In the final three months of 2015, the Carson campaign paid:
$4,769,922.68 to Eleventy Marketing Group. Eleventy Marketing Group’s
president is Ken Dawson, who is also Carson’s chief marketing officer.
$2,871,229.50 to TMA Direct. TMA’s president and CEO is Mike Murray,
who is also Carson’s senior advisor for grassroots marketing.
$1,256,436.09 to Communication Manager Source, which is run by Joanne Parker, wife of Dean Parker (Carson’s chief fundraiser – Politicalprof).
$138,666.06 to Vita Capital. Vita Capital’s CEO is Dean Parker.
That’s
over $9 million siphoned directly to companies owned by Carson
staffers, out of a total of $27 million spent by the campaign in that
time. A great deal of the campaign’s expenditures went to marketing,
which completes the cycle by bringing even more money into the Carson
campaign.
Ben Carson is not, and has never been, a serious candidate for president.
I don’t mean that he’s not a candidate who should be taken seriously (though he isn’t). I mean that he has never been serious about actually becoming president. His entire campaign is one long con, and the people he’s conning are too stupid to know it.
GOP: We must follow the Constitution THE THE LETTER ALL THE TIME NO MATTER WHAT BECAUSE THE FOUNDING FATHERS!
Me: Oh, okay. Glad you mentioned that. See, here's this thing in the Constitution where it says that the president shall appoint Supreme Court Justices, and now that there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, President Obama's Constitutional duty is to appoint a new justice.
GOP: But Obama is in his last year of office!
Me: You mean like Ronald Reagan was when he nominated Anthony Kennedy?
GOP: But
Me: Yeah, go ahead and say something critical of Ronald Reagan.
GOP: Well. He. It. See. Ronald Rrrrreee...
Me: I'll wait. Take your time.
GOP: RrRrrrOoooonnnnaLllddddddd.......
Me: Are you okay?
GOP: Rrrrrreeeaaagggg gggg gggg gggg ggbbzzt bzzt bzzzzzt
Me: Are ... are you having a system freeze?
GOP: (a)bort, (r)etry, (f)ail?
Me: Let's go with fail. That's what you're best at.
What do excessive testing in schools, the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, speed cameras, and the recent lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, all have in common?
They’re all symptoms of a new America. An America that is no longer a democracy. An America that is under the control of corporate special interest groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And an America that is being micromanaged by a mid-level tier of bought-and-paid for politicians who no longer work in the interests of the public.
The media keeps presenting these crises as one-off events, singularities.
If you take a step back though, there are clearly common threads. The first thread is that corporate special interests keep buying themselves out of responsibility (privatize the profit, socialize the risk). The second is that in order to keep people in check and execute on these plans, increasingly they’re relying on a tier of mid-level micromanagers. The poisoning of Flint is just the latest symptom of a country that seems to be more and more under corporate special interest micromanagement.
“i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.”
i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.
ETA: don’t send me angry messages about this…at all, preferably, but at least check the tag for this post before firing off an irate screed.
no one seems to be following the directive above, so here’s the version of this post i would like all you indignant folk to read.
no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.
because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.
point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.
not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.
not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.
not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.
no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.
so spare me your self-righteous tirades, thanks.
Oh my gosh YES, this post got so much better.
this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook.
and
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the
basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real
ramifications
Well, and now they know how it felt when Clarence Thomas succeeded Thurgood Marshall.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead on Saturday, leaving a vacancy on the highest court nine months before Election Day. That should leave President Barack Obama plenty of time to find a qualified replacement to succeed Scalia. But within minutes of the announcement that Scalia had died, prominent conservatives began demanding that no new justice be confirmed until after Obama's presidency ends next year. In essence, they want the Republican-controlled Senate to block any nomination that Obama might send it. And leading this charge was Sen. Ted Cruz, a GOP presidential candidate. In a tweet, Cruz declared, "Justice Scalia was an American hero. We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement." Soon after that, Sen. Marco Rubio, another presidential wannabe, said the same.
This is a quickly spreading right-wing meme. Here are other conservatives demanding government obstruction to deny Obama the chance to fulfill his constitutional duty:
Look forward to this issue—when to fill Scalia's slot and who should appoint his successor—becoming a major fight in the presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, issued this statement: "I hope that no one will use this sad news to suggest POTUS should not perform its [sic] constitutional duty." He was a little late with that.
Update: Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has weighed in too:
“Twitter users have been using the hashtag #askbevinaboutmyvag to direct gynaecological questions at the first-term politician.
The bill requires women to have a face-to-face consultation - either over live video chat or in person - at least 24 hours before receiving an abortion. Previously, women were required to only listen to a recorded message about the risks and benefits of undergoing the procedure. Bevin is also supporting a bill that has passed the Kentucky senate, requiring any woman seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound - if the bill becomes law, doctors who do not comply could face fines between $100,000 and $250,000.
Derek Selznick, director of the Kentucky ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, told the Lexington Herald-Leader: “This is not informed consent. This is about politicians trying to bully, shame and humiliate women who have already made the personal, informed and heart-wrenching decision to terminate a pregnancy.”
In response to Bevin’s anti-abortion stances, Twitter user Molly Shah, said “Since@MattBevin has so many opinions on my uterus, I have some Obgyn questions to ask him”, starting off the new hashtag.”
Read the full piece and see more #AskBevinAboutMyVag tweets here
“You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to remember the history of the last quarter-century. Bill Clinton raised taxes, and Republicans said the country would plunge into recession and the deficit would balloon; instead we had one of the best periods of growth in American history and we actually got to federal budget surplus. Then George W. Bush cut taxes, and Republicans said we’d enter economic nirvana; instead there was incredibly weak job growth culminating in the Great Recession. Barack Obama raised taxes, and Republicans said it would produce economic disaster; instead the deficit was slashed and millions of jobs were created.”
- We don’t actually have to argue about whether the Republican tax plan
will increase the deficit, because the theory behind it has been tested
again and again, and the results are obvious.
If Americans fully understood how bad economic inequality is in this country, would the reaction make CEOs and bankers look gratefully at Bernie Sanders’ moderate rhetoric? Because, boy, the average person really doesn’t know how much CEOs are making:
A survey of 1,200 individuals released Thursday shows that the median respondent said [CEOs of large companies] make just $1 million a year.
The right answer? More than 10 times more than the typical guess: $10.3 million.
That underestimation of what the CEOs of America's 500-largest companies make is not reserved for the less well-off, either. While lower income respondents (those making less than $20,000 a year) vastly underestimated how CEOs get paid -- their median response was $500,000 -- even those who make more than $150,000 a year were wrong by half, guessing the corporate brass take home $5 million a year.
The median household income was a little less than $54,000 in 2014, by the way. That’s per household, notice, not per working adult. Could you blame people for thinking fondly of pitchforks and torches? But instead, this astonishing inequality doesn’t fully register—maybe people can’t quite wrap their minds around how big it is—yet people still think inequality is too high. According to this study, “The vast majority (74 percent) of Americans believe that CEOs are not paid the correct amount relative to the average worker.”
Will things change anytime soon? Information about inequality will become a little more available:
The average American will soon get a better idea of what the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay really is when new SEC rules go into effect and companies have to start calculating those figures in 2017. Companies will have to report this simple piece of arithmetic each year, creating a figure that either grabs headlines and shames outliers -- or gets buried in the corporate proxy and does little to change the overall trend of executive pay.
But the wealthiest and greediest will keep getting the biggest platforms and megaphones to explain why they totally deserve their astronomical pay and they’ll still be in a position to squeeze workers not just at the bottom but in the middle and even toward the top—because American inequality is so extreme that being in the top 10 percent can still leave you at the mercy of the top 0.1 percent.
What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?
My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually
Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire
very very slowly.
What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.
I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.
oxygen, and our dependence on it, is evenmorecoolandterrifying. we don’t just set ourselves on fire very slowly. we set lots of things on fire, very quickly, all the time. it’s not just our lungs: the structure of our entire fucking skull reflects the fact that one of humanity’s primary tools is FIRE.
like ok way back when, you have algae and it starts producing waste oxygen and that starts building up in the atmosphere. you have the cambrian explosion as all kinds of critters start breathing the oxygen and finding that rocket fuel definitely builds you some more kickass critters than non-rocket fuel. what was also exploding in a completely literal sense was fire. all over. everywhere. earth has always had lightning, but it didn’t do shit while there was a) no oxygen to have a fire in and b) nothing on land to fuel the fire with. well, that stage was super done.
you get wildfires. you get forest fires. you get prarie fires. you get charcoal and coproliths with fire damage. dinosaurs caught on fire. mammals caught on fire. everything fucking caught on fucking fire. you get plants that start relying on fire to spread their seeds or clear out their competition. you get herbivores that know to show up a day after a prairie fire and gobble up all the tender new sprouts, and you get carnivores that know to show up five minutes after a prairie fire and chow down on whatever died of smoke inhalation. free barbecue. fire has been part of this world for a million zillion years.
and humans were probably always strolling along with everyone else, the herbivores and the carnivores, cleaning out the forests and plains, enjoying our fresh salad and our barbecue. learning how to cook shit on purpose. once we had that shit down, our brains could get bigger because our jaws could get smaller. we could still eat as much nutritious nuts and roots and stems as we ever were —actually, we could eat even more roots and stems— but we didn’t need gorilla-size chompers or gorilla-size bellies to deal with. plus, we don’t need the kind of hardcore carnivore stomach acid and liver to deal with bad meat, either. we manipulate our environment, we eat tons of stuff very fast, we collaborate with each other, we have divisions of labor, we innovate, we go to mars.
fire is really really cool. and humans are really, really, really scary.
Atticus leans back in his chair and regarded the question. “I suppose much of our work discusses topics other than violence because we are a supplier, so much of our work handles the beauty in the mundane. But violence… it rarely suits what we need and what our customers are after.”
The interviewer wordlessly held up a picture of a shirtless Atticus, screaming, punching (and being punched by) an angry snowman.
“…that photo is entirely out of context as that arctic sonnah-bitch ate my lunch from our staff fridge and threw the first punch…”
Nerdy Fact #1434: Wonder Woman was originally based on two women: the wife of creator William Marston and one of his former students that both he and his wife had sexual encounters with.
Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne were among a number of women who contributed to the original Wonder Woman, and they’re fascinating people in their own right.
Elizabeth Holloway Marston was a brilliant woman. She earned three university degrees in psychology and law at a time when few women received any tertiary education. She was a successful career woman who assisted her husband with his work and was frequently the breadwinner of the family.
The main reason she was able to continue working after having children? Olive Byrne, who was not simply a casual “sexual encounter”, but the Marstons’ lover and life partner. To enable Elizabeth to work, Olive stayed at home and raised both her and Elizabeth’s children. She also wrote for Family Circle and contributed to Marston’s research.
Elizabeth is credited with pushing her husband to create a female superhero, and after his death she worked hard to preserve his vision for the character, urging DC to employ her as the comic’s editor (she was ignored).
Wonder Woman’s bracelet’s are Olive’s bracelets: Olive was known for wearing a pair of wide silver bracelets, and Marston had these in mind when he envisioned Diana’s bullet-deflecting accessories.
Marston died in 1947, but Elizabeth and Olive continued to live together until the end of their lives.
Wait. Clarification please. Are you telling me that the creator of Wonder WOMAN WAS IN A POLY-AMOROUS RELATIONSHIP?
Yep! They were in a poly relationship and had four children together, two by Elizabeth and two by Olive.
(And for those who’ve asked about sources, the Marstons’ story is covered in detail in The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore and Wonder Woman: The Complete History by Les Daniels)
Wonder Woman was inspired and shaped by not only a man who was incredibly progressive and awesome by todays standards let alone the standards of the day he lived in but also by a fierce, intelligent and awesome bisexual woman
This is one of the many reasons why the ways DC has ruined Wonder Woman in their pursuit of making the book as backwards and heteronormative as possible pisses me off…
Not a fierce and intelligent and awesome bisexual woman.
Two fierce and intelligent and awesome bisexual women.
