I have it on good authority that anti-recall team captain Dick Ackerman has been diligently hounding OC Register personnel to start flogging the wonderful deeds accomplished by the Three Rotten Eggs, Dick Jones, Don Bankhead, and Pat McPension.
Will it work? It’s hard to see how. Two of the three are career public employees with massive inflation-linked pensions; Jones was the drum-beater for the abortive pension spike of 2008 only stopped by Shawn Nelson; Jones and Bankhead have approved of an illegal 10% water tax every year for 15 years; and all three have been reliable water bearers for whatever idiocy was put in front of them by the city bureaucracy.
Ackerman has millions of reasons to fight the recall of the gents who are in the process of handing his client a deal worth millions in government subsidies, but the editorialists at the Register have no reason to promote these clowns.
True, Ackerman is drinking buddies with a couple of the Register social columnists – the same ones that went out of their way to pass on the smears of Ackerman against Chris Norby, and to promote the useless, carpetbagging Ackerwoman.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Ackerman’s efforts to promote the unpromotable, gains traction.
Over at his website called Fullerton Stories some poor fellow named Davis Barber has felt the need to unburden his soul of lots of weighty thoughts, n’ stuff. Most of the rather embarrassing dissertation is another lame defense of the Fullerton status quo, and the attack on “protesters,” including FFFF, that we have become all too familiar with from City Hall cronies pretending to be journalists.
But there is one part of this coughed-up pabulum that just has to be read, and re-read, to be believed.
• Blame the messenger/Fullerton Police Sergeant Andrew Goodrich lied about, well, everything: FullertonStories.com does not agree. While there may be reason to doubt statements from Sgt. Goodrich, calling him a liar is un-called for and wrong. It’s his job to tell “the people” what he knows.
The lies were for your own good...
Surely this guy must be joking. Can’t this genius see the problem with his own assessment? Why in the world is there ” reason to doubt statements from Sgt. Goodrich”? Because he made up stories that were not true and passed them to “the people” via complacent boobs like Davis Barber. That’s called lying. And people who lie are liars. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Give me two ciggies and I'll say anything you want...
On the subject of liars in 2011, and changing gears somewhat, one thing I would like to know is how Mr. Barber came into contact with the so-called homeless jewelry peddler named Richard Fritschie; the guy who popped up almost on cue, claiming to be an eye-witness to the Thomas murder and who tried to exonerate the cops of any wrong-doing. That whole thing stank like a rotting corpse.
Of course the DA’s description of events from the audio and video record proved that Fritschie was a liar, but the question remains – why?
Lots of people have wondered who set up that con man with his mark.
Almost on cue, who pops up to start cluck-clucking anti-recall nonsense? That’s right, the old dithering bird-brain herself, Molly McClanahan, who was recalled in 1994 for instituting an unnecessary utility tax.
Enjoy the vague abstractions and self-righteous pontification. You are left to your own devices to figure out what in the hell “emotional mischief” is. It’s anybody’s guess.
Let Molly do what Molly does best: babble idiocy about “the body politic” and the “soul of the City.” Let Molly roll out the same garbage she did eighteen years ago: that recall is only supposed to punish “malfeasance.” Wrong, dingbat. That’s what the Penal Code is for. Recall was instituted in California to get rid of politicians who had obviously failed in their duty to their constituents by placing special interests first. And that is precisely what has happened in Fullerton. And that’s why the recall of ’12, like that of ’94, is going to succeed.
Rudy says thumbs up, way up, to suckers, who are born every minute.
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.
The luck of the Irish was about to run out...
Despite immediate ridicule, the FSD stuck to their guns.
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.
Politicians are forever saying asinine things and then denying they said them. Small time politicians like our own mutton head Don Bankhead have been getting away with this sort of thing for years. Televised council meetings have helped expose the intra-noggin confusion that exists in minds like Bankhead’s, but youtube has really been invaluable.
A while back we ran a post that highlighted Bruce Whitaker rightfully taking Bankhead to task for sharing his opinion that Fullerton would be ghost town without Redevelopment. No, no said Bankhead, testy-like. He really said “downtown Fullerton.” Forget that neither would be a ghost town without Redevelopment – that’s just Big Gummint Bankhead passing along all the lies he’s swallowed over the years, and of course his own campaign literature year after dreary year – taking credit for “revitalizing” DTF over and over and over and over and over again.
Here’s what Bankhead really said, verbatim, an insult to the hundreds of businesses in DTF and in the rest of the city that never took a nickel of Bankhead’s largess:
Seems as if the mass exodus of LAPD cops gave McKinley the opportunity to take his pick of his former colleagues and put them on the streets of Fullerton.
Fullerton: a veritable jobs program for ex-LAPD cops. And it’s interesting to connect the dots in this Bilblical succession of miscreants: Armstrong hires McKinley; McKinly hires Cicinelli; the cop who never should have been on the street bashes in Kelly Thomas’ face like a piñata.
We’ve written about the control freak Armstrong before, perched as he was, atop an incompetent pyramid of his own construction. When Shakespeare said, “the evil that men do lives after them” he said a mouthful.
Here’s an eye-opening story from last winter by Greg Sebourn about one of the most hare-brained Redevelopment boondoggles ever proposed. The fact that it was suggested by Don Bankhead a mere six weeks after his umpteenth re-election is ample evidence that either 1) his mental gears have slipped completely; or 2) he really never had any judgment in the first place. You decide if you really want this king-sized boob in office any more.
– Joe Sipowicz
Mayor Pro Tem Don Bankhead seeks to use Redevelopment Agency funds, originally set aside for combating blight and providing low-income housing, to prop up the Fullerton Civic Light Opera (FCLO).
We're off to see the wizard...
In an article penned by Eric Marchese of FullertonStories.com, Bankhead indicated he is “…investigating the use of Redevelopment Agency funding to assist the Duncans and FCLO.”
What would prompt this Republican and self-proclaimed conservative council member with more than 22 years of elected service under his belt to conclude a necessity for a taxpayer bailout of the FCLO?
Bankhead was quoted as saying, “It would be a blow, a terrible loss, to the city if [the Duncans] can’t figure out some way of saving [the company].”
And therefore taxpayers must somehow bailout this private endeavor??
Infrastructure lying in ruin from continuous neglect.
What about the public employees who have taken significant cuts in pay (and service hours) to help shore up the financial debacle created by a city council with their collective heads in the sand? Should the Redevelopment Agency also bail out these other departments and public employees?
The short answer: NO! Before the Redevelopment Agency existed taxpayer funds were meant to go toward all of our public services from engineering and education to public safety. But after the Redevelopment Agency was created and expanded, taxpayer funds were redirected to combat blight and fund low-income housing. Meanwhile, our infrastructure lays in ruin from continuous neglect and habitual misappropriation of public funds.
I like the flying monkeys.
If we use Redevelopment Agency funds to bail out the FCLO we will have effectively robbed all of our public agencies so that a select few can be entertained.
They even put a little chocolate mint on my pillow!
Here’s a really fun post I did about 20 months ago making sure people knew that it wasn’t just a spendthrift Democrat who blew over a grand at a fancy hotel at a useless League of Cities meeting. Turns out the RINOs Bankhead and Jones did, too. The way they see it, it’s their money, not yours.
– The Desert Rat
Okay, like I said the other day, I’m a fair guy. Fullerton Mayor Don Bankhead attended that fall of 2008 League of Cities Meeting in Long Beach right along side Pam Keller. Like Keller, Bankhead also put in for a double occupancy room for three nights. Here’s the smoking gun.
Over $1100 for a swank hotel room barely 25 miles from Bankhead’s house. And this during the vast economic melt-down of late 2008. Bad judgment? Sure, to you or me. But not to a guy who has likely spent twenty years going to these schmoozefests on our dime.
Sayonara, baby!
A juicy side-irony is the fact that this is the same piece o’ manpower that Doc Jones seems to think is the right guy to lead Fullerton through tough economic times. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the dimwit Jones. Hell, Jones was at the no-tell hotel, too!
Well, anyway, Don Bankhead, like Pam Keller, is up for re-election this year, if in fact he decides to run, which of course he will. So you can bet the desert acreage that both of them are going to be targets because of their willingness – no, eagerness – to waste, public money.
I really don’t know why I bother communicating with the feather-headed Sharon Kennedy and her wretchedly incompetent Fullerton Observer.
When she wrote an unsigned “article” last month alleging that I rent space from the City worth more than $12,000 a month for a mere $1300, I felt obliged to respond. So I sent in a letter to The Observer to add important facts that she casually omitted and also to question how in the world she came up with her crazy valuation. To my knowledge Ms. Kennedy has no experience of any kind in the commercial real estate business and knows nothing about the subleasing potential of the Santa Fe Depot or even its vacancy rates or square foot lease potential.
The deal looked pretty damn sweet for the City 20 years ago when I offered to make a large up front payment and finance the historic restoration myself – especially since the other responders wanted to be paid; and this ignoramus somehow thinks the City gave something away. I mentioned in my letter that if she had any complaint to take it up with the Good Folks at Redevelopment.
As usual, Ms. Kennedy appended her inevitable dingbat editorial comment to my correspondence that completely ignored my points and instead launched into a diatribe about all the good that Redevelopment does for poor people. She neglected to inform her readers that this so-called “affordable” housing costs twice as much as the regular kind, that it pays for high roller lobbyists, hustlers and bagmen, that it is principally just a mechanism to employ house-ocrats, and that, of course, it ends up displacing the poor for the less poor. She also mentioned to explain that Redevelopment giveaways are financed by robbing other local agencies that rely on property tax revenue.
For some reason Kennedy believes if you say something enough times it will become true: just like she claimed (again) that I am suing the Redevelopment Agency for $1,000,000. That of course is just bald-face lie made somewhat amusing by the weirdness of her fabrication; I am suing to stop Redevelopment expansion into areas of the City that are not “blighted,” the minimal legal requirement for Redevelopment spelled out in the State Health & Safety Code.
At the end of her little tantrum, in an hysterical twist, Kennedy chided me for not fighting the corporate abuse of Redevelopment – even though my friends and I on FFFF have been attacking Redevelopment and its history of abuse in Fullerton, for years when she was silent. This includes the City’s illegal planning review for the Hillcrest Park/Lion’s Field reconstruction on which she was utterly silent – until they had the temerity to install synthetic grass – a move that apparently injured her delicate aesthetic sensibilities.
Where O Where has Sharon Kennedy been these many decades as Fullerton Redevelopment lumbered along, including a ridiculous proposal to spend $6,000,000 to move a McDonald’s 200 feet? You guessed it. Happily cheerleading for Redevelopment with all of its corporate boondoggles, every sad step of the way.
When I was a kid, liberals were all about civil rights, social justice, anti-police corruption, women’s rights, etc., etc., etc.
Maybe professorial tenure, home mortgage interest deductions, and appointment to a City Community Service Commission or Bicycle Committee tends to make one complaisant. I don’t know.
In the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder at the hands of the FPD, and the revelation of a potential serial sex offender in FPD uniform, Fullerton’s liberals have been silent as a graveyard. A great letter to the Fullerton Observer by a guy named Steve Baxter sums up the situation to perfection.
Maybe this silence marks the difference between a statist liberal and what is now being called a “progressive.” I don’t know.
But one thing I do know: the first category includes our esteemed Congressional She-Bear, Loretta Sanchez, whose district includes south-central Fullerton, as well as some of the locations where women allege they were sexually assaulted in the backseat of an FPD patrol car!
Here’s an e-mail from one of the recall petition signature gatherers who re-enforces the ugly truth that Ed Royce isn’t our only congressional problem.
I was at the Stater Brothers today with my recall petition and I had an interesting conversation with a 50-ish red-headed woman who happens to work for Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. I asked her if she was interested in signing my petition to recall our City Councilman and Mayor and was sort of shocked when she declined. As she was putting away her groceries I asked her what Ms. Sanchez position was on the recent events that had occurred in Fullerton, and she told me that Ms. Sanchez was staying out of the matter because it didn’t involve her constituents. I said that that was odd because I had voted for her in the last election and that I live in West Fullerton. She said that Loretta’s district only encompassed a sliver of Fullerton and that where Kelly Thomas was beaten to death was out of her district!
I sort of left it at that, however when I got home and checked the district map for Loretta Sanchez I saw that not only is my home in her district, but the site where Kelly Thomas was beaten to death is maybe 200 feet from the boundary.
Is there any way that you guys can inspire this champion of women’s rights to engage in what’s going on here in Fullerton? I got the distinct impression that Loretta Sanchez was looking to stay out of the fray and distance herself from what’s going on in her district, and I think that it’s important that she get involved or make a statement on what her position is pertaining to violations of Kelly Thomas’s civil rights, as well as the violation of the these recent allegations of sexual assault under color of authority by members of the the Fullerton Police department.
Best Regards,
p.s. I’ve changed my political affiliation to “decline to state” on my voter registration so there is no love lost on Loretta.
It’s pretty obvious that Ms. Sanchez has seen her main chance in trying to ignore things in Fullerton and hope like hell that no one will ever associate her with what was done, or in her case what hasn’t been done. Comically Ms. Loretta found time from her busy schedule to attend the Fullerton Library re-opening – a building also not in her district – while 500 feet away people of good will were protesting the murder of a helpless homeless man at the hands of the FPD.
Disgustingly, Sanchez seems a lot more interested in the civil rights of Vietnamese women (who live eight thousand miles outsider her district) than with her own constituents.
Sanchez could get the Department of Justice fired up with a phone call. But even that smallest of gestures would require a modicum of courage.
