Orange County: home of the original right-wing lunatic

• "DANGEROUS AND DISTRACTING."
.....I don’t know what it is about this county, but we’ve got just about the best right-wing lunatics in the entire U.S. of A.! Take John Briscoe, an Ocean View School District Trustee, who keeps showing up to tell another school district how to decorate their boardroom! More specifically, he insists that they display “In God We Trust” on the wall there (Trustee turns to PennySaver to pitch 'In God We Trust' in Fountain Valley).
.....But it gets better. When the Fountain Valley School District trustees weren’t sufficiently receptive to his decorating tip, Briscoe took out an add in the PennySaver, a local throwaway:

.....In the advertisement released to the entire city, Briscoe chides the district for not pursuing the motto, calling it "dangerous and distracting", not honoring Flag Day, not honoring Veterans Day, not singing the American patriotic song and being generally unpatriotic.
....."I believe the (district) is far and away estranged from their community in this matter. They do not understand the deep community appreciation of our national motto," Briscoe, a Huntington Beach resident, said in an e-mail.

.....Fountain Valley officials are chuckling. I guess they think Briscoe is a lunatic. They are correct.

.....According to Briscoe, he purchased the $500 ad with his own money in response to the district's unanimous June 12 decision not to pursue a display of "In God We Trust" in the board room. During the meeting, trustees had also refused to join him when he asked them to sing two verses of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

.....That really tore it, I guess.

P.S.:
.....I briefly researched Briscoe. At some of his sites, he claims to be a member of the "Alliance for Education." But, near as I can tell, there is no local group by that name. I suspected that he meant "Education Alliance," a right-wing organization that pursues education issues in Orange County, and so I went to EA's website. Sure enough, here, at the end of a submission to EA's blog, one reads: "Submitted and Approved by John Briscoe, Elected Trustee Board Member of the Ocean View School District. Education Alliance Board Member."
.....About 15 years ago, EA received its seed money from the notorious Christian Reconstructionist Howard Ahmanson, Jr. Originally, EA was set up to promote a state teachers union-busting measure that failed.
.....Q: who else is on the EA board? A: the president of our own board: trustee Don Wagner.
.....Don may be a wacky right-winger, but at least he knows the names of the organizations on whose boards he sits!

• COLLEGE OF MARIN PROF NAMED NAT'L POET LAUREATE.
.....Community college instructor Kay Ryan, who teaches remedial English at the College of Marin, will be named national “poet laureate” today. See Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate

• END TIMES NEAR.
.....Yes folks, we’ve got it all here in "the OC": great weather, great beaches, mountains, world-class clowns, world-class rat bastards—and blue whales! According to the OC Reg (See giant blue whales now off O.C. coast), “At least 15 to 18 blue whales have been seen in the area over the past week.”

• NOW, THAT'S HEAVY.
.....The Reg’s Science Dude reports on efforts by UC Irvine’s Philip Humphrey, an astrophysicist, to weigh massive black holes by determining the temperature of the gases that surround them. Humphrey and a colleague “used the technique to confirm that the black hole in NGC 4649, an elliptical galaxy about 50 million light years from Earth, weighs about 3.4 billion times as much as our sun. Which is a lot. The sun weighs 2 billion-billion-billion tons.”

• BUSHIE SHENANIGANS AT D.O.E.?
.....Looks like the Bushies over at the Dept. of Education, nearing the end of their reign, are trying to pull a fast one. According to this morning’s Inside Higher Ed (‘Emergency’ Data Request Raises Suspicion), “Stymied in its efforts to alter federal laws and regulations to make it easier for students to transfer academic credits from one institution to another, the U.S. Education Department plans an ‘emergency’ survey of federal Pell Grant recipients that seems designed to build a case that changes are necessary. The request has agitated some higher education officials, who questioned both the premise and the purpose of the department’s information expedition.”

• ACADEMIC WOMEN.
.....Also in IHR is an article (Women, Men and Service) about women in academia:

.....By many measures, women are advancing at a significant pace in academe. While there are differences by discipline, the percentages of women entering fields is rising across the board, and women have in recent years assumed some of the most prominent presidencies in higher education.
.....At the same time, in discipline after discipline, there is evidence that the careers of many women in academe stall — and considerable debate about why in fields where 50 percent of new Ph.D.’s are women, far smaller shares of women are becoming senior professors or reshaping their disciplines.

.....A new collection of essays (Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education) “explores these contradictions,” arguing, among other things, that “the barriers to women’s advancement today are less in the form of overt sexism (although that remains) than in assumptions, and larger patterns of the way colleges are organized.”


• NOBEL LAUREATES WANNA TEACH GRADE SCHOOL?
.....Presidential candidate John McCain gave a relatively detailed talk on education yesterday (see). He complained that too many qualified people are prevented from teaching in our schools owing to a “monopoly on teacher certification.”

“You can be a Nobel Laureate and not qualify to teach in most public schools today. They don’t have all the proper credits in educational ‘theory’ or ‘methodology’ — all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it. If we’re putting the interests of students first, then those qualifications should be enough.”

.....Naturally, the usual suspects dispute this claim, arguing that there exist many paths to teaching that block no one who is serious from entering the profession.

• DEXTER HAS HIS EYES ON EMMY.
.....It appears that TV’s “Emmys” are moving toward greater recognition of “cable” programs (New Crop Of Cable TV Shows Break Through At Emmys). "Mad Men," "Damages" and "Dexter," were nominated for best drama today.
.....Friends tell me that “Mad Men” is terrific. Don't know about "Damages." I’ve seen “Dexter,” and it’s my favorite show.
.....We appear to be in a golden age of TV dramas. I’ve got to admit, though, that it’s odd to realize that most of my favorite TV shows in recent years are stunningly violent. I enjoy these shows despite the violence (I mightily disapprove of movies such as "Saw"), but still….

John Stewart on New Yorker cover: