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Bloomberg, and Bush's Post-Modern Presidency

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:43:10 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Sam Jack - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - I really don't see how anyone can look at the overwhelming blizzard of abuses, crimes, and foolhardy errors that have constituted the Bush years and then decide that what they're really sick of is partisanship. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that voters are sick of what I'm sick of, which is the actions of the current executive, and the actions of Republicans in the House and Senate (and now apparently the Supreme Court). If pressed, I could draw up a specific, and fairly inclusive, list of grievances against BushCo and against the GOP and other enablers. But maybe that's just because I'm on the high side of the news-awareness bell curve. I can see how, in someone who doesn't spend a fairly significant portion of their waking life reading and digesting news information (this is a class issue as well, by the way; a good portion of the population doesn't have the leisure time or spare energy), my fairly specific dissatisfaction could manifest in a general 'screw the government' sort of feeling. That it's so difficult for a casual news observer to distinguish between radicals and anti-radicals is also a damning comment on our broken media discourse. After all, most politicians sound the same as one another, they all yell and point when they get angry, and mostly they only are seen on television disagreeing with one another.

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Jesse's Sensible Political Program

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:34:36 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Jesse Miksic - Jun. 25 (Opinion) - t's time to bring some lucidity to our messy culture of politics. For all of us wrestling with the idea of social systems and personal liability for the state of the union, the whole culture of political ideas - from The Republic all the way up to the Ken Starr Report - seems impossibly disarrayed. The truth is, there are probably a thousand ways to bring order to it and make sense of it, on a thousand different levels, but even finding ONE that's effective has become an insurmountable challenge. But I think I've got something. Here's where I'm coming from: I have no direct political training, but I subscribe to the idea that every person has both a right and an obligation to form a political opinion. Thus, I've read some political articles, browsed some Wikipedia write-ups, and dug through hundreds of reader comments attached to newspapers and blog posts. My background is in philosophy and media studies, and as committed as I am to the liberal cause, I've struggled incessantly to keep from being a narrow-minded partisan fanatic.

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A Convenient Truth - Blaming Wildlife

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:32:46 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Mark Edward Manning - Jun. 22 (Opinion) - There's an excellent column in the June issue of the BBC Wildlife magazine by noted conservationist Richard Mabey who states that "wildlife persecution in the UK ought to be a thing of the past. Sadly, age-old ignorance and intolerance are on the rise." I couldn't agree more with the points that Mabey brings up about just how ignorant we can be when animals cross our path. Mabey quotes the manager of the shoe shop Office, in West London's fashionable Portobello Road, who describes what happened when a red fox wandered into the store in January: "We had lots of people in the middle of trying on shoes who started shrieking and ran out into the street in their socks. We shut the shop because we couldn't tell if the fox would make our customers sick."

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