Friday, March 28, 2008

Sunny Girl, late Friday

GOT HOME, let out the Sunny Girl. She enjoyed the good weather, the cool air. She weaseled around.

I gave her her medicine tonight. I've gotta shoot 1 ml of goop into her mouth twice a day. She hates it.

Hopefully, it will address what ails her, which may be urinary tract disease. Not sure.

Have I told you that she only drinks bottled water? It's true. She just won't touch my tap water, which comes from a well. Don't know what that's about.

Have a nice weekend. Sunny says "hey."

Public Defender

~
This obituary ran in the Thursday March 27, 2008 edition of the Daily Journal, the legal newspaper.

Deputy PD Was a Progressive Advocate
Eric J. Zucker 1959-2008


By Ryan Oliver
Daily Journal Staff Writer


.....
LOS ANGELES - Eric J. Zucker, a veteran Los Angeles County deputy public defender and progressive political advocate, died Monday after a 16-month battle with brain cancer. He was 48.
.....Zucker's last assignment was as a deputy public defender in the office's Public Integrity Assurance Section, which is responsible for defending cases in which police misconduct is suspected and for reviewing post-conviction cases with potentially exonerating DNA evidence.
....."He was the quintessential public defender," Marie Girolamo, deputy in charge of the unit, said of Zucker. "He really was a true believer. He believed in what he did."
.....Zucker previously served as deputy in charge of the office's Eastlake juvenile branch. He considered Homeboy Industries founder Father Gregory Boyle and Eastlake Juvenile Hall chaplain Sister Janet Harris to be among his mentors.
.....He joined the public defender's office in 1990 after graduating from Hofstra University School of Law. He was a staunch opponent of the state's three-strikes law and testified against it before the California Senate after he saw one of his clients sentenced to 25-years-to-life for joyriding.
.....In his latest assignment, Zucker was deeply involved in advocating on behalf of women serving life sentences who were unable to present evidence at trial that they had been battered.
....."He was one of the most energetic, positive-minded people I've ever known," Girolamo said. "Anybody who spent any time with him would immediately like him."
.....A Los Angeles native, born Aug. 10, 1959, Zucker inherited strong progressive values from his parents, Betty and Max Zucker, who were survivors of the Holocaust. Zucker attended anti-war demonstrations as a child and was involved in a number of political and minority organizations while a student at the University of California and in law school.
....."He was one of the most generous people on Earth," said Zucker's friend, Pasadena attorney Ron Kaye. "He supported the rights of immigrants to juveniles to people with disabilities." Kaye said Zucker was able to use his compassion for people in the courtroom by bringing his clients' stories to life for the jury.
.....Zucker is survived by his wife, Donna Herlihy, and their three children.

Catching bullies in action

From this morning's Inside Higher Ed:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget plan to cut back funds for California’s need-based grants program would disproportionate hurt students at the state’s community colleges, the Institute for College Access and Success said in a report Thursday. The report said that because of the way money from the Cal Grant Program is distributed, new grants to community college students would be cut by 45 percent, or about 18,500 students, in the fall. The report also estimated that 700 students at the University of California would be denied a Cal Grant, 2,000 in the California State University system; 1,200 at private nonprofit colleges; and 3,000 at for-profit career colleges.
From the OC Reg (Local preteen inventors to be on Leno tonight):
Three young inventors from Tustin and Irvine are heading up to Burbank today to hang out with Jay Leno for a few minutes of TV fame on the “The Tonight Show.”

Brandon Sharpe from Loma Vista Elementary will be talking about his belt buckle video camera. The invention, according to the third-grader, is designed to catch bullies in action. Joining Sharpe will be fifth-grader Benjamin Jacobs from Westpark Elementary and his “Perfect Parker” guide, which helps drivers park in their garages; and fifth-grader Kerissa Iyer at Brywood Elementary, with her popcorn-mate.

The trio was part of a group of more than 300 elementary and junior high students who displayed their inventions at the 21st annual Astounding Inventions showcase, which was sponsored by Greenberg Trauig law firm, at Irvine Valley College in January….

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Adiós and hola!

HOLA. Life is good! The OC Reg reports (Case against H.B. Mayor Debbie Cook dismissed) that
Congressional candidate Debbie Cook has won a victory, after the Fourth District Court of Appeal dismissed a lawsuit that challenged her ballot designation as mayor of Huntington Beach...Republican leaders said they filed the lawsuit on the grounds that Cook, a Democrat, shouldn't be allowed to use the "Mayor" designation on the ground that the voters elected her to the City Council and not to the position of mayor.... Cook has said she followed the law. She called the suit an attempt to distract her from her campaign to unseat Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, incumbent for the 46th Congressional District.
.....The lawyer for the Repubs? That would be Tom Fuentes' pal (and OC "Republican mafia" Godfather) Michael Schroeder. State GOP official Keith Carlson filed the suit. Carlson, who is on the IVC Foundation board, was the emcee at the November Fuentes fundraiser.
.....The Reg notes that "Three Republican candidates for Assembly had also indicated 'mayor' in their individual ballot designations and achieved the position in a similar manner as Cook, records show. Republican leaders had not filed suit against them."
.....That's because they're assholes.
.....Carlson and Co. were ordered to pay Cook's litigation costs.
.....Nya!

ADIOS. Meanwhile, our pal Gustavo Arellano has written his last "Ask a Mexican" column. He ended today's offering with:
And with this, the Mexican formally bids adios, effective the feast day of St. Melito. It’s been a great run, cabrones, but all the hateful e-mail, the attacks by PC pendejos and the fact that few of you have bothered to submit video questions to my YouTube channel wear on a guy, you know? Besides, like Mr. Dooley, Olle I Skratthult and The Katzenjammer Kids before me, this column’s time has come: It’s no longer necessary to explain Mexicans to Americans because Mexicans are Americans. Gracias for all the fights, the propositions of sexytime explosion, and the slugged-back tequila shots after book signings, but there’s a little ranchito in Zacatecas waiting for me and a barefoot muchacha ready to cook me dinner. Vaya con Dios, America, and always remember: Order the enchilada-and-taco combo TO GO.

Indoctrination? Don't think so!

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Faculty Are Liberal—Who Cares?:
One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. The argument is probably made most directly in a film much plugged by Horowitz: “Indoctrinate U.”

A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and says that it’s true that the professoriate leans left. But the study—notably by one Republican professor and one Democratic professor—finds no evidence of indoctrination. Despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years, and that deflates the idea that cadres of tenured radicals are somehow corrupting America’s youth—or scaring them into adopting new political views.

The study’s authors—Gordon Hewitt of Hamilton College and Mack Mariani of Xavier University, in Ohio—write that they believe too much time has been spent debating the proper methodologies for testing whether there is a political imbalance on college faculties. If the danger of such an imbalance is that it is hurting students, the key question is whether the imbalance leads to an otherwise unexplainable shift in student political attitudes.
…..
Based on a review of numerous other studies, as well as of specific surveys of faculty political attitudes at various private colleges, they do not contest that the faculty in higher education is liberal—significantly more so than the public at large. To measure student shifts, the scholars used data from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute in which students are asked—as freshmen and seniors—to place themselves ideologically. Student data were examined for specific colleges for which data on faculty political leanings were available, and those colleges were grouped into three categories, based on politics. The student attitudes were examined in 1999 as freshmen and 2003 as seniors.

The scholars find some self-selection, with students who enter college as conservative slightly more likely to be found at relatively conservative institutions, and so forth. But over all, they found only slight shifts in political leanings (albeit to the left) during the students’ four years. The analysis also found explanations other than faculty ideology—gender and wealth, for example—that correlate with the modest political shifts that took place. Whether the students attended a college that was more liberal or conservative did not correlate with the shift—which it would have had liberal professors been engaged in indoctrination, the authors write…..

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "your very flesh shall be a great poem"

~
Rebel Girl's friend who was dying has died - the only end of that particular story could have had for awhile now. Still, there it is, a fact that makes her breath catch and her eyes sting.

He was a public defender in the best sense of that word. She saw him these last years after her life had taken her south to Orange County at two kinds of venues: rock 'n roll concerts and good cause dinners. If there was music, they'd stand, for hours and sing along and dance, dance, dance, an aging coterie of lawyers, educators, community organizers, activists all, getting old, yes, drinking less, but willing to sing along late into the evening:

I saw two shooting stars last night. I wished on them – they were only satellites…Is it wrong to wish on space hardware? I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care..

All those good cause dinners with the round tables and the round bread rolls, the white poly-blend tablecloths and napkins, and the speeches and the standing ovations and the promises and pledges we made to people, ourselves and each other, over and over again. Liberty Hill. Death Penalty Focus. National Lawyers Guild. ACLU. It occurs to her that we spent a lot of time standing for one thing and another, all of it good.

And then that last dinner, last fall that honored, among other people, their friend for his work. It was a benefit for Families to Amend Three Strikes. He couldn't make it but two round tables of friends did, in a ballroom at an LAX airport hotel. They watched as a video played and their friend spoke, reading his speech from a chair in his green backyard just before going back to the hospital for another surgery. He wasn't giving up on anything.

This is for him today and for all of us.

From the Preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855):

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches,
give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your
income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience
and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown
or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and
with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air
every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at
school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your
very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and
in every motion and joint of your body. . .



(image is by Eric Drooker)

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Nielsen Schmielsen!

.....The OC Weekly and OC Register are reporting that Tom Fuentes’ old sauna mate, Jeffrey Ray Nielsen, was sentenced today to three years in prison for molesting two boys.
.....No word yet on whether Jeff's been asked to return that swell suit Tom bought 'im at Macy's.

SEE GOP's Nielsen headed for the pokey

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...