Category Archives: politics

With American Power Comes Irresponsibility

politics, rhetoric 2 Comments

I wasn’t going to say anything about the most recent Rush Limbaugh controversy, mostly because I haven’t cursed on here in over five years and I’m not sure that there is a way to properly respond to Limbaugh’s slurs without resorting to profanity to prove the point. If Limbaugh wants to argue that Sandra Fluke, because she posits that health plans should pay for birth control, is a “slut,” the temptation to use other nasty words to describe Limbaugh, mostly amalgamations of body parts with…

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The Myth of Schadenfreude

internet, politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

Sometimes you just latch onto something you hear somewhere like you don’t latch onto anything else. It’s like your intuition, instead of giving you a friendly nudge to let you know, “Hey, this might be useful,” screams at you, “You must remember this for the rest of your life.” One of those moments for me came when Dennis Miller had his HBO show during the Clinton years (you know, back when he was still funny), and he devoted one of his rants to the topic…

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Calling Out Real Stupidity

politics, rhetoric 3 Comments

Doubtlessly as the year draws on I will be drawn back, to some extent, to the spectre of national politics, if only for the horse race aspect of this November’s elections. Any kind of heavy-duty number crunching has a strong appeal to me, and I’m certainly more interested in politics than sports or fantasy sports or anything else like that. For the most part, though, I’m kind of enjoying not following the news so religiously, even if Buckeye Cablesystem really needs to get Current so…

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Screwing Up the Ninth

greenparty, kucinich, politics, toledo Leave a comment

Given all the press that Congress gets, it’s easy to overlook the impact that state legislatures have on our everyday lives; I’ll cop to being guilty of this. Just when you’re not paying attention, though, years like this one come along and wake you up as to what’s going on in your state capital. Although the efforts of Wisconsin’s governor and state legislature to kneecap state unions generated more press earlier this year, in Ohio newly-elected governor John Kasich (he whose offices, when he was…

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Are You Ready For Some Hyperbole?

freespeech, politics, rhetoric, television Leave a comment

This past week ESPN pulled Hank Williams Jr.’s “Are You Ready for Some Football” song from its Monday Night Football telecast in response to Williams invoking Hitler when discussing President Obama on Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends. Originally cutting the song for only one week, ESPN later decided to ax the song from its broadcast altogether, although Williams has since claimed that he made the decision to pull the song himself after, in his words, “[ESPN] stepped on the Toes of the First Amendment…

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