College Student in Drug Tank: Drug Laws on Trial

If there is any news story that should dissuade future illicit drug use on campuses, it would be the untimely and near fatal fate of Daniel Chong, an undergraduate at UC San Diego.

If there is any news story that should dissuade future illicit drug use on campuses, it would be the untimely and near fatal fate of Daniel Chong, an undergraduate at UC San Diego.

After being locked up then abandoned in a holding cell following a raid by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the student suffered from terrible hallucinations, starvation, and dehydration in a holding cell.

 During his solitary confinement, Chong resorted to drinking his own urine and consuming a left-over piece of meth just to survive. Fearing that he would die after being abandoned and forgotten for four day, Chong tried swallowing broken shards from his glasses, then carving into his forearm a final good-bye to his mother. Fortunately, drug enforcers discovered the emaciated and weary college student before it was too late. The hallucinations he endured during that period of time most likely enabled him to stay alive longer than if he had gone without food or water.

The circumstances of his arrest leading to his incarceration are hardly praiseworthy. He had gone to a friend's house to get high on April 20, a cult holiday for marijuana enthusiasts. After staying over for the night, the DEA raided the home, where the federal officials uncovered 18,000 ecstasy pills, other illicit substances, and firearms.

 If there is any news story that should encourage the rapid decriminalization of controlled substances, it would be this timely yet disconcerting account. College students were rolling joints in a neighbor's kitchen, stocking and selling large numbers of controlled substances without any quality control, substances which have skyrocketed in value because of drug criminalization. The news account provided no record that the DEA officials produced a warrant following their sudden invasion and arrest of the college students, which ultimately lead to the incarceration, neglect, and near death of one young man.

 The behavior of these college students was reprehensible, and college campuses should uphold strict rules regarding the conduct of students and sale of illicit drugs on their campuses. Yet as private citizens who choose to use, or who are addicted and in bondage to these drugs, cannot be served or reformed by such arrogant and arrogating state power. The rights and efficacy of our courts systems are also in jeopardy because of drug laws which neither  protect us or enforce a drug-free culture in our state.

The arbitrary and forceful natural of the seizure and abandonment of Daniel Chong, coupled with the inhumane treatment, does not warrant such an overwhelming, immoral response from the state. Daniel Chong's four days of fear and loathing in a holding cell may serve as a resounding death knell for the draconian drug laws in California and the entire country.

Unlucky Lotto Winners in Arkansas

How unfortunate that a woman, who prized her capacities to scoop up winnings from discarded lottery tickets, that once she found a million dollar winner, she is now forced to give back her winnings to the previous winner, who has thrown the ticket away because of an error in the lottery ticket scanning machine.

The woman in questions, Sharon Jones, established herself in making quite an effort, collect a number of tickets while caring for a sick relative. She has already spent a significant amount of her winnings, paying off long-standing debts and providing her children some extra cash.

The previous owner, Sharon Beebe, has argued persuasively that she would not have discarded the winning ticket had the machine not misread it in the first place.

If there is any culprit, it would have to be the state Lottery Commission, whose machine malfunctioned in the first place. To best resolve this matter, the state of Arkansas should award both Sharons with $1 million dollar prizes. Moreover, to prevent future discrepancies and potential lawsuits, the Commission must also write a stipulation for all future lottery entrants, that if they discard their card because of misinformation, they will forfeit any future winnings. The lotteries instituted throughout the state have been set up in order to fund public institutions, like education or public safety. These coffers for these programs should not suffer because of these accidental irregularities.

Compensation for Cal State Administrators

California State Universities are a luxury. They provide a higher education at a lower price then well-placed and prominent private universities in the state.

Until recently, the Cal State system was the envy of elite institutions, offering a wide range of courses, emphasizing theory and practice for enrollees who wanted to do more than just thinking about what they were learning in class.

I earned my teaching credential at Cal State Long Beach, a well-respected institution which prepared a number of graduate students for the teaching profession. Unfortunately, I found the training in my classes was heavy on theories and ideas, with very little training on classroom management. Also, my instructors never prepared me for the political and social problems which would are affecting our schools and limiting our students' learning.

Still, Cal State Long Beach possessed an admirable library system, and the majority of faculty members were helpful, if not entirely knowledgeable of the ways of the real world.

The opportunities which I enjoyed nearly a decade ago have been slowly vanishing away. Over the past decade, the Cal State system has hemorrhaged beneath crippling budget cuts, forcing students to pay higher tuition while offering fewer courses. Students have been forced to prolong their state in higher education just to pass the adequate number of classes. The inexpensive higher education is slowing growing out of reach.

Understandably, students across the Cal State system are frustrated by these developments. Economic scarcity was not in the forecast for high school counselors when they were preparing high school students for college. Still, despite the diminishing return of a college education, high schools are still pushing college enrollment as the salvo that will guarantee young people a solid job and a higher quality of life.

No wonder so many disillusioned youth are storming the public square on their campuses. Some of them, I am sure, feel that they were sold a bill of good. They face a growing debt in the face of declining returns on their educational investment. For many students, four years in a post-secondary institution has turned into four more years of high school: avoiding responsibilities., not paying any bills, getting by on someone else's charity.

In college, the coursework is hardly rigorous. Some courses are "Mickey Mouse" classes, which enable students to earn credits toward graduation without really learning anything. The more rigorous coursework remains out of most students' intellectual reach, as many of them received a barely adequate education from their local high schools.

Of course, the budget cuts, the limit in course offerings, the dwindling number of available faculty members, have all frustrated students' chances for learning something consistent and meaningful.

Finding fewer options for stopping the loss of revenue, students and staff have turned their attention to the top-tier administrators in their local campuses and in the Cal State University Central Offices. While students are losing course options and paying increased tuition, chancellors and directors are receiving higher salaries. Most students are outraged that high-level bureaucrats are getting more money, while schools, staffing, and supplies are getting less. However, in contrast to the rising number of students seeking enrollment in Cal State Universities, the higher ranking staff in the system are having a harder time finding willing administrators to take on the politically challenging task of running a complex university system beset with growing demands and less revenue to work with. No matter what course of action future chancellors may take, they are certain to be criticized, demonized, and forced to endure ongoing uncertainties. In the face of growing political challenges and fiscal crises, both of which the state governments have refused to resolve adequately, high ranking university administrators find fewer reasons for investing themselves in a system  of organization which grows strained and dysfunctional with every passing  year.

The matter of post-secondary governance in education is a matter of attracting qualified talent. Cutting the salaries of a selected number of administrators will not ensure that the several campuses throughout the state will enjoy even a fractional increase in their available revenue.

John Edwards and Campaign Finance Laws on Trial

John Edwards has fallen from political celebrity.  A twice-failed presidential candidate, and a failed vice-presidential candidate during the 2004 Campaign with Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Edwards varnished veneer of homespun charm wore off on very few voters outside of the Democratic fold.

A trial lawyer he floated through North Carolina politics on his humble, working class background, Edwards amassed a substantial fortune practicing a profession with an reputation as odious as his exposed private life.

Shamefully, the former U.S. Senator pursued an adulterous affair with one of his staffers, using a significant sum of money to cover up the fling from the press. While the tabloids offered to cover up the story if Edwards would swear under oath that he was not cheating on his wife, Edwards continued to campaign, pressing past a dragging third-place finish in state after state, while his supportive wife was dying of cancer. When his ill wife discovered that he had even fathered a child with this dilettante, Nancy Edwards divorced her husband, cut him out of his will, then wiled away her remaining months on the talk show circuit before succumbing to the illness.

The Edwards family indeed faced many hardships. The couple had fallen in love, had endured the stunning loss of an older son in a tragic car accident. They sired another child to replace the one which was so untimely taken from them, along with a doting daughter, who still stands by her father during a fraught media-frenzied trial.

John Edwards engaged in a despicable set of choices. Cheating on his sick wife, spending lavish amounts of cash to cover up his private perversion, the whole mess is a distasteful mesh of public and private failings.

Notwithstanding the shameful outcomes of his abortive campaign, Edwards does not deserve thirty years in prison for his immoral conduct. If anything, this trumped-up case in federal court makes the case for reforming or scrapping this nation's arcane campaign finance laws, the bulk of which assist incumbents, who commandeer a larger war chest, while weighing on grass-roots contenders who have very little knowledge about the legal trappings of campaign finance law, or the necessary connections to protect them from the damaging lawsuits of state and federal agencies who automatically serve the politicians in power and seeking to retain their incumbency.

Christie Stumps for Walker

New Jersey Governor and GOP darling Chris Christie will conduct a campaign rally through Wisconsin on behalf of his bold yet beleaguered executive counterpart Scott Walker.

Governor Christie bluntly declared at the outset that his administration would no longer support previous exorbitant payouts to public sector unions. Tackling high property taxes, wasteful boondoggles, and unsustainable entitlement obligations, the New Jersey Governor stood by his word.

Going further than his East Coast counterpart, Governor Walker should be commended for taking a tough but principled stance against the progressive third rail of Wisconsin politics: collective bargaining. Despite the vocal opposition that dominated Madison, and the successful recall efforts against two of his state senator colleagues, the Wisconsin Governor stayed true to his plan to curb the political power of public sector unions, which resulted in a noticeable dip in unemployment and greater relief to the  taxpayers.

These two statesmen may differ in physical capacities and geographical localities, but they command a great deal of respect across the country for their common stance against a growing problem: the rising cost of public sector pensions and benefits, coupled with the bank-breaking stranglehold of these unions on their respective statehouses. City, state, and federal governments can no longer afford to compensate public workers with lavish perks, awarded during more flush times, and now causing state governments to flush the growing part of taxpayer dollars down the drain.

These two executives’ remarkable leadership against public sector unions has served their states and this country very well.

On the Corruption Case Against the LA County Assessor

The Los Angeles County Assessor has been investigated in an ongoing corruption scandal. Accused of lowering property taxes in exchange for political contributions, his subtle attempts to enrich himself at the expense of tax payers have been exposed by the local press.

Yet instead of investing in investigating public corruption, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the local media, and our state legislators would better serve the public by eliminating the number of public offices that presumably serve the voters.

How many agencies have to be administered by an elected official? How many public agencies do we really need? We have witnessed the horrible conditions and circumstances for children in the County's foster care program. Every week, we read about the abysmal conditions of inmates incarcerated in our local jails. Public sector unions are taking the majority of our tax dollars for employees' retirement. This unsustainable financial burden will bankrupt our cities if our leaders do not take immediate action.

Why are there so many cases of extravagance, corruption, and waste in government? Government plays a larger and growing role in the lives of the County's citizens. Have the voters not yet learned that government does not serve the public as well as private institutions?

Less government, fewer politicians, more private initiative and market forces to hold our schools and our public workers accountable: these are the solutions that we need to see, not just a change in how we elect or appoint our local leaders

Response to Letter Advocating for a Charter District

Having worked in the public school system for a number of years, I have long advocated for school choice. If the state cannot enact a voucher system right away, at least the authorization of competing charters would force public schools to innovate and improve, or face the increased loss of their school population to better schools.

From the dedicated parents of South Torrance to the wary and disillusioned tax payers of Hermosa Beach, rich as well as poor, urban and suburban parents are getting tired of the public school government monopoly, one which rewards mediocrity without recognizing in a compensatory fashion the excellence of excelling teachers. Teachers' unions, the well-entrenched powerhouse in today's school districts, protect their stable stream of union dues while standing by the weakest members in the face of discipline or forced departure. School boards spend more time spending time and money rather than delegating policy and resources to students and their teachers. Parents have little say over the choices and character of these two politicized forces in public education.

Never would I have imagined or even considered that an entire district could go charter. Yet in a recent letter to the Daily Breeze, Ms. Suzanne Hadley renewed my hope that the Beach City Schools may be the primary movers to shake up the statist status quo of government run schooling that takes taxpayer dollars with no accountability . Arguing that the entire Manhattan Beach Unified School District should go charter, she cites that her local schools would be able to dismiss the weakest teachers in the district, which a charter could do without the costly legal battles of unionized stalling.

"Let's spend our limited funds more wisely by rewarding the best while weeding out the worst." I could not agree more, and I would like to see this trend break up the monopolized public education monotony in every school district in the state.

CSUN Hunger Strike -- Hardly a Protest

When one thinks about hunger strikes, the images that come to mind include oppressed minorities fighting against imperial cruelty,  like Mohandas Gandhi rallying his Indian peers against the ravages of the British Government.

Then there are those religious dissidents who oppose the unjust use of military force, or political prisoners who protest their unjust incarceration by refusing to eat.

Not once would anyone consider tuition hikes and course reductions in the California State University system as cause for mounting a hunger strike. Yet a tiny group of outraged, yet apparently undedicated students are doing just that.

Decrying the 318% rise in tuition, committed students have promised to "fast until it hurts", arguing that someone must do "something" " 'cause someone's gotta make a change. They have to meet our demands."

Who this elusive antecedent "they" refers to remains a matter of speculation. Like the Occupy Movements of the past year and the vocal public sector union rallies in Wisconsin, collective action is running up against the well-entrenched and unmovable realities of declining state revenues and enraged and overcharged taxpayers. They are struggling to pay their mortgages and keep their jobs, so without question they are challenging the subsidy of underwhelming and unsupportable state programs that guarantee less return on their forced investment.

I find the starving students' tugging at the hear-strings of cash-strapped bureaucracies both sad and amusing. Since when did the skyrocketing rise in tuition ever exist on par with persecuted minorities and men and women of conscience? Youth on our college campuses today allege that every shock or attack on their entitled sense of comfort is an injustice which merits taking up massive protest or turning every challenge into a moral cause. This lack of moral clarity among post-secondary students today is indicative of a failed academic elitism. Like-minded and socially isolated instructors have propped up their students' socialism and idealized liberalism at the expense of economic scarcity and political reality, both of which are the true causes for tuition hikes, and neither of which will be altered because a couple of students have decided to forgo their late-night snacks.

The laughable dedication of a crowd, or more accurately this band of students, is hardly becoming of a serious protest movement. "I'll go until I am seriously ill," one student promised. "Illness" as defined by death or a seizing case of the munchies, we cannot tell.

One professor, a poster-child for this pathetic -- and bathetic -- adolescent exuberance, remarked:

"These students are putting their bodies on the line for their education. You don't have to be a martyr, an activist, to do something in your everyday lives."

Martyrs indeed:

"Right now, I'm getting kind of sick," commented one hunger-striking student. "I'm willing to do it until my body says I can't do it anymore. . .I am not doing this in vain."

Confusing his jejune enthusiasm with the Apostle Paul's appreciation of God's grace, the student cited above inadvertenly exposes the ludicrous and unfounded reasons for starting a hunger strike in the first place. The diminished return on college degrees, coupled with spiraling student loan debt, decreased job opportunities, and unintelligent intellects hyping their myopic world-view, should be enough to discourage the new generation of students from initiating an abortive foray into higher education. If one must starve, one should at least starve knowing that he or she will not have to discharge a massive debt to the state for a degree that no longer guarantees employment in today's weak and anemic job market.

Public School Reform More Heated than Tanning Salons

Across the country, the mainstream media and tabloid outlets are screaming about the alleged abuse of Patricia Krentcil of Nutley, an overly tan New Jersey mother who let her young daughter steam in a tanning bed. The New Jersey legislature has already criminalized the use of tanning beds by minors, as did my home state last year.  Yet the liberal majority and media in the Garden state, the Golden State (no pun intended), and throughout the nation have ignored the deleterious effects of a more dangerous machine, one that daily drains the life out of our children, all in the professed aim of preparing them for adulthood: the public school system.

Governor Christie and like-minded staff are steamed up about this more heated yet less vetted matter of public education. They have properly identified the declining quality of our schools as a combination of teachers’ unions’ resistance to reform, school boards’ growing and unsustainable burden of pensions and health care benefits to public school teachers, and parents’ frustration in subsidizing poor schools with their own tax dollars, coupled with their incapacity to choose the best education for their children.

Instead of damning the pretended abuse of one parent bronzing her daughter in a tanning salon, the voters of New Jersey and in the rest of the country ought to demand that the media train its attention on the reforms touted by Governor Christie: scholarships for children in poor neighborhoods, the expansion of charter schools, and the end of teacher tenure.

The Unintelligble Intelllectual Origins of the Occupy Movement

Occupy Wall Street should not be occupying discussions among elite and out-of-touch intellects in the Ivory Tower.

The movement has a ragged, undefined inclusiveness only because they claimed to represent "The 99%", an amorphous mass of the aggrieved, marginalized by the political process which has created multi-trillion dollar debts while benefiting an effect and limited class of wealthy lobbyists at the expense of the rest of us.

Instead of targeting the government to flex more state power, the unhappy and unruly many who want to see change must demand to see less government altogether. This populist movement, which has failed to articulate any coherent cause or enumerate a list of operational concerns, has merely devastated the public square at the expense of the very people whom they claim to represent.

If anyone should be held accountable for enabling such crass pandering by over-educated and under-serving adult-children, the professors must be held to answer. The academic world has argued, professed, and all but indoctrinated a growing number of college students that the answer to all of society's ills lies with expanding state power. The bias of centralization and controlled economies has bewitched a growing number of the younger generation that if they want to see results in their lives, they must petition the government at length, even violating the rights of the citizens and the several states to make their point.

Their inarticulate arguments, their incoherent collective communities has exposed the following of raging protest without ideas, strategies, or proposed solutions. Academics are funded with state money to speculate about the forces of economy, society, and nature. For the most part, their opinions have little impact beyond their enclosed coterie with other myopically scholastic colleagues. Yet their values have power, their flawed world view has vaulted a growing number of unprepared youth, armed with an entitlement mentality and vocal rebellion as their mission. The target of their rage, the wealthy and the influential, will only gain power to the degree that today's populist demand that government do more for them. Regulation, intervention, and expansion of government created the very problems which the Occupy Movement claims to challenge.

This dark irony -- populism creates the problems it intends to undo -- merits more attention from our academics and our youth. With a greater awareness of the dangers of state power, voters would dismantle government through the political process instead of damaging the rights of petition and grievance in the public square.