If you picked up the Register Guard today, you probably noticed the headline “Council high on downtown ideas“. Somebody down at the RG must have been having a chuckle, or else they’ve never been downtown.

But I can see why they must have thought the city council was high. The story is about the multitude of proposals being considered by the council for developing downtown Eugene. Here’s the lead:

Condos. A four-screen movie theater. Restaurants. A grocery store. Even a 24-hour newsstand.

The Eugene City Council on Wednesday liked all of those ideas and more for revitalizing two blocks in the heart of downtown.

A 24-hour newsstand? God, they must have been baked. “Imagine, like, a newsstand … a newsstand that you can go to anytime, and the guy there will tell you what the news is, like, right at that moment. Whoa.” However, these were just a few of the 123 recomendations submitted by the West Broadway Advisory Committee, all of which sound totally awsome when you’re stoned. (more…)

Yes, we know that all the jumps go to the wrong page, but it was an executive decision to leave it as is. Enjoy.

 UPDATE: The new and improved summer issue is posted. You will be able to tell it’s the new one from the great new table of contents - now it zig-zags! Also, we fixed the jumps, most spelling errors, although we left a few in honor of the Bad Spelling artical in Best of, and after much thought even fixed Tim’s name.  Cheers.

As if the UO Athletic Department wasn’t already having PR issues, now their public face has been suspended for next weeks home game against Fresno State for delivering this brutal smackdown to the Houston Cougar. No word yet on why the Duck decided to run wild on the Cougar, nor why he felt compelled to savagely teabag his hapless victim as he lay quivering on the turf of Autzen Stadium. Needless to say, this comes as a blow to the ASUO’s much-vaunted (by them) “Classy Fan Initiative.”

Watch the Ducks teabag the Michigan Wolverines today at 12:30 on ABC.

Edit: If you missed this, it was quite the teabagging. Go Ducks!

In case you didn’t know, Leonardo DiCaprio has a new ecological documentary coming our titled the “11th Hour”. It is supposedly bad. Supremely bad. How bad? Well, when the co-founder of Greenpeace is calling your film a fraud you know that you’ve got a problem on your hands.

As a lifelong environmentalist, I say trees can solve many of the world’s sustainability challenges. Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials. Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, DiCaprio and Berman ought to promote the growth of more trees and the use of more wood. …

DiCaprio’s movie, The 11th Hour, is another example of anti-forestry scare tactics, this time said to be ‘brilliant and terrifying’ by James Christopher of the London Times.

…everyone else and their little brother is weighing in on the Phil Knight donation and Academics vs. Athletics generally, over at the Register-Guard blog. Everyones favorite nutty professor even stops by to raise the level of discourse by claiming that Frohnmayer supports drunk driving and therefore only pretends to dislike Fanconi Anemia.

Now where were we? Oh yeah… why doesn’t Phil Knight just give every professor at the UO half a mil each? Wouldn’t that be better?

So, we’ve been getting lots of late night, pro-DPS advocacy in our comments sections lately, as has the ODE. Interestingly enough, all of these comments have come from UO computers too, leading one to believe that perhaps DPS staff have been a little, erm, distracted from their duties of late. We had no idea how bad things had become though. A new blog, This Turkey Is Done has appeared, as a countdown to the departure of the unloved current interim director of DPS, Richard Turkiewicz. It features such stunning critiques as photo comparisons to an actual turkey, and excessive use of the nickname “Dick.”

The best part? An admonition to

“be sure to leave comments here from your home computer on your own time.”

What a bunch of pros!

Shame on you for clicking on this link.

This story comes from the Honolulu Star Bulletin. Besides regulating wardrobe malfunctions, the FCC also licenses broadcast stations and distributes the four-letter call names for stations. For example, the CBS affiliate in Eugene is called KVAL, and the ABC affiliate is KEZI.

Now, the FCC has decided to give a yet-to-air station in Maui the surname KUNT. That’s right. That one word you aren’t supposed to use…ever. The FCC has now decided that it is no longer indecent, going so far as to name one of their stations the dirtiest of dirties. To make matters worse, the FCC has also named a station in Arizona KWTF. Like, “KWTF man? I can’t believe you named a station KUNT.”

I would also like to state that this the first time I have ever come close to writing the “C word” on any public form. The internet is awesome.

Is it a full moon or something? The last couple of days have seen a violent increase in crazy-vibes. For example, if you’ve been paying any attention to the “blogosphere” (god, I shudder everytime I have to use that word), you might have heard about Bill O’Reilly’s crusade against DailyKos, one of the biggest liberal blogs on the Internet. O’Reilly called the blog a “hate site” and compared it to Nazis and the Klu Klux Klan; he also managed to dig up some kooky quotes from the site’s thousands of users and commentors.

Keith Olbermann descended on the situation with barely restrained glee, but he just might be the only person on earth capable of making his task look difficult . C’mon, Olbermann, you’re practically being handed a shotgun and directed to the barrel of fish! Of course, Stephen Colbert wasn’t about to let anyone talk bad about Papa Bear.

But how did DailyKos respond? Well, they did the only responsibe thing and dug up insane posts from users on O’Reilly’s forum! The difference, of course, is that DailyKos is an open forum, whereas O’Reilly’s requires a membership fee. One blogger also wrote this impassioned plea to O’Reilly to call off his vicious attack. To wit:

Please, Bill O’Reilly, spare us from your savage and inexplicable rage. We can’t take any more of it. Being defended by Keith Olbermann… being roundly and sternly publicized by Stephen Colbert… it’s all too much. The extra traffic, the publicity, the footage of your narcissistic tantrums… the subsequent exposure of hate speech and death threats on your pay-to-post blog. How can any liberal website withstand such a well-planned assault?

I guess the moral of the story is the internet is full of completely insane people. Of course, we here at the Commentator were already well aware of that (*cough* Deb Frisch *cough*). Also, I hope everyone enjoys this post because I had to wade through page after page of self-righteous DailyKos musings to put it together. They post about 100 article a day; seriously, they make Proust look minimalist.

Live from Tillamook, I welcome you all to the 4th and everything that goes with it. Remember your founding fathers, remember your troops, and eat meat in their honor…for we don’t know how long we’ll have the freedom we currently have.

Some reading material for you all:

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm

“Of Ann Coulter, Ashley says, ‘She’s someone I would read and admire, and I think she’s correct on most fronts, but I don’t think a whole country of Ann Coulters would be a good idea.’” That is Ashley Delp, president of the UO Network of Enlightened Women (NeW), which “serves as part book club and part activist group for right-leaning women,” in an article in the last Voice of the school year. I have had nightmares about an all-Coulter nation every night since I read this.

NeW calls themselves feminists, “though hesitantly,” opposes abortion, opposes the Vagina Monologues and thinks the radical feminists “took a good thing and ruined it.” I’ll give you abortion, but calling the women’s suffragist movement a good thing is too radical for me. What really grinds my gears about the article was this quote by Holly York, “Chivalry being dead is a disappointment and a bad reflection on society.” Pardon me Miss York, you are cordially invited to come to EMU 319; I’ll show you that chivalry ain’t dead.

So, two days behind the curve is pretty untimely by blogosphere standards, but I just had to blog this. CNN anchor, xenophobe and sensationalist, Lou Dobbs is under fire this week for, get this,  exaggerating leprosy statistics and blaming his reported increases on illegal immigrants. The whole story is here, including a comprehensive debunking of Mr. Dobbs’ fearmongering bridge too far. You know you’ve entered a dark age in politics, when the old “fear the lepers” chestnut makes a comeback. Oh, and is it surprising that Pat Buchanan has Dobbs’ back on this? Maybe it’s time to consider opening “populist pundit colonies” to cleanse our society of this uncleanliness. (Hat Tip: Hit & Run)

As Radley Balko put it over at Hit and Run, here’s your schadenfreude for the day. The son of AM radio’s arbiter of morality, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, is under investigation for his MySpace page, which apparently contained

“cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets” (From the Salt Lake Tribune)

What could possibly make this any better? Deryk Schlessinger is currently deployed with the U.S. Army in Khandahar, Afghanistan, where he is currently engaged in God’s work, as he explains on his MySpace Blog:

“I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.” 

Of course, there’s always the chance that the preachiest bitch in America didn’t mother a moral monster who posted images of a top-hatted man laughing as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family, and a man forcing a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life on his MySpace page. Maybe, just maybe, the terrorists did it?  According to Army spokesman Robert Tallman, “it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this. Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace, and sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Laura is keeping quiet on the subject, preferring of course to tell other people how to raise good children. Although, this little blog post has more than a hint of irony about it now.  Unless of course, this is an Al Qaeda smear job… in which case, their PR people are just nasty.

After Jethro Higgins’ tiresome whining about the oppression of Christians, this actually sounds credible (well, funny, anyway). Bias Response Team, Go! To the Leftorium!

Former Daily Emerald Columnist, Former ASUO Executive Candidate, and International Man Of Controversy, Ty Schwoeffermann has been awarded the Ebony Man Of The Year award by the Black Women of Achievement. One could go crazy with the links on this one, but you should start at the ODE archive and read some of Ty’s work for context, then read this, this and this. Having read the incredibly flattering ODE piece on his receiving the award, I’m still not entirely sure why he deserves it, besides generate controversy. Ty’s a nice guy if you talk to him, but his writing this year has been heavy on the rhetoric and light on the common sense, clear goals, and results achieved. In fact, his greatest achievement this year might well be his inspiration of more ODE guest commentaries than anyone else. I’ll give him props for sparking debate, and inspiring participation, but the means to that end were not particularly award-worthy.