I see where the School Board voted by a surprisingly narrow 3 to 2 margin on Tuesday night to present an early vacation plum to the 52 members of the School District’s management team. All of them will receive raises, from little ones to gigantic increases (43.8 percent). Aside from the fact this is their second raise of the school year, what really reddens the faces of the Teachers Union and other Board critics is that the increases are retroactive to last September.

The justification, like much of this School Board’s conduct, was lost somewhere out there in space where it gets hazy. How they love to operate deep inside of fog where the community cannot see what they are doing. Call it the Bubar Syndrome, to which we shall shortly return. From a sensitivity standpoint, the timing of the raises was poor. The wounds of the angry members of the Teachers Union still are healing from the most recent hostile negotiations. How about a breather period? What is the rush, guys? The only logical rationale is to slide one more raise under the door of District Supt. Dr. Laura McGaughey before she retires on the final day of last month. In honor of Flag Day, I don’t want to beat a comatose horse this morning about one more pay leap for the Super.

Now what does Mehaul O’Leary do to make himself better known to Culver City voters? For almost three years, ever since the summer day that the 40-year-old Irishman became an American citizen, he has been driven by the notion of winning a City Council seat. On Monday night, though, he was rejected by the City Council for one of the numerous openings that were available on six different city commissions. And so, Mr. O’Leary finds himself standing in a tall jar of pickles this morning. Everywhere he turns, the air smells a little stinkier. When he finished third — one place out of the money — in last April’s City Council election, the explanation was that he had little name recognition. He was advised by presumably well-meaning persons that if he wanted to become a deserving, valid candidate for the City Council, he would have to earn his experience first. Start, said his unsolicited counselors, by serving on one of the city’s several commissions.

What do you suppose happens to numerous men and women who, once elected to office, wear themselves out every day trying to throw a big, old Indian blanket over their professional activities. Not surprisingly, I have in mind the School Board. All five members probably could be re-elected for life, without resistance, if they would stand facing you and me when they make crucial decisions. After Board member Stew Bubar declined to a fulfill a sensitive but sensible request from my occasional colleague George Laase at a meeting last month, I wrote an essay seeking to encourage Mr. Bubar and the Board to provide the answer. Since three weeks have gone into the history books, it seems unlikely that Mr. Laase’s inquiry will be answered.

I have been in the newspaper business long enough to have witnessed paranoid editors refusing to run television listings. This was deemed to be a cursed act of aiding the enemy. The creative reasoning of my editors went this way: We had a limited audience of sports fans. If readers watched a ballgame on television, they would not feel compelled to read our less compelling game report the next morning. If we did not acknowledge a game was being televised, perhaps the reader would forget, and then he would have to consult our newspaper the next day. Newspapers remind me of the Democratic Party: They are constantly searching for enemies whom they can claim are preying on them.

Timmy Rutten, the virulently anti-war media columnist for the Los Angeles Times, opened his essay last Saturday morning with a fib, a gross mischaracterization. This is what some liberal pundits tend to do when facts are inconvenient. This is what he wrote: “When two CBS journalists were killed and a third critically wounded this week, the war in officially became the deadliest ever for combat correspondents.”  Not a bad subject, if you glance at it fast. But it was a phony construction by the angry Mr. Rutten. Pure cabbage. He dreamed up the opening definition. By deliberately mis-labeling two obscure technicians, a television soundman and a television cameraman, as “journalists,” he slyly sought to buttress his jacklegged premise. He had to reshape the facts because there was no room inside the truth to tell the story.

Making an encore visit this week to