Category: Politics

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Hey Obama– give your staffers an office to call from!

I’m sitting here in Sweetwaters with Will (he too likes working/playing/hanging about in coffee shops once in a while), and there’s this just out of college kid sitting a few tables away.  So far, he’s made about 40 cell phone calls to various people on some kind of list to get them to come to a rally to support Barrack Obama.  It’s a free country I know and I too have been on the cell phone in here recently, but jeesh, if you going to do nothing but talk on the phone for an hour and a half, can you go someplace else?  And here I thought Obama had fistfuls of cash.

There goes call #41.

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What Stanley Fish doesn’t know about writing could fill a universe

Stanley Fish has a new book coming out called Save The World On Your Own Time, in which, among other things apparently, he decries the ways in which politics have crept into the classrooms of university professors and how it ought to stop. What professors are supposed to do is teach and that’s that. He has an interview here in Inside Higher Ed where he talks about this and some of his other views.

Frankly, I think he’s kind of lost his marbles.

Continue reading “What Stanley Fish doesn’t know about writing could fill a universe”

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Misc. posts while watching million dollar password and the movie “Resolved”

As the title suggest, I’m posting these things while watching TV, including Resolved, which is running on HBO right now. I thought I’d sort through my Google Reader feed with some links.

  • The Hyperlinked Society looks like an interesting read, certainly something to think about for ENGL 516 or ENGL 444. Via a thaumaturgical compendium.
  • The Reanimation Library, which looks like a kind of interesting installation art version on a library. Some cool pictures here. Via Earth Wide Moth.
  • Five Free Online Video Editing tools. In the fall, I’m going to experiment with a simple video assignment, and one of these tools might be useful/worth playing around with.
  • Obama as a Secret Vulcan, from culture critic extraordinaire Henry Jenkins. Pretty interesting analysis, and it’s better than saying he’s a secret Muslim– not that there’s anything wrong with Muslims, of course.
  • Alex Reid has an interesting post about this article in the CHE about an online and non-university associated (kind of) first year writing course/program called StraighterLine, which is being run by SmartThinking, which runs a lot of online tutoring programs at universities. Besides the critique that Alex offers– which I completely agree with, that there is generally speaking a disconnect between the best scholarship in the field of composition and rhetoric and the course that generically tends be called composition and rhetoric– it just doesn’t seem like an idea that’s very workable. I think that one of the big textbook publishers tried to do this a while back, tried to offer a course with college credit not associated with a traditional institution. As I understand, that program folded up. So I guess I’m just not sure what the plan/business model is here.
  • This also looks like a good book, one to think of for 516: Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Here’s a review at Grand Text Auto.

There’s probably other stuff I should put here too, but enough for now.  Oh, and go check out that movie, Resolved.

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Ten commandments to politicians and sex scandals

You may have heard something about this whole Elliot Spitzer thing out there. The thing that occurs to me is that it probably would be pretty easy to go to a contemporary translation of Oedipus Rex and change it into Spitzer Rex. I don’t have time to try my hand it myself, so you can have that idea for free. If someone makes such a version and/or finds one out there, let me know.

Anyway, besides good posts from Deb Hawhee here (I would never cheat on my wife, but beyond that, I too wonder why all these political spouses, including our own local Mrs. Kirkpatrick, so willingly stand by their man) and here from Alex Halavais, I also found myself somewhat amused with this piece by Erica Jong I found on Huffington, “Morals to Be Drawn From Spitzer’s ‘Case’.” It is far from the best piece of writing I’ve seen on the Internets– actually, it reads more like Jong dictating thoughts off the top of her head than anything resembling coherent paragraphs– but she does have some good/amusing points, especially in the ten rules/commandments that start the piece. For example: “If you are famous for closing prostitution “rings,” don’t frequent them;” “Pay hookers in cash;” “Don’t yell at investment bankers on the phone;” and, one that I’ve cleaned up slightly for this space, while in office, don’t sleep with someone other than your spouse, “unless you are in French politics.”

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Stupid Michigan Democrats…

I’m listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” right now, and they were talking with Debbie Dingle (no, that’s not a made-up name), the wife of John Dingle and a mucky-muck in the Michigan Democratic party, and she just said that the Michigan decision to break the Democratic National Committee rules and have the primary sooner was an act of civil disobedience in protest of a broken system. WTF?! The party bosses in Michigan decide to disenfranchise millions of people because they don’t like the primary system? Even though if they had left things just the way they were, Michigan and Florida would both be hugely relevant right now?!?!

I agree with almost everything Mark is saying right here, and I agree with what I heard Howard Dean saying on the Sunday morning talk shows: changing the rules now is going to give the advantage to one candidate or the other. Senator Carl Levin is apparently talking about/floating a mail ballot system; I’m not sure who would come out on top of that one. And apparently the wisdom out there right now is that neither Michigan nor Florida is going to be enough to put Obama or Clinton over the top anyway.

But what I’d really like to hear someone in a position of power at the Michigan Democratic Party say– I don’t care if it’s Granholm, who is pretty much term-limited and Canadian-ized out of running for anything for the foreseeable future or Mrs. Dingle who isn’t elected to anything anyway– to admit that they screwed up and to apologize. We can argue that the primary system is screwed up and needs to be fixed, though, as a former Iowan, I personally can see the point of a place like Iowa or even New Hampshire going first. But the fact of the matter is these people took a gamble and they lost, and they ought to ‘fess up to that.

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Oh, Ralph…

Good Lord, Ralph Nader is running for president again, and as far as I can tell, he’s doing it because he’s kind of gone from being a really important consumer advocate and progressive politico into a kind of crazy and angry old man. Kind of sad, really.

I think he’s right when he says “if Democrats can’t landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form.” But I also think that Obama is right when he says that Nader is an egomaniac and “My sense is that Mr.. Nader is somebody who, if you don’t listen and adopt all of his policies, thinks you’re not substantive.”

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I agree– the Michigan (and Florida) Dems could have been relevant

Oh, if they knew then what they know now: As kos points out, had Michigan and Florida not violated (admittedly stupid) rules of the Democratic party about holding their primary too early, had they held their primaries when they were supposed to (this week or so, I think), then these states would have obviously been hugely important. I guess it just goes to show you there’s been a lot of unexpected stuff this year.

Jack “the funny-voiced political commentator on Michigan Public Radio” Lessenberry wants to have a do-over. Wishful thinking, but maybe not a bad idea.