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Hillary's Baffling Appeal

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:37:25 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Adam Ash - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - Let's face it. Hillary Clinton has something. Otherwise, why would she be leading Mega-Charisma Barack Obama by 15 points? What is it about her that appeals to some voters? Rather weird, isn't it, since almost half of US voters say they'll NEVER vote for her-46%, to be precise-in a Zogby poll in March. That's a whole lot of voters who can't stand her, for reasons we'll get to a little later. I must confess, I used to be against Hillary myself, because she won't apologize for her vote giving Bush the power to go to war in Iraq if diplomacy failed. When she said, if she knew then what she knows now, I figured this was total BS, because plenty of Democrats knew back then that Bush was full of crap about WMD and voted against the resolution. Also, I used to be an Obama man. Down the line. He bowled me over. His rhetoric, his manner, his self-deprecation, his smile, his intelligence, his writing: I thought he had it all. Until I saw him on stage next to Hillary. Then something happened. The most bizarre thing.

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Conservative Talkers in the Presidential Echo Chamber

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:53:26 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Dave Nalle - Aug. 02 (Opinion) - Ten of the top talk radio hosts came to the White House Wednesday morning to meet with President Bush for an hour, during which time they had the opportunity to ask any questions they liked on the stated topic, and get his best answers. The only catch was that no recording and no direct quotes would be allowed, but they could paraphrase and describe and give their interpretations of the President's comments freely...Obviously, Bush wants his side of the story of the War on Terror and in Iraq to get better exposure. Since the mainstream media seems uninterested in covering the story as he wants it told, he's decided to look for exposure for his message elsewhere. But is he just preaching to the choir here? Aren't these radio talkers already going to promote his viewpoint or something like it anyway? Might he not be better served by calling in more moderate media figures and attempting to convince them or at least give them a fair chance to ask a few questions? We'll start to hear more reaction to this in the next couple of days. It will be interesting to see which has more impact, the conservative talkers promoting the idea of progress in Iraq, or their leftist counterparts decrying the inappropriateness of turning the radio airwaves into a presidential echo chamber.

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Should the DailyKos be Subject to the Federal Election Commission?

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 06:55:01 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By John Bambenek - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - someone wrote: "In John's defense, I don't see how his complaint is an effort to silence DailyKos. Even if he were successful - which seems unlikely - all it would mean is that full disclosure and registration as a PAC would be required.

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Canadian Politics: Military Denies Access To Information About Afghan Detainees

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:11:23 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Richard Marcus - Jul. 11 (Opinion) - Well the Canadian armed forces have finally cottoned on to a trick the American Army has been utilizing since the beginning of their invasion of Iraq. The best way to make sure that everybody believes what you tell them is to suppress any evidence that contradicts your version of events. Last spring there was a great stink raised about what was happening to Afghani people detained by Canadian soldiers. It turned out that our soldiers were being asked to turn over all detainees to the Afghan security forces even though they knew full well that the majority of those turned over would not be treated according to conventions regarding the treatment of combatants captured during a war time situation.

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Enzyme Removes HIV from Cells

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:44:45 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By John Vaccaro - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - A study published in the June 29 issue of the magazine Science provides the first evidence that Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) can be fought by removing HIV's DNA from infected cells. A group of German scientists have created a mutant strain of a well-known enzyme that acts as a pair of scissors to "snip out" HIV's DNA sequence that was previously inserted into the larger human cell DNA as part of an HIV infection. What makes HIV so insidious is that it insinuates its own DNA into that of the host cell. HIV's DNA hijacks the cell's reproductive mechanism to produce more of the HIV virus. When that host cell divides more of the HIV virus is produced. Current treatments for HIV focus on the use of anti-viral drugs to suppress the HIV virus before it enters cells.

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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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Ron Paul and the Politics of Responsibility

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:41:24 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Mark Edward Manning - Jun. 20 (Opinion) - When it comes to Republicans for the 2008 nomination, I have been trying to decide between John McCain or Mitt Romney for my endorsement. However, I've been hearing, through the internet grapevine, about a certain libertarian Republican named Ron Paul, a 10th-term representative from Texas. There is a lot about this surgeon-turned-congressman that I like. * He favors abolishing the income tax as well as the Internal Revenue Service. He has battled for repeal of the 16th Amendment (which authorized the income tax) and the National Taxpayers Union has consistently given him a score of 100% every year that he's been in Congress, the surest sign that Paul has a conservative voting record on how tax dollars were spent.

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On Jay Rosen's "A Blog Is A Little First Amendment Machine"

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:59:43 -0700

Blogcritics Magazine - By Robert K. Blechman - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - I would like to call attention to a piece written by New York University professor Jay Rosen in today's Huffington Post, "A Blog is a Little First Amendment Machine," where he discusses the impact that journalistic blogging has had on the main stream media (MSM), and the potential it has to set a new agenda for newsgathering in the future. Rosen writes that although the U.S. Constitution guarantees a free press, in practical terms that freedom has been limited to press owners. Blogging will change all that. Rosen notes that the blog Firedoglake showed up the MSM at the Scooter Libbey trial, and showed everyone else how real journalism is done. By providing a continuous live blog of the trial, the Firedoglake reporters created a public resource that even MSM reporters consulted.

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