FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Category: About Us
Intelligent, Responsible, and Accountable. These are the general qualities we seek in our elected representatives – plus the independence and integrity required to be effective leaders.We intend to support candidates in Fullerton who possess the willingness and ability to use their independent intelligence in weighing public matters; who will be responsible to his or her constituents; and who will insist on accountability for all the actions that he or she takes. We will actively oppose incumbents who have failed to demonstrate the qualities described above; who fail to remember that they are servants of the public; who believe that being a “team player” is more important than principle; who don’t have the courage to stand on principle when it means standing alone; who are not humble enough to admit error and are incapable of learning from their mistakes; and those who fail to treat constituents with the respect and dignity they deserve. And we will oppose candidates who through their words or actions indicate that they would not provide intelligent and responsible leadership, accountable to citizens of Fullerton. If you agree with our philosophy, you are a friend of Fullerton’s future.
Yes, Dear Friends, it is that time of year again. Well, not really “again” because we’ve never done it before. And whether we ever do it again will depend on whether Fullerton’s politicians and decision-makers quit doing and saying hare-brained things. Aw, momma, that’s a lead-pipe cinch.
Whoa, there, you say! What in the world is JFD going off on? Is somebody putting weird stuff in his kibble?
Remarkable qualities deserve recognition. The Fringies are coming!
No! What I’m going off on is the First Annual FFFF Fringie Awards. That’s right. We will recognize the most recognizable 2009 behavior by our political lords and masters/mistresses by awarding recognition for it. Several categories will be included, as well a special life-time achievement award.
Stay tuned as we announce the nominees! And don’t hesitate to make your feelings known. The Academy will take all views into consideration.
The Fullerton city fathers (and mothers) have dedicated themselves to the cause of converting historic downtown Fullerton into an open air food and booze court. The place is now chock full of food and drink purveyors – almost to the exclusion of any practical uses associated with a real downtown. Well that’s their vision for “preservation” and the rubes seem to be going for it: the nincompoopers keep getting re-elected. But I digress badly.
We would like to do reviews of Fullerton eateries, but, alas, we cannot afford a Food and Wine critic as was originally contemplated in our business plan. And, yet since DTF has become the sort of place aptly symbolized by the horror of Meatloaf Monday, it is clear that a free and open culinary exchange is needed now more than ever. To that end we are asking Friends to contribute their own reviews of various fooderies. If they are decently written and share a certain piquant je ne sais quoi, we will publish them for the edification of the Friends, comestibles-wise. Of course we will have no truck with the sort of blatant stoogery one would find in a Fullerton News Tribune restaurant review.
We’re used to insults flung at us from the non-fringers who talk a real good game, but who are basically all about feeling out and burrowing into whatever handy crevice will accommodate their abdominal bulk, six legs, and antennae.
hey baby, you don't get to be 100 million years old without some survival instincts!
So we take it in stride when the latest addition to the Red Bottomed blog, “Colony Rabble” took a little baby swing at us in the comment thread of her maiden post:
“I love Tom Daly to bits, and the fact that the nimrods at FFFF (how many F’s?) bag on him just makes me fight harder for him.”
Nimrods? Ouch. I think.
We really have no bone to pick with Colony Rabble. She “loves Daly to bits” which is just fine. She is clearly not a Repuglican, just a big time RINO. You fight on, girl! Work your tail off for Tom. You’ll probably end up working a lot harder than he will.
don't let it get a running start...
But why shouldn’t we “bag” on Tom Daly – a career politician with no evident ability other than political careerism? Is it really so bad to think we can do better? A lot better?
And it does seem pretty unusual that someone whom Matthew J. Cunningham agrees with on almost no issue he says he believes in, is suddenly blogging – just in time for the 4th District election. Well, color us suspicious. And so color, too, their own blogger Allan Bartlett, who is under the impression that his blog should stand for something. Silly Allan!
Oh Allan. remember when things used to be so simple?
Death of Socrates; Jacques Louis Davd, oil on canvas, 1787 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Because Socrates was teaching others how to think for themselves, the Athenian government found him guilty of a crime and sentenced him to death. Things had been going badly in Athens, freedom of thought became a casualty.
We received the following cell phone message from The Fullerton Harpoon who is currently on a fishing trawler in the vicinity of the Sea of Japan and, apparently, has no computer access.
Dear Friends, Happy Thanksgiving. Some of you may wonder what an old, crusty, salt-bitten sea gherkin like the Harpoon is thankful for (some of you may not, and may not care). I am thankful for being part of a society in which I can hurl my outrageous barbs (i.e. my current working version of the truth) at powers-that-be, and not get locked up;
I am thankful for having a bunch of fertile words and ideas bequeathed to me by people a lot smarter than I am, who happily deigned to bestow their gifts, Bodhisattva-like on the rest of us;
I am thankful for our Friends – a rare few who are able to view the socio-political terrain, and realize that we can do better – a lot better, and who are not terrified by the thought of criticizing the Chimps in Charge.
I am thankful for all the inert Clumps in the dead, sterile center, who peer out to the fertile, incubatorial edges of their paltry weltanshauung and start to sweat yellow fear pellets; for without them we fringers would have no frame of reference ourselves.
And so, from the cold, green-grey waters of the Sea of Japan, I wish one and all of the Friends a Happy Thanksgiving.
Here are some famous fringers who did not live in Fullerton.
Socrates - the original fringer.Peter Abelard was pretty damn fringy, and so was his girlfriend, Heloise.Old Mark tried real hard to fit in, but at heart he was a true fringerIn an era of proto-repuglican dead heads, H.L. Menken liked beer and Bach. A real fringy dude. Fringe! Fringe!Here, fringe looking decidedly feminine...
We just read a very interesting comment by our fellow blogger, The Fullerton Harpoon, who wrote what appears to be a fairly concise essay on the nature of the “fringer.” We have added some fun graphics to the text. Here is what The Harpoon wrote:
I think you guys are confusing unrelated terms. “Fringism” is a state of mind – not a political persuasion. The fringer has been identified as such by those in the gelatinous “center” who have an inherest trust and fondness for, or a personal stake in power structures.
A middling sea yields a bountiful harvest...
The fringer embraces the supposed insult knowing as he does that independence from entrenched interests brings clarity and objectivity. The true fringer is (or should be) a fairly rigorous empiricist (a fringer with a theological or Idealist bent is likely just to be just plain scary); if he has an acerbic personality and is unafraid to deploy perfectly good Anglo Saxon words then the fringer has the weapons to puncture the hot air-filled balloon the aeronauts in the middle like to waft around in. Hopefully now the picture of the fringer starts to come into sharper focus.
An inviting target...
The fringer is an iconoclast by nature or experience, refusing to recognize the graven images idolized by the marshmallowy middle.
The dead center (inertial resistance) is responsible for most of the lack of accountability in local government; the “conservatives” (they’re not) and the “progressives” (they’re not) are actually pretty happy just to share their five little thrones with each other while the real shot-callers keep the apparatus working behind the scenes.
Other definitions are welcome, as usual. Fringers are not dogmatic.
Mimi is the senator representing most of Fullerton in the 33rd State Senate District – so bequeathed by Dick Ackerman who made sure that some (but not all) of Fullerton was kept in his 33rd when redistricting occurred in 2001. Walters lives somewhere down near the beach but is our representative! Ah! Ackermanism, the gift that keeps giving.
In the fun photo above, Mimi Walters is the slender woman in pink, getting crushed by her good pal Mike Duvall’s tub of guts.
Why are we picking on Walters? Because to put it simply, her political presence in Fullerton is a pure expression of the repuglicanism propagated by the Ackermans and their cronies. Walters is a long-time buddy of Ackerman, Inc. and, like Mike Duvall, owes her political success to that gang. Naturally she would endorse a carpetbagging, no-ability zero like Linda Ackerman to represent us. Hell, that’s just par for the course.
But her latest episode is just as bad. Apparently she is the Campaign Co-chair for some creature named Sue Perez who wants to unseat State Senator Lou Correa for the 34th Senate job. Orange Juice blog has done a post on the subject, here. The 34th District includes a good-sized chunk of south-central Fullerton. And that makes it our business.
Well, guess what? Sue Perez doesn’t live in the 34th District!Quel surprise!She also has no political history, no record, no nothing, except that she seems to have some connection to the nut-jobs at the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and is pals with Lorri Galloway – another carpetbagger. Perez has hired Mimi Walter’s campaign consultant as an indication of her seriousness.
We would like to think that Mimi W. would have taken some time to soberly reflect upon the humiliation visited upon Linda Ackerwoman before embarking on another voyage into the same turbulent waters, but apparently such was not the case. Could the Gang find no one with even a shred of plausibility? Guess not. In the end it won’t matter much because Correa will win comfortably. Still, it would be nice to have a real opponent for Lou in the election.
So soon someone may have to festoon central Fullerton with a whole new round of “carpetbagger” signs. There’s just no rest for the weary!
In Puccini’s opera La Boheme, an undernourished Mimi finally succumbs to “consumption” in Act IV. Our Mimi may be a little harder to be rid of. But can we really afford any more of this sort of thing?
Dear Friends, we have received the following e-mail from Joe Sipowicz:
The last couple of months have been a lot of fun for me as I followed the doings in the 72nd Special Election primary. This was really the first time I have paid close attention to a state election, and boy was it an eye-opener. I guess enough has been said about the triumph of substantive record versus hollow slogans, mendacity, self-serving corruption, seemingly bottomless pots of money, and an outright lie of a residency.
My favorite part of the whole episode came when FFFF published a post on the Dave Lopez appearance at the Ackerman party at the Summit House and was subsequently notified by some huge law firm (Jones Day) that FFFF would be in big trouble if you didn’t remove it and cook up some cowardly “retraction” of simple facts. It was a pretty obvious case of harassment orchestrated by Ackerman himself.
You did not give in. Instead you left the post up and essentially told the Ackerman campaign and its running dogs to shove the crap right back up where it came from. I think you deserve a lot of credit for that. And I wonder how many of the sniveling centro-sphere pin heads who love to throw around the word ‘”cowardly” would have caved in to that sort of intimidation attempt.
Anyway FFFF, my thanks for you efforts to keep the Ackermans out of Fullerton. I’m not even sure if you realize the great service you have perfomed – but thanks!
