New Quote of the Day!

Funny, you guys will blog about some obscure North Texan legislator, but let the sainted one talk about a "typical white person" and you resemble clams.
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Naaaaaaaah, no liberal bias here.

Where have you gone, Molly Ivins?
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The best part of this story is that the name that flummoxed the Distinguished Gentlewoman was "Ko"

And Amy, what about Conyers' wife's comment about who people who don't look like her? Don't recall a blog post on that one . . . .
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Liberal bias, it's what's for dinner.

Hey Amy don't you think you should have given gunny credit for bringing this little gem to your attention or are you saying that you don't read any of the comments after you post?

Not cool!

Well you know names like Wong and Li are so hard to pronounce and spell. After all, my wife has a friend named Linlin Li and it took me years to learn how to say it. I keep telling her to change her name to something easier to remember, like Nancy Pfotenhauer.

do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?
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Yeah! No more of your made-up ching chong language!
/snark

This country has entirely to much ignorant white trash to succeed I'm afraid.

"but let the sainted one talk about a "typical white person" and you resemble clams"
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Wait, what day is it today? April 9, right? And what year? Did I wake up and all of a sudden its 2008 all over again?
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Spongebob, the quote you are apparently upset is not getting enough play is OVER ONE YEAR OLD. Try to keep up, k?

One more thing, Brown said,

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it's a rather difficult language..."

Actually Chinese, although not easy for the Western ear to pick up at first because of the importance of the tonal differentiations of similar sounding syllables, is a simpler and more direct language than English or most Western languages. For instance, verbs never change form due to number, tense or gender as in European languages and the grammar is quite straightforward and logical.

spob
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In looking up Ms Conyer's behavior I noted the following from a site called blogprof, who appears to lean towards the Conservative viewpoint. blogprof says the following about Ms Conyers:
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......she has been beat up even in the liberal media because of her boorish behavior. How could they beat up on her for making fun of the hearing of cancer patient (during an official Council meeting)? Or being involved in a bar fight just before taking office? Or calling then Council President Cockrel "Shrek?" Or the hotel disturbance at the Democratic convention this past August (ostensibly because she wasn't getting the "queen" treatment)? Or the illegal travel reimbursements? Or the Synagro bribery scandal? I mean - who even knows what Synagro is? And using the police force as a bunch of indentured servants, that was nothing!
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So blogprof suggests that the "Liberal" media did address Ms Conyers behavior, then in the next sentence blogprof makes fun of the "liberal" media by asking how the liberal media could find outrageous behavior outrageous.
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http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2009/02/conyers-chronicles.html
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The North Texas legislator probably got picked up by national wires because the Obama administration is working on immigration legislation. Immigrants were on reporters and editor radar.

Sigh, here comes the back and forth
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Anyway it should be obvious to everyone that AS doesn't read her comment threads based on the fact that the quality is still lagging miserably. This has only been a story for like 4 or 5 hours already and AS still didn't add anything to the discussion. As Jim FL pointed out it should have been pretty easy to point out that Betty Brown was making this statement to a woman whose last name is all of two letter. And even better observation worth of a "senior editor" that its precisely the fact that many Asian immigrants DO americanize their names that hurts them when they go to vote and they have ID with their Americanized name but the voting rolls have them with their real Asian names.

Fess up, Amy – You're moonlighting for Olbermann's "Worst Person" feature, aren't you?
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and mjshep re: Pfotenhauer – WIN.

What's interesting is that Gunny complained to AS in the Berlusconi Gaffe thread about reporting about the wacky Italian PM over, say, this Betty Brown character, 3 or so hours ago. And here we are.
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At any rate, its stories like this that demonstrate a massive social tolerance difference across the divides of both the young and old populations of this country and politicians on the left and right.

I agree with Brown. Minnesota has a large Hmong population.
What is the "American" version of Lee?

This is has voter suppression written all over it:
1. Get an immigrant to change his/her name to "fit all time zones."
2. Immigrant becomes naturalized and gets citizenship.
3. Citizen will try to vote, but wait, there seems to be a discrepancy with names. Did an ACORN volunteer register you??
4. Citizen's ballot becomes challenged, and likely disenfranchised.
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BTW, it's indicative that it's a rep. from Texas (where if I'm not mistaken, many areas a trending purple/blue). The GOP is trying everything it can to prevent permanent minority status, except adapt to the 21st century. Or the 19th, whatever.
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What about names of Eastern Eurpoean origion? Perhaps legislator Brown should get hooked on phonics.

My comments here about this issue apply to incurious idiots like Amy Sullivan as well.

Ms. Brown's ignorance aisde, this is actually an interesting question. My last name is spelled "Hsu" because it was translated from chinese under the Wade-Giles system. The correct pronunciation is roughly equal to "shoe" but thanks to the poor transliteration it's never pronounced correctly. Were it translated under the current pinyin system it would be spelled "Xu", which really causes people to choke. On the other hand, were it transliterated under the Yale romanization system it would be spelled "Shyu" which actually makes the most sense.
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I'm opposed to trying to force people to change their last name (I'm not interested in becoming "Smith" any time soon), but there's no reason to continually use such a poor transliteration scheme.

Guys, the point is, with respect to media bias, that some obscure legislator's comments make news and the other stuff does not. Doublestandardism.

mjshep - learning to write in Chinese is a pain, though. 26 basic components plus numbers and punctuation beats 10,000 slightly different components.

Peter
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I think that was the point that Ko was making when Ms Brown suggested it would be easier just to have them all change their last name to Jones.

Hey, here's another liar:
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/09/bush-aides-challenge-bidens-boasts-oval-office-slapdowns/
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There's Slow Joe again, making stuff up as he goes along. Someone should ask him if those meetings were seared in his memory.

"What's interesting is that Gunny complained to AS in the Berlusconi Gaffe thread about reporting about the wacky Italian PM over, say, this Betty Brown character, 3 or so hours ago. And here we are."
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I guess my main frustration is that Amy spends 2 days covering the boorish statements of a foreign leader like we here in American don't have our own home grown crack pots. So what nerve to we have to talk. She also dragged GBW into it for no apparent reason.

Yeah gunny, shouldn't someone be covering Biden's BS accounts of meetings with Bush?