The candidate for City Council who got whipped by Bryon Eagon made statements indicating that he wanted to tackle bar raids as an alderman even though he had no real jurisdiction to do so.

Well, it looks like he may have his chance to butt heads with police on alcohol issues yet. According to a source in ASM, Mark Woulf has been appointed to fill the non-voting student seat on the Alcohol License Review Committee. This was done in late April.

Well, now that Woulf is in the seat, he’ll have his first major battle to fight at the end of May:

Fed up with fights, disturbances and underage drinkers, Madison police had planned to take a new tack with the popular Kollege Klub bar near UW-Madison: Try to block the annual renewal of its liquor license.

But the effort to delicense the bar — named by Playboy magazine as one of the best campus party spots in the nation — ran aground earlier this week over a communications breakdown among city officials, leaving the city’s Alcohol License Review Committee the option of only imposing modest conditions on the bar’s liquor license.

[…]

But police are still exploring options to deal with the Kollege Klub, including license revocation, and have asked the city attorney’s office to schedule nonrenewal hearings against three other campus-area bars: Johnny O’s Restaurant and Bar, Madison Avenue and Ram Head Rathskeller.

First off, good job to ASM on filling the seat so quickly. But can Mark Woulf get up to speed on ALRC quick enough to make an impact on the committee? And what’s the student perspective going to be represented as? (especially someone who wasn’t 21 at the time of his City Council run?)

We’ll follow up as time goes on (as we’ll be publishing online on a weekly basis starting next week. Stay tuned!)

Take Collegian's For A Constructive Tomorrow's most recent packet on Earth Day, which, as I stated in my column, links Earth Day to a sinister communist plot involving Nikita Khrushchev, Lenin, and a US Senator. The fact that Earth day happens to occur on Lenin's birthday is not a coincidence, CFACT says. Pinko Commies are lurking in your room! On the street - behind that newspaper! IN THE HALLS OF POWER!

This is only too reminiscent of McCarthy-era politics - and after a good chuckle, such absurdity begins to sink in. Until SSFC denied it funding this year, CFACT was a group with a good degree of influence on campus. Certainly their parent organization, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, seems to make a good effort at having a sincere scientific groundwork to its claims on the environment. And although it would probably take a fat piece of sky shattering on the pavement before the "Committee" CFACT changed its mind, at least they are not engaging in red-baiting.

So why is its collegiate arm resorting to a tactic discarded some time before the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The answer lies in the increasing marginalization of the right on campus. While the campus left has always had some ideological influence here - even if it has waned to the point of irrelevance - the right, including the College Republicans and CFACT, has hardly had any since the Herald moved to a moderate position in its politics. Thus the right has been allowed to develop in its own conservative cacoon, widely derided but nonetheless left to its own devices. So when the chair of the College Republicans states in a debate that she "will worry about the economy when [she] loses her job", it becomes easily apparent that the right needs to be brought into the dialogue, lest they grow even more confused.

That isn't to say the nutbar commie paranoia should be taken seriously. It shouldn't. And on the whole, conservatives have rarely proved themselves to be any better than your money or your freedom than liberals (or leftists). But today's Sara Mikolajczak (or however the fuck you spell it) is tomorrow's Sarah Palin. In contrast to this, today's David Lapidus is tomorrow's Arlen Specter. And certainly, the campus right may prove itself unworthy (yet again) of being taken seriously.

But we should try engaging the moderates in the right - lest a statue of Marx suddenly get erected in Humanities, courtesy of our own home-grown Communist majority. You know, the one CFACT warned us about.

Years of promoting bike-friendly initiatives in Madison have helped the city earn a reputation as one of ... the most bike-friendly cities in the country. Bike lanes on the UW campus make it possible for students to jet between classes without running over pedestrians, and strategically-placed bike paths help commuters ditch their Toyotas in favor of Treks. However, up until recently Madison's bike-friendliness lulled cyclers into a false sense of complacency with its utterly silly law that fined, actually fined, bikers who were assaulted by malevolent car doors in an act infamously known as "dooring."

Fortunately, Madison's inner-biker came through last month, as several Common Council members sponsored a bill that reversed the "dooring" law, and actually made it the car-door-opener's responsibility to look before opening. State legislators have picked up on Madison's lead, and have proposed a state-wide law making car drivers responsible for preventing biker-door collisions. Promoting bicycle use in Wisconsin is a noble endeavor from an environmental, health, and transportation perspective, and thus passing of a state-wide anti-"dooring" law is something that needs to be done.

The most famous local assault on a biker by a malicious car door occurred last August when a local biker crashed into an opening car door while biking down Henry Street in downtown Madison. She was then issued a $10 citation for riding too close to a parked car while laying on a hospital bed recovering from her injuries. This drama brings a couple thoughts to mind. First, shouldn't that police officer have been at a State Street bar issuing drinking tickets to underage drinkers? And second, is this ultimate example of adding insult to injury not ridiculously stupid?

The laws of physics have generally made it possible for combustion-engine powered automobiles to travel much faster than people-driven bicycles, and thus the City of Madison has granted bikers their own lanes on the side of the road to keep them from slowing up traffic. The problem is that in many parts of campus and the greater city, these bike lanes are immediately adjacent to the areas reserved for parked cars. Thus, bikers who wanted to avoid being crushed by angry motorists were forced by the City to violate the draconian "dooring" law. I don't know if the bike lane setup and "dooring" law were a diabolical scheme concocted by a bike-hating bureaucrat to elicit revenge upon hapless bikers or what, but it was definitely a really stupid combination.

Most bikers want to avoid holding up traffic and do their best to be as small a nuisance as possible. It is only fair that these good-natured folks are protected against the wrath of car doors by the power of law. Actually, with the new law in place, perhaps that cop who gave the doored woman a ticket should abandon his assignment to issue tickets to inebriated football fans at Camp Randall and ride on down to City Hall to issue Mayor Dave a ticket for constructing bike lanes within three feet of parked cars.

Now some detractors may make the claim that most bikers are a bunch of out-of-control douchebags of the road who weave in and out of traffic and disobey traffic signs. While some of these jerks do exist, extensive statistical analysis, conducted mainly on my commute into work today, reveals that most bike riders in Madison are either kind old folks looking to save the environment or some cash on gas, or students riding really crappy bikes trying to make it to their next class before the bell rings.

While I'm sure the raving pricks will ultimately get their comeuppance, the real reason for the anti-bike backlash by unfeeling meanies is due to the douchebag "bikes are entitled to use the road too" crowd. These are the folks who rarely face the threat of getting doored because they are usually holding up traffic by riding down the middle of the street. I would be remiss in my journalmalism if I failed to acknowledge that the hatred inculcated in delayed drivers by these miscreants is pretty justified.

However, the proposed anti-"dooring" law does provide a solution to this problem. The new law will force motorists to check their rearview mirrors for approaching bikers before opening their doors into busy roads. This act of looking before opening will also allow peeved motorists to scope out the scene for any douches and ask themselves how they want to spend that $20 in their wallet. I don't know what the esteemed reader was thinking, but the answer to that question is obviously "donate the $20 to the charitable cause of their choice."

Ultimately, the small task of looking in the rearview mirror is a small price to pay for motorists who do not want bikes on the side of the road where they are not holding up traffic. Passing a law making "dooring" the legal responsibility of door-owners and not bikers is an absolute must for the Wisconsin state legislature. Madison has paved the way for this bike-friendly act to be introduced to other urban areas in the state, and now bike riders everywhere deserve this minimal protection against the tyranny of opening car doors.