothed,cross burning,racist trogladogs that done graduamated the 9th grade.Spouting such bunk is the same crap libs have spouted for a good many years now;as at the same time they call themselves the party of inclusion. Inclusion as long as your in lockstep with them? Tyro Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a new result.So this is your line.We get it.Heard it all before….America rejected it….can you for the love of God give it a break?
@michael e
Wholly in agreement with Tyro, despite his typos.
While not ALL conservatives are anti-science, the ones that aren’t are those who try to twist science to their own needs, often by turning the results a full 180°. And while not all cons are “gap toothed,cross burning,racist trogladogs that done graduamated the 9th grade”, people in those categories do tend to be conservatives. So it may be unfortunate that an educated, well-off patrician like you cannot identify with your fellow travellers, but them’s the breaks, y’all.
And for what it’s worth, I have seen this all in action with people I work with. And almost to a one, the conservatives tend to think scientific things are not important, or false, or against their religion (a popular excuse for not believing patently obvious truths). And those of a liberal bent, while not rocket scientists, do know the basics of science and the scientific method.
Oh, and America didn’t reject anything – only a very small portion of the population did (based on voting percentages).
Can you for the love of my lack of god give your nonsensical ravings up? Probably not…
Thank you DDB9000.
Worth repeating:
Perhaps we are missing the point in a topic such as this. Could there be a more insidious fundamental problem?
“We hear about the democratic deficit all the time, but it is the epistemological deficit that is putting democracy at risk. Epistemology signifies the “science of knowing” and expresses a civilizational conviction that truth, objectivity, science, fact and reason are fundamentally different from opinion, subjectivity, prejudice, feeling and irrationality. The science of knowing insists on the fundamental distinction made by the Greeks between episteme (true knowledge) and doxa (opinion or prejudice, a root of our word “orthodoxy”). The Greeks understood that there is a potent difference between knowledge claims rooted in reason, or in facts that reflect some version of a real or objective world, and the subjective opinions by which we advertise our personal prejudices. We may not always be able to agree on what counts as real knowledge rather than mere prejudice, but we can and must agree on the criteria by which the distinction is made. Indeed, our science, our society and our democratic culture depend on the distinction.
Knowledge as episteme denotes claims that can be backed up by facts, good reasons and sound arguments. This doesn’t mean there is perfect truth, but it does mean there are good and bad argumentsâ┚¬”Âclaims that can be verified by empirical facts or rooted in logically demonstrable arguments and those that cannot be. Because democracy relies on words rather than force, reason rather than compulsion and an agreement about the value if not the substance of objectivity, it works only when we agree on the distinction between knowledge and opinion, between claims that can be verified by facts and validated by sound reasoning and subjective personal beliefs that, however deeply felt, are incapable of being corroborated or falsified.
There are those who will say that democracy is simply government by the people, smart or dumb, knowledgeable or ignorant. But democracy is government by citizens, and citizenship is defined by education, deliberation, judgment and the capacity to find common ground. This is the difference between democracy as mob rule and democracy as deliberative civic engagement. Mob rule asks only for the expression of prejudice and subjective opinion. Democracy demands deliberative judgment.
Yet far too many Americans, including not just many of the new Tea Party politicians but established leaders like former President George W. Bush, honestly think the difference between, say, evolution and creationism is merely a matter of opinion: you think man is descended from the apes; I think he is a creature made by God. Two competing belief systems, two forms of personal conviction equally salient. Tolerance, to Bush, means we respect both views and acknowledge their common creditability, because, after all, we both feel deeply about the matterâ┚¬”Âwhich means, in turn, we teach both views in our schools.
* * *
The trouble is that when we merely feel and opine, persuaded that there is no possible way our opinion can be controverted or challenged, having an opinion is the same as being “right.” Being right quickly comes to trump being creditable and provable, and we lose the core democratic faculty of admitting that we might be wrong, and that our views must be judged by some criterion other than how deeply we hold them. Our polarized antidemocratic politics of personal prejudice is all about the certainty that we are right paired with the conviction that nothing can change our mind. Yet democracy is wholly contrary to such subjective certainty. To secure our liberty in a world of collectivity, we must remain endlessly sensitive to the possibility that we might be wrong. And hence to our reciprocal willingness to subject our opinions to corroborationâ┚¬”Âand to falsification. We teach evolution not because it is “true” in some absolute sense but because it is susceptible to falsification. Creationism is not, which is why evolution is science while creationism is subjective opinionâ┚¬”Âa fit candidate for belief but inappropriate to schooling.
Yet what has happened to American democracy is that we have substituted opinion and prejudice for science and reasonâ┚¬”Âor, worse still, no longer recognize the difference between them. Larry King can thus interview both bigger-than-life cosmologist Stephen Hawking and a psychic-for-hire who talks to the dead in a way that suggests there is no difference in their methods. Ghost stories can appear on the History Channel next to World War II documentaries. And candidates can say just about anything impulse dictates, confident that their constituents will have neither an authoritative basis on which to judge nor any reason to think they need one. As Obama learned, many Americans are likely to associate a call for “proof”â┚¬”Âfor epistemological authorityâ┚¬”Âwith “elitism” and suggest that pushing “knowledge” is less a common way to put ourselves in the service of reason than someone’s private way of announcing his own supposed superiority.
The great African-American author James Baldwin once said, “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.” Many Americans seem to have turned reality itself into a set of television shows utterly detached from reality. Daniel Boorstin, a former Librarian of Congress, wrote, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth.”
The tyranny most corrosive to democracy is not the tyranny of money but the tyranny of illusion. As Chris Hedges says in his book Empire of Illusion, “A populace deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining a free society.”
The November 2 elections were many things: a manifestation of anger and resentment, a tribute to citizen organization, a demonstration of protest politics, an invitation to polarization and a proof of the enduring role of money in politics. But they also offered distressing evidence of our emerging epistemological deficitâ┚¬”Âa long, destructive erosion of our Enlightenment faith in reason and reasoning and of our willingness to recognize that facts and good arguments must prevail if freedom is to survive. The elections sent a lot of politicians home, but the real loser was democracy.”
Benjamin R. Barber
Ok guys the minute someone realizes the failings of the Democratic party and switches his vote to R all his sense falls out his ass?I have never heard such a stupid, moronic, narrow minded ,dumb as a box of hammers, pin headed belief system in all my born days.We may not share the same ideology- but we do share the same biology.Most people come to the same watering hole of common sense.So Keep running with that prejudice.See how far it gets you.And we shall see just how much Americans reject things in a coming november.
Hey, Raymond…nice try, but michael e doesn’t understand what you’re saying…that’s because he doesn’t understand or need “facts” when he has a brainful of “Fauxfacts,” the root cause of our epistemological deficit.
Dick i took Philosophy too in by gone days.Ah to pontificate away the day in a haze of self importance.The only time in my life when I knew everything was in those golden college days.Yes Im well aware of james Ferrier a scott who lived in the 1800s and was father of the term.How is knowledge arrived at ?Truth…beliefe etc.Yadda yadda.Look your point in all this diahrrea of the mind is to prove how dumb those who have a conservative, constitutional ,capitalist,small government-and ultimate individual freedoms belief system are.And how enlightened those birkenstock wearing ,tree hugging little elitist really are.Hy you are welcome to that opinion.
Philosophical joke:
Written on a restroom wall….God is dead Nietzsche.(written under it)Nietzsche is dead ..GOD!
Nice try…. i didn’t say, or suggest any such thing. As far as i can tell everyone is only talking about how dumb YOU are.
Related: A July 2009 study by the Pew Research Center finds that only six percent of America’s scientists identify themselves as Republicans; fifty-five percent call themselves Democrats. Nine percent of scientists said they were “conservative” while 52 percent described themselves as “liberal,” and 14 percent “very liberal.”
http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1549
“Look your point in all this is to prove how dumb those who have a conservative belief system are.”
uh. no…the whole point is how american conservatives live in a reality where facts don’t matter.
Raymond, there was a related conversation about conservative epistemic closure earlier this year
Julian Sanchez
One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/03/26/frum-cocktail-parties-and-the-threat-of-doubt/
Jonathan Bernstein continued “The accusation isn’t that conservatives all reach the same conclusions about everything, nor is it that conservatives are excessively politically correct, nor is it that conservatives demand strict adherence to a set of ideas if one is to remain a conservative in good standing. It’s rather about information, and what counts as evidence about the real world. Sanchez’s point is that if one only gets information from a narrow set of sources that feed back into each other but do not engage beyond themselves, that one will have a closed mind (not his phrase, by the way) regardless of what one does with that information.”
———–
A bit more from Julian “The New York Times is not fundamentally trying to be liberal; they’re trying to get it right. Their conservative counterpartsâ┚¬”Âyour Fox News and your Washington Timesâ┚¬”Âalways seem to be trying, first and foremost, to be the conservative alternative. And that has implications for how each of them connects to the whole ecosystem of media: Getting an accurate portrait is institutionally secondary to promoting the accounts and interpretations that support their worldview and undermine the liberal media narrative. ”
———-
Conservative Bruce Bartlett concurs:
“ï»Â¿There has been a bit of a debate going on in the blogosphere on whether conservatives have achieved “epistemic closure.” What it seems to mean in terms of the current discussion is that conservatives live in a cocoon or echo chamber in which they only read conservative magazines like National Review and the Weekly Standard, only listen to conservative talk radio, only watch Fox News and only visit conservative web sites. It’s a closed loop in which any opinions or facts that conflict with the conservative worldview are either avoided, ignored or automatically dismissed on the grounds that they must be liberal or come from liberals.
I believe this view of how conservatives think is correct…”
Dick(and hey thanks for the personal insult that proves you be a liberal) try this graph…..take a list of occupations funded or subsidized by government state and federal expenditures(except military).For instance social workers…teachers…scientists etc.Now see where that graph overlays in support for those most willing to grow government taxation to support those “endowments”.It is called follow the money trail.The average is much higher than what you listed.It cuts across all cross sections.90 plus percent. I have a friend who works for Nasa.You should hear his rants on Governmental politicization of their work studies.So please no need to explain why support flows this way or that.Why is it that 97% of afro americans support BAM?
Helen…..I was for years a Dem.I worked on Clintons election com.I worker for Nader.My family has been in politics since i was a wee lad.Sisters are hard core libs.Anyone who believes that one side has given flight to their senses and forgone all logic are looney.Both do their best to view facts that they believe prove their theory.Stop with the compartmentalizing nonesense.I hear the same argument on both sides.For years Rush has said Libs are devoid of facts
Americans are pretty smart(you seem to believe the millions watching FOX are not).They threw out Bush on merit.They soon will do the same to Obama.You waste your time trying to paint Conservatives as a pack of dunderheads.At its core conservatives simply believe in smaller government intrusion and more personal freedoms over the collective,with an adherence to our constitution.What about that is exclusionary of all facts?Conservative values in this country are as old as…this country.It did not spring from FOX news.
“They threw out Bush on merit.”
???
They didn’t throw him out, he couldn’t run a third time…Plus, the new Gallup poll shows that W is the most admired man among Republicans.
—————
A recent survey of American voters shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources.
In most cases those who had greater levels of exposure to news sources had lower levels of misinformation. There were a number of cases where greater exposure to a particular news source increased misinformation on some issues.
Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely), most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points), the economy is getting worse (26 points), most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points), the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points), their own income taxes have gone up (14 points), the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points), when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points) and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points).
The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it–though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/671.php?nid=&id=&pnt=671&lb=
“You waste your time trying to paint Conservatives as a pack of dunderheads.”
You’re probably right…they do a hell of a job without any help from me.