Touchy subject

A college friend pointed this out: Bill Richardson's campaign is comparing its candidate to Appalachian State in a new fundraising e-mail. That hits a raw nerve for a lot of U-M alumni — which doesn't seem like a good idea, with Michigan holding the earliest primary this year. Then again, this is the candidate who always manages to piss off potential supporters for no apparent reason.

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout

Since yesterday, I've put up with a lot of (warranted) gloating from non-Michigan friends.

Go ahead, have your fun with us. But have a little mercy, too.

Consider this: According to a friend who called me last night from Ann Arbor, Welcome Week festivities have effectively ended three days early. The student ghettos are eerily quiet; the undergrads have lost their stomach for jungle juice and beer-bonged Natty Light. This, on the school year's most celebrated week for house parties and bar-hopping.

It's like if Spongebob SquarePants died on Halloween, and all of America's prepubescents decided they weren't in the mood for free candy.

I haven't seen it, but I believe it. And if you're a college student or recent graduate, you know how sad it is. It cuts to the heart of how Michigan football fans feel right now.

So, non-Michigan fans, feel free to throw Appalachian State at us in all future trash-talking. That's fair. But this week it's just cruel. So ease up a bit, would you?

MSU: Worst of the Big Ten

I don't normally go in for Spartan bashing, but this one is too good to pass up. TNR's Jon Chait (a U-M and Michigan Daily alum) points out this great Radar feature on America's worst colleges. Michigan State is highlighted on the first page as the Worst of the Big Ten:

It's not surprising that this hard-drinking football school hasn't made it to the Rose Bowl since 1988: Much of its student body seems to be in jail. ... Mix MSU's licentious ways with notoriously high acceptance rates and low SAT scores, and you get the school ranked dead last among the Big Ten.

Go to Chait's post on the Plank for more fun.

Don't worry about Rick's

Rumors have been spreading this summer that Rick's, the premier trashy upperclassmen's bar in Ann Arbor, lost its lease and is closing or moving to somewhere near Necto. According to sources close to Rick's, there's no truth to them — in fact, the owners just recently signed a 10-year extension on the lease. Just thought it was important to clear this up.

David Boyle, fixture of the netroots

An American Spectator writer, in a roundup of embarrassing comments by lefty bloggers at the YearlyKos convention, found this gem by the always-bizarre David Boyle:

"St. Augustine's heavenly 'City of God' is not wholly different from the 'City of Kos' or the 'City of Blog' that the orange (not clockwork) cooperative 'we' blog Daily Kos is." Boyle writes. "The blog is just too progressive not to be redolent of something higher."

If you don't know Boyle, it's hard to describe how weird he is. The unofficial style at the Daily for describing him is "Ann Arbor gadfly." I think he's the only Arbor Update blogger ever to be kicked off the site. Check out his music video and mp3s (songs include "George W. Pussy" and "Arafat May Never Die" here.

Facebook group of the day (or: How stupid is Leon Drolet?)

Group name: Prop #2 is the best thing in Michigan since sliced bread
Type: Student Groups - Political Groups
Members: 96
Description: Everyone that is happy that the minorities finally stop complaining and are now considered equal to whites then join this group because this is how i feel. So join the group if your happy about it cause I know I am. Also if your mad about every interview against prop 2 is from some minority asshole that has a dumb ass name that you know is foreign by looking at it

Must be some kind of a parody by left-leaning tricksters, right? No respectable Michigan Civil Rights Initiative supporter would ever be dumb enough to join such an objectionable group.

Oh, wait:


Yes, that's the Leon Drolet, former statewide chair of the MCRI, and now chair of a state panel on civil rights.

What's wrong with young Republicans?

The recently elected chair of the Young Republican National Federation is under investigation for, uh, violating a sleeping male Young Republican after a house party for the group (via Michigan Conservative Dossier).

This comes a few weeks after Michael Flory, the former Michigan Young Republicans chair, pleaded guilty to raping a college student at a national YR convention. At least he was sorry:

The teary-eyed college student he overpowered in a downtown hotel room gasped and dabbed her eyes as Flory replied to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Peter Corrigan's question, "Are you indeed guilty?"

"Sure - yeah," Flory said.

It's a little cliched to accuse the Republicans of hypocrisy for this stuff. But like with Justin Zatkoff -- who isn't a sexual predator, but is a loudmouthed idiot who is animated entirely by venom toward the left -- you have to wonder about the people who elected these guys. I can't help feeling that there's something a little off about the GOP's young activist base, or at least about the character traits they look for in their leaders.

Affirmative action talk

Chetly Zarko, the anti-affirmative action crusader and former Michigan Review writer, has launched a new "cross-partisan" blog about affirmative action and racial equality. According to this intro page, the site is supposed to be a place for opponents and proponents of racial preferences to find some common ground.

So far, it seems like Zarko is the only poster. Still, it's not a bad idea, and I agree that people on either side of this issue have more in common than most of them think. I hope Zarko manages to find some sharp bloggers from both sides. If he does, it could get interesting.

End of an era

Donald Hall, the U.S. poet laureate and former U-M professor, is stepping down after only one term. Here's a good article on his successor, Charles Simic.

From Slate, here's a poem by Hall and one by Simic.

"He's not a Michigan man"

Mike Hart is not happy with former U-M quarterback and current Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh.

"Progressives" and academia

On liberals and progressives, reader Chet makes a good point:

Interesting point about the difference between liberals and progressives - especially the part about demanding adherence to the party line. The "netroots" - coming from a more academic background to start - certainly has carried with it much of the authoritarian nature and theory of their academic peers.

I think it's probably a better distinction to suggest it's between libertarian liberals and their inverse.

Some of the biggest problems with the campus progressive movement (I'm torn on whether to use scare quotes here) stem from its reverence for trendy academic theories. And yes, in terms of their attitude and their approach to debate, the netroots and the campus left have a lot in common.

"The use of letters is often used to falsely express a hierarchy of oppressions"

I'm a big fan of the U-M LGBT office, but this is just silly.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dan Savage at The Stranger for the link. There's an interesting debate going on in that blog's comments section over whether Michigan's LGBT office is, in fact, being silly, and whether Savage and Andrew Sullivan are being assholes for making fun of it. Check it out.

This was my contribution on Savage's blog, by the way:

My two cents: I've dealt with Michigan's LGBT office a bit (I used to edit the campus paper), and I always found them much more competent and effective than most university bureaucrats. I'm sure they're perfectly capable of carrying out this crazy process without getting distracted from actual work.

My only problem with this is that, to an outsider reading all of these high-minded Audre Lordeisms about this nitpicky, P.C. mess -- well, it makes gay-rights activists look ridiculous. It gives the impression that they're whiners who spend all their time looking for exclusion where none really exists. Which I think undermines them when they point out instances of actual exclusion.

Liberal vs. progressive

Something else that bothered me from Monday night's debate was when Hillary Clinton pulled out this "I'm a progressive, not a liberal" deal. I don't know if this is new for her, but I don't like it.

Being a liberal means something -- it implies a set of values and a political philosophy going back to the Enlightenment. Saying you're a progressive, from what I've seen on campus and among progressive commentators, basically means you're willing to go along with whatever the left is into at the moment.

On Michigan's campus, at least, that's my main problem with the progressive movement: It seems to demand a kind of lock-step, uncritical way of thinking. People who call themselves progressives give the impression that they're part of a team, and they generally won't criticize the other members of their team, even if what they're saying doesn't make much sense or is actually objectionable.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to this because I've been a follower of campus politics for a few years, and I've seen how illiberal progressives on campus can be. The classic example is the United Coalition Against Racism, which pressured administrators into adopting hate-speech codes in the late '80s. Courts quickly struck down those policies, but the attitude behind them -- that in fighting racism, it's OK to ignore things like civil liberties and academic freedom -- is still pretty widespread on the campus left. And the tendency for demanding loyalty to the "movement" and discouraging self-criticism is one of the defining characteristics of the progressive blogosphere.

Is any of that relevant to Hillary Clinton? I don't know. More likely, she just thinks not calling herself "liberal" will play well in the general election. (Although, as a friend noted, this points to one of Hillary's annoying qualities: her tendency to accept conservative narratives -- in this case, "liberal = supporter of big, expensive, intrusive government" -- and use them to position herself as a moderate.) Either way, I'd prefer if we could just call ourselves liberals -- it's easier to keep ourselves honest that way.

Good day for students' voting rights

The Michigan House just passed a Democratic package of bills that would, among other things, make it easier for college students to vote.

The most important bills here are HB 4447 and 4448, sponsored by Ann Arbor's freshman Rep. Rebekah Warren. They would effectively overturn "Rogers's Law," which requires people to vote at the precinct for the address on their driver's license.

(That law makes it harder for students to vote while on campus -- they have to either drive home on Election Day or have the Secretary of State change their permanent address to their campus address, which is inconvenient for students who move year-to-year. Also, there have been reports of students being told at Secretary of State offices that changing their permanent address would remove them from their parents' insurance coverage. Students and other observers have long speculated that Mike Rogers, the Republican U.S. congressman who sponsored that bill, used it to depress the mostly Democratic student vote in his Lansing district.)

Democrats say they expect to pass another bill soon that would allow voters to get absentee ballots without meeting one of six qualifications. That's also helpful, although I suspect few students want to use absentee ballots.

The bills to repeal Rogers's Law passed mostly along party lines, and the Republican secretary of state still opposes them. So it's not clear that they'll get through the Republican-controlled Senate. Still, this is encouraging, and it's good to see that Warren is following through on her promises to bring student issues to Lansing.

U-M vs. MSU: Facebook network stats

Have you ever compared the Facebook network stats (where they show the top movies, interests, etc. listed in people's profiles in a given network) for Michigan and MSU? It's pretty remarkable. In most cases, they're almost identical -- our top three or four in most categories match up exactly -- so the differences are telling.

A few observations:

• Michigan students skew a little more toward the highbrow. For example, Radiohead and "Little Miss Sunshine" are #4 and #3 on Michigan's top music and movies, and neither appears at all on MSU's lists.
• Our favorite books are roughly the same, except the Bible is #3 at Michigan and outside the top 10 at State. Also, Michigan students aren't such big Dan Brown fans. Infer what you will.
• For relationship status, "none listed" is easily the most common at Michigan with 38%, while it's third at State (behind "single" and "in a relationship) with 27%. Weird.
• Michigan students are also slightly more likely to list "married," but I think that only means we're a little more ironic than State students on average.

Great moments in campus conservatism

Justin Zatkoff, noted idiot and chair of the Michigan Federation of College Republicans, posed for some racy pictures at the College Republican National Convention last weekend. Scroll down to the comments for some hilarious intraparty backbiting, hand-wringing and anti-Semitism.

This raises a serious question, though: How does a person like Justin Zatkoff get elected chair of his party's statewide youth organization?

My personal experience with Justin has been limited (I wrote about him, briefly, here), but from what I gather, he's the prototypical YAF type -- loud, obnoxious and obsessed with "un-P.C." political theater.

(My impression of YAF has always been that it's a manifestation of the Ann Coulterization of the campus right -- it's interested only in offending the left and otherwise amusing its own members and sympathizers.)

I guess maybe YAF members feel entitled to act like assholes because the campus far left is similarly loony. And sometimes they do manage to provoke BAMN and the like into looking like kooks, which they probably think reflects poorly on the left.

But we already know BAMN is crazy. And unlike YAF, BAMN doesn't control its party's statewide college organization. So how is YAF helping its side, again?

Here's the bio of Steve Japinga, Zatkoff's opponent in the MFCR chair election. (Yes, he had a campaign website.) He seems like a pretty typical College Republicans sort of guy. I've met enough of them to know that, for the most part, they have very little in common with YAF.

So can someone explain to me why this guy is their leader in Michigan?

Compulsive clickers, unite!

When I read on a computer, I do this thing -- I click on the words. More specifically, I double-click and highlight words on either edge of the text, in a sweeping pattern that roughly follows my eye movement. If you're not a clicker, I can't explain to you why I have to click on the words. It's just how I do.

Why do I bring this up? Because we compulsive clickers are being persecuted. News websites, starting with nytimes.com, have been adding a "feature" that displays a pop-up dictionary entry for any word you double-click in a story. Kriston Capps explains how tragic this is for "screensifters" who read the Times here.

Now I discover that my college paper, The Michigan Daily, has joined the dark side. And this iteration of the pop-up dictionary is even worse than the original: It evades pop-up blockers by using Flash or something to display a definition from Answers.com instead of opening a new window.

The Daily's current editor tells me College Publisher, the paper's Web provider, added the pop-up "feature" a few days ago. He's not sure whether it can turned off, and he thinks he'd probably leave it on because, in his estimation, the only people who obsessively highlight random text are current and former Daily news editors. His other comment for the record was vulgar but quickly retracted.

This raises two questions:

1. How much money is College Publisher (which is owned by a division of MTV Networks) getting from Answers.com in exchange for adding the pop-ups to its 450 or so sites?
2. Why not let users turn the pop-ups off? I would go so far as to call this an accessibility issue.

I'll report CP's response when I get it.

The GOP's tuition hikes

Students at U-M and MSU are organizing to protest this summer's tuition increases -- but they're putting the blame on Mike Bishop, the Republican state Senate majority leader, for forcing cuts to higher education funding. Seems like a good tactic to me.

Here is the YouTube video, and here's the Facebook group ("I'm Pissed that Mike Bishop is Raising My Tuition").

In today's News

Two stories I particularly liked: Cindy Rodriguez's piece on young professionals who are fiercely loyal to Detroit (all of the subjects she profiles are Michigan alums), and Neal Rubin's hilarious column about the Detroit City Council.