Creeps 'n' plagiarists

creep [noun]: an unpleasant or obnoxious person

1. THE UNLUCKY MR. TOM FUENTES. Poor Tom Fuentes. It must be such a drag to have his rotten luck. I mean, so many of the people he associates with turn out to be creeps.

Let’s get the creepiest of these creeps out of the way. According to Gustavo Arellano of the OC Weekly,

[C]hurch documents obtained by the Weekly reveal that [Tom] Fuentes for five years supervised a priest caught in flagrante delicto with a 13-year-old boy in a Sacramento area graveyard…[Pedophile priest Jerome] Henson first came to the diocese in 1983 to direct its television department, where he remained for six years. As communications director, Fuentes oversaw the television department five of those years.” (See Henson)

Sheesh. The Weekly tried to talk to Fuentes about all this, but he wouldn’t return their calls. Can you blame him? He must be mortified.


uentes is closely associated with attorney Mike Schroeder. Indeed, Tom was recently spotted at Mike's birthday party. Schroeder's the attorney and advisor of Mike “Scandal Boy” Carona, OC’s Sheriff, and Tony “Sleazeball” Rackauckus, the OC D.A.

No doubt thanks to some Fuentean string-pulling, the IVC Foundation gave Carona an award. And Tony Rackauckus? He showed up in the district a year or so ago to swear in new Trustee officers.

Carona and Rackauckus are total creeps. I bet Tom's really disappointed in those boys.

Fuentes is on the board of Eagle Publishing, which own Regnery Publishing. Regnery publishes such gems as Unfit For Command, the infamous fact-challenged “swift boat” expose that smeared Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry during the last Presidential election campaign. Check out their catalog! Regnery (hence Eagle) is a creep publishing company.

The chairman of Eagle Publishing is founder Thomas L. Phillips of Orange County. (N.b.: most of our board members have partied at one time or other at Phillips’ fancy schmancy home in Corona del Mar.)

Phillips is on the Board of Trustees of the “Phillips Foundation,” which includes our own Thomas Fuentes (plus Alfred Regnery).

Tom’s colleague on that board is uber-Creep Robert Novak—you know, the “journalist” at the heart of the Valerie Plame scandal. Novak, who writes a column, has been known to interview—

You guessed it! –His pal, Tom Fuentes.


hen there’s Tom’s boss, William Lange, who heads LFC (Lange Financial Corporation). Back in 1997, Lange was sued by the Justice Department for fraud. The case was settled out of court.

Jeez, if the guy was innocent (i.e., not a creep), why didn’t he insist on his day in court? Inquiring minds wanna know.

Let’s get back to Regnery Publishing. As I said, Regnery publishes Unfit For Command. You remember! For 13 weeks, it sat on top of the New York Times’ best seller list, and it helped Mega-Creep George Bush get elected.

The book was written by Jerome Corsi. Guess what? Corsi’s a full-on plagiarist.

I know this because I watched Keith Olbermann’s show on the 27th. On that day, the very funny Mr. Olbermann named Corsi his “worst person in the world”:

…our winner [is] Jerome Corsi, author of the infamous swift boat book “Unfit for Command.” He has admitted now to lifting research and information and seemingly entire passages from the column of another conservative columnist Debbie Schlussel. The admission comes after Schlussel complained about plagiarism and posted Corsi‘s WorldNetDaily column side by side with her original. Jerome Corsi, himself, evidently [is] the captain of a none too swift boat—and [he’s] today‘s worst person in the world. (Schlussel)

Corsi’s obviously a creep.

Another Regnery “star” is David Horowitz. According to Regnery, Horowitz’s new book—The Professors—is about “Terrorists, racists, and communists—you know them as The Professors.”

OK, you know lots of professors, right? Are they terrorists, racists, and communists?

Didn’t think so. Horowitz is another creep.

I could go on all day listing the creeps in Fuentes’ world, but let’s leave it at that for now.

Tom, you’ve got our sympathy.

2. ARE CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS VICTIMS OF DISCRIMINATION? Speaking of Horowitz, you might want to check out an article that appeared in the Chronicle on the 30th. As you know, Mr. Horowitz has promoted the idea that conservative students face “discrimination” in the college classroom. Well, a new study suggests otherwise.

Here’s an excerpt from that article ("Study Casts Doubt on Claims That Conservative Students Face Discrimination in Classes," by Jennifer Jacobson):

Study Casts Doubt on Claims That Conservative Students Face Discrimination in Classes

A study showing that conservative and liberal students do equally well in courses with politically charged content casts doubt on conservative activists' claims that liberal faculty members routinely discriminate against their conservative students.

The study found no difference in the grades conservative and liberal students receive in sociology, cultural anthropology, and women's-studies courses. It also found that conservative students tend to earn higher grades than their liberal classmates in business and economics courses.

Titled "What's in a Grade? Academic Success and Political Orientation," the study was conducted by Markus Kemmelmeier, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nevada at Reno, who was the lead author; Cherry Danielson, a research fellow at Wabash College; and Jay Basten, a lecturer in kinesiology at the University of Michigan.

The researchers published their paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin last October, but it has attracted little attention, even as activists like David Horowitz continue to press state legislatures to adopt a so-called academic bill of rights to make college campuses more "intellectually diverse" and more tolerant of conservatives.

Mr. Kemmelmeier's study follows two others, published within the past seven years, that found that conservative students tended to earn slightly lower grades in majors such as sociology and anthropology. The professor, who describes his politics as slightly left of center, says he did not undertake the study to contribute to the ongoing discussion of political bias on college campuses, but to address ongoing questions in social psychology about the choices people make regarding their interaction with organizations and what personal characteristics contribute to their success within those organizations.

The earlier studies are "consistent with what Horowitz might suggest -- that conservative students are actually not doing all that well in fields that are thought more left-leaning," says Mr. Kemmelmeier. But there's a problem with that argument, he says: The students' performance "has nothing to do with bias" on the part of their professors.

In a four-year longitudinal study that began in the late 1990s, he surveyed 3,890 students at a major public university in the Midwest. Asked to describe their political orientation, 2.7 percent identified themselves as far left, 34.6 percent as liberal, 42 percent as middle of the road, 20 percent as conservative, and 1.2 percent as far right.

Mr. Kemmelmeier then compared the transcripts of a variety of students taking the same courses, specifically courses taught in the economics department and the business school (which Mr. Kemmelmeier considered "hierarchy-enhancing," or conservative) and those taught in American culture, African-American studies, cultural anthropology, education, nursing, sociology, and women's studies (which he considered "hierarchy-attenuating," or liberal).

He found that in the latter courses, students' political orientations had no effect on their grades -- which, the study says, suggests that disciplines such as sociology and anthropology "might be more accepting of a broad range of student perspectives," while economics and business classes "appear to be more sensitive to whether student perspectives are compatible with those of the academic discipline."

In economics and business classes, the study found, conservative students earned better grades. It also found that conservative students were likely to graduate with higher GPA's in those courses than liberal students who entered college with similar SAT scores….