One question I put into my Speechwriting training courses (and into any course I give) is this:
What is the Supreme Quality in any piece of professional work such as a speech? Choose from the following options:
“The Pentagon is banishing the term “strategic communication,” putting an end to an initiative that had promised to streamline the military’s messaging but instead led to bureaucratic bloat and confusion, according to a memo obtained by USA TODAY.”
What do you think? Is it a mistake to eliminate strategic communication from the military?
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One of the first rules of etiquette in debate is that you do not make personal attacks on your opponent. Last night, President Obama — who has so loudly, so frequently, so eloquently, so passionately and, we may add, so self-righteously — deplored the decline of civility in American politics, broke that rule. Not once, but repeatedly.
At long last, we are past the debate stage of the presidential campaign. Three up and three down. Now we can look forward to Election Day, when the voters decide who gets to be President of Ohio and Virginia.
Wait a sec — what? There’s another debate? Get out. For reals?
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(Part one of four) April 3, 2000, Haitian journalist Jean Léopold Dominique was shot dead in an ambush at his own radio station (Radio Haiti Inter) on the rue Delmas in Port-au-Prince. Maybe coincidentally, former and future president Jean Bertrand Aristide flew to Miami the next day.
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To decipher the arcana, we used to tell students, “The World Bank is the one that messes up the economies of poorer countries, the International Monetary Fund does so for richer countries.”
The dictum is now outworn, as should be any lingering bitter-ender Francophobia these days, with the remarkable Christine Lagarde now heading the IMF. Francophobia met strong headwinds June 12, at her presentation at the Center for Global Development in Washington.
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Johannesburg was the established crime capital of South Africa in the hopeful 1990s. Later in the decade, the sleepier Pretoria made courageous inroads in crime statistics. This was never supposed to happen in South Africa’s most “boring” city, which was considered by people in the Cape as “the largest cemetery in the world with traffic lights.”
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DHS, IRS Announce “See Something, Say Something” Partnership
Under the banner of the “See Something, Say Something” program, the two agencies will work together to teach citizens ways to help identify potential terrorists or prevent criminals from carrying out their grisly deeds.
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