Dead heads Archives - Page 33 of 65 - Friends For Fullerton's Future

August 2, 2011March 14, 2012Behind Closed Doors

SORDID SEXUAL ASSAULTS IN THE BACKSEAT OF FPD PATROL CAR?

For some folks sexual fondling in the backseat of a car may evoke happy memories of teenage hormonal overload and good clean fun. But when you’re handcuffed by a police officer on trumped up charges only to be sexually groped by that cop, things take on a much more sinister character.

cop car — Night time is the right time...

Like sexual battery and federal civil rights violations, just for starters.

Here are the stories of two women who claim that Fullerton cop Albert Rincon, aided and abetted by Officer Christopher Wren essentially kidnapped them and sexually assaulted them in 2008 while they were in custody – in the backseat of Rincon’s patrol car, to be precise. Rather than rehash the story, I’ll let you read the complaint filed in federal court. Checkout pages 5 through 12 of 35 for the sordid details.

Three long years later the case is winding its way through the court system toward a November 2011 trial. The case found its way to the federal courtroom of Andrew Guilford, who knows all about pervy cops – having presided over the Michael Carona corruption trial. Check out the Joint Conference Scheduling Report:

Note #1: the City of Fullerton offered the victims $7,500 to settle; and the alleged victims assert that the City knew of Rincon’s prior history of sexual misconduct! I wonder what that history was.

Note #2: The DA never prosecuted the alleged victims for any crimes related to their arrests. Is Rincon a Brady cop?

Note #3: the City’s lawyer, Bruce Praet is the same charming individual who allegedly offered FPD beating-death victim Kelly Thomas’ dad a cash settlement before threatening to drag his mentally ill son’s name through the mud; and that before “all the facts were known,” an admonition the cops seem to think only applies to us citizens and taxpayers – not themselves.

Fullerton, this is your out of control police department; it is enabled and protected by majority of your city council. What the Hell are you going to do about it?

July 20, 2011July 27, 2011Dead heads

FAIL To The Chief

by Joe Sipowicz60 Comments

chief-sellers-300x240 — We have nothing to hide. Now it's off to the Caribbean...

We received the following correspondence from a long-time Friend.

The controversy surrounding the recent beating death of Kelly Thomas, a local mentally ill homeless man at the hands of the Fullerton Police has been marked by the absence of Chief Michael Sellers. The FPD has instead relied on its regular spokesman Sgt. Andrew Goodrich for information about the case. This might be thought an appropriate channel of communication if this were anything like standard police work. It is not. Six sworn peace officers beat a man to near death (he died days later) in the parking lot of the Fullerton Transportation Center, and no explanation has been offered other than that the man offered physical resistance and that a thorough investigation will follow.

The brutality of the beating has left many in this city asking how it was that six trained police officers could not subdue a single unarmed man without killing him. Chief Sellers, who is reportedly vacationing, neither returned to Fullerton to appear before the press and public or even offered a written statement about the tragedy. His complete absence does nothing to assure the people of Fullerton that there is responsible leadership being exercised over the officers in his department.

July 19, 2011July 20, 2011Behind Closed Doors

Pringle’s Cash Cow Stops Giving Milk

by Grover Cleveland4 Comments

PringlePud — When the money ran out did Der Pringle?

Thanks to Friend Tony Serra for providing a link to a Sac Bee story about Anaheim’s former Mayor-for-Hire Kurt Pringle quitting the California High Speed Rail Board.

Could it be true? Sure looks like it. According to the story he wants Governor Brown to be able to appoint someone who represents his point of view. I wonder what that point of view might be. Ethics? Brown, who as Attorney General took note of Pringle’s conflicts of interest over many years may have asked him to go.

So Der Rat is jumping off Das Sinkingboot; timely, too, now that all the revelations of incompetence, waste, misinformation, and decreased funding are dragging the HSR to a well-deserved grave.

The funniest thing in the piece is the glowing valediction to Pringle from fellow HSR barnacle, Tom Umberg, who in the past has proved there is no moral morass too low for a politician to sink into, and who recently penned a pro-HSR op-ed piece in the Register that was so incompetent I’m not going to link to it to save Umberg any more embarrassment.

July 18, 2011July 27, 2011Behind Closed Doors

CONSUMER WARNING: It’s The New West

by The Desert Rat19 Comments

For all you folks out there that are thinking about dining and drinking, or drinking, or even art walking in downtown Fullerton, think twice before you venture into the battle zone. A few years back, your esteemed Mayor, Dr. Dick Jones, declared the downtown “unsafe,” and called it the “Wild West;” he said that “there are people down there that don’t look like me,” and called them “last week’s prison felons.” Here is Jones in all his befuddled glory:

So what did the city do? It looks like they spent one and a half million dollars per year to employ a collection of goons to work the downtown beat who, with exception of a uniform, may be hard to distinguish from the folks they go after – last week’s prison felons.

The original problem, created by Jones & Co. persists. And now I invite you to consider whether the remedy isn’t worse than the disease.

July 12, 2011May 10, 2012Chronic Failure

Go Home or Go To Jail

by admin124 Comments

Awhile back Grover Cleveland posted on how the Fullerton City Council’s creation of a mess downtown led to the rise of an FPD goon squad to quell the crime wave. The only problem was that the FPD goon squad added to the crime wave. Here’s a reminder. An innocent bystander is beat up and arrested. Later he is tried for assaulting a cop to which Fullerton cops Kenton Hampton and Framk Nguyen swear in a court of law. Only problem is it didn’t happen, but that didn’t stop the FPD and the DA from trying to put an innocent man in prison.

July 10, 2011July 11, 2011Behind Closed Doors

The Latest County Melt Down

by Mr. Peabody23 Comments

Campbell — OC's Boss Tweed steps in it. Again.

Okay, Friends this one is a bit convoluted so stick with me.

The latest State budget deal takes about $50 million away from Orange County. How come? Best I can figure it out is this: after the bankruptcy of 1995 the County sold recovery bonds and the State sequestered about $50,000,000 annually to pay off the bond holders from part of the Vehicle License Fee that was distributed to the County. Later when the VLF was swapped out for property tax income the payoff to bondholders still came from the VLF. When OC refinanced it’s debt in 2006 it started taking the VLF money directly from the State even though no other county got any of it.

Confused? In 2006 County Supervisor Bill Campbell said he wasn’t, but he failed to do anything about the money hanging out there according to Voice of OC (EA)’s Norberto Santana, here. It seems he didn’t want to address the issue and hoped everybody would forget about it. That lame strategy worked for about 5 years. Now the State is laying claim to the dough.

The worst malefactor here is County CEO Tom Mauk who has yet another catastrophe to lay claim to. Following swiftly on the heels of the disastrous Human Resource Department audit in which Mauk was busted giving his cronies huge raises and promotions, this latest calamity may prove to be the final nail in Mauk’s coffin.

Will three supervisors finally perform self cranial-rectal extraction and get rid of this bozo? They aren’t very bright but sooner or later…

Stay tuned.

June 28, 2011December 16, 2016Dead heads

The Ponsi Scheme: One Good Theft Deserves Another

by admin60 Comments

As The Orange County Register sinks deeper in economic distress I have to wonder what is taking so long for this rotten scow to go under.

Today a Register hackling named Lou Ponsi – who used to report Pop Warner football game scores – wrote a story about the Fullerton cop iPad theft story that FFFF broke the other day. This creep actually availed himself of documents that we posted to make it look like he had done some real reporting.

The funniest part is how Ponsi reports:

“She had seen the iPad in the bin and placed her bag of check in over it and walked away with it,” the report stated.

A bag of “check in?” What the Hell is that?!

Of course FFFF got no attribution from the Ponster since “real” reporters apparently believe they can rip off a blog and peddle what they harvest therein as their own work. That’s pretty shameful, especially when most of The Register city hall press release regurgitators like Ponsi wouldn’t know a real news story if it bit them in the ass.

We had a lot of traffic yesterday from The Register and clearly Ponsi visited our website and then was off and running – pretending that our work was his. And that puts him right at the bottom of the barrel he swims around in.

And what does Lou do during a slow news day? What to do? – rip off somebody else’s work or do public service announcements? And how does he determine what to cover? That’s easy, wait for someone else to do the story first!

May 20, 2011May 20, 2011Behind Closed Doors

He’s Baaaaack! Matthew J. Cunningham Scores Some OCTA Gravy

by Grover Cleveland88 Comments

With a little digging I have discovered that our old small government pal Matthew J. Cunningham, who raked in hundreds of thousands of bucks doing $200 an hour make-work for Rob Reiner’s tax-and-redistribute Children and Families Commission has found a new gig. Or, as is more likely the case, has had a gig given to him by his repuglican overlords.

A year ago FFFF exposed the hypocrisy of this guy making a small fortune off of the nanny statists and social engineers at the Children & Family scam. After that sweet run was terminated due to uncomfortable exposure, Cunningham landed a contract with the social engineers at the Orange County Transportation Authority to do…well, I’m not real sure.

It might be instructive to remember that two targets of Cunningham’s tiresome tongue treacle, Bill Campbell and Kurt Pringle, were OCTA Board members when he got this new arrangement last November. I wonder if this contract was result of an honest RFP or if was just laddled out to Mr. C. behind closed doors.

Here’s the agreement, noting Mrs. Cunningham as the “Principal” of the operation and the Mr. as “Project Manager.”

View the agreement

Hmmm. $30K a year with a scope of work that seems ridiculously inconsequential. Basically it entails reading city agendas for transportation issues and telling the OCTA who’s on city councils and going to some meetings. Tellingly, there is no listed OCTA project manager named to ride heard on the egregious wordsmith suggesting that OCTA contract quality control may well be no better than that exercised by the C & F Commissariat.

View the scope of work

Well, I guess this means we’ll be doing a public records request for work product and billing records.

P.S. Please note that Pacific Strategies is still using the phony “Suite C” address – hilarious given that the Cunninghams operate their business, whatever it does, out of their house.

May 19, 2011May 19, 2011Behind Closed Doors

County Human Resources Disaster

by Mr. Peabody26 Comments

Crater — You may have felt the impact...

Every government agency displays a tendency to circle its wagons, defend incompetent behavior and keep outside scrutiny….well, outside. A notable exception appears to be the County of Orange’s Performance Auditor, whose office just completed a scathing report on County executives gettting unjustified pay raises with the assent of the CEO, and just as bad, giving away the farm when it came to negotiating sweetheart deals with the other County “family,” er, union members.

And juxtaposed to this is the typical behavior County CEO Tom Mauk, who has presided over the disaster and who, rather than letting his HR director quit in disgrace, and fixing the catastrophe he helped create, has apparently talked the incompetent Carl Crown into staying on another year so he can “negotiate” another disastrous deal with Nick “Bullhorn” Berardino’s union. He’s circling the wagons, hard.

Here’s a good recap by the Register’s Kimberly Edds.

The real question is what are the County Supervisors going to do about this mess? In a Voice of OC(EA) post our Supervisor, Shawn Nelson seemed outraged. He should be. Let’s hope the Gang of Five will finally shoot straight – and get rid of their CEO, Tom Mauk.

May 3, 2011May 10, 2011Dead heads

Say What?

by Mr. Peabody24 Comments

Over at the Red County blog some dude named Walter Myers has been downplaying the egregious e-mail by Fullerton’s Marilyn Davenport that has made so much news recently. Today he did a post outlining the party’s real problem; and it’s not racism, really, but poor educational outreach to Latinos (he calls them Hispanics) and Asians. Apart from some completely specious demographic reasoning, he indicates that the problem is evinced by the fact that no Latinos or Asians stood up to defend Mrs. Davenport. Huh?!

This guy also has gone out of his way to defend the watermelon patch on the White House lawn e-mail that got Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose into so much hot water a couple of years ago. Surprisingly, no Latinos or Asians stood up to defend that cretin.

Well, okay Walter, de gustibus non es disputandum.

And here’s some fun commentary at the end of today’s post , starting with an intro by Fullerton religious zealot and anti-Islamic crusader, Zonya Townsend:

Marilyn Davenport and the OC GOP

Submitted by Zonya Townsend (not verified) on Mon, 2011-05-02 05:37.

I can’t write too much right now because I must to get ready to leave for work but must say this much. Marilyn Davenport is the woman that reached out and encouraged me, Zonya Townsend to run for OC CC several years ago. Her activism and concern for our nation fueled my interest in leadership positions in various organizations, including but not limited to the California Republican Party and the Women’s Federated. This whole email situation is a tragedy and misunderstanding that did not need to happen.

To Zonya

Submitted by waltermy on Mon, 2011-05-02 14:22.
Thanks for sharing that, Zonya, which is excellent information and insight for those who don’t know Marilyn. I wasn’t aware of that myself. This is a very unfortunate situation, and as I have always maintained, we need to provide grace towards Marilyn, who made a mistake that she apologized for, and determine how to best move forward as a party. The question now that this has gotten out is how we will respond as a party because we know what the perception of the party is now. We clearly have some work to do. My hope is that this entire situation motivates the party leadership to take our brand seriously and does the outreach that we so need to do in order to grow the party and truly be the party of Lincoln and Douglass.

Tragedy. Misunderstanding. Um, yeah, right, Zonya.

Walter’s wrong about the shape-shifting “apology,” but he is right that the GOP needs to be motivated and has work to do. But get this: he thinks the GOP is the party of Lincoln and Douglass. Forget the fact that Lincoln stood for almost NOTHING allegedly promoted by the modern GOP (except for neocon war and big government), Stephen Douglass was a freakin’ Democrat!

* As a reader points out, the Douglass referred to might have been the abolitionist Frederick Douglass! If so, my apologies to Mr. Myers for insulting his knowledge of American history, although I’m pretty sure FD would not recognize today’s GOP as “his” party.