Names and "blackberries" redacted (EDIT: also can we please talk about how it is redundant to say "please rsvp"--thanks):


Richard,

To answer your question...yes there will be free food at the reception.

Graduate Assistant

Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication

Franklin Pierce University

Office: (603)

---

From: Richard Amidon
Sent: Tue 4/29/2008 10:48 AM
To:
Subject: RE: An invitation to the Engaging Students: First in the Nation students and staff

Will there be free food?


Ry


-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Fri 4/25/2008 4:00 PM
To: Richard Amidon
Cc:
Subject: An invitation to the Engaging Students: First in the Nation students and staff

Hello:



I want to extend a personal invitation to you all to The Fitzwater Center Honors on Monday, May 5, as we recognize Dana Perino for her leadership in the public discourse. As FIN Scholars, you will be recognized in the program and at the event. We will also be honoring an alumnus, a graduating senior and a high school media advisor. It promises to be a great evening, and we hope you can join us.



The event begins at 5 p.m. in Pierce Hall and a public reception follows at 6 p.m.



We will have reserved seating for you, so please rsvp to



Thank you,




The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication

Franklin Pierce University

40 University Drive, Rindge, New Hampshire 03461

Office: Blackberry: FAX:



"Educating leaders of conscience

in public communication"

Reading the opinion in Crawford . v. Marion County Election Board

Compare:

The State has identified several state interests that
arguably justify the burdens that SEA 483 imposes on
voters and potential voters. While petitioners argue that
the statute was actually motivated by partisan concerns
and dispute both the significance of the State’s interests
and the magnitude of any real threat to those interests,
they do not question the legitimacy of the interests the
State has identified. Each is unquestionably relevant to
the State’s interest in protecting the integrity and reliability
of the electoral process....



A photo identification requirement imposes some burdens on
voters that other methods of identification do not share.
For example, a voter may lose his photo identification,
may have his wallet stolen on the way to the polls, or may
not resemble the photo in the identification because he
recently grew a beard. Burdens of that sort arising from
life’s vagaries, however, are neither so serious nor so
frequent as to raise any question about the constitutionality
of SEA 483; the availability of the right to cast a provisional
ballot provides an adequate remedy for problems of
that character.

Am I right to see an inconsistency here? That the frequency or magnitude of voter fraud is not relevant in addressing the state's interest in preventing it, but that the frequency or magnitude of burdens on the voter are? I am probably wrong and have mixed feelings about this case and I need to read further.

I love Elizabeth Edwards:

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

What’s more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. Just to be clear: I’m not talking about my husband. I’m referring to other worthy Democratic contenders. Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden’s health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.

And it’s not as if people didn’t want this information. In focus groups that I attended or followed after debates, Joe Biden would regularly be the object of praise and interest: “I want to know more about Senator Biden,” participants would say.

But it was not to be. Indeed, the Biden campaign was covered more for its missteps than anything else. Chris Dodd, also a serious candidate with a distinguished record, received much the same treatment. I suspect that there was more coverage of the burglary at his campaign office in Hartford than of any other single event during his run other than his entering and leaving the campaign.

Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

[NYT]

I was looking at this article in the Times magazine and was struck by what seemed to be the proliferation of exclamation points (31). Another piece of comparable length about Chris Matthews from a few weeks ago boasted 4 (three of which were: "Ha!"). So what I am wondering is:

a) how do journalists decide when interviewing/taking notes? where is the line between a period and an exclamation point? this seems like it can drastically alter the meaning of a quote (“The fish is not going to eat itself!” vs. “The fish is not going to eat itself.")

b) what is with all the exclamation points in the gay lifestyle article? are they simply more exclamatory as a group, New York Times Magazine?

A song is up.

I don't care.

Also, I was vaguely considering writing about Pennsylvania but, fuck it.

I'm in a new band. We are called Graph. I think you would like it. We don't have music up yet but we will soon.

Things I learned this morning:

-Vatican City is the only absolute monarchy in Europe and has the highest per capita crime rate on the planet.

-Not eating meat can reduce your carbon footprint up to a quarter.

-Fruit is delicious.

Story.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

It was nice out

"The Bathroom..."

I am going to throw up.

All day.

New York Times, your bourgeois lifestyle pieces make me want to die. I get it. Wealthy people can afford to live in towns in Connecticut full of good food, colonial houses, and local businesses. I get it. Wealthy people can afford to go to top tier colleges with exciting and expensive meal options. I get it. Wealthy people can afford to habitually ride horses, and this is sometimes dangerous.

All the "most emailed" stories are just fluffy stories about things upper-middle class people enjoy doing that the rest of us engorge enviously as a soothing substitute for actual news which is sometimes upsetting and often demonstrates the overall tilt of our political and economic system in favor of the wealthy--the ones whose life details we love to read every morning before driving our kids to an inadequate education and reaping mediocre wages.

You used to be alright, New York Times. What happened?

All I will say about this is that stuff white people like (passé) will get to it in a couple days.

Full of gems:

Colleges nationwide have been innovating. Stanford offers “spa waters,” mineral water with cucumber, watermelon, mint and other flavors. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst shares guest chefs with eight colleges. Yale has an organic cafe. Brown has a farmers’ market. At Wheaton College in Illinois, low-carbon meals use local and organic food; students can choose Thursday dinners illuminated only by the lights outside...

Mr. Johnson said students expect to eat the way they do in a restaurant: “We discovered a way in the marketplace concept — kitchens brought out from behind the wall, cooking platforms with pizza ovens, broilers, fryers — so students can see you throw the dough, top it to order and put it in the wood-fired oven. And they don’t just want that product in name only, but they want it to be authentic, because they’ve eaten at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant and they want to smell that hickory wood burning...”

“They love food,” said Mary Lou Kennedy, Bowdoin’s dining director. “They love the community of food. They were Slow Food 10 years before it became a movement. At dinner, they come and stay for an hour and a half...”

Of course, colleges that put a premium on food tend to have higher endowments and more costly meal plans. Bowdoin, which renovated its two dining halls for $13 million, charges $2,600 per semester, Yale $2,380.

“The dining halls post the students’ comment cards. One read, ‘Would it be possible for you to make pumpkin chocolate muffins?’ Underneath, the reply was, ‘Please expect to see them every Monday morning.’ ”

This man is comparing himself to Rosa Parks.

Not everyone is a racist, Nicholas Kristof.

Today's Pravda link

This week's bumper sticker:
from the back of a Ford Expedition with NH plates:
Quote:

Don't Apologize for America
One Country, One Language, One Flag

A nice logical sequence, to be sure.
One country: yup, definitely one sovereign political unit. No secessionists outside of Montana to speak of. Check.
One language: well, 82 percent of us speak English, so that's not so bad. If you're expecting just one language to be spoken in a country of 300 million with no coherent national identity, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
One flag: at first this seemed like a given, but we do have those pesky 50 states, as well as various districts and territories with their own flags. Guam has a pretty sweet one.

Seriously though, I do think this bumper sticker misses a larger point about American civic culture. It is funny that the same people that adhere these to their motor vehicles also espouse the "states' rights" argument, because this bumper sticker seems to me to go against the idea that Americans are essentially a local people brought together by their federal system (see Tocqueville, Federalist 10). A coerced national identity is a bad idea and this is essentially what the bumper is supporting.

I kind of over did that.

Charlton Heston died!

What am I supposed to say?

Ben Hur Was bad ass.

You should've chilled your rifle scene.

"From my cold, dead hands."

Well, um.


-Good night.

Death by blogging? Nothing special about this story aside from this existential gem:

“I haven’t died yet."

This was going to happen, eventually.

Summary of All Human Conversation
A Play in One Act
by Ry Amidon

(A MAN and WOMAN sit adjacent on an inexpensive love seat with a floral pattern and one pillow. The MAN, Bohemian, charming, is inextricably engaged in conversation with the WOMAN, who is accordant in Bohemian-charm. It is times like these that the MAN chooses to practice good posture. Their closeness is tactful but salient.)


WOMAN: I have organic bananas.

MAN: I have organic bananas.

End.

I have a proposal. I, like many, was not impressed with A Ghost Is Born. Part of the problem was that it came after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album which, as a matter of objective fact, cannot be topped. By anyone. A Ghost Is Born is a lot like Hail to the Thief in that a band found a successful formula and took it too far, thought about it too much or too little; maybe passed their peak (this did not happen with Radiohead). I think Ghost has good songs on it, but a big part of the problem is the sequencing. It sucks. It's slow and poorly balanced. It is also too long. So I would like to offer a new order for the album. For the sake of being up tight I didn't get rid of any songs, though Less Than You Think would be a candidate. Skip less than you think if you want.


1.Muzzle Of Bees
2.Hummingbird
3.Handshake Drugs
4.Wishful Thinking
5.The Late Greats
6.Company In My Back
7.Hell Is Chrome
8.Theologians
(9.Less Than You Think)
10.I'm A Wheel
11.At Least That's What You Said
12.Spiders (Kidsmoke)

Yes, I am going to make a Nude remix.

Fuck.

I really don't like television. This is, of course, obvious. Now there are some exceptions: the X-Files, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Planet Earth. But for the most part it is crap. My roommate moved back yesterday and he brought his TV back with him and I was promptly reminded why I don't touch the stuff. I think I found the worst song/band ever. I don't have time to go on the lengthy diatribe that it deserves, but I was horrified that such music exists.
I found the video. As a game, see how far you can get through it. My record is 37 seconds.

It's poetry, really:

"Then in the field you'll be the show girl of the home team
I'll be the narrator
Telling another tale of the American dream

I see your name in lights
We can make you a star
Girl, we'll take the world by storm
It isn't that hard"

"Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama’s Democratic rival, has studied this argot. Her style of declamation tends toward that of the school valedictorian, but she grounds her talks in detail after detail after detail — her plan for stanching foreclosures, for tuberculosis, for tax breaks and so on and on, every program coming with a precise dollar sign attached." [nytimes]

Apparently, Pennsylvanians are angry "prosaic" jobless yokels who are meticulous policy wonks who, since they don't have employment, just spend all day looking at what bills have made it out of committee. This paragraph misses the point, though. A basic understanding of the United States government suggests that such detailed proposals are nonsense. Clinton's nuance, in fact, amounts to making promises, the keeping of which require an accurate forecast of:
-the value of the dollar for FY2010
-whether or not budgetary priorities will change
-whether or not congress, which will presumably be composed differently, will cotton to any of this

The president may propose whatever sort of budget he (and perhaps in some future election, she) wishes, but this does not at all guarantee that the budget that actually comes out of congress will much resemble the proposed one. The domination of parochial interests is especially determinant of the appropriation process.
In this way I think Barry's heretofore more general, idealist rhetoric actually makes him more, not less, ingenuous. I am not suggesting they forgo detail. A presidential candidate ought to talk about goals and priorities; where more money is needed, how to prop up the big investment banks--but any candidate pledging X dollars for tuberculosis and Z dollars for defense and 0 dollars for education is pandering, and failing to yield to reality. Here's what happens when Barry speaks the truth:

“I don’t want to make a promise that I can bring back every job that was in Johnstown,” he said. “That’s not true.”

Some in the audience applauded; others sat stolidly.

More later.