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You know what the best thing about having interns is? You can get them to do your work for you have the privilege of teaching them what you know, and watching them grow professionally. This week, we bring you a special Linked Up, written by publicity interns extraordinaire, Alexandra McGinn and Hanna Oldsman. Be sure to check back next week for my (awesome/hilarious) Q & A with them.

I think I may want to move to Japan and make pizza. [Reuters]

The Good News: Thanksgiving isn’t a reason to break up. The Bad News: Christmas comes shortly after Thanksgiving. [Popfi]

I’m more of a Garamond type of girl myself. [Not Cot]

If you’re still in a candy coma from Halloween it’s time to let the goods go.

The Shining’s not so scary in Lego form. [Flickr]

Obama the Grinch Steals Christmas In Tea Party Picture Book [Gawker]

Commute via holograph? Yes please! [Wired]

C the difference? [Virtual Linguist]

Van Gogh would have bought an iPad. [BBC]

Which literary character is a Facebook addict? [Salon]

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Yesterday, Cathy Cohen published an article with the Washington Post titled, Another Tea Party, led by black youth?” In it, she shares,

In my own representative national survey, I found that only 42 percent of black youth 18-25 felt like “a full and equal citizen in this country with all the rights and protections that other people have,” compared to a majority (66%) of young whites. Sadly, young Latinos felt similarly disconnected with only 43 percent believing themselves to be full and equal citizens.

In the video below, Cohen further  discusses the involvement of black youth in American politics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Posted with permission. (c) 2010 University of Chicago

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By Edward Zelinsky

The United States is in the midst of a “free lunch” campaign in which Republicans and Democrats alike promise painless resolution of our budgetary problems. As a result, neither party will have an electoral mandate for the hard choices necessary to tackle our fiscal quandaries. Both parties are squandering an important opportunity to mold public opinion and set the stage for meaningful budgetary discipline.

In a recent survey of the U.S. economy, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded, with considerable understatement, that “the United States faces challenging budgetary prospects.”

This conclusion should surprise no one. The history and current reality are there for all to see: In 2001 and 2003, the Bush Administration and Congress reduced federal income taxes significantly. Instead of decreasing federal spending to pay for these tax reductions, the Bush Administration presided over significant increases of military and domestic outlays as well as unrestrained growth of so-called “entitlement” spending – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. The Obama Administration has continued and exacerbated this trend. At the state and local levels of government, budgetary prospects often even worse as unfunded pension obligations and unfinanced retiree health benefits balloon.

To be sure, there is much contemporary political rhetoric about the need for fiscal discipline. President Obama has appointed a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Tea Party candidates successfully exploit growing public anxiety about budgetary deficits.

However, none of this should be taken too seriously. President Obama’s deficit commission is scheduled to report only after this November’s elections. We have become inured to public images of Tea Party activists denouncing federal spending – except for their own Social Security and Medicare payments. The House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” promises fiscal responsibility while also refusing to reduce defense spending or spending which affects seniors.

The net result has been a free lunch campaign in which Democrats and Republicans alike promise budgetary discipline but refuse to specify how they will achieve it. The bi-partisan message to the electorate is that public deficits can be controlled without pain.

This, of course, is untrue.

Undoubtedly, it is considered wise politics to promise tax reductions and vague spending restraints while ignoring the tough choices necessary to put our budgetary house in order. However, in the long run, the promise of a free lunch will prove to be poor politics.

Empty, anodyne campaigns result in elections without mandates. Postponing the real discussion until after the election forfeits the opportunity to establish an electoral basis for the painful actions necessary to eliminate federal and state budget deficits.

In ordinary times, off-year elections are low key affairs in which the President’s party typically loses some or all of the congressional seats it gained in the prior presidential election. Conventionally, such off-year elections are preceded by locally-oriented campaigns.

However, these are not ordinary times. We are barely recovering from the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s and confront current and projected budgetary deficits of unprecedented magnitude. In this historically unique setting, the 2010 campaign is an opportunity for the two parties to form electoral mandates by specifying how they wil

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By Dennis Baron

Tea Partiers seem intent on throwing more and more of the American government overboard. Yet there’s one area where both these wing nuts and many ordinary conservatives support more big government, not less: they want the government to make everyone in America speak English.

Christine O’Donnell, an upstart Tea Party candidate who beat a more traditional Republican congressman in Delaware’s senate primary, says that she “will fight to make English America’s official language for all governmental purposes,” adding, “We cannot be one people without speaking ONE language in common.” In 2007 O’Donnell told FoxNews that American scientists deep in their underground laboratories had created mice with “fully functioning human brains”—experiments which she opposes, unless of course the researchers can guarantee that the mice will speak English.

Tea Partiers support official English because they believe that not speaking English is prima facie evidence that you’re an illegal immigrant who swam across the Rio Grande. They’ve forgotten that English itself is an immigrant language, not just in the U. S. of A., where it clambered ashore “without papers” along with the pilgrims and the Virginia colonists in the early 1600s, but also in England, where, though it wasn’t called English, ‘the language of the Angles,’ till it got to Britain, it swam the North Sea with marauding Angles and Saxons in the 5th century, CE. Everyone in the Tea Party seems also to forget that these English-speaking illegals eventually turned merry old England into a socialist state with government-run health care.

Despite the fact that English has now gone global and is spoken by more people across the planet than any world language ever before, some Americans fear that English is endangered at home. That’s why Iowa’s Rep. Steve King, a career politician who wants government out of our lives (except for banning abortions and term limits), but firmly believes that government must dictate our language preference, bullied Iowans into passing an official English law in 2002. King scared Iowans with Census figures showing that the state’s Hispanic population had doubled since 1990, going from 1% to 2%, ignoring the fact that more than half of the state’s 80,000 Spanish speakers also spoke English well or very well and the rest were learning it as fast as they could. King then successfully sued his own state for posting election information on its website in languages other than English in violation of the new official English law, further demonstrating his belief that it is the job of government to meddle with the lives of citizens and limit their individual choices.

King then introduced the English Language Unity Act of 2009 in the House of Representatives in order to make English the official language of the United States. H.R. 997 requires English for all official government actions, everything from our laws, which are already in English, to anything that the government does that is “subject to scrutiny by either the press or the public,” which seems to cover everything from committee reports, hearings, and press briefings subject to the Freedom of Information Act, to the sexual peccadilloes and personal indiscretions that some members of Congress keep inadvertently exposing to the scru

Here at Oxford, we love words. We love when they have ancient histories, we love when they have double-meanings, we love when they appear in alphabet soup, and we love when they are made up.

Last week on The Sean Hannity Show, Sarah Palin pushed for the Barack and Michelle Obama to refudiate the NAACP’s claim that the Tea Party movement harbors “racist elements.” (You can still watch the clip on Mediaite and further commentary at CNN.) Refudiate is not a recognized word in the English language, but a curious mix of repudiate and refute. But rather than shrug off the verbal faux pas and take more care in the future, Palin used it again in a tweet this past Sunday.

Note: This tweet has been since deleted and replaced by this one.

Later in the day, Palin responded to the backlash from bloggers and fellow Twitter users with this:

Whether Palin’s word blend was a subconscious stroke of genius, or just a slip of the tongue,  it seems to have made a critic out of everyone. (See: #ShakesPalin) Lexicographers sure aren’t staying silent. Peter Sokolowksi of Merriam-Webster wonders, “What shall we call this? The Palin-drome?” And OUP lexicographer Christine Lindberg comments thus:

The err-sat political illuminary Sarah Palin is a notional treasure. And so adornable, too. I wish you liberals would wake up and smell the mooseburgers. Refudiate this, word snobs! Not only do I understand Ms. Palin’s message to our great land, I overstand it. Let us not be countermindful of the paths of freedom stricken by our Founding Fathers, lest we forget the midnight ride of Sam Revere through the streets of Philadelphia, shouting “The British our coming!” Thank the God above that a true patriot voice lives on today in Sarah Palin, who endares to live by the immorternal words of Nathan Henry, “I regret that I have but one language to mangle for my country.”

Mark Liberman over at Language Log asks, “If she really thought that refudiate was Shakespearean, wouldn’t she have left the original tweet proudly in place?”

He also points out that Palin did not coin the refudiate word blend. In fact, he says, “A

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the health-care debate. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As America goes into intensive partisan-battling mode this summer over health-care reform, it may be helpful for President Barack Obama and his advisers to sit back and understand the basis of the rage against their plan. An understanding of the resurrected ghosts of Anti-Federalism in today’s conservative movement may offer him some strategies for bringing the Republicans and Blue-Dog Democrats back to the discussion table.

The rage that is out there among conservatives may seem excessive and irrational to liberals, but it is based on an ancient American quarrel. The differences between the “Birthers” and angry town-hallers and Obama precede the Democratic and Republican parties; they precede the Progressive, the Whig, and the Jeffersonian-Republican Party. They were there from the beginning. For the biggest fault-line in American politics was also the first political debate Americans ever had between themselves. It was the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists about the need for a consolidated federal government with expanded responsibilities.

In 1787 and 1788, Anti-Federalists hurled charges of despotism and tyranny against those who proposed the need for a stronger federal government with expanded responsibilities than was envisioned in the Articles of Confederation. Today, the analogous charges against the neo-Federalist Obama are of fascism and socialism. As Federalists reviled the Anti-federalists for their shameless populism, Obama has likened the angry protests staged by his health-care opponents as mob-like thuggery. Conservatives, in turn, have recoiled at liberal condescension; just as Anti-Federalists fulminated against the Federalist aristocracy.

The Anti-Federalists envisioned a small republic because they could not conceive of their representatives - sent far away into a distant capital and surrounded by the temptations of a metropole - would ably be able to represent their communities. The fear of the beltway and of faceless, remorseless bureaucrats directing the lives and livelihood of honest workers and farmers struck fear into the heart of every true republican (lowercase is advised), as it does the modern conservative. Death-panels weren’t the first Anti-Federalist conspiracy theory.

Today’s “birthers” and “enemies list” conspiracy theories are not new stories in themselves other than the fact that they reveal the visceral distrust conservatives have of Barack Obama, just as many Anti-Federalists turned (Jeffersonian) Republicans accused Alexander Hamilton of illicit connections with the mother country, England. Today’s “Tea Parties” are but the modern conservative articulation that they are, like the Anti-Federalists were, the true bearers of the “spirit of ‘76.’”

As Cecilia Kenyon observed decades ago, the Anti-Federalists were “men of little faith.” This characterization is both accurate and one-sided at the same time, so it is no surprise that contemporary Democrats have taken the same line of attack, calling Republicans the “party of ‘No.’” The Anti-Federalists, like today’s conservatives, cannot bring themselves to trust the federal government or Barack Obama. Conservatives are using “scare tactics” because they are scared.

But their fears are not entirely unfounded and certainly not illegitimate, because a measure of distrust of government is the first defense against tyranny and the first implement of liberty. Liberals who have been so quick to trust the federal government should not only have a look at Medicare and Social Security, but acknowledge the mere fact that with one half of the country unconvinced (legitimately or not), the country’s faith in its government has been and will almost always be a house divided. This is a given fact of a federal republic; it is the blessed curse that is America. That is why in all areas in which there is concurrent federal and state responsibility - such as in education and immigration policy - lines of authority and execution are invariably confused and American lags behind almost every other industrialized country. In areas in which federal prerogative is clear and settled - that is to say in areas in which the federal government acts like any other non-federal, centralized government in the world - such as in foreign policy, the president can typically act very quickly (if not too quickly).

The conservative grassroots movement (staged or not) is a real threat to Obama’s health-care plan. But if the movement doth protest too much, it should ironically also be a source of comfort to the president. That there is so much anxiety and push back suggests that conservatives feel genuinely threatened. With Democratic control of all branches of government (and the open possibility of passing the health-care bill via the reconciliation process which will only need a simple majority in the Senate), conservatives believe that the liberals can transform their America into something their parents and grandparents would no longer recognize.

Here then, is the lesson to be learned. If the president wants to get anything done - he must strike at the heart of the problem: it is one of a fundamental, thorough-going(dis)trust. Barack Obama must convince Republican and Blue-Dog dissenters that he is one of them. Bowing before foreign Sultans and mouthing off about racial profiling did not endear him to conservatives, who only want to feel assured that the president is for them, not against them. These are minor gestures, which is why it won’t be tremendously costly for the president to present them as a peace offering. And calling protesters to his health-care plan a “mob” is definitely not a peace offering. It invokes the very perception of condescension the Anti-Federalists felt in 1787, reinforcing the ancient and original “us” versus “them.” To unite the county, he must transcend not only party, but ideology, and history itself. Barack Obama must break the legacy and transcend the language of our 222-year-old, bimodal politics. Quite simply, he must convince conservatives that he too can feel, and talk, and protest, and hurt, and fear, and agitate like a latter-day Anti-Federalist; and he is no less intelligent, no less rational, no less compassionate, no less constructive,  and certainly no less American for trying to do so.