Having a little fun, is all

See 1998: I am ordered to undergo "anger management" counseling. Or not.

Yep, that's a photo of Chunk at one of the Mammoth Lakes, circa 1994. He wasn't angry then either. Just hairy.

Angry? Nope. It's summer, the weather's great, and all is well!

For you, too, I hope. (Sunny says "hey.")

Here's another draft of "Tommy-Ann Fuentes-Coulter":


I came across the following picture of Chunk, circa 1973. I was posing for artists, I think. Or maybe it was my Village People period. I can't recall.


And this, of course, is my Aunt John. She was on a junket in Orlando at the time of the photo. She hated Cubans, but she loved their cigars.

Ann Fuentes, Nancy Bushberg, and DickJohn Wheney

I was twiddlin' my thumbs, waiting for video to be rendered on my G4--so I figured I may as well respond to a coupla more reader requests (see yesterday's blog below).

"What if," asked one reader, "you crossed John Williams with that rat bastard Dick Cheney?"


That could get ugly, what with the clash of John's celebrated boyishness and Dick Cheney's renowned slow-burn evilosity. Here goes:


I call it, "Dick Wheney." Or maybe "John Chilliams." DickJohn Wheney?

Speakin' of people with a history of dangerous drivin', what about Laura Bush, the First Lady? (See Fatal Car Accident.) I do believe she's the most admired woman in America, and why not! I mean, she leaves the driving to others nowadays, so she's safe as milk.

Plus, she's a librarian.

One reader asks: "What if you crossed Trustee Nancy Padberg with our beloved Laura? I bet that would make a pretty picture!"


Don't think so. Check it out:


Good Lord! Good Lord Almighty!


OK. You've gotta admit that Ann Coulter and Tom Fuentes have a way of stirrin' up hornets nests. I mean, they're practically twins, what with his talk of "whores" and her talk of liberal "treason." Naturally, therefore, many readers have requested a crossing of Orange County's own Tom Fuentes with the Dark Side's Ann Coulter:


I give you--Ann Fuentes! --Or maybe Tommy-Ann Fuentes-Coulter, although I don't think Ann would sit still for the hyphenated name. But whadoo I know.

P.S.:

Earlier today (Friday), "Patrick" requested a Sherry Miller-White/Teddi Lorch hybrid. That's pretty weird, but whatever.

Sherry, as I'm sure you know, was the President of the faculty union during its most controversial phase (circa 96-7).

At the time, Teddi was on the Board of Trustees. She resigned amid rumors (mentioned in Dissent at the time) that she coveted the Human Resources job. How inappropriate.

Guess what?


Well, re the graphic, I didn't have much to work with, just an old black and white photo of Sherry (circa 1996) and what appears to be Teddi's High School graduation photo. I put 'em together and got this:


Well, that ain't a bit funny. She's just attractive, not funny.

I know. Here's Teddi Miller-White (Sherry Lorch?) as she appeared on the TV show "Room 666" in an alternative universe, circa 1968:


Remember? That's principal Seymour Kaufman standing behind our girl.

Jeez, I feel old.

We get requests

We at Dissent the BLOG get asked some weird-assed questions from time to time. Lots of questions have to do with our love of Adobe Photoshop. Go figure.

For instance, one reader asks: Hey, DtB, what if you crossed Trustee Don Wagner with, say, Huell Howser of PBS? (See Huell does IVC.)


That's a pretty weird question, but we like weird. So here goes:


That turned out pretty well. I suggest that Don take up weight training.

Another reader asks: Um, what if you crossed Trustee Tom Fuentes with that old Latina singer, Joan Baez? She was a babe.


Well, we hate to break it to you, but Joan ain't Latina, as far as we know. But Tom is. So here goes:


That wasn't nearly as successful. Still, our mongrel does suggest that Tom might do well to go for that softer female 60s warbler look. We'd like to hear 'im sing some of Joan's songs, too. One of her Spanish songs, maybe.

Another reader asks: I've got a real good one for you guys. How about if you crossed Chancellor Raghu Mathur with, say, that Christian guy, Pat Robertson?


We figure, since both of 'em are such hilarious guys, this might just work. Here's what we came up with:


Wow. Looks to us more like a cross between Robertson and a weasel. Sorry about that.

Finally, one guy made this odd request: Aren't you always yappin' about your cat, Sunny? Well, what if you crossed Sunny with, say, the President of the Board of Trustees, Dave Lang?


Weird, man. Still, we've got to admit that, lately, Lang has got his claws out. He gets real hissy, too. Funny thing is, Sunny's never got hers out, and I've never seen her hiss!

But we'll give it the old college try:


If you've got any requests, let us know.

¡Don Aztlán!

Last night, Gustavo "¡Ask a Mexican!" Arellano was the guest on Stephen Colbert's show (The mock O'Reilly Colbert Report), and that went well, I think. OC Republicans will be especially pleased:

Colbert: You speak very good Spanish!

Arellano: I know, isn’t it surprising?

Colbert: Were you born here, in the United States?

Arellano: I was born in Orange County, California.

Colbert: So, where’d you learn your Spanish?

Arellano: In Mexico—Orange County, Mexico.

Colbert: Oh, really? Because—it’s almost Mexico at this point.

Arellano: Yeah. Well, it’s already Mexico really….
.....
Arellano: Orange County is the Mexican hating capital of America. The reason why we're so obsessed with Mexicans right now is because Orange County--your buddies--the Republican delegation, they sent...James Sensenbrenner into a room, they beat him senseless, and they said, "You're gonna obsess about Mexicans now, you're gonna obsess about illegal immigration, and you're gonna make this into a national issue"...the hate that's been in Orange County for the past decade or so is now out in the United States, and so, it's what we think in Orange County--now you get to think. [See Can You Say...'anti-Mexican'?]

To see the entire interview, go to

Colbert interviews Arellano

(This link was provided by Matt Coker over on his blog: Clockwork Orange.)

One of the recurring characters on Colbert's show--I haven 't seen many episodes--is some guy named "Esteban Colberto," who, evidently, is an illegal alien (aka "immigrant") threatening to take Colbert's job! Funny.

But guess what? This Esteban guy is the spitting image of our own Don "Don't Ask a Mexican" Wagner! Check it out:


Pretty cool, eh? Well, to drive the point home, I've stuck Don's head on Esteban's body:


It's uncanny ¿Que no?

Evidently, those gals are called "chicas," "chicas calientes."

Don and chicas. Very cool! All he needs now is his Colt--and his Tejana!

La Raza Cósmica!

[DtB wishes to acknowledge its blatant exploitation of G. Arellano's "¡ASK A MEXICAN! glossary." See OC Weekly.]

Ron Suskind’s new book!

Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, has finally been released. The publisher describes it as follows:

Relying on unique access to former and current government officials, this book will reveal for the first time how the U.S. government—from President Bush on down—is frantically improvising to fight a new kind of war….Little, in fact, has been revealed about the nature of this struggle and the methods being used. This book will change all that…Suskind's report is filled with astonishing disclosures and will profoundly reframe the debate about a war that, each day, redefines America and its place in the world.

The book is reviewed in this morning New York Times by Michako Kakutani (Personality, Ideology and Bush’s Terror Wars). Writes Kakutani:

…Mr. Suskind's book … reveals that Qaeda operatives had designed a delivery system … for a lethal gas, and that the United States government had a Qaeda source who said that plans for a hydrogen cyanide attack on New York City's subway system were well under way in early 2003, but the attack was called off — for reasons that remain unclear — by Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The book also reports that Al Qaeda had produced "extremely virulent" anthrax in Afghanistan before 9/11, which "could be easily reproduced to create a quantity that could be readily weaponized."

Just as disturbing as Al Qaeda's plans and capabilities are the descriptions of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror and its willful determination to go to war against Iraq. That war, according to the author's sources who attended National Security Council briefings in 2002, was primarily waged "to make an example" of Saddam Hussein, to "create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."

"The One Percent Doctrine" amplifies an emerging portrait of the administration … as one eager to circumvent traditional processes of policy development and policy review, and determined to use experts (whether in the C.I.A., the Treasury Department or the military) not to help formulate policy, but simply to sell predetermined initiatives to the American public.

Mr. Suskind writes that the war on terror gave the president and vice president "vast, creative prerogatives": "to do what they want, when they want to, for whatever reason they decide" and to "create whatever reality was convenient." The potent wartime authority granted the White House in the wake of 9/11, he says, dovetailed with the administration's pre-9/11 desire to amp up executive power (diminished, Mr. Cheney and others believed, by Watergate) and to impose "message discipline" on government staffers.

"The public, and Congress, acquiesced," Mr. Suskind notes, "with little real resistance, to a 'need to know' status — told only what they needed to know, with that determination made exclusively, and narrowly, by the White House."

Within the government, he goes on, there was frequent frustration with the White House's hermetic decision-making style. "Voicing desire for a more traditional, transparent policy process," he writes, "prompted accusations of disloyalty," and "issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the president's desk, and if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his 'instinct' or 'gut.' "

This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation….

Protecting “life as we know it”: Groundhog Day

[Scariest OC people #3] We keep explaining to anyone, including The New York Times, that OC’s reactionary rep is outdated hooey. But then the Weird Sisters of the Westminster School Board come along.

Roll call! Helena Rutkowski once said school libraries have too many books on Judaism.Judy Ahrens calls the teachers’ union “Communist” and talks about how her “rewards are going to be great in Heaven” by defying state law. And Blossie Marquez-Woodcock...has offered varying accounts of phony educational degrees before finally admitting all her degrees are from now-defunct, unaccredited ministerial colleges.

It all came to a delicious gestalt in March, when the Sisters refused to allow the district to pledge...against discriminating based on one’s perceived gender. The decision nearly cost Westminster $40 million in state and federal aid, but Ahrens justified it on her website by claiming “the legislative gay agenda . . . shortens the lifetime for the average male to 34 years if he becomes gay...just to get that tiny 1 percent vote of the gays the liberals have legislated a shortened life span for your child by approving an alternative lifestyle that is poison.” (OC's Scariest People, 2004) OC Weekly

Lately, I’ve monitored the ongoing Westminster School District (WSD) Ridiculosity. The WSD’s board achieved national laughingstockery a couple of years ago when it took a fatheaded and self-destructive right wing stand against a policy concerning gender orientation. The Fuentes crowd was involved in that one, of course, just as it was involved in the Orange Unified School District's right wing ridiculosity (which led to a successful trustee recall election).

Now, the board has drawn attention to itself with regard to its efforts to hire a superintendent. The Board first hired then, a few days later, inexplicably unhired Kimoanh Nguyen-Lam, a seemingly well-qualified person of Vietnamese descent who appears to have the support of many in the diverse WSD community (Caucasians are a minority).

Now the community is upset. A lawsuit is likely.

On Sunday, the Times provided a helpful recap of The Westminsterian saga (Westminster School District Lives in a Furor), which, as I’ve suggested previously, parallels SOCCCD's travaillery, what with its right winged wacko trustees, its precipitous descent into mediocrity, its endless instability, its capacity to generate embarrassing media circuses, etc.

Owing to my experiences with the sometimes superficial (albeit sometimes excellent) news coverage of our own travails, I’m not entirely sure that we know, based on newspaper accounts alone, what’s really going on in the WSD. Times and Register reporting paints a portrait of incompetence and chaos, stemming largely from the Neanderthal right wingedness of the WSD board.

No doubt, that's largely true.

The teachers union is not usually portrayed as a contributor to the Schweinerei. But, according to Orange Juice’s designated right winger—Art Pedroza—the latest WSD FUBARery can indeed be attributed to the teachers union (the WTA) and its willingness to do whatever is necessary to secure a favorable contract.

Sound familiar?

On Saturday, Pedroza offered the following report (Something Stinks in Westminster):

Inside sources tell me that the problems at the Westminster School District stem not from Kermit Marsh, the conservative Westminster council member who allegedly advised one of the school board members to pull her endorsement of Kimoanh Nguyen-Lam, but rather with Janet Brubaker, the president of the Westminster Teachers Association [WTA]. She is well known for her stand against the school board, in 2004, in favor of a uniform complaint policy that gave protection to students and staff based on gender orientation.

The WTA has already endorsed a slate for the fall including Jim Reed…, a cop named Bridgewater, and a third person—all are Caucasian candidates. Bridgewater is the husband of the PTA president who supports the union.

My sources tell me that the WTA, in endorsing Jim Reed, a Republican who caters to the WTA, is showing its true colors. They cannot say that they are neutral with regard to Nguyen-Lam, and that they support the community.

I believe that their real concern lies with their concerns about a new contract. They will do whatever they have to in order to take control of the board and get the contract they are looking for…. [My emphasis throughout.)

Pedroza seems to embrace a view provided to him by like-minded “inside sources.” It’s hard to say how reliable he and his account are.

But, especially given our own district’s history, the "corrupt union" interpretation is at least plausible.

So maybe we’re seeing the 1996-1999 SOCCCD Unprincipled Unionist Occupation, mutatis mutandis.


O HERE'S MY POINT. I am continually amazed by the short memory of SOCCCD denizens. Some battle will be fought--over, say, how to respond to violations of faculty rights, or, say, how best to approach the upcoming trustee election--and then, a few years later, the battle will be fought again, but with zero recognition that we’ve been through this before and that costly & important truths were then revealed.

That's when the Twilight Zone theme starts playing. Or maybe the Groundhog Day theme.

Let’s remember just what happened a decade ago. A small group of greedy and unprincipled and secretive faculty sought control of the Board by any means necessary, including support of right winged wackos, such as the Holocaust Denying Steve Frogue, the sleazy John Williams, and, a bit later, the acutely anti-faculty and anti-union Don Wagner, Nancy Padberg, and Tom Fuentes. (Maybe Padberg's improved since then.)

I recall a meeting—9 ½ years ago—in which the Faculty Association president was asked to explain the organization’s unprincipled tactics. We asked: How can you defend using a deceptive and homophobic flier? (See The homophobic flier.) How can you defend supporting a Holocaust Denier? How can you defend installing a slate of conservative anti-union Republicans?

We did all that--especially resort to the flier--she said, to protect “life as we know it." She repeated those words as if they were magic. "Life as we know it." Shazzam!

Some of us were upset by this answer. Some of us were not upset! That's pretty upsetting.

Face it: our current plight is, without doubt, a residue of that disastrous Old Guard victory of 1996. Protecting “life as we know it” by any means necessary has given us a board that hates faculty, a board that can't be got rid of for as long as Mr. Connected is around. (Maybe.)

So when you run into Mike or Sherry or Sharon or Raghu or Patrick or Curt or any of the rest, be sure to express your appreciation of history. Say: THANKS FOR THE MASSIVE & INVETERATE DISTRICTULAR SHITULOSITY.

And when somebody like me or Reb or Red comes along and insists on reminding you of events of the past decade, please don’t complain that that’s “old news” or that we’re just “complaining again” and “being negative.” No, that’s not it at all.

You know the Santayana quotation.

OK then.

(For a brief account of SOCCCD history in the last decade, go to Dissent's Very Short History of the District's Troubles.)

Finger paint fiasco

An area of lawn at Irvine Valley College was supposed to evoke IVC students' “patriotism and piety.”

By Bud Towne

June 15, 2006

OK everybody, stick your hand in the paint and then smear it onto the paper!

That was the idea, anyway. Officials at Irvine Valley College sought to get a large crowd of students together yesterday in a bid to create the “world's largest finger painting.” The project is a part of a month-long campaign to draw attention to the campus by celebrating what some IVC administrators are calling “IVC’s awesome patriotism and piety.”

“Our students are way more patriotic and pious than students at other colleges,” chirped a high-ranking administrator. “So we decided to fingerpaint, since IVC is a school, sort of, and finger painting happens at school.”

“We had high hopes,” added a second administrator.


“Just think of it! We’d be in the Guinness Book of World Records! It would be the crowning glory of a long series of achievements at this fine college!”

But then, yesterday, no students showed up.

"It would have been great," said the first administrator, shaking his head. "I believe that world record holders get a free trip to the brewery."

"Eventually," said the other administrator, "we scraped up a few young scholars who were sleeping in the library.”

“But those guys had really small hands,” said the first administrator.

In the end, maintenance personnel were instructed to spray paint a large blue hand on the 100-yard wide piece of canvas on the lawn in front of the Student Services Center. But since it was the only image on the canvas, and it was smack dab in the middle, it looked tiny.

“It’s better than nothing,” said the first administrator.

“Yeah,” said the second.


For a related story, go to Smile...for the "World's Biggest Camera"