How remorseful is LA school board candidate Christopher Arellano about the untruths and misrepresentations made during his campaign? Not much judging by his official web site (Christopherarellano.org) which still contains the very falsehoods that have embroiled his campaign.

As of today, March 9th, Independent Sources found that Arellano’s website still claims that Arellano earned two master’s degrees from USC even though documents provided by USC show that although Arellano was not awarded either a dual degree or two separate degrees.

From the Arellano web site:

The education claims are not the only untruths and lies of omission on ChristopherArellano.org. The site still touts the endorsements of Sheriff Lee Baca and the LA County Democratic Party via press releases on each even though both have publicly withdrawn their support of Arellano.

Here is what Sheriff Lee Baca said on March 3rd, four days before the election:

Eric Bauman, chairman of the county’s Democratic Central Committee, ended support for Arellano around the same time but you would not get this impression visiting Arellano’s campaign site.

According to the Whois database, the URL ChristopherArellano.org is owned by Arellano himself (registered through Go Daddy in November of 2004) and thus he is in the full control of the site and its content.

We will stop short of calling this a calculated falsehood of the Arellano’s electronic campaign literature however given the reasons that Areallo has been losing the support of his base (misstatements, falsehoods, omissions, etc.), one would think that he and is campaign would have exercised greater diligence with regard to the truthfulness of their website. There was time to correct the website and take down the endorsements of both of these organizations prior to the March 7th election and given that there will be a run-off in June, the site’s incorrect information is even more damning. In at least one California city, it is illegal to falsely represent support of an individual in campaign literature which would presumably include a candidate’s web site.

Additional coverage of the Arellano story (links are to home pages so you will need to search the respective sites for all of their postings):

LA Observed
Mayor Sam’s Sister City
Martini Republic
Los Angeles Times

Update: Los Angeles Times is reporting that UTLA’s political action committee voted to recommend to the union’s 300-member house of representatives that it withdraw its endorsement for Arellano. Campaign activities on behalf of the candidate are on hold pending final decision.

March 14th Update: Shortly before officially losing the backing of the powerful UTLA, Arellano pulled the plug on his stalled campaign. It was the right decision done several days too late. This report comes via The LA Weekly and not his website which still touts the degrees he did not earn and the backing that he does not have.

[Note to our readers: Independent Sources initially treated the Chris Arellano saga as a minor story and wrote about it in a ‘tongue and cheek’ manner. We were a little put off that Arellano wouldn’t good-naturedly participate in a Los Angeles Times math pop quiz. We honestly didn’t care whether any of the school board hopefuls correctly answered the basic algebraic question given them by the paper though one would hope that it would have been no problem for Arellano–a supposed holder of two masters degrees from USC. However the lack of effort put us off so we wrote a quick posting about it and expected to forget about it. Subsequent developments have made it a very serious story of immense lapses of judgement and ethics and we now regret the snarky tone (i.e. “bonehead”) with which we initiated our coverage].

tags: Christopher Arellano

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 11:50 am by Insider and is filed under California Schemin', (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.