" Fallows responds:

"...Newt Gingrich knows exactly what he is doing when he calls Obama the "food stamp" president, just as Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing when talking about "welfare Cadillacs." There are lots of other ways to make the point about economic hard times -- entirely apart from which person and which policies are to blame for today's mammoth joblessness, and apart from the fact that Congress sets food stamp policies. You could call him the "pink slip president," the "foreclosure president," the "Walmart president," the "Wall Street president," the "Citibank president," the "bailout president," or any of a dozen other images that convey distress. You decide to go with "the food stamp president," and you're doing it on purpose.

" If Joe Lieberman had been elected, I would be wary of attacks on his economic policy that called him "the cunning, tight-fisted president." If Henry Cisneros had or Ken Salazar does, I would notice arguments about ineffectiveness phrased as "the mañana administration." If Gary Locke were in office, then "the Manchurian candidate" jokes that had been used on John Huntsman would have a different edge. And so on. "

" The Manhattan Institute, perhaps best known as the “brain trust” of the Giuliani administration in New York, has a long history of working to privatize, undermine, and cut public schools, social services, and public transportation. These are the very services that Raimondo cited as essential in her life and to all citizens of Rhode Island.

" More broadly, the Manhattan Institute pushes a right-wing agenda that is only partially obscured by the intellectual veneer it projects on its work. Whether it’s equal rights for gays and lesbians, immigration reform, equality between men and women, or affirmative action for minorities, the Manhattan Institute is working against it. In fact, the think tank’s best known “scholar” is Charles Murray, co-author of the discredited Bell Curve, which claimed a genetic link between race and IQ – e.g. blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites. "

" Watson's gloom, Saletan's technophilla, and the Harvard 3L's email draw attention to the irony that genetic explanations of racial disparities remain resilient ten years after the Human Genome Project was supposed to have ended such conversations. It's a reminder that science alone cannot solve every social problem. "

" "The Good Old Days" have become a driving force in the comics industry in particular and DC Specifically ... But there's an unintentional side-effect to all this regression that often goes ignored: The piece-by-piece white-washing of the DC Universe. "

" It is not only on the right that the auction of demagogy is operating, and the bids are headed downward. "

"Kick a Ginger" from 2009

"Kick a Ginger" from 2008

"Kick a ginger" from 2008

Waitwaitwait, racial attacks on "gingers" have been going on for 2 years?

" CUSA members voted 17-2 to approve a motion to look at donating the frosh week fundraising money to other charities because “cystic fibrosis has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” and “all orientees and volunteers should feel like their fundraising efforts will serve their diverse communities.” "

Weird reified ethnocentrism / racialism is downright creepy as hell, but the crop metaphor is even creepier. "I am a proud American of Hispanic origin. I want you to know that Hispanics are instinctively, intuitively pro-life. There is a plentiful crop waiting to be harvested. All that is needed is enough workers."

"unless... those who possess it can somehow recognize one another, find that trait attractive and be more likely to partner and produce offspring who themselves survive to reproductive maturity, this whole argument quickly becomes meaningless."

"Say nothing. Start carefully annotated files. Resist the impulse to try to stifle the discourse with so-far bogus cries of racism. ... Wait. Watch. Study. Amass evidence for some very specific, very well timed indictments."

"“I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic variability there is between populations,” said Dr. Altshuler... it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes.""

"No, the reason I don't want to let Watson go quietly is that he didn't really clean up his original comments. ... His revisions... Scientifically, they say nothing and retract nothing. All they do is make racism harder to identify, scrutinize, and test."

"factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn't distinguish these alternatives either."

"Popular support for eugenics among the...intelligentsia had very little to do with its dubious scientific credentials. Its wellsprings were linked to middle- and upper-class anxiety concerning burgeoning populations of the poor and waves of immigration."

"In 2000 Watson shocked an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, when he advanced his theory about a link between skin colour and sex drive. ... "That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to people who attended the lecture."

"[Watson] said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”."