Nearly all voucher programs created in the United States in the last generation offer vouchers only to children in families below a certain income level.
You can rephrase most of the RW falsehoods in the OP in the same manner as you do here. All except the birther one, actually.
I was talking about the fact that the CBO estimate relied on accounting gimmicks and unrealistic assumptions (most notably the Medicare cuts). Not accepting the CBO estimate is by no means a falsehood.
[quote=“ITR_champion, post:57, topic:564933”]
[ul][li]25 percent of all women have been raped.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Reading some recent threads on the SDMB, one would think the percentage was much higher. That’s not to make light of rape. Still, among my close female friends past and present, and women I’ve been intimate with, none have ever claimed to been raped. That doesn’t mean by extension no women have ever been raped, but I don’t believe it’s 25% either.
Along the same lines, claims that 10% of the population is gay.
“Crunchy” means “granola-munching” I take it. That’s funny, because I often refer to the religious types as “Chrispy”.
Quoting myself, I know. I’ve seen other overblown statistics used by those on the left;even as a liberal, I have to shrug whenever they’re mentioned.
- Some outrageously large percentage of the population is homeless or illiterate.
- Women are paid far less than men for the same work.
Granting that for the sake of argument, produce a reliable, nonpartisan cite that backs you up.
I wonder how liberals … .other than Doper-type liberals … would respond to the following statement:
“In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, gay leaders knowingly grossly exaggerated the numbers of straights who had HIV infections to make it seem the disease was a problem for straights as well as gays, even though the number of people who had it who were not either gay or HIV drug users was a negligible percentage of those two groups.” True or false?"
Actually, even the example I cited doesnt work for the purposes of this thread, because there was never any liberal media claiming falsely that gay leaders either did not like about AIDS statistics, or that they were misled. It’s just the sort of thing a generally left-leaning person would tend to assume without any actual lies contributing to their opinions, so there’s no conclusion that can necessarily be made about liberal media here.
The problem with this one is that it defines neither republican or democrat. Are we talking senators? Congress-persons? Or voters? You can get a definitive count on the first two via votes on TARP, but if they mean voters there’s no real way to determine that because it’s just about impossible to find two different polls with the same results.
- The right to bear arms was never meant to extend to private citizens
- People who are anti-abortion are always anti-woman too
- Bush will suspend elections to keep himself president for life
- reducing/eliminating capital gains taxes for small businesses will create a lot of jobs
Easy: “Cite?”
None of your “counterexamples”, even if representative or even real, indicates ignorance.
Nice try, but your implicit claim is that the CBO estimate is prima facie false, to the extent that accepting it is an indicator of ignorance. Don’t be silly.
So, ya got anything or don’tcha?
Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house. Or any one of the quotes attributed to Sarah Palin that were actually said by Tina Fey.
“And, Charlie, you’re in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They’re very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.”
“They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”.
“We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.”
Fey’s paraphrase of Palin differed only in being succinct and grammatical.
This is false on two counts. First, both Fey and Palin as you quoted her are perfectly grammatical. Second, there is another important way in which way Fey’s “paraphrase” differs from Palin’s: it is hyperbolic. The key line you quoted from Palin (“you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”) is for all I know factually correct, whereas I would bet that the claim that Palin can see Russia from her house is false.
But is there anyone who really thinks that Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house? I think it’s pretty well-known that Tina Fey said that. It just gets repeated a lot because it was such a funny and spot-on mockery of things that Sarah Palin really did say.
Wow. That was repeated so often on here that I took for granted that there was a new study since the ones in the article.
Please identify the sentences in the actual Palin quotes that have a clear subject, verb, and predicate, with number and tense agreement.
Then you have misidentified the key line - actually the entire point.
The Fey comedy line actually makes Palin sound smarter than Palin’s own statements. To quote Fey instead is to be kind to Palin.
I’d be happy to, but with two qualifications which I trust you’ll find reasonable. First, sentences can have more than one subject, verb, etc., as long as they consist of more than one clause. So I’m going to take the liberty of dividing up the identification task in those cases where the quoted sentence has more than one clause. Second, I’m not sure what you mean by “tense agreement”. On the one hand, English verbs agree with their subject in a way that is sensitive to person and number (“subject-verb agreement”). And on the other hand, English finite verbs also display tense. But this is not “tense agreement”. Hence I take the liberty of interpreting “tense agreement” simply as “tense”.
Subject: you
Verb: are (contracted to “'re”)
Predicate: (a)re in Alaska
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Subject: we
Verb: have
Predicate: have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Subject: they
Verb: are
Predicate: are our next door neighbors
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Subject: we
Verb: need (main verb), have (subordinate verb)
Predicate: need to have a good relationship with them
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
First conjunct:
Subject: they
Verb: are (contracted to “'re”)
Predicate: (a)re very, very important to us
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Second conjunct:
Subject: they
Verb: are
Predicate: are our next door neighbor
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
First conjunct:
Subject: they
Verb: are (contracted to “'re”)
Predicate: (a)re our next door neighbors
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Second conjunct:
Subject: you
Verb: can (auxiliary), see (main verb)
Predicate: can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Subject: we
Verb: have
Predicate: have trade missions back and forth
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
(Note: I assume in this sentence that “we–we do–” is a false start and so I don’t include it in the analysis. It is a disfluency, sure, but a far cry from ungrammaticality.)
Main clause
Subject: it
Verb: is (contracted to “'s”)
Predicate: (i)s very important when…
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Temporal adjunct headed by “when”
Subject: you
Verb: consider
Predicate: consider even national security issues with Russia…
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Adjunct headed by “as”
Subject: Putin
Verb: rears, comes (these two verbs are in coordination)
Predicate: rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Subject: they
Verb: go (supported by auxiliary “do”, which undergoes subject-auxiliary inversion since it’s an interrogative clause)
Predicate: do go where
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Subject: it
Verb: is (contracted to “'s”)
Predicate: (i)s Alaska
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Subject: it
Verb: is (contracted to “’'s”)
Predicate: (i)s just right over the border
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Main clause
Subject: it
Verb: is
Predicate: is-- from Alaska that we…
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
Clefted clause
Subject: we
Verb: send
Predicate: send those out to make sure that…
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Complement of “make sure”
Subject: an eye (this is also the logical object of “keep”, but becomes the subject via passivization)
Verb: is
Predicate: is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia…
Number agreement: singular
Tense: present
“because” clause
**Subject:**they
Verb: are
Predicate: are right there
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Subject: they
Verb: are
Predicate: are right next to-- to our state.
Number agreement: plural
Tense: present
Now, granted, there are many more ways that a sentence can be ungrammatical than by not having, as you put it, “a clear subject, verb, and predicate, with number and tense agreement”. But I fail to see any way in which these sentences attributed to Palin are ungrammatical, and I hope this exercise shows that I take claims about language seriously and consider such claims to be subject to empirical (dis)confirmation.
Okay, forget what I said about the line being “key”. I was using “key line” as a shorthand for “line that was famously satirized by Fey”.
Palin said: “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”
Fey said: “I can see Russia from my house”
Palin’s original line is no doubt asinine (because while it may be a true assertion, it is hardly relevant to foreign policy) and Fey’s version a brilliant parody. But how can you deny that Fey’s line is a hyperbolic version of the original? Being able to see Russia from land in Alaska is a far weaker claim that being able to see it from a particular house.
Palin has said a whole lot more than that, and I’ve quoted some of it for you. Take it all into consideration, instead of trying to cherry-pick the least inane of it, and try again.
To repeat: Quoting Fey instead of Palin does Palin a favor.