Orange County's favorite pastime besides bashing Mexicans is bashing Stanton, and there was a doozy of a wallop in yesterday's LA Times story on Bill Hunt's demotion. To quoth San Clemente councilmember Wayne Eggleston:

I wouldn't want to stop in Stanton, much less patrol it

That's the same we feel about Aliso Viejo. The quote was ugly enough for gentlemanly Jubal over at OC Blog to call out Eggleston on his civic bigotry. Eggleston responded with an apology and claimed Times reporter Garrett Therolf misquoted him. He ended with this gem:

Lesson: Do not co-operate with LA Times reporters as they are not trustworthy. I have dealt with Orange County Register reporters and they are of the highest quality.

The OC Weekly news team would beg to differ on your latter point, Wayne. But in the interest of fairness and accuracy, we e-mailed Therolf and asked him to respond to your charge. His reply:

I quoted Mr. Eggleston accurately, and I wonder why he did not say he was misquoted until he was criticized on blogs. Mr. Eggleston's statement is in my notes. We don't make up quotes at The Times. However, my editors have said that as a matter of course we do not provide access to reporters' notes.

Fair enough. We're not the Justice Department, and thus won't ask for Therolf to turn over the notes. Besides, he's a good, honest reporter. So awright, Wayne: so what did you really say?

Another law and order triumph for Sheriff Mike Carona. OK, maybe that law doesn't belong there-- there's going to be a lawsuit contending that what Carona did wasn't legal (which in turn calls the triumph part into question)-- but Carona is definitely enforcing order in the sheriff's department. Carona has clearly demonstrated that anyone challenging his leadership in an election is going to pay a big price for such independence. After all, what do people think this is? A democracy or something?

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Orange County sheriff's Lt. Bill Hunt, who unsuccessfully challenged his boss in this year's election, said Wednesday that he has resigned after being told that he would be demoted to patrolman because of his criticism of Sheriff Michael S. Carona during the campaign.

Hunt, who is going to set up shop as a private investigator in Santa Ana, plans to sue Carona, so undoubtedly more here's will appear in the future.

In a strange way, it is perhaps somewhat fitting that James Brown and Gerald Ford died within a day of each other, since Brown and Ford had a unique bond. As Brian Koller notes in his ePinions review of the James Brown compilation CD Disc Four: Godfather of Soul (1972-1984), "James Brown was probably the only person who thought that Gerald Ford was funky."

Koller is referring to Brown's 1974 hit, "Funky President (People It's Bad)".

People people, we gotta get over before we go under

Hey country, didn't say what you meant
Just changed -- brand new funky president

Of course, Nixon is the other thing Ford and Brown had in common. Without Nixon, Ford would have rated a three paragraph obituary everywhere except Michigan. He would have been remembered as a go-along-to-get-along kind of congressman. A steady member of the Washington establishment, whose brightest moment in the national spotlight was serving on the Warren Commission. Nixon and his need to find a replacement for his first vice president, Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign when his criminal activities were exposed, changed all that.

James Brown, on the other hand, had less happy results from his association with Nixon. He was widely criticized by fans for performing at Nixon's 1969 inaugural. And following his public endorsement of Nixon's reelection in 1972, protestors showed up at Brown's concerts with "James Brown - Nixon's Clown" signs.

In time, of course, Brown's genius eclipsed all that unpleasantness. His legacy is Nixon-free, loud and proud.

Ford's legacy, however, is bound to Nixon. While it is a standard assertion in the thumbnail sketches of history retailed to the general public by the media that Watergate proved no one in America is above the law, Ford's pardon of Nixon demonstrated rather clearly that no one in America is above the law-- except for those who are above the law. It demonstrated to the presidents who followed Ford that if Nixon wasn't quite right when he asserted "Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal", then at least when the president does something illegal, he doesn't need to worry about facing the punishment prescribed by the law. Consider Reagan shrugging off responsibility for the illegal enterprises known as the Iran-Contra affair. Consider George W. Bush sneering at critics of his domestic wiretapping program. That's where you'll find Gerald Ford's legacy.

(Koller review via Norwegianity)

Stumbling out of a holiday food haze? Feeling fat? Wondering what separates you and your good intentions about your waistline from those who seem perpetually and effortlessly svelte? Well, maybe-- just maybe-- it's less your inability to resist Christmas cookies and your little used gym membership than the bacteria packed into your gut.

The Associated Press reports:

According to two studies being published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, both obese mice and people had more of one type of bacteria and less of another kind.

A "microbial component" appears to contribute to obesity, said study lead author Jeffrey Gordon, director of Washington University's Center for Genome Sciences.

Obese humans and mice had a lower percentage of a family of bacteria called Bacteroidetes and more of a type of bacteria called Firmicutes, Gordon and his colleagues found.

The researchers aren't sure if more Firmicutes makes you fat or if people who are obese grow more of that type of bacteria.

But growing evidence of this link gives scientists a potentially new and still distant way of fighting obesity: Change the bacteria in the intestines and stomach. It also may lead to a way of fighting malnutrition in the developing world.

"We are getting more and more evidence to show that obesity isn't what we thought it used to be," said Nikhil Dhurandhar, a professor of infection and obesity at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

"It isn't just (that) you're eating too much and you're lazy."

Of course, until scientists develop a cereal called Bacteroidetes Flakes for your breakfast, it's probably best to put down the cookie and step onto the treadmill.

More from the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it's an e-mail Michael Scott "Wanted in Arizona on a Child Support Arrest Warrant" Kerr sent yesterday to participants of the Snowball Success:

From:
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 12:54 PM
Subject: Help!

Hi everyone,

There are three reporters and two individuals who want nothing more than to destroy the Snowball Express and particularly destroy my wife and I.

We would appreciate it if you would send them your feelings about the Snowball Express, what it meant to your family and that you stand behind Jeannie, myself and the Snowball Express team.

Their emails are listed below. Please copy mkerr@snowballexpress.org on each comment.

Roy.Rivenburg@latimes.com

HBerkes@npr.org

ksharon@ocregister.com

tmoore@ocregister.com

Also any editors at NPR Radio, Orange County Register, Orange CA or LA Times would be appreciated. Thank you and God Bless all. Have a wonderful Holiday and see you next year if not sooner.

Best regards,

Michael Kerr
Founder<

The Berkes in question is NPR national correspondent Howard Berkes, who put the nail to the Kerr story last week in an NPR online exclusive. The Sharon in question is Orange County Register reporter Keith Sharon, who snowballed (in porno parlance) Kerr's story last Saturday. No mention of the Weekly, which kick-started this damn scandal in the first place.

We don't know if Sharon, Rivenberg and Berkes are working on more stories, but you know times must be bumming for Kerr if he has to resort to having war widows harrass reporters who merely reported the facts. Stay tuned, but in the meanwhile, click on your right for our previous Snowball Express coverage!

For some reason, I'm largely immune to the charms of Frank Capra's movies. So I am not one of those people who must watch It's a Wonderful Life every year-- having seen the movie twice, I think I'm set for life. I must confess, however, that regardless of how non-worshipful my attitude has been towards It's a Wonderful Life, it never occurred to me that the movie's hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), was actually a menace to his hometown. But then, I'm not James Howard Kunstler, the author of such books as Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape and The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

Kunstler sees in Capra's Christmas movie an ominous foreshadowing of suburban sprawl and urban decay-- sprawl and decay that has nothing to do with evil, old Mr. Potter.

In one of the movie's major set pieces, George Bailey opens Bailey Park, a tract of car-dependent cookie-cutter bungalows, and turns over the keys to the first house to the Italian immigrant Martini family. Had the story continued beyond 1946 into, say, the 1980s, (with George Bailey now a doddering Florida golfer), we would have seen the American landscape ravaged by suburban development, and the main street towns like Bedford Falls gutted and left for dead. That was the perverse outcome of George Bailey's good intentions. We also would have witnessed the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s, when changes in federal regulation opened the door to an orgy of looting and grift (acted out largely in suburban development scams) so extravagant that a quarter-trillion dollar federal bail-out was eventually required to cauterize the economic infection.

At a crucial point in the story, Clarence the guardian angel takes George Bailey on a tour of Bedford Falls as-if-George-had-never-been-born. Only the town is named Pottersville now. Main Street is lined with gin mills, strip clubs, and dance halls instead of wholesome banks, groceries, and pharmacies. (Oddly, casinos are absent, because in 1946 we lacked the vision to see how truly demoralized our nation could get.) Prostitutes ply the busy sidewalks. Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place -- the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey's efforts -- a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America's morale. Frank Capra could imagine vibrant small towns turning their vibrancy in the direction of vice -- but he couldn't imagine them forsaken and abandoned, with the shop fronts boarded up and the sidewalks empty, which was the true tragic destiny of all the Bedford Falls in our nation.

Most ironically, today America's favorite main street town, Las Vegas, is Pottersville writ large, and most Americans see absolutely nothing wrong with it. How wonderful is that?

I kind of like that-- George Bailey, the unwitting destroyer of Bedford Falls-- but not enough to watch the movie again.

It does make me wonder what's next, though. Will someone argue that Ralphie's desperate desire for a Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story foreshadows the school shootings of the past couple decades?

It's a familiar sounding story this time of year-- a virgin with child. Only this time the natural world is outdoing the supernatural, because this virgin is with children. Seven, in fact. And these virgin offspring will have grow up to have mouths filled with toxic bacteria-- though I'm not sure that's really an improvement.

Flora, an eight year old komodo dragon living in a zoo in Chester, England, has produced seven eggs baring ferocious little omnivores, despite the fact she has never known the scaly touch of a male komodo dragon. Parthenogenesis, females reproducing without all the problems associated with mating with a male, is known to occur in some 70 other species, but until this year it had never been observed in komodo dragons. (If you want a quick refresher on these minor league dinosaurs, here's a brief komodo overview.)

Actually, Flora isn't the first virgin mother among the deadly omnivores of Komodo island. Another dragon, Sungai at the London Zoo, pulled off the parthenogenesis trick last May, but that blessed (if slightly toxic) event didn't get the international media coverage Flora's story is generating. All of which proves that amazing new discoveries in science have something in common with comedy-- it's all about timing. History-making virgin lizard birth in May? A story too obscure and boring to touch. Virgin lizard birth in late December? Now that's a story.

Of course, if any herpetologists understand comedy, it should be komodo dragon experts. For decades, the great radio comedians Bob and Ray performed a famous routine about a komodo dragon expert called, appropriately enough, "The komodo dragon". You can listen it here. (scroll down to the bottom)

It was a long fight-- a generational struggle, as President Bush might say-- but UCI Professor Jon Wiener has finally prevailed: the government agreed yesterday to release the last of the classified FBI surveillance files on John Lennon. For 25 years, Wiener, a historian who has written two books on Lennon, has been denied those FBI files on national security grounds. Or the government was trying to hide material that might prove embarrassing to the reputation of the FBI behind a phony claim of national security. You decide: the official reason the government gave for the past quarter century for not releasing Lennon's FBI files was that their release might provoke "military retaliation against the United States."

Yep, declassifying the documents that showed the U.S. government spying on John Lennon's antiwar activities during the Nixon years might bring on military retaliation against the United States. Military retaliation by whom? Sgt. Pepper?

Well, it seems whoever it was that was ready to attack the U.S. when the public learned how much time and effort was wasted spying on a musician devoted to peace has hung up his guns.

The threat of war is over. Happy Xmas.

Update:  In comments, Matt provides a link to Wiener's own account of prying loose the files (and since it's the season of goodwill, I won't point out that Matt's Beatle metaphor uses a McCartney song, instead of one of Lennon's).

Will the Ducks win the Stanley Cup? Will the Angels make it to the Series? Will Tawny Kitaen stay out of jail? Will terrorists hit one of our local targets: Disneyland, the San Onofre nuke plant or TBN headquarters? Should they hit Disneyland? Will home prices collapse? What will happen first: our troops out of Iraq or Bush out of the White House? And what about Britney Spears? Will she find love, or if she can't find love is this crazy world not worth a hill of beans? What kind of beans? Kidney? Refried? Black? Who you callin' kidney?

Folks, we need your help. Please leave your comments in the box at the bottom of the blog link. We are conducting what those crack scientists at Tyra call "research" or an "upcoming" thing we like to call "a piece." Yummm . . . Tyra: now there's a piece. Damn fine kidney, too. Wonder what's in store for her in '07. Tell us below, 'cause like we said, we don't know shit. That's where you come in: to give us shit.

You may believe there's a little bit of Santa Claus in all of us, as long as we keep the spirit of the Christmas season alive in our hearts. If you do, you better not mention that to Disney, because according to the BBC, some of the company's mouse-eared bah-humbuggers are claiming that Disney owns Santa.

When James Worley paid a visit to Disney World in Florida his portly frame and white beard soon had kids asking: "Are you Santa Claus?"

Not wanting to disappoint, Mr Worley, 60, played along with some "ho-ho-hos".

But Disney officials descended, telling him to stop the impersonation or get out of the park. They said they wanted to preserve the magic of Santa.

Mr Worley took off his red hat and red shirt but said: "I look this way 24/7, 365 days a year. This is me."

'Confusing'

Even after bowing to the request to alter his appearance, Mr Worley, from Tampa, said children continued to ask if he was Santa.

"How do you tell a little kid, 'No, go away, little kid'," Mr Worley told local television.

He said Disney had told him "Santa was considered a Disney character".

Mark Giselson, former City Pages blogger and all-around angry Norwegian, reminds us that 34 years ago today saw the beginning of the special contribution to Christmas history made by local boy turned felonious president, Richard M. Nixon (now Yorba Linda's leading roadside attraction). Up until 1972, Christmas and war had generally been linked by phrases like "Christmas Truce"-- it took Nixon to make "Christmas bombing" part of the Xmas vocabulary. Between December 18 and December 30, the U.S. dropped 20,237 tons of bombs and other ordinance on North Vietnam to force North Vietnam to accept an agreement to end the war-- the terms of that agreement being ones that North Vietnam itself had proposed two months earlier.

If that makes the Christmas bombing seem like a pointlessly murderous undertaking made all the more appalling by its timing-- well, that's just the magic of Richard Nixon.

God bless us, every one.

Last night on The Simpsons there was a Harold Stassen joke.

This morning in the Oakland Tribune there's a story titled "Angelides eyes another gubernatorial bid".

Phil Angelides, the Democrat who lost to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in last month's election, announced Friday he plans to launch an investment firm, advocate for education causes and lay the groundwork for a possible gubernatorial run in 2010. [emphasis added]

Today on All Things Considered, reporter Howard Berkes picked up the Weekly's story on Michael Scott Kerr, the man behind the Snowball Express and who we've shown over the past week to be little more to be a schmuck: a negligent father, possessor of an child support arrest warrant in Arizona, and a resume-padding liar. Kerr, of course, denied it all--not to us, but to another blog, where he also dismissed us as "a local smut paper selling porno and the like."

Berkes verified everything we did, and discovered another doozy--turns out Kerr also lied about obtaining a degree from the University of Santa Barbara. When Berkes asked Kerr about it, Kerr put the blame on the Saywitz Company, his former employer. But a spokesperson for Saywitz told Berkes they merely posted what Kerr told them.

Kerr says he'll answer all questions after Monday, once the families of soldiers who gave their life for the War on Terror leave Orange County. Hopefully, Kerr will stop his snowballing as well.

While it can't be called a sign of progress, it is a sign that at least one familiar aspect of American life is taking hold in Iraq. According to Paul Kiel at TPMmucker.com,

Not long after Republicans harrassed tens of thousands of Americans with automated phone messages in November's election, news comes that the robo call, that staple of American democracy, is being deployed in Iraq. And it's literally terrorizing city residents.

Nir Rosen of the new blog Iraqslogger reports, calling it a "mysterious psychological operations campaign," that Baghdad residents have reported "receiving phone calls that the caller ID shows to be originating from outside Iraq." What follows is a "recorded message from an anonymous man speaking formal Arabic" who goes on to condemn the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia headed by the powerful cleric Muqtada al Sadr that's been a continual thorn in the U.S.'s side.

The Mahdi Army has also infiltrated police ranks, and run assassination squads. Fearing that the militia's inside men have access to wiretapping technology, ordinary Iraqis live in fear that their robocall will be picked up and intepreted as proof they are anti-Mahdi -- and face execution at the militia's hands. The call reportedly left one Iraqi woman in tears.

Like the non-lethal American variety of robo call, the source of the Iraqi calls has been cloaked, and no one has figured out where they're coming from. Or how to stop them.

A political tactic that's merely obnoxious in the United States might prove deadly for its unwilling targets in Iraq. There' s a metaphor in that, I'm sure.

The final numbers for November's election are now posted on the Secretary of State's website, and according to the final tally, Gov. Schwarzenegger carried Orange County with 69.7% of the vote. Writing at California Progress Report, Frank D. Russo describes the gov's margin of victory in OC as "bone crushing", but points out that Phil Angelides bones were crushed to even finer dust elsewhere.

[Schwarzenegger] carried other counties outside of the Orange Curtain by higher margins, including 14 rural counties where he exceeded 70% of the vote.

In the end, Phil Angelides only carried six counties-- which makes how poorly the statewide Republican candidates who didn't star in Kindergarten Cop did all the more remarkable. The Republicans only picked up one statewide office, Insurance Commissioner, and, as anemic as Angelides' vote total was, Russo notes, "Angelides got more votes than Republicans did in four statewide races: Poochigian (Attorney General), Claude Parrish (Treasurer), Tony Strickland (Controller) and Dennis Mountjoy (US Senator)."

I don't what the opposite of "coattails" is, but whatever it is, Arnold's got it.

In porno parlance, to snowball someone is to swallow a guy's semen, then kiss him and deposit the gunk in his mouth. Why do we bring this vile practice up? Only 'cause Michael Scott Kerr insists.

Kerr, you'll remember, is the man behind Snowball Express, an organization that will fly into Orange County this weekend the widows and children of soldiers who lost their life in our War on Terror. As we pointed out before in the paper, we found it strange that a guy so concerned with helping out other kids doesn't care much about his own family. And, as we pointed out before on the Blotter, Kerr wouldn't respond to us but did to the blog The Sit and Spit.

You'll remember that there was a skipped part in the original letter Sit and Spit published. Now blog author Karen Spears Zacharias has posted Kerr's letter in its entirety, and oh are the skipped passages doozies. Here's the sanctimonious intro:

I am not a perfect man but I can say most of [the OC Weekly's article] is untrue. I pay my child support and work every day to repair my relationship with my children. Mine
has not been an easy life but through this mission I have healed myself and
am healing the hearts of souls of many. It is not about me it is about the
kids...

Care to comment back? If you want out now is the time

But this is the more interesting part:

How much more do you want to know about my life? I almost died once and it
changed my outlook on things. Would you like to hear about that once we get
this done because right now I need to work on final details.

As to how reputable the reporter or paper is I would question that. They
are a local smut paper selling porno and the like.

Hey Mikey: use the porno slur against us all you like, but the fact remain--you wouldn't answer my questions when I first asked for an interview request, and you still won't answer the questions others pose to you. And you sure as hell weren't calling the Weekly a smut paper when you e-mailed our photo editor that swell picture of you at the Crystal Cathedral with the Rev. Robert A. Schuller--this back when you thought we'd snowball you like everyone else.

During his stand-up segment on Tuesday night's rebroadcast of Comedy Central's Last Laugh 2006, comedian/actor/Commie Girl pal Patton Oswalt went off on KFC's Famous Bowls—the disgusting, layered mishmash of mashed potatoes, yellow corn niblets, deep-fried popcorn chicken and gravy all topped with a melted three-cheese blend. Did somebody say angioplasty?

Oswalt broke himself up as he revealed to the audience that KFC Famous Bowls are the fast-food chain's all-time bestselling item. Then, in his best redneck voice, Oswalt cracked, "You know what? If you could pile it in a blender so you could liquefy it and then lower it into a caulking gun and shoot it into my ephemeral artery, even better. But until you get a lunch gun, a failure pile in a sadness bowl is just fine."

And then after Oswalt, 43 minutes into the special, came the kicker: a KFC commercial for its Famous Bowls.

You can't pay enough for product placement like that, folks.

The Trust for America's Health has issued its annual report on how prepared states are to cope with "a pandemic, biological attack or similar disaster", and the results are very reassuring… if you live in Oklahoma, which was rated the most prepared.  Oklahoma's northern neighbor (and fellow tornado-target) Kansas also did well.  As for California, Reuters reports,

California, Iowa, Maryland, and New Jersey scored the lowest on the assessment.

The report said that in the five years since the Sept. 11 attacks and deadly cases of anthrax being sent in the mail, the United States has endured public health threats ranging from Hurricane Katrina and to a life-threatening E. coli outbreak to a potential flu pandemic.

But virtually all states still lack what is known as surge capacity in hospitals, meaning their hospital beds would fill up quickly if there were large numbers of casualties or sick people.

Still, the Times reports, "Jeffrey Levi, executive director of Trust for America's Health, agreed that California has made strides".  Considering that those mighty strides have made California 47th in preparedness among the 50 states, I'm not sure how reassured people should be.

In this week's edition of the Weekly, I profiled Michael Scott Kerr, founder of the Snowball Express, an organization set up to help out the children and widows of soldiers who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Great cause, sure, but we found out that Kerr doesn't seem to care too much about his own children, owing around $49,000 in child support and having a Arizona child support arrest warrant in his name.

Kerr didn't respond to our requests for an interview, but he did take the time to refute our article on The Sit and Spit, the blog of writer Karen Spears Zacharias. Good luck finding his response, though: it's no longer there. But thanks to the miracle of Google, here's Kerr's response (second item down) and published in its entirety here:

"I went through a wicked divorce, I now pay my child support on time each and every month. There is no warrant it is old news. The issue with the former employer was a business issue and had nothing to do with my kids. We settled on the eight thousand dollar amount."

More folo...

"The paper or the reporter never contacted me at all. I can post a statement but I really don't think I need to. There have been lots of good positive stories but no one talks about those. As to sponsors no one has pulled out
and more have come on board. I am not a bad guy, I am trying to help motivate the country to do the right thing. People learn from their mistakes and they can learn from mine. Much like we did concerning our
mistakes about how we treated people like you and all our vets in the past."

Fascinating response, considering:

1. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Department's website still lists an outstanding arrest warrant in Kerr's name. We called the department verifying if the postings on this website are still valid; they say it's updated every evening.

2. Kerr's child support case on file with the State of Arizona shows he made his last payment in August of 2004. The total balance Kerr owes now exceeds $50,000.

3. The court docket for a case against Kerr filed by his former employer that he mentions specifically mentions child support as being part of the case (scroll to the bottom)

4. I did indeed contact Kerr for the story. Read my e-mail below:

From: Gustavo Arellano
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 12:41:57 -0800
To: info@snowballexpress.org
Conversation: Michael Scott Kerr
Subject: re: Michael Scott Kerr

Hello,

My name is Gustavo Arellano, and I'm a staff writer with OC Weekly. In doing research on Snowball Express, I found that a Michael Scott Kerr is wanted in Maricopa County for failing to pay child support:

http://www.mcso.org/submenu.asp?file=mostwanteddetail&recordid=13120

This same Michael Scott Kerr is also listed in the Maricopa County Superior Court website as once having a judgment filed against him by Equis Corporation, regarding child support as well.

My questions:

*Is this the same Michael Scott Kerr behind Snowball Express?
*If so, how can Mr. Kerr explain the child support arrest warrant and the Equis case?

I can be reached via e-mail at this address or by phone at 714-550-59**. If the Michael Scott Kerr in question is not the same Mr. Kerr behind Snowball Express, my apologies.

Regards,

Gustavo Arellano
714-550-59**
GArellano@ocweekly.com

An e-mail sent to that address by our photo editor two days earlier was returned with a phone call by Kerr that very day.

We can go on about Kerr--and we will! Click here for the next post on Kerr!

Did you read the previous post about Michael Scott Kerr? Click on the previous post here so this one makes sense. Finished? Let's proceed.

Earlier this year, Kerr worked for the the Saywitz Company, a Newport Beach-based real estate brokerage and consulting firm, as a "senior real estate consultant." Kerr used his Saywitz e-mail and phone number when he started Snowball Express for contact purposes.

Kerr no longer works there for reasons unknown. But if you play around enough with Saywitz's website, you can find Kerr's bio. In it, Kerr states he's a "licensed real estate person" in California and Arizona.

What Kerr doesn't mention is when. According to the California Department of Real Estate's website, Kerr's license expired in 1993, while Arizona's Department of Real Estate website shows that the real estate license of one Michael S. Kerr expired in 1998.

Now, Kerr can easily claim that his bio isn't necessarily lying—he was licensed at some point in his life. But given Kerr has also been less than forthcoming with other aspects of his life, we wouldn't buy that argument one bit. And lest military supporters call us anti-American, anti-troops, or any of that for pointing these things out, we'll say this: the idea behind Snowball Express is wonderful. Too bad we can't say the same of the man behind it.

*Update: Karen Spears Zacharias responds in an e-mail:
There was no nefarious reasons behind the removal of MK's posts. I simply took it off (though it's now back up) because I'm headed into town for the event and want the focus to be on the children and widows.

Duly noted.

Is it any wonder that Congressman Gary Miller (R-Diamond Bar) coasts to easy wins every election? His district, the 42nd (which covers eastern OC and doglegs down over Mission Viejo), is one of the state's most reliably Republican districts, and Gary Miller doesn't just embrace those beliefs Republicans hold dear, he puts his beliefs into action.

Republicans believe in low taxes, and Gary Miller will meet any challenge, bear any burden, to keep taxes low-- for Gary Miller. This morning's Los Angeles Times details how Miller has avoided paying millions of dollars in taxes by using what charitable souls might describe as "questionable means". Less charitable souls reading the Times account might wonder why Miller isn't busy stammering out excuses in front of a team of IRS investigators. Still less charitable souls might wonder why the congressman isn't busy arguing with ex-Congressman/current jailbird Duke Cunningham over who gets the top bunk.

Miller also embraces that other sacred tenant of Republicans, smaller government. And, as the Times reports, Miller is doing what he can to keep government small by only occasionally showing up for work.

"Gary wants to leave early to get back home on the weekends, and he doesn't want to come back early on Mondays for votes, because he's focused on his [personal] business, and he'd rather be at home," one former aide said.

According to the Washington Post's database of congressional votes, Miller missed 65 votes during this session, putting him in the top quarter for the most votes missed in the House.

But there's more to Gary Miller than just not paying taxes and not showing up for work, he's also dedicated to constituent service. Of course, it probably won't surprise you to learn that constituent Gary Miller is most dedicated to serving is Gary Miller, as the Times documents at length in a second story.

You might think that disgraced former congressman Tom Delay would be too busy brushing up on prison etiquette to spend time frolicking on the internets, but you would be wrong. Delay can now add to his already impressive resume as a professional bug-killer and moral cancer in the American body politic, the august title of blogger.

Alas, things have not gone smoothly for the newbie. Only 75 minutes after Delay invited his readers to "speak truth to power" (or at least, the formerly powerful), the blog shut down its comments section, which had instantly become an impressive swamp of hostility. But since nothing ever truly vanishes in cyberspace, the comments are now available at another blog set up just to preserve them.

Here are some randomly selected samples of the comments the official Delay blog tried to delete.

YOUR [sic] ARE A FUCKING DISGRACE TO THE IDEAS OF GOLDWATER. CRAWL BACK INTO A HOLE YOU TURD!---

You left Congress disgracefully and you want people to take you seriously? You should be in prison you assclown, piss off Tom.-----

Tom,

When you're locked up, will you smuggle blog posts out in your visitors' rectums?-----

Tom, you corrupted the conservative cause and brought disgrace to our party. We can never forgive you for that. Please crawl back into your hole.----

Forget the blog, Tom. Just hook up with OJ and write a book.

When her Aunt Virginia died in 1982, Lorna Catling had no idea that forty years earlier the Gestapo had declared her aunt "the most dangerous of all Allied spies" in France, and issued orders to "find and destroy her."  Virginia Hall seldom spoke about what she had done during World War II, and didn't even bother to collect all the honors she was entitled to for her heroic service.  Tomorrow one of those long overdue honors will be presented to Catling as her late aunt's representative by the British Ambassador in Washington D.C.

The Gestapo knew Hall as "the woman with a limp".  That limp was caused by her prosthetic leg-- her left leg had been amputated below the knee following a hunting accident in 1932.  The accident derailed Hall's plans for a career in the diplomatic service, since the State Department at the time did not hire amputees.  What was bad luck for her in 1932, proved to be good luck for the Allies during World War II, as Hall, a native of Baltimore who was living in France when the Germans invaded in 1940, worked first for British Intelligence and then for the OSS.  She helped Allied spies contact the French Resistance, and, as The Associated Press reports,

… located parachute drop zones where money and weapons could be passed to Resistance fighters and later coordinated guerrilla warfare. Her teams destroyed bridges, derailed freight trains and killed scores of German soldiers.

It's possible that, by censuring trustee Steve Rocco, the Orange Unified School District may be hastening the Second Coming. Not of Jesus, mind you, but of Andy Kaufman.

The Weekly recently received the following graphic from a reader.

At first we were puzzled—the first picture is clearly Steve Rocco, but the second? The bastard offspring of a Belushi and the guy from Counting Crows, maybe? Actually it's Kaufman; the image is taken from his Elvis impersonation on the cover of his 1983 PBS special, The Andy Kaufman Show. Kaufman had several characters he regularly impersonated, including the King of Rock & Roll.

In October the district voted to censure Rocco for saying he would fire former Villa Park High School Principal Bill White instead of reassigning him (supposedly a violation of the Brown Act and the Constitution). But in addition to his censorious District Trustee work, Rocco may be involved in one of the greatest celebrity conspiracies of all time—the faked death and imminent public resurrection of Andy Kaufman.

In 2004 the Weekly identified Rocco as the conspiracy theorist behind andykaufmanlives.com, a site which suggests that Kaufman did not die of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai on May 17, 1984. The evidence:

• In "The Tony Clifton Story", an unfinished biopic about one of Kaufman's characters, Kaufman appears as himself towards the end to announce Clifton's death from lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. Later the film reveals that Clifton still lives. Kaufman supposedly died of lung cancer at, of all places, Cedars-Sinai. What are the odds?


• The man who died in Los Angeles that day might not have been Kaufman at all, but a man named Nathan McCoy. McCoy supposedly checked into the hospital that day but was never recorded as checking out—maybe because his body was identified as Kaufman's?


• Kaufman is alleged to have told several confidantes of his plan to fake his own death, supposedly telling his friend Mimi Lambert that if he ever faked his death, he would pretend to have cancer.

King/Kaufman/Presley/Rocco has two incredible projects on offer. The first is a link to a new O.J.-esque website, If I Faked It. The tagline: "If Andy Kaufman had faked his own death, this is exactly how he might have done it." Sadly, IfIFakedIt.com is still "coming soon," with nothing but a link back to andykaufmanlives.com. Still, it says it is signed by the author, Andy Kaufman.

The other work advertised on the site, "The Book of Illusion," is cited in a release on PRWeb on May 11, 2006, as "the greatest Illusion in history."

The Book of Illusion is an eight film epic that has been in production for over two decades. According to KING "the first frame of this eight film epic was created the morning of Thursday May 17, 1984. The last frame has yet to be created." The Book of Illusion reveals the greatest Illusion of all time, past, present, and future.

Chapter 7 is the story of a celebrity who, through the love and devotion of a parent, was presumed dead for years. Chapter 7 will only be released on DVD. This is due to the fact that seven copies of the DVD will contain golden tickets. These Golden tickets will invite the 7 ticket bearers, along with 7 acquaintances, on a Caribbean cruise. On the island of Aruba the seven ticket bearers will attend a private screening of Chapter 8.
Chapter 8 is entitled "The Final Revelation". In chapter 8 KING will be revealed to the 7 bearers of the golden tickets.

Never in a million years would we have thought that our August cover boy and esteemed UC Irvine professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o would suffer indignities and racial profiling in that ethnic melting pot San Francisco, but our pal Rick Reiff—the EE at Orange County Business Journal and host of his own public TV show—has the story of the "international row" in his latest OC Insider column.

To back up a bit, Cornel Bonca wrote a piece for us titled The Homecoming that had Ngugi (pronounced "GOO-gee," with both the g's hard) returning to his native Kenya in 2004 after 22 years in political exile. Despite having previously spent a year in a maximum security prison in Nairobi, he returned to gather information for a novel he was writing, convinced it was a politically safe time to do so. And, when he arrived to hundreds of well-wishers at a Kenyan airport, greetings from people on the streets and thousands of rapt audience members at his lectures, that seemed to be the right call. But everything changed on the night of Aug. 11, 2004, when three armed men carrying two guns, a machete and a bolt cutter forced their way into the Nairobi apartment compound where Ngugi and his wife Njeeri were staying, robbed them of their money, a computer and their jewelry, and then stuck around, inexplicably, for a full hour, beating and torturing Ngugi, and beating, stabbing and then sodomizing Njeeri. Somehow, the 66-year-old man and his 49-year-old wife were able to free themselves from their captors.

So, to get back to Rick's piece, Ngugi called what happened to him at a four-star hotel on the Embarcadero waterfront worse than anything that ever happened to him in South Africa during the days of apartheid. To boil it down, Ngugi—in San Francisco as part of the promotional tour for his novel Wizard of the Crow, which deals with strife and oppression in a fictional African nation (hmmm, wonder which one inspired that)—was on a Hotel Vitale veranda in his native dashiki, reading a book, when an employee ordered him to leave. The confrontation did not end until Ngugi took the employee to the front desk to prove he was a registered guest, but Ngugi apparently suffered such a stink eye from other staffers that he immediately checked out.

What I find unusual about all this is I've been spending a lot of time in San Francisco lately, and I thought we Southern Californians could learn a lot about living together in racial harmony based on my visits there. It's not a utopia by any means, but everyone generally seems to get along (or, at least, stay out of one another's way) much better than they do down here.

Of course, my budget doesn't allow stays at four-star hotels on the Embarcadero—and I don't even know where one goes to buy a dashiki.

Today, the Los Angeles Times reports on how Huntington Beach police will no longer plant evidence as a training exercise. Reporter H.G. Reza doesn't pretend to have broken the story--no, he credits nosotros with having first reported the story, not the self-aggrandizing Orange County Register (read my jefe's post on the matter here). And lest ustedes non-journalists think we're overreacting in wanting credit for a story, consider this: the Register constantly slurs us as "irrelevant" to Orange County, as being controlled by "outside" owners, as not caring about the community. When the Reg tries to take credit for an important story and won't even print our name in its pages, it's not ignorance that governs the oversight: it's deliberation. They don't want their readers to know we're out there lest they defect to our paper. Pendejos.

At the end of last week, it appeared that OC's Dick Ackerman was about to lose his position as Minority Leader in the State Senate. He stood accused by many of his fellow Republicans of being too ready to cut deals with Governor Schwarzenegger and too pro-infrastructure bonds. Sure, voters had already approved the bonds and seem to overwhelming approve of the latest version of Schwarzenegger (the deal-making, semi-Democrat model), but Senate Republicans didn't appear to care. After all, the California Republican Party didn't get where it is today by paying attention to what Californians want.

Going into yesterday's final leadership vote, Ackerman was just one vote away from losing his Minority Leader job. But that final nail in the coffin never arrived.

The Capitol Weekly reports,

Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman fended off an attempt by colleague Jim Battin to oust Ackerman from the Senate's top GOP post. It marks the second time in a year that Battin has sought to dump Ackerman as leader.

"Our caucus has made a decision that Dick will continue on as leader," Battin said immediately after the closed-door vote in the Capitol that followed a two-hour meeting. Battin described the final vote as "razor-thin," but declined to elaborate.

"There were "several votes," he added. "And we had a long discussion on how the leaders should act with the governor."

Jim Battin-- not a gracious loser, but a loser nonetheless.

We hate to brag--no, we don't--but we'll point out an error in today's Reg. Reporter Jennifer Muir says the HB police have decided to "stop planting unloaded weapons, fake drugs and other props in unsuspecting civilians' cars . . . two days after the the practice was detailed in [wait for it!] The Orange County Register." In the interests of full reporting, we'll note that the Register's original story appeared weeks after the same story in another fishwrap, your OC Weekly. See R. Scott Moxley's story "Training Day" here.

You know what's funny? We ask our young adults to throw themselves into the youth versions of established adult institutions—your governmental bodies, your newspapers, etc.—but when the kids dare express dissent or themselves in a way that rubs the ruling class the wrong way, the adult overlords crack down on the kids. Case in point: the Orange Coast College student government. For whatever reason, the student body officers decided they would no longer say the Pledge of Allegiance before their twice-weekly meetings. Well, you'd think the kids had bombed a bank, kidnapped a professor or matter-of-factly been walking across the Kent State campus before being felled by National Guard bullets.

Now, keep in mind that the student leaders—following their OCC-approved rules and guidelines—decided on their own to remove the pledge portion of their meeting. And yet, a history professor (!) is now circulating a petition to get the student leaders ousted.

A first reaction would be, hey, if you don't want to say the pledge, don't. Have everyone stand, face the flag and whoever wants to pledge can pledge and whoever doesn't can wait the 28 seconds or so it takes and then sit down. That's what I do during National Anthems at ball games or prayers in church. Just respectfully stand and keep your mouth shut (it's also fun scanning the room to see who else is/is not praying; you'd be surprised, especially when you lock eyes with the guy leading the prayer!).

But then again, if this elected body is against going through the ritual, so what? No one should be ordered to pledge anything to anyone—or pretty soon you'll have Hitler's tanks rolling up Fairview Road. In this case, it seems the people squawking about the kids have drawn more attention to a matter that would have been quickly forgotten. And spare me your, "I didn't have bullets whizzing by my head in Korea so that you could not say the Pledge." It just makes you sound even stupider than you look squeezed into that "I fought in Korea" jacket.

Students who dared follow their conscience are all over the news currently. The editor of USC's student newspaper just up and quit because administrators were blocking his attempts to restructure the paper's job duties. The principal at Carson High ceased publication of the student newspaper because of commentaries that argued for legalized marijuana, masturbation and greater sexual freedom—which just goes to show you how much hasn't changed since I went to high school in the late 1970s. The censorship came a week after a controversial issue was yanked because students hanging out at a local Taco Bell were compared to a "pack of monkeys."

I've been to that Taco Bell; the monkeys should sue.

And then there's the case the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up. A student standing on a street outside a Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002 unfurled a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" as the torch for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City passed by. The school's principal tore the banner up, the student sued saying his free-speech rights had been impugned, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco sided with the student this past March.

It all goes to show you that you can lead the young man and woman to the ruling body, Fourth Estate or public gathering, but you can't make them drink the Kool-Aid.

With one exception, there's nothing remarkable about being a new member of state legislature. The crop of lawmakers being sworn in today in Sacramento is swarming with freshmen. 36 of the 80 Assembly members and 12 of 40 Senators taking the oath have that new lawmaker smell. (In the Senate, though, some of the newbies also have older odors clinging to them-- several are just moving up from the Assembly.) But that one exception is still worth noting.

When Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) is sworn in, he will become the first Chinese-American to serve in the Senate, and only the second Asian-American ever elected to the Senate. (Alfred Song, elected in 1966, was the first. Four years earlier, Song, who died in 2004, had been the first Asian-American to be elected to the Assembly.) And according to the Los Angeles Daily News, Yee has quite a celebration planned to mark his swearing in.

Sen.-elect Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, is expecting several hundred constituents to celebrate his election…

His celebration will include firecrackers, lion dancers, a blessing by a Buddhist monk and a Shaolin martial-arts performance.

So, for at least today, Sacramento won't be a boring town for non-lobbyists.

My alma mater (at least for the MA) shocked USC, 13-9, a great joy for all of us who despise the lords of Orange County. Click over to OC Blog, where you can find a comprehensive list of these terrible Trojans (my boss and courageous Catholic lawyer John Manly excepted). Also remember that South Coast Plaza hosts a Trojans memorabilia store. Us UCLA grads? We get to revel in the upset of the millenium.

There's tension inside the world's smallest big tent.

Following the lead of their fellow Republicans in the Assembly-- who bounced alleged Schwarzenegger-appeaser George Plescia out of his position as leader of the Assembly's GOP, and replaced him with the allegedly unbending Mike Villines-- the rightwing of the rightwing in Senate has its knives out for that chamber's top Republican leader, Tustin's Dick Ackerman.

John Howard reports in the Capitol Weekly,

A closed-door retreat in Newport Beach for Senate Republicans has turned into a leadership battle, with state Sen. Jim Battin challenging Minority Leader Dick Ackerman for the top job - again.

Battin has collected seven votes, one shy of the eight votes needed to assume the leadership of the 15-member Senate Republican Caucus, sources told Capitol Weekly. Several senators did not attend the retreat, and another closed-door vote was planned Monday morning in the Capitol--on the same day that new members of the 2006-07 Legislature are scheduled to be formally sworn in.

Again, it's allegations that the current Minority Leader is too soft on Schwarzenegger-- too ready to negotiate on the budget, too supportive of the infrastructure bonds the voters approved-- that are fueling Battin's leadership bid.

Regardless of whether Ackerman survives as Minority Leader, it's nice to see that the hard right has established its priorities for the upcoming legislative session, and has decided that the greatest menace facing the Republican party is the Republican governor.