There were many fashion-no-nos I made in middle school. Thankfully, this wasn’t one of them.

Delias, with its ever-kitchy *, has once again reassured my faith in the masses. The t-shirt pictured above features the lovable Woodstock to put trash in “it’s” (sic) place. This egregious grammatical whoop-si-daisy is not getting as much press as it should. The designers should be embarrassed! And yet I hardly hear about it.

At least it puts my issues into some sort of perspective. Sure, I have a million finals coming up, and essays galore, but at least I did not publicly announce that I am completely and utterly incapable of using the apostrophe. (You know, that little thing by the return key?)

I am sorry that public schools have failed Woodstock so badly.

It would be interesting to see someone game theory the Israel Lobby phenomenon. Now I’m no econ-math major, but I imagine such a thought experiment would go a little like this: something of an anti-Israel nature seeps into the mainstream. Like AARP, CAIR or any group of concerned citizens that cares passionately about the ideas, policies and constituencies it represents, the Lobby goes into aggressive spin (or attack, as the case may be) mode. But Israel advocates are as self-conscious as they are sensitive, for reasons that have more to do with the historical fragility of Jewish political gains and the present-day fragility of the Middle East than it does with straight-up tribalism or neocon paranoia. Nevertheless, the lobbyists attempt to pre-empt their critics while a media fascinated with the very idea of the Israel Lobby tries to pre-empt the pre-empters. Inject a bit of presidential politics into the mix, and this PR-brinksmanship leads otherwise reputable news sources down the blindest of alleyways.

One such alleyway is Barack Obama’s friendship with Rashid Khalidi, which is at the center of this report in the LA Times. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again (and keep in mind that I’m generally supportive of Israel and relatively lukewarm on Obama): this friendship says less than nothing about Obama’s stance on Israel, and even less about his fitness to be president.

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A confession, readers: I’ve been blankly staring at my monitor for the past five minutes, wondering how (and whether) I can squeeze a couple paragraphs of Commentariat-quality analysis out of today’s Spec news offerings. Nothing’s coming. Worse still, the only thing even remotely worth writing about is last night’s farcical GSSC impeachment, which, like any gossip item, is probably best avoided by publications of the Commentariat’s caliber.

One could argue that the GSSC’s at least theoretical impact on the lives of its constituency makes this latest spate of juvenile behavior at least a little newsworthy. But the issue of student council reform transcends the dozen or so idiots who felt some inextinguishable need to impeach Niko Cunningham. So it’s enough to say that these people are idiots (and holy shit are they idiots) and leave it at that. For now.

So what’s today’s big news? The Pulitzer Prize ceremony on May 29th, of course. The Dylan lifetime achievement award is a brilliant ploy–an attempt to coax one of the world’s great enigmatic geniuses into a soul-baring acceptance speech from which there will be no escape. The ceremony will probably be invitation only, but screw that: any ideas on sneaking into Low? That don’t involve the 6-inch crawlspace underneath Kent?

Election time! A time where new faces pop up, and new (or newly re-worded) platforms are set up for the student body to see on every wall in Lewisohn, Hamilton and beyond. Well, not this time–the entire bloody lot of them at GSSC Elections Commission have resigned. Can GSSC fundamentalists somehow figure out a way to blame Cunningham? Probably!

But the mass resignation was not done without reason. Or at least one would hope not. Apparently, members complained that they were “being asked to legitimize what [they] believed to be an unconstitutional and illegitimate election”, the problem being that the Judicial Committee overruled the deadline for candidacy declaration and did a bit of picking-and-choosing in terms of who could actually submit late declarations. Speaking of the Judicial Committee and constitutional responsibilities, they’ve certainly proved to be a rather ineffective bunch.

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It was strange indeed to find the media ethicists over at IvyGate taking us to task for protecting the privacy of our sex blogger. Far stranger was the one commenter who attributed this decision to lingering “old-media bitterness.” I’d like to think that our sex blogger represents the potential of new media, since he brings the kind of edgy, honest and off-beat writing that would be hopelessly idiosyncratic in a mainstream print outlet. At its best, the web is a place for unique talents like the Big Bad Wolf to find both a voice and an audience. At worst, it’s a forum for pointless public humiliation, and the same internet that hosts awesome, boundary-shattering new-media creativity is also home to lowly, bottom-dwelling new media vampirism.

But on with our lives–after all, there are much better ways of using the internet to waste time. Slate’s vlog is a good place to start…

I guess the ex-VP decided to celebrate his invention of the internet by taking some time off to cruise around the lecture circuit in a private jet and invent what is commonly referred to today as “global warming.”

According to NPR, robots that have scoured the sea are reporting home that the water hasn’t actually gotten any warmer in the past five years, and when it comes to global warming, “it’s the oceans that really matter.”

As in, that’s where all the proof is. And the proof isn’t there.

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A little while ago, a commenter chided me for playing down the recent fracas over Juicy Campus, this in the midst of my chiding Fair Alma for letting its most important student governing body tip-toe around federal election law, and for its dismissive attitude towards the University’s shameful treatment of the School of General Studies. But these real controversies aren’t quite as, how you say, juicy as the one that’s gripped most of higher edfor the past couple of weeks. So to my commentor I’ll concede: Juicy Campus is (infintesimally) more important than I gave it credit for, if only for reviving the age-old (and rather tired) rights-versus-responsibility debate. Luckily, CCSC allowed for an open forum that helped expose a prospective JC ban as mere institutional paternalism–y’know, the kind that drives these guys up a wall. Not so at Yale, which holds an apparently anti-Bollingerian view on free speech:

Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry has consulted the University’s general counselabout the possibility of blocking the site from Yale’s network or punishing users who log onto it. Yale’s lawyers have contacted JuicyCampus about University concerns, Gentry said.

Like Board at Butler, Juicy Campus implodes the notion that the world’s smartest people are mature enough to handle unadulterated free speech. Unfortnately for the remaining Ron Paul revolutionaries, the free market won’t regulate itself, since regulation neutralizes the base human tendencies to which the free market appeals. The best we can hope for is a kind of principled balance–Columbia’s (more or less) popular rejection rather than Yale’s top-down, almost statist approach to things.

But I’m sure you’re as bored by the legal and philosophical aspect of this as I am. Just what the hell is on Juicy Campus, anyway?

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It’s been a not-so-great week for Barack Obama, and a terrible one by Barack Obama standards. The trial of real-estate mogul and dilettante wheeler-dealer Tony Rezko begins this week, which focuses attention on what was once the juiciest scandal of the Illinois Senator’s brief political career. The “juiciest” title now goes to a delicious bit of foreign intrigue involving an Obama adviser, the Canadian consul general of Chicago and a rather transparent attempt at covering up a pretty damning flip-flop on free trade.

Of course none of this is going to matter, since your average American voter is smart enough not to get tripped up on shady real estate deals or the finer points of U.S. trade policy. Your average American voter probably doesn’t read Slate either, but the ones who do recently witnessed the irascible Christopher Hitchens take his first-ever shot at the Democratic frontrunner. Hitchens is no barometer of public opinion (thank God), but his impatience with the canned and self-consciously insincere nature of American political rhetoric rings especially true in light of Obama’s recent troubles. After all, if the man has to lie about lying about a policy position, then what can we believe in?

An interesting coda was Monica Varman’s front-pager in today’s Spec looking at prominent Columbians who have donated to the Clinton campaign. In addition to Barnard Prez Judith Shapiro contributing one of the most nonsensical quotes in the history of Columbian newsmedia (one that’s on par with this Michael Sidel classic from an old issue of the Blue and White), the article is noteworthy for suggesting just how few ties Obama has to this place. The candidate’s diffidence towards Fair Alma was never a secret, but it shares a certain consistency with his high-minded aloofness–I’m never going to have a beer with Barack Obama, but I’m not sure I’d really want to. Meanwhile, Dennis Kucinich can drink whatever the hell he wants. I’ll pay.

Clinton could survive tonight, but I remember reading that she’d have to win every state by an average of 16 percentage points to make up the 113-delegate difference currently seperating her and Obama. That’s not going to happen, and with the campaign more or less over it’s time to start looking at what kind of a general election candidate Obama is going to be–and whether or not this week is an indication of things to come.

CODA: The quote, for those of you who were too lazy to click on links:

“This girl really went crazy!” Sidel said, his enthusiasm crescendoing. “I mean, this is the book right here. You’ve got the ass, and you’ve got the—well, the pussy—and if you turn it around, it’s the asshole. It’s also the portrait of the artist—Joyce’s two nearsighted eyes, his nose. And the whole loop, the infinity thing.” He paused for a second before launching into an anecdote about some faraway Finnegans Wake society. “They’d only do a page a month,” he said.

If that doesn’t win Christopher Morris-Lent a Pulitzer Prize, then there’s no way in hell I’m winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Power to the sheeple. Fake scandal swept through campus today, as Bwog and the paper of record fronted a CCSC meeting about a website called Juicycampus.com, which is by all accounts a less enlightened ripoff of Columbia’s own Bored at network.  GSCC had more important things to worry about, since a pissant off-campus website is piddling in comparison to the non-traditional school’s housing situation (while the Spec article doesn’t mention GSSC’s involvement, communications VP Brody Berg’s email cryptically referred to it as a “GSSC Housing Hearing at the University Senate.” It’s a semantic point, although it highlights just how different the student councils’ priorities have been…). Columbia can hardly house 350 students in 81 buildings in varying states of deterioration. But this is heartening compared to GS Dean of Students Dominic Stellini’s all-too-philisophical assessment of things:

GS is experiencing a “dearth of housing,” according to Stellini, who explained that this is a common problem in Columbia schools across the board. “Our housing allocation numbers don’t meet our needs—I am not sure that they meet any school’s needs.”

But it doesn’t matter if they meet other school’s needs. GS is not GSAS–it’s an undergraduate school serving students who are pursuing four-year degrees, and who spend several hours on campus four to five days a week.  Who cares if GS’s housing situation is on par with the the graduate schools’? What about the 5,000 CC and SEAS undergrads who recieve four years of guaranteed housing that isn’t neglected in the University’s phantom, two-decade capital improvement plan?

It’s a travesty that the University won’t be bothered to adequately house the modest fraction of GS students who feel they need to be closer to classes, friends, and everything else that makes campus life better than living off the Myrtle Avenue J. But one can understand why they won’t be bothered when they have the likes of Dean Stellini bothering them.

And now to the hackwars. Without campus radicals of hair-brained administrators to offend popular sensitivities, Columbia’s press corps has let its raging id roam free–by offending each other, that is. First we had this mocking bit of lecture hackery from no less illustrious a figure than Blue and White editor Anna Philips. The situation further escalated when el participante revealed a disturbing pattern of Zionist bias at the campus paper of record. Philips’ gripe seemed to be with the Spectator’s continued faith in the print medium, which is a little bizarre coming from the editor of a print publication. Meanwhile, ep is irked that Spec is slightly to the right of Al Ahram as far its Middle East coverage goes.

So have the campus hacktivists grown so disaffected with the student body that they’d rather take pot shots at each other’s expense than wage a legitimate battle of ideas? God I hope so, since it would make this blog about a thousand times more interesting to read. I also hope that Spectator brings back unregistered commenting, since it would allow critics of Spec’s news coverage to take it up on the message boards rather than having to drag an infant opinion blog into the hackwars fray. I think unregistered commenting would probably mean a huge bounce in Spec web traffic–after all, it wasn’t that long ago that an unassuming Spec message board touched off a blogospheric free-for-all. What say you, Tom?

The affable, pro-globalization economics professor says that Obama is “dead wrong” on NAFTA, which has apparently been better for our economy than Tuesday night’s debate made it out to be. One wonders at the signficance of an academic proponent of free trade supporting a candidate who is effectively a trade protectionist. Does this mean that the global market’s biggest fans no longer see trade liberalization as a cure-all? Or does it mean that Obama isn’t quite as protectionist as his proposed NAFTA policy would indicate?

I’ll leave this one to the econ majors, because Bhagwati’s quote isn’t even this week’s juciest statement from a past or present Columbia faculty member. Former visiting law professor Amnon Rubinstein chose this week to reflect on the rampant Israeliaphobia among Israeli academics. His peg: Ahmadinejad’s visit this past fall, during which, according to the Israel Prize laureate, observant Jews and secular Israelis were on opposite sides of the debate. I won’t bore you with what this says about the state of world Jewry (although you can drop me an email if you’re interested…).

What it says about the intellectual vacuum of the academy is obvious enough, and examples of the Ivory Tower’s paradoxical, often-contrarian herd mentality abound in places other than Middle Eastern Studies (I mean, how else could deconstructionism have gotten off the ground?) But while we’re on the subject, the Jpost does seem incredibly interested in MEALAC. Or more accurately, Martin Kramer is incredibly interested in MEALAC.

Kramer is a scholar at the Washington Institute, and was once blasted by Joseph Massad for being:

angry that the academy still allows democratic procedure in the expression of political views and has an institutionalised meritocratic system of judgment…to evaluate its members. Their goal is to destroy any semblance of either in favour of subjecting democracy and academic life to an incendiary jingoism and to the exigencies of the national security state with the express aim of imploding freedom. Their larger success, however, has been in discrediting themselves and in reminding all of us that we should never take the freedoms that we have for granted, as the likes of Kramer and Pipes are working to take them away.

This is a pretty ironic criticism, seeing that Massad will soon be out of a job. Of greater interest is the fact that Columbia is still seen as one of the crucial fault lines in the epic pro-Zionist-anti-Zionist battle of ideas. Chalk it up to our New York location, an active pro-Israel community, Edward Said’s long shadow, whatever–there is a sense among Israel supporters that what happens at Columbia matters in some intrinsic and possibly even extrinsic sense. But does it?

If it did, it doesn’t anymore. Thanks the Ahmadinejad invitiation, the MEALAC controversy, a “million Mogadishus,” Minuteman, the Constantine affair, ‘68, the Weathermen, Edward Said, and Lucien Carr (I’ll let you Google that one on your own), whatever comes out of Columbia is treated as bitter, reactive leftism. This is especially true in the realm of Middle Eastern affairs, and Columbia’s romantic post-modernists typically represent an isolated, radical fringe. Kramer and co. might just be piling on, because as far as the school’s credibility goes, they might have already won.

Having said that, it would be great to see somebody chart academic zeitgeist against real world results and/or public opinion. Any volunteers?