Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
By now FFFF readers know that the truth and the Fullerton Observer, run by Kennedy Sisters Skaskia and Sharon, are often at odds. These two dimwits seem to think their editorializing and narrative peddling go hand in hand with reporting news.
Well, they’ve done it again.
Thoughts and prayers…
While alerting their readers of the upcoming “Walk on Wilshire” vote on Tuesday, they lead off with this gem:
The city council is set to determine the fate of Walk On Wilshire on Tuesday, January 21, with a session at 5:30pm at Fullerton City Hall, 303 W. Commonwealth Ave. The recommendation is to accept a proposed motion to permanently close W. Wilshire from Harbor to Malden to vehicular traffic, thereby expanding Walk on Wilshire or to open the entire street to traffic by February 2025.
I seen the light!
This is not only completely backwards, but it omits the most important part of the agenda staff report, to wit: closing the whole block is not recommended; rather opening the street back up in February 2025 is the proposed action. There is a back up option to close the street, among several others should the Council decide not to follow the recommended action.
Giving honesty the middle finger…
This statement is tantamount to a lie, and at best can be considered intentional disinformation, the scrofulitic handmaiden that closely follows the Kennedy Sisters where ever they go. It’s clear they want to drum up support for the stupid boondoggle they have come to cherish, and are willing to mislead their fellow travelers into thinking that staff has actually recommended the street closure for the whole block. No, now that I think about it, this isn’t “tantamount” to a lie. It is a lie.
Hmm. Did we lay an egg recently?
But the standard of objective honesty among Fullerton Observer readers seems to be so consistently low and the casual acceptance of subjective ideology so high, that this sort of bullshit passes as journalism among them.
Ada Briceño, recently retired head of the Democrat Party in Orange County is going to run in 2026 to replace Sharon Quirk in the State Assembly. At least that’s the story she told Voice of OC publisher Norberto Santana. He mentioned it in a story about the new Chairpersons the OC Dems and Repuglicans.
Don’t worry. The stay in jail was short…
Ada’s back ground is one to give pause. Her day job is activist and agitator for Unite Here 11, a hotel worker’s union. Her activities are mostly centered around the horrors perpetrated by the Anaheim Resort hotels. This requires a lot of theater, of course, like getting arrested protesting Disney – that sort of thing.
Where did our money go?
She was the mastermind of the recent and idiotic attempted recall of City Councilwoman Natalie Rubalcava in Anaheim last spring. Merit of the charges aside, it was bad politics and a huge waste of her member’s dues. Even if the recall had succeeded (it didn’t) the Council there would have replaced her with somebody just as bad for Briceño’s members. Hundreds of thousands of dollars flushed down the drain. I presume it was an ego thing, mostly.
Less than a year before, Briceño’s union sponsored Anaheim’s Measure A, a $25 per hour minimum for hotel and event employees. The measure went down in flames by a 2-1 margin in October 2023. More hundreds of thousands wasted on the campaign, and the taxpayers picked up the tab for the special election.
Here in Fullerton her folk turned up to protest the boutique hotel/monster apartment, not because it’s a terrible project whose front men are scam artists. No, it’s because the project doesn’t include enough subsidized units for her members to live in.
Ada n’ Ajay celebrate…
If you’ve been following FFFF recently you’ll also know that Briceño must have known about the scam candidacy of Tony Castro in 2022 that deprived 5th District voters of a home-grown Latino representative. What her role may have been in the 2024 creation of the Scott Markowitz campaign fraud and the perjury therein remains to be seen, but her henchman and former OCDem Executive Director, Ajay Mohan, was involved in both.
But I checked all the right boxes!
Whether Ada knew about Markowitz or not she was all in for the deplorable Vivian “Kitty” Jaramillo, granting an early party endorsement without talking to the eventual winner, Democrat Jamie Valencia. There’s another black mark.
I can’t imagine what Briceño thinks her base would be. Quirk has been a fairly moderate Democrat, suitable for this district. She’s cozied up to the cops and established interests. That’s not Ada. And Briceño has zero name recognition in the district outside of central Anaheim where her reputation is not favorable. She’s made a lot of enemies in Anaheim. Enemies with a lot of money. She would have to rely on huge infusions of cash from the more “progressive” unions and from friends in Sacramento. Of course her tactic would be to frighten all other Dems away and waltz into office.
I don’t even know if she currently lives in the district.
Well, maybe this aside in a Voice of OC article is nothing more than a trial balloon. The 2026 primary is still a year away.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
In the the online edition of their rag, the Fullerton Observer sisters, Sharon and Skaski explain their behavior in intentionally defaming named individuals as purveyors of lies. These were some of the people who contributed to Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform, a group that made it its mission to educate the public about the candidate Vivian Jaramillo in the 2024 City Council election.
Skaskia doubles, triples down on her assertion of slander and defamation against poor Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo by Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform, but claims there was no intent to “harm the reputations of its contributors.” Well, of course there was intent to harm; the inclusion of individual names directly linked to accusations of distributing falsehoods was obviously intentional.
Hmm. Did we lay an egg recently?
It is comical that if you think about it, the Kennedy Sister’s underlying excuse must be that they didn’t know what they were doing. Exculpation through ineptitude! That phrase should be prominent on their Observer header.
Is this a sufficient “full retraction and public apology?”
I don’t have the answer. Not yet anyway. But I know that the “I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm” of Jones and Mayer has been making bank on Fullerton for over 25 years as City Attorney. And I know that that the dismal legal counsel has impoverished the taxpayers of Fullerton plenty over the two and a half decades. I’m not going to recite the litany of legal failures we can lay at Jones’s doorstep – not yet anyway; we’ve already been doing that for years.
For reasons that escape Council watchers, Dick Jones somehow managed to escape getting the boot between 2020 and 2024, and I can’t think of anybody outside the Council who knows exactly why. Generally we can conclude that at least one member of the Whitaker, Dunlap, Jung triumvirate was protecting Jones and his minions, since it is incomprehensible that either Ahmad Zahra or Shana Charles would dump this chump.
Jail is for the little people…
Dick Jones is nothing if not a politician, playing the angles to keep at least three council persons happy at any one time, even alongside legal debacle after legal debacle. It’s worked through 4 different decades thanks to Fullerton being Fullerton. The Old Guard didn’t care and didn’t want to cause trouble; they were easy to push and persuade without too much trouble. The lamebrains like Leland Wilson and Mike Clesceri were afraid of their own shadows. Norby, I’m told, was just happy that the job was outsourced. The other dopes like Pam Keller, Sharon Quirk and Jesus Quirk-Silva could not have conceived of anybody holding Jones responsible for the legal advice he dispensed. For a fixer like Jennifer Fitzgerald he was the perfect running buddy, trying to accommodate anything she wanted.
Is Jones & Mayer still have a pulse?
Well, now Whitaker is gone, and if he was the fly in the ointment for the past 4 years, we may soon find out. Will Council newcomer Jamie Valencia take an independent stand and actually review Jones and Mayer’s record of failure? I sure hope so. It’s time that the City Attorney started giving out advice that avoids lawsuits instead of getting into them, with the result that he gets paid even more for failure.
I don’t know if Ms. Valencia reads this blog, but if so I sure hope she follows that link, above. She would find stories of Jones & Mayer’s incompetence, self-service, and ghastly legal decisions that have harassed Fullerton citizens, given away public resources and cost the taxpayers millions going back 25 years.
I’m sure Jonesy has already tried hard to wheedle himself into Valencia’s good graces, because that’s what he has always done. Will she go for it?
Hanging on to Fullerton should be a big deal to Jones and Mayer in terms of the future legal partnership. And I’m sure Jones figures that the loss of Fullerton could jeopardize his jobs in other cities like Westminster, La Habra, and Costa Mesa. True, Jones is 75 years old and may not even care anymore. Still, the firm must go on, and the junior partners such as the terrier-like Kim Barlow and the obnoxious hand-job lawyer, Gregory Palmer may still have a few years of legal bungling ahead of them.
One thing you can always count on in Fullerton elections is that concrete, real issues will never be discussed. You’ll hear mostly generalities about this or that topic. Even roads and taxes melt away in general promises and vague hand-wringing. But, when it comes to specific projects with all sorts of facts and figures involved, you can forget it. A charming characteristic of all local elections, and especially in Fullerton, is that people aren’t elected on their knowledge of anything, but, rather on their acceptability as wise people who will do the right thing given the opportunity.
This is all nonsense, of course. The electeds, knowing nothing are in no intellectual position to push back on the lamest of lame ideas that percolate through the “experts” in the bureaucracy. Not knowing and not learning and not working are the natural siblings of the councilmember’s natural tendency to acquiesce to City Hall staff anyhow. It’s easier just to attend ribbon cuttings and golden shovel ceremonies, I suppose.
Enhanced with genuine brick veneer!
And so it is that zero attention has been given by anybody (except FFFF) to various nonsense projects, the worst of which is the so-called boutique hotel project that started out as an idiotic scheme and naturally morphed into the worst kind of Redevelopment boondoggle. It even has a stupid name: It’s called The Tracks at Fullerton Station.
I’m not telling the truth and you can’t make me…
You may recall that the hare-brained idea was hatched by your former Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald who pushed a non-competitive agreement with some local dude who couldn’t build a birdhouse. Because the City had to declare the land on which the thing was supposed to sit as “surplus property” a deadline had to met to dodge a State law requiring first right of refusal to low-income housing “developers.”
Rather than shit-canning the whole thing, boobs Bruce Whitaker, Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles approved of the project and the City actually deeded over the land before any agreements were in place. Pretty amazing, huh? Their convoluted reasoning was so dumb it doesn’t even deserve a description. That was December 2022.
They had me at boutique…
The even bigger problem was that by then the original guy (now deceased) had been pushed out and a whole new partnership had taken over. The new players were a pair of bums – Johnny Lu and Larry Liu who had a record of fraud, embezzlement, and bankruptcies in their wake, and creditors foreclosing on them. Why Fullerton’s crack economic development team and City Attorney failed to pursue even the slightest investigation of Lu/Liu’s record like FFFF did, has never been discussed. And it never will be, Fullerton being Fullerton.
I don’t know the current situation with this project. Two years have passed. Johnny Lu and Larry Liu had many milestones to accomplish certain actions per the agreement they finally signed. Did they? Who knows? Not the public, that’s for sure. Obviously, no one in City Hall wants to talk about this vast embarrassment, and an insecure council isn’t making them. And naturally, the Fullerton electoral process doesn’t discuss such things – bad form to discuss City failures, you see.
But the public has a right to know the whole story, because in the end, the entitlements granted to Lu and Liu are worth a fortune; even worse, the sales price of 1.4 million, less site clearance, is a tenth of the market value the City created with those entitlements. And the new density with hotel and with the new apartments Liu suckered the City into approving, just to keep the mess alive, is two and a half times the density the Transportation Center Specific Plan allows for housing. Go figure.
The mileage is terrible and the wheels are bald…
It’s also critical to remember that in Fullerton projects take on a life of their own through institutional inertia and the human instinct to dodge responsibility whenever possible. The Fullerton Clown Car has never had a rear-view mirror.
One of our frequent commenters, a loopy lefty and Ahmad Zahra fan complained of a post that included a picture of a kid holding a no Zahra sign, intimating that we were using kids as props.
Yeah precious. Little kid with no agency used a prop for some adult’s fucked point of view.
Kinda gross. No one’s winning anything for that.
I felt constrained to point out that the object of his affection, Zahra, uses little kids as props (and by the way others like Pam Keller, liked to do it too).
Our commenter replied:
I’m sure there’s no comparison to a kid being used as a prop for rank Bushala political schemes.
Hmm. Rank political schemes. Does getting elected and endless self-promotion count as “rank.”
Zahra the family man…
Our boy Zahra created a fake family for a mailer when running for office in 2022, using four Latino looking kids as props in an effort to come off as a family man with a wife and kids. Oops! Hopefully “mom” got paid something for her smile and maybe passed down a few bucks to the dragooned kiddos. More likely none of them were even related, just trawled out of central casting.
And let’s not forget the Zahra photo-op of posing with Maple area kids in 2023 to explain their Latino culture to them.
Oh, well, these BooHoos seem incapable of seeing what rational, honest people see, which explains how a Middle Eastern miscreant who stayed in the USA via Marriage Fraud can yak it up about how we welcomed him to our shores, and in some circles, get away with it.
For 50 years California has enjoyed/suffered the benefits of CEQA – the California Environmental Quality Act. The intent of the law was to assess the environmental impacts of various projects proposed by private developers and even the government itself – be it dams, roads, civic projects, etc. Some projects, mostly the big ones, required EIRs – Environmental Impact Reports, that cited impacts and measures of mitigation.
If the paper fits, push it!
Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on CEQA, but I’ve been told that all too often it is just a bungling paper chase that enriches “consultants,” and instead of addressing impacts, coughs up lots of gobbledygook and ginned up “studies” to talk around the problem. And this is just as true for governments’ reports as for those of developers.
Last night I listened to Fullerton’s beloved City Council vote for a new zoning law – the Housing Incentive Overlay Zone (HIOZ), including an explanation of why it was exempt from CEQA even though over 13,000 new units were being incentivized. The excuse was that no specific building was being proposed. You might think that is reasonable enough given that specific location has a lot to do with environmental impacts on thing like roads and street lights and traffic, etc.
And yet the new mandates from Sacramento dictate that because there is some sort of housing “crisis” new developments may be built “by-right” that is to say, without local controls over specific aspects of projects that would normally be comprehensively addressed in Conditions of Approval. Which means that those 13,000 units may not be attached to amelioration of the impacts they create.
And of course 20% of the new units must be reserved for low income tenants, another philanthropic mandate with unknown repercussions on the community.
Here’s the summation: the single-party legislature has serially made such a mess of California over the past 30 years that the fixes for the problems require that they jettison other mandates previously deemed critical, such as CEQA.
Locally, cities have been threatened with legal action by the State’s Governor and Attorney General if they don’t comply; and they are threatened by deprivation of State funding and grants by the Housing and Community Development Department, run by faceless bureaucrats. If cities try to fight back, like Huntington Beach has, the legal results are costly and a foregone conclusion.
And so Fullerton’s City Council went along with the inevitable, acquiescing to the demands of Sacramento in a sad 4-1 vote. Only Bruce Whitaker voted no in what is his last official vote.
I’ve heard it said that government spends half its time trying to fix problems it created during the other half. Sounds about right.
A special meeting of Fullerton’s City Council is taking place tonight. Why? To address the so-called 6th Cycle of the Housing Element of the General Plan and the concomitant Housing Incentive Overlay Zone, or HIOZ, for those who prefer government acronyms.
Where’s the Class 2 Bikeway?
The City Council has already postponed rubber stamping this twice which is odd, because they usually clean their plates like good little boys and girl.
People who need people…
Friends may recall that City staff proposed the opportunity overlay to construct as many as 30,000 new units with almost zero City control. This, even though the Sacramento houseacrats only demanded 13,000. I say “only” even though this lower number would still add twenty to thirty thousand new residents to Fullerton with new, massive apartment blocks on re-zoned commercial and industrial property.
I previously opined that the 30,000 number was just a dodge, to give the City Council the appearance of having fought a tough fight to “save” Fullerton, while quietly acquiescing on the destructive 13,000 mandate. This would be of particular benefit to the 2026 re-election chances of Shana Charles and Ahmad Zahra, both of whom are ardent lefties and both of whom would love to see those 13,000 units without regard for the damage dome to the City’s schools, roads, infrastructure and neighborhood cohesion.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a roll-out of the usual suspects singing hosannas to the Council for acceding to the 13,000 units.
Somebody’s gotta suck it up…
And that hypothesis seems right on. The Council has already directed staff to remove the Chapman and Commonwealth “corridors” from the HIOZ plan where the application would have been the most damaging and controversial. And paring back the scale of the disingenuous plan gives a victory to the Save Fullerton crowd who may have actually believed the 30,000 units was an authentic proposal. That group includes some our friends at the Fullerton Observer who will happily embrace the 13,000 as a wonderful compromise.
Pantomime…
Why all these meetings? Maybe it’s a necessary part of this Kabuki to give the façade of public review to something that was always a foregone conclusion – satisfying the knuckle headed legislators and the faceless bureaucrats in Sacramento; and their running buddies in the Southern California Association of Governments, and the California League of Cities.
And why a Special Meeting, other than to instill a sense of Heap Big Emergency about bowing to the diktats of an out-of-control legislature?
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
Right on cue, the Fullerton Observer has begun to bitch about the Fullerton’s 4th District election, as their favored candidate, Vivian Jaramillo, tool of the Marijuana Cartel, slips farther behind Jamie Valencia. The target of their irritation is Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform. The author? “Staff.”
Staff.
Once again Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform sent out fliers to homes filled with disinformation and outright lies this election targeting District 4 City Council candidate Kitty Jaramillo. In past elections, the same group made outrageous and false claims against candidates Ahmad Zahra, Shana Charles, and Ruthi Hanchett – all won their races.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Free Speech Clause protects false speech when viewed as a broad category, but the government may restrict limited subcategories of false speech such as defamation and fraud. A very good discussion of deception in political advertising is available by visiting https://www.freedomforum.org/lie-political-ads/
Hoo boy, whataloada bullshit. The rest of the article is a recitation of money collected and money spent, derived from public documents. What is completely missing is a single example of an untruth told about Vivian Jaramillo. Dispensing legal advice is not the Kennedy Sisters’ strong suit, obviously. And the reference to fraud is positively comical, given their diligent effort to ignore the fake candidacy of Scott Markowitz created by Jaramillo’s supporters to help her win.
See my badge? I’m a reporter!!
The Kennedy who seems responsible for this diatribe is most likely Sharon, the elder sister. She had been engaging the public in the effort to peddle the “Markowitz acted alone” narrative, and “anyhow none of it matters cuz we say so.” By her own admission she consulted with one of the key participants in the fraud, namely Diane Vena – who “willingly”signed the Markowitz nomination papers even though she had endorsed Jaramillo. Team Jaramillo. Jesus H., Vena’s name was on Jaramillo’s website!
“Sharon K.” actually replied to one person on her blog who questioned the Observer assertion:
BradyRhoades
Are there examples of what’s being called “disinformation and outright lies”? That would be helpful, thanks.
Sharon KBrady – the “Team Jaramillo Busted “ mailer sent out by Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform shown at the beginning of this article is a good example of outright lies. Kitty and her team had nothing to do with the candidate who was charged with falsely signing his nomination papers.
Now how on Earth does Sharon Kennedy know that Kitty and her team had “nothing to do” with Markowitz? Because they told her? The fact that Jaramillo’s active supporters were involved in the creation of the Markowitz candidacy is more than sufficient evidence that her “team” knew about it and at the very least failed to report what they knew after a crime had been committed.
But now the Observer Sisters have sunk to a new low. Not only using “staff” as a byline, but also responding to comments by inserting an “edit” into the comment itself. Check it out.
Sharon K
Brady – the “Team Jaramillo Busted “ mailer sent out by Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform shown at the beginning of this article is a good example of outright lies. Kitty and her team had nothing to do with the candidate who was charged with falsely signing his nomination papers.
BenjaminHow do you know that? Did you investigate the matter? Or did you ask Kitty and her team? Just because you believe something doesn’t make it fact or truth or journalism. It is just opinion right?
(Reply to Benjamin – Happily we know who putout the disinfo negative mailers claiming “Team Jaramillo Busted” because of the required disclosure on the mailer clearly naming Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform. The OCDA investigated the candidate who falsely claimed he had witnessed the signatures on his nomination papers and found no connection to Jaramillo campaign.)
This is another another way to make up stuff and be non-responsive without using her name. Notice how Sharon answers a question that nobody asked. Benjamin wants to know what about the fliers is untrue. She responds by saying who created the fliers (there’s nothing mysterious about the origin). What sort of fool would be satisfied by that sad misdirection?
But then it gets even worse. Kennedy the Elder is still pretending that Markowitz acted alone (really only a minor clerical error), but she asserts without a shred of evidence that the Orange County District Attorney found no connection to the Jaramillo campaign. The DA has said nothing of the kind and most certainly would not have confided in either of the Weird Sisters.
Here’s another example of the response embedded in comment technique:
Marian
I do not appreciate that the clickbait title and the story supports only 1 side. There was another group supporting Vivian Jamarillo that spent much more money. Why are you not citing that?
Answer to Marian – because the group that supported Jaramillo did not use dirty deceptive campaign tactics which is what this article is about. There are a few more in this Dirty Politics series coming up.
Sharon will not talk about the massive infusion of pro-marijuana money supporting Jaramillo. Oops. That would be bad. So the issue is brushed aside because they didn’t deploy what she considers “dirty deceptive tactics” although she hasn’t shared any of those with her readers. She does promise more of these undocumented claims in a breathtaking “Dirty Politics” series that will no doubt knock the wind out of contemporary journalism as we know it.
A comment by “Jeff” suffers the same fate as poor Marian’s:
Jeff
Wasn’t the other candidate in District 4 running so the Latino votes can be taken away so Kitty could win? That’s dirty campaigning!
Also, I would like to know what false claims were made against Zahra?
===== Response to Jeff: please remember that one comment from you is enough. If you continue with the various pen names you will be blocked. You are mistaken about the District 4 issues. Search for “Markowitz” or “Zahra” to come up to speed on either of those stories that we printed quite some time ago. All the character assassination hit pieces put out by Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform are totally false and meant to lower the bar for their favorite candidate to win – which, by the way, is not Whitaker.
Jeff’s remark about “Latino votes” is off, but he wasn’t going to get a honest answer anyhow. His point about the Markowitz candidacy being “dirty campaigning” is right on the mark, so naturally it must be ignored. He asks for examples of false claims made against Zahra, too, a perfectly reasonable request. He is admonished to do his own Observer searches which would of course, only discover more Kennedy unsubstantiated claims, but no concrete examples.
Sharon isn’t done. No. There has been “character assassination” (oh Lordy!) by “totally false” hit pieces meant to “lower the bar” so the favored candidate would win. Her description sounds a lot more apt for the Markowitz caper, doesn’t it? Finally, the mind reader Kennedy interjects that the favored candidate was not Linda Whitaker, a bit of information meant to be meaningful, somehow, but that is irrelevant to any topic at hand.
Let’s give this some more thought…
Finally, one of Kennedy’s commenters who seems to think journalism is going on there, explurts:
P.D.
Great article, but why don’t you unmask the membership of this libelous outfit?
I think Kitty SHOULD sue for libel!
Well, P.D. I agree. I think Jaramillo should sue for libel, too. I’m not sure what the cause would be, or what damages have been incurred, but it sure would be fun to get Jaramillo, Markowitz, Dem operative Ajay Mohan, Diane Vena, and even Sharon Kennedy deposed under oath.
My former mistress, Jan Flory has been around Fullerton for a long time. She’s been on your City Council three different times and just ran again, although she wasn’t all that young when I was alive. In those days she took out a lot of her anger on me, and later, after I passed on to Doggie Heaven, she found other outlets for the broomstick – namely the citizens of Fullerton.
During this last campaign she touted her qualifications as “the most experienced candidate” which was sort of self-oblivious given all the bad things she went along with. Her former constituents did not agree. In large numbers.
Woof.
Anyhow, I think you all in Fullerton are finally safe. At the next District 5 election Flory will be 85 human years old, or thereabouts. And you have probably heard the last from me.
