Cheap shots: Glitter edition

Liberal names start and finish with schwa, like "Amanda". From SodaHead.

The Washington Times ventures into the realm of linguistics:

A research paper by a team of University of Chicago political scientists found that liberals and conservatives, in addition to all of their other differences, have distinct tendencies when it comes to choosing names for their newborns. 

Names with the soft consonant “l” or that end in a long “a” — for example, President Obama’s daughter Malia — are more likely to be found in Democratic neighborhoods, while names with hard vowel sounds such as K, G or B — think former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s sons Track and Trig — are more popular in Republican communities.

In fact the paper—"Liberellas versus Konservatives: Social Status, Ideology, and Birth
Names in the United States", by J. Eric Oliver, Thomas Wood, and Alexandra Bass—does not anywhere allege that /k/, /g/, and /b/ are vowels. Nor does it argue that conservatives give all their children boys' names (like Romney) and liberals give all their children girls' names (like Obama). For instance, Palin is a conservative but has given girls' names to some of her kids, though only the female ones. [jump]

The way the researchers tagged the gender value of names may have left something to be desired—

Based on the relative gender frequency of... phonemes, we can assign Male Gender Scores. For example, names like Kurt, Dirk, Rocco, Beau, and Gunner have high Male Gender Scores, while names like Liam, Leila, Ely, and Janelle have low Male Gender Scores

—unless High Male Gender refers to occasions at which females are less likely to participate, like a Meatpacking District orgy, and Low Male Gender to occasions with more females, like the cast of a public TV children's show.

Ron Paul. From the irony-challenged Texas Tea Party Alliance.

Crooks & Liars opens a window on Fairyland:

Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) voiced concerns on Tuesday that the U.S. government may use a drone missile to kill Edward Snowden, who recently leaked classified information on National Security Administration surveillance programs.

"I'm worried about somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile," Paul said during an interview on Fox Business News. "I mean, we live in a bad time where American citizens don't even have rights and that they can be killed..."

Absolutely. Somebody in our government. We don't have any solid information on which departments, but it's clear there are tons of drone hobbyists spending their holidays taking potshots at US citizens in various world capitals. Hong Kong is perfect, because our spooks have learned to disguise drone death as a massive MSG attack.

And that Paul knows what he's talking about: wasn't he the first to discover the homosexual plot to murder him, by shaking his hand and passing on those gay cooties?

Raw Story dives deep:

Conservative actor John Ratzenberger, who is best known as the character “Cliff” from the television sitcom Cheers, on Friday called for former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) to take “something from his gene pool” and “put it everywhere across this great country.”

Heh. We could call him Allen Ampleseed.

Image from Kootation.

Shorter David Brooks, "Religion and Inequality", New York Times, June 14, 2013:

Blessed are the meek.
Like me! I'm meek as shit!