The Three Rs: Reading any and all (elite) media, Regulating oil and gas, and...ouR kitchen table

There is a video out there on the interwebs of Willaim O'Reils yelling at Barney Frank, lispy representative of the Washington elite, for causing Freddie and Fannie to fail. I won't post it here because he's too tiresome to watch, but essentially his message to democrat no-nothing-know-it-alls is this: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, "PLAY US OUT"?!??! FUCKING THING SUCKS!!!

I think O'Reilly was trying to play to his disaffected, conservative (reactionary?) viewers by 'stickin' it to the man' in charge, in this case Barney Frank (GET IT? I'm clever too). Because clearly Barney Frank is in charge of everything and always has been and is the sole reason for people hating politicians.

Speaking of Bill O'Reilly's disaffected, conservative viewers, did you know that around 30 million Americans are functionally illiterate? And according to the Daily Kos' "Hannah," who may or may not be one of Thomas Pynchon's writing students, the people who represent them may be too! It's a good read, one which involves fake war stories, family tragedy, disavowal of friendship, Spanish psychologists, astronauts, cause and effect, and democracy.

Speaking of people who may be functionally illiterate...teaching. As in, my students are not functionally illiterate! Yay! They are much smarter and more engaged than I expected. Teaching is not that hard. The only thing hard about teaching is the special needs website that we have to use to teach our students about "digital literacy." Except that, every time we ask the course administrators why our website lost in the internet special Olympics, they get all Sarah Palin on us and explain that we shouldn't worry about it because the students are already more digitally literate than us and will figure it out the only thing they can't do is think critically and write except you can't fix that by just having them write on sheets of paper you need to use the online tools and oh they don't work hmm well we'll just have to get back to ya on that.

But our course administrators are smart and educated and Sarah Palin seems so, I don't know, not. Therefore, it must be that neither W nor McPalin are functionally illiterate. Rather what we are seeing is a whole new emerging discourse, indeed, an entirely new epistemological frame. This week has marked the turning point in the rise of this frame, culminating in last night's debate (Adennak via Wonkette via Andrew Sullivan):