Category Archives: greenparty

Screwing Up the Ninth

greenparty, kucinich, politics, toledo 2011.10.27 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Given all the press that Congress gets, it’s easy to overlook the impact that state legislatures have on our everyday lives; I’ll cop to being guilty of this. Just when you’re not paying attention, though, years like this one come along and wake you up as to what’s going on in your state capital. Although the efforts of Wisconsin’s governor and state legislature to kneecap state unions generated more press earlier this year, in Ohio newly-elected governor John Kasich (he whose offices, when he was…

Double Time

greenparty, politics 2010.12.09 Sean Shannon 2 Comments

Say what you will about Bill Clinton — I’ve certainly made my displeasure towards him and his presidency known on multiple occasions — but at the very least Democrats had some ideas of what they were getting into when he ran for President and then later when he held the office for eight years. That he was a more conservative Southern-style Democrat was no surprise, and when he lashed out so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and so stupidly at Sister Souljah, he pretty much fired a…

The End of Reality

greenparty, politics, rhetoric, teaching, television, writing 2010.11.05 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

I often talk to my students about the ways in which arguments are framed. Anyone, with enough time and research skills, can find a way to set up an argument that, on its surface, will seem devastating, if not scary. Take, for example, Republican claims in 2004 that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was the most liberal member of the Senate — even more liberal than his Massachusetts counterpart, Ted Kennedy — and was thus too radical to become President. Technically Kerry was judged to…

That Man is an Enabler

commercials, greenparty, politics, rhetoric, television 2010.08.11 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Recently one of my friends sent a tweet out, asking what we, her Twitter followers, thought was the greatest television commercial of all time. As someone who was lucky enough to live through the middle and late 1990s, that last period of popular culture that had so much going for it, my immediate response was the landmark Orlando Jones “Make 7-Up Yours” spots, commercials that endure to this day. Now that I’ve thought longer about it, though, I think there is one commercial that stands…

Be the Change You Seek

greenparty, kucinich, politics, rhetoric 2010.08.10 Sean Shannon 1 Comment

Gibbs clashes with the “political left” over criticism of Obama (Yahoo! News) Robert Gibbs was perhaps the first harbringer of the realization so many on the left feel now. With Barack Obama freshly installed as President, Gibbs delivered his first press conference from the White House Press, and after all the rhetoric of change in Washington, of hope that things would get better, Gibbs deflected question after question, giving half-answers if he bothered to answer at all. It was the exact same behaviour we had…