Everyone is up in arms blogging about the spat between Hillary and Obama, instigated by David Geffen’s criticism of Hillary, which goes like this: “I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is, and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together.” Geffen is supporting and fundraising for Obama. What angers me about this quote is the same old tired gender-based rhetoric about Hillary as a pushy broad. Obama, who has been a senator for a whopping TWO YEARS, and who has very limitedRead More →

Every year for Valentine’s Day, my husband and I make cookies. We’ve done it now seven times. Of course, with each anniversary comes a recounting from the husband about the previous year’s events, including the cookie-making extravaganza. Twice when we lived in the Garden District bungalow and now five times in our current house. This Valentine’s Day our cookies came out perfectly. And when the news of peanut butter salmonella outbreaks hit the internet and the television, we blew it off, because we heard it was Peter Pan, and we buy the ghetto brand, Great Value. Well, lo and behold, we have two jars ofRead More →

I really dislike Ann Coulter, as I have stated on this blog before. Like others among the right wing, she insists on referring to Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, which is just petty and stupid. And she attributes the media hype and public attention about Obama to white liberal guilt. WTF is that supposed to mean. Obama’s identity is in a double bind. He’s not black enough for many black folks. He’s too black for many white folks. White liberals love him because he’s “articulate” (there’s that old stereotype), which means he’s not really very black afterall. As Debra J. Dickerson writes in Salon: Also,Read More →

  I am not the first to think that George W. Bush looks like a chimpanzee. Smirkingchimp.com raised that idea ages ago. As has Bushorchimp.com, which has been up since 2000. But I do think that a quick review of Bush’s simian-like visage as displayed on Netscape’s front page over the past month will demonstrate that A. he does indeed look like a chimp, and that B. Netscape News is not too fond of W. Here are seven pictures that I collected randomly from Netscape over the past month. They range from George Bush picking his nose to a floating George Bush head. IMO, theyRead More →

The #1 word of the year is Truthiness, as voted on by the Merriam-Webster online community. The word comes from Stephen Colbert, of course. Merriam-Webster defines truthiness as: 1 : “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” October 2005) 2 : “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (American Dialect Society, January 2006).

The more I hear about Barack Obama, the more he sounds like a Gen-Xer to me. I admit this is most probably the effect of selective perception, but he is in his mid-forties. Today in The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson writes about Obama’s pitch to the DNC, along with Hillary and Edwards. He quotes Obama as expressing concern for the “debasing of the public sphere.” That concern, of course, hit home for me as a rhetorical studies person. Interestingly, public address scholars seem most worried over fragmentation in the face of culture wars, and they worry about the intolerance of political correctness, yet now weRead More →