Prompted by the UOC’s 300-student canvass and forum last week on financial aid reform, the Yale Herald does a feature on the impact of policy on people:

Financial aid detracts from everything Yale has to offer,” a Davenport sophomore said. A first-generation college student and daughter of immigrants, with roots more country-rural than Connecticut-suburban, she appreciates the benefits of a Yale education which she would otherwise be unable to afford. But she has found that the same aid that granted her this privilege also constricts her Yale experience. Due to long hours spent on her work-study job, she often feels pressured and unable to participate in the greater Yale community in the same way non-financial aid recipients do. She complains that work-study prevents her from taking more demanding classes like Organic Chemistry and from pursuing a medical career.

There seems to be a consensus among financial-aid recipients at Yale that while Yale’s aid program is generous, other elite universities may be doing a better job at lightening the burden on students. One student said that upon hearing that Princeton had erased student loans, he wanted to quit Yale and move to New Jersey. As the Davenport sophomore put it, “We are definitely grateful and feel really lucky to afford to come here, but at the same time there’s room for improvement.”

From the YDN write-up of the forum:

“We think Yale can do better to accommodate people with financial needs,” Maslin said. “There are issues of class that exist, and we want to figure out ways to approach that and what potential policy solutions could be.” The University’s representatives acknowledged the broad complexity of student concerns, and Associate Vice President for Student Financial and Administrative Services Ernst Huff said a newly resurrected Yale committee, the Subcommittee on Admissions and Financial Aid, will create an arena for further discussion…

Rebecca Livengood ’07 questioned the financial aid representatives about their office’s efforts to attract a more diverse applicant pool. Livengood cited the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. Under the initiative, Harvard no longer requires families with incomes of less than $40,000 to contribute to their children’s tuition costs. But Smith said that it is difficult to measure the realistic effects of Harvard’s policy. “It was a smart move, but we don’t know how effective it is in terms of attracting students and university costs,” Smith said. Huff said the University may consider enacting a similar policy in the future, but they would first need to do a cost-benefit analysis. According to Harvard’s Web site, about 70 percent of Harvard students receive some sort of financial aid. About 40 percent of Yale students receive financial aid, according to the Yale Admissions Web site.

Tim Cavanaugh at Hit and Run on how John Kerry got Pat Buchanan while losing Christopher Hitchens, and George Bush got Hitch while losing Bob Barr:

By now it’s a truism that 9/11 opened a hole in the space/time continuum, turning up into down, left into right, hawks into doves, white into black, cats into dogs, and so on. Pat Buchanan’s magazine makes the case for a candidate the Republicans keep telling me stands to the left of Castro. Bob Barr is voting against the staunchest family-values conservative to occupy the White House in our time. The last Trotskyite is making the case for Bush. Now gallant Hospers, Mars in swathling clothes, says “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.”

The Nation offers a hundred facts to condemn George Bush. Read ’em and (don’t mourn) organize.

Read his lips:

”I’m going to come out strong after my swearing in,” Bush said, ”with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.” The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ”two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I’ll be quacking like a duck.”

The question is why this Bush quote in the NYT Magazine, which directly contradicts Bush’s stated policy and the desires of most Americans, has gone relatively unnoticed, while a blatant misinterpretation of a Kerry quote most folks agree with in the same publication a week earlier (I mean, who among us doesn’t see the reduction of terrorism to a “nuisance” as a worthwhile goal?) got blasted across the airwaves. The answer is not that we have a liberal media bias.

San Francisco’s Mayor calls for San Francisco hotels to get back to the table:

Mayor Gavin Newsom on Sunday asked labor leaders and the management of 14 hotels embroiled in a nearly month-old dispute to resume normal operations for at least 90 days while the two sides try to negotiate a new contract. In a letter requesting a 90-day “cooling off” period, Newsom said the dispute has caused “significant disruption” to San Francisco residents and visitors, threatening to harm the city’s economic recovery. It represented Newsom’s first formal attempt to broker the peace in an increasingly bitter battle pitting several of San Francisco’s landmark hotels against thousands of housekeepers, bellmen, cooks and other employees represented by the union, Unite Here Local 2. The trouble began Sept. 29 when unionized workers frustrated with stalled contract negotiations struck four San Francisco hotels. Ten other hotels subsequently locked out their non-management workers. Labor leaders ended the strike of the four other hotels Oct. 13, but those workers also have been locked out…The hotels plan to respond by the deadline, said Cornell Fowler, a spokesman for the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group. The union will eagerly agree to a cooling off period, said Mike Casey, president of Unite Local 2.

At least the oil is secure:

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives – used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons – are missing from one of Iraq’s most sensitive former military installations. The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man’s land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives. American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

So much for those famed GOP outreach efforts to the rest of us:

David Barton, the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders, was hired by the RNC as a political consultant and has been traveling the country for a year–speaking at about 300 RNC-sponsored lunches for local evangelical pastors. During the lunches, he presents a slide show of American monuments, discusses his view of America’s Christian heritage — and tells pastors that they are allowed to endorse political candidates from the pulpit.

Barton, who is also the vice-chairman of the Texas GOP, told Beliefnet this week that the pastors’ meetings have been kept “below the radar…. We work our tails off to stay out of the news.” But at this point, he says, with voter registration ended in most states and early voting already under way, staying quiet about the activity “doesn’t matter.” Barton’s main contention is that the separation of church and state was never intended by the nation’s founders; he says it was created by the Supreme Court in the 20th Century. The back cover of his 1989 book, “The Myth of Separation,” proclaims: “This book proves that separation of church and state is a myth.” Barton is also on the board of advisers of the Providence Foundation, a Christian Reconstructionist group that advocates America as a Christian nation.

Human Rights Watch releases a new report on ongoing home demolitions in Gaza:

Over the past four years, the Israeli military has demolished over 2,500 Palestinian houses in the occupied Gaza Strip. Nearly two-thirds of these homes were in Rafah, a densely populated refugee camp and city at the southern end of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt. Sixteen thousand people – more than ten percent of Rafah’s population – have lost their homes, most of them refugees, many of whom were dispossessed for a second or third time.

As satellite images in this report show, most of the destruction in Rafah occurred along the Israeli-controlled border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. During regular nighttime raids and with little or no warning, Israeli forces used armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to raze blocks of homes at the edge of the camp, incrementally expanding a “buffer zone” that is currently up to three hundred meters wide. The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law. In most of the cases Human Rights Watch found the destruction was carried out in the absence of military necessity.

Check out this ad from Russ Feingold’s campaign, in which veterans recognize the courage of his lone vote against the PATRIOT Act. The rest of his ads are unusually good as well – helps that he has a progressive record to run on. And the ’92 and ’98 ads are, well, vintage.

Pressure mounts on San Francisco’s struck hotels:

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez introduced a resolution Tuesday urging 14 city hotels to stop the lockout of 4,000 union workers. He has scheduled a hearing on the matter Friday at 10 a.m. The resolution sides with the union, Unite Here Local 2, in urging the group that negotiates labor contracts for the group of hotels, the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group, to end the lockout. It also urges the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau to notify all city visitors on the “noncooperation on the part of the Multi-Employer Group and their refusal to allow workers to return to their jobs.”

The union struck four hotels for two weeks starting Sept. 29. On Oct. 1, the 10 other hotels in the group locked out their union workers, and on Oct. 13, when the strike ended, the original four hotels locked out their workers. On Friday, Gonzalez attended a hearing of the board’s Finance and Audits Committee that was called to hear an update on the labor dispute. Both sides were invited, but representatives of the hotels declined the invitation. They noted that several members of the board had joined locked-out picketing workers recently “at our door.”

Welcome to Oz:

In 2000, [pollster John] Zogby took a novel approach to predicting the race between Mr George W. Bush and former vice-president Al Gore. He asked voters to make a choice: ‘You live in the Land of Oz, and the candidates are either Tin Man, with all brains and no heart, or the Scarecrow, who is with all heart and no brains.’ The score – 46.2 per cent to the Scarecrow (seen to depict Mr Bush) and 46.2 per cent to the Tin Man (Mr Gore). In an interview with The Sunday Times, Mr Zogby sees the Tin Man-versus-Scarecrow model as still relevant in the present race, with Mr Bush now facing a new Tin Man in the form of Senator John Kerry…Going by the Tin Man/Scarecrow contest, Mr Kerry is ahead by 9 percentage points.