Noontide Press and von Brunn; what Fuentes' Regnery publishes

Just a brief update on yesterday’s blog re Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn and the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a local Holocaust denial organization with which one-time SOCCCD trustee Steve Frogue was associated. (Frogue praised IHR’s publications, especially the “Journal for Historical Review,” old issues of which are currently sold by IHR’s Noontide Press.)

In 1983, von Brunn was sentenced to prison for attempted armed kidnapping of members of the Federal Reserve board. After von Brunn was released from prison in 1989, he traveled to Southern California to work for the IHR. More specifically, he worked for the publishing arm of the IHR, Noontide Press, which evidently had (has?) a bookstore.

But where? The address given for Noontide Press these days is Newport Beach (same as for the IHR). But at one point (probably at least through the early 90s), Noontide Press was located in Torrance, a coastal town in southern LA county (not far from us). Torrance was also the initial home of IHR.

Noontide Press was founded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto in 1969. Carto founded IHR nine years later.

By the early 90s, Carto was “fired” from IHR, owing to alleged mismanagement/corruption. (Carto bought his wife a Cadillac, using IHR money, etc. The big issue was who controlled a big chunk of money that had been donated by the heir to the Edison fortune.) Eventually, there was a lawsuit, filed in 1993. Carto has been hostile to IHR ever since. Nevertheless, evidently under the direction of Mark Weber, IHR and Noontide Press have continued to pursue their original “populist” (i.e., racist) vision.

It appears that von Brunn ceased his employment with IHR/Noontide in the early 90s, right about when Carto’s relationship with Weber and crew soured. Carto claims not to have known von Brunn, which seems highly unlikely. IHR’s current leader, Mark Weber, also denies having known von Brunn, though he acknowledges having known of him.

There are reports that von Brunn has continued subscribing to IHR publications/newsletters.

Think of it! No doubt our boy Steve visited IHR's bookstore in the late 80s or early 90s. Picture him served by and talking to Mr. von Brunn! Yikes!

The loonies in our midst. Troubling, ain't it?

I do believe that most of the nuts who are drawn to racist organizations and publications are neither violent nor would they condone violence. I'm pretty sure that Frogue was in the non-violent category.

He's just a deluded fool. (It was troubling, however, to watch him fail to condemn the Nazis who descended upon board meetings in 1997 and 1998. What was that about?)

—Yeah, Frogue was "just a harmless nut"—or maybe not so harmless. People like Frogue—people in positions of power or authority who cozy up to racists and racist themes—make it easier to be a racist nutjob.

In any case, he was one of our trustees (until 2000)! Good Lord!

FUENTES AND REGNERY

To examine the publishing company with which Frogue's replacement, Tom Fuentes, is associated (along with the likes of Pat Sajak, Tom is an "external director" of Eagle/Regnery), visit Regnery Press and its very special catalog, which includes the titles listed below.

(Naturally, I'm not equating Regnery with Noontide, though it is surely scandalous that a college trustee is associated with the incompetent and dishonest "scholarship" presented in some of these books. I suppose that global warming denial and evolution denial are not as egregious as Holocaust denial. But what about Muslim bashing?)

The Bible Is History

The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House,

God, Guns & Rock and Roll

Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church

How to Survive Your Doctor's Care

Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?

In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror

Invasion Within: Overcoming the Elitists’ Attack on Moral Values and the American Way

Inventing the AIDS Virus

Kill It and Grill It: A Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish

How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror

Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America

The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos

The Myth of Heterosexual Aids

Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West

Outrage: How Gay Activists and Liberal Judges Are Trashing Democracy to Redefine Marriage

The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life

Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity

The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,

The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Global Warming and Environmentalism

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)

Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children

Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America

Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't

The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion

Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry

When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country

Who Killed the Constitution? The Judges v. the Law

Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster

IN THE NEWS:

GLOBAL WARMING DENIER ROHRABACHER FROTHS ON (OC Weekly)

Half who died driving [Live Oak Canyon] road were 18 or younger (OC Register)

...Of the 189 fatal or injury crashes along the road, 66 percent of the drivers were 25 years old or younger. Twenty percent of drivers were found to be between 26 and 40, while 14 percent were over 40.

Of the 12 people killed on the road since 1999, one was 16, two were 17, and four were 18 years old. Three people were 25 years old, one was 40, and the oldest was 48....

Big community college fee increases recommended by LAO

State hints at big fee hike for community colleges (OC Register; Gary Robbins)

The state Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) says in a new report that lawmakers could increase community college fees up to 3 times their current level without greatly affecting enrollment at the schools, which include nine colleges in Orange County.

The report does not recommend a specific increase, but says: “If the state were to increase fees to up to $60 per unit (or $1,800 for a full–time student), eligible students taking 30 units per year would be able to take full advantage of the tax credit—while leaving room to receive some reimbursement for textbook costs.”

The LAO report drew an immediate protest from the California Community College (CCC) system, which said any significant fee increase could have a devastating impact on enrollment, forcing tens of thousands of students to forgo an education.
…
The new analysis says: “New federal tax credit provisions allow the state to tap potentially hundreds of millions of new federal dollars for higher education. Because these tax credits will fully reimburse most California Community College (CCC) students for the fees they pay, the state could raise those fees (and revenue for CCC) with no net impact on most students. The purpose of this brief is to provide additional information—in a question-and-answer format—related to our recommendation.”

[CCC’s Paige Marlatt] Dorr added that previous fee increases had led to major declines in enrollment, a claim the LAO report disputes. The report says, “Our analysis suggests that this claim about fees being the sole or even the major cause of enrollment declines is exaggerated. In fact, there are several explanations for the enrollment declines.”….

Our tenuous "connection" to the (alleged) National Holocaust Museum shooter

[Note: this post inspired an OC Weekly story.]

File this one under “perhaps interesting” and also “probably trivial.”

But who knows.

You’ll recall that Holocaust denying and conspiracy theory-loving SOCCCD trustee Steve Frogue (of Lake Forest), who resigned from the board in 2000, was a fan of

(1) the “Institute for Historical Review” (IHR), a major supporter of Holocaust denial “scholarship,” and

(2) the publications/reports of Liberty Lobby, a publishing group run and funded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto.

Frogue was particularly interested in the Orange County-based IHR, which had been founded by Carto in the late 70s, though IHR management later had a falling out with the fellow (some time in the 80s, as I recall).

Frogue, of course, was very nearly recalled. Arguably, his serious troubles began when, as a trustee, he organized a Saddleback College “forum” on the JFK assassination/Warren Commission Report. The forum comprised four guest speakers, including ace Liberty Lobby “reporter” and tanning-booth enthusiast, Michael Collins Piper. Some of these guests, including Piper, seemed to express, or were associated with publications that did express, Holocaust denial, among other conspiracy theories. Piper had just written a long and silly book attributing the JFK assassination to the CIA and Israel (with the involvement of the Anti-Defamation League, as I recall). Some of the other speakers had equally incompetent views about the JFK assassination (ex-Nazis killed JFK, etc.).

On the day that approval for travel expenses for Frogue's four guests was on the board agenda, I phoned the ADL's Joyce Greenspan (her office was in Long Beach), alerting her to Piper’s association with Liberty Lobby (I had become familiar with LL and Piper while researching Frogue and his curious interests; Frogue, of course, had been supported in the 1996 trustees race by the Faculty Association). She did some of her own research and consequently came to the board meeting, urging trustees to not approve travel expenses for Piper and the other three "forum" speakers, whom she judged to be unsavory.

Willis Carto

Led by John Williams, the “board four” (Teddi Lorch, Williams, Frogue, and Dorothy Fortune) approved the funding anyway.

I made some phone calls. Perhaps Greenspan did so as well. Within one or two days, Saddleback College was in the news around the country: "College to hold forum including conspiracy nuts and Holocaust deniers." (That was the gist of it.)

During one board meeting, Frogue described visiting Piper in Washington, D.C., where Carto's Liberty Lobby is headquarted. During another board meeting at about the same time (in 1997), Piper came to an SOCCCD board meeting to defend his views and scholarship--but his presentation was lost in the noise and chaos caused by clashes and tensions between his racist, conspiracy-loving Liberty Lobby/IHR pals and the equally loony but perhaps more dangerous Jewish Defense League (JDL) crowd, including its founder, Irv Rubin. (See A motley crew of Nazis VS. JDL thugs: oh, what a night! and Night of the Nazi.)

(Horribly, Rubin later committed suicide--or was murdered--at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles awaiting trial.)

It didn't help that, during the same meeting, I read aloud a letter to me from Piper in which he offered veiled threats and repeatedly called me a "m*ther f*cker."

"Gosh, I don't know any scholars who use that word," I noted. (Something like that.)

So why do I bring all of this up? Because the Reb just sent me an article from the Lede—Noam Cohen’s “Traces of Gunman’s Online Life Begin to Vanish”—which, among other things, explains that the internet record of James von Brunn, the guy who shot a guard at the National Holocaust Museum yesterday, is being erased--presumably by those who'd rather not be associated with such infamy (or maybe they don't want the FBI on their doorstep).

Von Brunn, it turns out, has long been a member of this country’s racist, anti-Semitic, conspiracy-mongering, black-helicopter-dodging community.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Cohen refers to another blogger: Zachary Roth. According to Roth (of the TPM blog), “Von Brunn tried to use Wikipedia to promote the work of Willis Carto, the right-wing Holocaust denier and founder of the Liberty Lobby.”

In an update, Roth notes that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) added Van Brunn's website “as a hate site last year….”

Adds SPLC (according to Roth),

In the 1980s or early 1990s, von Brunn was employed by Noontide Press, a part of the Holocaust denying Institute of Historical Review [IHR], which was then run by Willis Carto, one of America's most prominent anti-Semites.

Did you get that? The loony Mr. von Brunn was associated with--evidently indirectly worked for--the very Orange County organization (IHR) that Steve Frogue promoted a dozen years ago in the midst of the controversy surrounding his Warren Commission "forum."

What does it all mean? Dunno.



ALSO IN THE NEWS:

Silverado Elementary holds last graduation (OC Register)

By RASHI KESARWANI

The big yellow school bus pulled into the parking lot of Silverado Elementary School for the final time today. ¶ The school, which serves 75 students from Silverado and Modjeska Canyon, will be shuttered by June 19 … due to budget cuts facing the Orange Unified School District.

Next year, some students will be bussed from the Canyons to Chapman Hills Elementary, which parents say is at least an hour bus ride that may begin as early as 6:30 a.m….

Parents and teachers said the closure of Silverado Elementary, a school that first opened over 100 years ago on Santiago Canyon Road, is a great loss to the community.
…
Lisa Alvarez, [a] parent, said she feared the effect that a long morning bus ride to Chapman Hills would have on young students' performance and behavior.

"I know the last thing my 7-year-old boy needs is a one-and-a-half hour bus ride in the morning," Alvarez said. "That's setting him up for failure."

Alvarez also criticized Prop. 13, the 1978 California ballot initiative that capped property taxes, a move which critics argue led to a reduction in school spending.

She called on corporate property owners to pay more in taxes. "These people should be facing higher taxes so we don't have to close down a century-old school," Alvarez said….

Overcoming sheer ugliness and total ergonomic perversity

NOT LONG AGO, the Reb and other members of Irvine Valley College's League of Obdurate Peevitude (LOOP) noted that, though our campus is looking wondrously spiffulescent these days, the major exception, superficially, is the butt-ugly dandelion zone just outside our own building—A200, the home of Humanities and Languages faculty, among others.

We squawked about it. Remember?

Conspiracy fans will recall that H&L faculty have been at the forefront of criticism/protest of our rotten Chancellor (Raghu P. Mathur) and the clueless, right-wing trustees who support him (including recent Grand Jury poster boy John Williams and Tom "inexplicable liver recipient" Fuentes).

Some prominent Mathur/board critics are of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, and much of that school, too, is kept in sorry old, penicillin-producing, A200.

Well, as it turns out, as we squawked, administration was planning to remedy the situation, 'cause, the next day, our Corner of Crumminess turned into a veritable Garden of Eden. Teams of workers, working around the clock, carried in hundreds of rectangular chunks of turf and just plunked 'em into place like tiles on the Space Shuttle. They straightened out and polished that scrawny Twig-o-Tree, too. See the pic above.

They did a good job on that turf. Can't see the seams. The lawn is practically natural.

Heck, the last time I checked (yesterday), students were sittin' in the grass, discussing philosophy, grimacing into the sun, smoking doob, and so on. Well, not smoking doob, but they seemed to be way mellow and they sure did like that grass.

OK, they weren't talkin' philosophy either. But they were talking.

I ran into my dean and she reminded me that our Library is another area of our fine campus that looks positively splendiferous. It looks best on the inside, we noted.

Inspired, I went into the Library and took some pics.

I never noticed before, but, in our Library, they've even got a sled so students (well, one student) can slide down the stairs to the ground floor in the case of a snow storm or something. Gosh, they think of everything.

Did you know that there's a "Freedom Shrine" on the top floor of the Library? I think they've pinned up some old OC Register articles about french fries and water-boarding. Very staunch.

The library is teeming with manifest (yet oddly unnoticed) UFOs, ever-hovering above iPod-encrusted studentry and drowsy Pecksniffian librarians.

Got clocks, windows. Nice view. I like the chairs.

Check this out. Going up the stairs is like taxiing down an aircraft carrier runway in an F-22 Raptor. Modern! Reckless! Delightful!

Very brick-and-mortery. Hey, if you don't actually talk to the students, the Library will make you think that IVC is the "Harvard of the West"!

—I kid. Many of our students are very bright. We do have some knuckleheads, but they don't hang out in the library. I think they're in student government or the Honor Society. That's just a guess, based on personal observation.

A REMAINING ZONE OF SHITITUDE

Gotta say, though, that, just across the sidewalk from our new Garden Zone is a remaining sector of abject shititude. Follow the arrow above.

Luckily, it looks like that's now getting a nifty makeover too. That's 'cause they're rapidly redoing building A300, which in some sense comprises the above-mentioned Sector of Weedery.

You know A300. It is legendary. More than ten years ago, one of Mathur's favorite hires (a notoriously inept and unprincipled dean whose trail of devastation, inappropriate touching, and failed pipe-dreamery occasioned construction of our famous "Faculty Mental Health Center" with its innovative "Narcissism Clinic") decided to turn A300 inside out. (That's how the Reb always puts it.) His loopy innovations utterly destroyed the place. Recently, its sheer ugliness and total ergonomic perversity led to abandonment and condemnation. Dogs wouldn't even pee on it. Rats eschewed it.

Yeah, but now they're totally revamping the interior! I snuck in there yesterday and took these snaps:

More alien craft and landing modules, but that's cool. Do we get to keep the little black cart?

Very spacey. The angles point to the exit, into the light, beyond IVC.

I like the blue pillar, which reminds one of the monolith in 2001 a Space Odyssey. Cool. Forbidding! Sublime!

No doubt somebody thinks these wavy wall elements improve the acoustics. What's that you said? I can't freakin' hear you.

TIMES ARE BAD, BUT THEY LOOK GOOD

I noticed some students sketching the Performing Arts Center or maybe the Beefsteak Bldg. (See below.) They were sprawling happily across the new Garden Spot and Live Modeling venue.

One student, upon confronting the wonder that is now IVC, seemed discombobulated by the excessive beauty and excellence.

I know how she feels.

Well, that's it. Things are looking up. And it's summer, too.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.

—Walt Whitman

OC Preacher prays for Obama’s death
Rev. Wiley Drake prays for Obama’s death (OC Weekly)

Somehow, we here at Weekly HQ missed that the Rev. Wiley Drake of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park not only declared last week that the murder of Kansas abortion Dr. George Tiller had been the answer to his "imprecatory" prayers, but that the so-called Man of God later announced he'd made a similar prayer of death for President Barack Obama....

Hear it for yourself:

Sacramento SNAFU

For some alarming insights into the state budget situation and its possible impact on community colleges, I recommend reading an article appearing in yesterday's The Ed Money Watch, a publication of the New America Foundation, a Washington public policy institute and think tank (it appears to be non-partisan).

In her article (“The State Fiscal Stabilization Fund Mess in California”), Jennifer Cohen explains that the state has won approval for federal State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) money but its application included a massive accounting error, overestimating the state’s “maintenance of effort baseline funding” (MOE) by $2 billion.

According to Cohen, the “oversight allows the state significant flexibility in its state contributions for education funding in 2009 and 2010.”

She continues:

At the same time, the state failed to include community college funding in its MOE numbers for higher education. As a result, the original SFSF application significantly understated how much money the state will spend on higher education each year....

California's revised SFSF application appeared on the Department of Education's website last Friday even though the revision is dated May 17th. The amendment only changes the MOE baseline numbers … for K-12 and higher ed, not the section where the state commits to actual levels of spending…. As a result, it seems that California hopes to reach the original state contribution levels but is allowing for the possibility of lower spending in the case of real budget problems….

As you know, I am singularly untalented in understanding fiscal issues (and articles such as Cohen’s), but I gather from all of this that disastrous incompetence is afoot, and community colleges stand to lose bigtime.

According to Cohen, “Because the $2.0 billion MOE revision affects K-12 spending and not higher ed spending, California's public schools could face even greater budget cuts than previously expected. Documents from the California Department of Finance suggest that total cuts to spending legislated through the Proposition 98 funding law could be as high as $6.0 billion over two years compared to previously planned budget numbers.”

(All emphases my own.)

Not the time for state education cuts, report says (Riverside Press-Enterprise)

Proposed state higher-education cuts will exacerbate a projected shortage of college graduates and imperil California's long-term economic future, a new report says.

The Inland area, already lagging the state average in the percentage of adults with college degrees and in the proportion of high school students attending college, could fall further behind and continue to have difficulty attracting high-paying jobs, said Hans Johnson, author of the study and associate director of research for the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

The report, released last week, predicts that the state will face a shortage of 1 million college graduates by 2025 unless current trends are reversed. Forty-one percent of jobs will demand at least a bachelor's degree by 2025, but only 35 percent of California adults will have one, the report says….

What I did on my summer vacation, part 2

Southern Utah is amazingly beautiful. I took this picture through the window, while driving, not far from Kanab. No place in particular.

The road crosses Kanab Creek here. Yes, the hills and cliffs really are red. Lots of westerns were made here in the old days. And TV shows: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, etc. Some of the sets remain standing.

Weather changes quickly and dramatically in S. Utah. It can be raining, and then, an hour later, the sun is blazing.

Everywhere you go in Southern Utah, it's beautiful.

Here are some shots from Bryce Canyon. I won't bother showing the familiar Bryce "hoodoos." Too familiar.

(Click on the pics.)

OK, OK. Some Bryce hoodoo action.

A beautiful pet cemetery in the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary (on 33,000 acres just outside of Kanab).

What I did on my summer vacation, part 1

Grand Canyon, north rim, just a few days ago. I visited the south rim in 1959. Don't remember that.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

The weather was moody and it fluctuated. Good weather for a visit with the sublime and the inexplicable.

They say that, from 30,000 feet, it looks stranger still, a hole that appears in an expanse of flat land.

I saw foreigners clutching their children. A saw non-foreigners letting their kids run wild, as though there were no danger of falling and dying. Odd.

The first European explorers hated it. It was, I'm told, monstrous to them, an odd thing for a good God to make.

I dunno.

The river, down at the bottom