When a system is in a state of equilibrium and a new, non-inert component is added, the system will become dynamic and then reach a new equilibrium. This scientific principle is true of chemical reactions and also of societal interactions, notably occurring here at UMass Amherst surrounding the release of the first issue of The Minuteman in February of 2009.

As student fees climb even higher, The Minuteman has learned that Student Bridges – a UMass agency whose $172,000 budget is allocated by the Student Government Association from the mandatory annual student activity fee paid by every undergraduate -- spent a significant portion of its budget on lavish dinners, wild parties and local hotel rooms.

Students returning to Southwest next fall will confront gridlock.  In an admitted attempt to prop up property values on Lincoln and Sunset Avenues, the Town of Amherst will block off two of the six roads that provide access to campus.  Lincoln Avenue, which once ran pass the Student Union and connected with North Pleasant Street in the vicinity of the Grad Tower, was once the primary road to campus.  It remains the only realistic way to reach the 1013 parking spaces in the five lots it empties into.

PITTSFIELD-- Jennifer Lighten, 33, found herself in a sticky situation on Mar. 10, when her wife Stephanie Lighten, 26 allegedly assaulted and attempted to forcibly inseminate her with her brother’s sperm.

The Board of Trustees of the University of Massachusetts has recently passed a $1,500 fee increase for students. In response, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has unveiled his own initiative to transfer some of the federal stimulus money to scale back or rebate part of the fee increase.

Here at UMass, it is easy to think that avoiding the Sylvan “rape trail” and locking your door a night is enough to be safe. Sure, UMass has certainly increased security over the years, and Amherst is a small town with little crime, but with recent incidents in the Hadley and Sunderland areas, it is important to have some idea of how to protect your self.

Hello,

First let me say that I came across the video protests of Don Feder, and was well, not impressed with the conduct of those protesting him, nor Feder himself.  I understand the frustrations that he was experiencing, but he failed to keep his cool, only causing the fire to ignite further.  Just the same, it does not excuse those protesting, as it is pretty clear that this was their intent from the very beginning.

When asked if fascism could ever come to America, Huey Long (the Depression-era governor of Louisiana) replied, “Sure, only here they’ll call it anti-fascism.”

Tolerance is not a one-way street.

Although UMass professors and students claim to encourage intellectual diversity and open-mindedness, their repeated actions of intolerance in the four years I have been at UMass suggest something completely different. The true test of tolerance is not whether you tolerate those with whom you agree, but that you tolerate those with whom you don’t agree.

Ron Paul - John Beale

Ron Paul, the champion of the Constitution, was a man who needed no introduction at CPAC 2009. To numerous standing ovations, Paul delivered his message of liberty, sound money, limited government, drastically reduced taxation, free trade, and a return to the constitutional republic the founders intended. The 10-term Congressman from Texas spoke twice at CPAC: once to the general assembly and again for his core Campaign for Liberty supporters. Paul’s constitutional message was refreshing to hear after 8 years of George W Bush’s neoconservative politics and after the election of Barack Obama, who this writer feels is practically a communist. Forgive the injection of opinion, but I firmly feel that Ron Paul is THE MAN.

We all have our own visualizations of the wealthy. Usually a male, over weight, pin stripped suit, sucking on a fat Cuban cigar, with an evil smile. It is safe to say, that is the image that the Obama Administration, the liberals and the majority of Hollywood celebrities (who are well, what we like to call mega-rich hypocrites) have given to the American public. The wealthy rarely ever fit this stereotypical profile, due to the fact that there are more millionaires in the world today then ever before. The term millionaire no longer has the glamour attached to it, like it has in the past. Today, the world billionaire, tycoon, magnet, and titan have the stereotypical feel, as described above, and one might think of a self-promoting pompous ass, like Donald Trump. In today’s society, the wealthy are made to feel embarrassed about their wealth, ashamed of their success, as if they hadn’t worked for it. The wealthy only have you and I to blame: as consumers who buy their products, as employees who increase productivity and efficiency, and as investors who give them our earned money to secure our future. Maybe we should recognize that the wealthy also need a lot of help to where they have ended up today, and maybe we are the ones who gave it to them.

6:56 AM – Woken up rudely after 15-pound Abraham Lincoln portrait on wall crashes onto bed.
7:00 AM – Attempts to hit ‘snooze’ on alarm clock on Abraham Lincoln night stand.

7:01 AM – Instead knocks William Ayers bobblehead onto floor.

Personal moral self-determination among individual people is a principle that is upheld strongly by most college students. This principle is held with a very high regard, almost to the level of sacred truth. The idea behind personal moral self‑determination is that each and every person has the right to determine the rule by which he will live his life.

When I was younger, I was a self-proclaimed idealist. I saw a world of chaos and pain, irrationality and adversity. My response to this was to view everything in a manner of what it could be. My archenemy was reality. Blaming “the man” for all of my fears and inconveniences was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew that someone out there was taking advantage of our society and I was going to complain and whine until they went away -- because I was right and they were wrong.

Much has been said as to whether the charms of the Obama Administration can transform American foreign policy from the moralistic black-and-white Bush Doctrine into the State Department’s new “Smart Power” doctrine, emphasizing all of the tools in the proverbial box, with an even-handed consideration of peaceful and military means.

A lot of Republicans get into trouble for putting earmarks into bills or for using taxpayer money on projects for their own districts. Governor Sarah Palin was criticized for having infrastructure projects funded and recently Congressman Ron Paul is catching trouble for putting earmarks on the Omnibus bill. While using this money is reprehensible and does go against their principles, not doing it will not really change anything. As they have noted, that money will be spent either way and some of it will come from their own districts. The most they can do is try and have the money their people pay go to those they represent. This dilemma is illustrated in the article “The Tragedy of Commons,” written by Garret Hardin. In the article, Hardin points out that given a finite resource, people will consume it quickly rather than lose it to someone else.  While not a perfect analogy, it is still relevant. Here there are two limited resources that lead into each other: votes and tax dollars. Promising other people’s money to voters is the best method of getting votes. As a result, any politician who wants to have a fighting chance simply must promise this. In doing so, competition for tax revenue results, since politicians use this money to buy votes, and said money is limited. Since all politicians are throwing tax payer money around, any politician who wants to keep their job must promise more money than their competitors. If they do not capitalize on the situation, others will. This is seen in the bailout of the states, where successful states that had not squandered their money were forced to pay the ones that were not as fiscally responsible. Several governors decided not to take such money, but this will only result in their states losing money and may even threaten the governor’s careers. It is thus in their best interest to live off other states rather than to be lived off of. This continual process is why the US government spends the largest part of the GDP.

The UMass Police Department (UMPD) and University administration once again proved their unwillingness to uphold freedom of speech and support intellectual diversity, with their ineptitude on full and magnificent display during the contentious and widely discussed hate crime speech by conservative Don Feder in the Cape Cod Lounge on Wednesday, 11 March 2009.

Reminiscent of its inability to maintain safety and order at the Andy Card die-in fiasco in April 2007, the UMPD’s performance this time around bordered on criminal negligence as 6 officers and one sergeant dreadfully but perhaps unsurprisingly failed to police an event centered on the importance of free speech.  The UMass Republican Club, of which I am Vice President, paid $735 for the services of the aforementioned officers and in return received nothing more than argumentativeness, disagreement and one colossal hassle – not from the foolish and intolerant leftist disruptors – but from the officers on duty and under oath to enforce the Massachusetts General Laws.  So bad was the performance of the highly paid and inaction-inclined officers that two Athletic Department (and Republican Club) donors immediately revoked financial support of athletics and the University as a whole, with one of them writing: “Once a speaker is allowed to come on campus and give a speech then I think it is incumbent upon the institution to require the person to be allowed to complete the speech - otherwise do not allow such speeches for any group.”

The other now-former donor, a retired professor of psychology, wrote:

“I am reassessing my financial support of UMass Athletics in light of events surrounding an event sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Republican Club, as reported in today’s [paper]. The invited speaker was literally shouted down by those unwilling to hear something they did not wish to hear and to make certain that no one else would hear it either.”

This paper and I personally applaud the important message sent by these two gentlemen, said message being that the University must make every effort to ensure that an invited speaker be able to deliver his speech unmolested by angry protestors.  And UMass routinely fails in this regard by compelling student groups to pay for the luxuriously salaried police out of their own budgets rather than fund police details for potentially disrupted events.  Doing so means that events like Feder either never happen in the first place if they sponsoring group lacks the money to fund the UMPD, and thus do not contribute to the intellectual marketplace of ideas on campus, or they are forced to pay astronomically high prices for police whose collective bargaining agreement with the school means that 1.5 hours of work, no matter how inept and shoddy, legally equals 4 hours of pay.  Something is egregiously wrong with this equation, and the worst-case scenario -- well-paid police funded by a cash-strapped student group ignoring repeated violations of state law for fear of being accused of police brutality and at the command of nearby University administrators -- played out to the dismay of community members and well-meaning students in attendance a few Wednesdays ago.

Furthermore, the University -- as embodied by the police and other officials on-hand -- failed in its duty to enforce the Code of Student Conduct and state law statutes covering harassment and disruption of public events against the student protestors.  Don Feder repeatedly asked the police to intervene as he was rudely shouted down, but they failed to even entertain his pleas for assistance, instead opting to ask me and other event organizers to remove the disruptive protesters.

The University’s mission is to provide an affordable and accessible education of high quality and to conduct programs of research and public service that advance knowledge and improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world.  Implicit in this mission statement -- and explicit in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution -- is the fundamental principle that one’s reasonable freedom of speech shall not be abridged.  By reasonable I mean that Don Feder’s right to freedom of speech in the Cape Cod Lounge earlier this month was absolute insofar as the Republican Club had reserved the room, procured the microphones and sound equipment, and generally established the space as the site of their event.  The freedom of expression of the leftist radicals legally ought to have been curtailed consistent with the “time, place, and manner” restrictions placed on freedom of speech in a plethora of 20th-century United States Supreme Court cases. Moreover, consistent with Massachusetts law, when Don Feder publicly declared that he felt as though he was being harassed to the point where continuing his speech wasn’t feasible, the UMPD ought to have arrested the most boisterously yelling and sign-waving disruptors.  To make the job of the duty-averse UMPD officers easier than it already was, Republican Club members were readily handing out copies to them of the state statute whose violation was clearly and presently occurring.  A simple message needed to be sent: Obnoxious and criminal disruptions of the event would not be tolerated and Feder’s freedom of speech would trump the protester’s right to behave like degenerate miscreants thereby allowing the invited guest to contribute to the intellectual diversity of the campus -- by offering a conservative perspective on hate crime law -- and therefore help advance the educational aspect of the University’s mission statement.

But this was not to be so.  Instead, what the attending audience got to witness was the free speech of a prominent conservative get curtailed by the very same hypocritical leftist fascists who proclaim to want an equality of rights for all (that agree with them); a police department’s miserable uselessness in full blossom (and as a law and order conservative whose instinctive respect for the police is high, I was quite disheartened and dismayed); and the reluctance of lazy bureaucrats (University administrators) to take the initiative to defend what is right, just, and legal.  Wow, this combination of incompetence, militant liberalism, and institutionalized crookedness sounds pretty similar to an accurate characterization of the Deval Patrick administration.  Only in Massachusetts.  Only on Planet UMass, where respect for free speech and intellectual dynamism are routinely the biggest losers and must be in hiding.

Brad can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

President Obama is the 44th President of the United States. He was elected from the Democratic Party in 2008 at the age of 47.

Setting:  President Obama took office this past January amidst an economic crisis not seen since the 1930’s.  The crisis stemmed from corruption in the financial and banking sectors, where fraudulent and predatory loans were pushed on people who could not afford them.  Over-investment from the 1990’s economic boom, combined with the sudden mortgage crisis caused a recession, as investors retreated from the stock market while their profits were still safe.  The lack of oversight by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) allowed for these predatory practices to take place, and provided the opportunity for investment tycoons such as Bernie Madoff to steal billions from investors.  Coupled with this economic disaster is the involvement of the U.S. in oversees wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost our country about one billion dollars per day.

Forget Blagojevitch, Edwards, Spitzer, and Kilpatrick. Some of 2008's most scandalous cases of sex, lies, and corruption happened right here in our own political backyard. From cash-stuffed bras, to sex acts with teenaged boys, the Minuteman dug through the worst of it to bring you the top 10 most ruthless, dirtiest, and straight-up shameless Massachusetts politicians of the past year.

 

President Barack Obama's inauguration speech uses aspiring rhetoric to bring the American people towards the ideal of self-sacrifice, as well as to inculcate us with a willingness to put our trust in government. While these sentiments are sincerely received, and I believe that the president has great intentions for the American people, his ideas fail on several grounds. First, the speech itself lacks the necessary cohesiveness to form a unifying philosophy. Second, the policy proposals themselves are destined towards failure. Third, President Obama does not properly account for human nature.

 

On January 20, 2009, quoting the early American revolutionary patriot Thomas Paine, newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama called upon Americans to embrace the spirit of self-sacrifice in trying times. President Obama addressed the issues of the declining economy and international terrorism in his speech. To accomplish his goals, our president states that there needs to be a reorganization of the current structure of government, and a reorientation of our personal priorities.

Michael Graham is an outspoken conservative talk radio host with WTKK-FM 96.9 in Boston, MA. He will be speaking at UMass Amherst on Tuesday, Febrauary 17, 2009.

See the event's advertisement on the following page.

First off, what do you think of the Economic Stimulus bill?

 

"Overall, the economic stimulus bill is horrible, but if you're a Massachusetts politician, it might seem to you like a good idea because the crappier you ran your state, the bigger a win it is for you because you'll desperately need the money. And the economic stimulus bill is going to dump lots of money into the system with very, very little accountability -- which sounds like a corrupt Massachusetts politician's dream. If you're [a politician from] New Hampshire, you don't need the money because you didn't run your state into the ground -- but the more you wasted, the more you need the billions to cover your mistakes. Massachusetts is like the dumb, pot-smoking dope at UMass whose dad is a millionaire and who'll bail him out of jail when he gets caught; Mass is the state that's like the drunk, dumb kid on campus who would pledge to a frat. I call the economic stimulus 'the Screwulus' because it's going to screw us more than stimulate the economy. Particularly for your generation! You guys are going to have to pay it back plus interest. Once you figure paying the interest on a trillion dollars, each American family will have an extra $30 thousand in debt that you'll have to pay -- and that's on top of your student loans."

Mike Harper

CHEERS & JEERS

 

CHEERS to Michael Steele, whose election as RNC chair has renewed the integrity of the Republican Party.

 

JEERS to Sal DeMasi for being yet another Massachusetts politician to resign under an ethical cloud.

Recently the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO), the Graduate Employee union on campus has garnered attention due to their highly-publicized photos depicting Chancellor Robert Holub as a rat in a tuxedo. After last year's Mike Gargano fiasco, these fliers may seem to some as a new attack against an administrative official, but the reality is more complex. GEO Vice-President graciously sat down with me to discuss some of the issues that are troubling their organization.

What a drag! On Jan. 14, Massachusetts lawmakers introduced a Transgender "Civil Rights" bill titled "An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes," also known as Bill H1722. This legislation would give transgender people the same special protection under Massachusetts law as racial, ethnic, and religious groups.