Category: Dead heads

Posted onBehind Closed Doors

The Latest County Melt Down

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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.

1. Shampoo and rinse. 2. Lose $50,000,000.

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.

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Posted onDead heads

The Ponsi Scheme: One Good Theft Deserves Another

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What me steal?

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!

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

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

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Back for more

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.

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

County Human Resources Disaster

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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.

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Posted onDead heads

Say What?

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Could this be our man?

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.

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Posted onDead heads

Well, At Least We’re Not Alone

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If that provides any satisfaction.

Some Surf Citiers have said "enough!"

It seems that downtown Huntington Beach suffers the same dysfunctional symptoms as downtown Fullerton: drunk driving, rowdyism, vandalism, etc., etc. The cause? Too many bars churning out too many inebriated patrons. Sound familiar?

DT HB has even more bars than DT Fullerton, apparently, and that’s saying something. Looks like some citizens are finally fed up with the trouble and the reputation all the bars bring to town.  The City has no idea how to fix the mess they’ve made.

Here in Fullerton we have the answer to the problem: declare victory, legitimize the troublemakers and subsidize their fire sprinkler infrastructure. Why? ‘Cause this is the New West, dagnabit, ‘n we’re open fer bidness!

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

A Blast From The Past

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Every now and then we like to remind our Friends about Fullerton’s recent history. We did it here, in a post on the arrogant mismanagement of Fullerton by former City Manager, James L. Armstrong. We noted that in 2001, after seven years’ worth of failure in Fullerton, he failed all the way to the top job in tony Santa Barbara.

But, alas, Poor Jim has run afoul of the cops up there, and, recently was taken to task by a blog for his efforts to stall the release of information about a city program that subsidized houses for – city employees! Too bad Armstrong mistakenly cc’d his sentiments to the very people who were making the public records request!

Jim Armstrong hard at work shoveling...well, you know what he's shovelling.

Still the same. Incompetent and arrogant.

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

So How Did Hugh Hewitt Get Onto the OC Children and Families Commission?

by 20 Comments on So How Did Hugh Hewitt Get Onto the OC Children and Families Commission?

Here’s a post we ran last summer. Why is it timely? Beacuse I noticed on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisor’s agenda an item to reappoint all of Supervisor Bill Campbell’s minions on the OC Children and Families Commission – including Hugh Hewitt – who is not legally qualified to be on the Commission in the first place.

Empires of Hypocrisy World Tour

P.S. Apparently you can join Hewitt on a cruise! If you decide to go be sure to ask him to explain the complicity of a “conservative”  on a big, liberal tax-redistributionist scheme. Let us know if you get a coherent answer!

– admin

And what useful purpose does he serve there?

According to the State Health and Safety Code, and the County Code that created the “First Five Commissions” (pursuant to liberal activist Rob Reiner’s successful tax and redistribute Prop 10), the commissions are made up of people in the kiddie welfare biz.

Which brings us to Hugh Hewitt, whom Gustavo Arellano has described as a “conservative yakmouth.” We’ll leave aside the conservative tag for a bit and reflect upon the fact that Hewitt is a lawyer, talking head, writer (when not being ghost written for by Matthew J. Cunningham), etc.

Here are the minimum qualifications, per the Code, for the membership category in which Hewitt is enrolled:

A representative of a local child care resource or referral agency, or a local child care coordination group, or a local organization for prevention or early intervention for families at risk, etc…

Say what?

Since Hewitt is clearly not recognizable by the Code’s definition, we are entitled to inquire and speculate about the real reason this ‘pug is on the Commission. Could it be simply to help ratify contracts to his pals and buddies at the behest of Commission Chairman Bill Campbell, the avuncular cipher who represents the 3rd District on the County Board of Supervisors? Campbell appointed him.

That's not a road apple. That's equine feces!

And maybe he is there to help his old friend Cunningham put some sort of conservative polish on this big, liberal road apple.

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Posted onDead heads

Deb Pauly’s Anti-Terrorist Price Tag

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A while back we did a post on the shameful fearmongering that took place adjacent to an Islamic charity event in Yorba Linda. Our own paper tiger Ed Royce was on hand to help whip up the know-nothing rubes, as was the big mouth, pea-brained Deb Pauly who somehow got herself elected to the Villa Park City Council.

Hate means never having to say you're sorry...

Pauly’s remarks were particularly inflammatory and unapologetic, consistent with her later non-apology as she tried to weasel out of what she had said.  The consequence of her remarks was a big demonstration at the Villa Park City Hall in which her outraged opponents and her nutwing supporters showed up en masse to have at one another.

Got something important to say?

The OC Sheriff Department that is responsible for protecting the mean streets of Villa Park brought in the troops, order was miraculously maintained, and everybody went home feeling pretty good about themselves.

And the price tag on the OCSD bill to the City of Villa Park? A City Hall insider places the figure at $13,500. And given the potential for much greater physical and financial damage the well-heeled folks of VP may consider themselves lucky they got off so cheaply.

But my question is this: why not present the bill to Deb Pauly herself?

 

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