By Joey Lauer
The hot-button issue of illegal immigration has bubbled to the top once again over the summer. The SB1070 law from Arizona has sparked politicians into taking another stab at the immigration problem. But what’s it going to take for true immigration reform this time around?
States like Arizona have it the hardest being on the border when it comes to illegal immigration. The flow of illegal immigrants contributes to drug and violence related crime, and also puts stress on services such as hospitals and the public school system. They …

By Chloe Rockow
In August 2005, Americans were reeling from the worst environmental catastrophe in recent memory, and begging for help. The state and local governments were overwhelmed and unprepared for the magnitude of what had to be done. Historic New Orleans was devastated as many pointed the finger of blame at President Bush, calling his response slow and inefficient. Five years later, the country seems to be suffering from a case of déjà vu. An environmental disaster, compounded with mismanagement at the federal level, is crippling the Gulf coast and …

By Trent Serwetz
This just in:
BJ Lawson has won the Republican Party’s nomination for NC’s fourth congressional district, earning  46 percent of the 23,000 votes cast (2010 North Carolina Primary Election Results, WRAL.com (link)).
Lawson, who also won the 2008 GOP nomination, won tonight’s primary election running on a platform of limited government and fiscal responsibility. The Lawson campaign especially highlighted the importance of constitutional government and opposed the Federal Reserve.
“I think the primary message of the campaign has been about getting our economic freedom back, the freedom to create our …

By Trent Serwetz
Ever had sexual relations with an underclassman, or someone who is your subordinate in a Duke Club hierarchy? Under the university’s new sexual misconduct policy, you are likely guilty of sexual misconduct.
The university’s new policy, adopted in summer 2009, destroys the importance of context clues and nonsensically broadens Duke’s adjudication of sexual harassment to indict students who are clearly innocent of any sexual misconduct1. As such, the policy is both antithetical to the proper enforcement of sexual misconduct on campus, as well as lethally dangerous for students.
On March …

By Christina Sun
You know there is a problem with the tax system when the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury fails to file his taxes correctly.
Whether or not Timothy Geithner knowingly evaded his taxes, the discrepancy shows how complex our current tax system really is.
If you’ve ever filed taxes, images of inscrutable tax policies and forms are probably ingrained in your recent memory – studies agree.  A Tax Foundation survey in April 2007 found that 83 percent of people surveyed said the federal income tax is “very complex” or somewhat “complex.” The …

By Kevin Kauffman
Fees, unions, directed choice, two-million dollar deficit: these are the buzzwords that have framed the dining debate in recent months. While the issues of creating a self supporting dining program and providing the campus with diverse foods both receive much attention, other pertinent issues in Duke Dining are less broadly discussed. Of these issues, the most troubling is the lack of healthy options available to low income students on a small dining budget.
It is a well-known that Duke students tend to be wealthier than their counterparts at many …

By Lingfeng Li
As we look forward to the 2010 elections, The Gothic Guardian sat down with BJ Lawson, a Republican candidate for the United States Congress representing North Carolina, for an interview.Our interview with Frank Roche, Lawson’s opponent in the Republican primary, can be found here.

“I’m not trying to fit into anyone’s box, in terms of labels,” William “BJ” Lawson says.
At age 36, Lawson, a Republican Congressional candidate for North Carolina’s fourth district, has already fit and outgrown many labels. He has been an engineer, a doctor, an …

By The Gothic Guardian staff
The executive board of The Gothic Guardian met on April 22 to elect Trent Serwetz the publication’s new Editor-in-Chief. The 2009-2010 editor, Lingfeng Li, stepped down in accordance with the Guardian‘s new one-year term limit for editors-in-chief.
Serwetz served as the magazine’s Production Editor this year and was the editor of his high school newspaper. He has also worked at Duke’s Multimedia Project Studio as a media consultant specializing in InDesign and Photoshop for the past three years.
During his tenure as editor, Serwetz hopes to expand the …

By Lingfeng Li and Trent Serwetz
As we look forward to the 2010 elections, The Gothic Guardian sat down with Frank Roche, a Republican candidate for the United States Congress representing North Carolina, for an interview.Our interview with BJ Lawson, Roche’s opponent in the Republican primary, can be found here.

The Candidate
Frank Roche values courage – he uses the word directly no less than five times during the course of an hour-long interview, and alludes to it in countless other instances.
Courage may explain his choice to run for U.S. Congress in …

By Trent Serwetz
Everyone knows what a political conservative sounds like; as soon as a person starts going off about tax cuts or defensive spending, it becomes an ostensible fact that they are conservative. But where did conservatism come from, and why do certain views resonate with us as conservative, while others don’t?
Edmund Burke, one of the philosophical founders of modern conservatism, sympathized with the colonists during the American Revolution because he felt that the English taxation was an arbitrary and oppressive use of government power1.
Adam Smith, the other grandfather of …