Meeting with Congressman Gary Miller, GASBAG

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«Posted for RED EMMA!»

.EIGHT OF US FROM THE CANYONS met with Congressman Gary Miller (R-CA) on Wednesday, April 11, in beauteous Brea, at his district office, which is decorated with vintage Nixon election posters, I shit you not. The 42nd district is Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Wally George country, friends. It is gerrymandered (thanks also to the Democrats) to include only the most reactionary of the right-wing in a dozen cities and three counties!

.Attending this meeting were attractive and handsomely dressed citizens Jan, Steve, Debbie, Ed, Linda, Lorraine, Dion—and Red Emma. Miller shook hands with everybody and insisted on asking us our first names. He then repeated our names to us, as if reminding us of them.

.We all thanked each other for being there and I opened by asking the Congressman to hold a TOWN FORUM or TOWN HALL MEETING on the war.

.Yes, Red likes a challenge.

.I suggested that everybody there at the big shiny wooden table was against the war and eager for it to end and that the Congressman should host a public discussion on that theme. I had already been discouraged from this very proposal by his aide a few weeks earlier. Miller, who offers a kind of Reagan-Chuck Heston-cowboy-jock persona, opined that nobody ever comes to his town forums (he didn’t seem disappointed) and that he did not have time for that since “the Democrats have us on a five day working schedule to do two days’ work.”

.That was supposed to be funny. He grinned, which frightened me. But I persisted, offering what I thought were some winning reasons for both educating and hearing from his constituents, people like us (well, exactly like us, maybe only us) with sponsorship from the League of Women Voters or anybody he liked. I mentioned media sponsors like the OC Register, LA Times and OC Weekly. He responded by stating that he was planning some kind of telephone conference call mass-meeting—if I understood him correctly—which seemed to me to be a whole bunch of people listening to him instead of listening and watching—as we were doing, god help us, the big gasbag.

.He just would not stop about how darn busy he was. I interrupted (interrupting him turned out to be easy, and fun!) to ask if this planned virtual-meeting would focus on the war in particular, and he said—surprise!—“No,” and then told us that immigration was in fact his constituents’ number one issue, not the war.

.He summoned a chubby and fawning aide (Miller is a big man. Weirdly, everybody on his staff is small. Think Willy Wonka and the tiny Oompaloompas) to nod at this assertion. I tried again to suggest that the war should be a priority, regardless, and that we wanted a forum, and that it would be good for Miller to make it an issue because he was our elected representative and George Washington had wooden teeth and Betsy Ross knitted a horse.

.Somebody from our band of citizen lobbyists bravely offered that we could get “a hundred people, easy” to come out for such an event in the canyons alone, which was so frightening an announcement that Miller turned from arguing with me, and asked to hear from others. Steve jumped in, identifying himself as a Vietnam-era veteran, opposed to the war, the lies, the waste.

.Steve was thoughtful and beautiful, and he wears a suit nicely. Miller, who is not only large but physically quite painful to look at (big white teeth, orange hair, skin courtesy of Madame Tussauds) offered some pro-military bromides about sacrifice, identifying a whole cemetery-full of wounded and dead family and friends. He was, pathetically if unshyly, trying to out-military our vet. It was the obvious “Support the Troops” red herring, meant to shame us into—what, I wonder? Changing our minds? Enlisting?

.Thankfully, Ed jumped in, dislodging a few body parts and military dead now strewn across the shiny polished table, with an eloquent economic critique about the failing health of the nation’s markets and trade, offering that the war was harming our status and financial future. Miller disagreed, though I was not sure with what, exactly. It was hard to follow, and since I read only Paul Krugman in the liberal capitalist paper of record, perhaps the dismal science lesson here eluded me.

.Or maybe Miller is just full of shit. At any rate, he disagreed a lot. And talked a lot. Jan had warned us that, during a recent lobby day, she had met with him and couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Miller said he disagreed with Steve too, by the way, and that “win or lose” he was not in favor of a “date certain” end to the war. He said he supported benchmarks.

.I thought of a bench. Thinking of the bench made me want to carve my name or a dirty word on it, and I had to hold my hand back so I wouldn’t start whittling away on the big shiny table. Still, I couldn’t get that phrase “win or lose” out of my head. It sort of wiggled around in there like a small insect or, increasingly, a big insect and then a real big one, maybe Mothra.

.Interrupting, I tried to get Miller to explain what “win” meant, and what “lose” meant. I really did. I should have asked what a benchmark might look like—say, 100 more dead for a month, two hundred dead in six weeks?

.Linda asked him to consider the war profiteering, and he responded, unbelievably, by saying that fraud was built into all programs. He pointed to fraud and abuse surrounding—yes, hold on, wait, here it comes!—Hurricane Katrina relief. This is, of course, ironic for so many reasons, not the least of which is named George Bush.

.Linda, who does not suffer fools, tried to link the war to the opportunism and theft of the war industry, going all cause and effect on him, whence Miller, no slouch, reminded us that he was on the oversight committee (more irony), and that there was abuse and fraud everywhere!

.I think “everywhere” includes his office, but I did not mention that, nor did I mention the part about him being investigated by the FBI for, yes, fraud. (See Most corrupt, Ex-Aids allege abuse of power, Gary Miller can always get what he wants.)


.I did mention Blackwater and KBR, but he looked at me like I had just stepped on his toe or eaten his puppy, which I would have at this point. I kept going back to his job of discussing the war with his constituents, but he again said that immigration and not the war was “our number one issue” and that he was only one Congressman, and that the war was not his committee and that he got along with Democrats, and was a pal of Barney Frank, and that they wrote legislation together, how about that?

.That was pretty darn subtle political insider stuff, I guess, as I think I read somewhere that Barney is gay while Miller is a member of the Sonrise Christian School, whose mission it is "To create an environment where children can experience the love of Jesus as they grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man." So see what a cool guy Gary is. Some of my best friends are homosexual illegal immigrants.

.I recalled his foolish views about punishing undocumented Mexicans. I almost interrupted to say that immigration was also not one of his committees. I wanted to make sure of that fact. At home, later, after taking a few recreational painkillers, I looked it up. No, in fact Miller is not on any committees directly dealing with immigration. (See committee memberships.)

.I interrupted again (I was getting good at it), advising him that I understood how committees worked, and didn’t need a civics lesson. He got a little pissy. I went back to the town hall forum idea (the only horses I ride are dead ones) and he said, finally, that he would take it under consideration or something to that effect.

.Soon a cherub or some other flying creature, perhaps one of the monkeys from Oz, arrived to tell the Congressman that our fifteen minutes were over and his next appointment (no doubt the Ghost of Richard Nixon Support Committee) was waiting for him. After shaking and thanking again, I made a bee-line for Steve T, the tallest little aide, with whom I’d met earlier, and asked him when Miller would be in the district again, and when we might think about a town forum. Meanwhile, my fellow citizen lobbyists chatted with Miller, Debbie giving him some moral and political instruction about not killing people. She made direct eye contact (brave woman!) and gave him what she calls the “John Nichols 10-10-10” in an attempt to bring a sense of urgency to ending what she calls “this senseless carnage” (I don’t think she meant the meeting). Here it is:

• Every 10 minutes an Iraqi dies
• Every 10 hours an American dies
• Every 10 days we spend 10 billion of our national treasury

.Thus ended our citizen lobbying effort. Methinks we showed a lot of restraint. Nobody once mentioned the bit about Miller being investigated for fraud as the result of not one, but two bogus land deals. (Naturally, he was a “developer” before being elected).

.Of course, if you visit the above link you could choose to embrace further despair (and who doesn’t need more of that?) by noting that this crook is, yes, a member of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, where he is the Ranking Minority Member.

.Which is just pretty darned perfect. —RE

Andrew Tonkovich

Gem or turd, it'll be a landmark

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TOOK MY CAMERA TO WORK TODAY. I figured I'd take some new snaps of the Irvine Valley College Performing Arts Center. It's still under construction, but it should be completed in a few months.

You know how people are: they see some big new thing, and so they naturally offer their opinion about its appearance. You don't have to ask 'em for it. They'll give it to you anyway.

At IVC, everybody's got an opinion about this thing. Some like it. Some think it looks like a Best Buy.

Me, I kinda like it.

I admit that it looks kinda weird and edgy. But I like weird and edgy.

I'd have chosen a different color, but, hey, this will do.

Near as I can figure, the thing is gonna be way cool on the inside. My guess: it will be impossible to be unimpressed by its innards, whatever one may think of its lurid hide.

The dang thing better be good somehow, 'cause it's seriously big.

Turd or gem: it'll be a landmark.

Nothing's ever been big at IVC. At IVC, we've only known dinky. This is our first Big Thing.

My money's on this thing turning out well. Naysayers can go pound sand, I say. —CW

P.S.: OK, maybe it does look a little like a Best Buy. But people LIKE Best Buy, don't they?

Hey kids! Let's put on a book burning!

     4/11/07 WEDNESDAY, at approximately 10:45, a college administrator who is responsible for community relations and fundraising approached Rebel Girl in her office. Chunk was there too, ensconced in his new ergonomically correct office chair, swiveling mildly, as if preparing for a stint in the space program. The administrator is a cheerful sort, and bounces with the kind of energy that Rebel Girl envies, but is also frightened by.
     The administrator—let's call him Mickey, shall we?—inquired if she had ever heard of book burning.
     “Sure,” she replied, wondering where he was going with this opening gambit.
     “Have you ever heard of any famous ones?”
     “Why sure,” she said, and she proceeded to talk about the reception John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath received in California by Chamber of Commerce types when it was first published, noting that the anniversary was fast approaching and adding that a book on that very subject was due out soon, written by a local acclaimed journalist. Reb really talks like this, Wiki-entry style. Helpful, right?
     "Well," Mickey said, "I was thinking that we need to better advertise our library and this college as an important resource for the community."
     Reb wasn’t completely following Mickey's train of thought (choo-choo) but she began to hope that what he meant would amount to some kind of scholarly lecture or talk, a series maybe, fully funded with honoraria and a budget and an invitation extended, perhaps, to that local journalist and others. She was, as you can see, already designing the flier and filling the seats. There’d be coffee and cookies, a tower of brownies and bottled water. Rebel Girl would do the introductions.
     “Oh yeah,” she said, “what kind of thing are you thinking about?”
     “Well,” Mickey went on, “the library, it has a lot of books it has to discard, right? Old books, books that are replaced. Sometimes it’s a problem.”
     “What do you mean?” Somehow, she knew at that moment, that her fantasy would remain just that, an unfunded fantasy.
     “We could have a book burning,” Mickey said. “It would get a lot of attention and we could use it to publicize the college.” He flashed her that winning smile of his that must have helped him land his position. Before he came to us, Mickey was in service to a series of local elected grinning Republicans.
     It’s difficult to faithfully describe this scene without further describing Mickey’s typical demeanor, distinguished by a kind of wide-eyed eagerness often found in movies from the 30s, Depression-era black-and-white films meant to warm our hearts. Think Mickey Rooney and young Judy Garland. Shirley Temple. His, like theirs, are the kind of eyes that literally shine with hope: “Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!”
     Or, in this case: “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a book burning!”


     “No,” Rebel Girl said, “we can’t do that.” Her fantasy had been trumped. There would be no speaker series, no salon on the politics of censorship. That ship had sailed. It had sunk, crashed on the reefs, been torn down like, say, a clock tower infested with termites or a sign on a greenhouse. She found it hard to look at Mickey, at his eager eyes, and instead she examined her new office chair, blue, ergonomically correct, a twin to Chunk's, delivered last week.
     Astronaut Chunk had crash landed. Zero gravity. Think Mercury Seven.
     “Why not?” Mickey wanted to know.
     “You can’t burn books to advertise the college. You can’t. It’s not what we do." (Yes, I really said this.)
     “I think it would be great,” he continued. “We could get lots of publicity, use up the old books."
     Earlier, Chunk had re-entered orbit, and had asked, “And what would be the point of that?” (Chunk has a bit of the Oscar Wilde about him.) He was asking about why we, the college, would burn books. He kept waiting for, as he told me later, Mickey to explain the point of doing that. He hoped that Mickey would pull a rabbit out of a hat, but no. Not a rabbit. Not a duck. Not anything. Actually, there was no hat either.
     Mickey looked at Reb with that smile of his that suggested that he still believed he could sell this modest proposal to her, “And you could be the one who lights the fire!”
     “No,” she said. “Not me.” She eyed the clock and began gathering her materials for class.
     “But you’re such a rebel,” Mickey said, still smiling. He grinned like we were sharing a private joke.
     “Not that kind of rebel,” she replied. “You’ve got me wrong.”
     She began to wonder if the college president had put Mickey up to this, had paid him to come over here and make this proposal, push her into a big practical joke, like the kind where your best pal kneels down behind the dope and then somebody pushes him over. Maybe it went like this: Mickey, Mickey, the president said, I've got an idea! Go over to Rebel Girl's office and tell her we're going to put on a book burning! Maybe she'll fall for it and write about it in the blog! Har, har, har!
     Perhaps there were secret cameras and microphones in the offices as some have suggested. Have you seen the Sharper Image catalog? Maybe even now, at this moment, the college president and his buddies were having a good old laugh at Reb's expense ("Oh, that Rebel Girl, she's such a sap!") in the presidential suite, watching the image of me and Mickey on a screen transmitted by a pen in Mickey's breast pocket that was really, yes, a tiny camera.
     “Look, the Nazis burned books,” Reb told him, “I don’t think we should do that.”
     “We could spin it,” he suggested. “Show that while people used to burn books, now they don’t anymore. It could be a statement about the First Amendment.”
     “While we’re burning books? It doesn’t work. You can’t spin book burning.”
     This went on. And on. Really.
     Chunk tried to clarify a point for Mickey: “A radical might participate in this sort of thing, not because we used to burn books but now we don’t, but because we still burn books.” Chunk teaches logic and you've got to hand it to him, that seemed pretty darn logical.
     Then Reb launched into some examples, including the recent case of the banning of Newbery-award winning children's book, The Higher Power of Lucky, by L.A. librarian and writer Susan Patron. "People banned it," she informed Mickey, "because it had the word "scrotum" in it. On the first page."
     How much longer could this go on?


     Rebel Girl realized later that part of her distress, other than uttering the word "scrotum" aloud to Mickey in her office, had to do with the fact that she was just not prepared to participate in a discussion about organizing a book burning on a Wednesday morning. She had awoken this morning pretty confident that she would not be having this conversation, uttering "scrotum" or staring at Mickey's ballpoint pen.
     Desperation set in. She looked instead at the clock.
     "I have an 11:00 o'clock," she announced and practically pulled Chunk out of his new chair to accompany her. Safety was a modest concern. Sanity was a close second.
     They bade farewell to Mickey who looked as cheerful as always. The show would go on!
     The day was brilliant, that cloudless blue sky that seems to suggest everything is just fine on the little campus in the orange groves, but without the actual orange groves any more, or the fig tree either. The line at the coffee cart was long. The rose bushes were in full bloom if a little sticky with whitefly. Rebel Girl and Chunk marched across the green grass.
     Rebel Girl turned to Chunk. “Did Mickey really just suggest a book burning?”
     Chunk replied, “Indeed he did.” —RG
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     (written mostly by Rebel Girl, with a big assist from Red and the usual support from Chunk.)

The Chunk file

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OK, I've got apples and oranges here.


Yesterday, I spent some time with my niece and nephew. Above: that's my niece, Sarah, checking out the leaves of a tree. She's some kinda nature girl. Loves lizards and frogs and stuff. She tells me that, when she grows up, she's gonna be a doctor and an "Iguanodon mother." She's pretty definite about that.


And here's my two-year-old nephew, Adam, preparing to roll his big Tonka dump truck down the hill near my place. He likes to watch it crash. He's a sweet kid.

Ran into these gals in the parking lot yesterday. They suddenly posed for me, so, naturally, I took a snap.

I won't tell you what one of 'em said, cuz I'm a gentleman. They're funny, boy.


Saw this great old Volvo, too. Very cool. You don't see many half-century old cars in Irvine. Everything's new or botoxed.

Earlier today, I accompanied Rebel Girl to her classroom—she was pretty steamed about something; you'll probably read about it here—and so I was along strictly for venting purposes. I said "absolutely" a few times.

By the time we got to her room, she'd mellowed out some, and so she showed me inside. "Check out the whiteboard and floor," she said. "Clean!"

She wore a look of astonishment. The students just stared.

"Wow," I said.




Here's my Congressman, Gary Miller, visting the set of a Civil War movie—this was about six years ago. He's a corrupt rat bastard and a supporter of the war, too. If you've been reading the paper, you already know that.


Here are his eyes. Part of me still thinks you can see who a person really is in their eyes. But that isn't true at all. Not at all.

—CW

Well, duh

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From Inside Higher Ed: MISALIGNED PRIORITIES:

Colleges rely on high schools to produce students who can do college-level work. But, according to a study released today, college professors and high-school educators don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on what the curriculum for college-prepared students should be.

The ACT’s National Curriculum Survey for 2005-2006 … highlights a “misalignment” gap that has persisted for the 30 years it’s been given, said Cynthia B. Schmeiser, president and chief operating officer of the ACT’s education division. “We haven’t seen it really getting any bigger, nor have we seen it getting any smaller,” Schmeiser said, but she noted that conversation on the topic was increasing….

…In math, … college instructors preferred an understanding of the fundamentals to a focus on higher-level study, while high-school teachers placed greater emphasis on the latter, such as statistics and graphical representations — often, colleges fear, to the detriment of the basics. In the sciences, college educators believe an understanding of the scientific process and investigative methods is more important than knowledge of specific content areas — again, the opposite of teachers’ focus in high school.

In English, the survey suggests, high school instructors’ focus on the development of students’ ideas overlooks basic grammatical and syntactic skills ….

We Get Mail!

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POISON! Money! Murder! Orphan girl! Charmingly poor syntax!

Direct from Rebel Girl's email account, preserved in its original state, delivered to you uncorrected:

From Miss Marie-line David

Dear One
Greeting.

Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you.

I am Marie-line David the only daugther of late Mr and Mrs George David from the republic of sierra loene. My father was a very wealthy cocoa merchant based in Abidjan, the economic capital of Cote D'Ivoire before he was poisoned to death by his business associates on one of their outing to discuss on a business deal.

When my mother died on the 21st October 1984, my father took me so special because I am motherless. Before the death of my father on 27th June 2003 in a private hospital here in Abidjan. He secretly called me on his bedside and told me that he has a sum of $9.500.000 left in a security company here in Cote d'ivoire, that he used my name as her only daugther for the next of kin in deposit of the consignment.

Further more he also explained to me that it was because of this wealth and some huge amount of money his business associates supposed to balance him from the deal they had that he was been poisoned.He then advised that I should seek for a God fearing foreign partner in a country of my choice who will assist me retrieve this consignment and transfer this money and use it for investment purpose, then I would want you to provide your personal contacts including your phone/fax number for easier communication.

I am honourably seeking your assistance in the following ways.

1) I want you to help me retrieve this money from the security company here and transfer it to your account for onward investment in your country.

2) You are going to be the manager of this fund and also my personal guardian until I finished my studies as I'm just 22years old..

3) You are going to procure admission for me to continue my studies in one of the known university in your country.

4) Moreover, I am willing to offer you 15% of the sum as compensation for effort input after the successful retrieve of this consignment from the security company here. And I am willing to proceed with you as soon as I have your response.

Anticipating to hear from you soon.
miss Marie-line David.

"Conservative” freshmen: the Fox generation

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In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: 40 Years of Changes in the Student Body:

For four decades, the University of California at Los Angeles has administered the Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshmen Survey, recording the values, attitudes and backgrounds of the high school graduates who will become the next batch of American college students. … Today, UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute is releasing a broad overview of trends gleaned from the survey. The report, “The American Freshman: Forty-Year Trends 1966–2006,” highlights some striking changes in the makeup of college freshman classes, many of which confirm widely reported trends — but not without a few surprising findings.

Among the trends reported:

Students are becoming more polarized. Moderates are in decline, and more are labeling themselves as either liberal or conservative. Another interesting finding (which might surprise David Horowitz) concerns campus speakers’ freedom to express themselves: “Over half (55.1 percent) of conservative (and far right) students believe that colleges have the right to ban extreme speakers compared to only 28.5 percent of liberal (and far left) students. Thus, not only may some polarizing issues divide students, but the method by which they engage each other in dialogue concerning these issues may also be a point of disagreement.”