Category: Chronic Failure

Posted onA Step in the Right Direction

What to Do With Former Redevelopment Employees? How About Pink Slips?

by 71 Comments on What to Do With Former Redevelopment Employees? How About Pink Slips?

Anybody who reads this blog knows that I have had a running battle with the Fullerton Redevelopments Agency, even going so far as suing the Agency to block its bogus expansion attempt into areas of west and east Fullerton that had no blight. That was just a fraudulent attempt to divert property tax revenue from legitimate recipients.

Now that Redevelopment has been killed off by the Legislature and the Governor, I really have to wonder what has and will become of that small army of government economic planners, boondoggle promoters, bribers, bagmen, design guideline perpetrators, and the rest, whose job it was to gin up sales tax revenue and property tax increment (usually at the expense of somebody else) while dictating land use development in Redevelopment project areas across California.

Lest anybody think I’m just grousing about an abstract problem, consider an article here in the OC Register that points out the exorbitant amount that Fullerton Redevelopment Agency wasted on administration.

Anyway, these folks were in the business of playing developer without taking any of the risks, and with a compliant city council there was never any fear of them being held accountable for their manifest failures.

Some of the former Redevelopment employees will be kept around to close things out. The rest? Who knows? In Fullerton, some of them have already been absorbed into the regular bureaucracy, to be supported by the General Fund – as if these people were simply interchangeable and indispensable parts. The message that move sent to the citizens of Fullerton is a really bad one – that the government has no appetite to shrink, even though a specific purpose has been ended.

 

 

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Posted onChronic Failure

That’s Sick

by 93 Comments on That’s Sick

Scott Moxley over at the OC Weekly is reporting on the case of a former Fullerton School District “recreational aide” named Emmanuel Moran who has been sentenced to 70 months in federal prison for possessing and distributing graphic kiddie porn. Apparently his computer contained thousands of images, and hundreds of videos.

Apparently Moran was employed by the FSD between 2009 and 2011.

No word on whether he was a good recreational aide.

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Posted onBoohooism

The Shame of The Human Relations Commission

by 55 Comments on The Shame of The Human Relations Commission
Three minutes elapsed. Nothing was said.

There has been a lot of boohooing lately about the future of the County’s Human Relations Commission. As usual, it seems that those doing the biggest drum beating for the continued taxpayer funding of this love fest are the folks who don’t want to chip in for the cost.

Right now the County pays $302,000 a year to the Human Relation Council (a 501(c)(3)) to provide “staff” for its Human Relations Commission. The reason why these folks think we need a Commission at all is that they believe having the County seal on their letterhead confers some sort of governmental prestige and gravitas. That’s how these folks think about government.

The Council employs a fellow by the name of Rusty Kennedy about a hundred grand to be the Commission’s Executive Director, a job he used to hold as a public employee of the County, and a job for which he now pulls down an annual pension of over $120,000 per year. Yowza! $220,000 a year!

Ironically, the very failures of Kennedy and his commission are being touted by him as success stories. The most egregious of these alleged successes are the race tagging of Santa Ana Councilwoman Claudia Alvarez after she made a boneheaded comment about Adolf Hitler; and of course even worse, the diversionary scam known as the Homeless Task Force, at the behest of the cover-up artists on the Fullerton City Council. In the first case, after he played the irrelevant race card, Rusty had a neat interracial controversy to address. Nice. In the second case, a genuine hate crime, perpetrated by his pals  in the Fullerton Police Department against Kelly Thomas, was glossed over.

By focusing on the fact that Thomas was mentally ill, and homeless, and that many others are too, the Task Force conveniently ignored the fact that neither his homelessness nor his mental illness were the proximate causes of Thomas’ death. That responsibility lay with the City and its goons, it was a murder – a fact that would necessarily be awkward for Kennedy and his Task Force to address given his cozy relationship with the Establishment and with the police chiefs of Orange County.

Fortunately, the City’s attempted sleight of hand failed; the recall and subsequent legal actions will demonstrate who did what, and when. But this failure should not cause us to forget the craven role of Mr. Kennedy in this shameful episode.

The time has come to defund this useless operation. Let the non-profit Council peddle its race relations mission. It collects charitable contributions from people who believe in its mission and its behavior. Time to get the rest of us off the hook.

 

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

Pam Keller Speaks! Apologizes For Not Stopping Our Bad Behavior.

by 196 Comments on Pam Keller Speaks! Apologizes For Not Stopping Our Bad Behavior.
Don’t let the silly hat fool you. There’s nothing underneath.

Yes, ever sanctimonious, ever self-righteous, Fullerton’s Queen Collaboratrix, Pam Keller issued a statement at the June 5th Swan Song of the the Three Bald Tires in which she really outdid herself.

I like the part where Pam declares herself up for a good sidewalk protest. We know all about that. She doesn’t mind screaming at people when her own self-interest is involved. Did Keller even show up at a sidewalk protest in front of the police station to protest the bludgeoning death of an innocent man at the hands of the FPD? Of course not. When there’s nothing in it for her it’s a lynch type mob.

But really, suggesting that Kelly Thomas was even remotely a factor for divisiveness in Fullerton  is stupid even for a dope like Keller.  No Pam, any divisiveness you perceive in Fullerton was caused by rogue, murderous cops and a sclerotic, incompetent regime bent on covering it up; a regime that ripped off its citizenry to pay for it’s own exorbitant salaries and benefits; a regime that handed out free land worth millions to campaign (and Fullerton Collaborative) contributors.

But in reality Keller is as wrong as she can be. We now know that the community is, and was not divided. The people of Fullerton demonstrated solidarity spectacularly on June 5th 2012, the very day Keller delivered herself of her idiotic diatribe. Two thirds of the voters delivered a very different sort of message, a message of unity, hope and reform.

The Recall of Jones, Bankhead and McPension succeeded in every precinct in Fullerton, rich and poor, Anglo, Latino, and Asian-American.

Say goodnight Pam, your party’s over.

 

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Posted on"Dick" Ackerman

The Dilapitated Dinosaurs Want Their Money Back

by 50 Comments on The Dilapitated Dinosaurs Want Their Money Back
Heh heh. The hardest part of the game is gonna be keeping the score down. Heh heh.

If you think about it, anti-recall managers Bennett, Ackerman and Ellis really screwed the pooch (and I don’t use that phrase lightly).

The Three Bald Ties put their reputations in the hands of Amateur Hour.

The metamorphosis into an oxygen breathing creature was slow and painful…

Remember the stupid rescission cards fiasco? The embarrassing website that just reproduced damning posts from FFFF and nonsense from Fullerton’s delusional gerontocracy?

Rock on!

And the of course there was the idiotic Stop Bushala campaign, ultimately doomed to fail since the name Bushala did not appear on the ballot.

Larry had sacrificed speed for size.

Stupid door hangers, stupid mail piece, stupid signs. Remember that awful video they touted as “hard hitting”?

These assclowns found the Recall team waiting for them with knives drawn around every corner as they kept pitching thousands of dollars into old school repuglican moneypits like Jim Bieber and Adam Probolsky.

And they lost by thirty points.

Need a jump?

True, the Three Dead Batteries put almost none of their own money into this disaster, perhaps showing the greatest wisdom of which they were capable. But even so, somebody should be asking for his money back.

 

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

County Supervisor Wants To Take Budget Axe to Human Relations Commission

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Just do it.

What is the Orange County Human Relations Commission? It is a County Commission whose mission seems to be get everybody to just get along. Calming the roiling waters of bigotry and racial insensitivity is one goal, seemingly a good one, until you start to realize that this operation has no way of demonstrating that is actually doing anything productive, and tracks a mere handful of incidents annually.

The taxpayers of Orange County currently give something called the Human Relations Council $300,000 a year to provide staffing for the Orange County Human Relations Commission. Confusing? Not to Rusty Kennedy the Executive Director. He pulls in his pension as a former County employee and gets paid all over again by us to do his good deeds via the office of the Council.

4th District Supervisor Shawn Nelson has seen and heard enough and wants to cut that down to $100,000 – just enough to cover some sort of police/community reconciliation program. Nelson seems particularly perturbed that in the wake of the Kelly Thomas killing Rusty Kennedy was MIA. I’m not surprised by Kennedy’s absence. FFFF posted about that, here, and here.

Of course when it came time to host a big collaborative boohoo session, er, I mean Task Force on Homelessness, Rusty was Johnny-on-the-spot, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Kelly Thomas’s main problem was not that he was homeless, but that he was the victim of a real hate crime. But Kennedy needs the cops to shill for his continued County-supplied budget, and it really wouldn’t look good if he started accusing the cops of hate crimes. Those letters of support would sure dry up in a hurry.

Anyhow, Kennedy’s contract is on the County Board of Supervisor’s agenda for next Tuesday morning and you can be sure all the squishy feel-gooders and race hustlers will be out in force – the very same church and synagogue pulpit preachers who were utterly mute after Kelly Thomas was murdered.

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

SlideBro Denies Complicity in Fake Phone Call. Again.

by 234 Comments on SlideBro Denies Complicity in Fake Phone Call. Again.

According to CBS local news, Jeremy Popoff, proprietor the the Slidebar Rock ‘N Roll Kitchen, categorically denies being involved in a phony call that described Kelly Thomas as breaking into or trying to open car doors.

However if you read the article, you will notice that there is no assertion from Popoff’s lawyer that no call was made from the Slidebar. And that’s interesting because in a report earlier toady the Slidebar lawyer, Eric Durbin, is quoted saying this:

Dubin said Reeves was not within earshot of the Slidebar employee who called police that night…

Meaning that there was some sort of phone call made by a Slidebar employee to the cops that night. Hmm.
In any case we are meant to be reassured that by his lawyer that Popoff is “heartbroken.”

According to Popoff he cares deeply for the local homeless population.

The Slidebar attorney is right about one thing: everything will come out at trial. But not the trial he is thinking of.

 

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

Quirk Endorsed by PORAC

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What is PORAC? The Peace Officers Research Associaion of California is a statewide cop lobby whose contributions go to provide legal aid and comfort to cops, good and bad. We learned about this “research association” last winter as it made a $19,000 contribution to the anti-recall campaign, a failed effort to protect the political hides of the three cop union puppets on the Fullerton City Council. PORAC is also paying the legal bills for the two Fullerton cops, Manny Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, who have been charged with the killing of the mentally ill homeless man, Kelly Thomas.

Now PORAC has a new project: promoting the dubious political fortunes of Sharon Quirk-Silva. Check out the list of supporters on her website.

Now that’s a fine collection of educrats, far left leaning politicos that have helped tank California, and of course, unions that greased their skids. But really, Sharon, PORAC? Can you really be that clueless? Or is it just desperation?

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Posted onA Step in the Right Direction

Slidebar Slides Into Litigation

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Hmm.

For almost a year now rumors have been swirling around the role of Fullerton’s Slidebar in the death of the mentally ill homeless man, Kelly Thomas, last July. Specifically, did a Slidebar employee at the behest of his or her boss, owner Jeremy Popoff, make a phony call to the cops to give them a pretext to roust Thomas.

Staring into an uncertain future...

Despite all of his protestations of innocence and donations of canned food to the homeless, Popoff’s story never quite rang true.

A couple days ago the other shoe finally dropped: a lawsuit for wrongful termination by a former employee named Michael Reeves that goes into elaborate detail about what happened on the night of July 5, 2011, and the cover up that followed.

The guy claims the fateful and false call to the FPD that triggered the events leading to the murder of Thomas  was made by Slidebar manager Jeanette DiMarco at the behest of owner Jeremy Popoff.

Later, when he wouldn’t play ball, Reeves claims he was demoted, then fired. The guy is suing for $4,000,000, a tidy sum, to be sure.

 

Read the complaint

Well, there you have it. Is any part of this tale true? I don’t know. But I do know that the other, even more sinister part of the story is still looming on the horizon like a nasty weather front; and that’s the disturbing possibility that the bar was in cahoots with one or more of the police before hand, complicit in a criminal conspiracy to deprive Kelly Thomas of his Constitutional rights and even his physical well-being.

We now know that the DA has decided to look the other way in his haste to kiss and make up with the Fullerton cops, but the possibility that the attack on Thomas was per-arranged does indeed explain the antagonistic behavior of Wolfe and Ramos, and perhaps even the seemingly inexplicable violence of Cicinelli.

All this is now bound to come out in the civil proceedings against the City by Ron Thomas and Garo Mardirossian. The latter may be pressured to cut a deal to avoid embarrassing the City too much in a public trial, but the new council needs a vehicle to get all the facts on the table once and for all. A trial is just the thing.

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Posted onChronic Failure

Don Bankhead Enters Exclusive Club

by 37 Comments on Don Bankhead Enters Exclusive Club

Chris Nguyen, who runs a blog called OC Political, says recently recalled Fullerton City Councilman Don Bankhead has just been initiated into a very exclusive club. According to Nguyen’s research (and I can’t vouch for that) only two men in American history have ever been recalled twice from the same job.

The first is some guy named James W. Holley who was mayor of Portsmouth, Virginia from 1984-1987 and again from 2008-2010. Each stint was punctuated by a recall. And now, with trumpets blaring and drums rolling, enters the august personage of Donald T. Bankhead, Fullerton City Council 1988-1994 and 1994-2012.

The asteroid was getting ominously close to Earth...

And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that if Nguyen is accurate, then Bankhead is the only office holder in the 162 year history of California to be recalled twice from the same office. And that’s a damn impressive accomplishment.

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