"Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

Stunning Break with Last Eight Years"

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota , some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off."

The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska .

"Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.

From HuffPo:

This is what Home Depot's founder Bernie Marcus said on a conference call yesterday:

"If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys," Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers "should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs."

It's nice to know Home Depot supports the death penalty for not supporting their politics.

Interestingly, the column in SFGate I was reading just prior to this one contained the following:

"Budget blues: One of the big-ticket items contributing to San Francisco's budget crisis is the $70 million in annual raises due to be handed out before July 1 that Mayor Gavin Newsom promised to nearly all 27,000 city workers before his re-election.

Police and firefighters, for instance, are in line for a 7 percent pay hike, and members of the Service Employees International Union - who account for half the city's workforce - are due for a 3.75 percent kick up.

The raises help explain why the city is facing an immediate shortage of as much as $125 million, with a lot more to come next year.

As of Friday, none of the unions had volunteered any salary give-backs or freezes - nor was the mayor's office asking them to make any concessions.

Newsom went to the unions for help just a few months back, with minimal results.

Now, the mayor is demanding that all city departments cut their budgets by 7 percent."

A no firings/ no raises kind of deal would seem to be the right idea here. But that's just my ill-considered opinion.

When you put it like that, it all makes perfect sense!

What money? I didn't see any money.

Did you see any money Joe?

Nope, no money here.

Did you look over there?

Yeah, look right over there....

Cheney deserves to be hung, and he probably deserves to be tortured first.

Spitzer deserves to be ridiculed and reviled, he's a creep a liar and a hypocrite among other things.

Just because Cheney won't get his due doesn't mean Spitzer shouldn't get his.

This is a trick article. A ruse.

Environmentalists don't have 2 kids, and they don't get SUV's to haul them around in either.

Another example of a BS writer outraged about a perceived injustice and pitching a fit about it without bothering (seemingly) to actually do any research about the matter.

Fortunately there are plenty of Salon readers with more than a modicum of common sense to write in with additional information, I can only hope against hope that Ms. Harding takes more time to read these replies than she did to make 2 or 3 inquiries about why there might be these dosing and survival rate discrepancies. The bottom line is that women with ovarian cancer are likely to survive 3-4 years on average. Exactly how and how aggressively to treat this vicious cancer is not a simple question. You'll note that in one study, obese patients seemed to survive a little bit longer, whereas in other studies it seems to be the other way around. This is a good reason to look more carefully at the data, and structure future research to take this matter into account.

Ms. Harding's outrage seems to be based on differences in the results of one study that the study's author says are not statistically significant. There are no quotes from anyone else, nor does there seem to be any information from any other source, nor is Ms. Harding a doctor or anything close to it. There are good questions to be raised about this, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. This seems to be about jumping to conclusions and pitching a fit. Well, in my opinion you can't be outraged that something isn't being studied properly or enough when you actually know nothing about the research into that question and haven't really bothered to check.

I wish I could say "I can't begin to express how furious this makes me" about this inadequate "reporting", but it's pretty much the norm in BS and the media generally. Fortunately other areas of Salon don't suck quite so much.