Even though I’m not broke, I’m feeling very broke today. Perhaps it’s because my husband bought a new laptop last night and I am jealous. It makes me reflect once again on my financial situation. A news article about the average family savings made the point that many people, particularly poor people, do not have savings for emergencies. I remember being that poor. I am proud of having learned to manage my money independently of my husband, who helped me out financially when we first got married. I owe my independence to a financial advisor. Everyone should have a financial advisor. Anyway, objectively, I amRead More →

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 →

The word ‘democratic’ has such positive emotional valence … so they politicize it to use it as a term to describe a group of political rivals.”
“Democrat Party” is not common usage in Texas, Hart said, noting that the only people he had heard use it were “sitting Republican legislators.”

– Dr. Rod Hart, Communication Studies Professor and Dean, University of Texas, Austin,
in an LA Times article on Bush’s gaffe in the State of the Union

Commondreams.org trashes Hillary for skipping town on the day of the big anti-war protest in order to launch her presidential campaign in Iowa. They suggest she would make a terrible president because she is behind the times and too centrist. And, most critically for Hillary Clinton, a desperate yearning on the part of Americans of all political stripes not for a triangulating “centrist” in the Clinton mold, but for someone who can show themselves as both attuned and responsive to the national mood and capable of authenticity and bold leadership. Hillary Clinton could not be a less appropriate candidate for 2008. Let’s recap: The LeftRead More →