Scots-Irish

Cameron Joseph `08, an alum of this class, has a perceptive analysis of the Scots-Irish vote at The Atlantic:

The populist fury aimed at President Obama and his fellow Democrats may have roots much deeper than health care. In fact, it may be that it can be traced back to the emigration of the Scots-Irish, the first white group to settle interior America.They've been called rednecks, hillbillies and crackers. In the modern parlance of political correctness, they've been referred to as the Bubba vote. They live in Sarah Palin's "real America," and they make up the majority of Reagan Democrats. They count as distant relatives at least twelve U.S. presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and even to Barack Obama, yet the Scots-Irish remain largely ignored as an ethnic group in America

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Goodbye, Dalai

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will not meet the Dalai Lama during his five-day trip to the U.S. capital beginning on Monday, the first time in 18 years the exiled Tibetan leader has visited Washington without seeing the president. Obama instead intends to wait until after his November summit with Chinese leader Hu Jintao before meeting the Dalai Lama, possibly sometime in December, officials said.

POTUS should watch Caddyshack:

On Addressing a Former President

Re: Titles used to address a person who was formerly the President of the United States

Judith Martin, AKA Miss Manners, maintains that the title of President cannot be used to address a former occupant of that office.

In an inauguration-day article in the Washington Post, she traces the origin of this idea to George Washington, who believed that "there could only be one president of the United States at a time...so he let it be known that he would revert to his previous title of General Washington."

Additionally,

From Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior:

"Letting Go"

DEAR MISS MANNERS:

I work in an office where we deal with guest lists, name tags, and titles (both elected and appointed officials).

After an official is no longer holding elected or appointed office, what happens to their title? I know in some cases they retain their titles. Do the elected officials retain their titles, but not the appointed officials? Do some of the elected retain their titles and some do not, depending on the level of the office (example: A governor would retain his title but not a school board member)?

GENTLE READER:

Alas, it is not as simple as whether the office holder was elected or appointed: A hodge-podge of historic custom make some title last a lifetime, while others disappear when the job does. Roughly, the job has to be high ranking, such as governor, colonel or judge, and yet not unique, such as President of the United States.

It is even less simple to get the former officials to let go of their titles when the time comes. Miss Manners has noticed that all former presidents now seem to retain the title, although she prefers to believe that they merely refrain politely from correcting people who wrongly address them.

Presidency I

Article II of the Constitution.

An example of the electoral college (Indiana 2008):




Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator. (The real birth certificate.)

LBJ takes the oath: look carefully, as it is a missal instead of a Bible.

The oath (sort of):




Lincoln's letter to Hodges on his oath.

Writing

• Some of you need to go to the CMC Writing Center.
• For endnotes, never use lowercase Romans. Always use Arabic numerals. Click here to learn how to change format.
• In endnotes, the author's first name always goes first.
• Media is the plural of medium.
• Watch out for shifts in tense.
• In American sentences, the period comes before the quotation mark, which comes before the superscript.
• Introduce your quotations.

Assessing the GOP Brand

This is an interesting graphic from an article on recent polling data regarding recent GOP poll numbers. The entire article can be found at http://www.pollster.com/blogs/assessing_the_gop_brand.php

Once Again, Madison Nails It...

In Federalist 62, Madison wrote:

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

In The Wall Street Journal, L. Gordon Crovitz writes:

Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can't keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals.

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book "Three Felonies a Day," referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.