Super Alarming

[First published: Wednesday, December 5, 2007)

Just when it seems like things can't get any worse at the Star News, they up the ante. Why look here, a flattering article for Rene Amy (and convent link provided to his blog).

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/education/ci_7637350

I'm going to get into exactly WHO Rene Amy is in a minute, but first I see something here that needs clearing up. This is false:

"Last year, his list was temporarily shut down after a school district consultant complained to Yahoo. Yahoo subsequently apologized, but Amy changed hosts to Google."

I was not a school district consultant, I was a PUSD parent and volunteer when I filed a basic Terms of Service abuse report with Yahoo groups - which shut down Amy's blog almost immediately (the blog was literally filled with hate, harassment and threats of legal suits). Like most hate-groups, Amy climbed aboard another, more tolerant host, Google this time and started PUSDgreatschools. The Star News and Pasadena Weekly championed this as a victory for "Free Speech" - which I couldn't understand at the time, but was only later to learn the extent of their dependence on Amy's blog.

What is crucial to understand here is that Mr. Amy is no "pillar of the community" (hardly!). He is a local, well-known right-wing extremist (see below), who has made a 14-year long "career" of attacking the Pasadena Unified School District, vastly to his own fortune. Amy has made over a million dollars in personal profit (verified by district lawyers) off of his multiple, profitable and harassing Public Records Act and Freedom of Information Act lawsuits (many of which have been funded by right-wing extremist groups like the U.S. Justice Foundation) against PUSD. He has also performed an extremely effective "Sneer and Smear" campaign against them on his hate-blog (I am defining it so based on the ferocity of its content) which is sourced by local reporters for, yes, articles attacking PUSD and public education.

He is, in other words, completely biased, yet made credible by our local papers, who defend (and cover for) him by naming him a "public school district watchdog".

A long time ago, Amy used to attack the school district in person and it got so bad that the district tried to take a restraining order out against him 9 years ago to try and halt his violent, obsessive (and scary) behavior on their premises. His early crazed hate-techniques included, driving a car around town festooned with banners bashing PUSD and, yes, he used a loudspeaker. And yes, is also included so much of his camping and ranting for the cameras at board meetings (often taking up 45 minutes of meeting time) that they stopped filming them. That was before he discovered a much, much louder (and better) "loudspeaker" - the Internet - and began his "popular" (called so in 2004 in the Pasadena Star News) blog - purportedly to "support" PUSD.

His blog proved wildly effective, giving bloggers a birds-eye view into his psyche with briefs about his latest lawsuit or his (along with Mary Dee Romney and other right-wing "pundits") review of documents "accrued" from the district under threat of lawsuit which he would pour over for fodder for his blog. The blog also documents Amy's self-titled "Bomb Blasts" against PUSD staff, which consist of often sadistic "dirty tricks" like this one, where Amy (using his considerable internet know-how) obtained former superintendent Clark's private online resume, and posted it with the subject line "Would you hire this guy?" augmented with posts like this:

"That giant sucking sound you hear seems to be coming from 351...

I guess good jobs are hard to find in the ed business these days.

Maybe *that's* why Percy Clark was thumbing through the want ads at the back of Ed Week...

Rene"

His blog also contains countless self-authored opinion posts like this one:

"[so many] give up and move out of PUSDville, like so many other families already have. I mean, how much idiocy are families expected to take before they walk away?"

There was (and is) clearly very little "support" going on, but that is not why his readers were there, anyway. It made "thrilling" reading for his 300+ members and countless others too (the Forward button being one of the most powerful media tools ever invented). Mr. Amy is not only openly used by our local press, he has endeared himself to them! He was voted 2-times the Pasadena Weekly's (our "alternative" weekly!) "Editor's Pick" citizen of the year, given "puff pieces" by the Star News (like 2004's Amy, a One Man Army), and Ruiz gives Rene Amy a flattering endorsement on his blog "Under the Dome" and here, in this article, he is again covering for him (sad!). The reasons for their use of Rene Amy are transparent - they turn to his blog (or he contacts them directly or turns up at their offices) to meet their purpose of printing articles that attack PUSD - and heres the rub - true or no.

Plenty of the Amy-supplied "information" has factual inaccuracies in it (I'll go into these in future posts), yet neither paper has ever printed a retraction or an apology to the community.

Mr. Amy has grown so bold and so cocky that he published this "how to" on his "methods" for siphoning money from school districts on the right-wing California First Amendment Coalition website, which offers it up in their "For Your Convenience" section. Mr. Amy includes his personal tips on "how to interact with the media" (given his success with ours I imagine many found this valuable advice).
.
http://www.cfac.org/opengov02/programdetail.html

SPOTLIGHT SESSION: RENE AMY
A Street Fighter's Guide to Open Government

On the web, Mr. Amy's is lauded by his fellow right-wing extremist Peyton Wolcott here (and these place him in a national context):

http://www.peytonwolcott.com/MinutemenReneAmy.html

and here:

www.peytonwolcott.com/Minutemen.html

and here:

www.ednews.org/.../Page1.html

A huge point needs to be made here - we are not living in Peyton Wolcott's Texas. We are living in Pasadena, California, one of the most beautiful city's in the whole country, a city known throughout it's history to be decent and tolerant. Open use of biased right-wing extremist sources in our local papers? Tolerance for legal "nuts" milking our school district for hard cash? (um, why don't the papers rant about THIS taxpayer money?).

This simply cannot be tolerated any longer.