Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Cheap shots and tilted fields

Update 5/28: National Review Plagiarism Watch

Film by Vittorio de Sisti, 1973. This is not in fact funny in any relevant way, but it is funny. 
Reported at TPM:
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said earlier this year that the Chinese aren’t “terribly imaginative” and must resort to stealing the intellectual property of Americans.
Fiorina's comments were made on Jan. 24 during an interview about the Common Core with Iowa political blog, Caffeinated Thoughts, video of which was surfaced by BuzzFeed News on Tuesday.
So if you're so smart, Carly, how come you can't think up an ethnic slur that's less than 80 years old?

You know who else murdered tens of millions of farmers who resisted collectivization? Read on!
From the National Review exposé of Elizabeth Warren flipping foreclosed houses in the go-go 1990s and according to the hotshot NRO research making a pile of money, which is like so ironic because we all know Elizabeth Warren regards buying and selling things as a crime against humanity. I commented trollishly:





  • Clearly when she said she was a Republican in those days she wasn't kidding.




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      She was kidding. Boy are you typical.




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        She was not at all kidding. She told Stephanopoulos in April,
        she has voted Republican in the past, and was a registered Republican in Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1996. Warren said she left the party after that because she felt it was siding more and more with Wall Street.

        "I was with the GOP for a while because I really thought that it was a party that was principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets. And I feel like the GOP party just left that. They moved to a party that said, “No, it’s not about a level playing field. It’s now about a field that’s gotten tilted.”
        She's still a conservative in some respects, too nationalistic (in opposition to TPP).




Because we all remember how Iosif Vissarionovich could never stand to pass up a real estate deal.

Update 5/28:

Steve M notes that the story came out and was fully dealt with three years ago (there wasn't even minimal greed involved in the house flipping, Warren was helping out family members who couldn't afford to buy; the story is written to suggest indirectly that it is somehow related to the housing crisis of 2007-08, but of course the purchases took place in the 1990s).

To which I would add if there's an ethical question, and there is, it's one National Review writers Jillian Kay Melchior and Eliana Johnson and the editors need to answer: why are they running this story as if it was original, with no credit to the Boston Herald writer (Jerry Kronenberg) who "broke" this nonstory in June 2012? Steve calls it "rehashing" the story, but in giving the impression that it's their own reporting, National Review is plagiarizing, and I think it's serious.

Gentlemen vs. players. Image via Deolu Akinyemi.

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