The Chancellor's Opening Session: chirpy, sans Elvis

Typical marmot

     [Update: be sure to check out Tere Fluegeman's official update of the Opening Session, which includes cool photos, especially the one with a fox jumpin' on Bob B's head!]
     I went to the Chancellor’s opening session this morning—foolishly, for I have a cold, and my perspective is both odd and unreliable, like that of drunken marmot. Everything I experience inspires slumber or abject irresponsible snarkitude.
     I showed up (at the Irvine Valley College Performing Arts Center) late and sat front and center. Nancy Padberg was saying something, girlishly. Don’t know what. I think I went to sleep.
     On my way in, a friend accosted me and informed me that Padberg, our new board president, had tried her best to emasculate the morning’s prayer, to move it to the merest of generic spiritual genuflakitudes.
     “Did she call anybody a ‘heathen’?”, I asked.
     Not this time. Dang!
     It was odd attending an opening session devoid of the usual lurid Mathurian, Wagnerian, or Fuentean elements. Cognitive dissonance, man. Nancy said something about new leadership in the district and how that was a good thing. (She was trying to be good, not bad.) Chancellor Gary Poertner got up and said wise and modest things. He said he’d probably been chosen for the job because he can work with people, all kinds of people. He heaped praise on his temp predecessor, Dixie Bullock, and described the positive change in climate between the time he left the district and the time he returned.
     It’s pretty clear that the district community is happy to have Gary as Chancellor. And Gary seems happy with his job, too. It’s all terribly positive. A chirpy situation.
     A student suddenly appeared to tap-dance in a performance that featured (beyond her face and feet and the lighting design) a red door, from which she hung upside down at one point. (I espied her navel.)
     It was about knockin’ down doors or something. Very symbolical.
     The Geek Twins—Bramucci and Gaston—briefly discussed new programs and coming technologies. They even offered a bit of their usual techno whiz-bangery and cornball visual humor. (At one point, the Brammster showed a photo of a woman and her pet raccoon. “Why?”, he asked.)
     Marcia Milchiker showed up, but I think that she was it, trusteewise, aside from Nancy. (When she was pointed out in the crowd during the subsequent FA meeting, Marcia gestured like Lucky Lindy in a ticker-tape parade.) Evidently, Prendergast was off doing his thing at his high school. Don’t know about the others.
     New administrative hires were presented or at least mentioned. People applauded. I fell asleep again.
     Some kid played Chopin on the piano. He was very good, I think. His performance didn’t seem to symbolize anything. Gary liked it.
     Gary offered some remarks about the dismal state budget and how at some point desperate politicians and officials might start eyein' the money our district gets via basic aid. So watch for that, but don't be frettin' about it. Gary ticked off a few more low-boil zingers, getting’ real quiet and real real—you could hear a pin drop—and that was about it.

* * *

If you have to ask why, you wouldn't understand

     This time around, it was decided that the Faculty Association (union) meeting would be held almost immediately after the opening session (normally, the meeting happens when folks are tyin’ on the feedbag in an echo chamber), so, there we were again, twenty minutes later, waiting for Lewis Long and the union gang to squawk their usual union squawk.
     That went pretty well, I guess. Lewis (or Bill Hewitt?) underscored the importance of the 2012 trustee race, which would involve four trustee seats: Williams’, Fuentes’, Lang’s, and Jay’s. By then, of course, Williams, who resigned as of a week ago, will have been replaced. Likely, that newbie will run for reelection (in 2012). However, said Lewis, two of the others might choose not to run. We all hoped that that was a reference to Fuentes and Lang. Dunno.
     Anyway, the union boys were quite right to emphasize the importance of the 2012 race. GET THAT? They noted the opportunity to sign up for automatic paycheck deductions, blah blah blah.
     Soon, evidently, candidates for Williams’ replacement will be making their case before the board. The final decision will likely be made at the next board meeting, which is two weeks away. (One assumes that the union is all over this. Sure hope so.)
     Lee Haggerty discussed contract negotiations. Dry stuff.
     The guest speaker was the President of the CCA, a fellow named Ron Reel, a half Cherokee, half-Irishman, evidently. Reel explained that, by virtue of membership in the CCA (the Community College Association), Faculty Association members are CTA members. And by virtue of the latter membership, they are members of NEA, the world’s largest union.
     Was he tryin’ to make us feel bad?
     Reel announced that likely CCA will merge with the CCC—the Community College Council, an affiliate of the Cal. Federation of Teachers—and that will mean that 94 (?) of the 112 California Community Colleges will have their faculty represented by one union.
     Reel seemed to think that that was epoch-shatteringly wonderful. I’m not so sure. You can read more about it here. (I think that voters will increasingly regard the CTA as the Great Satan of the war on educational incompetence. You wait.)
     The luncheon that followed seemed decent enough. Biscuits, lasagne, chicken, etc. I spoke briefly with our new Dean of Controversy. She seemed nice. I told her that IVC was a great place, and I meant it.
     Rebel Girl made me get drugs, and so I’ve taken ‘em. Hope they work.

TigerAnn says "hey"

"Polyurinated" —January, a year ago

     Regular readers of DtB might be wondering why we’ve posted so little in recent days. Well, the main reason is that I’ve got a bad cold. With luck, in the morning, I’ll be well enough to go to our new chancellor’s “opening session.”
     Maybe not. I still feel like crap.
     I was hoping to write a piece reviewing the events of the past year, as reported by DtB, but I’m not up for that. So I settled for a brief piece about what was going on a year ago (i.e., the month of January 2010).

POWERFUL RIGHT-WING HOMOPHOBES:

Typical Mathurian "keynote speaker": PRI's Lance Izumi

     A year ago, Raghu Mathur was still Chancellor, and the Spring “opening session” featured a presentation about our economic future by one of Mathur’s Republican cronies, Chris Harrington, a VP at Toshiba America Info Systems. That went pretty well. But it irked me that, over the years, so many of these events featured noted Republicans and “business leaders” with close ties to the GOP. At least Harrington wasn’t pushing a right-wing agenda, as was Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi, a foe of public education. [Correction: as an officer of PRI, Izumi undoubtedly is a foe of public education, though he wasn't attacking public education during his visit.]
     Remember those crazy Ugandan politicians who pursued a bill that would permit the execution of “homosexuals”? We wrote about all of that a year ago. Turns out they were brought to their level of focus and enthusiasm re the “homosexual” menace by a series of wacky Americans evengelical Christians, including one Scott Lively, a self-described expert on “curing” homosexuality.
     That name rang a bell, and so I did a little research. Sure enough, Lively is among the religious nuts who’ve been pushing the “homosexual Armageddon” notion. He’s part of a crowd that includes David Llewellyn, who has long been up to his eyeballs in evangelical homophobia.
     Llewellyn, of course, is one of the chief attorneys defending the district (against a crew of “heathens,” to use Nancy Padberg’s term) in the ongoing Westphal v. Wagner “prayer” case.
     Tom Fuentes’ pal Howard Ahmanson, Jr. has been a big contributor to some of Llewellyn’s anti-gay and evangelical efforts. Not long ago, the Ahmansons gave a big chunk of change to Rick Warren (of OC’s own Saddleback Church). Warren is among the evangelicals who has visited Uganda in recent years, giving some Ugandan lawmakers peculiar notions about homosexuality (which Warren has compared to pedophelia).

Saddleback Church's Rick Warren

OUR RIGHT-WING LUNATIC TRADITION:

     A year ago, I did a little looking into the namesake of Saddleback’s strangely fortress-like Utt Library: Congressman James B. Utt. According to an old LA Times article,

James B. Utt … helped Orange County gain a national reputation as a hotbed of archconservatism…. "Utt the Nut," his enemies called him. He was elected to Congress in 1952 and handily won reelection until his death in 1970. Each year Utt introduced a bill to eliminate the federal income tax. He also tried to pass a constitutional amendment which would recognize Jesus Christ as America's authority figure. He opposed all civil rights legislation, but gained national fame, however, when he argued that rock 'n roll was a communist plot.

JOHN WILLIAMS AND LUNCH MEAT:

     We’ve long tried to get Jennifer Muir of the OC Register to take a look at trustee John Williams’ longstanding practice of spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on trips to Orlando and the like. She finally came through with an article.
     She also dug up a curious factoid: “the district has spent $12,184 for catering during the board meetings over the past two and a half years.”

THE PURITAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT (more homophobia):

     An item on the January agenda for the SOCCCD meeting of the board included a recommendation that our colleges’ TV channels only broadcast programming—including student film and TV shows—with a PG rating. Evidently, the request had something to do with an earlier incident: trustee Nancy Padberg had noticed a broadcast of an award-winning student documentary about an older woman “coming out” and going on a cruise (“88 Years in the Closet”).
     Evidently, Saddleback College’s Channel 39 has broadcast programming within the less restrictive PG-13 standard, which the student documentary passed. It would not pass the PG standard.
     Naturally, the usual suspects in the affected programs came to the January board meeting to plead their case to leave the broadcast standard where it was—a change would mean that many student projects could not be broadcast. Further, Saddleback’s faculty senate leader, Bob Cosgrove, warned that this sort of censorship/micromanagement might have serious accreditation consequences.
     Nevertheless, the recommendation was pursued. In the end, officials for the relevant programs agreed to voluntarily limit broadcasts now to programming satisfying the PG standard.
     I tried to get readership riled about this, but—nothin’ doin. When the accreds finally arrived, I mentioned this event as an instance of board micromanagement. But I doubt that they heard me.

DID HE RESIGN? OR WAS HE FIRED?

     From the board room on January 25, I reported that “Mathur was out." I quoted the reading of board actions in closed session:

“In the closed session, the board approved an agreement with Dr. Mathur persuant to which Dr. Mathur’s service as the district chancellor shall end on June 30th, 2010, and provides for his retirement from the district effective June 30, 2011.”

     It was pretty obvious that Mathur had been forced out. He no longer had four trustee votes, especially after some fresh infamy (occurring some time earlier) at the expense of Don Wagner.
     But the district sold this thing as a decision by Mathur to retire—to spend more time with his family, etc.
     Naturally, I ignored that blather, and it was pretty clear that journalists, too, knew what was really going on. But the official word was that Mathur had decided to resign.
     Eventually, the always-stupid John Williams inadvertently spilled the beans. For a Register article, he was quoted as saying: “…You work for an elected board and you need a majority of those board members to vote to keep you. In this case, the majority of the board felt they wanted to have a change, so they voted to.”
     Gosh thanks John. You’re an idiot.
     I reported the fact that the district paid ethically-challenged GOP lawyer Phil Greer $25,000 to help Mathur to negotiate his exit. (He got a pretty sweet deal.)
     That’s pretty amazing, if you ask me. But few were amazed. Greer is also John Williams’ lawyer. He was Chriss Street’s lawyer. He's a typical friend o' Fuentes: corrupt, unethical, slimy. Don't it all make you proud?

WILL THE FIX BE IN?

     We ended the month of January with a post that asked: Will the fix be in—again? We were referring, of course, to the search for Mathur’s replacement. Eventually, Don offered strong assurances that the process would be clean. (In the end, despite a huge expense [a professional search firm was hired] and the efforts of a blue-ribbon committee, the board rejected all candidates and instead reached back for Gary Poertner, a safe [and probably excellent] choice.)
     Also at the end of January, I skimmed the cream from a New York Times piece about funny malapropisms and such. The examples mentioned were pretty damned funny. So here it is again:

SEVERAL LARGE BOWELS OF PASTA
     Yesterday, the NYT’s “Schott’s Vocab” zeroed in on malapropisms. Having been raised in an immigrant family, I own a brain that is hard-wired with dozens of malapropistic configuroons. I think I even got some of ‘em through the umbiblical “chord,” though, really, that’s a mute point at this stench in time.
     First, the malapropism upon which much of my parents’ fame rests:

“He died because of a blood cloth.”

     Sometimes, I will look right at them and say, “There is no such thing as a ‘blood cloth.’ You mean a ‘blood clot.’”
     Always, they look right back at me with immediate and utter incredulity.
     Here are some examples offered by Schott’s readers:

HE'S VERY EGOTESTICLE

• Someone I know is a genius at this. She spoke of a woman who had her hair up in a buffoon; saw my new shoes and said, "My, aren't you the fashion plague"; and recently spoke of a man who is very egotesticle.

• my favorite poem is "allergy in a church graveyard".

• My aunt always said, "I can't have anymore children because I've had my utopian tubes tied.”

• My father, noting the first hint of fall in the air, sighed and said: "Soon it will be time to fart stars in the fireplace.” [This seems to be something of a Spoonerism.]

• A busy woman: "Sometimes I get so stressed out I have to go to my room and decompose for an hour."

YOU DRIVE MY NUTS!

• A co-worker's little son announced that "you drive my nuts!" My daughter once wrote that our cat Butter Boy jumped on Frenzy when she was "least expectant." My grandfather deliberately invented examples like astosbestos for asbestos and nutneg for nutmeg. Another relative admired the singing of Ethel Murmur and the talents of Shirley Dimple. This becomes a way of life. It's dangerous to be exposed to it when young! [God, this sounds like my upbringing. Pretty whackitudinal!]

• i cannot decide which music i like better, R&B or flip flop

• "lead us snots into temptation...."

• My grandmother was famous for her malaprops; when asked if she would like to take a flight in her friend's new airplane, she gasped "Absolutely not, I like it right here on Terra Cotta";

• At a restaurant: Clams on the half shelf and a cup of chino.

• ". . . government takeover and mandation of healthcare . . ." --Sarah Palin

• Here are selected favorites from my wife:
1. This is the tip of the ice cube.
2. Security in schools has been tighter since 7-11.
3. The right foot doesn't know what the left foot is doing.
4. The swine flu has reached the pandemonium stage.

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TURTLE

• At work, our team had been working on a project that had been progressing at snail’s pace with no end remotely in sight. One day, we had a breakthrough, and one of my colleagues excitedly announced at our weekly meeting, “There’s light at the end of the turtle.”

• Our church secretary always refers to the annual report to the denomination as the Sadistical Report.

• A friend with a medical condition consulted a doctor at "Cedars Cyanide"

• "I am impressed by the enormity of the universe."

• I've been tracking these at work:
Someone who is frustrated: "I've been pulling my head out over this one!"
Working through a problem: "I'm just talking out loud here."
Suggesting something: "I don't mean to speak out of tongue, but..."
Rehashing: "I feel like I'm beating this with a dead horse."
Feeling a little disoriented: "At this point, we're running by the fly of our pants."
Is in a bad mood: "He's got a craw up his butt."

• "This is a bare-bones specification, let's flush out the details later".

• After a staff party at which pasta was served, we were reminded that several large bowels of pasta were left over in the refrigerator. None of us went near the fridge as a result.

HAD HIS KITCHEN FLOOR POLYURINATED

• A few years back my father, who is now nearing one hundred, proudly announced that he had recently had his kitchen floor polyurinated.

• The late Bruce King, governor of New Mexico for many years, was famous for having said of a legislative proposal that it would "open a whole box of Pandoras."

• One of my son's college roommates, an ROTC cadet, dropped out of the program just as the Iraq war was starting. "This is not a good time," he opined, "to be thinking about joining the Army corpse."

• "Be sure and put some of those neutrons on it." –While ordering a salad.

COULDA KNOCKED ME OVER WITH A FENDER

• "You could have knocked me over with a fender."

• "We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this country hostile or hold our allies hostile." –George W. Bush

• Explaining lethal injection: "First, they give 'em a needle to seduce 'em; then they give the legal injection"

• Friend referring to his relationship with his wife, "...like two ships that go bump in the night."

• "Those kids were able to Flea-Bargain their way to a lesser punishment."

P.S.: My ex and I, having had more than our share of exposure to my nutty family, have always enjoyed, and have been inspired by, endless malapropoidal Bauerific incorrectitude. To this day, when I speak with her, she'll note the "flaw in the ointment" or how the night is as "dark as a bat."

And then we'll just laugh like hell.

Dummy

My sister sent me this. Pretty funny.

"Meg" like "egg"

I read about this series, called "Office Hours," in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Not bad.

Who most deserves the title "SOCCCD creep of the decade"?

creep |krēp| n.
informal: a detestable person.

     (Participate in our poll at right!)  
     I offer three chief candidates:

Candidate #1: TOM FUENTES 

     Fuentes, already the long-time chief of the local GOP, brought a huge sack of “creepage” (i.e., creep baggage) with him when he joined the SOCCCD board in the summer of 2000 (to replace resigning Holocaust denying trustee Steve Frogue).
     Had he been, as the politically ambitious Nathan Rosenberg had angrily blurted during a 1986 political debate, Ronald Casper’s “bagman”? Fuentes was executive assistant to Supervisor Caspers, who died under mysterious circumstances off the coast of Baja in 1974. Upon Caspers' death, Fuentes entered a seminary. Six months later, he left the seminary and became a "consultant." As near as I can tell, he was and is some sort of lobbyist. By '84, he was OC GOP chair.
     To explore the curious question of what Fuentes does for a living, see O.C. Company's Gift-Giving Gets Attention (LA Times, 4/11/93) and Tom Fuentes: professional schmoozer, circumventer of open processes, and THUG (Dissent the Blog, 10/6/10).
     Long before the summer of 2000, Fuentes had attained a reputation as a thuggish boss of a powerful political machine that tolerated no divergence from Pooh-bah Tom’s narrow conception of Republican values. (Businesses that gave to both political parties, he opined to his pal Robert Novak, are “whores.”)
     On the SOCCCD board, Fuentes quickly fulfilled his nature as a doctrinaire and dogmatic foe of public employee unions. He publicly trashed faculty with dubious "facts." He openly contemned the Accreditors. Ever the fan of red meat tossing, he led an (at first, successful) effort to discontinue Saddleback College’s Spanish “study abroad” program owing to that country’s pulling its troops out of Iraq!
     From the start, he was Raghu Mathur’s most inveterate supporter. That he lost the struggle over Mathur with trustee Don Wagner—who was running for the state Assembly at the time—probably reflects Fuentes declining stature and pull in Republican county politics.

     Disagree? We welcome your input!

Candidate #2: DAVE LANG

     Irvine’s Dave Lang arrived on the scene during the infamous trustees campaign of ’96, when (then-)corrupt SOCCCD faculty unionists made a pact with a group of ultra-conservative candidates (Williams, Frogue, Fortune, and Davis) in a successful effort to gain control of the board. (Lang beat Davis, but, thanks to the union’s homophobic flier, Williams, Frogue, and Fortune prevailed in their races. Lorch, the fourth majoritarian, was not up for reelection.)
     For years, Lang, an intelligent albeit fiscally conservative moderate, joined with trustees Milchiker and Hueter to combat the Neanderthalic “board majority” (Frogue, Williams, Fortune, and Lorch). Owing also to his strong and consistent opposition to union Old Guard- (and Board Majority-) favorite Raghu Mathur—the pompous lickspittle who had become, first, the President of IVC and then the district Chancellor—many faculty, especially at IVC, campaigned hard for Lang in ’00 and ‘04.
     But then, all of a sudden, Lang pulled a switcheroo. In the course of a lengthy board battle over renewal of Mathur’s contract, Lang inexplicably switched sides, joining the decidedly non-moderate Fuentes, Williams, and Wagner in supporting Mathur, who also received a big raise. (Faculty supporters confronted Lang, who offered no intelligible explanation.)
     Then, as board president, Lang openly took on the role of Mathur’s mentor. The idea seemed to be that Lang would help Raghu become a decent (or, anyway, a less offensive) person.
     What!?
     Long-time Lang supporters couldn’t believe their eyes and ears.
     Why did he do it?
     A rumor surfaced that Lang had switched sides in order to satisfy diehard Mathur-supporter Fuentes, who (according to the story) would reciprocate by assisting Mr. Bean in his efforts to become OC Treasurer (in the election of ’06).

     It was that office that the seemingly Milquetoastian accountant really coveted.
     But that was the year of the rise of Fuentes and crews’ latest star, Chriss Street, who, despite his hinky handling of the Fruehauf Trailer bankruptcy in the 90s, allegedly deserved Jeremiah cred re the OC bankruptcy. According to the old boys of the OC GOP, Street would vault the County to new and wonderful heights of fiscal health!
     Whatever Fuentes might have suggested to Lang, he was really behind his new boy Street.
     By a year or so ago, the rumor seemed to be validated, for, with Street seemingly going down in litigious Fruehauf flames (not unlike earlier Fuentean star Mike Carona, who was ultimately convicted of a felony), Lang signed up to run for Treasurer. (Less than a year ago, Street was found to have committed fraud most foul in the Fruehauf business. He thus declined to run for reelection.)
     Despite Fuentes’ endorsement and Lang’s huge campaign spending (including over $100K of his own dough), Mr. Bean went down in flames, coming in third in the primary. According to some Republican observers, Fuentes made no effort to rescue the campaign. There were no special events at the Balboa Bay Club.
     One wonders, then, why Lang continues to march to Fuentes’ drum.
     What’s Fuentes promising now?

Candidate #3: RAGHU MATHUR

     From the moment of Raghu Mathur’s arrival at Saddleback College North (the future Irvine Valley College) in 1980, he angled and schemed to become an administrator. But the fellow was incompetent; further, he was a notorious schemer and a liar, and everyone knew it, and thus his efforts were repeatedly thwarted.
     District-wide, among the disgruntled and "oppressed" (including various faculty who routinely got away with appalling misconduct, thanks to growing union muscle), Raghu promoted a theory according to which most or all problems were attributable to the dark machinations of the alleged Morrison/Burgess cabal at IVC. (Utter nonsense.)
     Naturally, conspiracy nut and SOCCCD trustee Steve Frogue embraced the theory and, armed with a dubious petition, got Mathur (illegally) appointed as interim IVC President in 1997. Soon thereafter, the board (again illegally) reorganized the district, exporting "offending" (according to unionists) Saddleback deans to IVC and eliminating equally offending IVC faculty chairs (including yours truly). Soon after that, the ever-defiant board (again illegally) appointed Mathur “permanent” IVC President.
     Especially at IVC, it was downhill from there.
     I won’t repeat the familiar litany of Mathurian and related outrages that followed. Let’s just say that, despite two powerful votes of faculty no confidence, and with utter disregard of approved district processes, the board majority appointed Mathur Chancellor in 2003.
     Mathur’s conniving, officious, and autocratic ways led to a district-wide faculty vote of no confidence (93.5%) in 2004. That only served to bolster our rogue board’s resolve to support their man.
     Still, by 2005, Mathur had managed to alienate former supporter Nancy Padberg (who had arrived, along with Don Wagner, thanks to union and Education Alliance support in 1998), and it appeared that he no longer had the four votes necessary to remain Chancellor.
     Dave Lang’s sudden and mysterious switcheroo took care of that. (See above.)
     Among Mathur’s outrages: he took the lead in changing the procedures for faculty hiring over the protests of the faculty senates (and thus, as it turns out, in violation of the law--according to the courts). He went along with the board’s meddling in the Accreditation process, which led to dire warnings and then a Wagner-led effort to do whatever necessary to prevent accreditation Armageddon.
     In the end, Mathur was undone by his conniving ways, which, coming once-too-often at the expense of the stunningly ill-tempered Don Wagner, led to an unstoppable Wagnerian jihad. By mid-2010, Mathur was gone for good.

* * *

Eventually: contra Mathur/Fuentes

What about Wagner and Williams?

     • Well, Wagner, governed by his enduring hot-headedness and arrogance, did get rid of Mathur. And that wasn’t easy.
     Plus Wagner ended his days on the board thwarting Tom Fuentes’ agenda—admittedly, a consequence of the rift caused by his anti-Mathur jihad.
     So, though he's certainly a creep, he ended up an anti-Mathurian and an anti-Fuentean. He’s thus disqualified for this honor. Or so it seems to me.

Poop for brains

     • Williams is simply too stupid to rate as an important creep. In my estimation, he is undoubtedly a creep; but he is a mere creep.
     "Creepwise, what he amply possesses in hair loss, he sorely lacks in gravitas." You can quote me.

     • Lang, too, lacks gravitas, but he makes up for it by being the special kind of guy who would betray good people for the sake of mere self-aggrandizement.
     In some circles, that makes him a shoo-in for Creep of the Decade—or, anyway, future resident of Hades' basement.

A challenge to local GOP leadership, born of disgust

The ugly truth: painful to behold! 

     Today, on the OC Reg’s Total Buzz blog, Martin Wisckol reports that local GOP activist Tim Whitacre has declared his intent to win the county party chairmanship.
     That’s ‘cause he thinks the party needs to restore its reputation:

Whitacre: quixotic?

Dear Friends and fellow Central Committee Members,

     After much prayer, reflection, counsel and encouragement from a number of you, I am officially announcing my candidacy for the position of Chairman for the Republican Party Central Committee of Orange County.
     This decision does not come lightly but now that I have made it, it does come easily. I love our Party and the Principles it espouses on paper. However, like many of you I have watched those Principles be cast aside time and time again from the National level on down to our beloved County to which we were elected to serve.
     I believe it is crucial for us to march in a different direction if we are serious about restoring our Party’s reputation and greatness so that we can bring back those good Americans who rightfully left us in disgust. I, like all of you, believe our Party’s governing philosophy is best for Orange County and the Country. However, we cannot hope to spread that philosophy effectively until we do some necessary house cleaning within leadership all across our blessed Nation. We must start here at home….

     Meanwhile, Matt Cunningham at the always-mediocre Red County blog, describes Whitacre’s effort as a suicide run.
     Whitacre responds:

     "Suicide Run???" No, just the right thing to do. For the first time in about three decades, the OCGOP Central Committee will actually have a choice when it comes time to choose our next Chairman.
     This will be a cake walk compared to taking on the entire Orange County political machine who were staunch supporters of the now convicted Ex-Sheriff, Mike Carona. Even though I was proven right, you guys threw everything at me including the kitchen sink and yet I'm still standing and doing the same thing I've always tried to do: Bring ethics and accountability back to the Party while returning it to its core values that once made it a champion for The People -regardless of race, color, creed or sex.. . .
     Regardless, if for no other reason other than it emboldens others to stand up without fear and fight for what is right, ethical and good for both our Party and elsewhere, then it will have been worth it to have fallen upon this sword.
     I ask you now to please commit to pray for me for wisdom, discernment, humility, courage and protection as I charge this hill. Pass the word and join me if you dare run TOWARD the gunfire. : -)

The OC: endless sleaze and corruption.
SOCCCD leadership*: meretricious spring of a corrupt machine.

          OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley sheds a tad more light on the situation:

     [Current OCGOP chair Scott] Baugh—a graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and a glad-handing lobbyist who has cashed in on his undeniable political influence since leaving the state assembly a decade ago—first grabbed the chairmanship in 2004 after Tom Fuentes served in the role for 20 years. His admirers say he has done a decent job raising money and settling disputes between Republicans. He can certainly count on indefinite backing from establishment heavyweights like Michael J. Schroeder, Mark Bucher and Dana Rohrabacher.
     But in recent years, there's been mounting internal party dissatisfaction with what some consider Baugh's cutthroat management style, his backing of disgraced Sheriff Mike Carona long after it was clear he was a crook, his refusal to obey party bylaws that call for regular audits of party finances, his close association to a relentless pedophile who targeted 7th and 8th grade boys and the local party's dwindling voter registration numbers.
     Indeed, under Baugh's watch near Armagedon occurred in a place once proudly hailed as "Reagan Country": Barack Obama, a liberal Chicago Democrat, did exceptionally well here in the 2008 elections.
     Nevertheless, Whitacre—a former U.S. Marine known as a stickler on ethics, a proponent of conservative grassroots activism and the man who led the 2003 recall of lefty Santa Ana school board member Nativo Lopez—has a monumental task to make his case for new leadership at the OC GOP. Baugh enjoys the knee-jerk support of two partisan online fish wraps: Jon Fleischman's Flash Report and the Matt Cunningham-tied Red County. You can count on them to fillet Whitacre and champion Baugh in coming weeks.

     See also Santa Ana resident Tim Whitacre is running for the Chairmanship of the OC GOP (New Santa Ana)

*On the other hand, Wagner has left for the CA state assembly; Williams recently resigned (while his County troubles reach boiling); Mathur was forced out; and Carona no longer is invited to pray and pledge and photo op with the likes of Dave Lang, who betrayed his supporters for a promise of assistance, from colleague Tom Fuentes, in attaining higher office. (Lang's bid failed miserably.) A new day?

Orlando Boy headed for court again

     Are you up for more John Williams news? I’ve been sitting on this info for a week or two, thinking we’ve all heard enough about the guy for a while. But if you’re interested, check out Vern Nelson’s latest post on Orange Juice:

The Insatiable John S. Williams tries ONCE MORE to swindle dead martial artist’s family