Let Me Be Clear

A SEARING INDICTMENT OF THE MASTER OF CHARM, BARACK OBAMA, FOR HIS HISTORIC WAR ON AMERICAN YOUTH “Let me be clear.” It was his come-hither call, his winsome whistle, his lingual lure. Barack Obama employed this phrase to sell his lies as maxims and his ineptitude as expertise. From JFK to Bill Clinton, America has experienced charming and coy presidents. But the most charming and coy is Obama, who seduced a generation of 95 million young Americans he used for his own political gain. Katie Kieffer is a gutsy commentator who gives it back to Barack. She turns his words against him. She grabs the high bar of transparency that Obama set for himself and snaps it with her wit. In Let Me Be Clear, Kieffer gives us an unflinching yet entertaining account of this administration’s exploitation of Millennials: · How: Obama spearheaded the Great Recovery—and young people could tell when their law degrees landed them jobs as baristas. · What: the “New Shacking Up” entails. (Hint: parents AND young people hate this trend.) · How: Barack’s buddy essentially wrote Obama-care without Congress. Plus, nearly 300 doctors offer free-market solutions to improve health care. · How: a constitutional law–professor president failed to rationally discuss gay marriage. · Why: Barack wouldn’t have been the best father for Trayvon Martin; he deserved better. · What: “Assuming We Don’t Die Tonight” reveals about the bloodcurdling story of Benghazi. · How: liberal lies about guns have “tattooed” all youths as criminals. Kieffer implodes the naïve War on Guns and presents solutions for mass violence with more love and more guns. Inspiring hope, Kieffer outlines how conser­vatives and independents can win electoral races and achieve entrepreneurial dreams. Kieffer’s got grit. She’s very clear with her president: she brings smooth-tongued bullies to justice. See for yourself.

To the amusement of the pundits and the regret of the electorate, our modern political jargon has become even more brazenly two-faced and obfuscatory than ever. Where once we had Muckrakers, now we have Bed-Wetters. Where Blue Dogs once slept peaceably in the sun, Attack Dogs now roam the land. During election season--a near constant these days--the coded rhetoric of candidates and their spin doctors, and the deliberately meaningless but toxic semiotics of the wing nuts and backbenchers, reach near-Orwellian levels of self-satisfaction, vitriol, and deceit. The average NPR or talk radio listener, MSNBC or Fox News viewer, or blameless New York Times or Wall Street Journal reader is likely to be perplexed, nonplussed, and lulled into a state of apathetic resignation and civic somnolence by the rapid-fire incomprehensibility of political pronouncement and commentary--which is, frankly, putting us exactly where the pundits want us. Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, and Washington Handshakes is a tonic and a corrective. It is a reference and field guide to the language of politics by two veteran observers that not only defines terms and phrases but also explains their history and etymology, describes who uses them against whom, and why, and reveals the most telling, infamous, amusing, and shocking examples of their recent use. It is a handbook of lexicography for the Wonkette and This Town generation, a sleeker, more modern Safire's Political Dictionary, and a concise, pointed, bipartisan guide to the lies, obfuscations, and helical constructions of modern American political language, as practiced by real-life versions of the characters on House of Cards.

Titled after the US Air Force song, this engaging debut explores the legacy of the Greatest Generation from the perspective of Generation Y, the fallout of war through the eyes of a pacifist, and the enduring human desire for love, adventure, truth, and understanding. Pensive in the wake of 9/11, a young man—our “correspondent between the past and the present”—launches a mission to reunite his beloved grandfather, an American bombardier, with Luddie, the woman who saved him during WWII. Armed only with the address on the back of an old photograph and his grandfather’s memories, the young man begins writing letters to Luddie. Undaunted by her lack of response, the narrator travels to Poland with his girlfriend and grandfather. As they come closer to finding the site where the bombardier was shot down, the letters to Luddie become more personal and the saga of a family with a long and storied history emerges. Beautifully orchestrated and eloquently original, each sentence slowly builds upon the next in a charming style both poetic and engrossing. A tale of soldiers and saviors, of burning and bombing, of fathers and sons and brothers and lovers, this is also the story of what we find when we dare to revisit the past. Born in Iowa in 1979, Travis Nichols now lives in Chicago. An editor at the Poetry Foundation, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Believer, Details, Paste, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Stranger. Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder is his first novel.

Communication is the venue people use to invite others to their mental party. It's a Conversation is a head-to-head and heart-to-heart collaboration between two friends. During their casual talks, they decided to use Post-its and record comments that sounded special and worth remembering. These jotted Post-its grew and became this book. The authors agreed early on that what people say frequently includes onion-peel layers of meaning that extends further than the literal words being spoken. This book shares their perspectives with the reader by offering some clarity to selected, familiar phrases and buzz statements. It's a Conversation takes a second, sometimes third look, before responding to the situations presented in each idiom. The authors are looking at the big picture, not just what was said. For example, an old adage like "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" can unpack a deeper meaning once it is studied. It's a Conversation highlights the power your words have. Words can add to or subtract value from a person's quality of life. Unlike perishable groceries, words don't possess the luxury of a shelf life or an expiration date. Words outlive their microphoned participants, and yes, what is said, who says it, how and why it is said--always matters.

The volume considers politics as cooperative group action and takes the position that forms of government can be posited on a continuum with endpoints where governance is shared, and where hegemony dictates, ranging from politics as interaction to politics as imposition. Similarly, dialogue and dialogic action can be superimposed on the same continuum lying between truly collaborative where co-participants exchange ideas in a cooperative manner and dominated by an absolute position where dialogue proceeds along prescribed paths. The chapters address the continuum between these endpoints and present illuminating and persuasive analyses of dialogue in politics, covering motions of support, the relationship between politics and the press, interviews, debates, discussion forums and multimodal media analyses across different discourse domains and different cultural contexts from Africa to the Middle East, and from the United States to Europe.