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ONLINE POLL Do you regularly read the Garnet &' Black magazine? Let us know at Page o www.dailygamecock.com. Monday, April 4,2005 Results posted Friday. AMECOCK EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR ASST. VIEWPOINTS EDITOR Michael LaForgia Patrick Augustine NEWS EDITOR SPORTS EDITOR Jon Turner Jonathan Hillyard VIEWPOINTS EDITOR DESIGN DIRECTOR Wes Wolfe Chas McCarthy THE MIX EDITOR COPY DESK CHIEF Jennifer Freeman Steven Van Haren IN OUR OPINION Minimum wage fails working-class families Congress’ refusal to raise the federal minimum wage in 2005 represents the latest in lawmakers’ failure to recognize working-class job growth. The U.S. Senate fell 14 votes short of increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25, which would have been the first change in more than seven years at the federal level to what many employers pay younger and less-educated employees. Politically, Congress doesn’t want to touch a controversial issue such as minimum wage that affects big American employers such as Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and that few middle-class voters have a strong opinion about. t _ l i_ . r_ _ _• _ _ L/V/i/ujidu iwi v-uiupmjicj uiai _ . . enhance their bottom line by Earning the . minimum wage, , * . . working 35 hours a b'“f,,s :"d week and taking no pro"s',ba' ,n"““s w,n hu,‘ vacation, workers profi“'aild ul,lma“ly ,h' Still live in poverty. entire economy. A usual argu ment against such an increase is that it hurts small businesses, which are least able to deal with large shifts in labor expenses that a change in the minimum wage would bring. All these arguments, however, ignore the day-to-day realities of the millions of Americans who earn current minimum wage and instead find themselves in poor. Earning minimum wage, working 35 hours a week and taking no vacation, workers still make, before taxes, less than the poverty-line amount of $9,570 a year. Congressmen who earn six-figure salaries might care little about this plight, preferring instead to listen to the concerns of big business. Wal-Mart might not be able to make the ridiculous profits it does today if it paid its employees a living wage, but it would be helping to undermine poverty in America and ulti mately reduce the need for federal programs such as welfare. Only the support of average Americans can overcome the power of lobbyists who are keeping the least fortunate trapped in a cycle of poverty that a living wage can break. IT’S YOUR RIGHT Exercise your right to voice your opinion Create message boards at www.dailygamecock.com or send letters to the editor to gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu GAMECOCK CORRECTIONS If you see an error in today’s paper, we want to know. E-mail us at gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu. I-1 ABOUT THE GAMECOCK EDITOR I ! I Michael LaForgia DESIGN DIRECTOR Chas McCarthy COPY DESK CHIEF Steven Van Haren NEWS EDITOR Jon Turner ASST. NEWS EDITOR Kelly Cavanaugh VIEWPOINTS EDITOR Wes Wolfe THE MIX EDITOR Jennifer Freeman . ASST. THE MIX EDITOR Carrie Givens SPORTS EDITOR Jonathan Hillyard ASST. SPORTS EDITOR Stephen Fastenau SENIOR WRITER Kevin Fellner PHOTO EDITOR Nick Esares SPORTS PHOTO EDITOR Katie Kirkland PAGE DESIGNERS Jillian Garis, Staci Jordan, Jessica Ann Nielsen, Megan Sinclair COPY EDITORS Jessica Foster, Brindy McNair, Daniel Regenscheit, Jason Reynolds, Katie Thompson, Shana Till ONLINE EDITOR Ryan Simmons PUBLIC AFFAIRS Jane Fielden, Katie Miles eUINIAC>i 11\ r VJ K iVl A 1 IUl\ Offices on third floor of the Russell House. The Editor’s office hours are Monday and Wednesday from 1-3 p.m. Editor: 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; Sports: 777-7182 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 Garen Cansler CREATIVE SERVICES Burke Lauderdale, Chelsea Felder, Laura Gough, Joseph Dannell ADVERTISING STAFF Robert Carli, Breanna Evans, Ryan Gorman, Caroline Love, Katie Stephens, McKenzie Welsh 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 a.uthor and not those of the University of South Carolina. The 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. 29208 Fax: 777-6482 [MgU/5~: (?A^ CHOCOUAre Lo\)JeR5 fiLQoQ pgesruRg \ CARTOON COURTESY OF KRT CAMPUS WUSC broadcasts hit-or-miss radio ■ Look out for periods of hardcore music, look forward to better tunes Let’s talk about student media. Since you’re reading this column, I bet you’re probably already familiar with The Gamecock. We hope you like it. But did you know that the fun doesn’t stop there? If you can’t get your full allowance of student-run media from our three-times-a week newspaper (plus some online stuff), there’s more! Of course, you probably do not want to read the Garnet & Black. If you’ve ever wondered why USC doesn’t have a yearbook, it’s because we have the Garnet & Black. The G&B is now supposed to be some sort of combination literary journal and yearbook, which is odd, because it doesn’t have a picture of everybody you ever went to school with in any of the issues. I’ve looked. I guess I’m just confused — apparently a yearbook is an incredibly poorly put together yet infrequently published magazine staffed exclusively by writers on loan from The Gamecock filled with excruciatingly inconsequential features, poorly written fiction, and various random pictures of Columbia with ice on the trees. Fortunately for everyone (except for my colleagues here at The Gamecock who’ve actually consented to work on the Garnet & Black), the student-media extravaganza doesn’t stop there. There’s also WUSC, pronounced “wussy” for those “in the GRAHAM know” (aka CULBERTSON Garnet & Black FOURTH-YEAR • „ , ENGLISH writers). STUDENT During the past four years, I’ve listened to WUSC pretty infrequently, and there’s never been anything good on. But in the last couple of months, I’ve given WUSC a chance, and discovered that maybe it is worth listening to. Sure, college radio used to play stuff like U2, but it’s no use lamenting the past. Instead, you should turn your dial to 90.5 FM from time to time, and you’ll hear a real radio station, where you might not know the music being played but, if it’s good, its probably better than anything better on the radio. My method is to drive around with a U2 CD in my player and every time a song starts to suck, I frantically press play and get my “With or Without You” fix while waiting out the crappy song playing. But usually, that’s not the problem. On the whole WUSC plays good music. Of course, there are some exceptions. Often WUSC goes off the air for hours on end. And entire shows seem to be devoted purely to various types of hard core (one of two genres so crappy that only 14-year-old goth kids are supposed to listen to it) and various types of metal (the other). There’s also an entire show devoted to female vocalists, which means that it’s missing out on about 97 percent of all the good music in the world. One time in my rage at the crap being played I called in and requested The Fire Theft because Jeremy Enigk sounds like a woman (he really does, I swear). The lack of Fire Theft played implies that yet another femiNazi doesn’t have a sense of humor. But for the most part, WUSC is strangely worth listening to. Most of the DJs are pretty annoying to listen to yammer on about their day and what they had for lunch,' but I’ve discovered that the more they yammet, the better the music they play. Otherwise, you’ll just have to keep choosing between the radio stations that play Korn and Linkin Park, or Van Halen and KISS, or Elton John and Billy Joel, and nobody wants that (hopefully). And if you run into one of those all crappy screaming music just call up and request that the DJ kill himself — he’ll probably do it. Retropoints gives historical contrast ■ Looking to the past gives present issues fresher perspectives Putting together Viewpoints every week is a simple, but enjoyable, experience. However, it gets rather monotonous, and I wanted to do something different for the spring semester, so last week I put together a series of editorials, columns and cartoons for Retropoints. It wasn’t quick or easy, going through page after page of old copies of The Gamecock and looking for pictures of the columnists in old yearbooks (the Garnet & Black magazine used to be a yearbook, like you’d get in high school). Our fine paper didn’t even feature columns regularly until the 1950s. Fortunately for me and our paper, that’s when the excrement really hit the fan — namely a five-decade obsession with two main political and social issues: racism and Communism. If you read the editorial from Tuesday’s online edition, you would’ve read that The Gamecock was in favor of segregation in the mid-’50s. While alternately liberals and conservatives have dominated the editorial board during the decades, it was still a shock to me to read what was the official opinion of □ the paper at that time. While Communism didn’t strike quite so close to home as race relations did, the witch-hunt by Sen. Joe WOLFE McCarthy, the war in — Vietnam and dealings with the Soviet Union were frequently found in the opinion pages of The Gamecock during the past 50 years. Regarding the column that ran about Vietnam in Monday’s Retropoints, our student body seemed as out-of-touch as our nation’s leaders, or vice versa. Nobody understood that the conflict was way more about nationalism than Communism. Perhaps the most interesting things I learned while researching what I was going to run in last week’s editions had nothing to do with the opinion pages, but more with student life during the past century. The earliest editions of the paper carried stereotypical “rah, rah, siss boom bah” cheers for students to learn and yell out during football games. Before American involvement in World War II, many students were quoted as saying that they did not want to enlist in the military — a holdover from anti-war feelings following World War I. In 1977, USC had to close down for two weeks because it was too cold. It was during the energy crisis, and there wasn’t enough fuel to heat the school. For the first 50 years or so of The Gamecock’s history, the pages were filled with ads for cigarettes, cigars and pipe tpbacco. In the ’70s and ’80s especially, the cigarette ads made way for beer ads. One of my favorites was from the mid-’80s: “Busch: The Official Beer of the Charlie Daniels Band.” It certainly looked like students were having way more fun in our parents’ time — in the late ’70s there were legendary keggers that were open to everybody, held at the National Guard complex by the stadium. For about $5, you could see a band or two and drink until your liver crawled out and strangled you. Restaurants advertised amazing drink specials in the paper as well. I remember running across an ad that let students know that free beer was to be had from 8-11 p m. Thursdays at a local eatery. I know one thing after reading about life at USC in previous decades — tonight I’m going to have some fun and party like it’s 1979. Avid fans add drive, incentive to athletics (o ■ USC sports devotees can rise above Spurrier autograph snubbings The 2004-05 season of Gamecock sports is soon to be drawing to a close and looking back I’ve come to one definitive conclusion: Through it all, □ Gamecock fans are the heart of all sporting events here. There is no doubt in my mind that for many of our teams, events and plays, thc BRANDT fans truly make BOIDY a difference. ' I you were to v poi rrirA|AR look at our fans SCIENCE and their spirit STUDENT ,, , ■ , youd think we had the greatest sports teams | ever known. If I were to think of this year's quintessential Gamecock player, die first and most-deserving player to come to my mind would be Carlos Powell. I’ve never seen such an athlete with so much motivation, spirit and natural leadership. Whether you've | seen one basketball game or 10, within minutes it’s obvious who leads ! the team, and I don’t mean in stats. Powell deserves recognition for his accomplishments in scoring and such, but I find him more admirable t for his connection with Gamecock fans. Whether it’s pumping us up on a scoring run or pointing to us as his aides after a win, Powell fully embraces and recognizes just how important Gamecock fans are. 1 can’t say I’m up to date on where No. 15 is going next, but I hope the. best for Powell. Wherever he goes, it's probable he will be successful. On a different note, I must CQmment on a recent incident lacking respect for Gamecock fans. I recently watched Gamecock football at a public practice and had a quick moment with USC football coach Steve Spurrier. It was a nice day and some friends and I decided to spend it watching our favorite football team. We watched for about two hours until the practice concluded. A small . media group was there and at most ' 100 fans. The fans had started leaving and very few were left, but my friends and I stayed in hopes to see Spurrier. He walked by us with one of his assistants and we called to him to get his attention. Ropes blocked us off so we couldn’t go up to him direcdy. It was only a friend and myself calling to him and he acknowledged us, but with a half-sentimental grin and attention. The sentiment crashed when we asked the coach for his autograph. His response: “Come back on autograph day.” Disappointment and disgust slammed home, but it only continued. When asked when autograph day was, he threw up his arms with no idea and simply walked off without turning around. This is not how von earn . dedication from Gamecock fans. I ^ could understand if he was swarmed with people, media, duties from the team, etc., but to take two minutes to sign two footballs was not a major hassle. It literally would have made our day to get an autograph, and instead we left the practice with a sour taste in our mouths. I know of Spurrier’s previous reputation and I also know of his coaching accomplishments, but if he’s going to coach USC then he needs to quickly recognize a major element to the sport — the fans. In Spurrier’s defense, perhaps this was a one-time incident — maybe he thought we’d sell the balls — but at the end of the day he passed up the opportunity to impress some USC students and fans, and that’s not something to make ] common practice. COLLEGE QUOTE BOARD THE DAILY TROJAN UNIVERSITY OF SOUTI1ERN CALIFORNIA On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled the revolution was worth it. Tide IX Kars schools and colleges that receive federal funds from discriminating in any area “on the basis of sex.” It has had the greatest effect on athletics, as women’s sports have thrived around die country since the law went into effect. And in Tuesday’s ruling, the Supreme Court strengthened enforcement of the law by ruling teachers and coaches may challenge schools for ‘“giving girls second-dass treatment without fear of being punished.” THE GOOD FIVE CENT CIGAR UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND While U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has dismissed the allegations against him as “partisan attacks,” the evidence is mounting against him and he is coming to represent everything Republicans abhorred when they came to power after the 1994 elections. DeLay has been accused of offering to endorse the son of an outgoing Republican representative in the upcoming primaries i^fhe changed his vote or^a bill and accepting mojiey to take trips abroad from groups where House rules may have forbidden it. U-WIkt