One of our Master’s students, Dan Richards, posted this to our TA blog recently…it’s pretty cool.

Be sure to have your tissues nearby before watching this one.

Scott Rettberg posted this link on FB to a cool net art piece by Michael Takeo Magruder about Obama’s election night speech.

In today’s NYT, Stanley Fish serves up some blame in the torture blame game, and guess where he goes: rhetoric. “The emphasis is not on what is true, but on what works, what gets results even if the results are obtained by torture. If the testimony you are citing has been elicited by torture, just say that ‘it was in order to discover the truth that our ancestors wished to make use of torture’ (‘Rhetorica ad Herennium‘).”

In “Professors’ Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not” the NY Times reports on a study that counters the widely held conservative view that academia is indoctrinating students with liberal politics…and changing them. Not so, says this study. So much for the pressure to create faculty positions in conservatism and watchdog departments. Now, if those conservatives would just stop stealing our Obama signs from our front yards, come Nov 5th we might just teach them a thing or two about rhetorical ethos.

Soft money ads from places like Neverfindout.org are flooding the airwaves. One series in particular will end with this button image:
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My question: How can ‘never find out’ be a means to ‘think beyond rhetoric’?

I’m so glad my name isn’t Joe. Annnnyway…..here’s an interesting piece on NPR about a focus group from Pennsylvania asked to analyze the rhetoric of the campaigns. Too bad they won’t invite rhetoricians on CNN, rather than the pundits (and/or fundits on SNL).

NPR has visualized Palin and Biden’s words here. Interesting.

A CNN Republican Strategist contributor just characterized the folksy Palin as ‘young’ and Biden as ‘professorial.’ Okaaaaaay. And your point is….? Being professorial is a bad thing in politics, obviously. It is an attempt to tie Biden to the ‘liberal elite’ of academia. Are we going to take this sitting down? Where are the professors of rhetoric to refute this rhetorical dig?

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Gonzalo Frasca has created the Unnofficial Obama Debate Game, and it’s an interesting contrast to the McCain game. It’s also fun.

This game is pretty lame, but see if you can get to the next level.

Let’s hope this country’s universities and colleges aren’t hoodwinked by the latest neo-con strategies to bootstrap undergraduate curriculum with conservative values. This NYT piece has the scoop…”The initiatives are only political insofar as they ‘work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general’.” UGH…shades of the E306 flap at UT.

…is apparently not good for the gander. This whole ‘lipstick on a pig’ brouhaha has me rankled. McCain first used the phrase in reference to Hillary. Now Obama uses it in reference to McCain, and the McCain camp spin it as an insult to Sarah Palin (who told this joke: the only difference between a hockey mom and a Pit Bull—lipstick). Come ON!

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OK. It was suggested tonight on Larry King that the only vetting process John McCain used to find Palin was to ‘Google’ her. So, I decided to try it, too. Of course, a lot has changed in the Google universe in the last two weeks. And a lot has changed in the latest version of Firefox, apparently. Usually, when I enter a phrase in the Google search box of Firefox, it only ’suggests’ things I have already previously Googled. Now, it suggests things for me that I have not Googled.

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Folks….please read Jenny Edbauer Rice’s post about Marc Santos’ daughter Rowen, who is battling for her life….but doing so thanks to the power of the net. It’s amazing, and heart-wrenching.

Check out the NYT story on the unbelievable debate in this youtube video.

David Brooks column in the NYT today is rife with fodder of the ilk that gives one pause when pondering the futility of being a thinking, sentient being. Ha. If you’re a bit put off with that sentence itself, read his column.

NPR recommends 3 books in a story about the value of pithy-ness, or aphoristic writing. Who’d a thunk it? One happens to be Nietzsche’s Human, All to Human. Novels are gravity, Nietzsche’s brevity is the new ‘unbearable lightness of being.’

Along the lines of the ‘why does rhetoric have such a bad reputation’ lament, comes this story today on NPR about a young Hispanic woman who discovered philosophy as her ticket out of her poor social conditions. That’s good, but the problem with her story is that she credits ‘logic’ with being the great equalizer.

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What is the biggest threat we face today? Democracy, perhaps? According to Derrida, democracy “must thus come to resemble [its] enemies, to corrupt itself and threaten itself in order to protect itself against their threats” (Rogues 40).

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I wish rhetoric didn’t have such a bad reputation. Sometimes I Google the word just to see what that day’s rankings are, and usually it’s the Wikipedia or dictionary entries on the top of the list. But today, while enjoying the oh-so-brief cool of a South Carolina morning (the only time I can drink a hot coffee these days), I saw this blogger’s post “Rhetoric can kill.” It’s about the power of words, specifically the power of liberal rhetoric, that (perhaps) led to the Tennessee church shooting.

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Voting is such a basic right in a healthy democracy, yet it becomes the nexus of so much corruption…here, and elsewhere in the world. The people are the stake-holders, as it were, and our votes are the stakes. But what happens when those stakes are denied us, or worse, forced upon us with no viable set of options. The ONE candidate, the ONE stake, sets up a sham election…and often a violent sham at that. Zimbabwe is a prime example of the classic double bind, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. ‘Hanging chads’ takes on a whole new meaning (along with lynching/cinching the vote). What happened in Zimbabwe should be paired with classroom discussions and writing prompts as we enter this last stretch in the U.S. presidential election.

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Time has a piece on a recent report about the potential for our enemies to create a ’super-soldier’ along the lines of the fear-mongering that went on during the Cold War. The rhetoric of fear takes many forms, and it strikes me that looking beyond this election (and the hopeful change in the administration), we should tackle (and by that I mean take on, rhetorically) the media who give space for this kind of so-called reporting.

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Today’s opinion column in the NYT is worth a look. Stanley Fish takes on his critics on the topic of politics. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s refreshing to see a “public intellectual” given ‘voice’ in the mainstream media.

This situation defies understanding.

A memorial to the ‘unknown’ soldier should mean an ‘unknown’ memorial to the war that shouldn’t have happened. What does not happen cannot produce memorials. This is my thought for Memorial Day…to put and end to the need for war memorials.

Along the lines of the ‘where were you when..’ thread, check out an NPR piece today about the Catonsville Nine (including Father Berrigan), who broke into a Selective Service office to gather records for drafting soldiers and then burn them on May 17, 1968. This is nothing less than a backdoor draft, and recent reports bear this out.

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…could an Israeli-born businessman and his son finance a Hard Rock Cafe (Myrtle Beach, SC), a Bible theme park in Tennessee (Bible Park USA), an Iraq theme park in Dubai, and harbor a past career as a photographer for Penthouse Magazine. According to one report: “Mr. Bar-Tur, manager of Safe Harbor Holdings, a New York-based investment company for wealthy individuals, plans to pour millions of dollars into developing the Qur’an Park- Baghdad Experience. The park, a massive American-style ‘edutainment’ complex will feature the largest prayer rug in the world, a ‘guess that dowry’ game, a Qur’an museum, pita bread toss contests, re-enactments of sentences based on Sharia law, and the ubiquitous bomb shelter; all designed by firms developing Bible Park U.S.A., a Christian based theme park in the U.S. enthusiastically welcomed by local residents and clergy.”

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I was ending my junior in high school in Fort Worth, Texas…preparing to go to Europe for my first trip there in July ‘68. Little did I know when I walked those streets that only a few months earlier so much had happened to change the world. Forty years ago….see the story on NPR.

The academic practice of providing electronic coursepacks, book chapter pdf files, etc., is under fire. See info in this NYT piece about a lawsuit filed against Georgia State University by Cambridge UP, Sage Publications, and Oxford UP.

Greg Ulmer writes in Internet Invention about students forming what he called the ‘fifth estate,’ voices that can help change the world. Rarely do we see first year student writing in the mainstream media, so this is worth a look-see. Caleb Fleming, a freshman at Virginia Tech, has a piece featured on CNNU here.