Keep on rockin' in the free world

• OC LIBERAL LAW LOOMS.
.....The LA Times reports on UC Irvine’s new law school (Flap over dean's hiring doesn't keep UC Irvine's law school from lining up prominent staff).
.....As you know, last year, well-known constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky was hired and then fired as dean of the long-sought law school.
.....As the Times explains,

In the weeks before [UCI Chancellor Michael] Drake rescinded the offer to Chemerinsky, prominent conservatives, including Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich and former state Republican Party Chairman Michael Schroeder, one of Orange County's most powerful GOP political players, sought to derail his appointment through e-mails and phone calls to the university.

.....(DtB readers know all about Mr. Schroeder, a close associate of trustee Tom Fuentes.)
.....So Drake fired Chemerinsky. That backfired. The firing blew up into an academic freedom cause célèbre. Efforts at damage control led to Chemerinsky being rehired and Drake looking like a used piñata.
.....Many thought that the firing incident would doom Chemerinsky’s efforts to pull together an impressive team of faculty. They were wrong. Even conservatives seem impressed by the “dream team" that the C-man has assembled thus far.
.....Legal scholars tend to be moderately liberal, and so it comes as no surprise that the School’s new crew tilts in that direction, but Chemerinsky has not sought liberals. He has made an effort, however, to hire conservatives:

Chemerinsky…has deliberately courted prominent right-wing thinkers for hire at UCI—so far unsuccessfully—said Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychology professor who will teach courses at the law school and has been involved in recruiting. "He is not afraid to be in a place where there's people who disagree," she said.

.....To see the UCI law school faculty list, go to list.

• CARONA CARNIVAL SIDESHOW.
.....Remember Sheriff Mike Carona’s “reserve deputies” money-making scheme? Among the more infamous of his deputies was his martial arts instructor, Raymond Yi. The fellow “was accused of pulling a gun in 2005 on a group of golfers he thought were playing too slowly.”
.....In May, Yi was convicted of a felony count. Now, he’s “seeking a new trial on the grounds that a bailiff improperly talked with jurors during their deliberations about a gun that was a key piece of evidence in the case.” See Carona's martial arts teacher seeks retrial for Chino Hills golf incident.

• HOLLYWOOD STARS AT LAGUNA BEACH.
.....At a fund-raiser in Laguna Beach Thursday night, Harrison Ford, among others, was honored for his environmental work. (Stars come to O.C. to raise green for green cause.)
.....Everyone was invited—everyone, that is, who paid $500 (minimum) for a ticket.
.....Among the celebs: Ted Danson, Diane Lane, Diane Keaton, Jeff Goldblum, Beau Bridges and Sam Waterston.
.....And, of course, Calista Flockhart.
.....Some of ‘em were flown in by helicopter.
.....Also honored, says the OC Reg, “were John Picard, a Corona del Mar advocate of environmentally-sustainable architecture, and actor Sam Waterston, star of TV's ‘Law and Order.’”

• NEWBRIDGE COLLEGE?
.....Apparently, there is some sort of medical technician “college” in Santa Ana called “Newbridge.” It’s been in operation since 1976. (See Former enrollees file class-action suit against Newbridge College.)
.....Marla Jo Fisher informs us that some unhappy students have filed a class-action suit against the college, “alleging they were each defrauded out of $10,000 tuition by promises they could earn good salaries for medical jobs they were ineligible to obtain.”
.....They claim that they need an “associates” degree to get decent jobs, but Newbridge does not offer that degree.

• YOUNG UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS.
.....The wacky and occasionally wonderful Neil Young is about to release yet another film (July 25), this one a documentary of a tour with Crosby, Still, and Nash. (See Neil Young, Where Politics and Technology Meet.)
.....Before the tour, Young persuaded his mates to focus on the material of his controversial and well-regarded anti-war album. And so, during the tour, when the group commenced singing about impeachment of the President and the like, well, the shit hit the fan:

.....…[H]is band mates took to the antiwar theme eagerly. … But the audiences were not exactly unanimous in agreement. In Atlanta, the first verse of Mr. Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President” brought boos, middle fingers and worse.
…
.....To establish a journalistic tone for the film, Mr. Young hired Mike Cerre, a former ABC war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be “embedded” on the tour, interviewing fans and capturing the mood of the shows.
…
.....Mr. Cerre said he was given complete freedom to produce 12 newsy segments. Larry Johnson, the film’s producer, said most of them were used, and with only minor editing for length. Mr. Cerre found some support among concertgoers for the band’s politics, but what stands out are unflattering shots of the aging group onstage — like Stephen Stills, then 61, struggling to get up after a fall during “Rockin’ in the Free World” — and complaints from fans, not always civil, who disapproved of the political message.

.....I guess the reporter isn’t aware that there are other reasons, beyond age, for Stills’ trouble getting up off the floor.

A friend passed along this amazing little video about two guys reuniting with their LION, who had been released into the wild:

Hot for words: "general time horizon"

New York Times: U.S. and Iraq Agree to Goals for Troop Cuts:

The United States and Iraq have agreed to set a “general time horizon” for the “further reduction of U.S. combat forces in Iraq” following the improvement in security conditions in the country, the White House said Friday.
…
The administration on Friday insisted that it had not shifted its position. It said that the move was simply a reflection of the changing nature of conditions in Iraq.

“These are aspirational goals, not artificial timetables based on political expediency,” said Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman....

I thought that the Administration didn’t want to set any points in time—lines or points on the timeline—for withdrawals of troops? They've been pretty clear about that.

Hmmm. A time “horizon,” is, of course, a horizon, and, according to my Mac's dictionary, a horizon is a line:

horizon |həˈrīzən|
noun
1 [usu. in sing. ] the line at which the earth's surface and the sky appear to meet : the sun rose above the horizon.

So a “time horizon” is clearly a point in time, a line on the timeline. A "general" time horizon presumably is one that is not specific: between this month and that month. OK, but to the extent that one is general, one is failing to really say anything. "We'll withdraw troops some time in the future" is meaningless. Further, those who have argued for a timeline don't seem to have a problem with some generality re the line or lines.

The White House says that the horizon will not be "artificial." Artificial means “produced by human beings.” The White House's “time horizon” will of course be produced by human beings—unless they're consulting astrologers or tea leaves.

“Aspirational”? That’s just fancy talk for “we want this.” An "aspirational" goal is just a goal. C'mon.


So, I guess what this comes down to is: the White House has shifted its position. What's more, it has shifted it in the direction of what war critics have long wanted.

But it is asserting that, unlike war critics, the White House’s desire for an artificial timetable is not based on “political expediency.”

OK. That means that, unlike critics, the White House is not motivated by politics. —You know, like wanting to help out Republicans who are facing an election in a few months.

Really?

You gotta love politics.

HotForWords: "phoney"

A star for a Mexican

As he himself informs us today, Gustavo Arellano (Ask a Mexican) is about to publish a history of Orange County (Sept. 16), and the book has just been very positively reviewed by Publishers Weekly, which writes:

Orange County: A Memoir
Gustavo Arellano. Scribner, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-4004-5

Readers get two stories for the price of one in this witty and informative memoir. Journalist Arellano (¡Ask a Mexican!) chronicles the sweet-and-sour story of his family's assimilation into American culture, while also recounting a historical narrative at odds with the bucolic ideal of a place that's been mythologized for decades. “We're so American, so Orange County, that we're even prone to romanticize a past that never existed.” Arellano's structure keeps the narrative moving along at a snappy pace, alternating the threads of the story so “odd chapters constitute the memoir, even chapters tell the history, and one complements the other.” Readers get solid background on the beginning of master-planned communities during the 1920s, the little remembered Citrus War, Orange County's embarrassing 1994 bankruptcy and special mix of conservatism coupled with a dollop of big-time religion. “A 2005 Harper's article named Orange County the country's second hotbed of evangelical Christianity after Colorado Springs,” Arellano writes, and of the 100 megachurches in the U.S. with the largest congregations, four are in Orange County. Arellano explores a place he calls the “Petri dish for America's continuing democratic experiment” and delivers a prescient view of the new American landscape.

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:

Saw V: Butterfinger City

• ANTI-IMMIGRANT LEADERS SEEM TO BE “LOW INFORMATION” TYPES.
Over at the OC Weekly, Gustavo Arellano informs us that Barbara Coe, head of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, reacted to the kerfufflear New Yorker cover by sending a copy to her email list, writing, "Is this a 'parody' or did The New Yorker share the TRUTH?”

The truth?

According to Arellano, Coe also “forwarded an email she received from Ted Hayes…that contained an article purportedly written by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd about Obama's shady fundraising."

Unfortunately for Babs, the article was nonsense; and it was not authored by Dowd.

• OCC AT MGM FOR CHEF TOURNEY.
Today, Marla Jo Fisher over at the OC Reg informs us (O.C. culinary students whisk their way through Vegas contest today) that “Orange Coast College students are competing against three other teams this morning to win the national student chef championships.”

This is occurring at the highly academic MGM Grand.

Last year, the team came in second owing to screw-ups most foul. A light bulb blew up over the soufflé, making it too crispy.

• SO, REALLY, YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING.
It turns out that the high school dropout rate in OC isn’t as low as first reported (O.C. dropout data higher than previously counted):

The number of students who dropped out of Orange County's public high schools is more than double of what has previously been reported, according to state figures released today. ¶ A new tracking system … shows the county high school dropout rate for the class of 2007 was 12 percent, not the 5.8 percent that has previously been reported. ¶ "For too long, we had to rely on complicated formulas to make educated guesses about how many students were graduating and how many were leaving school without a diploma," said state Superintendent Jack O'Connell. "Now, using student-level data, we can improve the accuracy of our count of how many students drop out, increase accountability, and focus on preventing dropouts."

One (or I) want to ask: OK, just how hard is this? And how can you be that far off?

The worst performer in the OC—according to these new and improved statistics—was Valley High in Santa Ana (19.3%). The best: Oxford Academy in Cypress (0 dropouts).

It turns out the “statewide dropout rate for the class of 2007 has also been changed from 17 percent to 24.2 percent….”

Somebody from California Parents for Educational Choice carped that the data is still unreliable since "They're asking the districts which have a vested interest in this to come up with the numbers….”

That guy says the state rate is actually closer to 33%.

Well, there you are. We really don’t know anything, do we?

• SAW V: BUTTERFINGER CITY.
There’s a seriously nutty story in the OC Reg about students in Huntington Beach suing over cut fingers: Students file suit after cutting fingers on school saws.

One Huntington Beach Union High School kid says she “sustained a grievous injury to her left thumb.” That was in her technical theater class. Apparently, minutes earlier, the teacher left the class unattended because he needed medical attention for his own grievous boo-boo.

But that’s not all. Some other kid in another school claims to have severely injured his finger when the teacher, Charles Kelly, “negligently allowed a minor to use the ‘dangerous’ saw without proper instruction or supervision.”

The family is asking for a half a million in damages.

We need a bigger brick

• FEWER THAN 90 DAYS UNTIL THE APOCaccredALYPSE. I've heard very little about the goings-on at the district and the two colleges. As you know, the Accreditation Commission expects reports from each college in less than three months. (It's do or die this time, they insist.) And so you'd think that the designated report-writers would be busy bees.

I do know that Irvine Valley College's Accreditation efforts have moved forward nicely during these summer months. By all accounts, the focus group, which is impressive, has produced many pages of excellent work. Even more impressively, faculty have yet to throttle trustee Don Wagner, and the Wag-Man has yet to throttle any faculty.

As far as accreditation is concerned, Saddleback College, on the other hand, is like the guy who "flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions." Saddleback's Accred focus group has produced a draft of a report that, according to my sources, is short, unimpressive, and sans faculty input. You see, way back in the spring, Saddleback faculty leadership decided to bail from the proceedings—in disgust, a feeling that was perfectly natural, given the viciousness with which Donny and MaGoo messed with the last report. When the new leadership returned from vacation this summer, they were shocked to behold an apparent disaster-in-the-making.

Meanwhile, administration at Saddleback is sans leadership until the new Prez arrives in August. But nobody wants to deal with Chancellor "He who must be obeyed" Mathur, and our trustees, evidently, do not communicate between board meetings. (Some of 'em don't communicate during board meetings either.)

So there you are. Big, old Saddleback College lumbers and slumbers to the brink. Raghu Mathur sits in his office, counting his money and admiring his phony degrees. The trustees show up once a month to see if any buildings are burning. ("No? OK, then.") Trustee Tom Fuentes wanders around, smiling at his continued dark existence. —It's a freakin' disaster.

I've been trying to smash that college upside the head (don't thank me; it's the least I can do) for months now, but, evidently, there's no brick large enough to awaken this crew.

And now, the news:

• MY BIG FAT CORRUPT CONGRESSMAN. Oh, great. My Congressman—the stunningly corrupt Gary Miller—is at it again. In this morning’s OC Register (Congressman has financial stake in O.C. tollway), we learn that “One of Congress' strongest supporters of the Foothill tollway's controversial southern extension steered taxpayer money to and lobbied for the project while holding a financial interest in a connected tollway." "In an interview," we're told, "Miller acknowledged getting an $8 million appropriation for Foothill-South's construction in 2005. He has subsequently signed letters to the state Coastal Commission and the Commerce Secretary as part of a lobbying effort in support of the tollway agency's plan to build the road through a coastal park."

Naturally, Miller “expressed surprise when asked about that investment.” Must’ve been the wife who bought that, he says. Waddya gonna do?

The Reg notes that it is against House rules for a Congressperson to appropriate money or to use his position “to benefit projects and organizations in which they have even a small financial investment.”

• DEATH AND TEXAS. In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, we learn that

British authors and universities are afraid that the University of Texas at Austin is outbidding British archives for the collections of many of the country’s writers. [In an article that appeared in the Guardian, a] British archivist is quoted as saying: “Two things are inevitable: death and Texas.”

• HEY, TRY STUDYING. We also learn that

Community colleges in California might be able to significantly reduce the need for remedial education among students by using the results of 11th grade state testing to better direct students prior to enrollment, says a new report from the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success, known as Cal-PASS….

This has been tried by a state university, and it seems to work, they say.

• CHEAT.COM. Remember that new website in San Diego that provides copies of instructors' tests submitted by students (they're paid) for other students to download? Well, when professors complained, the owner said that the professors could submit a request to ban their students from using the service. But, according to Inside Higher Ed, now we learn that PostYourTest.com has suspended the banning option.

I think it was a business decision. I bet that Demir Oral, the website's owner, is a pal of Gary freakin' Miller and they count their money together on Republican junkets to China.

• SEXY BIOLOGIST HAS A POINTLESS SUGGESTION. In this morning’s New York Times (Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism), sexy biologist Olivia Judson suggests dumping the term “Darwinism.”

Naturally, she’s a fan of the D-man. But, according to Judson, his stature has an unfortunate consequence: "It’s a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. 'Why Darwin was wrong about X'; 'Was Darwin wrong about Y?'; 'What Darwin didn’t know about Z'."

“[I]t’s all grossly misleading,” she says. Since Darwin's time (one hundred and fifty years ago),

…[T]he field as a whole has been transformed. If we were to go back in a time machine and fetch him to the present day, he’d find much of evolutionary biology unintelligible — at least until he’d had time to study genetics, statistics and computer science…. Obsessively focusing on Darwin, perpetually asking whether he was right about this or that, implies that the discovery of something he didn’t think of or know about somehow undermines or threatens the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology today….

This all sounds good to me, but does she or anyone think that the culture will be taking her up on her suggestion? Nope. There're too many STUPID PEOPLE. Makes you wonder why somebody like Judson writes stuff like this.

Makes me wonder why I put out this blog.

The county of many Pharisees

• QUAINT, REDNECKY ORANGE. Recently, I visited downtown Orange and took a few pictures of my old house, a former brothel. (Chunk's travelogue.) Today, the LA Times posted a nice little video/slide show of the downtown Orange area: Orange, Orange Plaza. Check it out. It’s kinda nice, despite the rednecks—and flags, made in China, waved by ignoramuses, who would vote for Bush again if given the chance.

• ATTACK-DOGS TO DROOL AND SNARL AT G.O.P. CONFERENCE. Martin Wisckol of the OC Register’s “Total Buzz” (Obama ‘enemies’ to powwow in Newport Beach) reports that “Floyd Brown and Jim Lacy, two of the six people listed on Barack Obama’s enemies list, will be key players when the Western Conservative Political Action Conference convenes in October at the Fairmont Hotel in Newport Beach. ¶ Brown is most famous for his Willie Horton TV ad ... and he’s now turning his attack-dog skills against Obama….”

OK, there you go. In some circles, when you’re an “attack-dog”—a ruthless, vicious bastard like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove—you’re famous and admired. People come to hear you speak.

We're obviously going to hell in a handbasket.

• STEM CELLS WIN VALUABLE CASH PRIZES. The OC Register’s “Science Dude” reports that “UC Irvine has shattered its previous record for private donations, raising $130 million during the past year….” ( UCI smashes fundraising record.)

Naturally, the biggest donor was the Irvine Company’s Donald Bren (see pic above), who put in $20 million for the new law school, the progress of which we have been following. A recent anonymous $12 million gift supports stem cell research. It turns out that UCI “has emerged as one of the larger centers for this field of study on the West Coast.”

Our county’s crew of pious/ruthless knuckle draggers must have their loincloths in a twist about that. Lord, I hope so.

• THE OC LOSES A GOOD SCRIBBLER. Our pal (well, the Reb’s pal) Gustavo Arellano over at the OC Weekly posted an interesting piece today about reporter William Lobdell (WILLIAM LOBDELL—GONE :-(), who has quit the LA Times. According to Gustavo, “Lobdell was no ordinary reporter—the man was a multiple-award-winning titan, one of the best religion reporters ever to grace American newspapers, and definitely the best in covering the Gospel Swamp that is Orange County. He left the religion beat last year, sickened by the county's many Pharisees.”

Gustavo doesn't identify these Pharisees, but he does list some of our county's most (in)famous religious icons: "Schuller, Warren, Crouch, Calvary Chapel, Goat Boy, Robert Fuller...."