t 12 p.m. on January 20, 2009, as Yo-Yo Ma played “Air and Simple Gifts,” President Barack Obama (that does have a “certain ring to it,” doesn’t it?) took office. He spent the next 13 hours addressing the nation, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue in “the Beast,” practicing his salute, actually saluting, getting dance tips from Sasha (read SA-cha if you are Rick Warren), and dancing at ten different inaugural balls. After five hours of sleep, however, Obama was up and ready to show the world what kind of president he intended to be.

By 4 p.m. on Saturday, January 24th, President Obama’s statement was clear: change has come with an open-minded, somewhat liberal, eager and prepared, left-handed (literally) leader. In his first 100 hours as president, Obama made a few significant strategic decisions that set a new tone for the Presidency, both in foreign and domestic affairs; trying to prove to America and the world that he could be a dramatic departure from George W. Bush.

His first drastic—and much needed—decision was a temporarily halt on legal proceedings at Guantanamo and an order closing the detention facilities there within a year. The new administration went even further in requiring the closing of all overseas secret CIA prisons and committing to a ban on torture in interrogations. But while these actions set President Obama far above Bush, that’s a low bar to top. Stopping torture and illegal detainment are obvious decisions, not enough to determine whether Obama will be great, or even liberal-minded president.

President Obama showed more promise with his choices of first foreign leaders to contact. His first call was made to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority. Next came Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, King Abdullah of Jordan, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. These conversations—along with calls on Hamas to end rocket attacks and on Israel to withdraw from Gaza—demonstrated President Barack Obama’s desire to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one of his top priorities. They also demonstrated that he intended to keep in constant contact with important world leaders, even ones he might disapprove of, like Mubarak.

The new domestic policies unveiled in Obama’s first 100 hours also represent great strides in reversing the policies and practices of the Bush administration. His first action was to halt all pending regulations signed by Bush until further review. Obama then froze the pay of White House staff members earning more than $100,000 a year. While this will hardly relieve the 10.6 trillion dollar debt, it sets an example of sacrifice. George Bush urged spending throughout his accumulation of national debt; President Obama is conveying the message that some sacrifices will have to be made to reverse it.

In an effort to reverse the state of American politics, the President announced new, stricter ethics rules dealing with lobbying. Lobbyists may not give gifts of any size to any member of his administration. Also, any staff member who was a lobbyist within the last two years may not work on any issues related to the issue for which they lobbied. And for two years after leaving office, they may not lobby for anything related to their former employers or clients.

Unfortunately, these rules will also hinder the job of William J. Lynn III, President Obama’s Deputy Defense Secretary. Obama’s choice of a registered lobbyist from the defense contractor Raytheon is unfortunate, and this appointment is one of the few causes for worry within the new President’s first 100 hours. Other concerns include his approval of missile strikes in Pakistan, his insistence on including “so help me God” in his oath, and his choice of anti-gay rights Pastor Rick Warren for the Inaugural Prayer.

There is no need to end on a negative note when the majority of President Obama’s actions and statements within his first 100 hours give cause for hope. One hundred hours is not much time, especially when so much of it is taken up by ceremonial pomp and circumstance. Closing Guantanamo, opening up a conversation with key Middle Eastern leaders, ending torture, and setting strict lobbying rules—that’s a good amount to accomplish (even with the help of the Blackberry he was able to keep). Liberals should be pleased with this performance. Moderates should be elated, and everyone should recognize the necessity of the changes President Obama is bringing. We all have reason to believe that, at this rate, great things will be accomplished within the next 34,964 hours.

re you a hardcore Obama supporter? A Hillary devotee? An undecided Democrat or a staunch Republican looking for ammunition? Check out Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” which both details the Illinois senator’s journey to self-discovery (however clichÉ that may sound) and includes a discussion on race that is distressingly nonexistent in America.

Obama was born in Hawaii to a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas. His father left soon after his birth, and his mother remarried. The new family moved to Indonesia, but Obama returned after several years to attend an elite private school in Hawaii. From there he went on to Occidental College and then to Columbia. He soon found a passion for community service and was organizing several efforts around Chicago.

However, the core of this autobiography isn’t a timeline of his life but a truthful and sincere study of race and self-identity. Obama is not afraid to recognize that America is still very racist, segregated, and prejudiced. He is also not afraid to admit his own confusion on the subject of race. Was he black or white? Could he empathize with his fellow black students while still loving his white family? He did love his white grandparents, but also felt distanced from them. Barack was also deeply troubled that “men who might easily have been [his] brothers could still inspire [his grandparent’s] rawest fears.”

This distance caused him to stray from the values learned from his white mother and grandparents because he saw them as “somehow irreversibly soiled by the endless falsehoods that white spoke about black.” Instead, his fellow students taught him that morality has no color. He began to understand that identity is only partially defined by race and that he must choose his own future.

“Dreams from My Father” is universally pertinent and as reviewer Marian Wright Edelman notes, it will “tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.” It is inspiring regardless of racial background in the way that it provokes us all to create a self-identity rooted in our history, but not based on race.

he cost of a Dartmouth education gives some of us headaches and nightmares. Room, board, and tuition will empty $45,483 out of our pockets this year—if you’re counting, that’s two thousand dollars more than last year. I suppose we can be thankful that this 4.9% increase is lower than the average 6.3% cost increase among other private colleges and 6.6% increase among public universities. With tuition costs rising twice as fast as inflation, an update of the Higher Education Act of’65 is long overdue. On February 7th, 2008 the House of Representatives voted to pass the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007. If it passes the Senate (a vote has not yet been scheduled), this 747-page bill would help slow the cash flow from Dartmouth students’ pockets by distributing more money, forgiving more loans, simplifying FAFSA, and regulating the relationship between lenders and financial aid offices.

Most importantly, this bill increases Federal Pell Grants to those students whose FAFSA results demonstrate considerable financial need. For the 2008-2009 year, a student could only receive a maximum of $4,781 in Pell Grants, but the College Opportunity and Affordability Act would increase this amount to $9,000. Pell Grants covered about sixty percent of the tuition for a four-year university twenty years ago, but they haven’t kept up with rising costs, and now they cover just one-third of the tuition cost of a four-year public institution. Of course, $9,000 does not cover even a third of Dartmouth’s tuition, but at the least student loans would decrease by a few thousand, since Pell Grants are federal funds that do not have to be paid back.

Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (SEOGs) for the purchase of books and supplies would increase from $450 to $600. This may not seem like much, but it would be a step in the right direction. Furthermore, the bill addresses the issue of rising textbook prices. Under its provisions, textbook publishers must inform professors of the changes made from one edition to the next; that way, if significant changes are actually minimal, professors are not tricked by a flashy new cover into switching from an older, cheaper edition. It would require that books packaged with CDs or workbooks be offered for sale without those extras, since those often unnecessary materials dramatically increase costs.

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act will couple the increase in grants with extended loan forgiveness for people who enter certain careers. Although investment banking and consulting are not professions that supply debt forgiveness, we do have many other job choices, some of which actually serve to help people. Two thousand dollars of federal debt each year for five years will be forgiven for early childhood educators, nurses, foreign language specialists, librarians, highly-qualified teachers, child welfare workers, speech-language pathologists, school counselors, public sector employees, nutritional professionals, and medical specialists who work full-time.

Furthermore, this bill is concerned with regulating the relationship between private lenders and financial aid offices. Every college is now required to establish a code of conduct that does not allow for a conflict of interest with regards to education loans. For instance, lenders cannot give gifts to financial aid administrators or any other employees dealing with loans. If a college has a preferred lender list, it must compile the list for the sole purpose of helping students, and provide an explanation for the presence of each company. The college must explicitly state that students are not required to get loans from any of these companies, and the companies themselves cannot use the school’s name or logo in any way that implies that the college endorses its loans. Lenders on these lists are also barred from giving a private education loan to any student before they or their parents have discussed their federal loan eligibility with a financial aid administrator.

Of course, every bill has to have its catch, and this one includes an out-of-place pork piece for the music industry. Section 494 is a “Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention” clause that effectively threatens to withdraw federal funding from colleges if their students illegally download too many songs. This clause forces colleges to develop plans “for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property” and for “explor[ing] technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.” However, regulating music downloading is not the job of colleges, but of the Recording Industry Association and Motion Picture Association of America. According to the MPAA,‘.4% of illegal downloaders are college students but only about 4% of illegal downloaders use a college network. Thus, with just the construction of a few “plans,” colleges will not have to worry about losing federal funding.

Nonetheless, H.R. 4137 for the most part serves well as an amendment to the Higher Education Act of’65. Both the expansion of grant and loan forgiveness programs and the new textbook laws will help many of us on financial aid here at Dartmouth. Hopefully the bill will continue quickly on its way towards becoming legislation.

he 2008 Democratic presidential candidates are in a “gloves off” struggle (as the media loves repeating) to be the one who can bring the most change to America. Meanwhile, the media is constantly asking if America is ready for a “female or black president” but they seem to be the only ones unsure. Already Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada have said yes to Hillary and Barack. But it won’t be until Super Tuesday that we’ll see a clear front-runner between Hillary and Barack. In the meantime, we can continue to examine the trailing candidates, as much for amusement as anything else.

With the exception of Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich is the most leftward candidate in the race—so far left that people seem to miss his radicalism altogether. He may be the butt of countless jokes about not having a chance in hell of winning the presidency, but we peaceniks can dream, can’t we? Many were turned off, however, after the recent disclosure that Kucinich believes he has seen a UFO. Shirley McClaine, close friend of Dennis Kucinich, wrote recently that the congressman observed a UFO above him for ten minutes at her home and found the “encounter extremely moving.” Fox News may have blown the story out of proportion, but Kucinich defended his sighting in an NBC news debate last October. He correctly stated that Carter and Reagan also believed they had seen UFOs, and he joked that “more people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush’s presidency.” But unfortunately, those fourteen percent of Americans aren’t flocking to the polls to vote for the Congressman, and the rest of us have just one more reason not to believe in him.

And Edwards? Well, the media has pretty much dismissed him after these initial primaries. They keep him in the debates, but the fact that he actually got second place in Iowa’s caucus is not widely reported. Hailing from the South, however, might get him some wins south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But South Carolina is on Saturday, where Obama leads Clinton by ten percentage points in the polls, with Edwards currently polling a distant third.

Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire despite the polls predicting an Obama win by at least ten percentage points. What happened? Maybe the polls weren’t that reliable. Or perhaps it’s that Hillary cried–or rather her voice wavered as though she were about to cry. Many voters found this humanizing for once, as Hillary is often seen as cold and calculated. Others believe that this outbreak of emotion was just a political move, and was calculated. Either way, it seems that the voters of New Hampshire bought it.

Even though Clinton and Obama are the front runners, they aren’t exempt from making mistakes. Clinton’s recent comment on Martin Luther King, Jr. is hard to find: It is summarized all over the internet, but the actual footage can be found on The Daily Show website. The senator said that “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act” and “it took a president to get it done.” When this statement found the spotlight, her campaign blamed the Obama campaign of “deliberately distorting” her words. Distortion is probably a stretch, but regardless her statement was “ill-advised” as Barack later mentioned. A president should never be given so much credit for the success of a grassroots movement.

Obama’s comment on Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party is much easier to find. While in Nevada, just after receiving the endorsement of the Culinary Workers Union, Barack commented that “Reagan changed the trajectory of America” and “put us on a fundamentally different path.” He continued his praise, saying that for the last decade and a half “the Republicans were the party of ideas.” Hillary was quick to state that she remembers nothing in the past ten years that deserves this kind of praise.

With seemingly nothing else they could possibly be interested in reporting on, the media is picking up every little comment that Hillary and Barack make, and then blowing it out of proportion. But no more than the candidates themselves do. They are sure to gawk at the “audacity” of their opponent for saying LBJ really got civil rights work done, or that the Republicans had monopolized change. The nightly news is turning into a “he said she said” game as though the candidates were taking ideas from an Ashley Tisdale song. A bitterly divided Democratic party will not win the 2008 elections, and this country cannot survive four more years of Republican rule.

eah, yeah, the Earth is warming up. Global warming this, global warming that. The glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro could vanish in 15 years. Well, we weren’t really planning on climbing that volcano anyway. The annual melt season in Antarctica has increased by up to 3 weeks over the past 20 years. It doesn’t sound good, but we don’t actually understand what it means. But most of us actually would like to sample famous French wines, watch our favorite major leaguers bat .400, eat guacamole and lobster, and stay away from disease-carrying mosquitoes. These desires, much like glaciers around the world, are threatened by global warming.

Wine harvesters in France and California started noticing the warming trends even before they became big headlines. For decades, they have noticed the grape harvest arriving earlier and earlier each year. The harvest has moved up three months since’78, and the Alsace region of France has seen a 3.5 degree temperature increase, giving growers two options: pick the grapes earlier and suffer higher sugar contents, or leave the leaves on the vines longer and suffer higher alcohol levels. Centuries-old vineyards are being forced to change their farming techniques in an effort to thwart the effects of global warming. Even still, French Bordeaux might be no longer. We will instead see increased wine production in areas much less traditional, like England and Germany.

About half of major league baseball players prefer to use ash bats. These bats have been a staple throughout baseball history and their use is now being threatened by global warming. Higher temperatures are causing the wood to become softer due to the longer growing season. The soft bats are given to the rookies because they aren’t useful in helping the old timers reach 3000 hits. The higher temperatures are also fueling the emerald ash borer’s attack on the ash tree. The rising temperatures have quickened the reproduction cycle for these beetles that are eating the trees to the point of extinction. Baseball players should start testing out other types of wood, because the ash tree’s days are numbered.

The days of the prized American lobster are also limited. The catch in Maine last year fell by about 14 percent, and, surprise, surprise, the decline can be attributed to global warming. Lobsters prefer chilly waters, and slowly but surely northeastern waters have been warming. Maine has traditionally had the most hospitable waters for these large-clawed lobsters, but the state’s southern gulf is already feeling the effects of warming. Global warming is also affecting the avocado producing powerhouse of California as much as it is affecting the lobster capital. During the next half-century, avocado crops are expected to decrease in production by 40%. Avocados are already scarce and expensive! Other California crops, including the almond, walnut, and orange are also expected to dramatically decrease in production.

On top of all these losses, there has been an increase in disease thanks to the pesky mosquito. Cholera, Malaria, Dengue Fever, Lyme disease and West Nile virus are spreading as mosquitoes thrive in the droughts created by global warming, and as the heat helps the parasites that live in mosquitoes mature more quickly. Additionally, the dragonflies, lacewings and frogs that usually prey on the mosquito are dying out in the heat. The World Health Organization has identified more than 30 new and resurging diseases over the past thirty years, due in large part to global warming making an environment for mosquitoes to thrive in.

Global warming is not just affecting far away glaciers and polar ice caps. It is disrupting America’s favorite pastime, France’s historic beverages, California’s best crops and everyone’s health. Rising temperatures hit much closer to home than we sometimes realize, and if we would like to continue enjoying these favorites we had better react to them properly—with real concern. We need this real fear to prompt us to cut emissions and finally throw away the keys to the gas-guzzlers. Save Baseball and buy a hybrid!

repare to be shocked. One out of every ten high schools in the United States has a dropout rate greater than fifty percent. Let me put it another way: Ten percent of American schools are “dropout factories” where more than half of the students entering as freshmen do not make it through their senior year. These are the damning figures, generated by Johns Hopkins University, that show what those of us who drudged through the public school system already know–our public schools are failing.

Can we at least be comforted by the fact that policy-makers are working hard to slow these alarming rates and that political candidates are raising hell promising to take over our schools until the problem is solved? Nope and Nope.

Washington is still stuck on No Child Left Behind. The act is up for renewal this year, and Democratic congressman George Miller is leading the effort to renew the unpopular bill with some minor changes. Even Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy was working with the President to prepare the bill for renewal, but they have run into political deadlock and the bill will not be renewed this year. Hold on, don’t start celebrating just yet—the original law remains in effect whether or not it is renewed. How tricky! And even though practically everyone, including Bush, wants to see changes made to the bill, the focus on standardized tests does not seem to be out of the picture

With one in ten American high schools failing miserably, education should be at the forefront of the presidential candidate debates. It should at least rival the issue of the Iraq war. But the truth is far from this. Only four democratic presidential candidates, Obama, Richardson, Biden and Edwards, and no Republican candidates have even mentioned the jaw-dropping dropout rates. Barack Obama stated we have “one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world,” while Bill Richardson pledged to give “$1 billion a year in states’ dropout prevention programs to encourage the one million students who drop out each year to stay in school.” Joe Biden thinks with these high rates we are “losing too many children,” and John Edwards mentioned that they are “unacceptably high.” Education is not even listed as an ‘issue’ on Dennis Kucinich or Hilary Clinton’s websites, although one may find a few statements about pre-kindergarten under Clinton’s issue entitled “supporting parents and caring for children.”

What about the Republicans? Although Rudy Giuliani served as mayor of a city that has quite a few “dropout factories,” he does not mention the rates, and his only education proposals have to do with school choice. Education is not one of the 10 issues John McCain mentions, but protecting the second amendment right to bear arms is!

Why aren’t the candidates bringing education to the forefront? Why can’t education reform be the primary platform of a candidate? Why can’t lawmakers take the time to come up with a comprehensive law for our failing school system? They must think we don’t care enough. They must not have enough pressure from the people. Show them we care! Be alarmed!