Free Republic

The first thing that comes to mind when you meet Joe Wetmore, the owner and founder of Autumn Leaves Bookstore, is "Ithaca." With shoulder-length grey hair, dashing bluish-hazel eyes, a smile for everybody, black jeans and a t-shirt from WEOS, a Geneva radio station, he gives off the aura of everything this small city tries to achieve. It's a Saturday afternoon, and Wetmore is working in his bookstore, opening bills, joking with his employees, giving political advice to potential City Council candidates and answering questions from an overwhelmed Sun reporter. "I moved here 10 years ago," he says. "Ithaca seemed...

<p>ITHACA -- Council members from Ithaca and 26 other cities that have passed resolutions opposing a preemptive war with Iraq plan to deliver those resolutions to President Bush and also hope to meet with members of Congress today in Washington, D.C.</p>

Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm, discussed the history of the vibrator and the double standard applied to male and female sexuality in Hollis E. Cornell auditorium yesterday. Her lecture was a part of Cornell's V-Day series, a week-long event aimed at curbing violence against women. Maines criticized what she characterizes as an "androcentric model of sexuality" that is dominant in America and, although to a lesser extent, all of Western society. This androcentric model holds that the act of sexual intercourse occurs only in the event of vaginal penetration. Maines said this concept was deeply problematic because...

<p>ITHACA -- Around 200 people gathered at the Pyramid Mall Saturday to protest a possible U.S. war with Iraq.</p> <p>This was the second time since December that a crowd, most dressed in black and many carrying antiwar signs and flyers, gathered at the shopping center on a busy Saturday morning.</p>

ITHACA, N.Y. -- New marriage-promotion welfare rules proposed by the Bush administration will violate poor women's privacy rights and will not work, says a position paper written by three academics associated with Cornell University. The rules are expected to be reintroduced in the House of Representatives next week as part of the welfare bill, and brought to a vote as early as Tuesday, Feb. 11. Martha Fineman is a professor of feminist jurisprudence at Cornell Law School. Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell. Gwendolyn Mink, the daughter of the late congresswoman from Hawaii, Patsy Mink, holds...

<p>ITHACA -- Society's problems would be better solved with less emotion and partisan rhetoric and more application of scientific knowledge, Janet Reno told a packed Statler Auditorium on Thursday night.</p> <p>Reno, on the Cornell University campus for two weeks as a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor, gave a speech titled "Truth and How We Seek It."</p>

After protesting a crow-shooting contest in Auburn, N.Y., animal rights activists Milo Polte '03, Brian Pease '00, Tim Slate '02 and Laura Carver were arrested on misdemeanor charges of trespassing and interfering with the legal taking of wildlife last Saturday. Released on $100 bail each, they are scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 22. The protesters played a recording of a crow "danger call" on a boom box as they drove around the property where the hunters were shooting. The recording of a crow supposedly warns other crows to leave the area. "They were absolutely in the process of...

While some might commend Maura Stephens for her willingness to join a peace mission to Iraq, it is inappropriate that Ithaca College ever considered funding her trip. The institution’s mission should be educating students, not furthering the political agendas of its staff members and administrators. Four different college offices initially agreed to contribute $500 each to help Stephens, editor of the Ithaca College Quarterly, make a trip to Iraq with a women’s peace delegation. It was only when an Ithacan Online story published Tuesday raised questions regarding the purpose and legality of the trip that the college began to question...

AUBURN - With a Bible in his left hand, Bill Atkinson quoted scripture Sunday to explain why he thought it was wrong to participate in this past weekend's controversial crow hunt. Wearing a black fedora and a long coat, Atkinson, 51, a member of the First Love Ministries in Auburn, said it doesn't take going any further than the Ten Commandments to show his disdain of the two-day event that downed 380 crows - "Thou shall not kill." "It's incredibly shameful that they are killing these birds. It's got to come to an end," he said. "Personally, I'm glad the...

ITHACA--Janet Reno '60 arrives on campus today to start her 11-day stint as a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 University Professor. During her stay on campus, Reno will deliver two lectures to the public. The first, titled "Truth and How We Seek It," is on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the Statler Auditorium. She will deliver the second on Feb. 12 at 4:15 p.m. in Myron Taylor Hall. Besides the public lectures, Reno will participate in policy analysis and management courses, both as a lecturer and a participant in discussions. Late next week, students in Human Development 258: The...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Maura Stephens, editor of the Ithaca College Quarterly, has withdrawn her request for $2,000 in funding from the college to pay for her trip to Iraq. Four college offices had committed last week to give $500 each for her humanitarian and activist mission with the women’s peace delegation Code Pink: Women’s Pre-Emptive Strike for Peace. "I withdrew my request for support," Stephens said Tuesday afternoon. "I don’t want the college to be under any kind of cloud over this. I will be funding it myself." The Ithacan Online published a story earlier Tuesday that raised questions about...

<p>Forget any assumptions you have about organized protests. The images that come to mind may be a little outdated: Daisy-bearing flower children urging everyone to "make love, not war" and, more recently pipe bomb-wielding anarchists immortalized by demonstrations in Seattle and Quebec.</p>

As President Bush delivered his State of the Union Address last night, some local officials began preparations to demonstrate their discontent. Tomorrow, a Resolution to Defend the Civil Rights and Liberties of the People of Ithaca is anticipated to denounce the PATRIOT Act of 2001. This will be on the agenda of the Common Council meeting. "I was getting a lot of comments from constituents that Ithaca should draft a resolution like other cities were doing," said Dan Cogan (Dem.-5th Ward), the author of the resolution . Cogan said much of the text came from various resolutions found on the...

<p>TOWN OF OWEGO -- Eight local anti-war protesters dressed as weapons inspectors tried to enter Lockheed Martin Systems Integration facility Sunday, but didn't get far past the entrance.</p> <p>The group -- dressed in white hazardous materials uniforms with "citizens weapons inspector" printed in large black letters --were ticketed by Tioga County sheriff's deputies on trespassing charges. They are to appear in town court in mid-February.</p>

<p>Two weeks ago, Maura Stephens had no idea she'd soon be boarding a plane to Baghdad as part of a nationwide peace delegation.</p> <p>Stephens, senior editor of special projects in Ithaca College's Office of College Relations, is the only local woman out of the 15 U.S. women leaving Thursday for Iraq. Her husband, George Sapio, has also volunteered to join the delegation as its official photographer.</p>

<p>ITHACA -- "Drop Bush Not Bombs" reads one of the posters headed out of Ithaca for Saturday's antiwar protest in Washington D.C.</p> <p>At 1 a.m. the day of the march, people from the Ithaca area will load onto five buses, posters and all, for the eight-hour trip to the nation's capital. There, they will meet with what organizers hope will be tens of thousands of marchers protesting President George W. Bush's moves toward a possible war with Iraq.</p>

<p>I was sitting in Center Ithaca drinking a cup of coffee the other day when who should come along but my old pal Joe Woodchuck, archetypal yet thoroughly apocryphal Ithacan.</p> <p>He was accompanied by a shorter, somewhat younger, if equally scruffy version of himself. They made a beeline for my table.</p>

<p>Has there been enough yet said? Has the U.N. adequately said that there is "no smoking gun?" Is it clear that we are not yet in an impending crisis in which the U.S. government and its allies must attack Iraq? Has there yet been enough focus on the negative possibilities of war? Can there be a focus on creation of a safe world?</p>

<p>LANSING -- As demonstrators faced a judge Thursday for staging a die-in at a military recruiters' office, they made another attempt to voice their opinions about America's sanctions against Iraq.</p> <p>"I plead for the victims of war," said Leslie Schultz, when Town of Lansing Judge John Howell asked for her plea regarding the charges. "God forgive us for teaching of fear and hate."</p>

As years go, they don't get much worse than 2002. The year's main saving grace - that we haven't yet invaded Iraq - suggests that, believe it or not, 2003 could be even worse. A year that came on the heels of 9/11 was probably doomed from the start. Yet the ongoing War on Terrorism that most characterizes our times has cast a muddy shadow on public life that hints of the paranoia and knee-jerk nationalism of the 1950s. Although we have experienced no acts of domestic terrorism in the months since the Sept. 11 attacks, our country is becoming...