Twitter roundup

From my Twitter feed:
-More racial codewords on Obama's "ass to kick" comment -- Washington Times columnist calls it "street-gangster language"
-Bill Maher even more racially offensive on Obama and BP
-A cool network graph showing issue networks of the American left (from friends/colleagues Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas)
-Trailer for new gerrymandering doc seems uninformed by relevant political science
-"On Point" interview with author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism
-Contra Mickey Kaus, 20% against Boxer is not a big protest vote -- Hillary challenger in New York got 17% by himself in 2006 and she almost won the party's presidential nomination two years later

Comments

[Rob]

One of the interesting anomalies about apportionment is that, although we give lip-service to the concept of "one man, one vote," our practice of apportioning congressional districts to states on the basis of total population--citizen and non-citizen (whether or not documented)--results in citizens in states with higher numbers of non-citizens having disproportionately greater voting power. Changing this anomaly would probably require a constitutional amendment, btw.

[David in Cal]

I agree with Brendan that the "street-gangster" phrase is going to far. However, the phrase "kick [someone's] ass" is in the Urban Dictionary, so it's accurate to describe that phrase as street language.

See Def #4 at http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kick+ass