Stoning gay people to death not immoral? The money man behind the "Protect Marriage Act"

.....As Dissent readers know, OC resident Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., is a major funder of right-wing religious causes—creationism, establishing a Christian state, keeping gays down, etc.
.....And he has connections to our right-wing crew in the South Orange County Community College District. He was the key funder of Tustin’s Education Alliance, an organization with which some of our trustees (and our Chancellor) have recently associated and on whose board (SOCCCD trustee Pres) Don Wagner currently sits.
.....Further, he’s a close pal of—you guessed it—Trustee, and former chair of the OC GOP, Tom “Prince of Darkness” Fuentes.
.....Well, Ahmanson is the subject of a Gustavo Arellano’s article in today’s OC Weekly: OC FUNDIE FUNDER GIVES MONEY TO WACKY REEPS, HOMO-HATERS—AND LOU CORREA?!.
.....Some excerpts:

.....The most influential Orange County man you've never heard of is undoubtedly Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., heir to the Home Savings … fortune. He rarely makes public appearances due to suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, but that hasn't stopped him from giving millions of dollars away to some of the craziest causes imaginable: creationism, anti-gay marriage, anti-gay clerics in the Episcopalian Church, and so many others that in its list of America's most influential evangelicals a couple of years back, Time listed Howard and his wife Roberta as simply "The Financiers."
.....It's no surprise then, that Ahmanson has so far been the top individual donor to the Protect Marriage Act, the November ballot initiative that wants to create a California constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. Through his private philanthropic enterprise, Fieldstead and Co., Ahmanson has donated an amazing $400,000 to the initiative—even more than Focus on the Family and topped only by the National Organization for Marriage, a nationwide group whose campaign headquarters to defeat those marryin' gays are in Santa Ana. And remember: this money was spent just to get the ballot measure qualified for November—heaven knows how much money Ahmanson will donate to this cause for the rest of the year.
.....Going through Fieldstead's campaign contributions (he was also one of the principal funders behind Proposition 22, the 2000 measure that the California State Supreme Court recently overturned to allow homosexual nuptials [sic]), we found Ahmanson also gives money to the county's crazy Republicans—last year, he donated to supervisors John Moorlach, Pat Bates, Janet Nguyen and Diane Harkey; Assemblymember Chuck Devore and Mimi Walters; Dana Point Mayor Diane Harkey, and DA Tony Rackauckas, while 2006 saw him donate to the campaigns of Irvine councilmember Christina Shea, Costa Mesa Minutemen councilmembers Allan Mansoor and Wendy Leece, South Orange County Community College District trustee (and former OC GOP chair) Tom Fuentes, and more to Walters and Devore. If the local Democratic Party had any brains, they'd pull a Jeremiah Wright on all these people for accepting money from such a paleo-conservative (just read up on his mentor, R.J. Rushdoony—and the Wikipedia entry doesn't do justice to the looniness of the man. Or consider that when the Orange County Register's Peter Larsen interviewed Howard and Roberta for a 2004 story, Howard said of countries that stone adulterers and homosexuals, "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," and that Howard saw "homosexuality as an illness akin to alcoholism, which treatment might cure."). But they won't do that, because to criticize politicians for taking money from Ahmanson means they'll have to go after one of their own: State Senator Lou Correa….

"G.I. Bill" benefits more than doubled; other news

• Some are very unhappy with how this will be funded, but, yes, the increase in benefits will be funded. According to the Associated Press (Bipartisan accord reached on war funding bill), a bipartisan agreement reached yesterday would provide “$162 billion in long-overdue funding to carry out military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year.”

.....House passage of the bill, expected Thursday, would also pave the way for a quick infusion of emergency flood relief for the Midwest, a 13-week extension of unemployment payments for the longtime jobless and a big boost in GI Bill college for veterans.
…
.....The White House — and Capitol Hill Republicans — had signaled greater flexibility in recent weeks after Democrats orchestrated impressive votes to more than double GI Bill college benefits and give a 13-week extension of unemployment payments for people whose benefits have run out.
.....In late-stage talks, Democrats dropped a provision to pay for the GI college benefits by imposing a half-percentage point income tax surcharge on incomes exceeding $500,000 for singles and incomes over $1 million earned by married couples….
…
.....Conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats are upset that the new GI Bill benefits, with costs tentatively estimated at $62 billion over the next decade, will be added to the deficit instead of being "paid for" as called for under House rules.
....."We know the day of reckoning is coming," said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., who called the measure "totally irresponsible."
.....The new GI Bill essentially would guarantee a full scholarship at any in-state public university, along with a monthly housing stipend, for people who serve in the military for at least three years. It is aimed at replicating the benefits awarded veterans of World War II and more than doubles the value of the benefit — from $40,000 today to $90,000.
.....Full details of the nuts and bolts of the measure won't be released until Thursday….

• In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

A civil grand jury blasted the governing board of San Joaquin Delta College in a report released Wednesday, accusing trustees of misspending millions of dollars in public funds and of repeatedly violating the state’s open records laws by discussing the contents of closed session outside its meetings. “The Grand Jury has no confidence in the Delta College Board of Trustees as they are currently constituted,” its members wrote in the report of their investigation, which was prompted by citizen complaints. “The District needs capable trustees who are able to meet the task of bringing Delta College into the 21st century.”

• In this morning’s New York Times: Seas Rising and Warming Faster Than Realized:

.....On a very busy climate-oil-politics day I was able to just squeak in a short print piece last night on a new study in the journal Nature clarifying what’s happening with the oceans in a heating world (the heat held in by a building greenhouse blanket has largely accumulated in the oceans and physics demands that it will eventually add to atmospheric warming).
.....As you may be aware, those rejecting the enormous body of evidence pointing to a growing human influence on climate had embraced some transitory findings implying that the oceans were cooling. This new work may help resolve that particular line of debate. The formula holds: more CO2 = warming world = less ice + higher seas + lots of changing climate patterns.
.....The study, by Australian and American researchers, reviewed millions of measurements of ocean temperatures taken using a particular instrument on submarines and other vessels over four decades. The researchers found a subtle error that, when fixed, shows that the rate at which seas warmed and rose between 1961 and 2003 was about 50 percent greater than previous estimates.
.....The instrument in question, an expendable bathythermograph, is cheap and disposable, used for example by submarines to find the thermocline, the depth where warm and cold layers of ocean water meet. It was designed to take snapshots of water temperatures, not to collect readings that could be compared year after year, as is required with climate studies. Oceanographers have been trying to identify errors in the ocean-temperature data for awhile....

• Did you notice this one in Tuesday’s OC Reg?

OC tsunami ready

.....We’re not actually ready, of course, but we did meet certain minimal standards. Better than nothing.
.....Dissent has covered the topic of OC tsunamis before:

So Cal Tsunamis?
Preparing for the Big Wet One

The upshot? If a big landslide occurs on the Catalina side of the channel, we've got about ten minutes to prepare for a huge tsunami that will devastate our coast. Such events have occurred historically—and are thus inevitable?—but remain unlikely any time soon.