Former ASUO President Jared Axelrod has been hired by the current Executive to make some changes to the ASUO Constitution, Senate rules, committee bylaws, etc…

He presented to Senate last night some of the changes he’s making, a large part of them mainly housekeeping and cleanup of old, defunct, and obsolete rules. He wants to introduce a check to the Con Court, something along the lines of Senate needing to approve Con Court rulings on Constitutional changes. Con Court needs more checks on it, but I don’t know if just having a final approval from Senate is enough. The irony is that Con Court will have to approve that rule change. However, some of the changes he suggested last night raise red flags: Adding the Rules and Recognition Committee to the Constitution? RRC is ineffective and bureaucratic, and reform is necessary to the system. Having it in the Constitution will make it more difficult for these important reforms to happen.

And why now? Why at the end of the year? The timing of this is suspicious, and I’m curious to see what other changes President McLain and Mr. Axelrod will be cook up.

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.

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”.

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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Can’t really say if Senate is more exciting from the perspective of the table. Thanks for asking, Sen. Feldman. I suppose the vicious tension that exists in the ASUO becomes more apparent when at the table. Passive aggressiveness coats just about everything spoken by anyone.

“Soccer is the real Futbol” came in for a special request…they are a new group, and it seems that new groups are tinderboxes waiting to light for the ASUO (please refer to VFSA’s PFC meetings). Soon after “Soccer is the real Futbol” went through with the request, Senate President Athan Papailiou made a comment about how difficult it was for new groups to get started, and how long it took them to get budgets. It seems like special requests from surplus might be a good occasional alternative to unfunded groups.

Vice-President San SunOwen used the opportunity to jump on Athan’s back once again and call him out for being “hypocritical”. Athan may just have to start facing the possibility that he is, indeed, a hypocrit. And a racist. And…I’d continue on but I don’t want to give Vincent alcohol poisoning. $20 says ODE Reporter Robert D’Andrea at least quotes San’s rant or even puts a full text of her rant in his next article.

Senator Billy Hatch also called Athan unprofessional for mentioning his drunken behavior in Senate last week, without Billy being present. Not quite clear on who’s fault it was that Billy stormed out. But seeing as everybody seems to blame Athan for just about anything, I’ll go ahead and venture that he was responsible for that, too.

“Unprofessional” seemed to be the buzz word of the meeting tonight.

There are three noteworthy pieces in the Emerald today. First, a student came forward and accused Sara Hamilton of soliciting votes in the dorms for the Oregon Action Team.

Andrew McNulty contacted the Emerald Tuesday afternoon and said Hamilton identified herself by name and talked about her campaign for ASUO president last year.

McNulty, a political science major, said he was familiar with her name but he had no connections to the ASUO or any campaign. He said he had not been following this year’s election, but was surprised when he read recently that Hamilton had no formal role in the Oregon Action Team campaign.

This is just building up for Con Court’s big decision whether or not to order another executive election. It has been stated several times by Sam Dotters-Katz that Hamilton was doing things without his consent. If a new election was called, I am going to go around to every dorm and pressure as many kids to vote as possible. I’ll threaten one hall to vote for Kari and another hall to vote for Sam. With those two campaigns sabotaged, Thunderlove can slip right into the presidential position he deserves.

If Con Court does make this decision in favor of Rock The Yello, there is a chance that the University Administration would step in and not allow another election, and perhaps threathen to strip control from the current ASUO. All the rules have been thrown out the window by this point, so who knows what will happen?

Second, there is a breakdown of campaign spending in the election, which actually isn’t very exciting. The OAT spent a lot of money, but in terms of resources used, having control over the elections board pretty much evens out the playing field.

Finally, there is a nice write-up about the AFF blog contest, which we took second in. Thanks to Jill Aho for the coverage and to David Kirby of AFF for the kind words.

CORRECTION: I was just informed that McNulty is not a freshman, as I originally posted, he is a fifth-year senior living in the dorms. Sorry for the error.

I saw this on Facebook this morning, in a note by Zach Basaraba from the MCC. Basaraba is the same person that ridiculed Meili Yu for being “Culturally Incompetent”, amongst other things.

“Is the current Chinese occupation of Tibet just imperialism, or is the “Free Tibet” campaign just propaganda with the aim of maintaining US imperialism and an elite monarchy in the region (Considering the Dalai Llama is funded by the US Government and was essentially a puppet state of Chieftain rule)?”

Does the MCC really want someone like this representing them? Wow. Their logic has become so twisted that advocating for human rights is now maintaining US imperialism. These people’s hate for America is so strong that they’d rather advocate for CHINESE rule in Tibet.

But it makes sense for the MCC to do so, because after all, in the United States, here they do execute people and bill their families for the bullet used. And they march practitioners of Falun Gong throughout the street before lining them up on a wall and shooting them in the back of the head. And they censor Internet sites and perform late-term abortions on women that violate the one-child policy.

Wait, did I get something wrong here?

Voting in the general elections has started. By now, everyone is sick of seeing people on the streets with pamphlets. And the thing that sucks is that we still have to do it!

To keep the injustices from the Elections Board going, Oregon Action Team member Nathan Perley’s rightful victory has been inexplicably invalidated. He was running for Seat 13, and won an outright majority last week. Suddenly, last night, the Elections Board, without any clear reason, invalidated his win and said that the election for Seat 13 would open again this week.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

The Elections Board stated that some Business majors were unable to vote for Seat 13, and were complaining about it.

There haven’t given any evidence of this. Furthermore, when has “some people not being able to vote’ ever invalidated an election (national, university, or otherwise)?

I was just reading the Emerald’s story about the Oregon Action Team’s victory, and I noticed this interesting little tidbit:

 ”It’s easy to buy an election,” Sen. Nate Gulley, a Rock the Yellow supporter said after hearing the results.

The Commentator wonders if Senator Gulley can provide any evidence whatsoever to back up his statement, or whether he’s just speaking from personal experience.

For his part, Diego Hernandez was quoted as saying that he hadn’t “even processed it yet,” which probably stems from the fact that he’s spent a significant portion of his processing power lately fulminating against white people in the comments section of the Daily Emerald, producing such gleaming pearls as:

Diversity, in the mind of the average white, heteronormative male is obviously or should be non-European…White people suddenly want to be included in the term diversity. This is why Affirmative Action is becoming weaker and scholarships that are meant for people of color are going to white people because diverse means something different.

and leading off with:

Wake is an idiot, he needs to wake up and stop being a racist, uneducated baboso. 

I am guessing your not educated about “race,” especially because Wake’s comment is obviously ignorant and racist, and because you used the term “Hispanic.” I don’t get my definitions from the encyclopedia, especially socially related terms. Race and Racism is so complex that you can major on it and get a Doctorate from the topic. Suddenly, I have to stay silent when I speak about race, because if I talk about it then it might loose it’s meaning.  [emphasis added]

After someone in the comments section (whom Hernandez claimed was “Sean Jin himself or someone associated with him or the neoliberal, neoconservative, ignorant Oregon Commentator” [Gosh, it’s so nice that you’re always thinking of us!!]) pointed out that his sentiments were coming dangerously close to breaching the University’s definition of “discriminatory harassment,” Hernandez suddenly made an about-face, claiming:

But anyway if you read what Wake said, it is obviously not racist, but I thought I should just do it to see what kind of dialogue would come of it. Very interesting stuff…   [emphasis added]

Between churning out such confused vitriol and denouncing Sean Jin’s “hate speech” about the Multicultural Center, it’s no wonder that Mr. Hernandez has been suffering a dearth of CPU power needed for processing the Oregon Action Team’s victory, leaving it to Nate Gulley to instead insinuate election fraud and further drag what remains of the ASUO’s reputation through the mud.

Congrats to the Oregon Action Team for shaking these tossers up a bit.

Sam Dotters-Katz and Johnny Delashaw received 1608 of the 3164 votes for ASUO Executive; with a majority, they are the students’ new president and vice president.

Kari Herinckx and Jesse Hough earned 1290 votes and Dr. Drew Thunderlove Cattermole 119 votes. There were 147 write-ins.

In the race for Senate Seat 1, PFC, Sean Jin had the most votes with 832 but failed to earn a majority. He will be in a run-off against Carinna Miller, who earned 758 votes.

The Ol’ Dirty stuck to its true form today by endorsing the corrupt Rock the Yellow slate and Kari and Jesse. It is almost unbelievable that they would root for the political machine that was responsible for the ruling that candidates cannot advertise in the ODE.

But the reason for the Emerald’s endorsement extends beyond platforms and policy positions. Herinckx and Hough have presented themselves as more in touch with students and their needs.

Laughable. Everything Sam and Johnny have done is in the name of perpetuating the average student’s voice, while Jesse and Kari, great student leaders but with too much baggage with them, have only defended their positions as cookie-cutter pinups for the current administration.

I am disappointed with the Emerald Editorial Board. Supporting a ticket run by an administration that has abused its power to limist free speach on campus is a pathetic stance to have.

The ODE has a video of the candidate debate from Wednesday up. Fair warning: It’s almost impossible to watch this without making the thunder and/or feeling the love.

Also, so far there have been a total of eight grievances filed against the Oregon Action Team. However, the OAT has recently struck back and is filing a grievance against Rock the Yellow member Nick Schultz for allegedly telling people that the OAT would cut campus recycling if elected (ironic, since one member of the slate works for campus recycling). For his part, Schultz says this a “complete lie.”

And don’t forget the second grievance filed against current ASUO Exec Emily McLain. It’s a good thing we’re not actually playing the ASUO Elections Drinking Game because even Keith Moon would have a hard time keeping up with this.

I thought I’d post our editorial from the Elections Issue, for those who were too lazy to read it. Here’s the ODE’s editorial from today on the same issue.  

We apologize for the crude headline. We don’t literally want the justices to lick our collective nuts, so we hope they don’t take it seriously. Likewise, we won’t take what they say seriously.

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With the disgustingly colored and horribly designed ASUO Elections website, the convoluted ballot, and all the noisy pamphleteering out on the streets, I think students are already fatigued and confused about elections.

If anyone is interested in getting all the information on the candidates in one nice, concise location (other than from the Elections Issue of the Commentator, of course) visit the ODE’s website’s ASUO section.

God knows that the OC and ODE are doing better outreach for elections than the elections board is doing.

Maybe next year’s elections should be run by the media.

Big news day for ASUO Exec candidate Drew “Thunderlove” Cattermole. You might have noticed the front page of the ODE today, which has a picture of Thunderlove between the other two slates. Also, check out the ODE interview with him, complete with audio. I’ll throw up his statement in the ASUO Voter’s Guide when I get my hands on a copy.

If anybody wants to meet Thunderlove in person, shake his hand or have him kiss your baby, there will be a candidates fair in the EMU from noon to four p.m. Also, the candidates debate is tonight at 7 p.m. in the Living Learning Center Performance Hall.

UPDATE: Here’s the ASUO Voters Guide, where Thunderlove pledges to “work closely with the health center to get magnum condoms given away with the other free condoms. The well endowed students at UO should no longer be discriminated against.”