Porn, Democrats and student government. That’s the last two weeks in a nutshell.

First comes the porn. On Feb. 3, Student-Run Television aired a homemade pornographic video as part of its weekly “Koala TV” show.

When the old “Koala TV” hosts aired a similarly explicit video on SRTV a few years ago, the show was pulled by the administration — not for indecency reasons, but rather copyright concerns. The smut, it seemed, was a copyrighted work. Even though the Federal Communications Commission’s copyright guidelines do not apply to closed-circuit stations like SRTV, the student-run station’s own self-imposed governing documents forbid the use of copyrighted material without consent of the owner.

This time, the hosts of “Koala TV” dove through a grotesquely unthinkable loophole: Gain the copyright to a porn video by producing, directing and starring in it themselves.

That’s what they did, unfortunately for the now-scarred retinas of on-campus residents, who innocently flipped on SRTV late one cold February night. Expecting to see the highly acclaimed “Laundry Vision” or “Mr. Rogers Puppet Show” skits, they instead were treated to what the male star of the show dubbed “amateur, amateur pornography.” (Rumors of the woman being a “hired actress” are false, according to her male counterpart.)

That unlikely star? The Koala’s own editor and the man in charge of this spring’s A.S. elections, Steve York.

York has been planning his X-rated debut for a while now. The show, which doubled as an ad for weekly Koala recruitment meetings, will be the first of many, he has said.

Interestingly, barely a peep was heard from the administration regarding the footage. Copyrights obtained? Check. All other SRTV rules followed? Check. Nothing else mattered, unlike last year, when SRTV was shut down for airing a few seconds’ worth of low-quality footage from a Tijuana strip club.

Nationally, the biggest Democratic Party development in the last couple of weeks is Howard Dean’s clinching of the Democratic National Committee chairmanship. On campus, it’s either the successful sales of “Think Blue 2008” wristbands by the College Democrats or the founding of a new student-run political action group. Currently registered as a political “527” committee with the San Diego County Registrar of Voters, the Democratic Action Committee was founded by Earl Warren College freshman Alex Miller in order to “take a new approach to liberal values” and “stand up for what we believe in.”

“527” groups gained prominence during the 2004 presidential election because of MoveOn.org and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, two political action groups that managed to carpet-bomb swing states with ads blasting the opposing candidate.

DAC is also a registered student organization — a legally separate entity from the national DAC group that is registered with the federal government. As probably the first “527” to be born of UCSD students, it barely beats the Think Blue wristbands as the campus political development of the month.

The group’s Web site is http://www.democraticcoalition.com, where, it’s worth noting, the deputy media analyst listed is Warren College Television’s representative to the Closed-Circuit Television Governance Committee, Ben Sumner. There are probably less than 200 truly politically active students on this campus, and they manage to do everything.

At least 30 of those politically active students sit on the A.S. Council, which last week turned down a proposal to reform the student government into something more representative. The proposal would have transformed the A.S. Senate, whose membership is currently composed of four senators from each college, into a body with at least half of its members elected not by individual colleges but by the campus as a whole.

Current senators represent only vaguely cohesive constituent groups: Thurgood Marshall College juniors, for example, or John Muir College seniors. The differences between a Marshall junior and a Muir senior are negligible: Both live off campus, both are mostly finished with their GE requirements and neither really care about the student government anyway.

Electing senators at large, as student governments from UC Davis to UCLA have done for years, would encourage senators to cater to constituents that actually have something in common with each other. It could be the beginning of a new, more relevant Senate, one with a pro-affirmative action senator, a Greek senator, an engineering senator or a screw-them-all-let’s-spend-our-money-on-golf-carts senator — all of whom are actual senators representing actual constituent groups at UC Berkeley.

The senator from the “Defend Affirmative Action Party,” was disqualified in last year’s elections for badgering members of UC Berkeley’s judicial council. She appealed the ruling by the council all the way up to the federal courts, where she eventually reached a settlement this past week, costing the student government $15,000 in legal fees.

That’s one of the problems with elected officials who have to appeal to narrower groups of people: They tend to be a bit on the radical side.