COMMENTARY

GOP trustee incumbents out; Dems take seats

Voters handed a victory to the Democrats on Tuesday — and the MSU Board of Trustees followed this pattern, with Democrats George Perles and Faylene Owen taking seats away from GOP incumbents Dave Porteous and Dee Cook. Our favorite candidate, MSU social relations sophomore and Green Party member Lauren Spencer, came in a strong fifth with more than 100,000 votes, and even though she lost, she said she would still attend board meetings. But not everyone is as gracious as Spencer.

COMMENTARY

Dems must not waste opportunity for change

A funny thing happened Nov. 7 — the Democrats won. Sure, pundits from coast to coast were predicting a strong Democratic win in the congressional elections, but those predictions usually were peppered with guarded optimism over the outcome.

COMMENTARY

Voting bugs should still be addressed

It's election time and you know what that means. No, not a sterling representation of democracy in action by which we lead the world by example, but rather the same bumbling failure and incompetence that has plagued elections since 2000.

COMMENTARY

Saddam trial verdict no surprise

"Long live the people! Long live the nation! Down with the occupiers! Down with the spies!" This doesn't exactly scream, "I just got sentenced to death," but those are the exclamations Saddam Hussein shouted after he received his court punishment — death by hanging. After 24 years in power and almost three years after his capture, the Iraqi court has finally found Saddam guilty of crimes against humanity.

COMMENTARY

Make a difference: Vote - or shut up

Go vote. This year's midterm elections are important. Not only is it possible for the Senate to tip Democratic, but also according to The Center for Information and Research on Civil Learning and Engagement, this year's midterm elections follow a presidential election in which the highest amount of students and young adults turned out to vote in more than a decade. It's the perfect time for students to prove everyone wrong and show up to voice their opinions during this heated midterm political season. In Michigan, the youth voter turnout — people ages 18 to 29 — ranked 12th overall across the country for the 2004 presidential election.

COMMENTARY

Vote Granholm

Correction: The editorial should have said state representative candidate John Knowles is voting yes on Proposal 2. Governor: Jennifer Granholm Jennifer Granholm is the obvious choice for Michigan governor.

COMMENTARY

Loss of Smith gives MSU fans hope

Put down your pen. Stop typing. You can finally stop writing letters urging the university to fire MSU football's head coach John L.

COMMENTARY

Abstinence education wasted on adults

After Iraq, the Bush administration now has found itself in another place where it has no right to be: the bedroom.

COMMENTARY

Reduce effects of global warming now

A new British report by Sir Nicholas Stern printed Monday calls for immediate action to tackle global warming now — or wait and suffer the pricey consequences. The review was commissioned by the U.K.'s Chancellor of the Exchequer and explains that the world needs to spend £184 billion, or 1 percent of the global GDP (about $348.9 billion), to deal with global warming now.

COMMENTARY

Group's global outreach admirable

Students in an ISS class have taken what was meant only to be a presentation and turned it into something that could make a difference.

COMMENTARY

Mich. needs more higher ed funding

Two coinciding figures were recently released, and both leave Michigan students and employees-to-be in even more of a bind than they were already in.

COMMENTARY

Change in Bush's rhetoric means little

In another effort to save the sinking ship that is the GOP, President Bush spent Wednesday giving a speech and a press conference about the Iraq war — making a startling claim that what has happened in Iraq "rests with me." He's not exactly taking responsibility, but with only a week and a half left before midterm elections, that's probably all the "responsibility" the president is going to give us. The purpose of the press conference-slash-save-the-GOP gaggle was for the president to discuss Iraq, though almost everything he says about the conflict is contrary to what reports coming out of the country say.

COMMENTARY

City Center II will improve downtown

If all goes according to plan, the big, ugly, empty ex-bank building on the corner of Abbott Road and Grand River Avenue will soon be history. In its place, the City Center II project may be installed.

COMMENTARY

Bush's power shouldn't go unchecked

President Bush's newest vocabulary words are habeas corpus. He probably can't pronounce it, he definitely can't spell it and he might not even know what it means, but one thing is clear — he's gotten rid of it. Last week Bush signed what resembles an unconstitutional bill "in memory of the victims of September the 11th." The bill creates new rules for prosecuting and interrogating terrorism suspects, and he tagged it as "a way to deliver justice to the terrorists we have captured." As if using the victims of the Sept.

COMMENTARY

ASMSU bill won't halt cheating

ASMSU is teaming up with the University Committee on Academic Policy, or UCAP, to tackle academic dishonesty.

COMMENTARY

Paying for press hurts democracy

With "news" sources like the right-wing slanted Fox News, it can be hard enough to decipher fact from fiction.

COMMENTARY

Losing music venue means less culture

Earlier this summer we sadly said goodbye to Lansing's premier booking agent Steve Lambert, and now the city to our west is losing another music mainstay.

COMMENTARY

Taking over universe, 1 weapon at a time

As if American foreign policy weren't insulting and degrading enough for the rest of the world, now the White House has to spread its might into the final frontier. The Bush administration has chosen to claim space for America, insisting no one "hostile to U.S.

COMMENTARY

Hangers show cruelty of life without choice

On Monday, wire hangers were strung around campus with attached pro-choice slogans like, "What women choose when they have no choice." This effective form of protesting comes during Young Women's Week of Action for U.S.

COMMENTARY

Granholm articulates better than DeVos

The third gubernatorial debate between Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Republican candidate Dick DeVos brought the beef to the table, but little else. After criticizing DeVos for using the images of dead children in his campaign-attack commercials, Granholm told the Amway Corp.