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Archive for April, 2008

Con Court Rules

April 24th, 2008 by Sean Jin

Con Court has finally ruled on the grievance filed by Matt Rose, the Rock the Yellow campaign manager. As I was explaining to a friend yesterday, however Con Court rules, it can find some logical explanation to justify, making their rulings absolutely arbitrary. Lucky for the Oregon Action Team, Con Court’s whim worked in their favor this time. If Rock the Yellow refiles, who knows?

Aside from that, Chief Justice Bogar’s concurrence is quite amusing. He manages to say that “the absence of evidence is not evidence” three times and “no evidence of impropriety has been presented” two times. Seems like somebody is really straining to meet the word count requirement. “We are constrained by law and what evidence shows” once. Too bad! It seems that Chief Justice Bogar wanted ever so badly to pin Sara Hamilton’s actions on the Oregon Action Team, but couldn’t. I guess if the glove don’t fit…He also notes that Sara Hamilton’s actions are “fishy” and “fail the smell test“. No pun intended?

I sure hope I don’t draw the ire of the court.

ASUO Flurry

April 24th, 2008 by Sean Jin

Unexpectedly (or expectedly, depending on how you see it) both Senators Lauren Zavrel and Kyle McKenzie have resigned from their seats. They both stated that they were too busy and had too many commitments outside of ASUO. While Senator McKenzie had clearly lost interest in ASUO in the weeks before his resignation, Zavrel’s comes as a surprise to me. They both represented different but fairminded voices on the Senate body, and will be missed if not by everyone on Senate, at least by me.

Perhaps unrelated (or related), Senator Kevin Parks took one of my Facebook notes seriously and sent out excerpts from it on the Senate listserv with the hopes of revealing something new about me to the Senate body. Essentially, I had made a joke about running in Elections and that I wouldn’t do anything once in office if elected. Senator Parks failed to see the humor in it.

I was going to make a joke about resigning from Senate following in the footsteps of Zavrel and McKenzie. But I guess I’m not allowed to make jokes anymore, since no “actions or statements by a public official are above consideration and critique”.

Clinton Wins Pennsylvania.

April 22nd, 2008 by Vincent

Well, the results are in, and Hillary Clinton has taken Pennsylvania with a margin of roughly 10%. This means, of course that the Democratic Primary will continue to drag on with no clear winner. While I don’t have a whole lot to say about the primary in general, I found this report somewhat strange:

But Clinton still can’t break Obama’s hold on black and young voters. He won 92 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls, and between 56 percent and 58 percent of voters under 45.

Similarly, however, Obama can’t shake that a lot of whites are uncomfortable with a black as president, as exit polls showed him losing the white vote by 60-40 percent — a consistent trend in recent primaries. (emphasis added)

Really? Seriously?

Happy Ironic Earth Day

April 22nd, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

The ‘Ol Dirty’s front page today has a big spread on all the Earth Day events on campus. Below the fold, however, is a nice little story headlined “Researchers link biofuels to food price increase.” From the opening paragraphs of the article:

A sign outside of the SeQuential Biofuels retail fueling station in south Eugene reads “fight global warming.” But recent studies and media reports have increasingly questioned biofuel’s side in that and another life-and-death planet-scale fight.

As food riots erupt across the globe, researchers and analysts have been scrambling to explain why food prices have exploded in recent months, and the crosshairs are increasingly focused on corn-based ethanol biofuels.

The article goes on to mention the increasing criticism of biofuel production coming from sources such as The Economist (subscription wall), The New York Times and Science. Reason has been all over the subject as well. With all this scrutiny, you would think the government would be less eager to push through new biofuel subsidies and laws. Well …

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Con Court rejects Powers’ grievance

April 21st, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

Con Court Issued its decision today regarding Ed-in-Chief of the ODE Laura Powers’ grievance. Powers’ petitioned the Court to reconsider its controversial ruling that candidates for the ASUO may not advertise with campus media. The Court’s per curiam ruling denied Powers’ motion, stating “[t]he continued controversy surrounding Election Rule 6.12 should find correction through the political process, not this Court. The rule is clear on its face. If Members of this University do not like the rule, they should change the rule. Political options abound for such a result, and that is the proper avenue for change.”

That’s the Court’s entire decision, by the way. Seriously. Way to pass the buck, guys.

The full text of the ruling can be found here, along with Powers’ petition. Also, Con Court is set to recess on Wednesday, so they’re trying to clear their docket. There’s a whole slew of election related decisions coming out, all of which can be found on the Court’s website.

Finally, the ODE issued an editorial today calling for the reform of the Con Court.

Full text of Frohnmayer’s letter

April 21st, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

As I previously wrote, President Frohnmayer recently issued a letter where he addressed, as he called it, the “gutter bigotry” of the Pacifica Forum. Here’s the full text pertaining to the PF:

In moving forward, there will always be a diversity of opinion about our approaches to equity by constituencies both on and off our campus. Our efforts benefit from continued open and honest engagement in these differing perspectives. Yet, even as we talk about our different perspectives, we must remain committed to advancing these efforts.

Even as we make notable progress, there have been challenges to the inclusiveness of the community we attempt to create here. Just last term, a student writer for the Oregon Daily Emerald was the subject of a viciously personal anti-Semitic posting for expressing her journalistic views on American foreign policy. In another incident, a group meeting on campus, in an unabashedly racist manner, mocked efforts by others to honor contributions by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And, finally, larger issues of First Amendment freedom of expression were raised once again by the Pacifica Forum, an outside group that holds its meetings from time to time on campus, and which hosted as a speaker the person who targeted the Emerald writer. (more…)

Constitutional Rights

April 21st, 2008 by Sean Jin

This last week, the College Republicans celebrated Second Amendment Day, which simply involves taking a bunch of people off city limits and onto public land, and shooting a myriad of weapons. It is one of the more exciting parts of exercising our citizenship and Constitutional Rights.

A video by Kenny Crabtree can be found here.

As a final note, I just had the idea to exercise some of our other Constitutional Rights in a similar celebratory manner:
First Amendment Day – Overused by hippies, Bible Jim, Brother Jed, and protestors.

Sixth Amendment Day – Right to speedy trial

Eighth Amendment Day – No cruel or unusual punishment

16th Amendment Day – Authorization of Federal Income Taxes. I guess they already have one of these, it’s on April 15th.

My favorite: 21st Amendment Day – Repealing of 18th Amendment (Prohibition)

If you have to ask …

April 20th, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

Frohnmayer calls out Pacifica Forum on “gutter bigotry”

April 19th, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

President Frohnmayer recently issued a letter denouncing the Pacifica Forum for its sometimes “unabashedly racist” content. The letter came at the urging of the community board of Oregon Hillel, a Jewish student group on campus; they were prompted to action by a disturbing, anti-semitic screed written by PF regular Valdas Anelauskas attacking ODE columnist Deborah Bloom.

While Frohnmayer spent plenty of time denouncing the forum, he was careful not to call for their outright banishment from campus. From the Register-Guard article:

Frohnmayer said in his letter that groups such as the Pacifica Forum may use UO facilities but do not speak for the university. The appearance of any speaker on campus does not imply the UO’s “endorsement, support, or even its moral indifference to the content of a message,” he wrote.

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Run-off election results

April 18th, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

Voting ended today for the general ASUO elections. Here are the results:

  • EMU Board at Large: Michelle Haley
  • PFC at Large: Andrew “Andy” Cox
  • ACFC at Large: Cassandra Gray
  • ACFC at Large: Joey Freedman
  • ASUO PFC Senator Seat One: Carina Marie Miller
  • EMU Board Finance Senators Seat Five: Emma Kallaway
  • ACFC at Large Seat Seven: Alexander “Alex” McCafferty
  • Department Finance Committee Seat Ten: Hailey Sheldon
  • AAA/Interdisciplinary Seat 12: tie between Yu Hin “Adrian” Ho and Nickolaus “Nick” Gower. Another run-off to be held April 21-23 (sigh).
  • Social Sciences Seat 14: Lidiana Soto
  • Science Seat 16: Michael “Mikey” Latteri

Sean Jin unfortunately lost his seat by a very close vote. Sorry, Sean. We would have loved to see you mix it up at the table.

OLCC allows minors into 21+ music venues

April 18th, 2008 by Ossie

I had the pleasure of sitting through a monthly OLCC meeting this morning, and the senior citizen commissioners actually did something, well, respectable for Oregon youth and music business. After rejecting admendements to the minors posting rule in December, which allow venues that could only have 21+ shows to admit minors into shows, the board passed a revised rule change unanimously today.

All of the public testimony was in favor of the amendments, which surprised Commissioner Christine Lewandowski who noted that a MADD representative would generally be at such a hearing in opposition.

The admendment allows Oregon venues that serve alcohol to host all age shows and those that don’t serve alcohol to do so for added income, as long as they set up an approved liquor control plan. The WW’s Local Cut has a story and some video coverage here.

Clinton Courts Boozehound Vote

April 18th, 2008 by Niedermeyer

So, Obama thinks poor folks are bitter, but Hillary knows they’re mostly just looking for someone to buy them a shot of mid-shelf booze. That’s why she sprang for a shot of Crown Royal at a media event relaxing evening with close friends at her neighborhood bar (in Indiana). But wait, you say, Crown Royal is Canadian whisky… there’s no “e” before the “y” or anything. While the pundits desperately analyze “the shot heard ’round the world” for implications on Clinton’s NAFTA position, we applaud Clinton for simply making booze an issue in this election. And for providing the evil spirit which is currently possessing our copy of Photoshop with some fresh meat. Cheers!

Determinism makes one more likely to be cheater, pumpkin eater

April 18th, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

A series of studies by psychologists has found that students exposed to articles undermining the concept of free will were more likely to cheat than their control-group counterparts. It’s not exactly shocking that people feel less responsible for their actions after being told that every choice they make has already been decided by their subconscious, but the actual numbers are eye-opening; in the first test, the group that read the anti-free will article beforehand was 45 percent more likely to cheat. Other variables found to increase cheating were:

  • Sitting in a cramped lecture hall approximately 2 inches away from that smart Asian kid
  • Dollar well-drink specials
  • Secular, atheist agenda/ACLU/George Soros
  • Teacher just not “satisfying your needs” anymore
  • Having a GTF who can’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground
  • Intense dislike of controlled studies

A tip o’ the hat to Megan McArdle, who also just wrote a post mulling over whether or not she would transfer her consciousness into a robot.

MCC vs. Me

April 18th, 2008 by Sean Jin

I’ll admit it, I fanned the flames with my last article about the Multicultural Center.

I’m not going to say anything about them here, but please just refer to the comments of this Facebook Note by our illustrious friend and my fellow ASUO Senator Diego Hernandez.

The best parts are pasted down below in case you are too lazy to read a new page or log into Facebook.

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ODE files grievance against Con Court

April 17th, 2008 by CJ Ciaramella

Editor-in-Chief of the Oregon Daily Emerald Laura Powers is filing a grievance against Con Court for their recent ruling declaring that ASUO candidates can’t advertise with campus media. Powers is appealing the ruling on grounds of factual accuracy, since she can’t argue the Court’s actual reasoning. Powers, along with us, believes the ruling is complete bullshit:

“We’re not a university facility, we don’t reject ads based on politics and everybody has equal access,” Powers said. “Bitch, please!”

Con Court’s ruling seems to imply (although they won’t come out and say it) that since some people [read: Rock the Yellow] couldn’t afford advertisements it wasn’t equal access. I agree with Powers. Bitch, please!

P.S. How great is it that a grievance is being filed against Con Court to be decided by Con Court?