Zemanifesto Sept. 22, 2010

By Greg Zeman
The Guardsman

Nothing is sacred at The Guardsman, politically or otherwise, and this issue we’re proving it by slaughtering a golden calf for many of our readers: the Obama administration.

Yeah, I know, everyone got really excited when the Bush administration came to an end. Many of us on staff, myself included, thought it was pretty great, but the honeymoon is over and we are not a rubber stamp for the policies of this president.

Besides, it’ll be nice to get some hate mail form the other half of our readers.

Not the change we had in mind

We feel that the efforts of the Obama administration to expand law enforcement’s power to perform warrantless cell phone tracking represents an unnecessary and frightening affront to our civil liberties. We consider the use of cell tower triangulation an act of surveillance and we are shocked and appalled by the Department of Justice’s interest in expanding its use.

If a warrant is no longer needed for this type of information gathering, what is there to stop a future government from using it to repress dissent? What will stop law enforcement from creating databases of those attending protests deemed counterproductive to establishment goals?

The lawyers arguing on behalf of the Department of Justice have acknowledged that there are no distinct limits on the application of this expanded police power and that ordinary citizens will be subject to extensive, and in our view excessive, scrutiny.

All are welcome

I have recently caught wind of suggestions that The Guardsman is a paper that does not welcome the input of conservative readers. This is not true. If you write a letter critical of something we’ve written, I promise, I will print it.

It’s true that I might type out a few snarky remarks behind your letter, but I will never attempt to silence or marginalize your viewpoint.

By the way, not everyone on staff here is a liberal. We’ve taken some fairly liberal editorial stances, but those only reflect the consensus opinion of the editors, who make up less than a third of the staff.

We never decided, as a group of liberals, to enroll en masse in the newspaper laboratory class and shift the editorial line to the left. But there’s no reason that a group of conservative students at City College couldn’t do just that with the inverse goal.

I mean, except the difficulty of finding enough conservatives at City College to staff a lemonade stand, never mind a newspaper.

Which reminds me; I’ve been giving my responses in our letters section some thought.  At first I thought maybe responding at all was a mistake, but then I spoke with some close friends and family, and they assured me that I’m just an abrasive dick sometimes, and that I could perhaps try to be less of one in the letters section, and in general.

So I told them to piss off.