The Oregonian is projecting as of 8:30 that Uncle Ted has won reelection. Also of note:

• Vicki Walker and Jim Torrey are neck-and-neck with 9 of 34 precincts reporting. Update: Walker is now ahead by about 700 with 29 of 34 reporting.
• Measures 41 and 48 are getting beaten badly with about 30% of precincts reporting.
• Measure 43 (parental notification) is extremely close.
• Measure 39 is looking like it will be passed with about 18% of precincts reporting. Thank God.

• The latest TradeSports.com lines (updated in real time):

  
  
  
  
  
  
  (Hat-tip: Nanomics.)

• Voting in Oregon via mail is easy and secure. Electronic voting, on the other hand, is massively vulnerable to fraud and prone to error. I’m not a Democrat, but Senator Wyden is right on the money on this one. (If you value your own sanity, don’t click the “View Comments” link on that page.)
• Wonkette’s 2006 Midterm Binge Drinking Game is a must-use this year.
• FOX News fucked up Radley Balko’s election article.
• Reason’s Nick Gillespie will be liveblogging later tonight. So after you break your TV by throwing your remote at Brit Hume or Anderson Cooper, hop back onto your computer and check out Reason.
• Those looking for timely and non-rabid election day updates would be wise to check out Hotline On Call.

There’s a great letter in the Ol’ Dirty today from one “Dorothy Bucher”. Ms. Bucher is upset about all you damn drunk kids, and she knows that the best way to deal with it is to have the University step in:

We citizens of Eugene, who pay the taxes for the sheriff’s department and their men, and for the police department, are getting very upset at having to pay for huge amounts of police force action, when at Halloween, (or any other time of the year) the police and all their men have to go into drunken, rioting parties done by the students of the University, break them up and restore peace and order.

[…]

I am aware of several groups, right now, who are very angry about this and may start to take legal actions against the University and its dean, because they are not handling drunken students properly, and are not throwing them out of the school, or at least paying for their discipline themselves. This may result in the citizen groups actually suing, or demanding in some legal way, money from the University to pay for the huge amounts of taxes we have to spend to provide police and sheriff’s men to discipline the drunks who get “cranky” from the University.

I really do suggest that you actively inform a lot of your student groups that this may eventually come down, and their students who act out, will be thrown out of Eugene, or have their parents pay a lot of money for police actions. I am only warning you about this because it would be much better to nip this action in the bud, rather than have lots of costly legal work and a lot of conflict between the University and many of its taxpayers’ groups.

Well, this Dorothy Bucher lady is quite the concerned Eugeanean. Let’s do two Google searches for some other comments and letters of hers, shall we?

‘Talk to us‘ (Sep. 9, 2006):

I have only been back to Eugene,OR,which is my home town,for about 3 months,and already I see developers wanting to turn it into the wrecked California I just left.Ok,guys,if 37 is that bad,get your friends,voters and radicals together,and overturn it!!NOW!

So, she’s lived in Eugene for about five months.

A lot of people have been talking about today’s NY Times story regarding the “Nuclear Primer” the Bush administration made available online. As is usually the case, the story is overblown and the reaction to the story pitifully ignorant. What bothers me, however, is that there is a far more disturbing story in the same issue that has received scant attention:

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

“We had no idea we were supposed to read these things!”

Of course, there’s a question of whether Bowen had very much power to begin with. From President Bush’s Nov. 6 2003 signing statement:

The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investiga-tions by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security. The Secretary of Defense may make exceptions to the foregoing direction in the public interest.

Well, maybe this will get you psyched up:

Kickoff is at 12:30 PST, and the game will be broadcast nationally on TBS. Go Ducks!

Before we dive into this weeks ASUO-mania, one caveat must be made to our adoring readership. Your intrepid ASUO reporter was awfully tired for last nights Student Senate meeting because he’s been working during his days off to make up for time lost while putting out the SMACKDOWN! issue, which is on shelves now. As a result, he only stayed for about an hours worth of fun last night, and as a result he missed about 3 hours of whining, petulance and bitter recrimination. Please forgive him as he struggles to get this all straight. (more…)