It's like waving a red flag in front of 'em!

By Orange County's  Emigdio Vasquez

Todd Spitzer

     WHISTLE BLOW HARD. A few months ago, when Assistant DA Todd Spitzer accidentally poked into the nasty FUBAR that is John Williams’ Public Administrator/Guardian office (down at the County), it got him summarily fired from the DA’s office.
     People noticed. It was like turning on a flashing neon sign that said, “corruption and mismanagement, here.”
     Now, of course, Spitzer’s running for Supervisor, and so, naturally, he’s exploiting his recent adventures in accidental whistle-blowery for all that they’re worth.
     For instance, in today’s Red County (Public Administrator John Williams: Pension and Salary Robber), the Toddster roars

     The now-infamous Orange County Public Guardian John Williams was stripped of his powers as both the Public Administrator … and Public Guardian … on Tuesday after he refused to resign based on his incompetence in office and failure to perform his basic duties.
     It is my unwavering successful efforts for two decades as a prosecutor and elected official to get to the bottom of government corruption that has the backroom power brokers concerned.  For years they have comfortably placed their pals in position of power, gained lucrative no-bid contracts and hid behind the lack of transparency in government for their own personal gain.
     This online story from two days ago is now a FRONT PAGE OC REGISTER LOCAL Section story today. Read it. The article connects a lot of dots of the politically powerful in Orange County. But this is why I am running for County Supervisor. To end the nepotism, pension spiking, "I'll hire you if you hire me" mentality and the liability exposure to the taxpayer for putting incompetent politically connected people into important government positions. Enough already!

     Let’s hope Spitzer is serious about all this. I mean, what he’s describing, more or less, sure is real (like I’ve been sayin’). But will Todd really blast Crony-Connectoville once he’s elected (if he’s elected)?
     Maybe.

To be an Orange Countian is to have Mexican and Vietnamese tastes

     THE OC: PORTAL TO VIETNAM. Meanwhile, our pal Gustavo Arellano over at the “Stick a Fork in It” blog posts today about, of all things, a recent addition to the OED!

   Oxford English Dictionary Adds 'Banh Mi' to Dictionary

     Ah, the august [OED], grammatical gatekeeper to all that is proper and just in the world of the English language. The great thing about the tongue of Shakespeare, of course, is how it absorbs foreign words as they inextricably become part of the Empire—and, just this week, OED deemed bánh mì worthy of inclusion.
     "As the culinary appetites of the English-speaking world grow ever more diverse, loan words referring to new cuisines are a perennial source of new OED entries," explains Katherine Connor Martin, senior editor of new words (how awesome a job is THAT?!) for the dictionary….

     I’m none too worldly, but I’m guessing that this OED business is newsworthy (here in OC) because the term “banh mi” has entered the English language via Orange County, which is after all home to, well, the biggest Little Saigon in the world—namely, Westminster and Garden Grove, a portion of OC that is about 25% Vietnamese.
     —And very Republican. You know, like Miami with all those commie-hating Cubans.

     ART SHOULD BE PROTECTED. A few days ago, I posted about the “Cypress Street Barrio” in the city of Orange, my hometown, sort of. In the course of that story, I mentioned OC artist Emigdio Vasquez, who, as it turns out, grew up in that barrio and, I’m told, still lives on Cypress Street.
     Rebel Girl reminded me that IVC is in possession of a fine Emigdio Vasquez mural—it’s in the hallway bisecting the B100 building, one of IVC’s many architectural monstrosities. I was going to take a picture of it today, but that didn’t work out. I’ll try again on Monday.
     Rebel Girl tells me that the mural is on canvas and is utterly unprotected—and there’s lots of traffic in that hallway.
     Tsk, tsk. That ain't right.

Flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

     BRING BACK THE FLAGS O' THE WORLD! And that reminds me—let’s try to get those “flags of the world” flying again in the Student Services Center! You’ll recall that, a couple of years ago, some Vietnamese Americans complained that, included among the flags of the world colorfully displayed in SSC, was the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (boo, hiss!). Well, owing to the particulars of OC’s Vietnamese community (namely, their bein’ refugees from the Communist invasion that occurred after we declared victory and left Southeast Asia), flyin’ that flag around OC's Little Saigon crowd is like, um, waving a red flag in front of 'em.
     Yeah, it’s like dressing up as Castro down in Miami. It just won’t do, I guess.
     Naturally, when these none-too-subtle Vietnamese-American bulls hinted that there might be hell to pay if that red flag keeps flyin’, our Rocky decided to take down all of the flags. Problem solved.
     I.e., he caved.
     Well, that’s just bullshit. Let’s get those flags back up there. They were purdy. They shouted "global community." And, like it or not, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is among the nations of the world. Heck, we have friendly relations with ‘em these days!
     That’s good, right?
     Yes, it is.

Heads up: Monday's board meeting

     The agenda for the March meeting of the SOCCCD board of trustees—on Monday, the 28^th—is now available at the district website. There, look for the blue box, which includes a link to a pdf of the "current agenda."
     For what it’s worth (not much), the agenda for the 5:00 p.m. closed session includes the following item:

     I’ve glanced over the agenda for the open session, which is set to start at 6:30 p.m., and it contains nothing of obvious interest (to me). Possibly, the item concerning the proposed 2012-2013 district calendar (item 5.16) is interesting. Check it out:

     The meeting’s discussion items are the following:

"Ching Chong!"—pleasantly countering Stupid Girl's anti-Asian rant

The original rant HERE

Who can ‘splain 'em?

OC Republican: inexplicable

     It must be tough being a conservative and a Republican in Orange County. On the one hand, you’ve got the hypocritical bastards who maintain the cronyistic, self-perpetuating, corrupt County GOP machine—Scott Baugh and his crafty colleagues, all sucking on the public teat while regularly denouncing teat suckery. And then you’ve got the rest of the party faithful down at the Central Committee—an inexplicable crew who’ve stolidly put up with this leadershite—from Tom “Big Foot” Fuentes to Scott “Slime” Baugh—for decades.
     What’s the matter with those guys? Who can ‘splain ‘em?
     In the last couple of years, the Tea Party crowd has shaken things up on the Central Committee, but, while the Teasters hate hypocritical and sleazy establishment Repubs, they also, well, love to be stupid, and that’s almost as bad as sleazitude. For instance, the local GOP leadership now includes Villa Park City Councilwoman Deborah Pauly, who has taken it upon herself to alienate both Muslims and sodomites*. I don’t know about Muslims, but I’m sure local sodomites used to vote solidly Republican.

Baugh, Reagan bust

     In recent years, the Crony Club for Men have been scramblin’ to protect their own, and that’s been an endless PR nightmare (think Carona, Street, Nielsen, Beelzebub, et al.) for local conservatives. The latest fiasco, of course, concerns the unfolding and deepening fubar that is John Williams’ tenure as Public Administrator/Guardian.
     Williams, who was until December a SOCCCD trustee, must be seen to be believed. He’s so clueless that his official portrait is regularly assumed to be dirty trick against Williams. He once defended his habit of taking repeated, expensive, taxpayer-funded junkets to Orlando by arguing that it would be “unethical” for him not to! One time, a guy showed up to a board of trustees meeting, urging trustees to train people to respond to gun-toting “perpetrators” by throwing books and desks at ‘em. Really.

Tom Fuentes, praying

     I watched Williams. He was carefully taking notes. His pencil broke. He panicked and poked himself.
     Supervisor Bill Campbell is, of course, a card-carrying member of Team Crony, and so he’s joined his wall-to-wall-Republican Supe colleagues in protecting Williams from the urgings of common sense and decency to fire his fat, junket-taking ass.
     But, in recent months, local Repubs have been taggin’ the Campbster for not seeking to fire Williams. For instance, in today’s Red County (Really? Only the incredible mind of Bill Campbell), “Frustrated Republican” offers the following rant:

     Hey, Supervisor Bill Campbell: if your wife goes out and buys the $100 outfit instead of the $150 one, she didn't save you fifty bucks!
     What are we referring to? This quote:
     “I look at it as saving the taxpayers $450,000 if he would have stayed for another three years.”
     ...which is how Campbell justifies the absurd situation of paying double to man the post of O.C.'s public guardian: one salary ($150k) to the scandal-plagued John Williams, and another (of a similar size) to his 'replacement.' Meanwhile Williams will stay on for another year, collecting his salary while doing literally nothing….

     I’ve been keeping track of comments to stories about Williams in the Reg (etc.), and it’s pretty clear that many Republicans are fed up with Campbell and his pals, including the County’s unfortunately high-profile DA, Tony “the unscrupulous” Rackaucas, and low-profile über-wheeler-dealer-consigliere (and chiropractor advocate) Mike "Darth Vader" Schroeder. It's a strong and consistent phenomenon.

Williams: a real winner

     I don’t know what to make of it all. And what's with the Central Committee? You’d think that any group of self-respecting conservatives would immediately rout this rude crew of venal, taxpayer-exploiting assholes. Yeah, but, if that were true, how to explain the astounding fact that this same crowd of hyenas**, more or less, has been in charge of the county GOP for decades?
     I dunno. Beats me.

*Notoriously, Ms. Pauly, reacting to the President's health care bill, asked, "do you feel sodomized?"
**Pace hyenas!

• Gay Bar Mourns Elizabeth Taylor
• Humans arrived in North America 2,500 years earlier than thought

Nice Work If You Can Get It



Williams: pal o' DA & Tom Fuentes

 From this morning's Register website:

Public Guardian will cost county twice-at least for a while

Despite being stripped of nearly every duty belonging to the county’s public guardian, John S. Williams will continue to receive his full paycheck, the Watchdog has learned.

In fact, the County of Orange will soon be paying two people to head the county’s public guardian agency – Williams and an executive manager.

Williams, who has been hounded by accusations of mismanagement and asked by the Board of Supervisors to resign, will not be allowed to do anything except sign his name on official court documents.

Everything else – from hiring and firing personnel, overseeing the day-to-day operations, making budget decisions, and overhauling the troubled agency’s culture – will be handed to the yet-to-be-hired executive manager.

To read the story in its entirety, click here.

The Google "books" ruling

A Copyright Expert Who Spoke Up for Academic Authors Offers Insights on the Google Books Ruling (Chronicle of Higher Education)

     Pamela Samuelson played a lead role in voicing academic authors' concerns over the Google Books settlement. That advocacy made an impact: Judge Denny Chin cited her writing in his ruling rejecting Google's deal with authors and publishers….
     In an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday, Ms. Samuelson, a copyright expert and professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, shared her take on what the judge's decision means—and where we go from here.
     Q. Is this a good ruling?
     A. It's the only ruling really that the judge, I think, could have made. The settlement was so complex, and it was so far-reaching. With the Department of Justice and the governments of France and Germany stridently opposed to the settlement, it seems to me that the judge really didn't have all that much choice. So the ultimate ruling, that the settlement is not fair, reasonable, and adequate to the class, is one that I think was inevitable.
     The thing that surprised me about the opinion was that he took seriously the issues about whether the Authors Guild and some of its members had adequately represented the interests of all authors, including academic authors and foreign authors. That was very gratifying because I spent a lot of time crafting letters to the judge saying that academic authors did have different interests. Academic authors, on average, would prefer open access. Whereas the guild and its members, understandably, want to do profit maximization.
     … One of the things that was very pleasing to me about the judge's ruling is that the judge also said changes this far-reaching to the default rules of copyright law have to be done through Congress.
The settlement would grant Google about five different licenses that ordinarily, to get that broad a license, you'd have to get it from Congress….
     If Congress was going to grant licenses like this, it wouldn't just grant them to Google. Part of what the Justice Department came to recognize is that the licenses that Google would get from the settlement would create barriers to entry to any other firm, because no one else could get those licenses. That's something that really fed into the antitrust analysis in the case. The settlement would give Google a de facto monopoly over the orphan books [unclaimed works whose copyright owners aren't known or can't be found] that would make a subscription service that it could offer unreachable by any subscription service that anyone else might offer. Google could have millions and millions of books that no one else could reach.

     Q. What does the judge's ruling mean for privacy concerns raised about Google Books?
     A. He decided that the privacy objections by themselves were not a reason to reject the settlement….
The way the settlement was drafted, it called for Google to engage in extremely extensive monitoring of access to books. Now you could say that one of the reasons they needed to do that was because, if they're going to pay specific authors for specific books that might be read, let's say, in the institutional-subscription corpus, then they've got to know whose books are being read.
     But as we all know, Google basically also wants to know everything that we look at and everything that we read, and they would be engaged in profiling and serving up ads. There were virtually no privacy guarantees for users in the settlement agreement….
     … Libraries have been very, very careful over time about protecting the privacy interests of their user base. And Google was not willing to make commitments to essentially accomplish an equivalent level of protection. When we're talking about a corpus of books that millions of people in the U.S. would be using, not to have any serious privacy commitments here really was distressing.
     Q. What does the ruling mean for academic authors?
     A. There are a couple of paths that can happen from now going forward. One path is that academic authors can communicate with Google about their interest in making their books available on an open-access basis. That would be something that would allow more of their books to be more widely available.
     Second, I'm planning to be working with a group of academics to try to put together a legislative package that would accomplish some of the positive goals that the Google Books settlement raises as possibilities. Much greater access to out-of-print books: I think that goal is really commendable.
     A third possibility is that, if this matter goes into litigation, I think academic authors will probably offer support to Google in its fair-use defense, because we are the kind of people who think that if you scan my book in order to index it and make little snippets available, that's actually a good thing. That's going to promote more access to my books, and that's what I want as an academic….

See also 
Research Libraries See Google Decision as Just a Bump on the Road to Widespread Digital Access (Chronicle of Higher Education)

News

Judge Rejects Settlement in Google Books Case, Saying It Goes Too Far (Chronicle of Higher Education)

     The proposed settlement in the long-standing class-action lawsuit over Google's vast book-scanning project is dead, at least in its current form. In a ruling on Tuesday, the federal judge overseeing the case rejected the settlement, saying that it "would simply go too far," even though "the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many." But he also urged the parties to consider revising the settlement, and suggested an approach that would deal with his major concerns.
     The case goes back to 2005, when the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google, asserting that its book-digitizing violated copyright law. The parties to the case reached a settlement agreement in 2008, a revised version of which was filed in late 2009. That "Amended Settlement Agreement" is what was rejected today in a ruling from the U.S. District Court in Manhattan by Judge Denny Chin. (Judge Chin was a member of the district court when the case came before him in 2005; he is now a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.)
     In his 48-page ruling, Judge Chin concluded that the settlement as proposed "would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission." He said the settlement would have not only released Google "from liability for past copyright infringement" but from future liability as well, and it would "grant Google the right to sell full access to copyrighted works that it otherwise would have no right to exploit."….

Cal State University to cut enrollment, faculty, staff and more (LA Times)

     California State University plans to enroll 10,000 fewer students next year, slash spending in the chancellor's office and reduce faculty and staff to contend with a proposed $500-million cut in state funding, officials said Tuesday.
     At a meeting of the Board of Trustees in Long Beach, Cal State administrators outlined a series of actions that will probably mean fewer instructors and classes and more crowded classrooms across the system's 23 campuses….

Gov. Brown may seek November ballot initiative (Total Buzz; Oc Reg)

     Faced with the growing likelihood that he’ll fail to qualify a June ballot measure to extend temporary tax increases, Gov. Jerry Brown is considering gathering signatures for a November initiative for the taxes, the Sacramento Bee is reporting….

Hundreds Turn Out to Condemn, Support Villa Park Councilwoman (Voice of OC)

     A strip center parking lot in Villa Park became a cauldron of religious and ethnic venting Tuesday as hundreds of protestors descended on the town's city hall to release weeks of pent-up feelings over Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly's perceived anti-Muslim comments at a Muslim charity event in February.
     Muslims showed up to the Villa Park City Council meeting with signs and anger to condemn Pauly's comments, as did whites -- with their flags and signs -- to defend her First Amendment rights. Jews, Christians, Christian Arabs, Quakers and a Sikh man also came, the entire scene bringing to a climax a controversy that has brought nationwide attention to the North Orange County bedroom community….