30 CommentsUPDATE 2:42 PM: Damooei just called Bwog to inform us that the final word from Robert Taylor is that the Elections Board is not going to consider Krebs’ rules violation complaint because of the deal struck between Ness, Krebs, and Damooei. No idea what we’re talking about? Read on…
The front page of today’s Spectator features an article about George Krebs’ plan to file a rules violation against Alidad Damooei in response to a comment made by outgoing CCSC President Michelle Diamond’s that Damooei and his party were “a stronger ticket.”
The Spec article (and Damooei, when Bwog spoke with him) claims that a rules violations deal was struck between Damooei and Krebs. The deal, which was facilitated by Elections Board Chair Andrew Ness, specified that Krebs would not file a rules violation against Diamond’s statements (Diamond is not allowed to endorse any candidate), if Damooei would not file a rules violation against Krebs’ party for posting a campaign flyer on the glass window of an EC computer lab, which is a violation.
According to Damooei, Ness explained to Krebs and him that if either of them were to file rules violations this late in the game, hours-long judicial hearings would prevent them from going outside and getting people to vote. Krebs and Damooei agreed that avoiding this was appealing, and the three shook hands.
This last-minute ruckus began several days ago when the Spec ran an article with a quote from Diamond saying that “Connect Columbia is a stronger ticket.” The quote, Diamond says, was given off-the-record. Diamond told Bwog: “Now I was talking to [the reporter] on my cell while running to class and while I’ve had some trouble with working with Lien [Hoang, the author of the piece] in the past, I do really think that she has a lot of integrity and has really developed as a reporter this year, so I’m assuming she didn’t hear me or I wasn’t clear or I was talking to fast or something.”
Damooei pointed out other errors in the article: “There are major misquotes. They had two quotes from Cliff Massey that contradicted each other. That’s because the second one was [said by] Jen Choi.” Damooei sympathizes with the reporter, Lien, explaining that “she had a bunch of articles coming out that day. There was a lot of pressure that day.”
To make matters more complicated, Krebs filed a rules violation this morning against Damooei. The reason: several days ago, Diamond printed out and showed to Spec a three-month-old email that was written by ESC President Peter Valerias that said that Krebs had “dropped the ball on off-campus Flex.” Krebs told Bwog that the email proves that Diamond’s involvement was not merely through quote confusion but through a “thoughtful, premeditated act to really do damage to us. She was clearly trying to sway voters in the final moments.”
According to Krebs, Ness and the judicial board “won’t even consider [the rules violation] because we already had this agreement.” But things apparently can’t end there, so Krebs is taking the matter to Robert Taylor, the Executive Director of Student Life and Activities, who is the final word on all things CCSC.
Both candidates were anxious to get off the phone with Bwog so they could head back to voter outreach and both described their focus today as going towards winning the election. “By the time the smoke rises, the battle will be over,” Damooei philosophized.
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30 Comments
@asdasdasdasd hiiiiii
@l337 krebs pwns n00bs
@at least Krebs doesn’t think this year’s student council is doing a “good job”. If this is Alidad’s model, I guess we can expect another year of CCSC on its knees before administration if he wins. Talk about empty promises. Don’t I recall Michelle’s crew saying something about wind power last year?
@ccsc sucks Everyone running or associate with student council is a major TOOL. It makes no difference who wins, these people are running just to improve their own standing. It’s really nothing more than a soap opera.
Krebs seems really dishonest and he doesn’t even know how to speak properly. He came to campaign in my room and swore every sentence and wasn’t articulate at all.
What you really need for a student council president is someone who is geniunely HARD WORKING and not just someone who works hard the two weeks before the election. It seems from these accounts of Krebs he is not a true hard worker and is just another tool who wants to fill his out of control ego.
@ummm agreed. to put it plainly: 1. You guys suck; 2. No one cares.
@ahaha Whatever. It’s like Bush endorsing McCain(but 10000x more meaningless)…for every person it encourages to vote for the candidate, it will alienate another.
So in this case maybe like 3 people each way.
@hey folks no one gives a shit about student council except for those on student council.
@wow michelle diamond is just a horrible, ugly person.
@GHR committee As a Glass House Rocks committee member, George never came to any meetings and did nothing for GHR.
fact check.
@Sprinkles Also, write-in Hawkmadinejad rather than vote for yet another hack.
@Sprinkles CALM DOWN CALM DOWN
It’s only student government. It never does anything earth-shatteringly new, anyway.
@umm as an alum, I feel like I don’t need to have left the university to have perspective on this, but nevertheless: this. stuff. is. absurd. no one votes for a student council president based on a sign or two, and in real life incumbents campaign for their preferred candidates. this rule violation stuff has always only ever been an excuse for some people who sit on the sidelines of the futile mess of campus politics to play judge for a week.
@... I find it pretty strange that *any* of this is an issue, on either side. Isn’t it kind of weird for a liberal university to be regulating speech this aggressively? We’re not talking about $2 million donors here.
@Michelle Diamond should be impeached
@just to be blunt. george sounds like a whiny ass.
@One more thing If Michelle Diamond was really quoted off the record, why did she wait to say anything until she was interviewed “early Thursday morning” before the paper went to bed? Shouldn’t she have been more worried/concerned as to come out with a statement before that? She’s just making it up because she knows she screwed up.
@More news The major reason why Krebs and company are breaking the deal is because there were two different versions of the Spec story – the online version at first did not contain the quote where she says “Connect Columbia is a stronger ticket.” (This is all documented on the Commentariat, so check it out.) That quote DID appear in the print version, and it is a CLEAR endorsement of one party over another by the STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT.
So, at first, without seeing this quote, they felt that it would be fair to agree. BUT C’MON – taping a flyer to glass is NOT the same as the school president endorsing one party.
And off the record my ass. Lien is good, and they’re being condescending just to save face. Alidad struck that deal because HE WAS WORRIED.
I think it’s unfortunate that Experience didn’t read the print article version before they agreed, but I think they’re totally entitled to take this far. And the fact that Michelle is bringing up an e-mail FROM DECEMBER two days before the election is CLEARLY calculating. Read the Spec editoria today, too.
This is bullshit, and they know it. Also, Andrew Ness should stop being a wuss.
@well if only this e-mail had been made public sooner. i think it’s a shame that George has been running on flex-off-campus, “his baby,” but it turns out that other people were in fact raising “his” child…
@The Truth About Flex The truth about George’s record on Flex-off-campus… There was no conspiracy… Michelle took this up since she received multiple complaints about George from admins and other members of CCSC & ESC
Michelle,
I have really only worked with George on flex which has been hard, so I want to thank you for taking this up.
You have probably heard most of the concerns with George through other people, but my personal experience was that he just did not have time or care all that much about it. His meeting with Scott was over a month ago now and I emailed him two days later concerning my involvement with the project per Scott’s request of a student from ESC to be involved as well. I offered my assistance and George told me that he was writing the survey and would get it to me when it was done. After a while I began to wonder and emailed George again. A few days after this Scott emailed us and asked what was going on, I emailed back telling him that George had not responded to my emails and was writing the survey, to which he responded that George had not responded to his either. I emailed George about a week later and still got no response. Finally I found his phone number and called him to ask about the survey. He had not done it yet and had a big paper due on Wednesday, but he said that he was coming to our student services meeting that night at 9. He did not show up to this meeting, although one of my friends saw him in Lerner at 8:30, instead he went back to his room and went to sleep. I called him at around 9:30 wondering where he was and left a message. I then proceeded through other meetings and at 12:40, as I am leaving Lerner from GHR he calls and says he is sorry, but he fell asleep. So we meet right then and finish drafting the survey by 2:15, he tells me that he is going back to write it right then. I decide to make sure that he sends it out that night so I stay up doing homework, I figure how long does it take to type up five questions. At 4:30 I am done my homework and still waiting for an email from him. I decide to type of the survey myself and it takes me about 15 minutes, so I then draft an email to Heather T in the Student Services Business Office about putting it on, email George to see what is up and finally he emails me with the finished survey which he has also emailed to Heather to look over. It is not exactly well formatted or completely what we talked about, but it is close enough. Heather gets back to us that afternoon with her edits and we send it to councils to get approval. I guess the last item is not really his fault, but cubmail was down so he could not send it back to her as the corrected version and so that is why the current version still has mistake online. He could have called me that night to inform me of this and I could have sent it out through a different email address because I do not actually use my cubmail account, but this did not happen and I did not find out that it had not been sent to her until around 12:30 after I emailed him asking about it and about 5 minutes later heather sent us the email of what was on Survey Monkey.
Sorry that is so long, but I felt that you might understand more if I gave you my entire rundown of work with George. When we were talking about Off-Campus Flex on Wednesday while writing the survey he seemed really into it, but I am just not sure because he never did anything until I had to push so hard that he had no choice.
——–
Peter
@but Not a conspiracy, but I would call it a pretty blatant violation for the CCSC president to a) publicly declare her support in the spec (off the record my ass), b) strategically leak an email from a close ally to the spec at the last second of the campaign.
Obviously Peter had a bad experience with George that day, but this claim that he was taken off of Flex at an administrator’s request? Bullshit. Michelle saw a small opening (Krebs flaked out momentarily Flex) and stepped in so she could use it against him down the line. Don’t think she wasn’t imagining some shit like this when that happened. She’s hated Krebs for a long time.
@#4 again Yeah it’s one thing to put a poster on an EC computer lab window, and another to blatantly endorse your puppet and do all you can to usher him into your position.
@3 again Also, if this is really going to determine your vote [rolls eyes], go talk to George about his Flex record. (He’s glad-handing on the steps — shouldn’t be hard to find.) Among other things, he brought the model for the program down from Harvard, which is more or less the system they’re using now. So even if Peter’s email is 100% accurate, a momentary fuck-up like that doesn’t change the fact that he was working on it for a while. Were other people, too? Of course, but Krebs was, as advertised, a major player.
Seriously, folks, consider the source of this crap before you write off George. Michelle has wanted Alidad to beat George ever since he joined her e-board last year. Would it be any surprise if she tried to finagle his victory?
@... George is a liar. The harvard system was flawed and the current system has nothing to do with that…
@Okay But on the other hand, George is working on a University-wide initiative even though he was just the President of his class. Michelle should have been handling it in the first place, so George’s exhaustion may in this case be justified; especially since he was involved w/ planning GHR at the time.
@yeah i’m sure george was busy with ghr…especially since peter was chairing that event…
@well Doesn’t matter who was supposed to handle it in the first place. A leader would give a high level of responsibility to carry out whatever he agrees to do. This task shouldn’t be beyond the responsibilities of someone who wants to be CCSC President. However if George realized that he couldn’t complete the task, he should have owned up to that fact and requested more assistance from others in student council. He also should have replied to emails and asked for an extension. It’s never appropriate or professional to consistently ignore emails and not show up at meetings that one has committed to attending.
@also Also, if Michelle has worked with both George and Alidad, and thinks that Alidad is great to work with, and George is difficult to work with and takes credit for other people’s ideas, well she would probably know.
@hahaha Yeah, I definitely trust everything Michelle Diamond says. I’m sure she’s not at all prone to insider politics or meaningless shit like, say, the JuicyCampus debacle.
@that's not true. the class of 2010 and esc did all of glass house rocks. 2009 dropped the ball
@how about a rule where I stop getting bugged around campus to vote….Oh, and ffs, stop banging on my door. I refuse to vote BECAUSE you people annoy me.