I would humbly like to thank the Academy for this recognition...
The other day Orange County’s Most Hypocritical Repuglican (yes, that is one Hell of an achievement) Matthew J. Cunningham coughed up this Red County hairball in criticism of Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez:
How very congressional. And also ironic to listen to Loretta Sanchez speaking to a crowd of immigrants who came here seeking the American Dream,, even as she has been voting to make American more suffocatingly statist like the countries they left.
Is he really that breathtakingly unaware of the irony of the mouthpiece for the OC Children and Families Commission dumping on “statism.” Or could it be that he figures that whoever reads his post won’t know about his real day job; and if they do any comments revealing that fact will be deleted.
Aw c’mon Mr. C from Suite C, ‘fess up. You really, really dig suffocating statism; you profit from it and you shill for it. In fact, it’s just about your only real source of income.
Own it.
P.S. Wordsmiths “at the top of their profession” proofread their copy for embarrassing typos.
We just received an e-mail from a young Friend, directing our attention to a story in the CSUF Daily Titan about the university trying to go ahead with the acquisition of the Hope University campus across Nutwood Avenue. We’ve been documenting the damage already done to mid-century architecture in the area and of course noting that the buildings on the Hope campus are architecturally significant – and would be demolished by CSUF.
According to the article funding would come from the sale of bonds. $30 million will be needed to close the deal. But of course the university employee cited says nothing about how the bonds are to be paid for. It seems that the school’s debt service ratio is already crappy – they’ve been spending like drunken sailors over there and their credit card is maxed out. Can anybody forget the debacle of the “University Heights” housing fiasco, here, and here? That didn’t help, either.
With the State budget cuts they’ve had to cut enrollment, and so student fee revenue is down.
And speaking of fees, it also seems as if the recent increases in fees and tuition have a lot of students pissed off, and using their dough to help swing future expansion that’s years off is going to rub a lot of people the wrong way.
So will the CS Chancellor’s office nix this massive added liability? Let’s hope so. CSUF President Milton is on clueless cruise control. Somebody needs to behave responsibly – and soon.
Apparently part of Matthew Cunningham’s deal as wordsmith to the OC Children and Families Commission is to fill other functions from time to time – such as Ambassador to the Diocese of Orange with Dental Portfolio.
Here, in October and November 2007 we find Mr. Conservative Republican billing the taxpayers $200 an hour as coordinator of toothbrush distribution:
It seems as if the Commission was eager to insinuate itself into Catholic schools, too.
But did it not occur to anybody auditing these invoices at the Commission that it was a wee bit inappropriate to pay somebody that exorbitant rate to talk to somebody at the Diocese about handing out toothbrushes? Was anybody at the Commission even reviewing these invoices at all?
By the way, anybody out there know how many toothbrushes you can get wholesale for $200? Oy vey! Just more lax or non-existing oversight by our friends on the Commission.
Ironically, in the fall of 2007 Mr. Cunningham was hard at work in the trenches as a loyal foot soldier for the Diocese. But that’s a whole other matter.
It appears that Clerk-Recorder Tom Daly has mastered two skills in his eight years as head of the Clerk-Recorder Department. First, he has become a top-notch spender and waster of our dough. Second, he has mastered the art of creating jobs at tax-payer’s expense while receiving campaign contributions from the relatives of people he has employed.
Last week Daly hired Bruce Matthias, here. We learned from his campaign financial statements that Matthias’s wife Sonja Matthias had contributed to Daly’s now defunct campaign for Supervisor 2010.
Well, we looked deeper into his statements and found even more good old jobs for the boys (and girls) featherbedding. Look at this list.
In 2006, The Oftelie Company, run by former transportation bureaucrat Stan Oftelie, contributed to Tom Daly’s campaign. Could it be a coincidence that Stan’s son was hired shortly after this contribution and while the County was losing jobs. Stan’s son works in the Archives and was brought in as an “extra-help” employee which means that no competitive hiring process was conducted to bring him on board. I wonder what qualifies Stan’s son to work in the Archives.
The Walt Disney Company has been quite generous in its giving to Tom Daly’s campaigns. Since 2002, Disney and people connected to Disney have contributed more than $4000 to Tom. That’s just as much as the OCEA. Chris Lowe is the Government Affairs Manager for Disney in Anaheim. Well, Lo and Behold, Daly hired Chris Lowe’s wife to work in the Archives as an extra-help employee which, again, means that no competitive hiring process was conducted. And again the hiring was done when the County could least afford it.
In 2003 and 2005, James A. Liberio Realty made contributions to Tom Daly. Not surprisingly, Mr. Liberio’s daughter was also hired as an extra-help employee. So no competitive process was conducted to hire her. I’m unsure of her duties or qualifications.
Even during these tough times at the County, Daly has been budgeting at least $200,000 per year for extra-help hires. Despite revenues and workloads being at their lowest levels ever, Daly feels it is more important to keep his friends employed than to protect the interests of the public. Extra-help employees are basically at-will-employees and can be let go at anytime. I think that time has come now!
And I’d like to know why these these campaign contributors don’t hire their own relatives. Perhaps these people are not employable. Who knows?
Somebody needs to flush out this swamp of cronyism. Isn’t that why we have County Supervisors?
The High-Speed Rail Authority is bringing the show to our own Fullerton Senior Center on Thursday evening.
Considered by many to be the greatest boondoggle in the history of California, high speed rail will waste billions of dollars, threaten homes and businesses throughout the state while claiming to solve an inter-state transit problem that doesn’t exist.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) will host a public open house in the City of Fullerton to provide the community with a project update, information about the proposed alternative alignments, design options, and station locations being considered, as well as details pertaining to the environmental process. Residents will be able to see which areas might be needed for right-of way acquisition.
Fullerton is being considered for a station, in competition with Norwalk for the only other station between Anaheim and Los Angeles.
CHSRA is planning high-speed train service for travel between major metropolitan areas of California. The high-speed train is proposed to connect Anaheim to San Francisco in less than three hours. The Los Angeles to Anaheim high-speed train section proposes to travel adjacent to the existing Los Angeles to San Diego Rail Corridor from LA Union Station to the future Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC), although OCTA and Metro are now proposing a shared-track agreement.
Thursday, April 29, 2010, 5 to 8 p.m., presentation at 6 p.m.
Fullerton Senior Center, 340 W. Commonwealth Ave.
For more information, call (877) 724-5422
UPDATE: as one of our commenters pointed out, you can click on the billing fragment, below to get the picture of what happened for the month of July 2009. Enjoy, but try not to retch.
August 17th, 2009 was a great day to be Matthew Cunningham. See, the Red County Blog editor and pretended conservative pulled down $1680 wordsmith pimping for the liberal welfare state via his lucrative deal with the OC Children and Families Commission.
Why this Commission, that was created to help little children, is dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars each year into opinion swaying of dubious value is exasperating. The fact that this money is going into the coffers of well-connected repuglicans also gives off quite an aroma – influence peddling-wise.
How and why these contracts are awarded is certainly a topic that should be addressed by the Commission and their Executive Director Michael Ruane, as well as by the Board of Supervisors, who appoint Commission members.
One thing is crystal clear. This Commission is more interested in PR and lobbying for their revenue than they are actually accomplishing anything.
Here is the billing statement for that day that put a happy face on all the Cunninghams in Suite C. Who knew that revising vanilla versions of op-eds could be so rewarding?
Maybe Cunningham really does believe in the good works of the Commission, although I’ve got to wonder what other tax and spend schemes he will be promoting next.
Yup. The time of the year when this little-known, virtually opaque level of government that was created by Rob Reiner’s tobacco tax hands out its PR and lobbying contracts to well-connected “small government” types like blabbermouth Matthew J. Cunningham and Anaheim’s Mayor for Hire, Curt Pringle.
The hell with the kids. It's our turn at the trough!
I have previously documented the big government gravy being slurped up by Pringle and Cunningham here, and here. Were talking really big bucks here, Friends, and you get the feeling that not only is this Commission in existence to dole out the government largess to local repuglicans, but that its proprietors are a lot more interested in smiley face public relations and protecting their flow of tax revenue from Sacramento than they are in helping any kids. See, it takes a village to raise those children but unfortunately the bureaucracy and its spokesholes don’t come cheap.
Anyway, May and June are the months these contracts seem to come due and also seem to keep getting rolled over with almost no public scrutiny, or really any sort of performance audit for that matter. You can bet the family farm we’ll be reporting on the attempts to renew these contracts in the future.
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check, junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck, the price of food is goin’ up, an’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough, this Tuesday evening the city’s considerin’ a water rate increase.
Furthermore, the city is going to use the rate increase to pay for the League of Cities baloney. The two spendthrift promoters of this idea are Don Bankhead and Pam Keller who in 2008 attended the League of Cities conference in Long Beach here and here, a mere 25 miles from their front doors and racked up $400 per night waterfront hotel bills.
The League of Cities is a do nothing operation run by bureaucrats for the purpose of promoting their own policies. Fullerton’s annual membership budget is $75,000 – not an inconsiderable sum, exactly why the City of Orange quit the League.
NO new taxes, NO bogus water rate increase. We all know Bankhead and Keller are going to vote for this tax increase and I suspect Dick “RINO” Jones will, too.
Last year we laughed at Dick Jones’ plan to dig trenches all over Fullerton and form his own fiber optic Internet service. As predicted, the appointed Technology Working Group failed to pull in the magical Federal stimulus dollars to launch this terribly unnecessary project. Lobbyists were consulted, fits were thrown, but in the end we were saved from yet another boondoggle thanks to a faltering economy.
With that loss behind them, we had hoped that the TWG would rest on it’s laurels of creating the nearly useless and unused downtown wireless network, which they had finished building just moments before every single coffee shop, restaurant and bar offered their own wireless for free.
What's a gigabit? Sounds neat.
But then Google gave these gullible go-getters a new glimmer of hope. Last month the Mountain View technology behemoth announced a “contest” of sorts – the winning city will get to have Google come out and rewire a portion of the city for free as some sort of yet-to-be-explained telecom experiment.
Within a month, at least a hundred cities across the country (each presumably guided by its’ own version of a clueless technology commission) had announced interest in submitting an RFP for the contest. And so the corporate boot-licking stunts begin; Topeka, Kansas renamed their city “Google” for a month, Baltimore has appointed a “Google Czar” and Peoria has had its’ “Google Day“.
Yeah, we need that!
I suppose it’s fine if a couple of starry-eyed “technology fixes everything” types want to go against the odds, coddle Google and fill out a long RFP. In fact, knock yourselves out if you have nothing better to do.
But at best, Fullerton faces 100-to-1 odds and has no idea what Google is actually giving to the winning city. Please, please do not let Dick Jones waste a dime of our tax dollars on consultants or staff time for this high-tech Hail Mary.
Umm...
Ooops, too late. The Redevelopment and Community Development departments are already working it. Perhaps they just need something to do.
We’ve burned quite a few pixels explaining how Pam Keller’s is using her non-profit, The Fullerton Collaborative, as a vehicle to peddle influence, fund political activists, and profit Keller herself through excessively convoluted financial relationships.
But some of our loyal Friends still don’t get it.
That’s admittedly understandable, since the entire contraption is remarkably complicated. But to help everyone wrap his or her cerebral cortex around the many conflicts of interest, we present this valuable flow chart to demonstrate where The Fullerton Collaborative’s money comes from and where it goes. Naturally the nexus of the whole tangled web is Pam Keller. And that’s the big problem.
Click for an eye-opening experience...
Enjoy following the arrows. After perusing this chart there really is no excuse for not being concerned about the manifest conflicts of interests on the part of our City Council woman Pam Keller.
We just received an e-mail from a young Friend, directing our attention to 
