Opinion

Every presidential campaign in the history of American politics has been built upon a characteristic platform — a definitive set of values, beliefs and qualities that the candidate is hoping to embody and sell to the voting public. Abraham Lincoln ran on unity and abolition. Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to fix the Great Depression. Lyndon B. Johnson promoted a Great Society and Reagan pushed for a balanced budget.

President Obama is pushing to extend the lowered interest rates on federal student loans and Mitt Romney supports the extension as well. So it’s a win-win situation, right? Not quite. First, let’s delve into the nature of these loan rate extensions.

Recently, on campuses like ours, the Youth for Ron Paul campaign has been placing ads based on popular Internet memes around school — image macros of Ron Paul’s face and phrases like “Is a Christian; Doesn’t Exploit It.” Paul is using these popular memes to hook youth voters, using the one thing he thinks young people care about: the Internet.

When I was in high school I took Latin as my language requirement. It was the course that gave Cs just for attending class. There, I was the shy girl who wore oversized sweaters to cover her voluptuous chest. I was sitting in the back of the class reading “Mein Kampf” (no, I wasn’t a Nazi, just curious) when my classmate poured a line of cocaine onto his desk. He had done so covertly, darting his head around the room like a paranoid bird making sure the teacher wasn’t looking. He rolled up a dollar bill, stuck it to his nose, and snorted. Oh, the memories.

Surprising no one, the Senate failed to pass the Buffett Rule after the Republicans unleashed another filibuster. It’s not just that the Republicans block anything President Obama and his allies in Congress try to get done. This time one of their principles was at stake: the rich must be protected at all costs. Keeping in mind that the rich effectively pay less in taxes than the rest of us, the Republicans did their duty and maintained the status quo for their true constituents.

The trend of constantly rising gas prices is always a central focus in the U.S. economy; it’s a significant political issue from a global perspective, and it is continually making headlines.

Throughout my life, I have been a big fan of horror movies. Whether it was watching Freddy Krueger brutally invade young teenagers’ dreams for the first time, or seeing a young Jason Voorhees come from out of nowhere at Crystal Lake in the original “Friday the 13th,” the horror movie genre has always been one of my favorite movie genres. Additionally, it’s become especially relevant today to young cinemagoers as well, because of the scare factor that affects them both during and after whatever movie of the genre they’re viewing at the time.

A few weeks ago, millions of Americans celebrated Easter, the holiday that recognizes the Christian belief in Jesus Christ’s resurrection, through egg hunts, egg colorings and chocolate. While the connection between the Easter Bunny and the son of God does not make sense to me whatsoever, the 2010 poll conducted by Barna Group (a leading research organization focused on faith and culture) showing that only 42 percent of Americans know what the holiday is about worries me.

In the last few months, Internet privacy bills such as SOPA/PIPA and CISPA have been introduced in Congress, posing various threats to the freedom of the World Wide Web. Though SOPA/PIPA were defeated earlier in the year, attention has arrived to another piece of legislation called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). This bill is aimed at limiting the amount of “cyber threats” and sharing of “private intellectual property.”

Have you ever stopped to think about what your Plan B might be? And no, I’m not talking about birth control. Plan B meaning your secondary profession or career, if not Plan A (duh).

The Anteater Express Referendum is some of the best news I have heard in a long time. With all this talk of limiting certain routes or even canceling them entirely, news of possible future improvements to the shuttle system comes as a much needed breath of fresh air.

The Student Services Referendum, better known as “My Student Life Initiative” was created in order to improve the quality of student life funding at UC Irvine due to the recent budget cuts. Many students are concerned with cutbacks, particularly in regards to ASUCI services such as concerts, university leadership conference, Anteater Awards, Greek life, club funding through the Student Programming Funding Board (SPFB), Martin Luther King symposium, speaker series and teacher luncheons.