There's a lot of advice I could give you about the next four years of your life. There's a ton of stuff I could tell you that you should or shouldn't do and a mass of truisms I could throw at you about how important education is or whatever. I'm sure you've heard it all before.
Given their Nixon-esque polling numbers, it's safe to say that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are not exactly the most popular pair to grace 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In fact, only about 25 percent of people think our feckless leader is doing a good job. Incidentally, the same percentage of people predicted that the second coming of Jesus would occur in 2007. I've got a hunch that there's a lot of overlap in those two groups.
About a month ago, Florida's new "guns-at-work" law went into effect. The law allows employees with valid concealed weapons licenses to keep their guns in their cars while at work.
There are 3.7 million Floridians without health insurance. That means if you are under the age of 65, there's about a 1 in 4 chance that a serious illness would drive you into bankruptcy. But fear not - Gov. Charlie Crist has a plan. He calls it Cover Florida, and with it, he hopes to reduce the number of uninsured by offering them affordable premiums.
If your experience has been anything like mine, you've been surrounded by Obamamania for the better part of the past several months. It's not related, as much as you might expect, to spending most of the day on a college campus, where support for the master orator is pervasive and contagious. Rather, like most Americans, I've been bombarded with thinly veiled propaganda from the mainstream media in support of the hope-monger for longer than I care to remember.
The fact that most of us don't hold a mortgage, work a full-time job or have kids to support makes it pretty easy to ignore the current economic crisis. It doesn't help that for all but a few of us, economics is more boring than an episode of "Book TV" on C-SPAN 3 featuring an interview with Alan Greenspan.
s long as they avoid the monument to capitalism that is Butler Plaza, many denizens of Alachua County are able to convince themselves that the county is their own little bohemian paradise, an enlightened splotch of blue in an otherwise hopelessly red part of the state. Along with the ivory-tower idealism leaching out from UF, this attitude has resulted in a certain political party controlling local government practically unopposed for decades. Throw in a huge tax base that doesn't vote and doesn't care (that's you, students), and you have a recipe for disaster.
If you're a UF student, there's a good chance you support the formation of a committee to advise Bernie and Co. on how to invest our $1.2 billion endowment in a socially responsible manner.
Even if you're the consummate hippie, walking or biking everywhere, you've probably felt the squeeze of skyrocketing oil prices. The price of electricity, food and practically every consumer product imaginable has increased due to the historic spike in oil prices.
Late last week, The Guardian newspaper of London reported a leaked study from the World Bank that concluded that biofuels are responsible for driving up worldwide food costs by 75 percent â€" just a smidgen higher than the Bush administration's figure of 2 percent to 3 percent.
As the state of Florida and America move past the presidential election in November, beyond an ailing economy on the brink of a recession and headlong into the future, the country lies on the cusp of a crisis garnering little attention.
For the past two weeks, I was down in Argentina on vacation. This has kept me far away from my usual regimen of American politics and news. But while there, I found that Argentina's national political scene is almost as hard to stay away from as the red wine and grilled beef.
Last week, the Supreme Court turned its back on the American people. In a 5-4 ruling, the court held that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have the right to habeas corpus. In English, this means that prisoners are allowed to hear the evidence against them, and President Bush is prohibited from declaring anyone an "enemy combatant" and detaining them indefinitely without charge.
Last week, over 100 countries met in Dublin, Ireland, to sign an agreement banning the use of cluster bombs, weapons invented by the Soviet Union during World War II. Cluster bombs are large single bombs that release a number of "bomblets" over a vast area and are usually intended for anti-personnel use.
BRANDON SACK, Guest Columnist
Elizabeth Hillaker, UF Alumnus
With the first day of class behind me, it has finally sunk in: Summer is here.
Obama is selling himself as the president to settle the peace, not continue the war. Yet some of the senator's recent comments suggest he has far less of an interest in peace than in popularity. In an Associated Press interview from July 2007, Obama suggested that even the likelihood of genocide was insufficient grounds for retaining an American presence in Iraq. "If that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now - where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife - which we haven't done." Obama is implying America should bear as much responsibility for the security of citizens in a country we do not occupy as one we do. That is, none at all.
Solutions by The State News
