Was Raghu gonna take his ball and go home?

.....

.....I talked to a friend today who possibly shed light on one of the odd rumpuses of Monday night’s turbulent SOCCCD board meeting.
.....On the agenda for Monday’s powwow was an important discussion of ATEP, that eternal lead balloon.
.....Trustees Milchiker and Padberg (et al.) decided to table the item—until July.
.....Why until July? Well, Mathur will be around for the June BOT meeting, but not for the July meeting. It seems, therefore, that they didn’t want Mathur in the discussion. How come?
.....Mathur’s always been ATEP’s biggest booster. (It was supposed to be his ticket to Mt. Rushmore.) And the Saddleback Academic Senate ATEP report—which was sent to trustees prior to the meeting—seems pretty anti-ATEP. So I figured these trustees wanted to shut out Mathur so he wouldn’t insist on promoting the dang thing.
.....There’s one big problem with that theory though. The only trustee (maybe Lang, too) who sought to block tabling the item (i.e., who sought to let Mathur squawk) was Fuentes, and Fuentes has always been the most anti-ATEP trustee. Why would Fuentes vote to float something that he wants to sink?
.....What I was told today makes more sense. Mathur was shut out because he was gonna torpedo ATEP.
.....Why would he do that?
.....Guess.
.....That’s right. If Mathur’s not gonna be around for realization of the ATEPaloola, then NOBODY’S gonna be around for that.
.....Well, that’s the story. Buy it?

Random Dissentecdotes:

• From Religion Dispatches magazine:

“Donald Wagner, president of the Board of Trustees, took offense to their offense. So, in response to the complaints, he threw what amounted to a public hissy fit cloaked as religious observance at the 2008 scholarship award….”

• From Dedicating the RR Board of Trustees Room:

“Tom [Fuentes] said he ‘enjoyed the warmth of [Ronald Reagan's] smiles’ adding ‘I still miss him.’”

Dissent the Blog is—influential? Guess so!

.....

.....Dissent the Blog is listed on BlogNetNews/California.
.....To be honest, I don’t quite know what BlogNetNews (BNN) is. I know that it lists recent posts by a set of political blogs. It does appear that all of the major state political blogs can be found on BNN.
.....I vaguely remember reading about this thing when it started up about three years ago. “Sounds good,” I said. I joined it. I told Rebel Girl. She said, “Huh? What are you talking about?”
.....“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe it will help readership.”
.....But here’s the thing. According to BNN, Dissent the Blog is (right now) the seventeenth most “influential” political blog in California. That’s what it says on this page, and that page looks pretty dang authoritative.
.....And what (you ask) is “influence”? BNN explains:

BlogNetNews' Blogosphere Influence Rating combines a variety of data sets to determine which blogs are most powerfully influencing the direction of the California political blogosphere. The exact method BNN uses to calculate influence scores must remain proprietary in order to prevent attempts to game the system. BNN's methodology takes into account the fact that all Internet data is profoundly limited in its reliability by using multiple data sets that, when combined, reveal a fair picture of activity in the blogosphere.

.....See what I mean? Data sets. Proprietary. Gosh.
.....I did some looking, and it appears that we’ve been in the top twenty for two or three months. At one point, we were #12.
.....What does it all mean?
.....Dunno.
.....Rebel Girl just called me. She said:
....."That's great about our being #17. But there's something even better!"
....."What's that?"
....."We beat out those bozos over at Red County (OC). They're only #20!"

Video of Monday's wild board meeting: key moments

......

.....Go HERE. Look for the list of “archived videos.”
.....Click on “VIDEO” for the May 24 meeting.
.....The “streaming video” player should appear. (Mac users may want to use Firefox.)
.....JUMP TO:

Item 6.2 [esp. 50:42]
Spending $2 million in basic aid on "Westphal" legal defense
(Fuentes is among the last to speak. He says he hopes the district will "go after" those who brought the suit.)

Item 6.9
Discussion of classified personnel action—including one hire that inspired a heated exchange between Mathur and Wagner. Mathur bloviates re diminishment of Chancellor's role

Item 7.1
Discussion of “nepotism” at the SOCCCD

0:28:53 The faculty plaintiffs' ("Westphal" prayer complaint) public statement occurs (Margot/Claire, et al.)
1:09:50 Mathur speaks; it’s ugly
1:24:45 Here's where Fuentes does his best "Joe McCarthy" impersonation. He almost holds up that piece of paper. And it is a list. And he doesn’t care that lots of the people on the list have done nothing wrong. And he’s a tail-gunner. (Well, OK. I just made that up.)

UPDATE: on “going after” (discussion of item 6.2)

.....Marcia motions to separate out the part of the item requesting $2 million for legal defense in the prayer case. That occurs.
.....When the board gets to that part of the item, Marcia states that she pulled it (out of the rest of the item) to vote against it. She gives her reasons: Given that important services are being cut at the colleges, how can this large sum for defensive litigation be defended? (Note: the district's prevailing in the case would do nothing to improve the colleges or student services.)
.....Padberg explains that the action is only to set aside $2 million, not necessarily to spend it.
.....Lang then asserts: “I frankly find it somewhat disingenuous that the very folks who are speaking out about spending the money on this item are the same folks who are causing us to incur this amount of expense for the district. I’m gonna support the motion…”
.....Please note that Lang here commits a classic fallacy, namely, rejecting a view based on (alleged)  facts about the persons who hold it (ad hominem). Also, note that Lang’s point about disingenuousness in no sense addresses the point that Milchiker had just made—a point that Lang acknowledges he is sympathetic to. Note, too, that Milchiker is untouched by Lang’s ad hominem, for she is not among those who brought the suit.
.....Fuentes then says:

“It is my intent to support the setting aside of these funds. I think it is the only responsible action this board can take, to be prepared. I believe that our district will wiiiiiiin this case. I hope that we will pursue it with all aggressive action that we can take. And I hope that we can go after [51:10] those who have caused the district to spend this money and win the repayment of these attorney fees.”

.....I suppose that critics of our "prayer" lawsuit will claim that, in referring to “those who have caused the district to spend this money,” Fuentes is referring, not to the plaintiffs who had just spoken (and to whom trustee Lang just referred in his comment about "disingenuousness”), but to the organization Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS), who are providing the legal team for the suit.
.....But of course AUSCS are not the plaintiffs in this case.
.....I do hope that Mr. Fuentes will clarify his remarks, which could easily be interpreted as his hoping the board/district will “go after” those who have in fact caused the district to be sued, namely, the plaintiffs, which include faculty, students, and members of the community.
.....Further, Fuentes’ defenders will insist that Fuentes was referring only to “going after” specifically in the sense of gaining repayment of attorney fees. Perhaps. But given the supreme ugliness and wrongness of the notion that he seeks to “go after” those who brought this suit (plaintiffs), I think he needs to be very clear and specific about just who and how he wants to pursue this project of "going after."  --RB

More timecard shell games

.....

.....A friend sent me an article in today’s LA Times regarding fraud in various areas of government in LA County: L.A. County auditors find widespread fraud. According to the article,

Los Angeles County auditors substantiated 101 instances of fraud during the last six months of 2009, uncovering cases large and small in which taxpayers were cheated, according to a report released Wednesday. ¶ The latest report was unusual because it found misconduct that touched the highest levels of the Fire Department and the office of the county's chief executive, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraud.

.....In some instances, employees were viewing internet pornography—a problem that has arisen on several occasions here at Irvine Valley College.
.....But there were more serious findings—for instance, that “Three senior Fire Department managers played golf during county work hours but claimed a full day on their timecards, according to investigators. One of the employees also recorded overtime for that day, the report said.”
.....As in the case of John Williams, in this case, officials provided a dust storm of odd explanations and excuses:

.....Two of the employees were not disciplined because at the time, Fire Department rules allowed them to report they had worked full shifts if they worked at least one hour, a practice that has since been changed.
.....Fire Chief Michael Freeman said all employees involved had worked extra hours on other days, and he disputed the auditors' findings….

.....As you know, recently, we reported that trustee John Williams turned in timesheets to the county (re his job as OC Public Administrator and Public Guardian) that indicated that he had worked on days when in fact he was junketeering (often, in Florida) as a college trustee. This was explained essentially as an unavoidable artifact of the alleged complexity of Williams’ position as both an elected official and an appointed official.
.....We are in possession of further records and will be reporting about them in future.