After Florida, Political Forecast for Party Nominees

With McCain winning Florida for the republicans, and Clinton taking the win for the democrats, the primaries are slowly winding down. It seems that McCain has sealed his nomination, with a slim chance that Romney could hang in, but it is doubtful. Real Clear Politics, an awesome political information resource, is forecasting McCain for the republican bid, with Romney in second, and Clinton for the democratic bid, with Obama in second.

Obama is my clear favorite in the race, and I believe that he still has a fighting chance as long as he gathers some speed and wins in a key state, mainly, California. If Obama can take California, there is a good chance he could beat Clinton for the nomination.

So, taking these top four presidential candidates, what are the forecasts for head to head general election results?

McCain vs Clinton

McCain vs Obama

Romney vs Clinton

Romney vs Obama

The way that Real Clear Politics calculates their predictions, is by averaging a variety of other very reliable polls. From these averages, McCain beats every democratic candidate, and Clinton and Obama beat every other republican candidate, except McCain.

I remain an optimist, and say there is still time between now and November for the prediction to swing in favor of the democrats, but I do have to say that McCain is one of the most bipartisan candidates we have ever had, and could be a good president. Basically, I wouldn't move to Canada if he were elected.

(Photo from Time Magazine)

Barack Obama is My Homegirl

Senator Edward Kennedy, gave presidential candidate Barack Obama an endorsement yesterday. Alongside her brother in his endorsement, Caroline Kennedy stated in a New York Times opinion piece that Obama would be a president like her father. The Washington Post, among other national publications, claims that this will give Obama a "key boost," necessary to win the primaries.

So are these endorsements really going to matter in the long run? Not really. Lets face it, this is a close race, its too late for endorsements of celebrities to make a difference. Besides, isn't comparing the candidate of change to a president from the 60s a little contradictory?

So what is my real point here? That we should stop focusing on the minor details of this election and get down to the raw issues. Forget about race, gender, religion, and endorsements, lets talk shop.

The website zazzle.com has released various pins, shirts, stickers, and mugs that take a powerful political stand, showcasing a variety of "homegirl" products.

So why is Barack Obama my favorite homegirl? Just look at his her politics.

Education: an $18 billion plan for preschool, and a $4000 college tax credit for doing community service

Global Warming: Its time we do something for our planet, and Barack has got our back. A $150 billion plan for a 10 year program to fund research for "climate friendly" energy supplies.

Health Coverage: Barack cares about children, unlike George Bush, whose first reason for vetoing child health care was, and I quote, "poor kids." Barack would like to set aside $65 billion a year to make universal health coverage affordable, by raising taxes on the wealthy.

Immigration: A heated topic this last year in congress. Barack proposes a conditional plan for US citizenship for all illegal immigrants, but is also in support of a border fence.

Iraq: THE ISSUE. Barack said, "I opposed this war from the start. Because I anticipated that we would be creating the kind of sectarian violence that we've seen and that it would distract us from the war on terror. At this point, I think we can be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in. But we have to send a clear message to the Iraqi government as well as to the surrounding neighbors that there is no military solution to the problems that we face in Iraq. So we have to begin a phased withdrawal; have our combat troops out by March 31st of next year; and initiate the kind of diplomatic surge that is necessary in these surrounding regions to make sure that everybody is carrying their weight. And that is what I will do on day one, as president of the United States, if we have not done it in the intervening months." His plan is to withdraw all troops within 16 months of taking office.

Taxes: wants to raise income taxes on the wealthiest and their capital gains. Also proposes an annual $25 billion tax cut for non-wealthy.

Barack also favors abortion rights, gay rights, and relaxed restrictions on stem cell research.

Who is your homegirl? Have you decided yet? If not hurry up, the primaries are almost over! It is important to become aware of the facts and the issues, and vote with political awareness. If all else fails, vote Obama, it's what Kennedy would do :P

Phishing message targets USU webmail users

Written for The Utah Statesman on January 25th, 2008.

A phishing message asking USU Webmail users for their username and password arrived in an estimated 800 students' inboxes Monday night.

"Phishing is the Internet term for an attempt to fool someone into thinking that the message or Web site is from an official source, when it's really from the hacker, fooling them into providing private info to the hacker as a result," said Bob Bayn, Information Technology security team coordinator for USU.

The message, a forgery from a computer in the Netherlands claiming to be "cc.usu.edu Team," asked users to send their e-mail username and password to "account.upgrade@hotmail.co.uk" for the purpose of upgrading the database, Bayn said.

The IT security team sent out a notice about the e-mail Tuesday, warning students to not follow instructions and to immediately change their password if they did, Bayn said.

"In general, phishing is not structured like this," Bayn said. "This one was obviously a lot more direct and low tech. They just said please e-mail us your username and password."

Bayn said most phishing scams send someone to a forged Web site, where they will access an identical copy of a familiar Web page. When someone enters their information on the fake page, for example, when they try to log in, the hacker automatically obtains access to that information.

"They don't have to fool very many people to get what they want," Bayn said.

"This message appeared to be directed to USU, but it was structured in a way that they could easily adapt that message to someplace else as well," he said.

"Organizations that use log-in credentials don't, as a rule, do the same things legitimately that phishing messages do," Bayn said. "If you get a request via e-mail for private information, you should be immediately suspicious."

Typically, messages like this don't make it past the USU spam filter system, as most of it is blocked before it makes it to the inbox, Bayn said.

"A spam-filtering system does not relieve people of having to worry about this," he said. "It relieves people of the burden of receiving the bulk, but there are still things that come through. People still need to be Internet skeptics."

Winter Regulations Vex Students

Written for The Utah Statesman on November 26th, 2007

Each year, winter regulations for Logan streets aim to keep roads clear for easy snow removal, prohibiting parking on the street from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. from when the first snow fall is predicted through March 1.
Sgt. Barry Parslow from the Logan City Police Department said, "We need to have the streets clear of vehicles so that they can properly remove the snow and make the streets safe to drive on."
Keeping the streets clear benefits everyone, Parslow said.
"It's a little difficult finding places to park, and I understand that, but it's better than the alternative of having your car damaged, although the street department works really hard not to do that, even if you do leave your car there," he said. "You want your streets clean so they can be safe to drive on, that's really the biggest thing."
With the regulations in place, students now need to find new places to park, and Parslow said that responsibility is left to the individual apartment complexes.
"Parking is a big problem for several USU students, and the winter parking regulations are just making it worse," said Mandy Booth, an undeclared sophomore.

"When I work until midnight, I already have to park on the street by the credit union, clear down the road from my apartment," Booth said. "Now that I can't park on the road, I don't know what I am going to do."

Booth said she is a resident of Pine View Apartments, one of several apartment complexes that has a parking problem.

"There are not enough parking spots, and way too many cars," Booth said.

Sabrina Sorensen, manager of Pine View Apartments, said that apartment complexes are trying to work with students on this parking issue.

"Once the winter comes, since snow plows have to get by, you are allowed to double park," Sorensen said, "but you have to move your car by 9, and if it isn't moved by 9 then you get a boot on your car."

Sorensen suggested parking behind roommates, because the lot does get very full and that way residents avoid getting trapped in by someone they don't know if they need to get somewhere.

Pine View is one of several apartment complexes to regulate their parking lot with private companies, she said.

Sorensen said, "We go through Cache Valley Parking. We decided to do this because it was a more convenient way to regulate the parking lot. They come 12 times a day to regulate our lot."

Apartments are not the only places regulating parking through private companies. Logan City contracted Logan Parking Authority in 1999 to regulate parking on streets, said Tanner Morrell, manager of Logan Parking Authority.

Morrell said the city decided to contract his company because the Logan Police Department was "receiving around 200 reports a week regarding parking tickets and they didn't want to deal with that personally every day.

"Plus it was coming out of tax payers' money. They were also paying more city employees paid holidays, so this way was a lot easier for them. The way the contract works, they don't actually pay us anything. Anything above cost is just split between our company and the city. It's not a big money maker for the city really. The reason they do it this way is just to keep the calls regarding parking primarily for us."

Morrell said most people don't know about the regulations just yet, so they are "trying to give warnings for a couple days. We have given warnings through The Herald Journal, through local radio stations, and we also placed an ad on the Aggiemail home page. We are trying to get the word out."

Parking tickets are $15 and will now be given out to anyone found parking on the road between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., Morrell said.

"Everything we do is for preventative measures," he said. "It's like when we give a fire hydrant ticket. It's not like the building is on fire, but we hope that when it is on fire, we will be able to reach it. It is the same with winter parking. It may not snow that day, but when it does, we want to have the roads clear."

Mark Nelson, director of public works for Logan City, said, "There has been talk of changing the whole aspect of this regulation."

The new regulations in May involve the park strips in front of apartments, Nelson said.

Currently, parking is allowed on the park strips, but the city hopes to make this illegal, he said.

"The changes will take place next year, with the new parking restrictions going in this May, and the hope is that by next November we will have that evaluated and a new system in place," Nelson said.

"I think that changing the parking laws in May would be a great idea," Booth said. "It would benefit all the students who have cars."

Author urges appreciation, preservation of outdoors

Written for The Utah Statesman on November 16th, 2007

People should be more appreciative of the outdoors and actively preserve their surroundings, author Roy Dale Webb said Thursday.

"I hope people take away an appreciation for things that are gone," Webb said of his presentation at the Friends of the Merrill Cazier fall lecture.

The presentation featured slides of photographs from the Green River before the Colorado River Storage Project began building dams in the '60s.

"The Colorado was viewed in those days as having no beneficial use," Webb said. "The water went to waste. It just went down the canyon, so you couldn't use it to irrigate. The idea was to build these dams and store the water."

The construction of the dams were "also really tied up in the politics of the Colorado River Compact," Webb said.

The Colorado River Compact was signed in Santa Fe in 1923 "and still affects us to this day," Webb said, "because it allocated 7.5 of its 15 million acre feet a year of river to the lower basin states: Colorado, Arizona and Nevada, and the rest went to the upper basin states: Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming."

The Hoover Dam was the first to be built, after which Webb said the upper basin states wanted dams stored for them as well, "so it wouldn't all go down to California."

Fourteen dam sites were selected in Green River in 1922, with "the mouth of Cart Creek chosen for the site of the Flaming Gorge Dam," Webb said.

"It was a beautiful, unique area," Webb said of the lost canyons. "It's just one of those choices you make when you build those kind of projects, you lose that type of thing."

Webb said he is an advocate of preserving natural beauty and that the loss of these things could continue.

"The Bear River, it's at risk. People are still talking of building the Cutler Dam. Or the idea of building a nuclear power plant down by Green River, that is going to put us all at risk," he said.

Webb said students wishing to get involved with these and other environmental issues could join the Sierra Club or write letters to their congressmen. "Say,'I want to see these things preserved,'" he said. "The more they get those kinds of things, the more they are going to listen to constituents.

"There are younger generations to come. I want them to see these things too. It's nice to save what we have."

Colleges Collaborate on Water Research

Written for The Utah Statesman on November 5th, 2007

USU has six different colleges and 20 different departments that work with water, "and most of them have no clue what anybody else is doing," said Kim Shreuders, the system administrator and project manager of the Utah Water Research Lab.
Established in 2003, "the USU Water Initiative is an attempt to try and help tie together all the disparate pieces here at the university of departments, activities, programs and things that do stuff with water," Shreuders said.
There are seven colleges at USU, and the only one not involved with water is the College of Education, "but we know there are people who work on water education, we just haven't figured out who they are yet," Shreuders said.
"There is a lot of field science that people do with water around here," said David Tarboton, professor of civil engineering. "One of the things we are trying to do is integrate them together, get the data from them all in to common data bases, and stimulate collaboration by sharing data. If you can go to a single database and get information, you are likely to do more with that information."
Tarboton said this research is important because "water resources are critical to Utah and the waste we've got.
"We have got great populations and great agriculture, with people to feed, and with this scarcity and possible climate change, we don't know what that is going to do to our water resources."
Shreuders said the program is putting on water activities to bring people together and get them started in collaboration "because the sum is going to be greater than the total pieces."
The program focuses on anything that academically has to do with water, Shreuders said.
"This goes from landscape architecture and their water conservation programs, analysis and research, to the water lab that is doing water instrumentation development and analysis," she said.
Shreuders said one of the focuses of the program is trying to get graduate students interested in water to come to USU.
"If you are looking to be in that next generation of movers and shakers in water, then we want you to come to USU," she said.

As part of the program, there are monthly seminars held in Room 413a in the Engineering building. The next seminar will be on Nov. 13, and the topic will be "Aging Infrastructure, Ecosystem Restoration, and the New Economy of Rivers," presented by Martin Doyle, a professor from the University of North Carolina. All students are welcome to attend.

Shreuders said there is a run-off conference in the spring. The conference will be held at the Eccles Conference Center March 31 and April 1.

Students who would like to learn more about the USU Water Initiative or get involved can contact Shreuders at 797-2941.