Thirty masked freedom fighters on March 9 broke up a highly controversial and suspicious gathering on Orange Unified School District grounds: a board of trustees meeting. In December, you'll recall, the board banned the Gay-Straight Alliance from meeting at El Modena High School as part of the trustees' ongoing campaign to wipe out anything that stands in the way of district campuses evolving into Bob Jones University feeder schools—except they don't use the word “evolving” because they don't believe in evolution. Anyway, some wide-eyed freak was just going off on the alliance when 30 masked supporters of the can't-we-all-just-get-along club rushed her and tried to keep her from spewing more hate. Administrators dove into the melee; one emerged with a deep scratch on his wrist, while another was bitten in the arm. Protesters, dressed in black with bandannas or ski masks covering their mugs, fled before anyone could be arrested—or hired to randomly roam campuses as a district death squad.
SORRY STATE Facing pressure from gay-rights groups bent on keeping her new TV show from debuting in September, radio mock jock Dr. Laura Schlessinger on March 10 said she's sorry if her comments about gays have hurt anyone. Well, she apologized as only Dr. Laura can: by suggesting others misunderstood her. “Words that I have used in a clinical context have been perceived as judgment,” she said. “They were not meant to characterize homosexual individuals or encourage others to disparage homosexuals.” Obviously, you silly gay gooses took it personally when Schlessinger described you as “deviants” and “biological errors.” You thought her likening your behavior to pedophilia was some sort of “judgment.” To prove that Schlessinger's non-apologetic apology didn't sink in, a protest against her is still on for March 21 at the gates of Paramount Studios, her Hollywood producer. Black clothing, bandannas and ski masks are optional.
NO-FUN ZONE The overwhelming Measure F victory apparently shattered the county seat of government at 10 Civic Center Plaza on March 10. “It's a ghost town here,” an insider told Clockwork. Normally bustling hallways were eerily quiet. The parking lot, which during business hours is filled with cars belonging to employees of the second-floor El Toro International Airport planning office, was half-empty. The pro-airport supervisors' election-night insistence that airport planning would continue unabated despite the near-knockout blow delivered by passage of the Safe and Healthy Communities Act obviously didn't set in with many of their underlings. “It's not fun here at all,” one source told us. Even once-jovial county executive officer Jan Mittermeier, who has rammed the El Toro plans through as if her life depended on it, was said to be pacing the halls like a Night of the Living Dead extra. Do you suppose it has something to do with the airport superboosters' election-night scapegoating of Mittermeier for their stunning defeat?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.