Raise your hand if you’ve seen the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, directed by Stephen Herek. Raise your hand if you liked it, and if you thought there was a salient message about the arts embedded therein.

My hand is up. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, which — since it’s a rather dorky thing to see — I’m guessing is most of you, Mr. Holland’s Opus is about an inspiring music teacher, Glenn Holland. Although most of the movie focuses on how he manages to get through to his students, and how music helps him to connect with his deaf son, at the end he is forced into early retirement by arts-related budget cuts. Hmm.

Last night, approximately 100 students gathered for a discussion entitled “The 2008 Presidential Election and the Middle East,” which featured Prof. Ross Brann, Alice Cook House Professor-Dean and Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies.

From the very beginning of his lecture and throughout the discussion, Brann emphasized his non-political, strictly analytical examination of the Middle East region and the 2008 presidential election.

“I am not speaking as an advocate for either side,” he clarified.

Although last night’s presidential debate may not have provided as much fodder for late night comedians as last week’s vice presidential showdown, debate viewers at Pixel certainly found plenty of moments to laugh at.

The crowd of about 35 who had gathered at the Dryden Road bar last night clapped, jeered, laughed and booed throughout the 90-minute town-hall style forum between Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain, (R-Ariz.), in Nashville, Tenn.

The 2008 presidential campaign has been largely inattentive to the issues of health care, immigration and social security, according to a group of experts in those fields who gathered at Cornell for a policy debate on Friday before the first presidential debate.

The debate, sponsored by a host of campus organizations, including the Department of Policy Analysis and Management in the College of Human Ecology, was titled “McCain v. Obama in 3D: Data and Debate on Domestic Policy” and took place at Bailey Hall.

While organizers said that the free tickets to the event “sold out,” the 1,324-seating-capacity auditorium was about three-quarters full when the event began at 6:30 p.m.

Energetic applause seemed to follow much of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) rhetoric during the first presidential debate as it was shown in Bailey Hall on Friday night. However, Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) cheering section — headed up by the Cornell College Republicans — was confined mostly to the first row.

But this was no surprise for the McCain supporters. Pointing out the liberal tendency of Cornell’s student body, J.B. Rajsky ’11, the second vice chair for the College Republicans, alluded to former governor Mike Huckabee’s speech at Cornell last April when he described the political ideology of the majority of Cornell students as a little “left of center.”

It was almost 9 p.m. on Friday and the countdown had started.

About 35 members of the Cornell Democrats huddled in a small living room in Ravenwood Apartments and passed around home-made Obama cupcakes while counting down the minutes to the first presidential debate in Mississippi.

When the faces of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) finally appeared, all chattering in the room died down, and all eyes were fixed on the screen.

Obama’s attacks on McCain, whether on flawed tax codes or on the invasion of Iraq, were met with approving nods, a raised fist in the air and a few high-fives.