According to Bennett, City Hall is doing just fine on all fronts, thank you very much, and the residents of Fullerton have absolutely nothing to worry about.

But even a broken pair of pliers like Larry can drive around Fullerton and notice the broken water mains, leaking sewer lines and expanding potholes and crevasses in our streets, and realize that the residents, taxpayers and businesses of Fullerton have been sold down the river to cover the bloated paychecks, fat pensions and corpulent developer subsidies handed out over the last few decades by the Three Tired Tree Sloths. And then there’s that little matter of $27,000,000 his boys have illegally tacked on to our water bills for the past 15 years. Somebody’s got a refund coming!

Bennett obviously has no interest in relating the massive, multi-hundred million dollar pension liability that his pals have left the taxpayers. And of course we already know he thinks the thievery, sexual assaults, sadistic brutality and rampant corruption in the FPD is no big deal.

So there you have it, folks. The difference between the Recall and the forces of sclerotic self-interest, incompetence and malice.

Only one correction. Mayor “Dick” Jones was not replaced; his term as mayor ran out. He will be permanently replaced on June 5th.

When the esteemed council woke up from their nap, the tongue bath resumed.

Holy Smokes those anti-recall guys are dumb. How dumb? On their lame website some idiot just posted the hilariously funny and self-deprecating video made by Tony Bushala to mock his own critics. Apparently who ever uploaded the video never watched it; or they believe their audience is even dumber than they are. Well maybe they are!

Seriously, can anybody now believe that these people are qualified to run anything more complicated than an ant farm, let alone a city of 150,000 people?

Anyway here’s the video again. And thanks to chucklehead Larry Bennett and his dim bulb crew for giving it free air time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Well, now that these people have seen the video, their reaction is not exactly what Mr. Hughes seemed to be waiting for. And this begs a very important question that goes to the heart of both Hughes’ character and the FPD Culture of Corruption.

First let us suppose and dispose the notion that Hughes’ admonition to the protesters was nothing more than a ploy to stall for time. Coming from a department in turmoil that hadn’t got a clue what to do or how to do it, temporizing may be seen as an understandable, if pathetic strategy.

But now let’s give the situation a little more thought. By his own remarkable admission, Hughes had seen the video 400 times. That’s ridiculous of course, but he obviously watched his boys kill an innocent man lots of times. Dozens? A hundred? Enough times perhaps, that he became inured to the unnecessary and inexcusable brutality. In a mental effort to defend the indefensible and picking apart the video like a defense lawyer in order to come up with plausible explanations that would get the killers off the hook, Hughes may well have lost sight of the murder of a human being played and replayed in front of his very eyes. And that’s bad.

But it might be even worse. It may very well be that in watching the video our Acting Chief saw nothing wrong going on, nothing outside of the policy and training that he espouses. After all, there is a reason that the cops went to work the very next day as if nothing untoward had happened. There is a reason that four of the aiders and abettors still remain on paid leave, a weird limbo in which they continue to be remunerated until the Gennaco report can be used to justify some action or other. It’s as if there is no procedural mechanism in place at all to deal with the sort of cops who stand around as the object of their brutality is dying, untended, a few away.

For those who mistakenly believe that Sharon Quirk and Hughes have ushered in some new period of reform in the FPD I suggest you think again. Apart from some alleged sensitivity training I assert that nothing has changed in the FPD’s culture at all, a culture that recently rewarded a loyal purveyor of disinformation with a promotion.

A million bucks. It’s hard to begrudge the Thomas family of the settlements that are coming their way in this obscene killing. And yet for those of us who have criticized the obvious Culture of Corruption in the FPD it rankles to contemplate the fact that we are responsible for the bill; and that other enormous payouts are coming our way.

Pat McKinley created this unholy mess as police chief while Don Bankhead and Dick Jones sat on their fat behinds all these years as the department festered under the incompetent and indifferent leadership. We get the bill. And Acting Chief Hughes can only act like nothing is wrong, even as Joe Wolfe, the apparent instigator of the Thomas murder breathes the air of a free man on paid vacation.

First there was the sexual battery cases against Albert Rincon. Those cost $350,000. We now know the Thomas murder will probably cost us at least $3,000,000. And there’s no telling what the other violent and criminal episodes perpetrated by thugs like Kenton Hampton, et. al., will cost.

I also note that once again PatMcPension voted to approve a settlement to make on of his embarrassing problems go away.

Really folks, haven’t you seen enough of this rogue’s gallery? The answer is crystal clear. RECALL.

Matt Rowe

Some Democrats who supported Chaffee in 2010 are jumping ship – to independent candidate Matt Rowe. They are claiming that Chaffee is just a mealy-mouthed guy who wants to get elected without saying a damn thing substantive.

Here is a letter from Stephan and Noelle Baxter, and William Zdan sent to our friends at The Fullertonian. It’s a hard-hitting piece, born of the frustration of a politician who is so petrified of saying anything that he says nothing, and evidently stands for nothing.

The choice of Rowe over Doug Chaffee is the proverbial no-brainer. When you check out Chaffee’s supporters you’ll you’ll see the Old Guard Left like Molly McClanahan and Jan Flory who sat on their hands and kept their mouth shut in the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder. Many of his supporters actually oppose the recall and that speaks volumes about what they expect from their boy. He’s even being supported behind the scenes by repuglicans like Dick Ackerman and his sleazy ilk who apparently see in Chaffee their Main Chance.

If you’ve watched the now infamous video of six overfed Fullerton cops beating the life out of Kelly Thomas and then standing around joking as he gasped for his last breaths in the street, a few feet away, you will have probably felt some pretty raw feelings. Disgust, anger, fear, pity, and sorrow are what we have all experienced.

Upon calmer reflection we can use the video to start piecing together what really happened and what motivated our “officers.” The behavior of Joe Wolfe stands out as the most egregious and makes me wonder how in the world he escaped charges by the District Attorney. Many have already stated the obvious: that DA Tony Rackaukas’ supposition that Wolfe could not know what was happening right in front of him, a mere 15 feet away is patently ridiculous. But even if we accept the unlikely plausibility of this convenient surmise, one unalterable fact remains: Joe Wolfe assaulted Kelly Thomas. We have all watched Wolfe emerge into the video frame when Kelly raises his arms, palms outward in a submissive gesture. At this point it would have still been possible for the bloated, oafish cops to de-escalate this situation. But instead Joe Wolfe for some as yet disclosed reason attacked Kelly with his baton, and Manuel Ramos joined in the fun. The murder had begun. And Kelly Thomas, accused of nothing, cited for nothing, guilty of  nothing was entering his last ten minutes of his life.

I don’t know about you Friends, but the fact that Officer Joe Wolfe is not only walking free, but actually still getting a Fullerton paycheck makes me nauseous. The fact that my tax dollars are paying this thug’s salary makes me feel even sicker, and somewhat accountable, especially if I don’t do something about it. I’m sure I’m not alone.

Hell, if anyone were caught beating an animal in such manner as the way those goons treated a human being, they would be in prison.

So what do we do? Provide helpful suggestion in the comments thread.

Intelligent. And handsome, too.

There’s always lots of talk in Orange County about freedom-loving him, or freedom-loving her, when the repuglicans start trumpeting some mediocre authoritarian hack or other for political office.

But then there’s the real deal – former OC Register writer and now occasional columnist, Steve Greenhut. Enjoy Steve’s opinion piece on the Kelly Thomas killing and the Fullerton Recall, here.

Greenhut is hitting on all cylinders. He gets it: there’s serial police abuse, secrecy and subsequent cover-ups by the politicians; there’s Redevelopment abuse, cronyism, and unaccountability; there’s an illegal tax on our water, 15 years-old, that has misdirected over $27,000,000 to pay for perks and pensions of the politicians and bureaucrats in City Hall.

The best part of Steve’s broadside is this part where he goes after the pusillanimous Register Editorial Board that has hypocritically succumbed to pressure applied by Dick Ackerman, Inc.:

Unfortunately, the Register Editorial Board didn’t fully support this heart-felt political revolt, as it argued, “The citizens who voted [the three councilmen] in and now are disgruntled should vote them out during a regular election cycle.” The Register had no such qualms about backing the recall in 2003 of Gov. Gray Davis, for similar lack-of-leadership reasons.

And finally Greenhut sums up with:

The release of the video reinforces the wisdom of the recall. A recent news article explained that “legal experts caution that the footage doesn’t tell the entire story,” but we don’t need experts to tell us the truth, now obvious to anyone who can access YouTube. And we don’t need experts to tell Fullerton voters what to do about three councilmen who acted in a craven and unconscionable way.

Oh, yes. We’ll let “the justice system unfold,” in the clumsy phraseology of our feckless Mayor, Sharon Quirk. In the meantime we’ll apply our our God-given commonsense to the facts that we are permitted to see by our political masters. And then we’ll recall the the bums.

Those ladies were't like you...

Here’s an article from the tanking OC Register about the Kelly Thomas murder case, that includes a delicious quote from Mr. She Bear himself, the egregious former Fullerton Police Chief, Pat McKinley, who nonchalantly admitted he hired all the brutal thugs involved in the remorseless killing of the schizophrenic homeless man. “Let the wheels of justice turn!” says Pat.

The Wheels of Justice. Anybody who has reviewed the checkered career and sayings of McKinley, or the activities of the gang of thugs, pickpockets, perverts, con men, petty thieves, perjurers, and casual liars that he loosed upon Fullerton, may well question whether McKinley has any concept of justice at all.

O Patience! preaches McKinley, now a city councilman. Surely all the evidence is not in! The pathetic plea for more time to clear his thuggish hirelings is telling, as was his previous wink-wink comment about how good his goons’ lawyers are. But for McKinley time is the proverbial double-edged sword. For even as he admonishes us to wait out a protracted legal process that is designed in almost every way to avoid prosecuting criminal cops, his own political time is quickly running out.

Oh yes, it’s hard to avoid the gratuitous sharing of the irrelevant tidbit that McKinley is on vacation. Is this a sly reference to departed, disabled former Chief Mike Sellers who went on vacation in the days following Kelly Thomas’s murder? Naw, because that would be clever and insightful. Rather, we are left to wonder if, with a mere four weeks until the recall election, McKinley has all but given up fighting for his job; or maybe he is so confident that the somnolent folks of Fullerton will turn a blind eye to his own perverse incompetence, that he can afford to vacation – after all, nobody has ever cared what he did, or didn’t do before.