A challenge to local GOP leadership, born of disgust

The ugly truth: painful to behold! 

     Today, on the OC Reg’s Total Buzz blog, Martin Wisckol reports that local GOP activist Tim Whitacre has declared his intent to win the county party chairmanship.
     That’s ‘cause he thinks the party needs to restore its reputation:

Whitacre: quixotic?

Dear Friends and fellow Central Committee Members,

     After much prayer, reflection, counsel and encouragement from a number of you, I am officially announcing my candidacy for the position of Chairman for the Republican Party Central Committee of Orange County.
     This decision does not come lightly but now that I have made it, it does come easily. I love our Party and the Principles it espouses on paper. However, like many of you I have watched those Principles be cast aside time and time again from the National level on down to our beloved County to which we were elected to serve.
     I believe it is crucial for us to march in a different direction if we are serious about restoring our Party’s reputation and greatness so that we can bring back those good Americans who rightfully left us in disgust. I, like all of you, believe our Party’s governing philosophy is best for Orange County and the Country. However, we cannot hope to spread that philosophy effectively until we do some necessary house cleaning within leadership all across our blessed Nation. We must start here at home….

     Meanwhile, Matt Cunningham at the always-mediocre Red County blog, describes Whitacre’s effort as a suicide run.
     Whitacre responds:

     "Suicide Run???" No, just the right thing to do. For the first time in about three decades, the OCGOP Central Committee will actually have a choice when it comes time to choose our next Chairman.
     This will be a cake walk compared to taking on the entire Orange County political machine who were staunch supporters of the now convicted Ex-Sheriff, Mike Carona. Even though I was proven right, you guys threw everything at me including the kitchen sink and yet I'm still standing and doing the same thing I've always tried to do: Bring ethics and accountability back to the Party while returning it to its core values that once made it a champion for The People -regardless of race, color, creed or sex.. . .
     Regardless, if for no other reason other than it emboldens others to stand up without fear and fight for what is right, ethical and good for both our Party and elsewhere, then it will have been worth it to have fallen upon this sword.
     I ask you now to please commit to pray for me for wisdom, discernment, humility, courage and protection as I charge this hill. Pass the word and join me if you dare run TOWARD the gunfire. : -)

The OC: endless sleaze and corruption.
SOCCCD leadership*: meretricious spring of a corrupt machine.

          OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley sheds a tad more light on the situation:

     [Current OCGOP chair Scott] Baugh—a graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and a glad-handing lobbyist who has cashed in on his undeniable political influence since leaving the state assembly a decade ago—first grabbed the chairmanship in 2004 after Tom Fuentes served in the role for 20 years. His admirers say he has done a decent job raising money and settling disputes between Republicans. He can certainly count on indefinite backing from establishment heavyweights like Michael J. Schroeder, Mark Bucher and Dana Rohrabacher.
     But in recent years, there's been mounting internal party dissatisfaction with what some consider Baugh's cutthroat management style, his backing of disgraced Sheriff Mike Carona long after it was clear he was a crook, his refusal to obey party bylaws that call for regular audits of party finances, his close association to a relentless pedophile who targeted 7th and 8th grade boys and the local party's dwindling voter registration numbers.
     Indeed, under Baugh's watch near Armagedon occurred in a place once proudly hailed as "Reagan Country": Barack Obama, a liberal Chicago Democrat, did exceptionally well here in the 2008 elections.
     Nevertheless, Whitacre—a former U.S. Marine known as a stickler on ethics, a proponent of conservative grassroots activism and the man who led the 2003 recall of lefty Santa Ana school board member Nativo Lopez—has a monumental task to make his case for new leadership at the OC GOP. Baugh enjoys the knee-jerk support of two partisan online fish wraps: Jon Fleischman's Flash Report and the Matt Cunningham-tied Red County. You can count on them to fillet Whitacre and champion Baugh in coming weeks.

     See also Santa Ana resident Tim Whitacre is running for the Chairmanship of the OC GOP (New Santa Ana)

*On the other hand, Wagner has left for the CA state assembly; Williams recently resigned (while his County troubles reach boiling); Mathur was forced out; and Carona no longer is invited to pray and pledge and photo op with the likes of Dave Lang, who betrayed his supporters for a promise of assistance, from colleague Tom Fuentes, in attaining higher office. (Lang's bid failed miserably.) A new day?

Orlando Boy headed for court again

     Are you up for more John Williams news? I’ve been sitting on this info for a week or two, thinking we’ve all heard enough about the guy for a while. But if you’re interested, check out Vern Nelson’s latest post on Orange Juice:

The Insatiable John S. Williams tries ONCE MORE to swindle dead martial artist’s family

Great moments in pop history: #52

The great "Rock Lobster," the B-52s, 1977

Rock Lobster live

Studio version w/ video

The birth of a song:

The death of Ricky Wilson:

Christmas Week Flood

Silverado Canyon resident Chay Peterson wakes up to mud flooding her house. The rest of her neighborhood in Silverado was hard hit.

Help is still needed in Silverado and neighboring canyons.

If you are able and willing, they need diggers, bucket passers, wheelbarrow pushers, and crowd feeders throughout the week.

Go to 14931 Wildcat Canyon Road in Silverado or the Silverado Canyon market and look for the ICL tent to report for dig duty.

Thanks so much for your help.

*
UPDATE: They are desperately looking for persons to help with coordinating relief TOOLS.

They have diggers coming this week and they need buckets and shovels, gloves, lunches, etc.

Donations from local stores are needed and a letter for tax deductible donations can be picked up via Leslie Paskus. If you are available to do any of these very important tasks, please contact Leslie at 714-649-3038.

Thanks.

*

A coloring book for the kiddies

Click on graphic to see the lurid details

2003: Irvine Valley College administrator Dennis White declares that faculty may not discuss the Iraq war in the classroom. "After all," he says, "this is America, where students are, like, customers or something."

Check out the beast's expression.
We wanted to get the details right.

2009: County officials announce that, yes, OC Public Administrator/Guardian John S. Williams is "seriously, inveterately stupid," but that he is an "elected official nevertheless." Meanwhile, Williams is at a conference "for the college district" at an expensive hotel in Orlando.

1962: future SOCCCD trustee and 70th District Assemblyman Don P. Wagner beats up a Romper Room colleague who makes the mistake of confiding to Donny that he wants to be a "librarian" when he grows up. After delivering the beating, Wagner proudly poses for this photo.

1998: Irvine Valley College President Raghu P. Mathur declares the college a "no free speech" zone. Many lawsuits follow. The district loses all of them. In the spring of 2000, Mathur and County GOP chief Tom Fuentes make an infernal secret pact and plot the future of the SOCCCD. By 2008, their plan disintegrates and, by 2010, Mathur is sent packing. Fuentes remains, evidently serving no purpose beyond emitting sulphur.

2005: SOCCCD trustee Tom Fuentes acknowledges that he has long been assisted in his endeavors by Satan. For his part, Satan holds a press conference in which he declares that, though he has long used Fuentes as a "talent scout,"  he "will have nothing further to do with that duplicitous bastard." The Lord, too, announces a press conference but then He suddenly cancels.

2010: OC Treasurer candidate Dave Lang is endorsed by former GOP Big Cheese Tom Fuentes. He spends over $100K of his own money. He receives 12 votes. Fuentes is seen, snickering, emitting sulphereous vapors.

Washington Phillips sings "I had a good father and mother" (1929)

To learn more about Phillips and his peculiar instrument, read Exhuming the Legend of Washington Phillips by Michael Corcoran

Read also Washington Phillips CD study (Yazoo Records), by Gregg Miner

See also fretless zithers

Phillips, 1928

Phillips, 1950

“I got a A.”

A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean (New York Times)

     It could be a Zen koan: if everybody in the class gets an A, what does an A mean?
     The answer: Not what it should, says Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “An A should mean outstanding work; it should not be the default grade,” Mr. Perrin said. “If everyone gets an A for adequate completion of tasks, it cripples our ability to recognize exemplary scholarship.”
     As part of the university’s long effort to clarify what grades really mean, Mr. Perrin now leads a committee that is working with the registrar on plans to add extra information — probably median grades, and perhaps more — to transcripts. In addition, they expect to post further statistics providing context online and give instructors data on how their grading compares with their colleagues’.
     “It’s going to be modest and nowhere near enough to correct the problems,” Mr. Perrin said. “But it’s our judgment that it’s the best we can do now.”
     With college grades creeping ever higher, a few universities have taken direct action against grade inflation. Most notably, Princeton adopted guidelines in 2004 providing that no more than 35 percent of undergraduate grades should be A’s, a policy that remains controversial on campus.
     Others have taken a less direct approach, leaving instructors free to award whatever grades they like but expanding their transcripts to include information giving graduate schools and employers a fuller picture of what the grades mean.
. . .
     Especially in hard economic times, students worry that professors who are stingy with the A’s will leave them at a disadvantage in graduate school admissions and employment. No wonder, then, that many students visit Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com when registering, perhaps to help them avoid tough graders.
. . .
     Studies of grade inflation have found that private universities generally give higher grades than public ones, and that humanities courses award higher grades than science and math classes.
. . .
     “Anything that uses G.P.A is unfair, because a given student can be penalized or rewarded in grading just because of the mix of professors or the strength of the schedule,” Mr. Perrin said. “Some instructors grade harder than others. Some courses are harder than others, and some departments are harder than others.”….

Hangin' with the kids on Christmas Day

Sarah (age 8) seems always to be running

Her cousin, Liliana (age 7), enjoys cake

Sarah and Liliana with Tinkertoy merry-go-round

Liliana/Sarah

 Joined by Luca (age 3)

 Catherine and her twin sister, Natalie; both 3

Me 'n' Adam (age 7) 'n' Annie

Liliana

Liliana, Sarah, Adam, Luca

Liliana and Sarah

Luca

Annie

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "Even a map cannot show you a way back to a place that no longer exists"

Christmas, 1970
by Sandra M. Castillo

We assemble the silver tree,
our translated lives,
its luminous branches,
numbered to fit into its body.
place its metallic roots
to decorate our first Christmas.
Mother finds herself
opening, closing the Red Cross box
she will carry into 1976
like an unwanted door prize,
a timepiece, a stubborn fact,
an emblem of exile measuring our days,
marked by the moment of our departure,
our lives no longer arranged.


Somewhere,
there is a photograph,
a Polaroid Mother cannot remember was ever taken:
I am sitting under Tia Tere’s Christmas tree,
her first apartment in this, our new world:
my sisters by my side,
I wear a white dress, black boots,
an eight-year-old’s resignation;
Mae and Mitzy, age four,
wear red and white snowflake sweaters and identical smiles,
on this, our first Christmas,
away from ourselves.


The future unreal, unmade,
Mother will cry into the new year
with Lidia and Emerito,
our elderly downstairs neighbors,
who realize what we are too young to understand:
Even a map cannot show you
the way back to a place
that no longer exists.

*

(--My unsolicited addition. --BvT)

Dead Spartans

The class of '73

     Been out there in soaked Orange County, but I finally got home and I took a break (of the laptop variety), looking for something that led me to something else that somehow landed me on a webpage for my goddam high school graduating class.
     Nameless High, 1973. The Spartans.
     Uh-oh.
     Now, I’m not the kind to think about those ridiculous days of half-bakery, when we flailed and lunged about with gestures, not yet comprehending what it means to be a person. Remember high school? It’s like remembering the stages of one’s wretched bout with measles, after recovery. Why?
     After maybe 1975, I had no contact with any of my high school crowd (though I didn’t have a crowd really; just a few friends and acquaintances unified only by my random wanderings).

My BF: from
Avalon to oblivion

     I briefly kept in touch with my best friend—we had taken an ill-fated trip to Catalina Island literally the day after high school graduation, hiking for miles from the south end to the Isthmus. (The adventure was so dismal and ill-conceived that it likely destroyed our friendship.) He lived with his staunchly Republican family on a eucalyptus-lined street in the hills at the edge of the Santa Anas, and his next-door neighbor, a hundred yards up the road, was the pop singer Jose Feliciano. (His biggest hit was a cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.”)
     My chum and I used to look over at his house and say, “It doesn’t make any difference where he lives, ‘cause he’s blind.”
     “Yeah, he may as well live here.”
     I’d occasionally drive by Jose’s house, glancing through his locked gate and up to his shuttered windows. But I never did see anything. There was a kind of symmetry in our relationship; he couldn’t see me and I never saw him.

R.I.P.

     Anyway, I found that website for the Nameless High class of ’73, and, against my better judgment (I don’t actually have different grades), I looked at the page of “classmates,” organized by the first letter of our surnames.
     I hit upon the letter “H.” I recognized a friend: Rusty Heaps. (That really was his name. He was a Mormon.) He was a bit of a galoot, but, as youngsters, we were Boy Scouts together, so I knew him whether I liked it or not.
     Some classmates had provided information beyond their name and graduation photo. For instance, Rusty wrote:

“Hi all. I've been living in Arizona since 1987. I've been happily married since 1982, have two kids, one in high school, the other in grade school. I work as a news reporter for radio, for a company called XXXX. My memory of most of my classmates is shot to hell, but contact me if you remember me, maybe it'll bring it back. See Ya.”

The name, if not the
face, triggers something
akin to memories.
R.I.P.

     Ah yes. Rusty fucking Heaps.
     I saw something even more disturbing. One of my former classmates—I vaguely remembered her—had died. Next to her name, it said

“I am sorry to inform you, XX is no longer with us, [sic] she has passed away.”

     I don’t know why, but this startled me. There was her picture: a cute little seventeen-year-old girl (the year of her death was not provided). Dead.
     I looked further. I remembered lots of names, but few faces. When I did remember faces, I didn’t so much remember anything as feel a vague stirring. There is some subterranean patch of Roy Bauer’s mind that flinches (or otherwise emotes) at these images, even after thirty-seven years.

Articulate; dead

     One kid—I recognized him immediately—was briefly a friend. I recall his peculiarly precise enunciation of words and his somewhat advanced vocabulary. (This capacity, in his case, didn’t seem to correspond to academic achievement.) He was a bit of a nerd, but he was also thoughtful and distinctly cheerful. I recall visiting him at his home, not far from my best friend’s house. We stood in his front yard and spoke of literature and philosophy. He made fun of my pronunciation of the word “absurd.” “Ubzzerd,” he said, mockingly. We laughed.
     He died in 1998. Don’t know how or why.
     Another former best friend (circa 7th grade), the temporarily popular Bob, had a girlfriend who was devastatingly beautiful. I was strictly on the periphery of their relationship, a nonentity to her (I was sure). But I never forgot her striking beauty and, as it happens, she lived along my way to school, and so I saw her now and again. The years passed, but I was too shy ever to speak to her. She was beyond reach. My heart breaks to think about it.

Beyond reach

     By the time of high school, her beauty and elegance put her several classes beyond any of the rest of us. (Or so it seemed to me from afar.) I never knew what became of her. I forgot her.
     But, today, there she was, frozen in time, as beautiful as ever. Like Rusty, she provided information about her subsequent adult life. She had become a professional ballerina. She started a dance school. She married some asshole and had two girls. With her girls now pursuing important dance careers, she’s thinking of getting into real estate.
     I was devastated. (Don’t ask me how or why.)
     But she wasn’t dead. I was relieved.
     I came upon many former friends who are now dead. I was beginning to feel like a bad luck charm.
    The website provided a “memorial” page with twenty-eight dead “kids.” (1998 was an especially bad year.)
     Good Lord! I knew half of them!

The Roy of '73

     At the bottom of the “memorial” page, it said

If you know of someone from our Class that you would like to add to this page, email me at….

     That made me laugh.
     A few of my former colleagues described midlife crises. They seemed embarrassed about them. It occurred to me that I have a midlife crisis every goddam morning. It’s been that way for decades, so it would never occur to me to mention the dang things.

* * *

     It’s easy to feel gloomy about one’s life, especially as one reviews one’s dismal distant past, acutely aware of missed opportunities, failures of appreciation, youthful idiocy, and all the rest.
     But, really, that’s foolish, for, if we are lucky, there will be a time, well into the future, when we will look back at this time, right now, with similar longings.
     —But no. We can take the opportunities that we have now!
     Take them. Take them.
     Or die.
     Again.

It was forty years ago today: "birthday party for Jesus"

Laguna Beach's Great Hippie Invasion, 40 Years On (OC Weekly; Gunkist Memories)

…On this morning 40 years ago, hippies from all over California and beyond were massing in caravans that lined for miles on Pacific Coast Highway in both directions. They were gathering for a rock concert that originally had been billed as a "birthday party for Jesus" but which quickly became known as either the "Christmas Happening" or "The Great Happening." The concert, which was held in a grassy bowl at the top of Laguna Canyon known as Sycamore Flats, began on Christmas Day and ended three days later when hundreds of police officers and sheriff's deputies, who had already blocked off the town with barricades, forced stragglers onto buses and used bulldozers to bury everything left behind….

Laguna on Acid: The Great Hippie Christmas Invasion of 1970 (OC Weekly)

See also ‘The High Priest of LSD’ gets busted in Laguna Canyon (1968)

Voyager's way out there, man

Voyager 1 Spacecraft Arrives at the Cusp of Interstellar Space (Scientific American)

Thirty-three years into its voyage, the solar wind speed around Voyager 1 has dropped to zero as the space-hardened craft nears a milestone in its journey out of the solar system
. . .
Leaving the solar system, [chief scientist Edward Stone] says, will be "a milestone in human activity." Both Voyagers will likely outlive Earth, he notes. When, billions of years from now, the sun swells into a red giant, the Voyagers, albeit with their radioactive generators long exhausted and instruments frozen, will continue to wend their lonely ways through interstellar space and remain on course for the unknown, bearing a record disk and images of 20th-century Earth, music from many of its cultures, and greetings in dozens of its languages. They may be the only evidence the human race ever existed.

When they launched, they were "groovy"

Inexplicably cool gizmos: chapter 3

     Maybe it’s just me, but among the good things in life are inexplicably cool gizmos.  
     Consider these gadgets:

     Tiny brass brushes. Way cool. –I know: pipe cleaners. Whatever. I think of them as tiny brass brushes, so shuddup.
     Check out the fabulous bear bottle opener. That’s right. You screw it on the wall and then you open bottles with it. On that bear’s teeth.
     So cool.
     OK, the creamer thingy doesn’t really belong, though it is classic. (There’s no free play in the hinge!) And the hands clip: OK, another misstep. Don't know where that came from.
     I dunno where that little bar of fancy soap came from. It smells good. I like that I don’t know where it came from. Who gave it to me? Hmmmm....
     The gizmo in back is a portable cooling fan, battery powered. I gave it to my niece, who promptly broke it and handed it back to me. I just stuck some floppy Scotch Tape there and it works. Really.
     Now check out this set of doohickeys:

     I got all these toy toolwinkels at the local Home Depot a few days ago. Miniature vice grips! A tiny tape measure! A “pocket caliper”! (Don't really know what that is, but it's cool.)
     A "construction pencil" w/ sharpner!
     What could be better! I'm giving these to my nephew Adam for Christmas. Plus an R/C helicopter.
     One more:

     I found this tiny VW Beetle w/ trailer at an R/C shop in Lake Forest (near City Hall, next to a thrift shop). It even has a tiny engine, slightly smaller than the real thing, but more powerful! Very cool. Adam will love it.
     (If he's anything like me. And he is.)

My bear teeth bottle opener

One of my classic bottle openers

My old phone. Heavier than you'd think. People
used to commit homicide with these things

My old desk lamp. Nice, eh?

Don't agree?
Who can explain a difference in intuitions?
Who can explain the magic of an object?
The universe is full of brute facts,
some about us and what we perceive.
I see magic. You don't?
Oh well.
Brute
Fact