Daily Cal Counterweight

Week of September 27 - October 1

By Andrew R Quinio
Posted on 10/01/04

The following are some opinionated responses to some of the articles in this week’s issues of the Daily Cal.

HEADLINE: Hospitals Risk Losing Funding

The Alameda Medical Center’s six facilities may lose millions of dollars in funding due to cuts by the federal government. Their situation is a sad reminder that the government giveth, and the government taketh away. The medical center should move towards more privatization and less government intervention. Both the state and federal government need to deal with the waste and frivolous spending present in their budgets before they can fully address the needs of hospitals such as Alameda County. In the meantime, privatization will pinpoint the exact problems of the county’s hospitals and won’t place the burden on taxpayers.

OP-ED: Kerry, Edwards a Positive Alternative

Talk about an op-ed that lacks intellectual honesty. Bachilla and Woodward start off by labeling the Republican Convention a masquerade, noting the moderate speakers who took the stage in New York. What about the Democratic National Convention? Nearly 75 percent of those in attendance did not support the war in Iraq, but that little detail wasn’t even mentioned in any of the speeches. Most Democratic Convention attendees support gay marriage, yet there was no mention of that either. Wesley Clark gave a patriotic speech about the American Flag. Since when did democrats embrace the Flag? That’s what I call a masquerade. The Republicans may have had moderates speaking at the convention, but they all spoke about very conservative Republican values.

Furthermore, I do not find much positivism in class warfare and bashing the new Iraqi Prime Minister. Nor is there any positivism in tax increases. Bachilla and Woodward make many bold claims about a Kerry/Edwards term, with plans and policies that sound too good to be true. The question I have for them is this: HOW?

How will Kerry “launch a new era of alliances to better respond to the threat of terrorism..?” Many government leaders in both France and Germany have stated that it doesn’t matter who is president after November 2nd. They will not send troops to Iraq. Bachilla and Woodward also claim that Kerry will “modernize the world’s most powerful military to meet new threats.” Kerry had a chance to do that while he was a senator, but repeatedly voted against many improvements for our armed forces. He voted against the B-1 and B-2 bombers, the Apache Helicopter, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the Patriot Missile. In addition, he voted against improvements for the CIA. I’m not so positive he will do a better job of keeping me safe as president, when his senate record kept our soldiers as exposed as the day they were born.

The writers claim that Bush “misled” us into war. John Kerry and several other Democrats voted to go to war with Iraq. British Intelligence, Russian Intelligence, and UN Intelligence all corroborated US intelligence that Saddam had weapons of Mass Destruction. As many liberals constantly point out: the US supplied Iraq with the weapons they had. Now these same liberals, who were so frustrated that the US gave WMD to Iraq, are saying that the same WMD never existed. Well, we still have the receipts but some think the merchandise was never there in the first place. If there were no weapons of mass destruction, then how did Saddam kill the Kurds? We must recall that before we proposed sending weapons inspectors into Iraq and the time Saddam actually allowed them in, several months had passed. During those months, what was Saddam doing? He wasn’t exactly cleaning up his palaces so they looked pretty for the IAEA. One wonders whether or not those few months involved WMD.

They go on to mention that Kerry will end the “backdoor draft.” The term “backdoor draft” is entirely misleading. Reservists who are in Iraq did not go unwillingly. They volunteered to join the armed forces and weren’t forced as a “draft” suggests.

As for the deficit and economic recession, Bachilla and Woodward seem to forget that Bush inherited a recession, and the nation went through a little event on September 11, 2001 that had a major effect on the economy. If one looks at the deficit as a percentage of the GDP, the deficit is much lower than those under Truman, Ford, Reagan, and Bush senior.

If you want real positivism, vote Bush. He has done a great job so far, so let’s extend his stay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

HEADLINE: Free Speech Movement 40th Anniversary

Let’s celebrate something that has allowed even us conservatives to contribute to the forum of opinion. Having Howard Dean speak on the sacred ground of Sproul Plaza isn’t the party I dreamed of, though he is a wild party animal. “We’re gonna promote free speech at Cal, UCLA, University of Arizona, University of Michigan, Florida State… yaaaaaaaaaa!.” Officials will hopefully be on hand with a strait-jacket and some tranquilizers. But that is not what concerned me in this front page article. The police car which Mario Savio stood on top of will be symbolically displayed during the anniversary festivities. Several student leaders have disagreed with this ornament, calling the police car an offensive symbol of “police brutality.”

CalServe Senator Dena Takruri mentioned that it was especially offensive to “communities of color.” I personally see a police car as a representation of the men and women who put themselves in harm’s way every day to protect me, my family, my grandmother, and even the ungrateful Senator Dena Takruri. This is the same conspiracy theory thinking that is preventing our officers from protecting and serving. Does Takruri actually think that white officers get together and figure out ways to arrest and beat minorities? It’s absurd, considering the most recent chiefs of police for Los Angeles have been African-American. And Los Angeles is supposedly one of the major bastions for police brutality. False notions of victimization wrongly turn the innocent into the guilty, and the guilty into the innocent. It is reminiscent of the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the poor farmer falsely yells, “Help, help, I’m being oppressed.”

HEADLINE: FSM Café Serves Up History

Critics have accused the Free Speech Movement Café of commercializing the important movement. If anything, the café educates naïve freshman and others about an event that has significantly shaped the campus. It is essentially a museum with food on the side. As you bite into your grilled chicken panini, one only has to look down on the table or look at the walls to read about the history of the Free Speech Movement. The exhibits on the walls and tables offer so much more knowledge than a simple statue would. It is important to note that there are no items on the menu called “Mario Savio sandwiches” or “Free Speech Pesto.” That would be true commercialization.

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