The Ubiquitous Grammar Cop

I've been reading plenty of angry commentary about President-Elect Obama's choice to have Rick Warren provide the invocation at his inaugural. I've even heard angry muttering on liberal leaning talk radio (such as it is). Their ire comes from Warren's position on Roe v. Wade, on the LGBT community, and several other issues that social liberals and conservatives argue about constantly. While I disagree with Warren's positions on these issues, I have to ask those people who are upset about Warren's invocation of Obama's inauguration to calm down and keep it in perspective. Firstly, this would be a graver issue if Warren were somehow associated with Obama's incoming administration in some capacity, as a spiritual adviser or something similar. Warren is only giving the opening prayer which will last no more than two minutes. Secondly, many people feel Warren's invocation will provide him a large platform to speak about this, that, and the other. Historic...

The Mainstream Corporate Media has devoted several news stories to allegations of potential voter fraud specifically implicating ACORN, a grass roots community organization that encourages people to register to vote (among other things). More recently, there have been news stories about the long, long lines in some places (Florida, Ohio, and Indiana) for early voting. I'll get to that later. The media successfully conflated fraudulent voter registration as voter fraud while making cursory mentions of voter suppression. Here are some of the myths and realities surrounding voter fraud and voter suppression. MYTH: ACORN, with the help of the Obama campaign, has registered thousands (if not millions) of fraudulent voters. REALITY: ACORN only submits the registrations they get from their volunteers to the fifty Secretaries of State. Each Secretary of State office in all fifty states registers voters, not ACORN. Furthermore, ACORN actually flags potentially fraudulent voter registrati...

A friend of mine suggested I parse the grammatical missteps in the final debate between Senators Obama and McCain. Honestly, it would be sort of unfair to compare the oratory style of McCain against Obama. Since I live in Chicago I have witnessed the plodding oratory skills of Mayor Richard Daley during his unscripted press conferences (and he was a prosecutor in the Illinois State's Attorney's office). Also, I've had healthy servings of schadenfreude over the last few weeks. In my opinion, political debates in today's television and YouTube era does not possess the rhetorical gravitas of past debates (Kennedy/Nixon in 1960 comes to mind). Instead they have several key elements that people see and react to: sound bites and visuals. Some of the sound bites offered by McCain and Obama I deem worthy of these internet forum inspired tags: LOL , WIN , FAIL , or FACEPALM . Here are some examples taken directly from the debate transcript provided by the Los Angeles Times. MCCA...

For the last two weeks, everyone in the mainstream corporate media has been bleating about the dire straits our economy is presently in as if it's a big surprise that it's come down to this. For some people who actually follow such things, this present crisis is simply the culmination of several things that has happened over the last thirty to forty years of plutocratic policies wearing a fiscally conservative mask. Our government, egged on by lobbyists who abuse the power afforded them by the First Amendment, allowed the deregulation of the rules that oversee the activities of corporations (trading, speculation, et cetera). They removed our currency from the gold standard, weakening the dollar against other currencies. One of the first things they did, possibly under the notion that it was no longer needed, was remove the 0.25% tax on all stocks and commodities bought and sold in our markets in the 1960s. For example, if I purchased $10,000 in Apple Computer stock, I would pa...

I watched with morbid curiosity Governor Sarah Palin's (R-AK) Vice Presidential candidacy acceptance speech on Wednesday evening. Needless to say I was not terribly surprised in the content and tone of her speech. (I could say since she graduated with a BA in communications that she controlled the content of her words, but who am I kidding?) She managed to hit her opponents (Barack Obama and Joe Biden) hard, once or twice with fair criticism but mostly with hyperbole, misdirection, and exaggeration of easily researched evidence to her claims. For what she needed to do, since the role of the VP candidate should be to attack the opposition, she did it well. When I thought about how Obama and Biden should counter her efforts, I thought of basketball. During my undergrad years at the University of Illinois in Urbana, I needed to fill two credit hours in my schedule. Since I enjoyed playing basketball, I signed up for a Kinesiology class that taught the fundamentals of basketball: an e...

A friend of mine posted a blog on her MySpace page, voicing her displeasure about Senator Obama's vice presidential pick of Joe Biden, the senior senator from Delaware. This is what she had to say: Hillary, Thank you for doing your best and showing exactly how far a woman could get. Your courage and tenacity has inspired me and I hope future generations of woman. I supported you til the end. I know some will say I only supported you because you were a woman, (of course those are the people who ultimately allowed for your downfall) But I supported you because you were the best candidate for the positon[sic] and I know I don't stand alone in that voicing that sentiment. I know it must puzzle you to think that so many out there ultimatly[sic] feared you and your stengths[sic] and convictions and therfore[sic] could'nt[sic] bring themselves to support you. I'm sure it is made worse when those "many" turn out to be women. I wish you the best of luck and know ...

Why do people who profess to dislike government (and everything that it its supposed to do) choose to work in government? I thought about this based on two quotes by President Ronald Reagan I heard recently: "Government isn't the solution to our problems; government is the problem." "The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are. 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Have at it...

Remember the British game show The Weakest Link hosted by Anne Robinson? Trivia game shows always piqued my interest being a trivia geek myself. The strategies employed by the game's contestants though irritated me enough to make me not watch it after I saw how they played the game. It's also part of the reason why I never watched Survivor ; those contestants used the same tactics. When either show has its full complement of players, the challenges and stronger contestants weed out the weaker ones through mutual attrition. When the numbers dwindled to three or four people, that's when things start to get weird. Clearly one person stands head and shoulders above the remaining participants. That person succeeds by observing all the rules and manages to excel despite the obstacles and challenges presented. The others, not being slouches themselves, recognize that while they still have talent and skill they do not possess what the perceived leader has. To increase thei...

At work about a week ago a friend told me that Congress (specifically the House of Representatives) passed the economic stimulus package President Bush so desperately wants to keep our faltering economy from circling the proverbial water closet. This bothers me. It bothered me the last time Bush decided that our economy needed stimulating in the summer of 2001. Since it's common practice for people to analyze overly complicated subjects with simple platitudes, who am I to walk away from such an opportunity? My friend asked me when I reacted angrily to the news that this "stimulus" package passed the House to explain why I feel that a several hundred dollar check from the government is a bad idea. In 2001 when the Bush Administration gave individual taxpayers anywhere from $300 to $600 (depending how you file your taxes), he and the lawmakers who agreed with this plan argued that the budget surplus amassed during the Clinton Administration actually belonged to us because i...