Fullerton 5th District Councilman Ahmad Zahra seems to have adopted the strategy of rewriting his previous interaction with the wheels of justice, to wit: he was not arrested because nobody cuffed him and tossed him in the FPD slammer. And oh, by the way, “there was no case.”
Well there sure was a case, Friends.
Here’s what it looks like:
Looks guilty to me…
Zahra has previously claimed he was somehow exonerated, too, although he seems to think that statement is satisfactory. And yet other than his say so, he has shown no evidence to show the DA dropped the case – for any reason. Meantime, a source in the DAs office has indicated that Zahra pled guilty, did community service of some sort, and had his criminal record safely sealed.
(Revised: I missed the Date Qualified column and so missed the fact that Shelby Perea and Rosalia Guillen did not qualify for the ballot. The text of the post is revised to reflect this)
Here’s the list of candidates in Fullerton’s 3rd and 5th District elections in November.
The most notable feature is the number of Spanish surnamed candidates in the 5th, a fact that makes it much easier for the arrested and charged incumbent, Ahmad Zahra, to continue his sanctimonious hypocrisy from the dais.
This is all ya got?
We already know that Tony Castro is an unemployed dead-beat who gives off the aroma of a Zahra plant meant to split the Latino vote. Oscar Valadez seems to be a good Catholic boy with a family, a house, a real a job, and standing in the community – all of which set him apart from the empty suit, Zahra. Valadez’s statement says a lot of popular sounding stuff and he’s a Stanford graduate. Geez, it would be nice to have a councilman who wasn’t a preening, self-absorbed weasel? Oscar has the support of Fred Jung, so that’s another positive indication. Zahra wants to save murals and “assets.” He says he’s lived in Fullerton for 21 years which is probably just another Zahra lie he figures nobody can disprove. Among his other supporters of dubious intelligence, he lists the octogenarian bird-brain Molly McClanahan – which is almost cause for pity.
This is a Boohoo. There’s just no getting around it…
Over in D3 there are 3 candidates. We’ve already been introduced to Shana Charles, whose statement includes “progressive” catch-phrases. Her statement about restoring Fullerton’s “gutted” services means one thing – another swing at a tax increase. Her backers are the Quirk-Silvas, of course. I wonder if she’s ever even bothered to thank the Council for creating a district that she is in and that Jesus Quirk-Silva is not! The second candidate is Arnel Dino. But Dino Arnel sounds way better, so that’s what I’m calling him from now on. Mr. Arnel seems to be a lefty also, which doesn’t bode well. Those who have seen him perform on the Planning Commission are immensely underwhelmed. The final candidate is John Ybarra who seems to have relocated to the 5th District. His campaign statement is concise and rational. It appears to be a somewhat conservative and pragmatic voice. One thing is certain: the other two will never fight for accountability at City Hall.
The final element in this election will be the Independent Expenditure committees. The cops and emergency truck driver unions will back Zahra and most likely Charles – liberals, yes, but public union supporters, uber alles.
Things could be better. Or they might get worse…
Then there’s Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform, an I.E. run by Tony Bushala that evidently has set its sights on Zahra. They have already launched a shot across Zahra’s bow, and are likely to continue the pummeling until Zahra’s attitude improves.
Here is a fun video in which District 5 Councilman Ahmad Zahra stumbles and stutters his way into denying that he was arrested for battery and vandalism. It happened right outside his fundraising party when protesters showed up.
With some coaching from a masked friend he concludes that there was no “case,” and no arrest because he was not handcuffed and was not taken to a jail cell.
It was not an arrest says Zahra because some “citizen” (in air quotation marks) did something.
Uh huh. Get a kick out of how Zahra tries to incriminate Tony Bushala of something dishonest; the woman rightly points out that it is Zahra who was elected to represent Fullerton and who needs to come clean.
The confrontation then disolves into Zahra’s Spanish speaking camp followers adding a little ethic flavor like they constantly do at council meetings.
Well the thing is simple. The District Attorney, Todd Spitzer chargedthis miscreant with crimes, so the fact that he may or may not have spent some time in the FPD lock up is hilariously irrelevant.
Come clean Ahmad. If there was no case you can prove it by sharing the correspondence from the DA saying so. But one thing will always be undeniable: you were arrested and charged. No getting away from that albatross around your neck.
So I’m driving down Commonwealth yesterday afternoon and notice a protest in front of D’Vine, another one of downtown Fullerton’s scofflaw noise nuisances.
And then I noticed this:
Hmm. Nice sign, black and white. That’s appropriate.
Turns out that Ahmad Zahra was holding a fundraiser for himself at D’Vine, with special guest, career politician Lou Correa. Apparently, Fullerton Taxpayers For Reform financed by Tony Bushala have decided to remind Mr. Zahra that he was arrested and charged by the DA with battery and vandalism, perpetrated against one “Monica F.”
The hors d’oeuvres were divine…
Zahra publicly claimed he was “exonerated” although a conflicting narrative emerged from a source in the DA’s office – that he pled guilty to get his slate wiped clean. He hasn’t bothered sharing any evidence of his alleged exoneration and probably hoped the whole issue would disappear. If he though that he must now know he was wrong.
The explanation was simple. Arrested and charged…
It might be interesting to find out what Lou Correa thinks about his boy now, especially considering there’s still twelve weeks before election day. Zahra’s devoted followers will cry out his victimhood, yet again, but there’s only so far he can ride that donkey.
As a public service to Fullertonions, we here at FFFF like to keep folks apprised of who’s who in the political zoo.
And so, with 5 days left for November 2022 City Council election filing, we present those who have “pulled papers” in order to qualify for the ballot. Here’s the current list:
The list wasn’t very big around, but it sure was short…
In D5 we see Shana Charles, whom we have already introduced, here. This individual is part of the academic healthy neighborhoods mafia who mobilize Latinas to babble about things about which they are completely ignorant. She is buddies with the egregious Ahmad Zahra, which tells you all you want to know about her. She will try to mobilize the hard-core lefties over CSUF way, but are there really that many of them?
Dino
Doctor Shana has an opponent, a person called Arnel Dino. Mr. Dino is on the Fullerton Planning Commission, a common stepping stone for the City Council. I’m not familiar with this individual but I will be.
Zahra & Co.
Over in D3 we have Zahra himself, a guy who has tried to cash in regurgitating boohoo generalities and photobombing every picture taken in Fullerton. In 4 years he has accomplished nothing except hiding his own arrest and charge for battery and vandalism against a woman. Even his emergency vote to allow weed stores within 100 feet of a school was later rescinded.
A potential opponent for Zahra is a fellow named Oscar Valadez. I haven’t learned much about this man, but I have been told he works for his long-time Fullerton family business. That alone makes him supremely more qualified than Zahra who apparently has been unemployed since being on the City Council. A guy who pays taxes, employs people, and has a family? Hmm.
At the bottom of the list we find somebody named “Tony Castro” who pulled papers the very day after Mr. Valadez. That makes one wonder. Nobody I have spoken to knows anything about this individual which leads me to smell a rat. Or in this case, a rata. It’s an old trick to find a patsy to enter a political campaign to split off an opponents votes, in this case, possibly Latino voters. Who would benefit from this? Why, the ethically-challenged Zahra, of course. So we’ll be keeping an eye on Tony Castro and will let the Friends know what’s going on.
Word from a well-placed source suggests that back in 2020 after being arrested and charged with battery and vandalism perpetrated against a woman named Monica F., Fullerton City Councilman Ahmad Zahra, through his Irvine attorney, hired a P.I. to investigate his “alleged” victim.
Now why would anybody do that?
I leave it to readers to draw their own inferences from this.
The issue of whether Zahra was “exonerated” as he exclaimed publicly, and that he and mom were the real victims; or whether he pled guilty to get his dirty slate wiped clean remains in doubt. He has never provided any evidence from the District Attorney Todd Spitzer that charges against him were dropped.
Whatever the case, the broader story is not going to go away, and in fact is likely going to become a focus of opponents in this fall’s City Council election.
FFFF has squirted some cyber-ink on the missus, so I thought we ought to start spending a bit of time with Pilferin’ Paulette’s hubby, the egregious Doug “Bud” Chaffee.”
If the snout fits, wear it…
This piece was recently sent out by Chaffee’s OC Board of Supervisor challenger, Sunny Park of Buena Park.
The swine were offended by the comparison…
The reference here is to an early foray of the Chaffee Crime Family into “affordable” housing, the subsidized sort that always costs so much more than the regular kind. Of course this was thirty years ago and Chaffee has a much longer list of grifts large and small, including selling out the advocates of preserving the West Coyote Hills, creating phony districts in Fullerton, supporting overbuilt prison, I mean apartment blocks with inadequate parking, and of course spending all his time failing to reform the Fullerton Police Department.
On the Board of Supervisors Chaffee has distinguished himself by hiding COVID information from the public, overseeing the public humiliation and politicization of the Health Care Agency, and being a lackey for the misfeasance of his fellow board member, Andrew Do. And the funniest thing of all is that he, as Chairman of the Commission to End Homelessness, had to confess to reporters that he didn’t know what the Commission does.
Putting politician’s faces on animals has always struck me as desperate and sort of silly, persuasion-wise. But Sunny is running against an incumbent (and recumbent) Democrat and needs to syphon enough votes to 1) at least come in second; and, 2) keep Bud from reaching the magic 50%+1 number thereby forcing a runoff in November. Will this help?
For some strange reason, Paulette Marshall (Chaffee) thinks that she should be elected something. Once again, she is giving it a go, again running for the OC Board of Education. She got wiped out last time, coming in third – 5,000 votes behind Vicki Calhoun who spent half a million dollars less.
Here is Paulette’s ballot statement, just oozing sympathy for the traumatized victims of COVID and offering her special brand of boohoo bullshit.
A moral paragon speaks…
For starters, Paulette is nota teacher and non-profit boardmember is not a job. But expecting the truth from a Chaffee is like expecting rain in the Sahara. Plus this office has very little to do with those 600,000 kids, so she either doesn’t know the job she’s running for, or is just lying – again.
In the past FFFF has shared how, in her desperation to get elected, she has created or paid to advertise in phony websites. I guess she thought this was somehow a winning strategy, because she’s doing it again, with a feminist flair, here.
Crime doesn’t always pay in Fullerton…
Of course Paulette’s bios never mention an extremely embarrassing, and telling, fact: when she ran as a fake carpetbagger for the Fullerton City Council in 2018, she was caught on video – twice – stealing campaign signs, a crime for which she pled guilty.
Poor Paulette. You almost have to pity somebody who is so desperate to get elected something. Well, here at FFFF we try to help folks with self-improvement whenever we can. And here, I suppose, we’ll have to keep trying to teach Paulette that there are more important things in life than being elected to office. One of them is being honest.
The 2022 effort to create new districts stumbles along. Last week, the Commission set-up to make a recommendation to the City Council met to discuss the several maps that had been submitted. The complete lack of public participation was evident – only a handful of maps were submitted.
At the end of the meeting a 5-2 majority favored Map 114 – the demographers tweak of Commissioner John Seminara’s Map 106. Then they added Maps 111 and 112 as worthy of Council consideration. Take a look at Map 114. The dark lines show current district boundaries:
Map 114 making pre-eminent good sense.
Map 114 isn’t perfect, but it is informed by Fullerton’s clear major street boundaries and respects both ethnic and physical communities of interest. It cleans up the idiotic Tentacles of Interest foisted on the voters in 2016 by our former Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald. There would no longer be district contortions so that council members could each have an interest in the public money vortex knows as Downtown Fullerton.
Two of the commission members – former City employee Kitty Jaramillo, and Jody Vallejo preferred Map 110 a bizarre amalgamation for District 3 – a long, thin district that stretches from Placentia Avenue to Euclid Avenue connecting neighborhoods that are physically remote and that don’t share any obvious connection. The adherents of this map apparently banded together into a committee of some kind to concoct this hot, wet mess, proving that more heads are not necessarily better than fewer. Check out this acid burp:
The people who defended this map claimed that it is the “College map,” joining CSUF and FJC with their surrounding neighborhoods as a dubious “community of interest.” The further rationale for its support was that “many people” had participated in its creation. This map violates several basic tenets of district-making, to wit: creating a district (3) that is not compact; splitting the trans-57 community of interest into two separate tribes; and throwing together neighborhoods almost 4 miles apart in a weird, horizontal embrace.
How anybody could justify this District 3 is still beyond me. The demographer tried to make it less ridiculous by whacking it back by a mile (Map 112), but it still looks unsupportable by reason or logic. Here is Map 112.
So what gives? Commission member Tony Bushala dialed in to proclaim that Map110 (and by extension, Map 112 was motivated by purely political consideration, not the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Map Act that govern this process, and would have none of it. He didn’t elaborate.
The train of thought was weak but it sure was short…
And then it hit me.
Map 110 (and by extension Map 112) was submitted by a group of people committed to keeping Jesus Quirk-Silva, the current liberal, dim-witted D3 councilman in office. The other recommended maps – that removed the gerrymander that put him in the office – would leave him with no place to run in 2022 and out office!
Hence the desperation by this “committee” that wasted a lot of verbal gas doing what it not permitted by the FPA – protecting a party or a politician.
Oh, well, the maps go to the City Council on Tuesday the 8th, where outrage theater, liberally sprinkled with liberal handwriting will be featured on the playbill. Expect long lines the usual weepers, new and old, show up to promote Map 112. Will it work? That depends on Mayor Fred Jung who by now must be getting a shitload of unwanted importunity coming at him.
Of course there is nothing stopping a council majority from devising its own map, drawing on others, or cooking up a whole new one. But as it stands now, Map 114 is the one supported by the Redistricting Advisory Commission.
Sort of like toenail fungus, Paulette Marshall (Chaffee) is an unwelcome parasite that won’t go away. She has recently announced yet another run for public office – this time another try for the Orange County Board of Education.
Crime doesn’t always pay in Fullerton…
Friends may remember Paulette from such hits as faking an address to run for Fullerton’s 5th District back in 2018. Too bad she was caught stealing campaigns on video. That ethical lapse caused her to quit the race (not in shame, for she has none). The DA wasn’t impressed and charged her. She was forced to plead guilty, pay a fine and do community service; her record was expunged, but the two videos that document her criminal activity are alive and well on the internet.
And that’s where I put the sign in the back of the car…
In 2020 Ms. Marshall (Chaffee) returned to electoral politics – a first run at the OC BoE. Her campaign was marked by a phony “news” website and phony interviews which were so lame it was almost more pathetic than angrifying.
Trying to run on her County Supervisor husband’s coat tails yet again, she poured a ton of cash into her campaign, yet finished a distant third place – way behind Vicki Calhoun – who spent virtually nothing.
Why Paulette thinks her chances are any better than they were two years ago is unknown. Her past is hanging around her neck like the proverbial albatross and it seems unlikely that her by just using her husband’s name will work.
In 2021 she got a crony to sue Tim Shaw, the guy who beat her in 2020, to quit the Board. His reappointment to a 2-year term must have come as a shock to Paulette who unsuccessfully interviewed for the job, and is suing Shaw yet again.
I suppose FFFF will just have to dust off and crank up the old campaign machine and get ready to go to work.
