I have been a CSUN student for three years now. During this time, my school has shamed me many times. Our baseball stadium was ranked the worst in the entire National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I level. Commentators from Fox Sports West publicly mocked our basketball ‘?arena’ ?’#8209;the Matadome ?’#8209;when they were covering a men’s basketball game here. And at the Big West Conference basketball tournament in Anaheim this past March, our school band wasn’t actually our band ?’#8209;it was… Read more

The Bush administration has been indicating that the first order of business the president would like Congress to address is Social Security reform. This is because a crisis is looming in the Social Security system that will cause its eventual collapse. Even the president’s critics do not doubt this forecast, their sole point of contention being the date of the crash, and how loud a sound it will make. But the crash is coming. By 2018, the amount of money… Read more

Governor Schwarzenegger is once again taking heat, and this time, it’s from the education establishment. Howls of protest have greeted his new budget proposal, with many educators claiming that Schwarzenegger is shortchanging education. This cacophony of condemnation directed at the governor is not only misguided, but fails to address real problems with education in California. That California is somehow skimping on education spending is an exaggeration to say the least. According to EdSource Online, California’s per-pupil spending in the 2002-03… Read more

All the cool kids are doing it. When I enrolled at CSUN, I decided I was going to follow in the footsteps of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of students before me, and become a bona fide, certified, business major. When I told people I was a business major, they would nod in approval. “Business? That’s a good major. You can get rich with a business degree,” they said. To this day, I don’t really know what a business… Read more

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newest crusade against the entrenched special interests in Sacramento involves the always-sensitive subject of illegal immigration. While his drive to push for a more responsible border policy has elicited the predictable outrage from the usual suspects, his attention to the immigration issue shows that Schwarzenegger has a better appreciation for the gravity of this subject than his detractors do. In the past three weeks, Schwarzenegger has tackled the immigration issue head on. On April 19, Schwarzenegger spoke… Read more

Being a smoker is a problem. It’s bad for your health and it endangers the health of the people around you. Smoking leads to cancer, heart disease, lung damage, and other horrible diseases. The cost of treating these illnesses is astronomical. What is more important, and perhaps more dangerous than these problems, is how addictive a cigarette’s chemicals really are. Adults should have the freedom to smoke cigarettes if they want to take these risks. What should not be allowed,… Read more

On May 2, the Los Angeles Times reported that newspaper circulation for its Monday through Saturday daily editions fell from 1,253,849 to 907,997, a drop of 6.5 percent. The Times’ Sunday edition also had its circulation drop by 7.9 percent. On the same day, the Associated Press reported that overall newspaper circulation had fallen 1.9 percent. Both the L.A. Times and AP stories attributed the drop in large part to the new federal do-not-call registry, which prohibits unsolicited telemarketing. That… Read more

I am a vegetarian for moral and health reasons. When I debate with people about the morality of consuming meat, inevitably the conversation turns to the human body’s natural predispositions and needs for protein. The assumption is, if a human being needs protein to survive, and we need meat to get protein, it would seem counterintuitive to claim eating meat was immoral. While I agree it is counterintuitive to claim a necessity for human life is immoral, I do not… Read more

It seems like the new political touch of death these days is to be identified as a Christian or be associated with Christians. That at least seems to be the feeling held by our good friends in the press, as evidenced by the coverage surrounding Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. At issue is the way Frist is seeking allies among conservative Christians in his fight to confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees. Frist has made several speeches recently highlighting the… Read more