McCain is getting a little confused these days. His campaign has become so focused on his clever “Joe the Plumber” and “X the Y” meme, that he is getting a little carried away.

Ha Ha Ha!

I know the more we attack Sarah Palin, the more her supporters love her, but I am so tired of hearing her half-assed attempts at producing grammatical sentences of English that I feel it is time someone say something.

Almost every time I see this poor woman speak, she makes some egregious grammatical error. Most recently here.

“We’re fighting two wars, with a force strength in need of rebuilding, not in being gutted,”

First off, “force strength.” You can almost see the rusty cogs feebly trying to turn in there, but I am sorry. I am not OK with “force strength.”

Second, she got caught somewhere beween

“not in need of being gutted,” and
“not of being gutted,”

But where she ended up is most certainly NOT English.

You know, she is exactly like a parrot. She is very good at mimicking human speech, but when it comes down to it, the internal machine that turns out human language is missing from her brain.

Is it too much to ask for our political leaders to be able to string words together into something we recognize as a part of our native language? America is in need of intelligent leaders, not in being led by this woman.

Can anybody really take this seriously?
I love the recurring image of the San Francisco skyline, as if it’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of gay.

This is a third-hand quote, but it is amazing:

“I think there is a prudential reason for maintaining a progressive tax system (and we certainly can argue about “how” progressive it should be): namely, that if you believe, as I do, that the U.S. is best served by maintaining a capitalist system and a free market, we have to accept that one of the natural consequences of such a system is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Regardless of whether these fewer and fewer deserve the money they accumulate or are unfairly being punished by progressive taxation, the political consequence of such an accumulation of wealth is radicalism - a majority that uses its political power to destroy the system rather than simply to modify it.

In other words, progressive taxation is required to maintain the political viability of a free market.”

Original post and commentary here.

Here are some graphs I created (sources of data at the bottom):

Here you can see an overlay of both graphs, and you can compare the wealth held by the top 1% (green line) with the amount of taxes they paid. Notice the times when ‘life was good’ — the teens, and the 50’s and 60’s, the taxes on the rich were sky high, and they held the least wealth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
(an awesome source, check it out)

I was reading Dear Abby today, and I came across the following gem of a sentence given as a suggested response to someone to whom you do not wish to disclose your choice of presidential candidate:

“Isn’t it great we live in a country where we can’t be persecuted or nagged for whom we vote for?”

I can only imagine the kind of vindictive prick that would utter such a biting retort, instead of just saying “I don’t want to tell you,” and I would therefore like to take this opportunity to offer an equally supercilious response to what I plan to demonstrate is attempted grammatical snobbery.

Notice that the sentence ends in the stranded preposition for. Stranding prepositions is something most people most people get riled up about up about which people get riled.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, or why the last sentence is funny, take the following example:

A: What are you looking for?

B: For what are you looking?

There are people who would tell you that the A is incorrect, or at least that it sounds informal, because the word for - a preposition - occurs at the end of the sentence instead of preceding the interrogative pronoun what.

I personally think they are insane, but, for the sake of argument, let’s grant it to them that B is more formal or proper - whatever that means.

Now, these same tightwads are also generally proponents of using the object form of the personal interrogative pronoun. Sorry for the grammarese, but that means the word whom.
Most sensible English speakers have no idea where whom occurs, and where who occurs. I can explain it, but it is a little more difficult to wrap your head around.

First you need to understand what an “object” is, and in the interest of keeping it simple, you can just remember that if it’s a noun, and it’s not the subject of the verb, it’s the object.
So in the following sentences, the objects are in blue and red.

Frederick swallowed a peach seed.
I sent my congressman anthrax.
They will hum Daft Punk in the shower.

Second, you need to know that sometimes, for various reasons, stuff gets “replaced” by “question words” and those question words show up in strange places.

Normal: The transient accosted the mannequin.
What did the transient accost?
I saw what the transient accosted.

You see, in the second two sentences, the word mannequin is gone, because it has been replaced by what, and the word what is popping up somewhere other than after accosted. The word what is easy, because it doesn’t change based on whether it is a subject or object, but when the question word replaces a person, we run into the who/whom problem:

Normal: The transient accosted the day trader.
Who(m) did the transient accost?
I saw who(m) the transient accosted.

These sentences should technically have whom, because the question word replaced an object: day-trader. However, it’s hard to tell, because the question words have a pesky tendency of floating around, so you can’t tell where they came from. That is why people have trouble.

We can pretty much agree though that if you use whom, you are one of three things: a 19th century aristocrat, a grammarian, or a pompous windbag.

Our friend from the Dear Abby column, who(m) I submit is just such a pompous windbag, nailed the use of whom, but forgot about stranding the preposition. Why would he/she allow such a blatant inconsistency in niveau de langage? Well, in this instance, you are forced to strand the preposition, lest you produce the following superb specimen of English prose:

“Isn’t it great we live in a country where we can’t be persecuted or nagged for for whom we vote?”

WTF?! Lesson learned. You can’t always avoid stranding the preposition, although I am sure the author at least tried not to.

The problem that I saw in the original sentence is that whom sounds silly if you leave strand the prepositon, because you are mixing levels of formality. Don’t believe me?

Normal: Who were you speaking to?
Formal: To whom were you speaking?
Normal/Formal: Whom were you speaking to?
Formal/Normal: To who were you speaking?

The last two sound like crap, because they can’t make their up minds if they are elevated tone or not.

The point is that our author wrote him/herself into a syntactic corner, where they were forced to strand the preposition, but rather than saying “screw it, I will sound like a normal chump for one sentence,” they just HAD to get that whom in there, even if it made them sound silly.

If you are wondering what I, in my infinite grammatical wisdom, would have said…

“I voted for Barack Obama, and I am proud of it!”

Suck it, you jerk.

Oh, Oh Oh, Election.

Cash is more than just cash, it’s opportunities. Once education or owning a shelter are commodified, they are subject to the same rules as money: he who hordes them wins. We have tried to shoehorn freedom into the mould of capitalism, but some things just shouldn’t be capitalizeD.

Sarah Palin won’t stop ranting about how Obama is going to turn the country into a communist state:

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else.”

In classic Palin style, she singlehandedly accuses liberals of advocating abolition of private property, while at the same time blurting out a completely unintegrated noun phrase “more tax agenda” that sounds like some kind of Buzzword-Tourette’s tic.

This single sentence is a scintillating example of the Republican strategy: make people fear your opponent with utterly inarticulate, nonsensical, baseless accusations, delivered with a contrived appeal to down-home sensibility. And tragically, this seems to be working.

To me, the discourse plays out as follows:

Liberals: “The rich are getting richer at expense of the poor.”
Republicans: “You are a redistributionist.”
Liberals: “No, it’s just alarming that in 1980, the top 7% owned 20% of the wealth, and today the top 1% owns the same amount. We need to rebuild the middle class.”
Republicans: “You are a socialist.”

Republicans are just calling names, they aren’t offering any real solutions to the problem that our country is becoming a plutocracy.

Well let me make a radical claim: redistribution is exactly what we need right now. At times, that word has been (rightly) treated as a profanity, but today it shouldn’t be. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of plutocracy, and it’s time that it swing back towards fairness. You may call that change in direction “socialism”, but we have to pull to get back to center.

We’re all on the same team. Team America.