Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Yeah, but wait till the voters really take a gander at Peeve Boy

Wagnerian drama: a pact with the Devil


Yesterday, we learned that  former OC GOP chair Tom Fuentes is endorsing Don Wagner for the 70th Assembly District race. (Both are on the SOCCCD board of trustees.)

Today, Matt Cunningham of the OC Red County blog notes that, last night, the Orange County Young Republicans (OCYR) also endorsed Wagner.

Or so said Republican crony Adam Probolsky on his FaceBook page (he’s one of my “friends”).

I checked the OCYR site and, sure enough, the youthful goosessteppers (check out their pics!) held an event last night (at the “Club House” in South Coast Plaza). Their guest speaker was OC DA and corrupt rat bastard from Hades Tony Rackaucas, a close associate of Tom Fuentes. The Tonester has occasionally visited SOCCCD events over the years. Photo ops, you know.

Probolsky, you’ll recall, was Tom Fuentes’ busy little helper during the period of the latter’s curiously scripted appointment to the SOCCCD board of trustees in the summer of 2000, when Steve Frogue resigned. Since then, he has also been close to IVC’s Foundation (his bro has been close to Saddleback’s), and he has been very involved—ubiquitous, one might say—in Irvine and OC politics.

Mathur, Christina Shea, Anthony Kuo

As IVC President, Raghu Mathur, following the example set by his mentor Tom “let’s go to the spa” Fuentes (curiously, the two had met months before Frogue's resignation!), courted Republican youth (Mathur has served as advisor to campus Republicans), one of whom was the IVC ASG President Anthony Kuo. (It was during young Kuo’s tenure that Mathur’s boy Rodney Poindexter was inexplicably selected as ASG’s “Administrator of the Year”—at about the time that Rod went apeshit and had to be escorted off campus for the safety of all concerned.)

Later, as I recall, Kuo was a fixture in the county GOP scene as a member (and leader, I think) of the OCYR. More recently, he has worked for Christina Shea and other prominent Repubs. He's also been on the IVC Foundation board, natch.

It’s Fuentesland, Jake.


Fuentes and Wagner: very staunch

Tom's friends are just what you'd expect.

Whatever happened to humility?

Oil fire, Orange County, 1909

From David Brooks’ column this morning: High-Five Nation.

On V-J Day, Frank Sinatra appeared [on the show “Command Performance,” broadcast on the radio], along with Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, Lionel Barrymore, Cary Grant and many others. But the most striking feature of the show was its tone of self-effacement and humility. The allies had, on that very day, completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. And yet there was no chest-beating. Nobody was erecting triumphal arches.

“All anybody can do is thank God it’s over,” Bing Crosby, the show’s host, said. “Today our deep down feeling is one of humility,” he added.

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.

This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.
On the bright side, here's a fine discussion of UFOs (that's full of scientific humility):



Logicians talk about the "appeal to ignorance" fallacy. It works like this:
Nobody's disproved the existence of Bigfoot. That's evidence that Bigfoot exists!
OR
Nobody's proved the existence of Bigfoot. That's evidence that Bigfoot does not exist!
Wrong on both counts.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...