The Wayne Review, vol. 2, issue 1

Read on for assorted criticisms about the latest issue of the Wayne Review. (NOTE: This post was updated at approximately 8:30pm to include further clarification and hyperlinks.)

How Much is a Nickel Worth? In this "Wayne Review Staff Report", which presumably is the codeword for "we're too ashamed to associate our names with this garbage article", Wayne Review writers criticize a bill that hasn't been written yet. (I guess concrete targets are harder to attack.) The Wayne Review is against a proposal to raise the Ferndale liquor tax by 5 cents, which would finance the Ferndale police's "Bar Patrol". In the spirit of conservative thought, the Wayne Review uses incoherent and contradictory arguments to back up their position.

The first problem is that many responsible people simply looking to go out and drink within the limits of the law are being forced to pay for a police patrol, looking for those that break the law.

Of course, if you buy this argument, then you'd also buy mine: "It's unfair that many responsible, law-abiding people simply looking to drive are being forced to pay for a highway patrol looking for speeders." Or how about, "It's unfair that many responsible homeowners are being forced to pay for a fire patrol, even though they've never started a fire." I think any rational person would call these arguments bogus.

Now if the drink price is raised a nickel the owner has two choices. Lose 5 cents profit on his drinks or bump the drink from 20-95 more cents to make the price convenient again.

Really? Are those his only choices? Do you mean to say that the market has absolutely no influence on drink prices, and that prices are only determined by their change-making convenience? The writer of this portion needs to get his conservative brainwash re-applied.

One State Senator who is on record in the Free Press supporting this is Gilda Jacobs, D-Huntington Woods, "I think it's a creative idea for handling some of the problems that Ferndale is facing as they become more of an entertainment downtown." What this means for most people, even those that don't frequent Ferndale is that prices on liquor could go up anywhere from 5 cents to more than a dollar for some drinks.

Well, now that we're not acknowledging market influences anymore, who's to say that the price increase will stop at a dollar? I predict that this legislation will make martinis cost 75 dollars each -- a conservative estimate, of course.

Sarcasm aside, this is just a scare tactic. Now onto blanket generalizations about liberals:

[Andy Deloney] went on to explain that he wasn't speaking specifically of Ferndale, but many local governments use taxes as the first answer to what they consider a "problem." Deloney also said, "Fire and Police should be top priorities."

Ok, so fire prevention and police should be top priorities. But Ferndale, according to the article, is facing a yearly overtime bill of more than $60,000 for their Bar Patrol. Clearly a "problem". Since the Bar Patrol is part of the police, it is a top priority. How do you make up the difference? If you're the Bush administration, you can put future generations into overwhelming debt, but Ferndale is more responsible. If Ferndale is not to increase taxes, then they'll have to cut spending somewhere. The Wayne Review does not recommend any such spending cut. So congratulations, you just read a couple hundred words and learned nothing!

Features Apparently the "liberal media" doesn't do a good enough job of highlighting sororities and staged photo ops, so the Wayne Review dedicated an entire page to balancing things out. We get such hard-hitting exposes as "Featured Student Organization of the Month: Kappa Delta Sorority" and "Bush Twins Make Tour Stop at MSU". The sorority interview is nice, but ultimately useless. (However, I can say that it shows absolutely no political bias whatsoever, because politics is never discussed.) And the Bush twins photo op article features a photograph of the twins meeting with the article's author. If another media outlet had a reporter who was campaigning for a Democratic candidate, this would be considered "a conflict of interest". But when the Wayne Review does it for a Republican candidate, it's just good reportin'!

Bishop of Wayne State?? Teaches About Abortion? This article is long and boring. I'll do a quick Geekable summary: "If you want to know what old guys in silly hats think about abortion, don't read the South End."

Is Your College Professor Biased... My guess is yes. It's impossible to not have subtle biases and paradigms that affect the way you think.

Now Gregory Wright's articles are usually top-notch, but this is pretty disappointing. If the anecdote about how a Colorado University student was failed for not writing a paper on the given topic "Why President Bush is a war criminal" is true, then yes, that's a pretty big instance of bias. (I should note to anybody interested in law that you may at some point have to defend a client whom you find objectionable. However, you are still obligated to write motions, etc. in your client's defense. Best to practice defending viewpoints you disagree with starting now.)

But Gregory Wright has to take a cheap shot this time around:

There is even bias on Wayne State's campus, as hard as that is to believe. One doesn't have to look any further than the name of one of the libraries, The Walter P. Reuther Library. Granted labor movements have a huge role in the State of Michigan and especially in Metro Detroit, but should we really celebrate a man who helped cause the economic and manufacturing drop we have experienced as of late?

Ok, so we have a little library at Wayne State named after a labor leader, and a major American airport named after one of the biggest union-busters in history. Yet somehow Mr. Wright is outraged about the little library. Give me a break.

Fighting Terrorism on Your Campus This article by Frank Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy argues that we should immediately stop supporting terrorist-supporting regimes, in direct contrast to our vice-president's view that we should eliminate U.S. sanctions against Iran, because "unilateral sanctions almost never work".

America: The Super-Power! Emmett Thalmann's geopolitical analysis ends with this observation:

...A world with no hegemonic power might be the real alternative to American power. This could turn out to mean a new Dark Age of waning empires, religious fanaticism, widespread pillage in the world's no-go zones, economic stagnation and a retreat by civilization into a few fortified enclaves.

Hopefully Thalmann realized on 9/11 that religious fanaticism is not unique to his disaster scenario.

Student and Academic Bill of Rights Good For WSU As I've said in previous Geekable posts, I think our universities' mission statement is already clear about political discrimination. Wouldn't a true conservative try to solve the problem with the least amount of meddling possible?