Our pals at Dissent the Blog have a new post today following up on South Orange County Community College District trustee Don Wagner, at the board's January meeting, leading a vote to remove the American Library Association from its list of memberships. Wagner called the ALA “liberal busybodies” for opposing filters on library computers and essentially un-American for opposing portions of the Patriot Act. DtB resurrected the Wagner item because of a recent New York Times story reporting that not only have librarians been asked to fork over its records on Americans to the FBI, they have been asked to keep those requests secret FOREVER. Given that bit of Big Bro-ism, DtB wants to know how Wagner can portray himself as “some sort of libertarian–you know, the kind of guy who prizes liberty and who seeks to keep government powers to a minimum in order to protect our liberties. Do Libertarians trust the government? Not so much.”
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.