Claremont Conservative Blogger E-mail Hacked

ADULT--OR VERY JUVENILE--LANGUAGE ALERT

People who correspond with Claremont McKenna student Charles Johnson were perhaps surprised by a Saturday morning message from him. The subject line read, "f*** all of you".

The message was along the same lines, "honestly, f*** off".

Charles Johnson is the CMC sophomore who started the Claremont Conservative blog last year.

While the Claremont Conservative takes on issues well beyond our sleepy little town, and has a decided political slant, it also occasionally deals with local issues, especially town and gown relations.

We have found Mr. Johnson unfailingly polite. So we were shocked--shocked--to see the above sentiments sent by him. It bothered us some though when we saw the signature block:

Ronald Mc Donald
Claremont Mens College
Claremontfascist.com
Claremontliar.com

Hmmm, we thought to ourselves, could it be that Charles Johnson was hacked? After all, Claremontfascist.com and Claremontliar.com could be really really clever takeoffs on the name of the blog, Claremontconservative.com. And the Ronald McDonald allusion? Isn't that a clown?

We were puzzled by the "Claremont Mens [sic] College" reference, but decided that was what is known as a Red Herring to throw investigators off the scent.

Also, we have never, ever, heard of Charles Johnson being awake at 10:38 a.m. on Saturday. The only way that would happen is if he had been up all night.

This hacking was most likely done by a student, probably one with access to some of the IT family jewels at the College. Or maybe Charles Johnson just had a really obvious password like, "wfbuckley", or "sarahbarracuda", or "mitt2008!". We wonder how much effort President Pamela Gann is going to put into solving this--dare we use the words that may not be said?--hate crime.

Click on Image to Enlarge

We are impressed with the length of Mr. Johnson's email address list, even if some of his correspondents appear in it three times. How many of us have well-known Harvard law professors, editors of national publications, and other such luminaries in their contact lists? Too bad they all now think Mr. Johnson is a juvenile delinquent.

CGU Orders YouTube to Yank Video

Contempt for the First Amendment is a long tradition within the Claremont city limits. In keeping with that stifling tradition, the Claremont Graduate University (CGU) recently hired an attorney to have a YouTube video by a person named Peter Musurlian removed from YouTube's website.

In June, Musurlian came to CGU to attend and videotape a lecture by a Turkish consul general. Musurlian, who is of Armenian-descent, then posted a film he made of the lecture. Musurlian's film depicts some of the concerns the Armenian-American community has with Turkey's denial of the World War I-era genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Turks in the Ottoman Empire.

The film must have ruffled some feathers because a short time after he posted his YouTube video, an attorney representing CGU contacted Musurlian. The attorney informed Musurlian that he no authority to post a film containing the faces of students who attended the lecture. The attorney demanded that the students' faces be blurred, or CGU would have YouTube pull the film from its website.

Musurlian says his video was pulled from YouTube on June 25th but was restored on July 10th after Musurlian responded to YouTube's concerns.

Charles Johnson's post on the Claremont Conservative first alerted us to this matter:

The very fact that CGU's first reaction to seeing a video on YouTube was to call in an attorney who gets a high fee should really bother us. What does it say about a college that their first act was to call the lawyers?

What indeed?

The Daily Bulletin also picked up on the story and carried an article yesterday on the issue:

Musurlian said he had a campus lawyer, identified as Paul S. Berra, tell him to blur student faces or the university would have the video pulled. "He initially said some of the students were being harassed," Musurlian said. But the video doesn't focus in on students and he said he wasn't given a specific reason about the kind of harassment. In a letter claimed to be from Berra posted on Musurlian's Web site, the lawyer wrote " ... I asked you to voluntarily remove your video from YouTube because you had no authority to publish it. I explained that you needed to obtain, for starters, the students' consent before doing so."

Here at the Insider, we've had our own run-in with Claremont censorship, so we can sympathize with Musurlian and his problems with YouTube, which is owned by Google. CGU still hasn't justified its actions, by the way, which happens to be another Claremont strong suit: When in institutional trouble, deny, deny, deny.

It's certainly been a tough year for the First Amendment at the Claremont Colleges. Heck, an entire issue of the Pomona College newspaper The Student Life was pulled from newsstands, something that we might more properly associate with the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

In any case, here is Musurlian's video, in case you're interested. Musurlian also has started a website called "Claremont Genocide University." The Musurlian film runs about six minutes:

Claremont Conservative Covers Council Meeting

Charles Johnson at the Claremont Conservative attended last night's Claremont City Council meeting after interviewing Nancy Lodolo, the owner of The Hair After, a salon Lodolo has owned in Claremont for over 20 years.

The Council passed an ordinance last night placing strict limits on new beauty salons in the Claremont Village. The ordinance places an outright ban on salons in first floor storefronts. The ordinance also bans existing salons from expanding into those same areas. Salons would still be allowed on second floors or in storefronts facing alleys - both limits that mean new salons wouldn't benefit from high foot traffic.

Johnson has a post on his interview with Lodolo and the Council action on the beauty shop ordinance:

Pomona's The Student Life have called Hair After's prices "unbeatable" and CGU's School of Religion describes it as "close to campus, a good price, and a good quality."

Nancy loves catering to students and senior citizens. She keeps her prices low -- $15 for a woman's cut compared to upwards of 35 and higher at some of the other places -- and treats her employees well. Some of them have worked with Nancy for about as long as she's had the shop!

"Claremont," she says in her cozy shop, "is a college town and college students don't always have a lot of money. You might think that this is an affluent town, but not everyone who lives here is. We want all this youth running and around and we don't cater to it. How many shops here could you afford to shop in?"

Nancy's right. Some of the high end clothing and restaurants offer services well beyond my means. Whenever I want to buy something on the cheap, I have to take a bus or borrow a ride from a friend.

If you happened to catch the streaming video of the meeting last night, Lodolo addressed the Council on the subject and raised the same points. [Update: We have posted video of Lodolo's remarks in a link HERE.]

The council went forward with the ban, so if you start seeing empty storefronts with "For Lease" signs in the windows, you'll know that by cherry picking businesses it wants, the City Council and the Claremont Chamber of Commerce, which had lobbied for the ordinance, picked the wrong businesses to allow in their pool of possible tenants. For whatever reason, beauty salons seem to survive in town. Maybe it's all that inner ugliness we've seen on display from time-to-time at Council meetings in want of a makeover.

With the City in search of new sources of tax revenue in a time of either economic stagnation or contraction, does it really make a lot of sense to limit who can open a business in town? If there isn't a market in Claremont for other types of businesses, they either will fail or won't come here in the first place, and the result will be empty storefronts.

Besides being the City of Trees and Ph.D's, Claremont is also the city of unintended consequences, and we suspect that there will be plenty of those to come out of the sort of central planning the current council has embarked on.

A tip of the Insider hat to Johnson for taking the time to interview a local business person and for actually covering the council meeting, which we know can be a painful experience. Over the years, the local government reporting at the colleges has been spotty at best. Unless it's been something that grabs the students' passing interest - the proposal to put a trash transfer station in at the old gravel pit, the Landrum shooting, the purchase of Johnson's Pasture - student life and Claremont's civic life have rarely been seen to intersect.

Students' interest in town affairs has been notoriously fickle in the past and typically lasts about as long as a mayfly. So, it's great to see a student looking at something as seemingly arcane as a municipal business ordinance and trying to explain how that relates to students. We hope we see more of that in future at the colleges.