“Obama refuses to ‘meddle’ in Iran“. I guess letting the world know that the President of the United States stands behind people who’re being beaten and shot by “security forces” for demonstrating against corrupt elections might run the risk of “offending” Iran.

The President is in full-on “grovel” mode, it seems. Martin Peretz has some related thoughts regarding the “Cairo Speech”.

Our friends at The Liberty, the conservative student publication at Oregon State, are currently in a kerfuffle with the administration over their right to distribute issues. The OSU administration told The Liberty that, since it’s not an officially recognized OSU publication (whatever that means), it can’t have distribution boxes around campus. The Liberty says this is little more than de facto censorship. From a guest opinion in the Daily Barometer:

To censor, as a transitive verb, means “to keep from being published or transmitted: ban, black out, hush (up), stifle, [or] suppress.” Todd Simmons, OSU’s spokesperson, said in an interview with KEZI regarding the University’s treatment of The Liberty’s distribution, “I have never seen an instance that they haven’t been readily available at multiple locations around campus. So if that qualifies as censorship, I’d have to be educated as to what the thinking is there.” If we don’t count the term (winter ’09) that OSU officials ordered the removal every single Liberty bin from the OSU campus and tossed them by a dumpster at 35th and Washington, then the multiple locations that Mr. Simmons is referring to are The Memorial Union and Snell Hall. In other words, the only locations that the university is allowing The Liberty to place its bins are in and around the buildings that are owned and run by the student body (ASOSU). By restricting our publication to a single block, if even that, of campus, OSU officials are stifling and therefore censoring The Liberty.

The OSU administration also claims the Daily Barometer’s long history and association with the university give it special rights to distribution. Sorry, but the First Amendment doesn’t work on the merit system. OSU needs to give all of its student publications equal access to campus, regardless of their history or how much the administration likes them.

On May 13, the Arab Student Union held a screening of the film “Occupation 101,” which is about the Israel/Palestine conflict. (Take a guess about which side it takes.) Anyway, a student unaffiliated with the ASU showed up and began distributing the t-shirt below:

I emailed the ASU, and they responded saying: “During this educational event, a student unaffiliated with the Arab Student Union began handing out shirts, which this student had individually produced. ASU budget money was not used, and the ASU was not affiliated with the shirts in any way.”

Which is good, but to Mr. Anonymous Student, a swastika on an Israeli flag? Way to keep it classy. You represent your cause well. I also enjoyed the horrible misspellings, especially “Zionest.” Is that the superlative of Zionist, as in “I am the most Zionest”?

Here’s the end o’ year edition of the Oregon Commentator News, brought to you by a definitely-not-high Drew.

Earlier today (well, yesterday) a suspicious bag was reported in Lawrence Hall by a stupid paranoid student, Junior Ben Reider. The ‘suspicious’ was a backpack padlocked to the bathroom stall by fellow student, Garret Soan Lon Len, for ‘safekeeping’.

DPS, EPD, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING?! WHAT?) responded to the call with bomb-sniffing dogs. In retrospect, it looks like an over reaction, but every false threat seems like an over reaction. Calling in DHS might be a bit much, but it’s that one time you under react to a real threat that it’s game over.

Turns out that there was nothing suspicious about the backpack…except for the fact that it was padlocked to a bathroom stall. Great going, Mr. Len, you really showed your mental prowess there in trying to keep your bag safe. Or were you just so damn lazy that you couldn’t carry it on, oh I don’t know, your BACK? Mr. Len is being charged with disorderly conduct, which holds a minimum fine of $255. I thought disorderly conduct was being a drunken douchebag bro and pushing people on the sidewalk in front of Taylor’s, but I guess leaving backpacks around constitutes a similar offense.

But it’s not all Mr. Len’s fault. How paranoid do you have to be, Mr. Reider, to automatically suspect that a backpack is a bomb? And just think for a moment, why the hell would anyone want to bomb Lawrence Hall? Well, maybe all the architects stuck there on Friday night in Studio…anyways, good job. You’ll forever be known as the College student who cried wolf. I think you should at least have the courtesy to offer to pay for half of the disorderly conduct fine.

The ODE has the rest of the story.

You didn’t think we were going to let yesterday’s opinion piece in the ODE about concealed carry on campus slip by, did you? In case you missed it, columnist Truman Capps wrote about how icky guns are and how they shouldn’t be allowed on college campuses. Of course, he made sure to get his liberal credentials out in the open:

I live in Portland and listen to NPR, and my family owns a Prius and a Subaru (with a Volvo in our recent past) – perhaps it’s not surprising that I disagree with the notion that a campus full of armed students and staff is safer than an unarmed one. While I agree that people, not guns, kill people, I am also a firm believer in the familiar adage “Mo’ firearms, mo’ problems,” especially on a college campus.

It’s not so much that I completely disagree with Capps (although I do); it’s that his article is factually wrong on several counts. For example, at the beginning of his second paragraph Capps writes:

Currently, concealed weapon permit holders can take their guns with them everywhere except for government buildings, bars and college campuses.

There is no Oregon statute against concealed carry in bars or college campuses. According to ORS 166.370, possession of a firearm in a public building is a Class C felony, but one of the exceptions is “[a] person who is licensed under ORS 166.291 and 166.292 to carry a concealed handgun.” In fact, the only public buildings you are not allowed to carry a firearm into are courtrooms, airports and federal buildings.

The university system code against concealed carry is in clear contradiction of state law. I don’t even know where Capps got the idea that concealed carry is illegal in bars. Perhaps before he writes an article disseminated to the whole campus, he should do some basic research first. Or perhaps his editors should fact-check his stories for, y’know, blatant errors. Perhaps a retraction is in order.

I wrote an article last year about concealed carry on campus, which prompted this response from the ODE. Searching through the blog archives for “concealed carry” and “gun control” is also fun.

P.S. In his penultimate paragraph, Capps writes, “[I]f campus safety is such a concern, let Department of Public Safety have guns.” Can we nominate this for oxymoronic phrase of the year or something?

As many of you probably remember ten years ago today, a couple of wackos shot up a high school in Colorado. The media had a field day blaming guns, violent video games, scary sounding music (Marilyn Manson in particular), bullying and trench coats. Well, not so unsurprisingly, it turns out a lot of what was initially reported wasn’t true. Slate wrote an article about it a few years ago, in which you can read all about the myths here and the rest of the story right here. Also, there is a new book out that apparently has all the gory details (from the FBI reports and such). 

I think it is great that the misinformation and lies surrounding the columbine massacre are being steadily put to rest. Maybe it’ll help put the kibosh on the many asinine rules and policies that high school administrators use the massacre to justify. Plus, as someone who strongly believed that everyone you picked on and tortured during high school became your slave when you reached Valhalla it is slightly vindicating.

From a Washington Post opinion piece and probably one of the best articles I’ve read on drug legalization:

Here is a glimpse of what lies ahead if we fail to end our second attempt to control the personal habits of private citizens. Listen to Enrique Gomez Hurtado, a former high court judge from Colombia who still has shrapnel in his leg from a bomb sent to kill him by the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar.

In 1993, his country was a free-fire zone not unlike Mexico today, and Gomez issued this chilling — and prescient — warning to an international drug policy conference in Baltimore:

“The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the state, and if the state resists … they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages.”

Speaking of Baltimore, here’s David Simon, creator of The Wire, in a recent interview with Bill Moyers:

I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods [ghettos] inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we’re basically treating our underclass. The drug war’s war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.

I tend to disagree with the some of Simon’s argument, which is fairly anti-capitalist (you should watch the whole video), but it just goes to show the breadth of drug legalization support.

You’ve probably noticed the clouds of acrid smoke choking campus since about 3pm or so. That’s because the building next to the “Louie’s Village” restaraunt down on Franklin Blvd. is currently in the process of burning to the ground.

Franklin is totally closed to traffic at Alder St., so don’t go down there.

[EDIT]

Unless you want to take pictures.

[UPDATE]

According to KEZI, the building is vacant. That means the electricity is probably shut off. My guess? Squatters.

[MORE]

Word on the street is the “Clean Air Project” will be organizing a campaign to ban smoke from blazing infernos from campus, pointing out that they have “a right to clean air.”

“One dead in pie factory explosion“

Well, call me old-fashioned if you will, but I have always taken the view that swastika symbols exist for one purpose only—to be defaced.

–Christopher Hitchens

By now, comparisons between Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt have become as commonplace as hearing heedless pundits liken Iraq to Vietnam. Some have gone further, casting Bush as Herbert Hoover while others have gleefully piled on, spouting off about “Hooverites” and “laissez-faire capitalism” whenever they can and without really having any idea what they’re talking about.

Much like the facile equation of Iraq with Vietnam, the substitution of the credit crunch for the Great Depression is based on a few superficial similarities but breaks down under even cursory scrutiny. As with Iraq, however, the cheap comparisons have inspired people to look to past solutions for today’s problems.

Unfortunately, their prescriptions, based as they are on caricatures, have little to do with reality. In no case is this more true than with Franklin Roosevelt’s “first 100 days”, which many hoped Obama’s first 100 days in the Oval Office would be modeled on. In his review of the recently published Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America by Adam Cohen, Daniel Rothschild of the Global Prosperity Initiative ably deconstructs the fashionable inaccuracies regarding Hoover and FDR that have been gaining currency:

Hoover was not the Grinch that Cohen wants him to be; he believed in aid to the poor, preferring it to be raised and delivered through means as close to the recipient as practicable. (This was essentially the same position Roosevelt held as governor of New York.) More important, he was by no means a proponent of unfettered markets. An engineer by training, Hoover believed fully in the power of central planning and technocratic government to better society.

[…]

In a campaign address, he argued that the American economy “is no system of laissez faire” but rather “demands economic justice as well as political and social justice.” Hoover was complex, both as a man and as a president. Cohen’s caricaturization may advance his angel-replaces-devil storyline, but it ignores the similarities between FDR and his predecessor, in both their philosophies and their policies.

For the people who’re pimping the “Obama-as-FDR” meme and getting all spittle-flecked about “Hooverites”, however, the “Great Depression II” narrative is all too easy to cast as the story of hard-nosed and noble progressives struggling to undo the evils of feckless, greedy, and dishonorable conservatives (aided in no small measure by the behavior of the Republican Party over the last eight years). But one should not mistake ill-informed polemics as authentic historiography. Indeed, as Rothschild notes

… Cohen’s actual agenda probably has more to do with influencing the present than understanding the past. The book was timed to appear less than two weeks before Obama’s inauguration, and its jacket carries an alarmist blurb from the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, progenitor of the Eleanor-Rooseveltas-lesbian theory: “At this critical moment, with our nation imperiled by the ‘starve the beast’ crowd, this book offers a hope for what is now again most needed: the restoration of democracy, and the restitution of New Deal agencies to promote dignity and security for all.”

They may yet get their way. After all, fiscal conservatism has been utterly discredited, right?

Welcome to the future.

I’m issuing this as an editorial. I’ve talked with Guy, the publisher, and he is in agreement with it. If any of the staffers disagree, that’s fine. You’re welcome to write your own opinion and post it on the blog. Without further ado:

It has come to the Oregon Commentator’s attention, as it probably has to most of the campus, that the Oregon Daily Emerald is on strike.

In a front-page editorial and separate broadsheet issued this morning, the Emerald presented what it says are unacceptable conditions forced on it by its Board of Directors and stated that it would cease publishing until the board meets the staff’s demands.

The full substance of the Emerald’s argument will not be restated in this editorial, but we will summarize it for context: The Board of Directors, going directly against the wishes of the Emerald staff, hired Steven Smith to be the paper’s new position of “interim publisher” for a year while it searched for a permanent publisher. (more…)

State officials announced today that University of Kansas provost Richard Lariviere will be the next president of the University of Oregon, succeeding Dave Frohnmayer when he steps down this year.

Lariviere was the sole finalist of the UO’s closed search for the next president. Before holding the provost position at KU, he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

In my limited research into Lariviere, I’ve already discovered a few things: First, Freedom for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has given both the University of Kansas and the University of Texas at Austin a “red light” rating for censoring student speech. This isn’t so much a direct indictment against Lariviere, but it should raise some concerns. I would certainly hope that these universities’ positions on free speech do not reflect Lariviere’s.

Second, if you were hoping that the new president would make the campus wet again, forget about it. During his time at KU, Lariviere forced the bowling alley in the student union to stop selling beer. From a 2008 interview:

[A]lcohol abuse–binge drinking, irresponsible and dangerous behavior while under the influence–is a huge problem on every college campus. KU is no different. One of the arguments for selling 3.2 beer in the Union was that it might be a venue for showing students how to drink responsibly–limiting sales to individuals to two beers, putting up materials to educate students on the dangers of drinking to excess, etc. In the end the decision was mine, and I didn’t see how the positive message of responsible drinking would be adequately conveyed by our selling beer.

It’s much too early to make any definitive conclusions about him, but I have serious misgivings about a man who doesn’t understand the joy of bowling and drinking.

I will be looking more into Lariviere’s work at KU and UT. Until then, please enjoy the comment thread on this story about Lariviere’s upcoming departure from KU. Oh, and let me be the first to say: The Oregon Commentator looks forward to working with you, Dick.