And don’t forget, you owe Uncle Sam a lotta dough.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
Daily Archive
plain speaking is intelligent speaking
David Ogilvy was a giant in advertising in the ’50s and ’60s.
When I began writing advertising copy I bought his book, which was short and sweet.
In a memo to his staff, he offered ten writing tips, among them:
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
This is context for a silly article based upon a silly study (they’re a plague) about the level of speech in Congress.
Discourse in the House and Senate has dropped a full grade level — to the equivalent of high school sophomore, according to a new study.
Call this the dumbing down of Congress in a partisan age. Or a shift to plain-spoken populism ignited by the new class of tea party Republicans.
But what has become clear in the new research is that the soaring oratory that once filled the floors of the House and Senate with million-dollar diction and sophisticated syntax is making way for a more modest approach.
“Congress is changing as an institution, and what you see is more and more members gearing their speeches as sound bites or YouTube clips,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, which compiled the study released Monday.
Brace yourself.
In an analysis of floor debates over the last several years, the study found that newer lawmakers tended to speak at a lower grade level than the veterans of congressional speechifying.
And political moderates among both Republicans and Democrats tended to carry on at a higher grade level than those more partisan liberals or conservatives.
With that framework in mind, it should come as no surprise that the lawmakers at the bottom of the list, speaking at the lowest grade level, are among the most ardent tea party Republicans in the freshman class. Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, Rep. Robert Woodall of Georgia and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky were the bottom three — speaking at about an eighth-grade level, the study found.
I bet you saw that coming. Tea Partiers are so dumb they talk simple.
“We look at it as a badge of honor,” said Mulvaney, a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina Law School, who notes that he often speaks on the floor “extemporaneously.”
“It’s a conscious decision on my part. We are trying to be clear and trying to be concise,” he added. He said he and his wife had been known to diagram sentences at the dinner table, a byproduct of having schoolteacher parents.
“I can explain the difference between ‘fewer’ and ‘less,’” Mulvaney said, but he acknowledged that he still stumbled over the difference between “farther” and “further.”
“I don’t think people see the polysyllabic words — or the number of words — in a sentence as a sign of your intelligence,” he said.
Intelligent people don’t.
UN wants to run the Internet
It seems that everybody wants a hand in the massive cookie jar known as the Internet. The latest group that wants some form of control over the Internet is the United Nations. I don’t need to tell you how bad of an idea that is and it seems that our government finally agrees with the Internet on something.
The House of Representatives will be examining the proposal this week. According to The Hill, the UN backed proposal is already supported by China, Russia, Brazil and other countries that would benefit greatly from being able to control the Internet. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned, it’s that the U.S. hates it when foreign countries try to control the Internet.
Hey, we invented it and let the world use it. So Putin and other tyrants can pound sand.
Fortunately, there is bipartisan opposition to this absurdity.
another UN joke
…two dictators walk into a bar….
With a line-up that includes Drew Barrymore, David Beckham, Orlando Bloom, and Ricky Martin, the UN’s choice of ambassadors has been known to cause raised eyebrows or the odd smirk.
Seldom, however, has there been such anger, or questioning of the organisation’s credibility, as that greeting the appointment of a new international envoy for tourism: Robert Mugabe.
Improbable as it seems, the Zimbabwean president, who is widely accused of ethnic cleansing, rigging elections, terrorising opposition, controlling media and presiding over a collapsed economy, has been endorsed as a champion of efforts to boost global holidaymaking.
Despite that fact Mugabe, 88, is under a travel ban, he has been honoured as a “leader for tourism” by the UN’s World Tourism Organisation, along with his political ally, Zambian president Michael Sata, 75. The pair signed an agreement with UNWTO secretary general Taleb Rifai at their shared border at Victoria Falls on Tuesday.
The UN has credibility?
Oh, yes, those Progressives still believe in it, the same crowd that mocks religious folks.
for some, too late smart
Jim Geraghty
New York magazine analyzes the president’s reelection campaign:
Thus, to a very real degree, 2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear. For many Democrats, this is just fine and dandy, for they believe that in the Romney-Republican agenda there is plenty to be scared of. For others in the party in both politics and business, however, the new Obama posture is cause for concern. From the gay-marriage decision to the onslaught on Bain, they see the president and his team as coming across as too divisive, too conventional, and too nakedly political, putting at risk Obama’s greatest asset — his likability — with the voters in the middle of the electorate who will ultimately decide his fate.
Whichever side is right, one thing is undeniable. For anyone still starry-eyed about Obama, the months ahead will provide a bracing revelation about what he truly is: not a savior, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in power — in other words, a politician.
Three questions: First, is anyone still starry-eyed about Obama? Two, if you’re still starry-eyed at this point, with the results he has generated, would a nasty, negative campaign really be what removes the stars from your eyes? And third . . . considering that a significant number of us never saw Obama as a savior and a saint, and always argued that he was a ruthless politician . . . wouldn’t it behoove the bright minds at New York magazine to acknowledge we were right?
killing with kindness
It’s amusing to watch Obama claim that not waterboarding suspected terrorists is morally superior to striking them dead with a missile from a drone.
Maybe it’s because you don’t have to look ‘em in the eye.
Daniel Kleidman in the Daily Beast.
Barack Obama came to the White House with no military background and negligible national-security experience. But he inherited an American killing machine that was very much on the offensive, hunting suspected terrorists from the lawless regions of Pakistan to the militant strongholds of Somalia. Within days of his inauguration he faced life-and-death decisions. One of them went terribly wrong.
It turned out they were the wrong people. As the CIA’s pilotless aircraft lingered high above Karez Kot, relaying live images of the fallout to its operators, it soon became clear that something had gone terribly awry. Instead of hitting the CIA’s intended target, a Taliban hideout, the missile had struck the compound of a prominent tribal elder and members of a pro-government peace committee. The strike killed the elder and four members of his family, including two of his children.
Obama had just signed a series of executive orders aimed at rolling back the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s war on terror, and he was flush with the possibilities of what could be accomplished in the years ahead. Learning his way around the labyrinthine West Wing, he poked his head into an aide’s office. “We just ended torture,” he said. “That’s a pretty big deal.”
Oh, how he loves to pat his own back.
Now, on the morning of Jan. 23, CIA director Michael Hayden informed the president of a drone missile strike scheduled to take place in the tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghan border.
The targets were high-level al Qaeda and Taliban commanders. Hayden, accustomed to briefing the tactically minded George W. Bush, went into granular levels of detail, describing the “geometry” of the operation to the new president. Obama, who preferred his briefings concise, grew impatient and irritated with Hayden. But he held his tongue, and raised no objections.
Tribesmen a world away, in the tiny village of Karez Kot, later heard a low, dull buzzing sound from the sky. At about 8:30 in the evening local time, a Hellfire missile from a remotely operated drone slammed into a compound “of interest,” in CIA parlance, obliterating a roomful of people.
But nothing’s perfect.
It turned out they were the wrong people. As the CIA’s pilotless aircraft lingered high above Karez Kot, relaying live images of the fallout to its operators, it soon became clear that something had gone terribly awry. Instead of hitting the CIA’s intended target, a Taliban hideout, the missile had struck the compound of a prominent tribal elder and members of a pro-government peace committee. The strike killed the elder and four members of his family, including two of his children.
Obama was understandably disturbed. How could this have happened? The president had vowed to change America’s message to the Muslim world, and to forge a “new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest.” Yet here he was, during his first week in the White House, presiding over the accidental killing of innocent Muslims. As Obama briskly walked into the Situation Room the following day, his advisers could feel the tension rise. “You could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man,” recalled one participant.
No one would be. No one wants to kill innocents. But…
…In the end, Obama relented—for the time being. The White House did tighten up some procedures: the CIA director would no longer be allowed to delegate the decision to carry out a drone strike down the chain. Only the director would have that authority, or his deputy if he was not available. And the White House reserved the right to pull back the CIA’s signature authority in the future. According to one of his advisers, Obama remained uneasy. “He would squirm,” recalled the source. “He didn’t like the idea of ‘kill ’em and sort it out later.’?”
Still, Obama’s willingness to back the drone program represented an early inflection point in his war on terror. Over time, the attacks grew—far beyond anything that had been envisioned by the Bush administration. When Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency. By his third year in office, Obama had approved the killings of twice as many suspected terrorists as had ever been imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. “We’re killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them,” the head of the CIA’s counterterrorism division boasted to The Washington Post in 2011.
So the great moralizer, the one who accused George W. Bush of ruining our international reputation, was even more ruthless.
And curiously, there were no condemnations from Linda Ronstadt, the Dixie Chicks or Whoopie Goldberg.
Jimmy Carter didn’t travel to Europe to condemn Obama’s behavior to adoring anti-American audiences.
Congressional Democrats were equally mute, but then, they were very busy seeking new monkey wrenches to throw into the economy.
