Opinion

On Friday, the UC Davis athletics department announced the discontinuation of four teams – men’s swimming and diving, men’s indoor track and field, men’s wrestling and women’s rowing.

Picnic Day was routine for me. I woke up, took a shower, mixed orange juice and Southern Comfort into a mug, lit up a fat Churchill cigar and sat out on the lawn to watch friendly drunks walk by.

Editor, Picnic Day is progressively becoming more about binge drinking in public and less about the open house of UC Davis and its community that it was established to be.

Editor, Thanks for the article by Marcos Rodriguez in last week’s Aggie on the Women’s Alpine Ski & Snowboard club’s national championship. It’s great to see sport clubs get some love.

I urge you not to follow the recommendation of Athletics Director Greg Warzecka to cut the women’s rowing and men’s wrestling, swimming and indoor track teams. This is a shortsighted solution that will result in long-term problems for the athletic department and all of UC Davis.

There’s North Davis. Then there’s South Davis. You can tell how they see themselves by their Safeways.

Perhaps no other part of the Constitution is mentioned more than the first amendment. Most people can name free speech, but it isn’t the only protected expression in the first amendment.

I had a lot of fun on Picnic Day – or so my friends tell me.

One is a lonely number. You can’t talk on the phone to yourself. You can’t play tennis without an opponent. You can’t even walk the dog without a dog. It takes at least two to have fun in most activities. The only things you could really do alone are play Pokémon Soul Silver on your Nintendo DS or read manga in a dark corner of the room. Eating is no exception to the lonely number rule. If you go to a restaurant alone, the setting tends to magnify that you are, indeed, alone. At least at the movie theater, you can hide in the dark, behind your large popcorn.

Measure R would keep decisions on development and construction projects in the city of Davis in its residents’ hands. If passed, the measure will extend an already-existing law – Measure J – until 2020. Measure J states projects on agricultural land surrounding the city must be approved by a majority of Davis citizens. It was originally passed in 2000 with a 53.6 percent vote.

For years, human rights advocates have been working to expose the horrific working conditions tomato pickers face in Florida. U.S. Attorney Doug Malloy labeled the situation on one farm as “slavery, plain and simple.” In the past 15 years, seven labor operations have been prosecuted for involuntary servitude and other related offenses. Hoping to support the cause, the ASUCD Senate voted 8-4 last week to grant $580 to a group of six students to purchase plane tickets to a protest this weekend in Florida.

We recently witnessed historical reform on two critically important issues: health care and education. But young Californians could be forgiven for thinking it had little to do with them. Almost all the public discussion of health care reform focused on older people’s issues, and student loan overhaul was barely discussed. They couldn’t be more wrong – in fact, there are few demographics that have more to gain from the new laws. This time, Congress and the administration really did deliver on their commitment to young Americans.