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6 « 0 n I i n 0 “Just give me 30 minutes; my U111111C. r U i i girls will be done in 30 minutes.” Should there be a ™ n,nc Constitutional amendment MICHELLE CLOVIS L/Onstmmonai amendment ALPHA deltA pi house director Asking banning gay marriage? workmen to leAve the wAter on so www.daUygamecock.com. SS"PREPARE F0R™EIR =- ----— In.our.opinion No excuse for plagiarism In Friday’s issue of The Tiger, Clemson University’s' student newspaper, Editor in Chief Daniel Lowrey resigned amid the discovery that he plagiarized in at least five articles over the past three years. This is a blemish for student media everywhere. Much like last year’s incident at The New York Times, in which reporter Jayson Blair confessed to making up quotes and events in his articles, the situation at Clemson reminds readers and media outlets that writers and reporters are not immune to humanity’s flaws. However, such violations of basic journalistic ethics We applaud The Tiger’s breachthe trust faff’s effort to deal between a and it8 with the plagiarism „ .. . situation quickly and readerslup-and are decisively, “acceptable. Instead of faulting The Tiger for what could happen to any paper despite an appropriate level of vigilance, we applaud their effort to deal with the problem quickly and decisively. Lowrey met with The Tiger staff before issuing a public apology in Friday’s edition. In his final column, Lowrey indicated that he would like to remain with the paper in a non-writing role. Retaining Lowrey, however, would be a mistake as The Tiger seeks to regain its readers’ trust. Lowrey said in his Friday column that after staying up 24 consecutive hours to finish producing The Tiger, he realized at 7:30 a.m. on Thursday morning that he still needed to write a column to fill up space. His deadline was 8 a.m., and Lowrey said he panicked. The result, he said, was an article that was only half his. Regardless of the circumstances, there are no acceptable reasons for taking the work of others and calling it your own. Students who misappropriate ideas that are not theirs, be it in a test, a paper or in publication, commit the gravest sin of academia. Universities are correct to treat such instances as grounds for dismissal, and underline the importance of an honor code, like the Carolinian Creed, enforceable by a student judiciary. Gamecock. Corrections Because of an editing error, Brad Senkiw’s column ip Friday’s paper should have said the USC men’s basketball team lost to the Mississippi State Bulldogs. The Gamecock regrets the error. If you see an error in today’s paper, we want to know. E-mail us at gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu. AboutThe.Gamecock Editor in Chief Adam Beam Copy Desk Chief Gabrielle Sinclair Design Director Shawn Rourk News Editor Michael LaForgia Asst. News Editor Alexis Stratton Viewpoints Editor Patrick Augustine The Mix Editor Meg Moore Asst. Mix Editor Jennifer Sitowski Sports Editor Wes Wolfe Asst. Sports Editor Jonathan Hillyard Photo Editor Morgan Ford Asst. Photo Editor Johnny Haynes Page Designers Erin Cline, Staci Jordan Brian Ray. Brad Senkiv Mary Pinckney Waters, Chas McCarthy Copy Editors Allyson Bird, Jennifer Freeman, Jessica Foste Steven Van Haren Wire Editor Z'Anne Coveil Online Editor James Tolbert Senior Writer Kevin Fellner CONTACT INFORMATION Offices on third floor of the Russell House. Editor in Chief: gamecockeditor@gwm.sc.edu News: gamecocknews@gwm.sc.edu Viewpoints: gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu The Mix: gamecockfeatures@gwm.sc.edu , Sports: gamecocksports@.gwm.sc.edu Public Affairs: gamecockPR@yahoo.com Online: www.dailygamecock.com Newsroom: 777-7726 Editor’s Office: 777-3914 STUDENT MEDIA Director Scott Lindenberg Faculty Adviser -Erik Collins Creative Director Susan King Business Manager Carolyn Griffin Advertising Manager Sarah Scarborough Classified Manager Sherry F. Holmes Production Manager Amber Justice Creative Services Whitney Bridges, Robbie Burkett Advertising Staff Robert Carli, Kate Femim, Latoya Hines Carolina Love, Jesica r Johnson, David Weatherford Public Affairs Kimberly Dressier The Gamecock is the editorially independent student newspaper of the University of South Carolina. It is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the fall and spring semesters and nine times during the summer, with the exception of university holidays and exam periods. Opinions expressed in The Gamecock are those of the editors or author and not those of the University of South Carolina. Tbe Board of Student Publications and Communications is the publisher of The Gamecock. The Department of Student Media is the newspaper’s parent organization. The Gamecock is supported in part by student-activity fees. One free copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for $1 each from the Department of Student Media. TO PLACE AN AD The Gamecock Advertising: 777-3888 1400 Greene St. Classified: 777-1184 Columbia, S.C. 2Sg08 Fax: 777-6482 _.. __; u.S. Stalls u.k. Plan to tight oeesity_ I— ^—- t i i . i 7~ Hw Levs aeAP\ : Loeeysr, perep\ ? neupev rue us Me UN.'* PLAfJJ Me vjo{2(~v s' P«£T ft r ( I----- ^_^ *•* -.—* V1 ’ -szjJ CARTOON COURTESY OF KRT CAMPUS Why pay when you get it free? If there’s one thing that USC can’t spend enough money on, it’s football. Everybody but the NCAA wants to give our players the finest stadium, equipment, stereo equip ment, Escalades and coaching mon ey can buy. We need to give them these things, as quietly as we can, so that they come to our school, play for our team, and have successful ca reers in the NFL after we have misused their talent, played them out of position, and gone 5-7 two years in a row. But there’s one iittle area that USC has never, to my knowl edge, funded, and that’s the one area that the University of Colorado is funding..Rather than make sure that their re cruits have the newest in P. Diddy Escalade technology, or give them thousands of dollars of throwback jerseys, the University of Colorado (known to the dyslexic residents of Boulder as “CU”) is paying to make sure their football players get to have sex. Sure, I know that didn’t make sense to you, so I’ll write it again. The University of Colorado is paying for its football players to have sex. It’s paying people to have sex with football players. Football players! If there is one thing in the his tory of football, from John Heisman to Lou Holtz, that play ers have never had a hard time getting, it’s sex. I mean, they’re football players. With the exception of Catholic priests and Roman em perors, no group has ever had more guaranteed-to-succeed op portunities for sex than football players. Every Division I-A school in the country has thousands and thousands of young, unattached coeds who want nothing more from life than to sleep with a football player. It’s good for the football players, and it gives the girls a sense of accomplishment (“Janie, I slept with the starting center! It was kind of weird, though. He made me grab his butt and kept calling me ‘QB’”) Most of all, it’s good for the uni versity. What is bad for the university is promising football players sex, paying for them to have sex, and having the NCAA find out about it. Most SEC schools buy Cadillacs in bulk, but when peo ple find out about that little trans action, they only blame us for be ing pragmatic. When people find out you’re paying for your foot ball players to get laid, you just think your coeds aren’t doing their job. So ladies, the next time you’re at a football game, don’t think, “Wow, those guys are all wear ing really tight pants and jump ing on top of each other.” Instead, you should think, “Man, maybe they have an open ing in the color guard. I could guard his colors any day!” Because if we ever stoop to paying people for having sex with our football players, then it means that we’re a universi ty that no football player in his right mind would want to at tend. And hey, if a top running back prospect hit on me, I’d wince, but do my duty. Take one for the team. Anything for USC. in.your.opinion Wolfe insults Bush with name-calling Wes Wolfe should be ashamed of his column (“Unifying to get an idiot out of office,” Wednesday). Instead of present ing a sound argument based on reason and logic, he resorted to nasty name-calling and puns on me pi caiucin. Throughout the column he took many low jabs at Bush. From calling him an “idiot,” and “witless wonder," Wes wrote a very partisan, unprofessional col umn that does nothing to further his cause. He made references to polls showing that Bush was to be on the losing end in this up coming election. Instead of citing this, maybe he should have gone back and looked at the polls from the last election that indicated that name-calling and harsh rhetoric used by the Democrats, like that in his column, were the biggest turnoff for undecided vot ers, who proved to be the decid ing factor for Bush in 2000. The “reasons” he presented were just as insane as his name calling. First, he and thousands of others need to come to grips that Bush won the election. Second, as an economics major, I can tell you that tax cuts help stimulate the economy, not wreck it. He should not talk about things he doesn’t know the first thing about. Third, and most importantly, Bush has done an outstanding job in defending this nation against terror. This is per haps the strongest reason Bush has for being re-elected. To claim that Bush has failed on this front is just plain false. Although in this column I have defended Bush, there have been many things that I have not liked about his policies. In such things as immigration laws, bud gets, and federal programs, I have found many things that I disagree with the president on. However, I am not going to dis regard the office he holds. It is time for people like Wolfe to start showing some respect for the president, whoever he may be. He should have concentrated on the topics and not on dehuman izing our leader. Instead of per suading me to vote for Kerry, by his lame tactics he has instead persuaded me to vote for Bush. CHRIS LANGFORD SECOND-YEAR ECONOM ICS STUDENT Don't forget dorms have built-in dangers In his letter (“Culbertson plays with fire on safety,” Wednesday), Mike Myers men tions that the reason we don’t al low cooking equipment and var ious other fire hazards in the dorms is to prevent the damage of people’s belongings. Correct me if I am wrong, but every apartment-style dorm has a stove and an oven that produces heat. What is the difference be tween leaving your hamburger frying in a pan on the stove and leaving it on a George Foreman Grill, both of which could lead to fires. If housing really wants to prevent fires in the dorm they should outlaw electricity, as this would prevent any fires. However, I doubt that housing really cares about the chance of a fire — what it does care about is its insurance premium, and this can be greatly reduced if all objects that are not a permanent fixture in the dorms are out lawed. Mr. Myers, if you value your possessions so much then why do you bring them to cam pus where they could be stolen? I have a solution to protect peo ple from themselves: Make all of campus a sand lot, plant it in grass and forbid anyone from bringing anything to campus, including clothes and books. This would pre vent theft because there is noth ing to steal, fix the budget issues, foster an open learning environ ment, and we would have all the green space one could want. SEAN RAYMAN FOURTH-YEAR CHEMICAL ENGINEERING STUDENT Submission Policy Letters to the editor should be less than 300 words and include name, phone number, professional title or year and major, if a student. E-mail letters to gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu. Letters will be edited for space, possible libel and style. Anonymous letters will not be published. Call the newsroom at 777 7726 for more information. Dancing away the love-less day blues Line dancing is exactly what it sounds like. It’s freshly cropped mullets, slippery with booze, gy rating to country music. With a group of four brave, single souls from the Gamecock staff, I took □ the Valentine’s Day eve plunge to remedy lone liness and see lots of chain smoking. We went deep into the night to find | STtvtN VAN Skyline, a mys HAREN tical dive locat 0 , ed near the Second-year _ , , . mechanical Columbia air engineering po^; student Skepticism was thick in the f fl Friday air, es pecially when we walked into the cavernous hall and all hillbilly eyes set upon us, seeing into our hearts, knowing that we were absolutely not regulars. Our Gucci suits and fur coats didn’t impress them as we intended, although one sharp bumpkin noticed how similar our minks were to “something I done killed with a shovel last week.” We found a table. Now fast-for ward two hours, and let me set the scene. Names have been changed to sound cooler and/or dumber. I can’t find the words to describe how fun this place was. There was line dancing, granted, but there was also bumping and grinding. For me, “bumping” was clumsily knocking into rednecks, ancU “grinding” was grinding my teetlr nervously as I jostled about like an idiot. Jan Friedman, my dance partner, kicked me around and kept me in check. She became more mortified at my complete lack of inhibition and rhythm as the night went on and ditched me for the mechanical bull. This er ratic, gyrating contraption had more rhythm than I did, despite be ing designed as the antithesis, the black hole if you will, of rhythm. One member of our party, let’s call him Matt Augustus, laughed cheerily with a middle-aged wom an who wanted to play his fiddle with, ahem, no strings attached. He was polite, but the 4-packs-a-day woman made us all squirm un | comfortably and clutch our youth. When her husband, dressed like an oil tycoon, playfully offered up his old ball-and-chain for the evening, Matt obliged. The two were last seen early Saturday morning get ting a marriage license at city hall. The very-Irish Shane O’Rourke, hopped up on Lucky Charms and V-Day bitterness, dis played his break-dancing skills to a touching rendition of “Muskrat jjuvc. int; reguicu 3 vuuu 1 uac this “voodoo craziness” in then dancing but loved Shane’s knowl edge of Irish spirits and page de sign. After they lowered their pitchforks, he fit right in. The fashionable Megar Morrison took careful notes an, will be doing an expose on the dos and-don’ts of country style. Most of these will be don’ts, especially since she went into mild catatonic . shock upon entering Skyline. After we revived her on the mechanical bull, she whispered, with teary eyes, “Must... cut their... hair... send... subscription... to Vogue.” The tight-knit house band in tegrated Metallica and “Addicted to Love” into the Electric Slide. I was won over, especially because the middle-aged gal belting out lead vocals was quite obviously checking me out the whole night. As our little group left, I locked eyes with the singer one last time. She pointed at me, pointed at herself, pointed at a rawhide saddle and licked her lips. I shud dered, from love or lust I don’ know. She’ll be mine next time.' College.Quote, Board CORNELL DAILY SUN COH.^EfcLf'NlVKRSITV "Though flawed, the SAT is a statistically accurate measuring stick' A common complaint about the SAT is that it is biased against minorities and the poor. This condemnation is often heard on college campuses, where ironically, research has con sistently shown that the test accurately predicts college stu dents’ grades. In the case of minorities, the SAT actually over predicts college grades slightly, on average.” DAILY ORANGE SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY “The Democratic Party needs to ask (Howard) Dean to step down. President Bush is a $200 million dollar incumbent who will be very difficult to defeat in November. Given that Dean has un fortunately earned the brand of “unelectable,” has failed to win a single primary after being the overwhelming favorite and has re peatedly made a screaming spectacle of himself, it has become painfully obvious he will not be able to win the White House.” COURTESY OF Y-WIRE