Ashley Ragovin

**Because of the gravity of the fires, I have chosen to omit a song to accompany the slideshow above. Please click on the arrows in the left corner to view pictures. 

The Oakridge mobile home community in Sylmar was just one of many affected by the fires that raged through Southern California.  Now that the flames are gone and the ashes have stopped falling from the sky like snow, everyone has gone back to  worrying about the economy, talking about the new president, and preparing for the holidays...

Everyone except those who lost their homes.

       Between the celebrity-ism that so fodders public media consumption and the remarkable cultural flash point that Sarah Palin has become, it is no wonder that the coverage of the VP nominee is under scrutiny as much as the candidate herself.  The big "debate" over whether she has been subject to sexism in the news media is hardly a debate at all.  Even those who are on the so-called other team--top academics, former aids to Hillary Clinton, some of the "liberal media elite"--have agreed with the Republican accusations of chauvinistic spin.  But the news media's fetish for exacerbating the gender bias isn't the problem.  It's the way her own campaign has handled her that is the most offensive sexism and the factor most culpable in counteracting headway made thus far for women in politics. 
        

If the law falls silent in times of war, then the War on Terror perhaps best illustrates Cicero's sentiment.  It is important to note that this war was embarked on in response to the tragedy of 9/11 but was not waged against terrorists in the Middle East.  Despite the dedication of an entire administration to blindfold the American public to convince them that the War on Terror was necessary to stop enemy terrorists, in fact it was a war waged on our own soil against the civil liberties of the American people by an administration and a leader who chose to ignore the system of checks and balances upon which the nation's democracy was founded.  In the midst of such fear-mongering, the law, along with democracy, is easily side-lined, allowing government to pursue its own interests, irrespective of the fundamental notions of justice and due legal process.

By fostering this culture of fear within the public and terrorizing the nation's psyche, the impacts on democracy have been severe, and the complete lack of mainstream media coverage to question the paranoia, effectively temper the abuses of the Executive branch of government, or move the public into action has in its own way aided and abetted.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are sure to miss the future.

~John F. Kennedy

With something so monumental as this year's election it feels like only cliche will do, so for lack of a more original way to express the magnitude of emotion, November 4th, 2008 marked the first time in my life that I truly felt proud to be American, proud to be a part of history.

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." --Nelson Mandela

A debate should be a verbal match, whereby each candidate has a firm stance on an issue, or variety of issues, and comes prepared to defend those positions whole-heartedly with the hard facts--the zingers, if you will; or, in consistancy with the ever-popular boxing metaphor, the knock-out punches.

But a US Presidential Debate is a special breed of debate entirely, and if you bought front-row tickets to the second round of McCain v. Obama hoping to see the good fight and a close-up of that knock-out blow, the disappointment would be inevitable.