Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
So you’ve already signed the petitions to recall McKinley, Bankhead and Jones, but now you’re wondering what else you can do to help the cause…
Show your neighbors that you demand responsible and accountable government. Head on over to the Fullerton Recall website and order yourself some of these nifty yard signs – for free!
The idiots who run FSD agreed to pay some chucklehead named Rudy Ruetigger $2000 as a motivational speaker at an August management retreat. We reported about that, here.
Ruetigger, a shameless self-promoter actually talked somebody into making a fictional movie account of his pathetic football efforts at Notre Dame.
Despite immediate ridicule, the FSD stuck to their guns.
Those guns backfired blanks today as it was reported that Rudy was a stock scammer who’s been busted by the SEC.
What sort of lessons were learned by FSD management at this retreat? Maybe Superintendent Mitch Hovey or one of the pathetic Trustees who voted for this will travesty will stop by and enlighten us.
In our previous article about Fullerton’s MWD rep-almost-for-life Jim Blake we received an interesting comment from havegunwilltravel, one of our frequent semi-coherent trolls describing Jim Blake as some sort of wealthy philanthropist who has been slaving away for free on the MWD Board of Directors. Here is his/her comment:
Jim Blake, as the City’s MWD representitive gets no pay, and no pension, and no benefits. And doesn’t even ask for mileage reimbursements. He could by and sell Tony Bushala, 100 times over, and still have a pile of gold. So get your facts straight.
But check out this OC Watchdog article by Teri Sforza about the massive amount of expenses racked up by MWD directors. Oh, oh. There’s Mr. Moneybags Blake piling up over $10,000 in “travel” in less than two year’s worth of toiling in the MWD salt mines. I’d love to see those receipts!
Living high on the public hog is par for the course to certain self-entitled folks who seem to think their “service” justifies all kinds of self-indulgence – reflected in behavior like parking in handicapped spaces when you’re not supposed to.
Remind you of anyone?
As if they didn’t have enough problems already, the Fullerton Police Department may have a new issue to grapple with: the wrath of the Almighty. According to Brandon Ferguson of the OC Weekly, a couple of Fullerton cops rudely broke up an annual celebration in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe over in an east-side alley. According to a witness one cop was heard to yell “I don’t give a fuck. You have to end this, or you’re getting arrested.”
¡Ay caramba! As they say, ¡No bueno! What’s next for FPD? Breaking down the doors of the church because the music is too loud?
The best part of the story is that apparently FPD spokes-stool Andrew Goodrich has decided to play hard to get with the Weekly in retribution for Marisa Gerber’s magisterial story of FPD law breaking and goonery. Important job tip, Andy: angering the media is no way for an under-employed PR jerk-off to make friends.
According to our Friend Scott Moxley over at the OC Weekly, the mother of Kelly Thomas, Cathy Thomas has sued our illustrious District Attorney, Tony Rackauckas. It seems she wants to gain access to materials collected by the DA about the murder of her son by officers of the Fullerton Police Department.
Naturally, the DA said no, forcing Ms. Thomas to sue.
It sure would be nice for someone outside of law enforcement to takle a look at just how the DA came up with the dubious theory that only two cops were implicated in criminal activity; that Officer Joe Wolfe had no idea what was going on just 15 feet from where he was standing; or why he exculpated Hampton and Blatney who not only made made no effort to stop Cicinelli’s tasering and beatdown on Kelly, but seemed to have piled on; his take on the role of Sergeant Craig who seems to have coordinated mop-up operations while the dying man was waiting for hospital transportation; his reasoning behind not charging superiors in a blatant criminal conspiracy to cover up the misdeeds of the McKinley Six.
Well, good luck, Cathy.
Amid Fullerton’s water rate debacle the City’s representative on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California announced Tuesday that he is stepping down. After representing the City of Fullerton for 24 years on the MWD Board of Directors, Jim Blake says he is done.
It is rumored that Fullerton’s retired city manager Chris Meyer is looking to be appointed as Blake’s replacement but that will require a majority vote by the Fullerton City Council. Since City Council Members Bankhead and Jones appointed Meyer as City Manager in 2002, there is little doubt that they wouldn’t give him the MWD nod as well.
However, with Fullerton’s water rates under scrutiny and an illegal tax being batted about City Hall for justification, you have to wonder how much of the water mess can be attributed to Meyer- not to mention the rest of the City’s countless woes.
An appointment of Meyer to the MWD Board might bring further outcry to City Hall, something the new Mayor might wish to avoid. Since August the Council members have been cussed at, cursed at, sworn up and down, and yelled at. They are now being held accountable for their general lack of leadership by a campaign to recall three members, Mayor Pro Tem Pat McKinley, and members Don Bankhead and F. Dick Jones.
Many believe that the appointment should be filled by a current council member so that they can be held responsible by Fullerton voters for their actions on the Board. Currently, Blake is answerable only to the Fullerton City Council.
If the appointment is to be held by a non-council member, then the process should be open to ALL candidates equally like any other council appointment to a commission or committee.
Whoever is appointed will be tasked with a massive budgetary shortfall that rivals Sacramento’s. The appointee will be asked for double-digit rate hikes and even more spending. They need to know the water industry and even more about public policy and long-term investment solutions. They need to know Fullerton and not just through the myopic eyes of service clubs.
Fullerton deserves an accountable and credible representative on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
Due to reasonable requests from Friends for additional images, the Nominating Committee reopened the selection process and has generously included additional images for consideration.
– JFD
In one of our most popular categories our Nominating Committee considered images from 2011 that aggravated our collective angst, that seared our frayed synapses, and that moved us to laughter, rage, tears, blood and sweat. Such mind-numbing work can only be assuaged by mind-numbing medication, and so the Committee found itself self-medicating frequently and without any of the controls imposed by people who control controlled substances. Controcontrolcontrolcontrolcontr…okay where was I?
Oh, yeah. Best Image Fringie® 2011. Here are your nominees:
1. Smirking police spokesorifice Andrew Goodrich. This image of utterly smug self-satisfaction, bloated self-worth, utter disdain for the civilians that pay his engorged salary and pension, and utter disdain for the truth came to symbolize a dysfunctional police department. Image and behavior in perfect synchronization. This picture is going to be hard to beat.
2. Ahoy there, matey. Back in late summer former Fullerton police sergeant Arthur Wiechmann deigned to visit our humble blog to defend the killers Ramos and Cicinelli. He left a slime trail that was quickly traced back to his own website. And what we found there was pretty creepy. In case you were wondering, yes, Swinging Loverboy is a proud member of Fullerton’s $100,000 club.
3. Until their mug shots graced world-wide news media there was no face to the cop side of the brutal beating death of Kelly Thomas. When Ramos and Cicinelli became the Faces of Fullerton to the world, the true extent of Pat McKinley’s disastrous stretch as Chief of Police became evident to all except the most delusional. If you can discern an iota of humanity in these photos, God bless you.
4. Back in September Fullerton opened it’s new library remodel and conference room. While only a few hundred feet away a “lynch-type mob” protested the murder-by-cop of an innocent man, a crazed Doc Heehaw and His Business as Usual Co. got tough with an over-sized scissors. Which just goes to show that when the going gets tough, the tough get to cutting ribbons.
5. Colonel HeeHaw as Colonel Sanders. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
6. Boss HeeHaw as Boss Hogg. All hat and no cattle. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
7. The She Bear, Pat McMcKinley lumbered through our collective consciousness in 2011, leaving copious amounts of She Bear scat in his wake. This picture resonated with the Nominating Committee as one of the great reflections of hypocrisy anybody could recall. See, if you’re one of Pat’s “Special Ladies,” you are not credible and your claims to have been sexually assaulted by one of McKinley’s cops is unbelievable.
8. This cheerful image of former City Manager Chris Meyer surfaced in connection with the bloatation of Fullerton’s $100,000 pension club. Meyer cashes a $14,300 pension check each and every month so he doesn’t have to worry where his next meal is coming from. As City Manager the Meyer oversaw a Fullerton Police Department that sank into its current Culture of Corruption.
9. Thanks to Friend JT for reminding us of this fun still harvested from an entertaining video about police union boss Barry Coffman handing out citations for “excessive horn honking” a new Vehicle Code violation cooked up by the Fullerton Police Department to harass protesters. For sheer overfed haplessness there’s just no getting around this image. That the haplessness is accompanied by a badge, a gun, arrogance, and self-entitlement should give all freedom-loving people cause to reflect.
10. Since Time Magazine© has named “The Protester” as Person of the Year, it seems fitting to give due notice to Kelly’s Army for their diligent two-month protest in front of the police department. To all the protesters right, left, and center who joined together, God bless you.
That’s enough abuse. Who will take home the coveted Fringie©? Stay tuned and find out!
When the sun rose on January 1, 2011, who could have foreseen the strange and disturbing circumstance that would produce a veritable cavalcade of scary ghosts from Fullerton’s olden days.
Sweet Baby Jebus!
And who knew that so many vaporous remnants of Fullerton’s horse and buggy days would be putting in appearances to remind us of the bad old days before talking pictures and x-rays.
Damn Recall!
1. First we heard the name A.B. “Buck” Catlin, supporter of the anti-recall crew, and inveterate staff stooge/big government RINO when he was on the City Council in the 1880s. Catlin was a proud supporter of every Redevelopment boondoggle in Fullerton’s history; and some that were so hare-brained even his pals wouldn’t support them. How frightful! Good Old Buck was recalled alongside Don Bankhead and Molly McClanahan for promoting a totally unnecessary utility tax. Wow, things don’t change much around here, do they? Shriek!
2. Another scary ghost reappeared to support the Three Dithering Dinosaurs: the hideous spectral phenomenon known as Linda LeQuire. Linda’s image does not appear in mirrors or photographs so you’ll just have to take our word for it. She also popped up to haunt Fullerton two years ago, so I guess we’re just going to have to get used to these biennial visitations! Brrrr!
3. Then there was the horrifying and serial re-appearances of my former, broomstick wielding mistress, Jan Flory. Like her former colleagues she too glady voted to approve an illegal 10% tax on your water bills. Even her offspring are creepy. That’s enough to make you cough up your kibble! EEK!
4. Some purists may quibble that Molly McClanahan can’t possibly be a eerie apparition since she is actually an elected member of the North Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees. But if that isn’t an insubstantial graveyard I don’t know what is. Like Catlin, and Bankhead, McClanahan was recalled in 1994 for backing that shameful utility tax; her eerie manifestation in defense of the indefensible Three Sluggish Sloths says all that need be said about this transparent emanation.
5. And finally, in 2011 we were treated to a horrifying visitation from the Great Beyond in the vacuous form of former city councilwoman Pam Keller. Don’t be fooled by any apparent substance. There’s no there, there.
First she showed up to scream union slogans into a radio show mike; later she appeared at a city council meeting in some sort of cryogenic suit. If that don’t send you shrieking into the night then I don’t know from Milk Bones. Boo!
Feel free to run screaming into the night, yourself.
FFFF had a chance to sit down with councilmember Bruce Whitaker to let him explain how the police department and city management deliberately withheld critical information and misled elected decision makers in the immediate aftermath of the Kelly Thomas death.
As you listen, be sure to reflect on the atmosphere of fear and distrust that permeated Fullerton in the weeks immediately following the murder; remember that we were told to remain calm and patient, and that we were to trust our leaders who supposedly had access to all the information that we did not.
Later we found out that our leaders knew nothing, and the city let accused killers roam free with badges and guns while we were kept in the dark.
Normally a non-election year would mean that the pickings for political stoogery would be pretty slim. But 2011 is not a normal non-election year, and the advent of a vigorous Recall campaign has produced that rarest of phenomena: the Off-year Stooge. And so we present the Fringie® nominees in the next category: Creepiest Political Stooge 2011.
The Nominating Committee labored long and hard to come up with the nominees, and we owe them a sincere debt of gratitude. For it could not have been easy pondering the visages and miscreance of these small-town hacks and poltroons. And that may explain the 11 empty bottles of akavit laying around the Editorial Boardroom floor the next morning.
1. Right out of the chute the Anti-recall forces deployed the limited talents of the unctuous Jim Alexander to attack the character of the Recall leader. Alexander is a reptilian homunculus with a reputation as a small-time bag man for developers who want to grease the City Council.
2. Then the same group of uberklowns engaged a four-foot tall gnome-fossil named Bill Gillespie to annoy the FPPC with a hollow complaint drummed up by Dick Ackerman, ironnically the subject of a legitimate FPPC complaint himself for illegal lobbying!
3. But they weren’t done. Next they employed the oleaginous services of Anthony “Big Tony” Florentine to lodge yet another empty complaint with the FPPC. You remember this paragon of virtue, right? He’s the guy who built an addition to his bar on a public sidewalk and got the City Council – including Dick Jones and Don Bankhead – to go along with the hijacking.
4. And finally we come to Larry Bennett, the moral bellwether of the anti-recall campaign; a man who earnestly pretends to care about such things as probity and honesty, and yet who lends his name to the worst prevarications cooked up by the amphibio-pus sac, Dave Ellis, and who oversees a website that is nothing more than a pathetic collection of outright lies only made amusing by the unintentional comedic value of the amateur site.
Bennett has distinguished himself by challenging Fullerton water rate payers to find evidence of the hidden illegal 10% tax on their water bills. Of course they can’t find it. It’s hidden, jackass. It’s not on the water bill. And that’s why it’s illegal.
These are your nominees. There will be no winners, only losers. Until we have a Recall, that is.