I Aint a Swallerin That Archives - Page 4 of 46 - Friends For Fullerton's Future

January 4, 2025January 4, 2025Chris Norby

Chris Norby Gone Almost Forgotten

This communication was sent to the high school board by former Brea HS teacher, Fullerton Councilmember, County Supervisor, and State Assemblyman, Chris Norby, on Thursday. I reproduce this from the Fullerton Observer.

To: FJUHSD Board Members, Steve McLaughlin, Superintendent, John Caffrey, Principal, Audrina Gomez, ASB President, Kimberley Harris, Tribe Tribune Adviser, and Fullerton Observer:

State law (AB 3074) now requires all Native American nicknames to be dropped by public school athletic teams by July 1, 2026. The law bans “Indians” and even the word “Tribe.” It’s time to look at the best options for Fullerton High School. As a second-generation alumnus, former ASB President, athlete, and Wall of Fame Member at FUHS, I propose a new nickname: The Fullerton Fenders.

Fullerton Fenders would honor the technological and cultural contributions of alumnus Leo Fender, Class of 1928. It would recognize his namesake invention, the Fender Guitar, and its role in the development of rock music and its ongoing impact on international culture. Just one block from campus is the permanent Fender Exhibition at the Fullerton Museum Center. It could also lead to corporate sponsorships and a beneficial relationship with the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, now headquartered in Corona.

Fullerton Fenders is unique—we would be the only high school in the country with this nickname. It is an alliteration and easy to say. Our mascot could be the Fender guitar itself, or someone playing a guitar on the sideline. The word fender itself is defined as one who “fends off, repels.” It could mean an athlete defending a goal, or a car fender. It would allow future pep squads to use their imagination on how it’s portrayed.

Enclosed are some examples of how our new mascot could be portrayed. There is plenty of time for a comprehensive process involving students, coaches, faculty, administration, and alumni in the new nickname selection process. It should be deliberate and thoughtful. We need to take advantage of this opportunity to select something creative, unique, and reflective of Fullerton’s heritage.

The Fullerton Fenders do all this. Fight On, Fenders!

Sincerely, Chris Norby ‘68

Of course the new law is one of those top-down diktats from Sacramento from a legislature that has too much time on its hands and too little common sense. Norby wastes no time arguing the point, but instead has his own solution to getting rid of the name “Indians” that follows Fullerton High School.

Fullerton Fenders sounds ridiculous to me, and not the sort of name that usually accompanies a mascot. Then again, Mr. Norby presents FFFF with the opportunity to provide a better name.

January 2, 2025January 2, 2025Ahmad Zahra

The Symbiosis of Self-Service

by Mr. Peabody45 Comments

When not disrupting City Council meetings Skaskia Kennedy is the editor of the still Yellowing Fullerton Observer. A few days ago she published a piece, which I reproduce below, verbatim. See if you can tell what immediately jumps out to me.

The City of Fullerton is working to establish limited inclement weather shelter options for families and seniors (62+) as temperatures drop below 40 degrees or during heavy rainfall. According to City Manager Eric Levitt, efforts have been made to collaborate with various agencies, but securing a provider to operate a dedicated shelter for this winter has proven challenging.

“Unfortunately, there are no similar shelters in Orange County due to the high costs and complexities involved,” Levitt stated. In response to these difficulties, Levitt and his colleague Housing Manager Daniel Valdez have developed alternative options following directives from recent City Council meetings.

The city plans to work with two local hotels to offer shelter specifically for families and individuals aged 62 and older when weather conditions reach critical levels. However, Levitt acknowledged that the initiative will have limited scope due to resource constraints. “We currently have approximately $5,000 allocated from the Housing Fund to assess the effectiveness of this program,” he added.

Council Member Ahmad Zahra sent an email thanking Levitt and Valdez for the update on cold weather shelter for the unhoused and agreed that this is a good alternative option. He wrote, “How would families or individuals over 62 know about this program? Also curious, why 62 specifically?”

In response to Council Member Zahra’s inquiry, Housing Manager Valdez emphasized the importance of prioritizing seniors, who are often among the most vulnerable populations. Citing federal guidelines, Valdez explained that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines seniors as those aged 62 and over. “While we will continue to utilize our local shelter whenever available, this initiative offers an additional option for those in need,” he said.

To facilitate outreach, the city will rely on the efforts of Community Outreach Specialists, HOPE Center personnel, and Homeless Liaison Officers, all of whom maintain ongoing communication with unsheltered residents.

As the winter months approach, Fullerton’s initiative aims to address the urgent needs of its most vulnerable citizens despite the limitations presented by funding and provider availability.

First, we know this isn’t even newsworthy because nothing has happened. The City Manager Eric Levitt and his hard-working Housing Manager Daniel Valdez are thinking about doing something, somewhere to help homeless somebodies. They haven’t actually accomplished anything worthy of alerting the public.

I will get what I want, one way or another…

But hold on a second. How and why is the email correspondence between Ahmad Zahra and the City Manager included in this nothing waste of space? The answers to both questions are easy. The “why” is: a free opportunity for Zahra to posture for his Observer followers – ever active, thoughtful, hands-on – even though his involvement is with…nothing! The “how” is just as easy. It is the ever self-promoting Zahra who has forwarded his correspondence to Skaskia Kennedy to make him look good and to give the Kennedy Sisters another opportunity to promote Zahra in a “news” story.

Legitimate journalism operations don’t let politicians promote themselves, especially when the vehicle is, as yet, a non-story.

Now this can be seen as beating a dead horse, since anybody paying attention already knows that the Fullerton Observer is not a legitimate journalistic endeavor, and the Kennedy Sisters are not purveyors of objective news. Still, we have yet another example of how the they gladly aid and abet Zahra under the cover of journalism – just like they did when they published water articles Zahra plagiarized from an OCWD PR flack.

December 30, 2024January 1, 2025Ahmad Zahra

Welcome to the No-tell Hotel

by The Desert Rat21 Comments

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.

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.

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.

December 27, 2024December 27, 2024Bad Cops

Legos And Transfiguration

by Joe Sipowicz42 Comments

You can’t make this stuff up. Here’s a press release from DA Todd Spitzer’s office detailing the killing of a driver by Anthony Michael Hanzal, 43, of Anaheim, a drug-addled petty thief who was chased by Fullerton police for shoplifting some Legos from an Albertson’s the week before Christmas.

An undercover cop called in the crime and uniformed cops took over the pursuit of the big heist perp.

The pursuit turned into a high-speed chase on the 91 and in Buena Park and La Palma where the petty thief ran a red light and t-boned the car of his victim.

How in the world did a few bucks worth of plastic culminate in the death of a 67 year old woman in La Palma? Pretty obviously some poor decisions were made all around, but you have to wonder why the cops had to convert this almost ridiculous episode into a chase endangering an awful lot of people and resulting in a death and who knows how many tens of thousands of dollars in vehicle damage.

Somebody needs to do some hard thinking about this sort of thing. Will they?

Of course no OC DA press release would be complete without a stupid speech from Todd Spitzer, and he doesn’t fail to oblige us with this no-nonsense, tough on crime pabulum:

Funny plastic handcuffs graphic borrowed from Voice of OC

“Enough is enough. Actions have consequences and I am mad as hell that an elderly woman is dead because a drug addicted repeat thief decided to steal Legos from a grocery store and then lead multiple police agencies on a high-speed chase through Orange County in the middle of the day,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer. “Marianne Casey’s family should be planning their holiday celebrations and instead they are planning a funeral because California’s soft-on-crime policies have created an environment where there is no accountability. Those days are over, and while may be of little comfort to Marianne Casey’s loved ones, if you commit crimes in Orange County, there will be consequences for your actions and there will be justice for victims.”

Ironically Ms. Casey is referred to as “elderly” even though she was only a year or so older than Spitzer himself when a completely unnecessary incident ended her life.

December 24, 2024December 23, 2024Boohooism

Victim of Kennedy Abuse Requests FPD Assistance

by The Fullerton Harpoon35 Comments

George Bushala, the public speaker at the December 17th City Council meeting who was verbally assaulted by the Fullerton Observer’s Sharon Kennedy is documenting the harassment he suffered with the Fullerton Police Department . FFFF has received a copy of his communication to Fullerton Chief of Police Jon Radus. Incidentally, it now seems that the second person involved in this abusive incident (as reported by Jack Hutt) was none other than Sharon’s younger sister, Skaskia. Kennedy.

Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)

Here is Mr. Bushala’s communication to Chief Radus:

Dear Chief Radus,

As you may recall, I was a public speaker at the City Council meeting on December 17, 2024.

During my comments I was subjected to several violent verbal interjections by Fullerton resident Sharon Kennedy and her sister, Saskia Kennedy.

It is my intent with this communication to convey to the Fullerton Police Department my concern that the violent verbal attacks were damaging to me and have caused me significant subsequent anxiety.

Prior to seeking legal recourse, I would like to file a report with the FPD documenting this incident and I ask for your assistance with this matter. I would also ask that you use your office to help in forestalling any more threatening behavior directed at me from the Kennedys, and any others who participated in this public verbal assault on me.

Thank you for your help in this matter.

Sincerely,

George A. Bushala
409 E. Amerige Ave.
Fullerton, CA 92832

Well, I think this is a very good idea. We can’t have public speakers intimidated at meetings – that would be a serious breach of the right to free speech that people like the Kennedys pretend to care about. I hope Mr. Bushala seeks redress for this attack on his honesty and his right to be heard.

December 23, 2024December 23, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Sharon Kennedy Wigs Out At Council Meeting

by Mr. Peabody23 Comments

At the December 17th Council Meeting, Sharon Kennedy, “former publisher” of the Fullerton Observer appeared to go bonkers when a public speaker began enumerating the reasons Ahmad Zahra was unfit to be Mayor of Fullerton.

She began screaming from the rear of the council chambers, accusing the speaker of being a liar and disseminating “disinformation” while interrupting both the speaker and the meeting.

Kennedy’s violent outburst continued – she kept interrupting the speaker, who calmly continued to recite the damning bill of indictment against Zahra.

Zahra himself interrupted the proceedings, too, as well he might, given that the list of objections to his mayoralty was so persuasive. Still, it’s bad form to engage public speakers – “chilling” is what County Supervisor Doug “Bud” Chaffee called it in 2012, and it treads upon free speech rights of a citizen, for sure.

Eventually, Kennedy removed herself from the chamber before Mayor Nick Dunlap could ask police Chief Radus to kick her out..

Zahra’s supporters like Sharon Kennedy and her sister, fellow Observer Skaskia, continue to ignore his plagiarism, his marriage fraud, his false police report against Fred Jung, his assault and battery guilty plea, his ever-shifting coming out/coming to America tale, and his perpetual victimhood narratives.

Their emotional and psychological investment in Zahra is such that they will never see the real story. That’s the persuasion of the conman when his marks would rather buy into the con than face the truth of their own foolish gullibility. Or they are infinitely hypocritical. Either that or they’re really stupid.

December 21, 2024December 22, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Because YOU Asked for it

by The Fullerton Harpoon47 Comments

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.”

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.

December 20, 2024December 20, 2024Doug Chaffee

Deception Connor Traut Style

by The Fullerton Harpoon13 Comments

It’s a pretty sad thing if your first campaign action is a cheap deception, a deception that is really tantamount to a lie. Or as the Kennedy Sisters would scream: disinformation.

The other day FFFF reported on the 4th District Supervisorial campaign announcement of one Connor Traut, a nebbish-looking guy on the Buena Park City Council whose history is one of self-promotion and carpetbuggery. His mentor was the late creep from Anaheim Jordan Brandman who went nuts and died of acute meth intoxication..

The troutlet’s first announcement as a proclaimed candidate came soon after. In it, he proclaims that his campaign “eclipsed” the $100,000 donation mark in just the first 24 hours! What an unparalleled display of wide and dedicated support!

CONNOR TRAUT ECLIPSES $100K FUNDRAISING MARK IN RACE FOR OC SUPERVISOR

THANK YOU! I’m so grateful for the outpouring of support following my announcement yesterday that I’m running for Orange County Supervisor. I’m excited to announce that we’ve eclipsed the $100,000 cash-on-hand mark in the campaign’s first 24 hours!

It’s clear that our community shares our vision for the future of Orange County. We’ll continue working hard to raise the resources needed to reach voters in every corner of this district.

Politicians often publicize their bank assets, when they have any, as a way to scare off the competition and to induce potential donors to get on the bandwagon. Of course the confident ones don’t need to. That’s obviously what’s happening here. The problem is in the details.

See, the Troutlet didn’t actually raise any money at all.

According to facts that came out on the Orange Juice Blog, what the Troutling did was transfer that hundred grand from his Buena Park City Council campaign account, money he has diligently raised over the past 6 years as a councilmember. It’s a shoddy little deception that goes right along with the outdated strategies that didn’t help Vivian Jaramillo, like having a bunch of endorsements from politicians that almost nobody has heard of. Like Jaramillo, he has been endorsed by Josh Newman, Sharon Quirk, Doug “Bud” Chaffee, Shana Charles, Jan Flory, Aruni Thakur and other Fullerton boohoo locals.

Oh, well. At least now we know what to expect from this obnoxious small fry: a marginal sense of ethics, and a lame, expensive, and lumbering campaign.

December 16, 2024December 16, 2024Boohooism

Kitty Cries Bitter Tears, Shares Final Word

by The Fullerton Harpoon29 Comments

The on-line version of the Fullerton Observer is now available to those inclined to be misinformed, or as in my case, to be entertained.

In the lastest version I discovered a lachrymose rewind of the November District 4 campaign by the loser, one Vivian “Kitty” Jaramillo.

Poor Kitty thought she had a lock on it, so no wonder her outrage that the plans went askew. She sued the City to make a district for her. She sat on the committee that endorsed her district. She had all the endorsements, a pile of money, the county party, and even a fake, perjuring candidate to help take votes away from her obvious competition: Linda Whitaker. She also had an $85,000 Independent Expenditure Committee mostly funded by out-of-town marijuana lobbyists, laundered through the grocery store workers union.

Jaramillo had the undying love of her pals, the Kennedy Sisters at the Fullerton Observer, who could be counted on to whisk away her problems and drop innuendo on Linda Whitaker, when called upon to do so.

How could she lose?

What Poor Kitty and her Team Jaramillo failed to take into account was the arrival of a new face on the scene who raised lots of money and got the police and fire union support. And she didn’t figure on Fullerton Taxpayers For Reform, a political action committee with the means and issues to beat her.

Yes, I was a phony from Day 1. And it was obvious…

And she didn’t count on the Scott Markowitz scam to backfire badly on her as it became apparent that her own supporters were involved in the fraud.

Jaramillo takes the time to swipe at her old pals in the police and fire unions, and of course her unnamed opponent, a smart professional, who, alas, doesn’t seem to know anything about Fullerton, unlike herself who has spent her whole life, yadda, yadda. Pathetic.

It would never occur to a self-entitled person like Jaramillo that her entire, adipose campaign was something right out of the year 2000 playbook: lots of endorsements, clunky mailers, paid precinct walkers, tons of money wasted on political “consultants,” etc. She had the agility of a canal barge. And the product itself was flawed: elderly, otiose, statist, whiny, self-righteous, “good guys” to the end. And for Miss Kitty, the end has finally come to her political aspirations.

Kitty was undone, she says, by the wave of “lies” about her, but she never says what they are and why they are not true. Neither have her sisterhood at the Fullerton Observer who certainly would have had the journalists’ ethic to enquire, had they been journalists, so of course never did.

In the end, Kitty says she is grateful. And so are a lot of other people in Fullerton. And the Observer “editor” has thoughtfully provided the names of contributors to Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform so we know who to thank.

December 11, 2024December 11, 2024Ahmad Zahra

The Hypocrisy of California’s Government

by Mr. Peabody9 Comments

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.

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.