Opinion

Late Saturday night, the House of Representatives finally passed a health care bill with a vote of 220-215 with only a single Republican vote. While this is only the first step to any meaningful health care reform, the bill is already making waves for its amendment excluding funding for abortion. Until now, the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, has made it impossible for the Department of Health and Human Services to subsidize abortions in its annual budget. This disproportionately affected poor women who could not afford to pay the private insurance cost for abortions out of pocket and was a restriction for anyone receiving Medicaid or working for the government. But now even more restrictive language has been drafted, taking the abortion issue to an extreme and depriving millions of women of their right to choose.

On Monday November 9th, the Supreme Court received a petition against the controversial practice of sentencing minors who have committed non-homicidal crimes to life in prison. The petitioners referred to two cases, Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida, in which both defendants were sentenced to life in prison as minors. The petitioners stated that the outcome of these cases conflicted with the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the 8th Amendment.

This Wednesday and Thursday at UCLA, a historic moment in the state of California will happen. And we, as UC students, will have an opportunity to make that moment ours.

The American effort to achieve anything in Afghanistan has reached a point of darkly humorous failure. The country is called “the Graveyard of Empires,” and for a good reason. In the face of this reality, American goals in the country have shifted again and again from “ensuring stable, democratic government” to “simply defeating Al-Qaeda and leaving nation-building to the Afghanis” in a farcical attempt to justify our presence there.

This week, ASUCI will hold elections for Legislative Council positions. The New University newspaper extended an invitation to all candidates running for positions on the Council to come in for an interview. The endorsements that follow are based upon interviews conducted with those who responded and participated in the interviews.

“Sunny day, everything’s A-OK…” Who among us can hear these optimistic words without being transported back to a simpler time? A time of learning the alphabet, counting along to catchy tune, loving milk and cookie, and the monsters that devour them? For 40 years, the average childhood has been tinted with the rosy hues of “Sesame Street.”

Late October brought a few of your friendly neighborhood white supremacists to Riverside. The National Socialist Movement and Neo-Nazis in general are apparently on the rise — with protest member numbers in California climbing to twenty!

Over 60 years have passed since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing approximately 140,000 and 70,000 people, respectively, by the end of the year. By dropping these bombs, President Truman accomplished his goal: by Aug. 14, Japan was willing to unconditionally surrender, sparing at least tens of thousands of American lives by eliminating the need for an invasion. He was well aware of the devastation he ordered, and the massive cost in terms of civilian life. Today, the dominant thought is that dropping the bombs was the quickest way to end the war and saved our soldiers from a long and costly invasion. Rarely discussed are the immense moral consequences of committing such an inhumane act.

Football is one of America’s great pastimes. Back in the day, if you were the quarterback of any team — high school, college, or professional — you would have it made. Recently, however, questions have risen about a football player’s future: just how set off are football players?

If you’re a progressive activist, last Tuesday’s election results were, to put it mildly, crushing. Of the four big races receiving major national attention, three of them were clean victories for conservatives: Virginia’s gubernatorial election, New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, and Maine’s Question 1, a measure to overturn Maine’s newly passed same-sex marriage law. While progressives and Democrats could downplay the results in Virginia and New Jersey (Creigh Deeds was a very flawed candidate and Jon Corzine has suffered from numerous ethical and economic issues), the results in Maine could not be ignored.

Have you ever thought about being the leader in a group? If you said yes, then you’re probably not Joe Lieberman. No, good old Joe is more like the guy in the group who says, “let’s put politics beside us and do what the other group is doing.” The only problem is that the other group is just playing Tetris on a calculator.

On Nov. 18 and 19, the UC Regents will ask UC students to pay $585 more to bailout the University of California. With the state giving the UC $637.1 million less, the UC Regents are asking the students to bear the burden of the state’s responsibility to fund higher education.