The Eugene Weekly finally has their new dating and personals site, Wink + Kink, online, providing the Commentator with a new, limitless source of comedy. The only question is how many I SAW YOU’s can you handle?  For example:

Hey, um, I saw you at the VRC in the food court reading manga, “Got Rice?” Tee shirt, glasses, very cute. Saw you later watching “Smart People” alone, thought you had an adorable giggle. Me: kind of loud girl sitting in the row in front of you, red Chuck Taylors, MC Chris shirt and Foster’s sweatshirt, glasses, ponytail. I get a discount on manga at work, interested??

Or, on a slightly more disturbing note:

You activate my motion sensing flood lights practically every night when you walk by. Why don’t you stop and say hi? Is it my big telescope that distracts you?

The site currently has a free promotion going, and being the curious journalist that I am (and single), I have started exploring this strange, new meat market. The “Wink” section of the site is set up more like a conventional dating site, while “Kink” is more, well, kinky. I haven’t delved into the horrors of “Kink” yet, but the public has a right to know, dammit! Expect a full report soon.

Yesterday OC Ed-in-Chief Ossie and I drove up to Kell’s Irish Pub in Portland to hear Gene Healy of the Cato Institute talk about his new book, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. The good folks at the America’s Future Foundation hosted the event.

Healy is a smart, funny guy, and we enjoyed throwing back some Guinness with him. I haven’t read the book yet, but everything he said last night was spot-on. In short, voters and politicians on both sides of the aisle need to get rid of the idea that the President is the daddy or mommy who will fix all their problems. I did have to disagree with Healy when he started bagging on Teddy Roosevelt, though. Ugly views on manifest destiny aside, Roosevelt was pretty awesome; he gave a 90-minute speech after being shot in the chest. C’mon, Hillary Clinton isn’t even that hardcore in her fantasies.

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.

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In Sean Jin’s post about Zach Besaraba’s characterization of the furor over Tibet amounting to little more than “propaganda with the aim of maintaining US imperialism (for his part, Besaraba makes an attempt to clarify his position in the comments section), I suggested that the “anti-imperialism” crowd (substitute “anti-war”, if you like) has little time to waste on protesting against “imperialism” on the part of anyone besides the United States and Israel.

Well, I’m glad to say that in a letter to the editor of the Eugene Weekly, Pete Mandrapa has proven me wrong, taking China to task for its “deplorable” “actions” in Tibet. Indeed, “some human rights activists’ calls for the boycott of Beijing Olympics and disruption of the Olympic torch travels across the globe”, he says, are “understandable. Good for Pete Mandrava for joining the ranks of the decent left and unequivocally condeming totalitarian aggression wherever he sees it.

But wait! What’s this?

Not satisfied to merely take a principled stand against Chinese imperialism, Mandrapa cites actual horrors like Abu Ghraib alongside such hoary old chestnuts as the “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis” “slaughtered” by American troops (la resistance presumably murders civilians for a higher cause) and the “physical destruction” of that country to argue that as awful as the annexation and decades-long Chinese occupation of Tibet might be it isn’t nearly as bad as the American invasion of Iraq. Evidently, Mr. Mandrapa doesn’t spend much time reading the news, since the only way his comparison would really hold is if the Tibetian “resistance” was butchering mourners with suicide bombs and the Chinese military was working with the UN to restore habitat for oppressed minority populations as well as repairing decaying infrastructure and opening schools.

But never mind all that. This is the Eugene Weekly we’re talking about, and high rhetoric (not to mention high drama) is de rigueur.

Expect this meme to become increasingly common as the Olympic trials draw ever nearer. When moral equivalence is the name of the game, it’s safer to suggest that perhaps American athletes should be barred from competing than it is to risk your activist cred by looking like you’re siding with the neo-con imperialists. China might be bad, but the U.S. is always worse.

[edit]

A similar dodge, this time from The Guardian.

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.

‘Ol Dirty columnist Nik Antovich gives OSPIRG more bad press in today’s Emerald:

Lately OSPIRG has been under considerable public examination; I want to keep it that way, considering that the problems with this organization don’t deserve just lip service but action. This fiscal year we will be handing OSPIRG a check for more than $117,000- a ridiculous amount of money, none of which will be publicly accounted for by the corporation. However, we do know that more than two-thirds of that budget is used to pay the salaries of about eight researches and activists who work in Portland.

Antovich goes on to stump for CFACT, which is kind of the conservative version of OSPIRG, sans off-campus money dumping (allegedly). I have my reservations about CFACT; besides disagreeing with them on some key issues, I’m opposed on principle to increasing the incidental fee. However, it’s good to finally start hearing some substantial OSPIRG criticism on campus.

Is the recent bad press, as well as the election of Dotters-katz and Delashaw, whose platform included decreasing OSPIRG funding, a sign that the Great Hope might finally be realized? Holding your breath is probably inadvisable, although crossing your fingers couldn’t hurt.

The official announcement went out today that Joe Malchow of Dartblog took first place in the America’s Future Foundation College Blogger Contest 2008 and will receive the $10,000 prize. The Oregon Commentator blog was runner-up, which would be somewhat anticlimactic except that one of the judges has decided to give us a $1,000 second place prize out of his pocket. Third place went to Surveillance State.

David Kirby of the AFF told me it was a close race and that we received a few first place votes. Going into the competition, we understood Malchov and company were heavy favorites; the fact we gave those Ivy League guys a run for their money calls for a big West Coast cheers.

“I’m so pleased that AFF has had the opportunity to shine a light on so many of the talented writers and journalists who are up-and-comers in the fight for liberty,” Kirby said. “We’re looking forward to building on this year’s success to turn the AFF College Blogger Contest into a consistent leader in encouraging freedom-minded writers to speak up on campuses across the country.”

Thank you AFF for hosting this competition and to all the judges, and a special thanks to the fine gentleman who created the now award-winning OC blog, Mr. Bret Jacobson, Mr. Oliver Ruff, Mr. Pete Hunt, Mr. Sho Ikeda and Mr. William Beutler, and to everyone else who has contributed to the Oregon Commentator for the past twenty four and a half years.

The Commentator is a tradition like no other and it’s a pleasure to continue advocating for conservatism, free thought and individual liberty at the University of Oregon.

Gustavo Arellano, author of the nationally syndicated and controversial iAsk a Mexican! column, announced in this week’s edition that he’s calling it quits. From the column:

It’s no longer necessary to explain Mexicans to Americans because Mexicans are Americans. Gracias for all the fights, the propositions of sexy time explosion and the slugged-back tequila shots after book signings, but there’s a little ranchito in Zacatecas waiting for me and a barefoot muchacha ready to cook dinner. Vaya con Dios, America, and always remember: Order the enchilada-and-taco combo TO GO. 

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the column, but I did thoroughly enjoy how much it pissed off Eugene’s progressive crybabies (or, as Arellano would call them, “PC pendejos“). Adios, Mexican. It’s been a fun ride.

Now that the ecstasy of Barack Obama’s visit to our humble city is beginning to wear off (though one keeps expecting his most ardent disciples to show up on the doorstep one weekend morning wearing “Hope” t-shirts and asking if one has “heard the good news”…), the Democratic primary is once again looking like a political campaign rather than a messianic ascension into the hallowed Oval Office.

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Ah, the Internet - a wonderful creation that allows unsound information to be spread to millions of gullible users. “Zeitgeist: The Movie” is the latest piece of flashy drivel to capture the imaginations of stupid people everywhere. Available to watch for free, the film is making its way across the Internet faster than you can say “nonsense on stilts.” In fact, today is apparently “Zeitgeist Day”; the movie is being screened all around the world, including on campus. Here’s part of the Zeitgeist Day manifesto, as lifted from the website:

The greatest fraud of our time is the social conditioning that leads us as individuals to operate out of our own personal self-interest and nothing more. Material, poverty, war, genocide, manipulation, crime and corruption are the results. The removal of the grand illusion known as “separation” is the true ‘activism,’ as everything else is a mere result of the consequential ‘elitism’ inherent in the need for self-perpetuation. [Blah, blah blah. Corporatism, religion.] The revolution is now.

The film is a hodgepodge of various conspiracy theories divided into three parts - Christianity, 9/11 and the international banking system. These parts that are ostensibly connected in an “everything’s connected” kind of way, but since I couldn’t make heads or tails of the “big message,” I’ll address each part separately. (more…)

With the perhaps not-so-stunning revelation that Barack Obama’s friend, pastor, and mentor, Jeremiah Wright (the title of “The Audacity of Hope” comes directly from Wright) has, among other things, suggested that the United States is responsible for AIDS, blamed the U.S. for bringing 9/11 upon itself, and suggesting that African-Americans (emphasis on the “African,” evidently) sing “God Damn America”, Barack Obama is once again in the same boat as he found himself when his wife made her “misunderstood” remarks about only just now being able to be proud of America. That is to say, the man who was supposed to be above it all, the man who was supposed to be beyond race, the man who was supposed to represent “change” is being dragged down into the slime of identity politics.

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On Friday, the Pacifica Forum met to continue it’s discussion, “Pacifica Forum: Attacks on and in.” The meeting addressed media coverage of the forum, as well its recent controversial lecture on Martin Luther King, Jr. Unfortunately, the forum never got around to answering my question as to why it had allowed itself to be overrun by complete assholes, but there was plenty of other fodder for discussion.

After an introduction by PF founder Orval Etter, Michael Williams, a member of the Community Alliance of Lane County’s Anti-Hate Task Force, addressed the forum with the following written statement:

One reason for the persistent criticism of the Pacifica Forum is that the forum has provided an approving and affirming environment for the expression of bigotry and hatred aimed first at Jews and now at African-Americans.

[…]

These diseased expressions of bigotry and hatred find a safe harbor in Pacifica Forum. Instead of correction and healing, this sickness is given encouragement and support; hatred is legitimized. This is what the community sees when it looks this way, this is what journalists hear when they accept the invitation to come and listen. This is why Pacifica Forum has developed such an unsavory reputation.

I invite you to consider whether racism and anti-Semitism are qualities you want to encourage, are attributes you want associated with your forum and your name. Because this is not the doing of a plotting media - you are doing this to yourselves by your silence, by your approval, by your applause.

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I must say, I really must say, that I am sick and tired of election season already. No, I am not talking about the ASUO Elections. Those have just started and I am giddy in anticipation for the first grievance to be filed. I am sick and tired of the race for the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nominee. It dawned on me today that maybe the Democratic Party is not torn between two transformational leaders, but that it simply is not satisfied with what it is left with. This is not to say that Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton are not transformational leaders, or that the DP doesn’t like them.

Maybe the initial media hype of “the first woman president” and “the first African-American president” that kept both candidates high in the polls (this speaks more to Obama polling higher than Edwards) is beginning to wear off. With almost identical policies, characteristics (combative, strong, dedicated, organized), and messages (Clinton’s initial campaign slogan was “If you are ready for change-she is ready to lead”),  the only things differentiating these two are their skin-color, gender and that Obama got a better graphic designer. Hopefully not a single one of these differences will be the one that decides who gets the nomination, but then what will?

Wait…I don’t care so shut up about it already! 

The Eugene Weekly ran an article today on the Pacifica Forum, covering much of what I wrote about yesterday. However, here’s a nice tidbit I hadn’t heard yet:

[Michael] Williams, who has been monitoring Pacifica Forum meetings since 2003 on behalf of the Community Alliance of Lane County’s (CALC) Anti-Hate Task Force, distributed a leaflet including a comment Pacifica Forum regular Valdas Anelauskas made on the Oregon Daily Emerald website and his critique thereof. Anelauskas’ comment, in response to columnist Deborah Bloom expressing support for the Iraq War, argued that the war was only being fought for the security of Israel and included statements such as, “Even if the author’s name wasn’t Deborah Bloom, after reading your opinion piece in the Emerald (Feb. 7) there is no doubt that it was written by someone who is Jewish. Because only from people of that peculiar tribe can we expect such Talmudic hatred for humanity. There is even a famous saying that wars are the Jews’ harvest. And today it is truer than ever.”

Eva Sylwester, who wrote the article, has her ongoing coverage of the forum archived here.

This Friday, 4 p.m. in the Walnut Room of the EMU, the Pacifica Forum will be meeting to address recent OC coverage of the group.

According to several emails I received, Editor-in-Chief of the Eugene Weekly Ted Taylor sent Orval Etter, the founder and organizer of the Pacifica Forum, an email on Feb. 18 asking him to confirm several details from my story. On Feb. 27, Etter announced that the forum topic of that week was being changed to “Pacifica Forum: Attacks on and in.” (The Pacifica Forum’s immediate reaction when questioned or criticized for its often deplorable content is to claim it’s being attacked).

That Friday, Feb. 29, Jimmy Marr, the delightful fellow who previously called Martin Luther King, Jr. a “moral leper and communist dupe,” read the email from Taylor aloud to the forum. In it, Taylor asked Etter to comment on my question as to why the forum had allowed itself to, as I wrote, “be overrun by complete assholes.” Etter reportedly said this would addressed at the next meeting (March 7).

I will be there, of course, recorder in hand, dutifully capturing all the wackiness. To catch up on the Pacifica Forum, start here. Also, contributing writer to the Eugene Weekly Eva Sylwester has her coverage of the forum archived.