Hey folks, you’ve probably noticed me bouncing around here by now, so I figured I’d step on up and say hello. Patriot is finally going the way of CalStuff and getting a girl on board, although i’m not quite as sexy. I’m Megan Sego, a Junior at Cal, majoring in Spanish and valiantly trying to learn Arabic also. I spend most of my time wandering around Dwinelle, Wheller, and Barrows, but occasionally get to take the odd poli-sci class, or some history. This semester in particularly you may feel the rubbing-off of one of Dr Gregor’s fascism classes in my posts.

Politically, I see no real need to delve deep into the okCupid workings of my mind (no offense James), because I’m a fairly typical conservative. I voted for Bush (but it didn’t ultimately count because of voter fraud in my home state, which is another story) but I’m not a party hack. I tend towards fairly stern economic conservatism and center-right to right-wing social values, but I don’t really believe most social aspects of life can be litigated (one reason I support Arnold). But if you have a question, ask! I’m a bit different than some of the other writers here, neither hardcore libertarian like PatR or very socially conservative like Chris, one of my sayings is “everything in moderation”. We’ll see how well that stands up!

Expect a lot of linking from me. I’m not gonna lie, the sites and blogs I read are mostly conservative and libertarian, so don’t expect exaustive reporting. Aside from commenting on other events, I enjoy the odd rant or two. I also write for the Patriot (as well as draw and edit), and have a few contributions to the Berkeley Poetry review.

I hope you enjoy!

Some of you might have seen it on C-span or other news outlets today, another typical anti-war protest. I happened to be touring Fisherman’s Wharf with my folks when I saw hordes of policemen leading the way for further hordes of protesters. They even had a helicopter circling, whether it was for security or news who knows. I’m sure Zombie, bay-area photo guru, will have some photos up soon, and perhaps some of our own bloggers will? The few photos I took in passing aren’t really worth posting as they don’t show any real action.

 One thing I noticed among the usual assortment of anti-war signs was a multitude of green dockworkers union signs calling for a boycott of some Alcatraz cruise line. This foiled our plans of visiting the island, but fueled conversation. Leftist protests tend to be an aggregate of angry expressions not limited to the subject at hand. At some of the events I have been to, anti-Israel messages are juxtaposed with pro-choice slogans. In my opinion, this limits the credibility of the message, and the power of it’s delivery. (Not like I’m about to complain though). Another perennial observation is the age of some of the participants. Today in particular, we passed some older gentlemen with their “end the Iraqi Occupation” signs, and they were actually talking about how they used to protest in the 60s.

What makes this particular protest any different than any other gathering of angry liberals? The fact that Jane Fonda was speaking in DC? It seems that these protests happen every two or three months to little avail. Whatever fills your Saturday, I guess. I spent mine being a tourist, and like most of the people around me, largely ignoring the protesters.

Yesterday at our BCR meeting, the board hosted an early Primary to help members sort out the potential Republican candidates. The format was statement, crossfire, and a final vote, and the results were interesting. Candidates to support included Brownback, McCain, Giuliani, Romney, and “Dark Horse”. Supporters for Brownback were non-existant (Because Fullmer wasn’t there), but the other camps were fairly evenly divided.

After initial statements and some crossfire, the trend of the evening seemed to be differentiating between representing traditional conservatism and defeating Hillary. Those in the Romney camp as well as half the dark horse-ers favored defending conservative principles, while some of the McCains and Giulianis compromised on social conservatism as a way to defeat Hillary (who actually got one vote during the evening).

Our primary had Romney win in the initial voting rounds and again in a run-off, but not by a huge margin. It was a thought-provoking discussion, and I was happy to see others are thinking similarly, as I found this morning. Right Wing News had a “Most & Least desired Republican candidates of 2008″ post where they surveyed a sampling of conservative bloggers. The voters ranked the candidates in a points system, and were given the following to select from, including any non-mentioned candidate:

Sam Brownback
John Cox
Jim Gilmore
Newt Gingrich
Rudy Giuliani
Chuck Hagel
Mike Huckabee
Duncan Hunter
John McCain
George Pataki
Ron Paul
Mitt Romney
Tom Tancredo
Tommy Thompson

The lowest scores were dropped, and the votes for “Most desired” ended up something like this:Â

14) John Cox (4)
13) Jeb Bush (5)
12) Jim Gilmore (5.5)
11) Ron Paul (8.5)
10) Condi Rice (11.5)
9) Mike Huckabee (14)
Tommy Thompson (15.5)
7) John McCain (19)
6) Sam Brownback (20)
5) Tom Tancredo (31.5)
4) Duncan Hunter (35.5)
3) Mitt Romney (43)
2) Rudy Giuliani (45)
1) Newt Gingrich (52)

Now I’m not just posting this to get back at the Romney folks from last night (I was in the Giuliani camp), but because the results are really interesting. Gingrich was one of our dark horses, as well as Tancredo. This may just be a result of internet-savvy people hearing more about the little guys than others, but maybe not. Now here’s what I’d like to do, if you don’t mind.

Please comment, of course, but list your pick. If you’re a Dem or an “other”, give us whatever analysis you’ve got on it. Sciency-types say that the outcome gets more “correct” the larger the population, and I’m curious.

Saturday was the Third Annual Walk for Life in San Francisco. I had fun marching with people for an end to abortion and respect for the life of unborn children. I went with the Berkeley Students for Life and helped with the setup of the march as well as actually marching.

I have been to a couple of San Francisco protests before, though this was decidedly different. First off, almost all the marchers were highly focused on the pro-life issue. Very few people carried signs on other topics. Second, the demeanor of the marchers was calm. Instead of yelling and screaming chants there were people praying and singing. In my section of the crowd, only one person was looking for a confrontation and he was pretty timid about it. Third, no one I knew of was smoking marijuana.

In true First Amendment and San Francisco style, there were people out there to disagree with us. Not all of these people who greeted us wanted to talk about abortion or what happens before a child is born. There were the usual drive out the Bush regime people. I did not see any Palestinian flags so I must have not been looking hard enough.

Would any protest be complete without the Dubya in a cage people?

If anyone can explain how Jesus = Hitler Youth or how that relates to a walk for life I would like to know.

While I was passing out signs a gentleman came up and started to talk with me. We argued over the use of the term unborn child or fetus. He tried to convince me that ‘it’ was a fetus and had no rights. My pleas for the protection of a human life were met by cries that I was a male and had no right to control a woman’s body. Which one of us do you think was blessed by an Eastern Orthodox Father walking by?

I liked the combination of the clenched fist and the woman symbol. They should use that next time a girl talks about her angry vagina on Sproul.

Surprisingly, the one time I came into contact with certifiable baby killers no one throw the term around, though someone threatened me with castration. Then there was the man standing with the pro-abortion crowd who told the marchers to keep their rosaries off his ovaries. I would be remiss if I did not pass along the new word I saw: heteroparricharchy.

There will be a photo essay in the February issue of the Patriot with more and different pictures worth seeing.

On campus this week the Berkeley Students for Life will be having a few events so check out their table on Sproul or the speaker they will be having at noon on Monday.

So, I promised I would post my quiz results and then an explanation of why they make no sense. To that end, I took the same OkCupid! test twice (the exclamation point is in the name. I’m not really that excited about it). The first time, I answered the questions textually - I read the question and answered it just for the statement itself, not for what it implies about political ideology.

For all y’all who make sport of calling me a closet liberal, this is the proof you’ve been waiting for (Sorry it’s a pic and not html…the html editor is being funky.):

But, before you get all twitterpated over this, the test neither mentioned John McCain nor did it mention immigration (my two most commonly cited apostasies), so that’s not why it’s putting me there. The reason is because of questions like this one:

40. A society is only as successful as its least fortunate members.

I absolutely agree with this statement. However, given that this question was most likely there to figure out my place along the economic axis, I would assume this takes my answer as the “liberal” or lower economic freedom answer. Now this assumes that 1) conservatives somehow inherently disagree with this statement, which I don’t believe, or 2) that believing in this statement automatically assumes that the government should assist said least fortunate members of this society. As a commenter in a previous post pointed out, that’s quite a logical leap. For a variety of reasons, while I agree with that statement, I don’t want to reduce economic freedom in any way to act on that belief.

Okay, so what about when I answered completely on the basis of whatever I thought they were implying?

Still a centrist, but on the opposite end of the scale. Here, of course, I answered questions like the one cited above based on what it implied in terms of the test. Not a huge shift, but a shift nonetheless.

Interestingly enough, when I take this test without adhering strictly to one method or the other, I usually come out in the “Capitalist” area, a little north of “Centrist” and a little west of the axis. And if I had to place myself on this map just based on what I think about my own views, that’d be right about where I’d put myself.

The problem with this test is that it combines questions about personal belief with questions about policy belief. See, if there are people who disagree with the idea that a society is only as well-off as its least fortunate members, on policy, I’d probably totally agree with them. On the other hand, if there were people who advocated radical redistribution of wealth to solve this problem, while I’d find their policy utterly idiotic we’d probably agree on the basic belief.

The quiz, by the way, can be found at www.okcupid.com/politics

I actually thought a more interesting question was one of the optional ones at the end:

Which issue is most important for you and your significant other to agree on?
Taxes
The War in Iraq
George Bush’s IQ
Abortion
The Environment

Personally, my rankings would be 1) Abortion, 2) George Bush’s IQ, 3) The Environment, 4) Taxes, and 5) The War in Iraq. How bout you guys?

I’ve posted a couple times here already, but I never got around to formally introducing myself. My name’s James Fullmer, and with Pat moving on to bigger and better things I’ll be helping Chris keep this place updated.

I’m definitely not the libertarian Pat is (few people are) so the blog will probably be taking a little bit of a different direction, politically. I don’t really fit into any of those nice premade labels like paleo-con or neo-con or ex-con - if any of you have read the book Crunchy Cons, by Rod Dreher, that describes my views fairly well, but even there I have some areas of disagreement - so I’ll refrain from trying to explain myself and just let you figure things out as I go. In the next couple of days I’ll post my score from that OKCupid politics test Pat posted up here a couple months ago, along with an explanation of why I think it’s a totally bunk test that can’t accurately represent one’s political views.

Anyway, just a little about myself, I’m currently the Managing Editor of the Patriot. I’m a third year Business and Poli Sci major with a City Planning minor, and like Chris and Pat I’m originally from Orange County - specifically, Fullerton - California. My main political claim to fame is that President Nixon went to my rival high school, though this was long before my own high school was actually built, so I guess I can’t take too much pride in that fact.

That’s all for now. Peace.

My internet has been working sporadically, we are still here.

A few days ago an op-ed appeared in The Chronicle by Patriot Editor in Chief Andrew R. Quinio. He talked about race and its use in college.

Today in the Daily Cal there was an article about the latest buffoonery of the ASUC. Seven weeks after their eight week deadline they finally have an elections council chair. Jessica Wren will be running the elections for a second year. The important stuff has already been said by Beetle and in the comments.

The elections will proceed smoothly even with the late planning start. Last year Ms. Wren worked a miracle by getting the job done in the record time of a few weeks while implementing the new online voting system. Last year she even had to deal with senators who did not want to give her what she wanted because it might make her put less effort into her job.

The delay came from the Graduate Assembly. They failed to supply graduate students to help in this process in a timely manor. Last year the GA insisted on more control in the elections process and forced through a memoranda of understanding. After they demanded and won this power, they can’t even find graduate students to fill the committee.

The one suggestion I have for the Senate is find some people who will be around for a couple of years and have them learn how to run an election and be trained this cycle. Last year just about all the elections council experience had graduated and that made the job harder and more expensive.

If you want to read about last year’s election planning for old times sake check here.

As you may or may not know, I graduated in December after the longest and shortest three and a half years of my life. As my time at UC Berkeley comes to an end, so does my position with the California Patriot. I’ve enjoyed my time assisting with this student publication, and I know that my successors will be able to pick up where I left off on both the magazine and this blog. So I’d just like to leave you guys with a few random closing thoughts…

Politics is the most unsatisfying of interests. Much better to be happily obsessed with sports or celebrity gossip than face the inevitable disillusionment of a political junkie. It’s like a game you can never win. Sure, your political party can “win”, and “win” big, but you need to sell your soul and become a partisan hack to really enjoy these victories. To see all of these smiling faces celebrating the GOP in 2004 or the Dems in 2006 is pretty mind boggling. Your favorite team didn’t just win the Super Bowl, your favorite celebrity didn’t just release a sex tape, so what’s there to be excited about? Your party defeating the “other” party so they can push things you really don’t believe in and give lip service to the things you really do? Because that’s what has happened before and that’s what will happen again. Do any of you actually want to admit that you actually approve of what one or the other of the two parties are doing in practice? If so, either reexamine your beliefs or, more likely, take a closer look at what your politicians are doing. I hate politics. If only it weren’t so interesting…

Do something. Besides academic stuff. Yeah, academic stuff is important and I wish I had spent more time on it, but a lot of other things go on at school too. Get involved with groups on campus or start your own. The experience will probably come in handy later on. My obsession with politics lead me to the Patriot for all these years. Even though I disagreed with much of what was printed, I personally got something out of it and I’m happy to have helped our countless writers and artists get something out of it too by getting them published each month.

Tolerance, please. If there’s one thing you should really learn from Berkeley, it’s to cherish individual diversity and look beyond what seems obvious. In less enlightened times and places, diversity can be the scapegoat for hatred. Hating others simply because of their race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, political orientation, social class, and so on. Instead, why not choose to like others because of shared tastes or compatible personalities? The things that actually matter in defining ourselves as individuals. And the only way to really know an individual is to put your prejudices aside and find out. The reality is, there’s six billion of us and we’re all minorities of one. Why is this such a radical viewpoint?

So that’s about it. I regret not posting more these past few months; I could never get back into the habit. I hope my libertarian rants weren’t too tiring and that they weren’t too out of place with the rest of the Patriot. I hope someday they’ll be the norm… Finally, I just wanted to thank everyone who actually read the crap I posted for the last few years. Maybe I’ll find a new blogging outlet, once the withdrawal kicks in…

It’s been fun.

Before this week, the only Republican that I would consider voting for (in the primary and in the general election) was Senator Chuck Hagel. Hagel’s a good guy, but I’ve changed my vote now that Congressman Ron Paul is in the running:

Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic, nine-term lawmaker from southeast Texas, took the first step Thursday toward a second, quixotic presidential bid _ this time as a Republican…

“There’s no question that it’s an uphill battle, and that Dr. Paul is an underdog,” Snyder said. “But we think it’s well worth doing and we’ll let the voters decide.”

Paul limits his view of the role of the federal government to those duties laid out in the Constitution. As a result, he sometimes casts votes at odds with his constituents and other Republicans.

Paul has been my favorite modern-day politician ever since I first got interested in politics back in high school. He’s a true libertarian, and he’s exactly what this country needs.

Given the excitement on sites from right-wing Free Republic, to left-wing Daily Kos, to geek-wing Digg, Paul can count on a diverse base that has been all but ignored by the mainstream media and pundits. 2008 will be the year the election will finally be decided by You, mobilized by grassroots blogs and sites like YouTube. This will be Howard Dean’s Internet fueled rise to the top, times 100, and without the meltdown. Get ready for a campaign like no other.

This country is tired of candidates like Mitt and McCain and Hillary and Obama. We don’t want more of the same. I look forward to finally being able to vote for someone I actually want and believe in.

Drudge’s headline says it all: “Yale A Cappella Group Beaten after Singing ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ in San Francisco…”.

The 16 singers showed up late to the party wearing preppy sport jackets and ties, and launched into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

A couple of uninvited guests started mocking them, and allegedly the words “faggot” and “homo” were tossed — and so were a couple of punches.

Wow, apparently SF is not only anti-American but also anti-gay as well. Who knew?

From the pages of the New York Times comes this article, the latest salvo in the battle against meritocracy in college admissions. The campus discussed is our very own, and the problem? Apparently there are too many Asians.

That’s right. Forget the supposed underrepresentation of other minorities, the substandard public schools that lead to differing educational opportunities, or any of the other myriad reasons cited in arguments for the reintroduction of affirmative action. The biggest problem caused by Proposition 209 seems to be that it has increased the number of Asians on campus. After a few paragraphs of reminiscing about the good ol’ days of protests, pot, and Peoples’ Park, the author describes today’s Cal as something more like a “small, industrious city of über-students” due in large part to its ever-increasing share of Asians. Yeah, that’s not stereotypical or anything.

And, of course, if we’re not careful, this demographic nightmare could happen at other schools too!

“IF Berkeley is now a pure meritocracy, what does that say about the future of great American universities in the post-affirmative action age? Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look something like Berkeley[?]”

I’m not one to cry “racism” needlessly, but seriously, why is it okay to talk about there being too many Asians on a college campus (or mock Asian languages) and not okay to do this for other people? Oh, that’s right, because there aren’t any prominent Asians who make a living by telling people that it’s not okay.

This double-standard aside, it’s yet another example of how the proponents of racial preferences seem to think that race is a truly defining characteristic of a person. Diversity is hard to achieve if 41% of the people on your campus are all exactly the same…again, that’s not at all racist to think along those lines.

Now, okay, hyperbole aside, let’s take a long hard look at this reasoning.

“The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation’s most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.”

That’s all well and good to say, but if we want to be truly representative of all of California, shouldn’t we be taking people who aren’t academically qualified at all for Berkeley? People who haven’t completed high school? People who didn’t pass the high school exit exam? Reminds me of G. Harrold Carswell, the supposedly mediocre nominee for the Supreme Court who was defended by a couple Senators who argued that mediocre Americans deserved representation too.

Obviously a university isn’t trying to be truly representative of its state, not in all senses. Why then is race a special category? Diversity’s nice, but a school looking for students should try and pick the best *students*, whatever racial mix that process yields.