• Major League Baseball,  Sports

    Bonds Reportedly being Investigated by Baseball

    The Kansas City Star has this piece on Major League Baseball player Barry Bonds:

    While Giants outfielder Barry Bonds rehabilitates his troublesome left knee, Major League Baseball is conducting its own investigation into the troubled slugger, major-league sources told the New York Daily News.

    MLB security officials believe Bonds may be at risk of ultimate imprisonment over allegations of tax fraud, and are conducting their own probe into Bonds’ relationships and activities. An official from another club said the Giants’ front office “is starting to freak out” over Bonds’ mounting problems.

    “I think they realize they’ve let the situation get away from them,” the source said.

    The most recent controversy centers on Bonds’ reliance on his own doctors and trainers as he attempts to rehabilitate his right knee. Bonds, 40, is recovering from three surgeries on the knee since Jan. 31.

    Bonds’ surgeon, Albert Ting, has been reprimanded twice by the California state medical board and is on probation for “unprofessional conduct,” according to reports.

    Baseball’s labor agreement allows players to go outside the organization for help, but requires that the player keep the team informed of any developments.

    MLB was not happy to hear that Ting, who performed all three of Bonds’ knee surgeries, has had trouble with the law. Because Bonds is under government investigation for perjury relating to his testimony before the BALCO grand jury and possible tax fraud involving allegedly undeclared income from memorabilia sales, baseball’s investigators have found it difficult to conduct their own inquiry, sources said.

    Officials aren’t sure where the investigation will lead or what action they would take if they find Bonds has violated baseball’s rules.

    Does anyone really think that Bonds will play baseball again? NO!

    The knee surgery is a distraction and a ruse. Using a disciplined orthopedic physician is a convenient excuse.

    Bonds should be stripped of his records – along with Mark McGwire.

    Update #1

    Baseball says it is NOT investigating Bonds. Read ths story here.

  • Media

    Michael Kinsley: The Press Is in Decline

    Michael Kinsley, the editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times has this attempt at a humor piece in today’s Washington Post:

    The Press Is in Decline
    So Where Are Our Subsidies?

    In this great country, there are newspaper editorial pages of every political stripe, from nearly insane far-left rantings to the Wall Street Journal. But when the United States faces a danger to its most important institutions and values, Americans can count on the newspaper industry to put aside petty differences and speak with one voice.

    Now is such a moment. The enemy is invisible, indeed inexplicable, but could be fatal to all we hold dear. In short: Some evil force is causing people to stop reading newspapers! Newspaper circulation figures, which had been drifting decorously downward for years, have started to plummet. At the current rate of decline, the last newspaper subscriber will hang up on a renewal phone call that interrupts dinner on Oct. 17, 2016. And then it will be over.

    I wonder if John Carrol, the Editor of the Los Angeles Times, and his Tribune Company bosses are quite so accepting of the massive circulation loses of their California flagship newspaper. The Wall Street Journal has the circulation figures here.

    Kinsley continues here.

    The Los Angeles Times link for the same piece is here.

    Did it ever cross his mind that it is his ideological slant of the Los Angeles Times that is causing the circulation decine?

    Nahhhh! He is clueless and lives in Seattle.

  • California,  Politics

    Dan Walters: Nothing to be Gained if Schwarzenegger Sounds Retreat

    Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters has this piece on why California Governor Arnold Swarzenegger must hold the line, tout his reform agenda and force a special election this fall:

    What is a supposition wrapped in a myth, encased in a fallacy? It’s the canard that were Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to drop his ballot measures and make nice with Democrats in the Legislature, dark clouds would part, the sun would shine, birds would sing, and all political conflicts would disappear.

    Democratic leaders and their allies chant that mantra constantly, of course, portraying Schwarzenegger as a Republican centrist who was somehow lured into the ways of wickedness – meaning confrontation – by mysterious forces of the right but who could be cleansed of his sins if he would confess them and repent…

    To restore his credibility, Schwarzenegger would have to end his myth-telling and describe the Capitol accurately – that it is a profoundly dysfunctional institution and that in the absence of fundamental reform, probably going way beyond what he is proposing this year, it will continue to deteriorate.

    Were Schwarzenegger to drop his reforms, especially redistricting and spending controls, as Democrats and their hallelujah chorus on the state’s editorial pages espouse, the result wouldn’t be a flow of constructive compromise, but a continuation of decades-long gridlock on major issues, and slavish devotion to narrow interests.

    Capitol politicians would rightfully see it as another cave-in by Schwarzenegger and as an indication that if they’d wait him out, he’d go away and a Democratic governor would succeed him and sign the measures that they want to enact for their political pals.

    The California Republican Party must hold the Governator accountable as well. Should Arnold become an appeaser then Senator Tom McClintock waits in the wings for the June 2006 primary.

  • Politics

    Senator Clinton’s Financing in the Spotlight

    Former fundraiser producer Aaron Tonken, shown during an interview in a prison in Taft, Calif., Thursday, April 21, 2005, speaks about the involvement of David Rosen, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former finance director, and an organizer in the “The Hollywood Gala Salute to President William Jefferson Clinton” in Los Angeles. A federal trial is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles Tuesday, May 10, 2005, in which Rosen faces charges he knowingly filed false reports that understated the costs for the event. Tonken, who is in prison on an unrelated matter, produced the 2000 star-studded tribute.

    Uh Oh…. just as I thought Hillary would have an easy path to the nomination. Guess she took lessons from her greasy husband. Read the story here:

    Campaign donations made more than four years ago at a celebrity-studded Hollywood gala have led to a federal criminal trial against a former finance director for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that could hamper her future campaigns.

    The trial set to open Tuesday focuses on a lavish August 2000 political party at a tony Brentwood estate that drew dozens of A-list guests and performers, including Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Cher, Diana Ross and Muhammad Ali.

    Clinton hasn’t been linked to charges that the cost of the event was vastly underreported, but Republicans will be watching for any ammunition they can use against the Democrat, considered an early front-runner for the 2008 presidential nomination.

    David Rosen, who was Clinton’s finance director during her 2000 U.S. Senate run, faces three counts of filing a false statement. An FBI agent speculated in an affidavit that Rosen was trying to duck federal financing rules so the campaign would have more money to spend on other expenses.

    Rosen pleaded not guilty in January. He could face up to 15 years in prison and $750,000 in fines if convicted.

    The party, called a “Hollywood Gala Salute to President William Jefferson Clinton,” included both a dinner and a concert. About 350 people accepted invitations to both, which cost $25,000 a couple. About 1,200 people purchased $1,000 tickets just for the concert.

    Many people got complimentary tickets and campaign reports never gave a full accounting of the total money taken in. However, organizers reported raising nearly $1.1 million for a joint committee benefiting Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and the national and state-level Democratic parties.

    Read the rest here.

  • Politics

    Joe Klein: Hillary in 2008? No Way!

    Flap woke up this morning listening to James Carville on Meet the Press touting the wares of every Demo’s favorite candidate Hilary Clinton. While ol’ serpent head was speaking, Joe Klein has this piece in Time Magazine:

    I was having a fascinating conversation with a Middle East expert about the intricacies of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza when I noticed the fellow growing impatient. “Enough of this,” he said. “What about Hillary?” Welcome to my life. In airports, on checkout lines, at the doctor’s office: “What about Hillary?” (Everywhere except in Washington, where everyone “knows” she’s running.) I shrug, I try to avoid the question, I say it’s too early—and it is. But you want to know too, right? So here it is. I like Senator Clinton. She has a wicked, ironic sense of humor (in private) and a great raucous belly laugh. She is smart and solid; she inspires tremendous loyalty among those who work for her. She is not quite as creative a policy thinker as her husband, but she easily masters difficult issues—her newfound grasp of military matters has impressed colleagues of both parties on the Armed Services Committee—and she is not even vaguely the left-wing harridan portrayed by the Precambrian right. I also think that a Clinton presidential candidacy in 2008 would be a disaster on many levels.

    Oh come on Joe…. Bill Clinton gave the Republicans the control of the Congress for the first time in over 40 years and lately majority control of all three branches of government. We conservatives love the Clintons.

    It would doubtless be a circus, a revisitation of the carnival ugliness that infested public life in the 1990s. Already there are blogs, websites and fund-raising campaigns dedicated to denigrating her. According to the New York Observer last week, these sites aren’t getting much traffic—yet. But they will. I remember several conversations with Senator Clinton after her health-care plan was killed 10 years ago, and she was clearly pained—nonplussed by the quality of anger, the sheer hatred, directed against her. That experience would be a walk in the park compared to the vitriol if she ran for President. And while I’d love to see someone confront, and defeat, the free-range haters on the right, the last thing we need is a campaign that would polarize the nation even more. Indeed, we could use the exact opposite—a candidate who would inspire America’s centrist majority to rise up against the extreme special interests in both parties…

    …And then there is her husband, a one-man supermarket tabloid. A few weeks ago, the New York Post ran a photo of Bill Clinton leaving a local restaurant with an attractive woman, and the political-elite gossip hounds went berserk. Prominent Democrats—friends of the Clintons—were wringing their hands. “Do we really want to go through all that again?” one asked me. I don’t know—should the sins of the husband be visited upon the wife? Absent any evidence, the former President should be considered guilty until proved really guilty. But there is another problem: What role would the big guy play in a Hillary Clinton Administration? Would he reform health care? Does anyone believe that a man with such a huge personality would have a less active role in her Administration than she had in his?

    I suppose Joe remembers this imagery and that Bill Clinton was impeached and disbarred.

    “You mean she can’t run just because her husband was President?” a Hillary supporter yelled at me. “That is the most incredibly sexist thing I’ve ever heard.” Yes and no. My guess is that Hillary Clinton would roll into Iowa with an incredible, Howard Dean-like head of steam in January 2008, and then the folks—yes, even the Democratic base—would give her a very close look and conclude that a Hillary presidency would be slightly dodgy. The Clinton line in 1992 was, Buy one, get one free. We’ve already had that co-presidency—for its full, constitutional eight years. What’s more, I suspect there would be innate and appropriate populist resistance to this slouch toward monarchial democracy. There is something fundamentally un-American—and very European—about the Clintons and the Bushes trading the office every eight years, with stale, familiar corps of retainers, supporters and enemies. Bill Clinton was a good President. Hillary Clinton is a good Senator. But enough already. (And that goes for you too, Jeb.)

    Hillary in 2008?

    She will win the nomination, lose the election and the Republicans will control the White House for another eight years.

  • Education,  Media,  VCCCD

    Ventura College Press Staff Members Prepare Paper’s Last Edition

    Today’s Ventura County Star (free registration required) has the story on the closure of the Ventura College Press, Ventura College’s student run newspaper:

    For Chris Martinez, it was like being back in college as he sat with a group of student journalists last week planning another edition of the Ventura College Press.

    Martinez last worked for the campus paper in the late 1960s, a turbulent era when tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in an unpopular war halfway around the world. The war, the civil rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy provided the then-young cartoonist with plenty of fodder for his college paper, then known as “The Pirate Press…”

    Nearly four decades later, grayer but no less idealistic, Martinez, 58, now a freelance cartoonist from Ventura, was compelled to put pen to paper for his old college weekly after hearing it was closing after 80 years in print.

    Flap previously reported the VCCCD Board of Trustees’ decision to close the Ventura and Oxnard College newspapers and to consolidate them at Moorpark College. Read those stories here.

    …Ventura County Community College District officials blame the paper’s closure on budget problems and low enrollment in the college’s journalism program. Officials also are closing Oxnard College’s student paper, The Campus Observer. They plan to replace both papers with a districtwide publication run out of Moorpark College.

    But many, including Lara Shapiro Snair, managing editor of the Ventura College Press, don’t think a districtwide paper will accurately reflect the issues of Oxnard and Ventura students.

    “This newspaper is the voice of the campus,” said Shapiro Snair, as she sat at the table with Martinez and others. “That voice can’t be heard from Moorpark.”

    Students protested the closures a number of times after district trustees announced the closures in March…

    The VCCCD Trustees should be more heavily criticised for their financial mismanagement of district’s resources. Flap is certain that the Ventura County Grand Jury will not have kind words for the VCCCD in July.

    …The Ventura College Press has won numerous awards over the years, including a statewide general excellence award last month from the Journalism Association of Community Colleges.

    Rob O’Neill, a member of the association and a journalism instructor at Pierce College in Los Angeles, said student papers are important because they inform everyone about events. They also serve as laboratories, training young people in the skill and craft of journalism, O’Neill said.

    “Campuses that don’t have their own newspapers are poorer places,” he said.

    O’Neill said news will travel with or without a newspaper because people’s curiosity and need to know is as old as the caves. But forced to survive as rumor, facts often become quickly distorted with little or no connection to the truth, he said.

    District officials are vowing not to let this happen at either the Ventura or Oxnard campus.

    Dennis Cabral, executive vice president for student learning at Moorpark College, has worked on the plan for a districtwide newspaper. Cabral said he knows it will be a challenge but the district is committed to making it work. One way to do that is by making sure the paper is open to students from all campuses, Cabral said.

    But students at Oxnard and Ventura remain skeptical.

    Without their own campus paper, Shapiro Snair predicted, one or more underground newspapers will soon sprout up.

    “It’s just a matter of time if we can’t keep this paper or the one at Oxnard going,” she said.

    Meanwhile, current and former staff members of the Ventura College Press will gather Thursday evening for the paper’s annual banquet. It will begin at 6:30 p.m. at Seaside Park’s Derby Club in the Ventura County Fairgrounds.

    Well that is a wrap – shameful as it is!