ASUO Senate meeting review, or “There are a lot of reasons why politics is necessarily detrimental.”
By setting a zero percent benchmark at its Wednesday night meeting, the ASUO Senate sent a message, loud and clear: “Go Ducks, but LTD can lick my sweaty, shaven nutsack.”
Or something like that. Probably not that exactly, considering that slightly more than half the Senate lacks nutsacks, sweaty and shaven or otherwise. But it was a remarkable act of solidarity with the purportedly bald-scrotumed screamer who frequents campus on his bicycle with attached trailer.
None of the senators who voted for the zero percent Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee benchmark calculated to stick students’ collective middle finger at the Lane Transit District would acknowledge in words that it was calibrated to support campus’ favorite genital depilation enthusiast (assuming Phil Knight doesn’t have a secret hobby). There was something, though, about the glint in their eyes when they said things like “I think we really do some work on it, we could cut a significant ammount of money off of a $1.6 million budget” that said “This one’s for you, nutsack man.”
So LTD Nutsack man, if you’re out there reading this, let it reassure you that, though it may seem you are alone out there, riding in the cold, shouting without knowing whether anyone is really hearing you or the pain in your voice, whether anyone knows just how drenched your testicles are, know that, in spirit, the ASUO is right there beside you.
But seriously, a zero percent benchmark. And not only that, but a zero percent benchmark supported by the ASUO’s top lefties — Jeremy Blanchard and Zachary Stark-MacMillan called for a return for OSPIRG and voted for a zero percent contract benchmark in the same meeting for Pete’s sake, and another vote came from Sandy Weintraub, who has never seen a funding request he didn’t like and would probably vote for it anyway if he did (liberties taken).
It’s pretty much the ASUO equivalent of Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy and the late Ted Kennedy casting the decisive votes for massive corporate tax breaks.
I can hear all this publication’s conservative readers tossing their ten-gallon hats into the air and firing their Smith and Wessons wildly. But note that the zero percent may come at the cost of the very two things the ASUO always cites as its raison d’etre, the justification of its existence in the face of skeptical students, the things this magazine’s editor in chief cited in an editorial this year as the reasons not, as his predecessor suggested, to chuck the ASUO into a tire fire. I’m talking about the ability to ride LTD buses by presenting a student ID and the ability, through whatever byzantine means, to obtain tickets to home football and basketball games for the cost of an incidental fee. And, I mean, three if you count OSPIRG, am I right?
Far more likely, the actual allocation could far overshoot the benchmark. The zero percent really is meant to send a message to LTD, presumably, if not a suggestion about what part of students’ anatomy the transit service ought to lick, then to say “We’re not going to spend any more money than we have to on you.” But many senators were pessimistic about how well that will work in practice.
