Recently, in reading a bit about some of the 2008 presidential candidates, I came upon a disturbing couple of quotes. Reports the National Review: “Crane says he was disappointed with Romney’s answer to his question the other night. Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind. Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.”

This is in line with actions of the current administration since the Sept. 11 attacks. The Imperial Presidency, to put it nicely. Another adjective might be dictatorial.

You see, when you are in power, you are infallible. It is impossible for you to be wrong about anything. You see, you can arrest anyone, for no reason, and hold them indefinitely, since, you know, you can’t be wrong.

Wait, no, I think I have things backwards. These ideas are repugnant and insane. Not even King George had this kind of power when the colonists rebelled against them, and it seems to be one the U.S.’s mainstream political stances today.

Specifically, this stance nullifies the writ of habeus corpus, often called The Great Writ, on the pretenses of national security. This writ allows the accused to face their accusers in a public setting.

Americans should be appalled that anyone in power holds these beliefs. The idea that the executive can hold anyone it wishes for no explainable reason or charge, and can do so indefinitely, and even in secret, goes against fundamental aspects of our theory of government.

One of the main arguments levied by Republicans against things like universal health care is that governments are inefficient and bloated, and cannot efficiently execute things like a private corporation at the whims of the market can. Governments, they say, are bloated, inefficient, and often wrong.

Yet, these same people hold up the idea that the government should be given a monopoly on power over its people, like the same idea doesn’t apply. I agree with the idea that governments, when left alone to accomplish a task, will probably accomplish it in the least efficient manner possible. This can be combated, however, with transparency and oversight by the press and the people.

There is no transparency in habeus cases. Detainees are, mostly, complete secrets. The press is occasionally allowed into Guantanamo hearings, but evidence is classified, even for the detainees themselves. Stories about detainees released have trickled out. One is a satirist who jokingly called for Bill Clinton’s head because of the Lewinsky affair. Another has nothing to do with al-Qaida. His file, filled with CIA reports, even says so, but he is still unreleased, since he and his lawyer can’t even see it.

These are the reasons the writ of habeus corpus was created–so that the wrongfully accused can get reviewed and get out, and, if you’re guilty, then we will find you so. You know, through the justice system, and not the whims of the executive.

Skipping back to the top, the idea that “smart lawyers” are required for Mitt Romney to know if he should favor or oppose this idea is ludicrous, and Giuliani? Well, he’s just going to use it a little bit, how nice of him.

And transparency? If there was real transparency here, we would all accept the horrible allegations of torture thrown out by released as fact, or know that they are lies. We would know if our government is actually attaching electrodes to people, and pouring menstrual blood on prisoners, and wrapping muslims in the Israeli flag, and putting out cigarettes on prisoners. If these things aren’t true, why can’t we look and see? Why all the secrecy?

This terrible tear of authoritarianism present in our government has got to stop. Sept. 11, 2001 was a tragic day, but if we throw out all the things that make our country great, then we’ve given the perpetrators of those attacks exactly what they wanted.

TRAVELING STUDENTS REGRET LUNCH DECISION

MANSFIELD, Ark. – Four journalism students returning to Lafayette from a convention in Fayetteville, Ark. regretted their decision to dine at a Sonic drive-in.

The students said they only faced the overwhelming greasiness of the cuisine because they were traveling through what they described as “hick country” and were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find another restaurant for another several hours of driving.

Upon leaving the Sonic, the students found a Subway restaurant 30 seconds later.

“Well, everyone, just puke it up, and we can eat again,” suggested Chad West, who ate a chili-cheese coney.

Reportedly, no one took him up on the suggestion.

PAPER PLACED UNDER DESK TO PREVENT WOBBLE

This week during a calculus class at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a desk in the university’s Maxim-Doucet Hall was hastily repaired by an inventive student by placing a folded-up piece of paper under the offending desk’s leg. The desk was reportedly suffering from a slight wobbling affliction that had plagued the seat for several weeks, a mildly irritating quirk to occupants of its curvaceous, buttocks-comforting expanse.

“I was annoyed by the rocking when I shifted positions,” said Jesse Landreaux, a mechanical engineering student at UL Lafayette, “so I took repairs into my own hands.”

Using skills of logic and construction gleaned from his classes as a student of engineering, Landreaux said he noticed the rocking phenomenon, and began to survey his materials at hand. Deciding that a cylindrical object like a pen was impractical, it suddenly dawned on him to make a standard sheet of loose leaf paper much thicker through a series of vigorous folding actions.

“It’s much easier to pay attention in class now,” he said.

Ernest Aquayitz, Landreaux’s adviser in the mechanical engineering department at UL Lafayette, said he was proud of his student’s accomplishment and critical thinking skills.

“That right there is resume material,” he said, grinning widely.

“It’s not unusual to see unusual feats of invention in the face of slight irritation,” said Susan Q. Crosby, Ph.D., a behavioural scientist at the University of Toronto who specializes in sudden bursts of brain activity in college students. “It’s not entirely unsurprising that a student was able to solve such a dilemma instead of paying attention in math class.”

Antoine Lacrimose, the UL Lafayette physical plant’s specialist dealing with student seating repairs, said a permanent mend for the desk may be in the works.

“We’ve written out a grant for the monetary resources, and are currently working on correspondence and approval with President Authement, the Board of Regents, the College of Mathematics, and the International Board of Standards for Collegiate Posterior Accommodations,” he said. “Hopefully a more permanent fix can be implemented by the end of the fiscal year.”

DROOL SPOT WIPED FROM DESK

A University of Louisiana at Lafayette student, who has requested to remain anonymous, reportedly wiped a voluminous drool spot from the northwest region of his desk in room 527 of Griffin Hall.

The student said he fell asleep during a particularly boring history lecture following a large lunch at local eatery/copy shop Campus Copies.

“I just couldn’t keep my eyes open,” said the deep-voiced student, sitting with a dark shadow draped over her head and shoulders during the anonymous interview. “The next thing I knew, there was a puddle of my own saliva working its way down toward my note

“I saw the spot,” said Mary-Meredith Davies, a history major present in the classroom. “It was really big and gross, and also the spit was thick and mucus-like.”

“It’s not unusual for students to fall asleep during my lectures,” said Chet Rzadkiewicz, Ph.D., a history professor at UL Lafayette. “What was unusual was the size of the drool puddle. I was astonished at its elephantine size.”

“The size reported is quite interesting,” said Phyllis Albert, a biology professor specializing in sleep habits. “Generally, one would only see that amount of salival discharge in a comfortable, deep sleep.”

Albert hypothesized that the student must have been dreaming about something really appealing to produce the spot.

AUTHEMENT HYPOTHESIZED TO BE CYBORG CONSTRUCT

Top University of Louisiana at Lafayette administration officials, speaking on the condition of pseudonym usage, have relayed their suspicions that University President Ray P. Authement is actually some sort of advanced cyborg construct.

“I’ve seen him occasionally have very jerky movements near the end of a workday,” said one official.

“I once saw him down an entire package of double-A batteries while sitting in traffic,” said a second official.

An anonymous maintenance official said he had a standing monthly appointment to deliver three gallons of oil and a dozen car batteries to the basement of the President’s mansion.

The maintenance official said that each month, the basement is empty, and he has never been given a reason for their delivery.

Authement and his wife drive two cars which do not utilize the same kind of battery delivered to the basement.

SGA PRESIDENT SURVIVES NINJA ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

Student Government Association President Claire Pettit has reportedly fended off a ninja assassination attempt thanks to two dudes she characterized as “bad.”

Pettit said she was walking from SGA offices in Coronna Hall to her vehicle at the Student Union when a cadre of ninjas, reportedly clad in black and wielding katanas, appeared in front of Pettit.

They walked up to her, she said, and demanded she come with them.

“I was so afraid,” she said. “I tried to run away, and they pinned me to the ground and began to tie up my hands with rope.”

According to Pettit, at this point, two men in what she described as matching red and blue “wife beaters” appeared and began to engage the ninjas in fist-fights.

Pettit said the men bested the ninjas easily, despite their lack of weapons or armor.

The University Police Department said it has no information on where the ninjas came from, or what they might have wanted with Pettit.

Computer science and computer animation students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have access to even higher technology now that the new computer science building is open: A full motion capture laboratory.

The lab, located on the first floor of the new facility, is unique in the state of Louisiana. It will allow students to dress up in a special black body suit, covered in strategically located white spheres, and capture animation for use in video game development and computer animation production.

“It’s about $100,000 worth of eight-megapixel cameras from Vicon,” said Jared Chambliss, a computer science graduate student. “Most of their products are used not in the game development area, but [...] for bioinformatics companies to analyze movement.”

The red light-emitting motion capture cameras follow the movement of the white spheres against the black backdrop.

“Basically, all those little sensor dots,” said David Ducrest, a computer science major who is using the lab for one of his projects. “The camera will track them in 3D space.”

The orbs are placed on strategic locations corresponding with bones and joints all over the body, allowing for computers to interpret bodily movements.

“We can associate these dots with different bones in the body,” said Ducrest.

The files generated at then mapped to computer models. The result is eerily accurate animation superimposed on students’ digital creations.

“You can say, ‘I want this bone to affect these polygons,’” said Ducrest. “So when this bone moves, those polygons are going to move.”

Tim Roden, Ph.D., the professor in charge of the equipment, said that because the equipment is new, students and faculty in the department are still learning the nuances of its operation. He demonstrated a figure dancing which was captured in the lab, noting a few minute problems in the animation he was working on.

“In the game class I’m teaching now, most people have a terrain with some trees and rocks, and a sky and a waterfall, and stuff like that,” said Roden, who is teaching CMPS 427, a class that will use the lab, “but there’s no people walking around. The next step in the class, now that we have this equipment, one of the assignments is going to be to get a character or a monster walking around. They’ll go in the motion capture lab and record their own data.”

Chambliss said that if the department needed to capture larger scenes, the tripod-based setup of the lab allowed them to move the system anywhere they needed to.

Roden said the computer science department would be open to allow any group on campus to use the lab once the department had the lab fully operational.

“Using a motion capture system is part of the education for animation,” said Yeon Choi, an art professor who teaches computer animation. “For the senior students, when they do the senior project, I’m sure a lot of students are going to find it very useful.”

She said that the system would not take work away from her students.

“After we use the motion system, we still need to fix a lot of things,” she said. “To be able to get natural movements, a lot of times we have to work for 80 hours. With the motion capture system, it can be done quickly, although there’s some cleanup jobs. It’s very exciting news.”

Roden said that a graduate-level course, entertainment computing, would be using the equipment this fall.

“Normal, average art and computer students will be able to use this to do animation,” said Chambliss. “They can come in and put on a fun little suit with reflective markers on it, and instead of having to sit there and hand-animate a foot moving, they can just move their foot or dance around, and be able to export that data into a 3D model to get a more fluid range of motion.”

Students in the College of the Arts, with the help of Scott Shall, an architecture professor, have created the streetURCHIN, an unholy marriage of plastic bags, bottles and rubber bands that come together to form a cheaply constructed dome-shaped shelter for the homeless. Their work is currently on display at the A+D Gallery in Chicago.

“We challenged the students to design an urban tent for Chicago’s homeless that was dryer, stronger and safer than the ones they currently use,” said Shall. He said students could only construct the tents out of materials from the dumpster, and the instructions had to be simple and able to be conveyed without words.

The result was the streetURCHIN.

“It’s a new way to approach materials,” said Kevin Dumatrait, an architecture student who worked on the streetURCHIN. “Kind of look at refuse, and trash, and realize how they have some kind of potential.”

Shall said the exhibit was in place in the front window of the gallery, and that the response has been “great.”

The structure itself is one of plastic bags and bottles held together by rubber bands. It forms a large dome that a homeless person could take shelter under. The streetURCHIN is designed to protect from both the wind and the rain. The entire thing can be constructed from what is essentially garbage

Shall said that the entire project took students only five weeks to complete it.

Shall said that the streetURCHIN would be on display in the Dean’s Gallery on the second floor of Fletcher Hall from April 13 to April 20, and that all students are invited to come view it.

He said that rather than shipping the original streetURCHIN to the exhibit in Chicago, students came up with a set of instructions that challenged museum patrons to take one of the instruction sheets and work with a homeless person to construct a shelter.

“We asked them to hang the instruction manuals in this kind of grid, so that you could see as people took them away so it’s kind of a performance piece in that regard,” said Shall. “You can see how people think about it. They’re looking at these things; they’re not sure whether to take them or not.”

Shall said that some students were currently working on what he called “version 2.0″ of the project, which was making a suitable floor from the same materials that could be used in conjunction with the urchin to protect from the cold ground.

Shall said the gallery’s administrators contacted him about displaying work from his International Design Clinic after seeing student work displayed in Romania. The IDC, which describes itself as “guerilla architecture and humanitarian design,” is an organization that aspires to help students enhance the lives of the less fortunate around the world.

IDC was also involved in Project Playhouse, a benefit for the Healing House of Lafayette which constructed three playhouses that were auctioned off for charity.

Shall said students were currently involved in another project to help the Healing House, and will eventually take a summer trip to India in 2008 to build portable schoolhouses.

Mandy Trahan’s walls are lime green and adorned with artwork. An iPod serenades her from a set of speakers with a “morning playlist.” Little here would clue observers in to Trahan’s occupation: She’s a landman.

“The profession–if you’re in it, you’re called a landman,” she said, from a Jefferson Street office accented with an over-sized beanbag chair. “People always make a joke, and say, ‘Well, aren’t you a landlady? Aren’t you a landwoman?’ That’s not proper terminology. If you’re male or female, you’re still a landman, and I hope that it never changes.”

Trahan, a student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, owns her own petroleum land brokerage company, Mantra Land Services. Here she works as a landman, where she works with oil and gas companies to research and negotiate for the use of land in on-shore drilling projects.

Though she has been working a full-time job, Trahan, 31, has also been at least a part-time student. After high school, she said she spent a few semesters in college and decided it wasn’t for her–at least at the time.

“I didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted to do at the young age of 18 or 19,” said Trahan. “I wasn’t really focused on my grades. They were really in the toilet.”

Trahan said after she left school and became a landman, she still didn’t return to school because “the money was so great,” and she didn’t need to return.

“[Being a landman] was a job I stumbled into,” she said. “It didn’t really hold any particular meaning to me, and I felt like not finishing school was just unfinished business.”

Trahan said she felt like a college degree was just “something she needed to have,” so she went back to school, eventually ending up as an English literature major after trying her hand at general studies, political science and journalism.

“I really just picked it based on what classes were available and what didn’t require a lot of math,” she said, laughing. “I guess I gravitated toward English classes because I always loved reading and I always loved literature, and I always came away from those courses with a deeper understanding of, I guess, life in general.”

“I think some people probably wonder,” she said, “‘What’s an oil field girl doing in a class like this?’”

Trahan said she had been encouraged by some of her professors to continue writing and pursue further education, but she planned to continue her career as a landman for at least the immediate future. She said the company she founded, Mantra, was less than a year old, and it is “really building up steam.” Eventually, she said, would return to the university and pursue a master’s degree, but for now she and collegiate life would go their separate ways.

Trahan said that her life as a landman in the “real world” was worlds apart from the life and perspective of the average English major she shared classes with.

“It’s a totally different universe,” she said. “I would probably have skipped lunch that day, because I was under pressure to finish a certain tract of land, get the contract prepared, get the check cut, drive out to the country, get the thing signed, rush back in, barely make it to class, and I’d gone through this really stressful, pragmatic intensified real-world day, where we were really trying to accomplish something, we were trying to build this rig, and we were trying to find the petroleum and market it.

“It was this heavy-handed, industrial sort of process that we were working as a part of, and I’d get to class, and they would be talking about all these sort of really out-there, nebulous topics, like transcendentalism. [...] It was just really strange, and I thought just as much as I couldn’t comprehend some of what they were talking about, because I didn’t have the vocabulary and history, they would have had no idea what it would be like to be in the real world, working really hard to accomplish a pragmatic task. It was fun, though.”

She said she had to drop many of her classes because she ended up working on high-profile high-pressure projects, and couldn’t handle the workload, but she persevered.

“Because my job was so demanding,” she said, “sometimes I could take one class per semester, sometimes as many as three, but that was about max.”

Trahan is currently in her last semester at UL Lafayette, and enrolled in her final class: English 327, or script writing. She said her college career has taken her 21 semesters over 14 years, including her post-high school semesters.

Trahan said she would miss her classes, as they really “add another dimension” to her life, and she enjoyed having them as a “hobby.”

“If I can do it, anybody can do it,” she said.

Ignignokt is a mooninite. You may recognize him from the Cartoon Network series “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” You may also recognize him as a character flipping you off on a series of Lite Brite-esque boards left around 10 major cities around the U.S. If you do, you also know that Boston was the only city that overreacted and assumed the lightboards were, in fact, improvised explosive devices.

This entire incident, which unfolded last Tuesday, on Jan. 31, encompasses several levels of stupid. The first and least dumb are the guys at Turner Broadcasting, and the marketing company involved, Interference, Inc. It wasn’t exactly the most brilliant marketing plan, a bunch of pseudo-Lite Brites, but they’re fun and look cool at night.

To the people who thought the lightboards looked suspicious: I understand. They were off during the day, after all. Not everyone knows what the compositions of various electronics are, and because one of them was hanging on a bridge, I can understand calling the police out of concern.

The police are where the story gets truly ludicrous. Once they got a close look at even one of these, they should’ve realized exactly what this was: An advertisement. The only thing that makes it different from a neon sign advertising Bud Light is that no one knows what a mooninite is. The similarities with an explosive device found by the Boston police are batteries, wires and electrical tape. Discounting the electrical tape, these are items found in nearly every electronic device ever sold.

The media also displayed a huge amount of irresponsibility in characterizing this story. They constantly referred to the lightboards as “packages” or “devices” or other ominous words, as well as continuing to refer to the events as a “bomb hoax” well after Turner had issued their apology. The 24 hours news networks, running low on 2008 presidential candidates to interview and casualties to report in Iraq, latched onto the story and gave it nonstop coverage. Even after it had been discovered that this was at best an amusing anecdote involving an advertising campaign, they continued to talk about it like there was an actual threat to society.

Of course, the authorities in Boston were equally asinine in handling the egg on their faces after they discovered they had closed down a waterway and countless major roads over a cartoon advertisement. They arrested a pair hired to put up the advertisements, charging the pair with “placing a hoax device to incite panic,” and claiming the two were trying to “get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location.”

This is, of course, absurd. Anyone with half a brain and any knowledge of electronics could tell that these things were completely harmless, Turner is saying they’re harmless, and well, if I was a terrorist, would I be placing flashing cartoon characters flipping people off on my bombs? Well, according to Massachusetts Attorney General, the boards “had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires.” I feel so safe that Boston’s finest are on the case here. After all, the lightboards had only been in place for around two weeks.

There is a more serious side to this, though. Boston Mayor Tom Menino applauded the actions of the law enforcement agencies in his town, and denouncing the advertisements, saying that “it is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme.” Mr. Mayor, I would charge that if we are so scared that we are running away from neon signs of cartoon characters, and condemning any sort of freeform public expression, the terrorists have indeed won.

I feel like this incident, no matter how asinine and hilarious it is on the outside, illustrates precisely the kind of damage that was truly caused to this country on Sept. 11, 2001. Days after the attack, the Congress gave up countless freedoms and civil liberties in the name of keeping us “safe.” After a purported plot to blow up airplanes with liquid bombs, we lost the ability to carry our own beverages onto airplanes. That plot has since been revealed to be a bomb scare without bombs, or even the intent to bomb, but the rules still stand. On Oct. 17, 2006, we gave up the most essential liberty granted to us, in the form of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denies U.S. citizens the right to habeus corpus if the president or secretary of defense wish it to be so.

And for what? To protect our freedoms from terrorists.

It’s sad that Turner Broadcasting is paying a reported $2 million in fines for breaking no laws at all. It sets a terrible precedent that apparently a cool two million is the only way to have free speech, however silly your message is. However, I would guess that $2 million is cheap for advertising of this magnitude.

However ridiculous and reactionary it was, the arrest of the pair produced the best thing to come out of this debacle. The two emerged from their arraignment into a press conference, but refused to answer any reporters questions that did not deal with haircuts from the 1970s, perfectly punctuating how ridiculous everyone in a position of power was acting in relation to the situation. It’s too bad I wasn’t there, or I would’ve asked them how David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” mullet went from being an androgynous glam-rock icon to the manly redneck icon it is today.

Note:  Super proud of this. Beat the local paper to the story. Hot scoop!

The former head of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette political science department, Donn Kurtz, Ph.D., has stepped down following allegations of sexual harassment in a complaint, civil lawsuit and criminal charges levied by a former student, Kelly May, who graduated in May 2006.

May, a graduate of the political science department, has filed a civil charge against Kurtz, UL Lafayette, the board of supervisors of the University of Louisiana system and the state of Louisiana. The suit, filed on Nov. 3, claims that “plaintiff, Kelly May, was subjected to a pattern of conduct in violation of her civil rights and human rights, caused by unreasonable intrusions into the most private and confidential subjects by Donn M. Kurtz, II, individually and in the course and scope of his employment.”

A criminal charge has also been filed with the Lafayette City Police Department. It was transferred to the UL Lafayette Police Department, where it is currently under investigation. The initial report reads that May alleges “that her former advisor touched her breast on several occasions over a two-and-a-half year period,” and that the most recent occurence was on Nov. 4, 2005.

The civil suit reads, “in the Fall of 2003, in one of her sessions with her advisor, Donn M. Kurtz, II, the defendant, inappropriately touched and fondled plaintiff’s breasts while he was alone with her in her office.” It then alleges that Kurtz touched May “inappropriately virtually every time he advised her in his office while they were alone,” and claims this continued until November 2005.

It goes on to accuse Kurtz of “assault, battery, sexual assault and sexual battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, through reckless and outrageous offensive conduct exemplified by a pattern of conduct and particular incidents unwelcomed, non-consensual assault, battery, sexual assault, and sexual battery.”

“There has been an allegation by a former student concerning Dr. Kurtz’s behavior, which is currently under investigation by the university,” said David Barry, Ph.D. and dean of the College of Liberal Arts. Barry said the complaint with the university was filed at some point after May’s graduation in May 2006.

Kurtz, who had served as the department head since at least 2000, stepped down following the accusation, and was replaced by his predecessor, Janet Frantz, Ph.D. Kurtz is still listed as the department head on certain sections of the UL Lafayette Web site. He is currently on medical leave for the rest of the semester, according to students in one of his former classes.

According to Barry, an internal complaint relating to the matter is currently under investigation by Patricia Cottonham, associate dean of students at UL Lafayette. Cottonham, Kurtz, Frantz and several faculty members in the department of political science all declined to comment for this story, because of certain restrictions the university has regarding confidentiality for “personnel matters.”

Kurtz graduated from Tulane University in 1971. According to the political science department’s Web site, he was honored with a Faculty Excellence Award given by graduates of Blue Key, an honorary leadership society at UL Lafayette. He has edited a compilation of articles about political families and authored a text on Louisiana supreme courts and their interaction with U.S. justices.

More and more college students, as well as people in general, are getting news from comedy programs such as Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”

According to figures in 2005, “The Daily Show” garners about 1.4 million viewers nightly. Neilsen ratings put the show’s median viewer age at 35, much younger than traditional nightly news broadcasts.

“There have been a couple academic studies recently of those shows, where researchers study the actual news content in those shows compared to the broadcast news media,” said Rick Swanson, Ph.D., a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “They discovered there was just as much actual news content – news information – given by “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” as there are in the actual news media broadcasts. And so, believe it or not, students are learning just as much about the news as they would be if they were watching a mainstream news outlet.”

The study, completed this year by Julia Fox, a telecommunications professor at Indiana University, showed that “The Daily Show” had about as much hard information during the 2004 presidential campaign as the average nightly news broadcast.

“It is clearly a humor show, first and foremost,” Fox said about “The Daily Show.” “But there is some substance on there, and in some cases, like John Edwards announcing his candidacy, the news is made on the show.

“In an absolute sense, we should probably be concerned about both of those sources, because neither one is particularly substantive,” Fox continued. “It’s a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an ‘infotainment’ society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available.”

“Personally, I think that the shows actually do a service,” said Swanson. “A lot of people have attacked or criticized the shows for bringing cynicism to public discourse, but I don’t think that there’s any more cynicism they could have than the bitter partisan fights we have had in recent years. What these shows do, I think, is correctly point out the absurdity in a lot of the claims of both those on the left and the right, and I watch the shows, and you often see that they do ridicule people on the extreme left and the extreme right, in general. What these shows point out is the hypocrisies and the absurdities of the arguments on both the far left and the far right, and I think that’s healthy. Free speech is always healthy, to expose these ideas for what they are.”

“[College students getting their news from “The Daily Show”] doesn’t really worry me,” said Pearson Cross, Ph.D., a political science professor at UL Lafayette. “Frankly, at this point, what you worry more about with getting news in terms of college students is that they don’t get any news, or they’re completely uninvolved. Obviously, Stewart’s show and Colbert are entertainment shows, but if it’s entertainment that gets people interested in what’s going on in the world, then I have no problem with that at all, and frankly, a lot of our news is pretty funny.”

Some college students do rely on the satirical programs as their main source of news.

“It’s really “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that I get my daily update on what’s happening,” said Joshua Daigle, a history major at UL Lafayette who said he had political aspirations. “I try my best to read print, but the thing is–about the Daily Show and the Colbert Report–is that they mostly present facts and they make fun of the facts.”

Daigle said he felt that the shows could be more truthful, because they didn’t have any credibility to lose by being accused of biased.

“For instance,” said Daigle, “when Dick Cheney said there was a link between 9/11 and Iraq, that there was evidence to show that Iraqi agents and Al-Qaida agents had met, and then a few months later, never said that? ‘The Daily Show’ was the only one who could show that, and say they were false. Other news organizations can’t really do that, because they’d be called biased and lose credibility, but ‘The Daily Show’ has its own untouchable credibility. They don’t have anything to lose, so they can report the truth.”

“People are getting their news wherever they can, and it is high time that the professional world and the academics respect that fact, and tailor their teaching and their media to suit,” said William Davie, Ph.D., a broadcasting professor at UL Lafayette. “We come from a sacred temple–in our minds–that suggests the traditional journalist shall never dabble in opinion, bias or even humor without violating his sacred vow to the calling. Nonsense.”

Davie said he felt that “people want to feel good when they read the news. We have forgotten that. We have decided since the news is bad, we want you to feel bad. That is stupid. We have to treat the news more creatively. What does Jon Stewart do? He makes people laugh. He pokes fun at newsmakers. So he is not a traditional journalist. Rumsfeld calls him an opiner. I call him a metajournalist.”

A metajournalist, according to Davie, is “someone who takes the work of traditional journalists and profits from it mightily by either using it for humor, or as Rush Limbaugh does, using it for opining, for commentary. The public likes it. The public is not that offended because its intentionality is clearer.”

Davie also said he felt the traditional journalists have to learn to accept the new “metajournalists,” because it is important that the same accountability for facts apply to both. He said one thing he was worried about was the trivialization of the traditional journalist on opinion programs, because the programs get their material from traditional sources while sometimes mocking the same sources. Davie also said he felt the shows were beneficial in their criticism of mainstream media outlets.

“I just can’t imagine anyone being interested in ‘The Daily Show’ if they weren’t interested in traditional journalism as well,” he said.

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

In October, President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law after rushing it through in the final days of a Republican Congress. The act, ostensibly designed to allow the administration to “facilitate bringing to justice terrorists and other unlawful enemy combatants through full and fair trials by military commissions, and for other purposes,” is one of the most frightening pieces of new legislation I’ve ever seen–and no one seems to care.

The guts of the act are this: President Bush or the secretary of defense can gather up a group of people he selects and declare anyone an “unlawful enemy combatant.” If you are declared an “unlawful enemy combatant,” you lose one of your basic human rights, that of the writ of habeas corpus. Those confusing Latin words allow you get a lawyer, confront your accuser and hear the crimes levied against you after being arrested, as well as for the court to determine whether or not your imprisonment is valid.

According to the Military Commissions Act itself, it only removes the writ if you are not a legal citizen of the United States. Putting aside the fact that if you’re traveling here you could be snatched up, put in a jail somewhere, and never heard of again, how could you prove your own citizenship were you accused of being an “unlawful enemy combatant?” How could you get in front a judge to prove it? Though the Act may pretend it is inapplicable to U.S. citizens, in practice, there is nothing stopping the government from using it on anyone, for no reason at all. All they have to do is decide you qualify as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” a term which has no explicit definition, other than being someone Bush considers outside of the protections of the Geneva Convention.

Of course, the entire reason for the act was that prisoners thrown in the Guantanamo Bay prison facility wanted to know what they were accused of, exactly, and if they were ever going to be given trial. I have no doubt that the place contains some of the scum of the Earth, but there are innocent people in there. Innocent people have been released as the result of now-impossible habeas corpus cases. Do these people somehow not deserve a basic human right that has been in place since the year 1305, simply because they are accused of being involved in a terrorist act?

The Constitution states, “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” As far as I can tell, we are not under invasion, nor rebellion, nor is there a grandiose, uncontainable threat to public safety right now. Terrorism? The 9/11 attacks were preventable with our pre-9/11 intelligence capabilities, had the administration actually paid attention to all those memos.

Before 2006, the only time habeas corpus has been suspended was in the midst of the Civil War, by President Lincoln in response to widespread riots and militia actions. Even then, it was only in small areas of the country that were experiencing chaos, not the entire thing. Should we not be up in arms about this? At the very least, we might be aware of the broad redefinition of the Constitution present here.

Ostensibly, President Bush and his administration are doing their best to defend our country from terrorists attempting to destroy our freedoms. I can scarcely imagine a situation the terrorists could create that would damage our essential liberties more than they have been in the name of protecting us. I don’t think people are going to start mysteriously disappearing any time soon, but we have (or had) that Bill of Rights for a reason.

Though the Democrats may have won control of the House of Representatives, Louisiana’s District 7 did not become one of the number of newly Democratic seats, as incumbent Repubilican Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. earned a second term, besting Democratic challenger Mike Stagg with a 71 percent majority.

Boustany’s second campaign amassed 113,486 votes, beating Stagg in all eight parishes located in District 7. Stagg’s final tally was 29 percent, or 47,007 votes.

“It is time to put the partisan bickering aside and really get to work solving the problems the American public expects government to solve,” said Boustany, 50, at his victory party at Pat’s Downtown in Lafayette. “You can count on me to work across party lines as I have done the past two years. I have worked hard and I am proud of the record I have amassed these last two years.”

“The fact [is] that he’s accepted all this money from the special interest groups and as a result, his votes don’t reflect the interest of the district,” said Stagg, 54, after his loss became apparent. “The real problem with his campaign is that he refused to debate. The only time he answered questions was in a structured setting.”

Stagg ran his campaign without accepting any funding from the Democratic Party or Political Action Committees funded by special interest groups.

“I don’t think [Stagg] should have done anything differently,” said Simon Hayes, a UL Lafayette political science major and membership coordinator of the school’s chapter of College Democrats. “I think he stood by his principles. I think it was just a matter of a candidate with $1 million versus a candidate with $35,000 to spend, and 30 percent compared to 70 percent is pretty admirable.”

Boustany’s supporters were predictably upbeat.

“I think he crosses partisan lines,” said Buddy Bonvillain, a political science major at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who worked on Boustany’s campaign team. Bonvillain said he felt that a Democratic house wouldn’t affect Boustany as much as other Republicans, because of Boustany’s record at working with the opposing party.

“I’m going to continue working in a bi-partisan way,” said Boustany of his future plans in office. “I was very successful these past few years in getting a number of bills passed as the primary author. I had Democratic co-sponsors on every one of my bills. I’ve developed some great relationships across the aisle, and I’ll continue to work in a bi-partisan fashion.

“Long-term [plans] for the next two years, obviously, fulfilling my prescription for prosperity, which I started work on in this past term, that’s something I laid out before. It talks about economic development, infrastructure, reforming health care, improving education in the district, be very strong on national defense, and protecting our Louisiana values.

“The issue with Iraq is much more complicated than what we get in sound bites, and the bottom line is, we have to do what we can to secure protection of our troops,” said Boustany. “Secondly, we need come to an agreement with the brand-new Iraqi government.”

Before serving in Congress, Boustany was a heart surgeon based in Lafayette. He was forced to cease practice because of arthritic hands. He graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1978. He was the first Republican elected in the history of his district.

Stagg, who ran an unsuccessful bid for governor in 1998, is a self-described “entrepreneur [and] civic activist.” He has lived in Lafayette for almost all his life.

Ah, Halloween. For college students, Halloween can mean many things. For some it is an excuse to dress like a complete moron. For others, it is an excuse to dress like a, to put it nicely, woman of questionable morals. For others still, it is a chance to score cheap one-pound bags of fun-size candy bars. For the subjects of ridiculous urban legends, it is a chance to disguise human feces as the aforementioned candy bars and place razor blades in caramel apples. For movie studio executives, it’s a chance to release innumerable formulaic horror movies. For pediatric dentists, it is the precursor to remodeling or buying a new yacht.

We here at The Vermilion hope to offer you some pearls of wisdom no matter what age you might be or position you might be in on the Pagan-tastic holiday of All Hallows’ Eve.

Tips for Children

Halloween will be the one-night stand that precedes an afternoon of grotesque dental work. (And, if you choose to not take care of those cavities, prepare to experience childbirth-like levels of pain.) In order to get the most out of it, you’ll need a pillowcase. Those plastic jack-o-lanterns with the flimsy handle? Insufficient for handling the volumes of candy you need to be aiming to acquire. They also will break at the point where you will be furthest away from your house. Ideally, use an old pillowcase. Large grocery bags will do in a pinch. The best commercially acquired container is a fancy bag from a department store or specialty shop. Additionally, one must weed out crappy candy like circus peanuts and stale popcorn balls mid-route. Make liberal use of nearby trashcans.

We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, kids. Let’s talk about costumes. If you are a toddler: seriously, the pumpkin is passé. Every kid in the history of the world has been a pumpkin for Halloween. Half of us even had a little sprout for a hat. It’s ridiculously cliché. If you’re older, be sure to get a costume that is not reminiscent of a garbage bag vaguely printed to resemble a super hero or cartoon character. Don’t forget the mask with eyeholes so small you can’t really see oncoming traffic.

Bullet Point Tips for Teenagers

• Do us all a favor and smash those mailboxes with your forehead.

• Dressing like you normally do and saying you’re a “15 year old boy/girl” is not and never will be remotely clever or funny.

• You are an unfunny blight on society if you egg or toilet paper random houses. Vandalizing your friend’s crappy car is encouraged, however.

• Trick or treating stops when you get in high school. No, really.

• Good luck renting all the “Friday the 13th” or “Halloween” movies from the video store before some Ain’t-It-Cool-News-reading dork with too much free time on his hands.

Tips for College Students

For many college students, Halloween is a chance to dress in a manner that might be called “promiscuous.” This phenomenon is not restricted to women; indeed, many men think it would be funny to dress up as, say, a Hooters waitress, or to simply wear a skimpy negligee. A note to you men: Everyone knows that you’re using Halloween as an excuse to exhibit your secret kinky cross-dressing fantasies to the world.

Unfortunately, Halloween usually falls on a weeknight, severely limiting the evening’s potential for satanic debauchery. If you’re worried about coming to class or work with a hangover, don’t worry: Everyone else has one, too.

It shouldn’t need saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Don’t even think about going trick or treating.

Tips for Adults

Do not give out any of the following:

• Toothbrushes and toothpaste. Do you really think any significant number of children don’t already have these things?

• Circus peanuts. They are easily the worst excuse for candy to ever grace a plastic pumpkin, assuming they even make it in there and don’t end up all over your lawn.

• Celery or carrots or another vegetable. You are up against candy here. Tons and tons of candy. No child will ever choose to eat a piece of celery over a Snickers bar, no matter how much peanut butter and raisins you put on there.

• Halls cough drops. Seriously, what were you thinking, dude down the street?

• Homemade goods. Parents will throw them out because of sensationalist news stories about razor blades and laxatives hidden in Halloween baked goods.

Note: This article was intended to be satirical. Do not take it seriously.

A few weeks ago, I was in my World Civilizations II course, and the topic of science and religion came up, and whether or not they could co-exist. To me, this is a moot point; obviously there are many scientists who also remain religious. However, hearing the class discuss it made me lose some faith in humanity, or at least the U.S.’s higher education system. There are people – people in college – who don’t believe that evolution is realily.

Our professor had brought the topic of science and religion, and how they could co-exist. He began asking students what they thought. I had assumed the lack of discussion on evolution was because it was a moot point; everyone knew and believed it, so they were merely discussing how religion could fit in with it.

About 10 minutes into the discussion, a student in the back row piped up, in an incredulous tone, “There are those people who think we came from monkeys or whatever.” His intonation is that of someone talking about a ludicrous conspiracy theory.

My mind reels. Voices in the class pipe up with laughter. I can only hope that they were laughing at how ridiculous the guy was, for believing this, and not at the content of his comment.

Our professor did not correct him. I realize that this is a touchy subject, but the purpose of college and higher education is to propagate knowledge, and allowing a student to continue to believe something patently false is failing in this.

In this same class, we discussed how people rediscovering science and inventing the scientific method was one of the reasons Europe moved out of the dark ages and into the Renaissance. We discussed how Galileo, when he proposed something as radical as the planets orbiting the sun, opposed to the sun and the other planets orbiting Earth, and backed this up with observation and calculation, was prosecuted by the Catholic church, put through the inquisition and forced to rescind his beliefs because they weren’t in line with the Vatican’s.

The idea that the theory of evolution could be found false is ridiculous at this point. In the 150 years since Darwin published “The Origin of Species,” not a single piece of scientific evidence has surfaced that contradicts it. We had only discovered and identified more modes of evolution. The amount of evidence in favor of evolution is overwhelming, and disproving it would be nearly impossible. Yes, it does say “theory” in front of evolution, but everything in science is a theory.

Modern scientists have even observed microevolution, or small changes that occur within a few generations. A group of birds introduced to a new island environment had, within a few generations, evolved larger beaks allowing them to consume larger seeds. Though the fossil record documenting larger macroevolutionary changes is incomplete, we are getting closer and closer to completing it – gaps are filled in all the time.

Disbelieving evolution, an idea with huge quantities of evidence in favor of it, no evidence against it and the blessing of everyone in the field of biology (you know, the guys that cure your diseases) is incredibly naïve and bordering on complete idiocy.

I will freely admit I don’t understand the intricacies of evolutionary science – I’m not a biology major. I’ve taken two classes in the field in my college career. However, I realize I am no expert, and should defer to experts in determining what I believe. When every major scientist of our time refers to evolution as something that amounts to an absolute fact, I listen.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the Lafayette Economic Development Authority proudly held the grand opening for the Louisiana Immersive Technology Enterprise, or LITE, last Wednesday.

The facility, recognizable due to the large egg-like structure at its entrance, is located on Cajundome Blvd. across from Cajun Field.

“It’s an exciting day for Lafayette, and it’s an exciting day for Louisiana,” said Blanco, in an address inside the facility following the ceremonial ribbon cutting. “When Neil Armstrong took that first step on the moon, he called it ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Ladies and gentlemen, today is one giant leap for Lafayette, and one giant leap for Louisiana.”

“This is indeed a great day,” said Jerry Luke LeBlanc, Louisiana’s commissioner of administration and a Lafayette native, “not only for Louisiana, but for Acadiana, this region and Lafayette. [It is] the culmination of a lot of hard work, dedication and belief in a dream.”

“Gov. Kathleen Blanco has made education and economic equal partners in her plans for this state’s recovery and renaissance,” said Ray Authement, Ph.D., and president of UL Lafayette. “We applaud her for taking the common sense approach and encourage her to stay the course. We’re here because she had the vision, courage and foresight to invest $40 million in LITE.”

“The state knows what’s happening at the regional level and at the national level, said Carolina Cruz-Neira, executive director and chief scientist at LITE. “The state knows what we need to be competitive as a state and as a city in the regional and national arena. They are trying to do something that helps people, that improves the quality of life.”

The facility, in planning and construction stages for the past six years, is one of the most advanced supercomputing and visualization centers in the world.

“Dr. Carolina Cruz tells me that there are only four states in this country that have similar investments,” said Blanco excitedly, “and when I say similar, she clarifies that California, Illinois, Indiana and Virginia perhaps have either supercomputing capacity or imaging capacity, but none have both. No state has as much invested in one place as this one facility here in Lafayette, La. [...] Only Germany and Japan are competing at this level — this is how powerful this combined investment positions Louisiana in the global economy in technology.”

“I was in Germany for a similar supercomputing opening,” said Dennis McKenna, CEO of Silicon Graphics, Inc., the company which provided the supercomputers that power the LITE facility, “and this was a supercomputing center funded by the German government, and I must say, being here today, you have something that is state of the art in the state of Louisiana that compares to what the country of Germany has committed to. The potential of this computing center; this visualization center is equivalent to anything I’ve seen in the world today.”

LeBlanc said that “a facility like LITE, where you can have unlimited opportunities, unlimited ability to draw business not only from other parts of the country but from around the world, will provide future stability for our state and for our region.”

“Imagine you are an engineer, and you are designing a building like [the LITE building],” said Cruz-Neira. “You want to be air efficient. You want to have a good temperature. You want to have all the rooms evenly cool, evenly warm up. We would be able to simulate it, and change the configuration of the rooms and the fans, and then an engineer would be able to see whether or not his design is efficient. He’s going to be able to do that on the fly, because we not only see, we compute.”

“I believe that this is a turning point in our economic development history for this state,” said Blanco. “The LITE center swings its doors wide open to the next century. This is our future. Make yourselves at home, because we are here to stay. This region is now competitive in ways that we could not even imagine as short a time as five or 10 years ago.”

The LITE facility is not the only new technology being introduced this fall.

“On Oct. 31, just a few weeks away,” said Authement, “we’ll gather again to install, or to light, the Louisiana Optical Network that gives us connectivity with all of the research universities in the state, and to the LambdaRail (a high-speed fiber-optic network), to give us access to all the research at universities from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean.”

Blanco said these two projects would work together to provide an unparalleled opportunity for Louisiana.

“The first major technology investment that I directed after I became governor came in September of 2004, when I announced the state would invest $40 million in a network called LONI, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative,” said Blanco. “LONI is the network that interconnects all our research universities and then moves them out on to the LambdaRail to connect to all the computers in the world. This powerful network, when combined with this LITE system, positions us in such a way that all of our scientists can collaborate.”

“The way science and engineering is done is going to change,” said Bradd Clark, Ph.D., the dean of sciences at UL Lafayette. “We are bringing a facility that will speed up the rapid change in science and engineering for the betterment of all mankind. I’m excited about this.”

“Those two investments put together position Louisiana in the most incredibly powerful way in the world of technology, which is the world of our future,” said Blanco. “It is our economic future.”

Blanco defended her decision to continue with the project after the budget problems caused by hurricanes last fall.

“There were many false prophets of doom who didn’t want the state to continue its investment in this LITE project after [Hurricane] Katrina,” said Blanco. “I knew it was risky, but didn’t let that stop us. We owe it to ourselves to become a leader in technology. We owe it to ourselves to be flexible enough to attract new opportunities for investors, and we owe it to ourselves not to let our darkest hours shut down our brightest opportunities. ”

“This is a really exciting time for the university,” said H. Gordon Brooks II, dean of the College of the Arts at UL Lafayette. “This LITE facility will give us unprecedented access to the most cutting edge visualization technology available.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” said Clark excitedly.

We here at the Vermilion, being the classy, cultured type, have noticed a startling number of similarly classy individuals who inhabit the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Want to be cool like us? Follow these simple rules, and you’ll be well on your way to a more sophisticated existence.

In college, one generally must walk to get to class. This requires using a sidewalk. Unlike other paths of transport, sidewalks have no clear rules on the specifics of their usage. Feel free to walk on either side of them, and at any speed.

Unfortunately, the inadequately sized sidewalks on our fair campus generally have other students walking on them, and they may get in your way! If you need to get around them, walk at an uncomfortably close distance behind them, and wait for them to move. After they do, feel free to brush against them in a gesture of thanks. The great thing about college is that, due to the university’s grand size, you will never, ever see the person again.

Regarding roads, cars are nothing to even consider when plotting the trajectory of your traipsing. Walk anywhere; it’s not like they’re going to hit you. After all, being a pedestrian, you do have the right-of-way. Crosswalks are a mere inconvenience in the way of getting back to your dormitory 15 seconds faster.

If you’re walking with your friends, feel free to encompass the entirety of the sidewalk. Sensing the camaraderie between you, others will happily walk around in the grass or mud.

If you enjoy the fineries of nicotine, you are among friends. Feel free to blow your smoke and ashes in the direction of anyone, to show off your cigarette’s carefully selected flavor and aroma.

Like everywhere else, it rains at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. You may choose to carry an umbrella. Feel free to shake off your umbrella hastily on your way in, getting water all over the floor.

If you live off campus, you may have to wait in line at the Rex Street bus stop. That section of the sidewalk is entirely for people waiting for the bus. Feel free to lounge around in semicircles with your companions, taking full advantage of the concrete expanse set aside for you in front of the Conference Center while you speak of how many fine canned brews you consumed in your leisure activities the night before. Once you get on the bus, feel free to take an entire seat; the people standing in the aisles will understand that since you were there first, you get the luxury of seating.

Once you do arrive in class, it’s time for you to begin your education. If you bring a laptop to take notes in class, feel free to play “World of Warcraft” in the front row of a darkened classroom while you take notes; it will distract no one.

You might also discuss the finer points of the professor’s lecture with a friend. Don’t worry, your colleagues can easily hear the professor despite his or her shy nature and lack of a functioning microphone.

If you have been blessed with a child at a young age, feel free to bring him or her to class with you. Your classmates will be delighted to see the spawn of your loins, and will certainly not be bothered with your progeny’s boisterous chattering about the topic at hand, or perhaps about his longing for some Go-Gurt.

Many young collegiate scholars in this day and age carry cellular telephones. Feel free to leave your device active in class; everyone in your freshman-level English class will appreciate the poetry of “Hollaback Girl” bursting from the speaker of your pink RAZR. If you must place the phone on vibrate, place it on a wooden surface so you can tell when someone is calling.

Your studies may bring you to the library. Like in class, feel free to speak animatedly into your phone or to your friend. After all, people only come to the library to make copies and print things. If you must get a book out, keep it as long as you like. No one will need it, certainly not a person in your class who might need a book on the same subject.