Category Archives: rhetoric

The False Dichotomy of Bipartisanship

greenparty, politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

Judge overturns Ohio law, restores in-person early voting  in 3 days leading to Election Day (cleveland.com) Ohio Democratic officials fired for attempt to extend early voting (Reuters) I wasn’t sure how much of last week’s Republican National Convention I’d try to catch, but I saw a fair bit of it and I was glad I did, if only to see the Romney campaign deal itself yet another series of setbacks. Republicans desperately needed people to enter their convention talking about the economy and exit it…

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They Say They Want a Revolution?

politics, rhetoric, teaching Leave a comment

Student shot at Maryland high school; suspect held (AP via Yahoo! News) U.S. Soldiers Allegedly Plotted to Kill Obama, Overthrow the Government (truthdig.com) Texas judge warns of ‘civil war’ if Obama re-elected (Globe and Mail) Back before someone at the University of Toledo’s Medical Center threw a kidney intended for transplant in the trash (my alma mater, folks), the most recent time my neck of the woods had made national news was about two and a half years ago, when members of a local militia, the…

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The Hell You Say

freespeech, politics, rhetoric, television Leave a comment

Kaitlin Nootbaar, Oklahoma High School Valedictorian, Denied Diploma For Using ‘Hell’ In Speech (Huffington Post) A few weeks ago, when Mitt Romney made his big foreign trip in support of his presidential campaign, one of the stops he made was at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Poland. On his way to his car after the visit, nearby reporters shouted questions at him, asking him if he was concerned about the numerous gaffes he’d made during the trip. For the Romney campaign, this was…

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Best Face Forward?

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Christie to highlight accomplishments, family in GOP convention keynote speech (AP via therepublic.com) In the book that catapulted him into the national political arena, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Al Franken talks a fair bit about the Republican National Convention of 1992, the year of what was then the most recent presidential election. I was in high school at the time, and I really hadn’t paid that much attention to politics that year (at least not compared to when Franken wrote his…

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Mind the Enthusiasm Gap

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Mitt Romney to Todd Akin: ‘Exit the Senate Race’ (latimes.com) Republican Party approves strict anti-abortion platform (boston.com) Going into this year’s election, one of the Republicans’ strongest assets should have been the vaunted “enthusiasm gap,” the difference in voter enthusiasm between the two major parties. The Obama presidency has yet to yield the kind of mass transformations that his “Change We Can Believe In” campaign of four years ago promised, and Democrats suffered such huge losses in 2010 that they mostly erased the gains they’d…

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