CNN.com reports today that buyers are starting to haggle over prices in all sorts of stores.  I like that.

The article mentions several things that students of rhetoric have know for centuries.  Communication consists of ethos, pathos, and logos.  As one tries to negotiate a better price, knowing one’s audience, establishing your character as one not out to defraud the seller (ethos), exhibiting passion that one wants the product and intends to purchase it (pathos), and presenting the logic on which to base the requested discount (logos) can and does work well–not just for requesting discounts but in all situations of language.

Language is really our only means of doing anything in life.  Learning to use the language both to our benefit and to the benefit of others is a worthwhile effort.  Just maybe the desire for discounts will help develop the understanding that language use can make every part of our lives better.

Ah, yes, the gates vs. the police saga continues.

I didn’t hear the comments offered by General Colin Powell on Larry King Live, but I read the remarks in a number of sources today.  I think that Powell put things in the best ways as he suggested that once things escalated, some adult supervision would have helped the situation.

Clearly, as more information dribbles down, Gates seemed to see this episode as an opportunity to make a statement.  Now, that doesn’t distract from the fact that many police officers treat black Americans much differently that they treat White Americans.  So, Gates might have seen this as a worthwhile opportunity for pointing that out.  Also, the police seemed to have suffered a bit from the Wyatt Earp Syndrome–where they’re out to get the bad guys, and everyone’s a bad guy.

Yes, adult supervision as in a cool-headed party could probably have headed off this meltdown at the pass.

End the end, this looks like an equal blame situation, and all parties would do well to shake hands and forget that night.

People must be living under rocks if they missed the Brouhaha this week over the arrest, booking, and subsequent dropping of charges of a Harvard University professor “caught” in his own house as a suspected burglar. Adding to the melee, of course, is race: the professor is black and the arresting office is white.

As we all read (and certainly could imagine even without reading), the talk and confusion escalated with each media report until finally President Obama called the police actions “stupid” and set the world ablaze.

I must admit that Obama’s comment immediately brought to mind the “Bring it on” comment of GWB several years ago when the fighters in Iraq accepted his challenge.

President’s must learn that their thoughts no longer remain just personal opinion.

Rhetoric plays a role, here, as the President started explaining what he meant to those who already decided what he meant. This is the inherent problem of language. No matter what we mean when we say something, the “real” meaning isn’t defined until hearers (or readers) decide the meaning, and then negotiation takes place between the speaker (or writer) and the hearers (or readers) to finally come to agreement on what was meant.

The difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is now trying to gather the parties to do that negotiation and come to that agreement. Bush never could admit that anyone else played any role in language, and he saw himself as the decider.

Clearly, all presidents will make mistakes. I’m glad that we see our current president willing to sit down and hammer out the “meaning” of what he says.

I really like Principal Steve Perry’s message to young people: “It’s OK to be smart.”

Perry serves as principal of an inter-city magnet school in Hartford, CT, and he lets kids know that they can become educated people. His main audience consists of black and Latino kids–kids who apparently don’t hear encouragement enough that they can be smart no matter their race.

I must say that I admire Perry’s work, and I wish that his attitude would catch on all over the country and among all races.

I teach at a university. Somewhere along the way we convinced our kids that they should attend college in order to get a good job rather than to receive an education. So, we see many people who enter our classrooms with little desire to learn and even less desire to think. If professors challenge them, they complain. If professors require critical thinking, they complain. If professors demand high standards of writing, they complain. If they don’t receive an A, all hell breaks loose!

I do wish that we could convince our students that it really is OK to be smart and educated. Sure, we can’t tell them that they can know all the answers to all the questions, but part of education consists of learning what questions to ask and how to arrive at answers that we can live with. Knowing something about Protagoras, about Isocrates, about Gorgias, about Plato, about Socrates, about Cicero, about Constantine, about St. Augustine, about church councils, about the Middle Ages, about the Renaissance, and about so much more can provide a launching pad for all sorts of thinking and learning.

Students, living as an educated person is why you attended college. Stop complaining about the challenges that face you and embrace them. Learn to think, to ask questions, to learn that you can’t define an answer for every question today, and learn that those “truths” that you learn may change tomorrow as new information arrives. If you become an educated person, good opportunities and probably even good jobs will follow, but good jobs seldom come to those who wasted their college years complaining about learning.

The toy is unnerving, but the reviews/comments are the best! See it here.

I don’t suppose that anyone expressed great surprise at the revelation of former VP Dick Cheney using all of his power and ability to hide secret CIA operations from Congress.

Information this week alleges that Cheney, who worked diligently for 8 years to make the offices of the President and the Vice President above the law and above questioning, hid information from oversight committees, caused the CIA to hide information, and generally did whatever he pleased in the name of the American people all the while not letting the people know what he did.

I hope that Congress exhibits the necessary fortitude to try this guy and put him in jail for his actions.

We might argue that in the course of fighting a war that all Americans need not know all the details. While this is a slippery argument, I suspect that it could be successfully argued at times. To make that same argument about the Congress who owns responsibility for overseeing war efforts, however, is an argument that should fall on deaf ears.

I doubt that this is the last we hear about the old dog Cheney and his shenanigans while in power. I can only hope as the other shoes drop, that he will hear the echos of them from a jail cell–maybe at Guantanamo!

Senator John Ensign (R) Nevada, just keeps the information flowing, now, doesn’t he?

I suppose not too many of us raise eyebrows at affairs any more. Frankly, they don’t interest me much, and they probably have little to do with whether or not one can govern well. But I must admit that this one does raise the hair on the back of my neck a little. Seems that the affair was with the wife of Ensign’s administrative assistant, and she worked on his election campaign. Now he reports that his mom and dad gave the two staffers a total of $96,000 because they were long-time friends, after Ensign admitted to the affair. Wow! That I had friends such as that!

Wouldn’t it be better to just come clean? OK, Ensign and the man’s wife had an affair. Something transpired after that, and the Senator’s mommy and daddy came riding to the rescue to shell out nearly $100,000 to the family–$12,000 each to the the adults and to two of their children, given on on two different occasions to fall under the tax laws for gifts–and everyone now accepts the explanation that mommy and daddy are just really wonderful to all of their friends.

Right.

A new USA Today/Gallup poll tells us that 7 out of 10 Republicans would vote for Sarah Palin for President if she runs in 2012. I wish I knew how to shake my head on line.

Apparently, 7 out of 10 Republicans paid no attention to her utter lack of anything remotely resembling an understanding of government, foreign relations, domestic relations, budget issues, or anything else that people asked her about. How can anyone who thinks at all believe that she brings qualifications for the highest office in America? What, exactly, might those qualifications be, if one believes that she brings them?

One reason that I teach is to help people learn to think. Oh, well. If Republicans continue down this road, at least the future for continued Democratic leadership looks bright.

How do I know that Sarah Palin, soon to be ex-governor of Alaska and former VP hopeful, is not a quitter?  Why, she said so!  There, that should settle it.

Now, most of think of quitting as stopping before your job is completed, leaving something unfinished. , etc.  But, according to the Republican dictionary now professed by the likes of Hannity, Limbaugh, and Palin, quitting means that you’re a hero, a wunderkind, a person of overarching principle!  My, how all we must do is say that something means something else, and these people expect us to just follow right along.

Like her or not, the people of Alaska elected Palin to serve as the Governor of Alaska for 4 years.  Now, she says, knowing that she won’t seek a 2nd term, she will bail out of the job and leave it to someone whom the people didn’t elect.  Yep, that sure sounds like a principled, hero, wunderkind to me.

Let’s start working on some other definitions so that the banks, the stockbrokers, the automobile companies, and Bernie Madoff can all be heroes, too!

I can really think of nothing else that tells a more humorous story than the swearing in today of Al Franken as a United States Senator. Now, that’s not so much a comment on Franken as on the US Senate!

For a group that takes itself so seriously and often seems to believe that they are some steps above everyone else, Franken’s entry into the ranks should provide both some comic relief and some levity to the Senators.

Will Franken serve well? Who can know? If nothing else, however, he should provide some fodder for the late night comedians. Ohhh, where is Jay Leno when we need him?