OCR Text |
Show AboutUs OurView Athletics fee: Both sides of tKe Ballot Editor in Chief Arie Kirk • • : ; * News Editor Rachel A. Christensen Assistant News Editor Greg Boyles U SU athletics provide a huge amount of monetary support to trie university through sporting events. To say anything else would be false. As the athletics department faces serious budget cuts, the lack of funds could cause even more financial strain during a time when our school is resorting to furloughs and departmental shifts to make it through. However, an increased fee of $65 is not the way to boost student morale and make ends meet. The general consensus seems to be that $65 is a small price to pay when we are already forking over thousands for tuition. It's this laissez-faire attitude that will brand our generation as apathetic. To many, that fee is a month of groceries or weeks worth of gas and not just a few extra dollars being poured into tuition. When students stop caring about where their money is going, they are prime targets for being taken advantage of. There are other ways to fix the athletic department deficit. For students who support the athletic fee wholeheartedly, why not ask them to pay a few more dollars for tickets to sporting events? in short, before imposing a mandatory fee increase, the USU athletics department should look to other sources for the necessary money and consider a less drastic solution. Athletics may be important to our school, but it's not everything. The other side Recently there has been a lot of talk about the proposed athletic fee. It's something that we need to do and has been a long time coming at Utah State. We nave one of the best and biggest student sections in the country yet the amount of funds our students are assessed is at the bottom of the WAC and near the bottom of the country. If we as students wish to keep enjoying the seats that we're allotted at our sporting events - most notably football and basketball - then it's time we do our part. Think of it as a down payment on a crucial, part of our college experience. Currently, our athletics department is facing a $2.3 million annual deficit. Yet, with the money they do get, they do the most out of any school in the conference. Imagine if we gave our athletic department a level playing field. The athletic department has done (4,000 student seats at the Spectrum) and is doing (hiring of a high-caliber football coach) its best to provide USU students with the most exciting college experience possible. Isn't it about time that we as students return the favor? Pres. Obama's bottom line T here have been few, if any, dull moments in the first five weeks of Barack Obama's presidency, at least when it comes to the economy. His first major proposal - an economic stimulus package larger than any previous legislation of its kind - caused a partisan brawl on Capitol Hill. His Treasury secretary triggered a sell-off on Wall Street when he announced a vague plan to ease the credit crunch by relieving banks of some illiquid assets. Other initiatives arrived weekly, including efforts to slow the pace of foreclosures, strengthen banks' balance sheets and, most recently, provide a new regulatory structure for the financial industry. All the while, reports on joblessness, the housing market and other economic indicators have been almost universally gloomy, sometimes frighteningly so. On Tuesday night, Obama offered some thematic unity to the flurry of rescues and handouts. In a speech aimed more at the audience watching from home than the one inside the Capitol, he offered a solid rationale for the stimulus spending and tax cuts, the financial industry salvage projects and the aid to struggling borrowers. With resentment rising about the efforts to help borrowers and lenders who made bad bets on the housing market - an anger personified by CNBC's Rick Santelli - the burden was on Obama to remind the public that the housing problems are connected to the credit crunch, which feeds into and is fed by the problems in the larger economy. He did that, although his remarks provided a better defense for bailing out Wall Street companies than troubled homeowners. But a good rationale, by itself, isn't enough to instill the business and consumer confidence needed to cut short the recession. The administration and Congress also must act USee OBAMA, page 9 Features Editor Courtnie Packer Assistant Features Editor Amanda Mears Sports Editor Tim Olsen Assistant Sports Editor Paul Kelley Copy Editor Lisa Christensen Forum L e t t e rS Campaigns are entertaining To the editor: Just when all Americans began to breathe air that wasn't saturated with hope, change and other self-proclaimed acclamations of the many candidates of 2008, election week hit campus. Student elections in a college setting are fascinating; it's as though some people have not quite been able to bring themselves to the cutting of the umbilical cord from the womb of high school popularity contests. In addition, the English language seems to be on sabbatical during campaign week as many of the slogans defy and blatantly ignore basic elements of grammar. Instead of actual platforms, cam- paigning becomes a contest about who can create the best limerick with their last name. FYI, my last name, "Ure" pronounced "your" will always win this competition - 'cause I'm not Ure average candidate. Yet, election week has its perks ... it is immensely entertaining. Sometime during this campaign season visit the southwest side of the library and watch human nature in action. From here, you are likely to see the following scenarios: People will either completely dodge the candidates by disregarding the sidewalk and optjng for snow filled shoes rather than an encounter with a zealous candidate for office, or they will pretend their shoes are foreign entities to their bodies and the harder they stare at them the more elusive they will become, Letters to the editor • A public forum or people will play the "If I don't make eye contact I am invisible" game. So what is a student to do in such a situation? Phone a friend or use the buddy system. People on cell phones might be given a flier but are under no obligation to reply to the person. Also, large groups are less approachable. Walking solo is a death sentence. With all this talk about change, I've decided to adopt a new policy for this election year. I'm calling it the No Name Recognition Deal or the NNR. The people who have not assaulted me with fliers or attempted to bribe me with candy, or blared their name in my ear-will earn my vote. Sometimes doing nothing is the best way you can do something. Happy campaigning. Laura Ure Bloggers can't fill the gap P acks of lobbyists fill two rooms outside the House and Senate chambers in Richmond, Va., every afternoon, watching the proceedings on big video screens, zapping legislators with e-mails the instant the lobbyists sense that one of their bills might be in trouble. The interest groups that hire lobbyists can rest easy; they've got the legislature covered. Down the hall, the people's representatives have a hangout of their own, the press room. But there, nearly half the desks are empty. Reporters have been called home, reassigned, bought out, laid off. Only one TV station in Virginia still has a reporter at the capital. Many newspapers have decided to cover the capital by phone, if at all. "Just look around - it's dismal," says Bob Lewis, the Associated Press's veteran Richmond correspon- dent. A decade ago, he had twice as many colleagues covering state government. "And it's not just the bodies that are gone - it's the institutional memory and knowledge." Warren Fiske of the Virginian-Pilot, who has covered Richmond for 22 years, is being required to take a week off as part of his newspaper's cost-cutting furlough of all reporters. Michael Sluss from the Roanoke Times had to miss a day last week because of his paper's furlough. "I've never even taken a sick day in my nine years here," he says.A similar emptying is evident in Annapolis, Md., where the number of reporters covering Maryland's legislature has "declined by a good half in the last two years," says Tom Stuckey, who covered the State House for 42 years before retiring from the Associated Press in 2007. Across the nation, it's not just that fewer reporters are covering state government; newspapers and TV stations are also devoting far less space and time to that news. Does that mean citizens are less well-informed? Do blogs and other new media fill in where old media are cutting back? Is it really a loss if reporters cover fewer legislative debates? "We used to sit here and it was a typing contest," Lewis says. "When we had four people here for AP, we covered every floor debate, every vote," Stuckey says. "I'm not sure much quality was lost when we cut back to two people. We focused more on what it all means than on the daily politics." In one hour in the Virginia House the other day, I watched debates on I I See BLOGS, page 9 Photo Editor Cameron Peterson Assistant Photo Editor Tyler Larson Editorial Board Arie Kirk Rachel A. Christensen Courtnie Packer Tim Olsen Amanda Mears Lisa Christensen About letters Letters should be limited to 350 words. All letters may be shortened, edited or rejected for reasons of good taste, redundancy or volume of similar letters. Letters must be topic oriented. They may not be directed toward individuals. Any letter directed to a specific individual may be edited or not printed. No anonymous letters will be published. Writers must sign all letters and include a phone number or e-mail address as well as a student identification number (none of which is published). Letters will not be printed without this verification. Letters representing groups — or more man one individual — must have a singular representative clearly stated, with all necessary identification information. Writers must wait 21 days before submitting successive letters — no exceptions. Letters can be hand delivered or mailed to The Statesman in theTSC, Room 105, or e-mailed to statesman@cc.usu. edu, or click on www.utahstatesman. com for more letter guidelines and a box to submit letters. Because of time constraints and the inability of candidates to respond to letters regarding ASUSU elections, no letters of support for specific candidates will be printed between today and March 4. |