Roxana Vasquez | Arizona Daily Wildcat

There’s lots to post on today, but for now the quickest one I can put out is the original text of the letter I sent to the Wildcat, which I thought was much more eloquent and powerful than the Wildcat’s…uh…okay I’ll stop.

Among the most shallow possible responses to recent offensive speech at the University of Arizona, examples among which have been graphic pictures of pregnancy abortions and “gangsta”-themed parties, are calls for university administration to censor such speech. Neither the U.S. Constitution nor traditions of natural rights assert that one has the right to be protected from offensive speech. In fact, both assert that such speech ought to be protected. One who manages not to be exposed to offensive speech during a four-year college career should report immediately to the Administration building to request a tuition refund for not having learned anything.

Thankfully, the administration does not look to be taking any action to censor these examples of protected speech. In the wake of feminists selling candies resembling female anatomy on the mall, one observes that men and women with self-esteem have not been attempting to invoke the censorship of feminists’ current lyrical bastardization of the Australian folk song “Waltzing Matilda” for fear that our brothers and sisters from Down Under may otherwise become offended.

On a campus such as this, one also observes with genuine gratitude that opponents of feminists’ recent speech have chosen not to respond in turn by selling candies resembling male anatomy and hopes this remains so.

Garrett P. O’Hara
political science senior

Ironically, it just had to occur on the day the Wildcat is publishing my letter (or some messed-up version of it) that there are allegations coming out of the ASUA Senate against the ASUA Appropriations Board for cutting more funding than was justified and text-messaging the word “vagina” around. It is already well known that current appropriations board members tend to be more conservative than the senators, but the appropriations board is supposed to be nonpolitical.

In a Federal body this would be easy: stop funding everybody. I’m not advocating we move to that kind of system; ASUA club funding is a fact of life here, and it requires checks and balances in order to ensure fairness in the process. Allegations indicate that the board was liberally-biased in the past, the proper response to which is not to run a conservatively-biased board. I surely hope this isn’t what we’ve concocted, is it?

I’m not quite outraged one way or the other quite yet, but somebody had better explains this to me and the rest of the student body. Is the “Vagina Warrior” (which by the way is an insult to the military) lying about appropriations board members joking about the aforementioned withheld word? Is the appropriations board exhibiting conservative bias against a student organization with rights just like every other club, no matter how disgusting their ideas are?

My first class today is at 11 a.m., which I hope conveys a message that I got up this morning at 5 a.m. to get schoolwork done, and instead I’m defending “Vagina Warriors” ad nauseam for an hour and having no time to cover the elections as I promised. Is there something wrong here?

Any story concerning a UA/ASU battle is usually newsworthy in the eyes of both bodies of students. Nonetheless, I think we can figure out which side the Arizona Republic is on.

The headline reads: UA gifts eclipsed by donations to ASU. UA basketball fans might find that surprising considering the typical number of wealthy, elderly fans in the stands at every game. Let’s give the author credit; he/she (no name) tried to make a case…

The University of Arizona’s endowments grew 18 percent for fiscal 2006.

However, Arizona State University’s gain eclipsed that of UA: up 42 percent.

But the Republic completely ignored the actual dollar figures… [emphasis added]

UA ended fiscal 2006 with $466 million in endowments, according to the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of College and University Business Officers. ASU had $394 million. Northern Arizona University’s endowment rose to $57 million.

The solution to this media bias problem is simple. Everybody stop donating to UA so that we have $0 in endowments. The administration will in turn be financially forced to fire all the liberal professors, name the Social Sciences building after Richard Mellon Scaife, and watch the endowments flow in again.

Okay, so that third sentence was implausible. Still, everybody stop donating. Then start donating as you did before, thereby forcing the Arizona Republic to report that UA endowments went up infinity percent. Media bias problem solved.

Friendly reminder: Please vote for my candidacy in the Political Blogging Scholarship if you haven’t already done so. Thanks very much to those who have.

THIS IS NOT A SATIRE.

Former school superintendent Gary Knox in this morning’s Yuma Sun manages 815 words of moot rant concerning the possibility of using computer generation (CG) to produce a “make-believe production of a terrorist or anarchical group” with the ability to influence Americans.

Knox’s strongest argument is how far society has advanced in creating realistic CG, and how far it is inevitably destined, but it completely ignores what we’ve observed recently in the wake of the Reuters “fauxtography” and Ra^thergate scandals. Along with advances in CG and the Internet have come advances in the ability of individuals to personally investigate truth versus fiction. The Internet is already full of conspiracy theories ranging from various 9/11 conspiracies to the faking of the Apollo Moon Landings. Such falsehoods are not solely the result of the information age; they are the result of freedom of speech. Likewise, so is the general public’s outright rejection of such ideas.

What we learned (or perhaps more properly, that of which we were reminded) from the Reuters “fauxtography” scandal is that fake news doesn’t require CG, but rather only takes a biased reporter. The infamous Photoshopped smoke spirals photograph of Adnan Hajj wasn’t the only development of note from Israel’s bombing of Lebanon; it also resulted in serious investigation of photographs that were clearly “set-up” not through software, but by the photographers’ very own physical and/or verbal manipulation of the scene. Ultimately, it was the development of cyberspace that allowed individuals to start disputing the coverage that led to the conclusion of many careers.

The Killian documents scandal is an easy case to cite to show that bad news is not beyond television nowadays, but I hate to think that this is the only example involving video. The “visual tricks” that Knox cites are not some golden limit, but are rather a small step ahead from where we already are with respect to the bias of the news media. At least within conservative / libertarian circles, the media are biased towards the left. The far left says the media is far right.  Basically, we all agree that somebody is wrong.

Knox’s second to last sentence calls for us to “increase our vigilance and maintain a very healthy skepticism for what we hear and see.” Regardless for the increased apparency that such vigilance is necessary, it is only that – an increased apparency, not an increased need. I fail to see the particular grave danger that Knox sees; rather, I see an inevitable increase in skepticism in the wake of need that has already persisted for some time.

This is what I have verbatim from Mrs. Mitchell:

Breaking News: About 45 minutes ago [This is 3:55pm yesterday by my calculations –GPO], the police detective Osborne told me that charges have now been filed against me for “intimidation and harrassment.” Apparently, the flyers we put up (see attached) caused the professor to feel intimidated. Also, the police department says it was misrepresentation of them to put the ASU police phone # at the bottom of the flyers.

Additionally, the flyers somehow made it into residence hall postings.

My defense:

• I am extremely sorry for my role in the flyers. I had no idea it would interfere with the police investigation whatsoever.
• I actually thought we were helping the police. Additionally, I didn’t even file the charges until Tuesday because I thought I had to do the footwork to identify the professors first.
• I’ve never been involved in a criminal case before; I don’t know the processes of investigation and what’s not allowed.
• Since I am not a student here, I also did not know the posting policies, and had I known them, I would surely have abided by the rules. I am sorry about that too.
• The “WANTED…for assault” that the professor believes may have implicitly indicated her in the crime was just a theme on the Old Wild West kind of posters. We do live in Arizona, after all. It was a catchy look or theme to the flyer to get students’ attention.
• There was absolutely no vindictive or pre-meditated motive at work here. The flyers were thrown together last-minute in the heat of the moment, and students were passing them out because they felt indignant for their recruiter.
• The one and only motive of the flyer was simple: we wanted to identify the professors.

The sole press coverage of the assault that I’ve found is coming from the Douglas Daily Dispatch, which hasn’t mentioned the counter-charges.

Additionally, “johnny,” claiming the URL of the Student Press Law Center, thinks that Mrs. Mitchell is a racist.

i’m a white guy, emily mitchell sounds racist to me. for most of american history, minorities have been excluded. often brutally. terrorized. now you’ve started this group. sounds like a). a great way for emily mitchell to draw attention to her pathetic self and b). racists, ignorant about the past, finding ridiculous excuses to exclude non-whites and stir up racism. so minorities arent excluded from this club? why the hell would they want to join a club committed to their exclusion?
what an embarrassment for ASU.

As I said before, I dismiss the general notion of “hate crime” on constitutional grounds, and I don’t even agree with the CAMASU’s premise. There’s at least two things to learn here (with more to come):

• Just because you don’t agree with someone doesn’t justify assault! Unfortunately, the attitude within academia these days seems to be in favor of heckling or assaulting anybody with whom one does not agree right out of the marketplace of ideas. Just take a look at how Columbia University dealt with Minutemen Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist.
• The liberal response to CAMASU, if they are not hypocritical, should be exactly the same as their response to other “minority” groups on campus. As I said in a letter to the Wildcat earlier this year:
  

  […]

  University policy on multiple levels is bent on painting us students with a large brush into segregated factions whose members are apparently unable to develop social and professional relationships with members of any other faction. “Student affairs” offices split students into their own little racial hangouts. The greek system’s answer to diversity problems is to separate minorities into their own little fraternities and sororities apart from the others. The campus at large is no longer made up of over 35,000 individual students with unique thoughts, abilities and experiences; it is rather a collection of arbitrary demographic numbers based, if I may paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., upon the color of our skin rather than the content of our character.

  So long as the university continues to encourage segregation between ethnicities, we will have made progress neither through the term of our new university president nor since the days of the forced segregation against which good and decent Americans of all ethnicities fought mere decades ago.

Related posts:

• Breaking: Charges filed against Mitchell
• ASU “hate crime” followup
• Breaking: Conservative field rep assaulted, harrassed by ASU professors

Those of you who were regular readers of The O’Hara Factor back in February know I had quite the debacle with the ASUA Supreme Court last year.  This I know well; I was getting sixty hits daily on a consistent basis.  Only Deborah Frisch could ever put me over that mark, bringing one of my days to 400. 

It started with Justice Shar Bahmani, who wrote a letter to the Wildcat encouraging calm amidst the Cade Bernsen sexual harassment scandal despite that he as a justice could have ended up hearing Bernsen’s impeachment.  I didn’t get much feedback from the court itself, but I did get referrer links in my site statistics indicating that individuals from the court (their names were in the URL’s!) had emailed each other about my criticism.

That didn’t bode well for me once the Rhonda Tubbs elections code violation scandal came out.  Chief Justice Jennifer Baker in reply to my request didn’t let me in.  I was merely a blogger, not a real journalist.  I physically entered the room to see if I could still attend.  No go.  In fact, I later  determined that the trial may have violated state Open Meetings Law.  Later on, I received similar signs of internal bickering over my existence via the referrer statistics.  Tubbs won that case, but there was another case nobody informed me of the following Saturday that ended up disqualifying her candidacy.

So now we have two new justices and one promotion to chief justice.  Jennifer Baker is among the departures (which is good).  So far, the website hasn’t been updated and the term expirations dates seem inconsistent with having two new justices, so it looks like somebody quit.  We’ll have to wait and see who’s on there.  Let’s hope that the court and ASUA in general don’t exhibit this kind of corruption this year.

I saw this earlier, but didn’t know whether to post until something was confirmed.  News sources now confirm that a 18-year-old female UA student was shot early yesterday in a drive-by shooting.  Some students on Facebook had already started a group entitled "Wildcats Against Violence," but the group lists the time as the night of the day before.

Time errors notwithstanding, it’s definitely the same party as FIJI is the same fraternity as Phi Gamma Delta.  The Facebook group reports that Theta Tau and Alpha Chi Omega are also within the vicinity.

Here’s what they didn’t tell you: 

Looking on Google Earth, FIJI is a dirt lot, so the picture is clearly old.  But notice what’s just southwest of that position.  FIJI, 1801 E First St, is just across the street from UAPD, 1852 E. First St.  This is further evidence that citizens cannot trust police as an alternative to the right to bear arms.

This is the second frat shooting this year and the third gun-related incident on university-related property to my knowledge.  Kappa Alpha was trying to remove an unwelcome guest when he pulled out a gun and shot an 18-year-old pledge.  And last semester on University and Park, a group of friends (including a good friend of mine) were mugged, with some of them getting pistol-whipped.

We had three at the nursing school killed back in 2002.  This year, we’ve had 22 aggravated assaults, including, at minimum, the University/Park mugging and FIJI.  How long will it take before we get our rights back?

Update: KVOA’s website thankfully does mention the vicinity to UAPD and notes that an officer heard the shots.  I also just remembered that back when I was in the fifth grade, my family and I were attacked by a raged driver…just near the Honolulu Police Department.  Go figure.

After clicking a link on the right side of the Tucson Citizen local page, I noticed this morning that Gannett’s "Border Divide immigration debate portal" has a Jeopardy-style online quiz consisting of government-printed citizenship test flash cards.  Some of it is what you’d expect: questions about who wrote the Declaration of Independence, what the stripes of the American Flag mean, etc.

Then I started going through the 1,000-point questions just to see if I could get one wrong.  I’ll take U.S. Rights for 1,000, Alex.

Well, that’s actually kind of debatable.  Rights are important, but valuing one or the other isn’t pertinent unless you consider that without the right to bear arms, the government can easily take away the other two without redress.  Naturally, (a), not (b), is considered the correct answer in the government-printed flash cards.

Let’s move one question up: U.S. Rights for 800!

This one’s on Gannett, not the government, as the former made up the multiple-choice answers.  Way to mock the Second Amendment, you objective journalists.