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…but then I came to the UO. The first truly sunny day of the year is upon us. Campus is filled with people chatting, laughing, and soaking up the sun. But lurking in their midst are groups of people wearing brightly-colored t-shirts and carrying clipboards. Definitely a good day to stay off of 13th and avoid the OSPIRG jackals and irrepressible candidates.

The ASUO Voter’s Guide can be found here, by the way. I haven’t read all the way through it yet, but a few things did jump to my attention:

• VOTE FOR ME AND VOTE FOR JARED AND JULIANA
• I’m sorry, but “the juice is worth the squeeze” is a terrible campaign slogan for the Daniels/DuFour campaign. You’re running for ASUO Exec, not an AVN Award. And if you’re going to go that route, you should have at least used “Vote for the Double D’s.”
• “We want to hear your voices and speak to the issues that affect you, be you gay, graduate, athlete, Greek, international, or all of the above,” say Dallas Brown and Emily McLain. A tip for next year’s candidates: don’t list off the groups you say you want to listen to, because you will always leave someone out or forget to add “none of the above.”
• Of the Exec. candidates, Mann/Grace have the best write-up. It is straightforward and focused on their objectives rather than their credentials and reasoning (both of which are important, but not when you only have 300 words.)
• Dolberg/Hartley are the only Exec. campaign to show any signs of fiscal conservativism.
• Eric Kaltenbacher and Athan Papailiou got my votes (and will get the Commentator’s endorsement) with their writeups.
• Just vote No on Miles Rost glamour shots. (Vote Yes for Miles Rost the candidate, however.)
• Jennifer Lleras, to her credit, is open about who she will represent: “I will advocate for programs within the EMU to ensure that each program has a space both physically in the EMU and vocally in each meeting that I represent them in. The EMU’s budget should be spent towards better accessibility for all students, to encourage safety and to create a space where students see their incidental fee money with a clear student driven purpose. Through my dedication and passion for student’s rights and student’s voices I will be an advocate for you and for your organizations.” I’m not sure what a “clear student driven purpose” means, but I do know that the First Law of Student Government states: we do not represent students, we represent the interests of particular student groups.
• If I was Wally Hicks, I’d be pissed that the bullet points in my writeup didn’t show up.
• The only person running for ASPAC or the Rec Center Advisory Board who I don’t actively dislike after reading their writeup is Manisha Marberry.

Do you smell that? Do ya? That’s the sweet aroma of democracy returning to Eugene, where the ODE has at last updated its blog.

If you have Firefox and you use Facebook, there’s a brand new Firefox extension that you might find helpful called Facebook Assistant. At the moment it does two things: tracks changes in other people’s profiles and automatically enlarges images when you go over a thumbnail. It’s still in its infancy, but it works pretty well for me.

First of all, to commenter “Nate”, I apologize. In an effort to curb douchiness, well, let’s just say I upgraded my status from bag to nozzle. Having exchanged some email with the more level-headed folks who also post here, I’m going to just own up and say I did the wrong thing. It’s been known to happen with shocking regularity. So, I’m sorry for that, I’ll be leaving comments alone in the future. Email me this permalink if I ever forget it, eh? And feel free to be snarky.

That brings me to item number two, the comments policy. In short, there will be no comments policy. The Commentator reserves the right to remove things we can all agree shouldn’t be posted: actual spam, nazi propaganda, racist bull, links to Barry Manilow songs, etc, but beyond that consider this the official reestablishment of an “open and unmoderated” policy. Wordpress automatically moderates anything with more than two links in it, I (or somebody else) will probably get around to approving those every so often, but I can’t make any promises on timeliness.

Anyway, that’s that, I’ll be seeing you. Probably not, really, but you know.

• The Presidential Candidates Debate is tomorrow at 7:00 pm in Gerlinger Lounge. As you might expect, the OC will be liveblogging what will likely be a waste of time, energy, and Internet bandwidth.

• Now I’m not going to claim that I’m some sort of expert on putting out a daily newspaper or anything, but I really don’t understand why the ODE put Nick Wilbur’s important story on the fourth page of today’s paper. Isn’t it far more relevant to the UO campus than, say, Western Oregon University’s budget shortfalls? Not even a jump from the front page. I’m mystified.
• Our candidate list has been updated and should be fully accurate. Expect more information to be added to it in the days to come.

• You can now go onto Duckweb and vote for your least-hated candidate(s) in the primary election.
• Nick Wilbur has an interesting story in the ODE today concerning two of the candidacies:
  • Vice-Presidential candidate Amy DuFour has resigned from Senate following the revelation that she is not actually majoring in Architecture and Allied Arts, which her academic seat represented.
  • It also turns out that Presidential candidate Dallas Brown’s Senate attendance record was misstated in a Mar. 6 story due to inaccurate attendance charts.

More later… gotta run to class.