Oregon Commentator alumnus, Mark Hemingway, has a new piece in the Weekly Standard about the behind-the-scenes Republican scrum for the Michigan primary. It’s well worth  reading.

As some may already know, this is Mr. Hemingway’s second major article in the Weekly Standard, his first  being his extremely popular article about Jack Abramoff and the making of Abramoff’s filmic opus, Red Scorpion.

Props to Hemingway, a man most of us haven’t met, but who is doing this publication (and the Weekly Standard) proud.

A Night in the Life of an Alpha-Male

I somehow found myself at the Oregon Daily Emerald’s end-of-the-year bash at my old house on Kincaid St. While enjoying a pleasant conversation with ODE Editor-in-Chief Parker Howell about the role of the paper (a personal note to Parker: I think you may overestimate the paper’s readership, and I have photos from the EMU to prove it), belligerent alpha-male Lucas Calderon interrupted and asked if either of us wrote for the Emerald. My guess is that he was making sure there was someone there to offend before he started speaking. As I have previously stated, Lucas Calderon, the instigator in the “drunken hilarity”, is one of the dumbest people I have ever met, and here is why:

1. The fight began because Calderon first criticized the Oregon Daily Emerald for trying to tell students that they could not get drunk at football games. After Howell and I refuted this point by clarifying the role of the newspaper (being that the paper’s job is to report on what is going on, and it cannot be held responsible for the administration’s decisions), Calderon moved to a backup argument. I do not know if Calderon thought this next point was more valid, but this is what he insisted: “the newspaper should only write articles about how you can’t make fun of minorities.” I wish I could make this comment seem even more idiotic than it actually was, but I am not blessed with such miraculous writing abilities.
2. Calderon refused to leave a party where he was everyone’s enemy. Personally, I am usually very conscious of when my presence is unwanted, and at times, I overestimate the level of resentment towards me and just leave anyway. Calderon, however, seems to lack any sort of self-awareness, and perhaps even normal human consciousness. He instead chose to stand in the kitchen and belligerently yell at an encircling crowd of pissed-off party-goers.
3. Calderon’s lack of normal human reflexes indicate a sub-normal intelligence. Not only did the Corona bottle he threw completely miss Howell, it instead went straight into the back of Catie Hager’s head. Additionally, when Emerald reporter Nicholas Wilbur (who was painted yellow, by the way) pushed Calderon out of the house, Calderon unresponsively flopped out of the door like a rag doll. While some people may point out that alcohol impairs reaction time, they need to keep in mind that although Calderon was drunk, stupidity has a far more detrimental effect on human reflexes.
4. Calderon followed up his night of wacky antics by faking a phone call to the Eugene police in which he claimed he was sexually harassed at a party. This was probably an amusing gesture on Calderon’s part at the time. However, his phone call is what inspired Hager et al. to call the police themselves. So, without that insignificant little act of revenge, Calderon would not have found himself with felony second-degree assault charges. Brilliant move.

Did I mention that immediately upon arriving at the party, Calderon had me participate in a drinking game in which five people pretty much stood in a circle and pounded cans of Milwaukie’s Best Ice? I can only imagine what the future holds for this up-and-coming History major. Personally, I am going to be watching my back and perhaps wearing a helmet in case any beer bottles are sent my way.

Editor’s Note: The OC was not invited to this party. Our contributor is not a member of the OC or Emerald staff. Our researchers tell us that Negro Modelo bottles make far better projectiles than Corona bottles.

There will be a meeting this Wednesday at 1pm at our office at EMU 319. All staffers are asked to attend, as are all those interested in contributing to our summer issue, or becoming contributers/staffers in the fall. We are looking for columnists, reporters, staff writers, editors, artists, technical advisors, webmasters etc to help keep the Commentator on top of its game. If you like what we do and want to join in on the fun, show up.

Poor college students. We are constantly being exploited, whether by Joe Francis, of Girls Gone Wild fame, credit card companies, or The Man. Now we’ve got another exploiter, in the form of internships.

Sonia Smith, a former intern, writes a terrible — TERRIBLE — piece of drivel for her former Mas’ah, Slate.com. This is some real sub-par high school journalism shit here.

 Slate was great (honest!), but I’d have much preferred a paycheck to the course credit. … But fulfillment won’t put money in your pocket. The credit I got for my internship was one of 19 that I accumulated above my school’s required number. And the credits are worthless for a lot of students: Because of the rise of Advanced Placement exams, savvy overachieving freshman (the same ones who tend to chase after internships) enter college with more credit hours than any previous generation.

 Yes, Sonia, that sounds awful. But here’s the catch: We’d all like to make vast amounts of money for the work we do. However, there are trade-offs that we make in life. These trade-offs can often be measured in opportunity costs. Getting an internship at a high powered company may not fill your pockets with gold bullion, but it will add an impressive line to your resume and allow you to network with professional mucky-mucks, some of whom might find some space in their on-line publication for your ignorant whining.

Smith isn’t the first to deride internships. Anya Kamenetz, author of the apparently abysmal Generation Debt, has been making a career out of it. Go to her blog and weep tears of anger. Anya Kamenetz is like an Ailee Slater with a book deal and professional cred. Will Wilkinson says all that needs to be said about Kamenetz here (hat tip: The Agitator)

 So I wonder, if internships are so terrible, why do college students apply for them? Or do I not understand Kamenetz and Smith’s point altogether?

Man, it’s, like, totally bullshit that we college students have to work within this capitalist system that exploits us so that these rich weasels can simply get richer. What we need to do is unionize the youth, and topple the power structures that feed the dominant paradigm … Oh, shit, I’m late for my brunch date with Jann Wenner at Le Cirque.

There must be people who read this blog who have gotten internships while in college. How were your experiences, and did you find them helpful in the future?

Will our long national nightmare never be over?

Step one: follow link. Step two: observe argument that Insurgent violates “harassment” clause of Student Conduct Code:

Harassment is prohibited at the University based on race, gender, religion and other characteristics if it involves “specifically insulting another person in his or her immediate presence with abusive words or gestures when a reasonable person would expect that such act would cause emotional distress or provoke a violent response,” according to the code.

Step three: regard text within bold tags. Step four: go about your day, leaving the Insurgent unmolested, because there is no fucking way that they have violated this portion of the Student Conduct Code.

Meanwhile, Senator (and law student) Wally Hicks provides a quote that’s either sinister or hilarious, depending on your tastes:

With Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito on the bench, I would hesitate to assume anything right now with regard to obscenity… Obscenity is always arguable to some degree or another.

Get it? They’re conservatives! So of course they’ll be on board for this idiotic fishing expedition! Make no mistake, it is in the best interests of nobody for the ASUO to start selectively enforcing a nebulously-defined obscenity standard. Even if Hicks is correct that the Insurgent could be judged “obscene” - and I don’t think he is, or at least I hope he isn’t - this would set an incredibly bad precedent for the University.

I wrote this post’s headline as a joke, but now it’s making me wonder: it would be amusing for someone to file a grievance asserting that the Insurgent actually is guilty of treason. I’m starting to think it would receive serious consideration, particularly once someone explains to Dallas Brown that organizing a public execution might get him on the news.

The University of Oregon’s own Department of Public Safety (which ‘the Ol Dirty informs us “is like a police department for the campus,” a claim akin to saying the ASUO is like a government for students) is trying to get themselves some Tasers. According to this Emerald article, the “attempted murder” of two DPS officers who were nearly drowned in the Millrace by a 52 year-old man two months ago both is and is not the motivating factor in the move to “explore the possibility of arming campus public safety officers with Tasers.” It appears as if “Our pepper spray didn’t work this one time” is all the argument that DPS has to make to bring a “less-lethal” weapon which raises serious medical questions to our campus. Hopefully the Administration realizes that making DPS feel more like “real cops” is not worth the inevitable fiasco when some undertrained campus goon zaps the wrong kid, or someone with a heart condition.

Stumbled upon the story on Captain’s Quarters and reported by the NYT:

The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s policies and internal administration.

“Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement,” the committee that compiled the standards wrote in its proposals.

It goes on… the tales of infighting on the board are rather fun. It’ll be interesting to see if the ACLU, which usually defends free speech (granted, they generally only defend speech they don’t disagree with), will impose restrictions on the speech of board members. They’ll certainly lose credibility among some people, but the unwashed masses will probably never notice.

After the jump, I’m going to flog this dead horse a little more.

(more…)

I must admit that when I asked for all future Christian proselytizing in our comment section to be done in rhyming verse, my expectations were not that high. (Although I’m sure there are some inadvertent haikus there, written in ALL CAPS.) Imagine my delight, then, at finding this today, courtesy of Heath:

O prudent men of Catholic faith
Cease from your plaint of wrong
And save up all your vitriol
For wicked Bishop Spong

Who, Wednesday come, at half past sept,
Will preach upon your grounds
His déclassée apostasy
In pleasant but vain sounds.

If you would please our Lord above,
Forget the “art” they ran,
(Which does but show that Christ was here,
Both fully God and man.)

Instead but love our Mother Church,
Reject Spong’s heresy,
Hearken to our Lord Cantuar,
(Archbish, M.Phil, Div.D)

Déclassé apostate that I am, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but somebody please give that man a medal.

I pass this story along without comment.

(Hat tip: Tim Blair.)

To cleanse the palate after all this exposure to Aroused Jesus and paranoid Insurgent rants about Catholicism, try this. As someone who tries to have as little to do with religion as possible, I found it highly informative.

(Link via Jane Galt.)

…Senators have approved several special funding requests, often for campus groups to have pizza.

Credit where it’s due: I think this is really good stuff. Maybe the ODE editorial board works better when they’re all pissed off about people demanding that they fire their reporters.

Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Charles Martinez, in the ODE:

[O]ur graduates will go out into a world that is much more diverse than Oregon, and we have a responsibility to educate them in an environment that will enhance their ability to compete in the ‘global marketplace.’

Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, but I think if I were an Oregonian - diverse or non-diverse - the phrasing of this would come a bit close to “you’re a bunch of hicks” for my liking. (Also, and I feel churlish even pointing this out, there is nowhere even the slightest indication of how the efforts of the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity will enhance the ability of the benighted non-diverse masses to compete in the ‘global marketplace.’ As near as I can figure, it’s some sort of osmotic process involving physical proximity to the diverse.)

For a refreshing change of tone, everyone who hasn’t done so already should check out Bill Harbaugh’s diversity blog, as linked by Michael below. Problems are stated. Policies are suggested. And - this is the good bit - the applicability of the latter to the former is addressed:

We would like to see some specific goals, some plans for achieving them, some evidence these plans will work, and some estimates of the cost. The current diversity plan does not even include a reference, footnote or bibliography. I can’t find even one mention of how the proposed ideas have worked at other universities. There is no discussion of costs, no estimate of how many people will be helped, or of the tradeoffs. The plan we are preparing will do our best to document these things.

You know, Diversity!

I, and others, went to the diversity plan open session on Friday, and I’ve been meaning to share my thoughts on the subject, but have been too busy.

There were a large number of faculty there. Of those who spoke, a large portion were from overseas. Of the people attending who were not part of the diversity plan committee, the opinions were largely against the proposed diversity plan.

There was some choice commentary from some of the people in attendence. My favorite was a short story about how Russia was lost to communism due to people talking about diversity and righting things with the serfs after they were freed in Russia.

“Stop this now, before it is too late,” was the passionate end to another anti-plan speech.

And there was talk of elephants in the room. To the Republicans on campus: There are some faculty members here who understand that intellectual and political diversity is valuable. Everyone in the room was treated to Prof. Bill Harbaugh’s brief report on the current state of Political Diversity at the UO.

Among the definitions of Cultural Competence that has been circulated: “Cultural Competency: Cacophonic Clause Created to Clear Campus of Conservatives.”

Several people asked the Vice Provost if he could name a budget figure for his office. He could not or would not. He stated that if anyone sent him an email asking for the figure, he would provide it. I have sent such an email and have been assured by an administrative assistant that the figure will be provided to me tomorrow or the next day.

I’ll have more soon enough. Stay tuned.

The ODE’s Nick Wilbur receives the highest honour a journalist can ask for, courtesy of Alex Deley. (About whom I know nothing, except that some lunatic in our comment section recently referred to him as a “doush”.)

Wilbur has demonstrated himself to be the worst kind of yellow journalist — willing to distort the truth to provide ammunition for his own personal vendettas and the news department of the Emerald has demonstrated gross incompetence in actually reporting the news. I call upon the Emerald to do the responsible thing and sack Wilbur.

Something tells me this probably isn’t going to happen.

Speaking of lunatics and comment sections, check this link again for a battle royale between

These are the people who offend me and require censorship, not some cartoonist.

and

To those responsible for the Insurgent, I demand an apology for your ridiculous and insulting behavior or I will do my best to seek a criminal trial against you.

Hm. Reading this, I’m beginning to worry that the ODE might be deliberately headhunting all the craziest comment-section denizens. Can we afford to allow a lunacy gap? Scott Austin, are you still - and I mean this in every possible sense - out there?