I hope everyone’s finals went well.I am graduating, so there have been some changes in the leadership of the club.The new leadership of the BYU Democrats is as follows:
President – Hyrum Salmond
Vice Presidents – Peter Snyder and Steve Pierce
Secretary – Jonathan Rivera
Action Chair – Celeste Grebe
Awareness Chair – Timothy Brownrigg
Treasurer – Jordan Kilgore
Thanks for a great eight months and for everything you all did.Between the historic election of Obama and the club doubling in membership among other things, we accomplished a lot and it was an honor for me to be in this position. Happy Holidays.
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’s 60 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.
Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.
I first heard of the Charter for Compassion from the TED talks. Karen Armstrong sent out a wish to push compassion into the majority of human acts, using religion as a tool to foster that sort of love.
“The Charter will show that the voice of negativity and violence so often associated with religion is the minority and that the voice of compassion is the majority”
Apparently, Democratic and Cougar blues are complementary colors. For the first time in memory, Brigham Young University is boasting as many College Democrats as College Republicans. About 1,200 students have signed up for each of the activist groups sponsored by the Political Science Department. In September, the Democrats had 700 students, but within the first few weeks of classes, membership had nearly doubled at the private school owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Barack Obama is inspiring a lot of youth, and a lot [of the growth] has to do with the last eight years and people being vastly disappointed,” said Randal Serr, a senior in political science and president of the club.
The club also has started getting more politically involved this year. Each weekend, a couple dozen BYU students load into cars and caravan to nearby battleground states such as Colorado and Nevada. They also write opinion articles for local newspapers, staff booths in the student union and participate in service projects.
They’ve come a long way from just 15 years ago, when the club had seven members, Serr said.
