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

Community College goals and reforms to be tossed aside?

From this morning’s Sacramento Bee:

Governor offers new plan to help community colleges weather budget cuts

Lawmakers are considering new proposals from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to allow community college districts flexibility to use more part-time instructors as part of the state's massive budget-cutting efforts.
…
The proposals are opposed by community college instructors and their largest union, the California Federation of Teachers, which recently helped defeat a Schwarzenegger-backed ballot measure – Proposition 1A – that would have extended newly imposed tax increases.
…
"Nothing the governor says these days surprises us," [CFT communications director Fred] Glass [said]. "He seems to be using this (fiscal crisis) as an opportunity to slash-and-burn education."

Specifically, Schwarzenegger is calling for a five-year suspension of portions of state education code that require 50 percent of a community college district's educational expenditures to be used for teacher salaries and which set a systemwide goal that 75 percent of instructional hours be taught by full-time faculty….

Cal Poly Pomona cancels summer session, affecting O.C. students (OC Reg)

Facing up to $35 million in budget cuts, Cal Poly Pomona (CPP) has abruptly canceled its summer session, eliminating a broad range of classes for 6,600 full and part-time students, some of whom live in Orange County.
…
CPP formally announced on June 5 that it has canceled its summer quarter classes, which were to begin on the staggered dates of June 22 and July 29. [Campus spokeswoman Uyen] Mai said CPP is studying whether it can offer some of the courses through its College of the Extended University, starting July 13.

If it is able to provide this alternative, students will have to pay more for their education. Mai said that a student taking 8 units of lecture classes in the regular summer quarter would have paid about $1,200. The figure would be closer to $1,800 through university extension….

Tenure and the public interest/another investigative reporter exits, stage left

Last week: at the Grand Canyon

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:
Tenure's Value ... to Society

A judge ruled last week in Colorado that not only is tenure a good thing for the professors who enjoy it, it is valuable to the public. Further, the court ruled that the value (to the public) of tenure outweighed the value of giving colleges flexibility in hiring and dismissing….

While noting "countervailing public interests" in the case, the judge wrote that "the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor academic freedom over tenure systems that favor flexibility in hiring or firing." The ruling added that "by its very nature, tenure promotes a system in which academic freedom is protected" and that "a tenure system that allows flexibility in firing is oxymoronic."
…
Rachel Levinson, senior counsel for the AAUP, called the ruling "fantastic," both for the individual faculty members and for professors elsewhere….

"More broadly, what this does is reiterate the value of tenure and the importance of tenure, and that tenure itself can be a public interest," Levinson said….

THIS JUST IN:

The OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley reports that Los Angeles Times in OC loses key investigative reporter.

According to Moxley, Christine Hanley has resigned. He's got good things to say about her:

For several years, Hanley was the lone daily reporter who joined me in determined pursuit of Sheriff Mike Carona's corruption at the Orange County Sheriff's Department. She broke key Carona stories, got reluctant witnesses to talk, found smoking-gun documents and withstood the intimidation that comes with challenging a twisted little man who had no business running California's second largest policing agency. Her excellence made me a better journalist.

Moxley includes her June 1 email to her colleagues.

Other exiting OC reporters: Norberto Santana Jr., John Gittelsohn both of the OC Register.