Announced today by the Nats and The George Washington University: That august institution’s baseball team will have the honor of being the first hardball squad to play at Nationals Park.

A March 22 game will pit GW versus St. Joseph’s in riveting Atlantic 10 action. Oh, and according to the GW press release, “The match between the Colonials and the Hawks will serve as a test run for the Nationals’ staff as they prepare for the 2008 season in their new stadium.”

Sweet! A chance for the interested fan/D.C. taxpayer to buy a ticket and see the stadium without the huge major-league/papal crowds, right?

Wrong:

The game will be privately ticketed and is not open to the public. A limited number of general admission tickets will be made available to the GW community after March 10. A valid GWorld identification will be required. Details will be released separately.

Not an auspicious beginning for our $611 million of public money, have to say. Chime in the comments with your own outrage!

Press release after jump.

EDIT: Right, so this was in the Post on Tuesday. I’m still pissed about it now!

Read the rest of this entry »

Ytit Chauhan is a sophomore at George Washington University. According to campus newspaper the GW Hatchet, he is also a former candidate for the city council in Atlantic City, N.J. Although he lost the race this year, there are future gains to be had! Chauhan is apparently going to be in a documentary about “young adults—five men and women ages 18-20—who are running for public office in different states,” according to the film’s IMDB page. The movie is being produced by David Letterman’s company Worldwide Pants Inc.

“At the beginning it was very hard to get used to,” said Chauhan, a sophomore. “They would film me from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. But it eventually became second nature,” Chauhan told the Hatchet.

Here’s a bit more from the Hatchet article:

Besides being a young candidate, Chauhan faced other problems including a lack of funding and organization, he said.

“I was focused on big issues, issues of corruption and bringing in change,” Chauhan said. “Since I was running for city council in a medium-sized city, people weren’t worried about the big things. It’s really the small issues that matter.”

He added, “If you are interested in running for office, you have to study the issues. You don’t have to have positions on every issue, but just know what the issues are. (People) don’t want someone who has all the answers, they just want someone they can trust.”

This semester, George Washington University has been plagued by some prominent Pinocchios. First,there was the GW sex columnist who plagiarized his sex tips. Then, the group of protesters who came under fire for plastering campus with ambiguously satirical anti-Muslim posters. Just last week, a freshman was found responsible for drawing swastikas on her own dorm room door, spurring campus outrage and an FBI investigation.

Here’s a break-down of GW’s sweet little lies:

Truth-Bender: Sahil Mansuri, a junior.
Offense: Lifted sage shackin’ up advice for his anonymous sex column, “Under The Covers,” from this Web site. The result was gems like this: “[Following] an unremarkable high school experience, where the only time I got laid was when my prom date was drunk …. I could walk into any party, any bar, any club, and within a few minutes, have some hot girl’s tongue down my throat. I exuded confidence, I was charismatic, I was irresistible.”
Defense: Ignorance. “He said he simply believed that the ideas—including phrases, acronyms and strategies—were allowed to be borrowed from other sources without attribution.” —The GW Hatchet
Punishment: According to the Hatchet, “He is not a paid staff member and his column is being suspended indefinitely.”
The Verdict: Kudos to anyone willing to admit that they lost their virginity by committing gray rape. Unfortunately, plagiarizing the pick-up advice of someone who wears fuzzy Dr. Seuss hats on VH1 doesn’t exactly make me believe your claims to be “irresistible.” Mansuri’s not writing, for now, but the real question is: Is he boning? And is he still such an asshole about it?

Fabulists: Freshmen Yong Kwon and Ned Goodwin; senior Brian Tierney; graduate students Adam Kokesh, Maxine Nwigwe, Lara Masri, and Ammal Rammah.
Offense: A group of wiseacres calling themselves “Students for Conservativo-Facism Awareness” hung posters around campus depicting anti-Muslim sentiments in an attempt to satire the Young America’s Foundation’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” When their satire was misinterpreted as overt racism, the group was scrutinized by Muslims and the YAF.
Defense: Just kidding! “There’s a great tendency in academia to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything controversial,” Kokesh told The Hatchet. “Anyone who bothered to read the whole thing got that point (that the posters were satirical).”
Punishment: The posters were torn down. Any further punishment was minor enough to go under the radar.
The Verdict: You got the publicity you wanted, but you also enabled the YAF, of all things, to play victim. Clearly, the GW community doesn’t respond well to satire; next time, know your audience better.

Jive turkey: Sarah Marshak, a freshman.
Offense: This past month, six swastikas were drawn on Marshak’s door. Earlier this week, it was revealed that Marshak drew at least five of them herself.
Defense: Denial. First, Marshak “categorically denied” drawing the swastikas; then, Marshak claimed she “only drew the final three of six swastikas on her door in an attempt to highlight what she characterized as GW’s inaction.” Earlier this week, UPD revealed that, yep, Marshak’s still lying. Marshak drew at least five of the swastikas—and possibly all of them. “I wasn’t looking to create this, sort of, insanity,” Marshak told The Hatchet. “I wasn’t looking to become a media darling. I was just looking for acknowledgment from University that someone drew a swastika on the door.”
Punishment: In the works. “Marshak said Tara W. Pereira, director of [GWU's Student Judicial Services office], informed her she would likely be expelled. Marshak said she did not want to leave GW but probably will,” The Hatchet reports. No word yet from outside law enforcement.
The Verdict: What does it take for a girl to get some acknowledgment that she faked a hate crime around here? Sure, most people do something they regret their freshman year of college. Few, however, manage to get the FBI called in.

On Monday morning, the George Washington University community awoke to a campus plastered with fliers that appeared to espouse vitriolic anti-Muslim sentiment. G.W.’s student newspaper, The Hatchet, describes the fliers:

The posters, on standard letter-sized paper, read, “Hate Muslims? So do we!!!” Below the statement is a picture of a Muslim man next to a diagram describing a “typical Muslim.” Some features mentioned include “venom from mouth,” “suicide vest,” and “peg-leg for smuggling children and heroin.”

The GW Young America’s Foundation is named as a contact on the poster, but leaders of the conservative organization said they had no involvement.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the posters were a stunt: An outsider’s satirical response to the YAF’s upcoming “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” set to begin October 19. The YAF staged a controversial event; someone who objected to it responded by falsely publicizing ridiculous anti-Muslim sentiments and attributing them to the YAF. That’s satire—albeit cheap, low-rate satire.

But the subsequent GW community meeting—and the Hatchet’s follow-up story—made it clear that (uh, sorry guys) nobody really gets it.

The GW Peace Forum, which organized the event, had this to say:

“We’re all here, we’re not all the same and we need to understand,” said sophomore Tarek Al-Hariri, president of GW Peace Forum, during the discussion. “I think something this morning happened. It may or may not have been taken the way it was supposed to be (and) may not have been a mistake. Nevertheless, people were affected, and people took offense.”

The quote is pretty representative of GW’s general confusion over what the discussion was, in fact, discussing. (Something happened, but it may or may not have been—what now?)

The remainder of the meeting was similarly stalled by a lack of understanding of the situation at hand. Reports The Hatchet:

“It was completely satirical and overblown,” [graduate student Lara] Nasri said. “It was the antithesis of racism.”

[YAF President Sergio] Gor disagreed with Nasri.

“This is not satirical,” said Sergio Gor. “It is hatred.”

Kareem Shibib, a senior from Cornell University who came to gathering after hearing about the poster, said that the flyer is racist.

“I think this is a rather overt form of racism,” Shibib said. “What is important (is) to look further into this.”

So, GW graduate student Nasri, for one, thinks it’s satire. But strangely, YAF president Gor—who has come under fire from students who think that he’s responsible for the flier—insists that it’s not. Cornell’s Shibib says we better look into it.

As for the unknown poster (or posters) of the fliers, just about everybody is pissed at them; some have suggested their expulsion if they’re ever found out. At least then they’d get a chance to explain to everybody what the heck they were talking about.

Until last fall, condom-buyers at many CVS locations were required to ask a grumbling attendant to leave the counter, trudge to the back aisle, and take out a selection from a locked case. Public health students at George Washington University didn’t think anyone should endure that, especially since D.C. has the highest AIDS rates in the country. Last October, they confronted CVS management with a survey showing that the 20 stores with locked displays were in the neighborhoods with the most cases of AIDS.

The drugstore chain promised a change and responded by installing displays called “power wings,” which let a customer take out one package at a time. CVS has also installed displays that dispense a package when you pull a lever.

But that hasn’t satisfied the students—they claim that the people and the rubbers are still being kept apart. “We’re saying that, having power wing or no power wing, it doesn’t work,” says Shumaya Ali, a health communications graduate student. “CVS has a mission that says it will be the easiest pharmacy retailer for people to use…and it just contradicts everything they are doing with locking condoms.”

Ali’s group, Save Lives: Free the Condoms, argues that the one-package dispensers—which hold a limited selection of brands—are inadequate. “People still want other brands, and they have to go and ask,” says Carolyn Watson, a public health graduate student. “They just have to grin and bear it, so to speak.” The group also found in April that 11 stores were still locking their inventory. CVS spokesperson Mike DeAngelis says that isn’t the case now. “There are no CVS stores where condoms are completely behind a locked display,” he says.