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.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
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?
Not really that agile…
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.
Smart and willing to learn…
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.
But I checked all the right boxes!
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.
Where’s the lie”
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.
Sometimes you just have to ask yourself whether somebody is just plain stupid, a liar, or truly untethered to reality. No where is this better seen than in the case of failed City Council candidate Vivian Jaramillo and her followers. We have already seen Jaramillo’s pitiful valediction, full of spite, and of course bemoaning “dirty tricks” of an undisclosed nature as cause of her (heroic) downfall. It was a twilight struggle of good versus evil, see, in a Manichean battle for the soul of Fullerton. Light versus darkness.
One might find this whole thing ludicrous in a way, and write it off as sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But there seems to be more going on here than a self-entitled Karen of a candidate crying about how the kids got into the HOA swimming pool. The holier-than-thou delusion of self-righteousness still seems to run deep in Fullerton. And it matters when the waste of public money, and a lot of it is wasted on stupid, empty gestures, is defended by people like Jaramillo and her supporters.
FFFF has observed how the Observer Kennedy Sisters did their level best to ignore the Scott Markowitz candidacy, a perjurious fraud perpetrated on the voters of the 4th District by Jaramillo’s Team. Sharon Kennedy, the elder sister and self-styled journalist even went so far as to contact key persons in the scandal, Diane Vena, ostensibly to aid in disseminating a plausible backstory – one that made no sense. And no printed story about the true Markowitz tale was ever forthcoming. The story was dirty tricks against Jaramillo.
Apparently, Jaramillo’s friends on Facebook are now lamenting her loss, and many are blindly following the dirty tricks narrative even though none of them seem to be able to articulate just what those may have been.
We all know that social media provides no barrier for people who don’t know what they’re talking about to opine freely, but this is pretty ridiculous. Jaramillo’s friends either don’t know or don’t care about:
the self-sabotage the Jaramillo Team inflicted on itself
the fraudulent Markowitz scam, created by Jaramillo’s supporters to harm the candidacy of Linda Whitaker
that Jaramillo publicly supported the establishment and the later re-enactment of the MJ ordinance that could have allowed a dispensary 100ft from a house
the fact that out-of-town dope dispensary lobby pumped $60,000 to support Jaramillo
that the dope money was laundered through the national HQ of the grocery store workers union
that the marijuana loot was used pay people to hector and harass voters multiple times
that precinct walkers for Jaramillo slandered her opponents, Whitaker and Valencia
that Jaramillo used City personnel to have her opponents signs removed
that Jaramillo’s signs were illegally placed on public and private property
Et cetera, et cetera.
The election is over, but I get the sense that for the near future, at least, the boohooing and hand-wringing of Fullerton’s self-righteous left-leaners will continue – the self-pity, the blissful ignorance, and the high-horseyness competing for dominance.
In what is shaping up to be Fullerton’s most expensive Council race ever, newcomer Jamie Valencia has increased her lead from yesterday’s 19 to 41. Here’s the November 19 tally.
At this point 41 votes is a significant lead and the trend for the past three counts is in Valencia’s favor. I don’t know how many ballots are left to count from the so-called provisional ballot pile. And then there’s the possibility that Valencia and Jaramillo are doing ballot “curing” in which ballots (that include a vote for a candidate) that have been disqualified by the Registrar of Voters are validated by the voter himself. Some of these may already be counted and the remaining such ballots, if any, may add to the totals.
And hey! Look there! The confessed perjurer Scott Markowitz, whose phony candidacy was created by the dope lobby and Democrat supporters of Vivian Jaramillo, is only 3 votes away from 1000, proving that the slimy idea to take votes away from Linda Whitaker was a well-calculated one, given the Democrat/Dopers expectation that she would run a real campaign.
There’s a couple things we know about the Kennedy Sisters, Sharon and Skaskia, the people who bring to Fullerton their confused mix of opinion, “news,” innuendo and spite known as The Fullerton Observer.
It has long been a purveyor of hard left perspective, in 1994 joining the establishment in a hearty defense of anything cooked up in the bowels of City Hall. There has been no crackpot idea, no new tax, no illegal venture that they were not willing to defend, ignore, obfuscate as they thought the situation demanded.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
The Kennedys have also believed in the completely unethical practice of joining in making the news. Why simply report on something honestly when one could involve oneself in actually drumming up support for some harebrained idea if it checked the right box? And the right box was about virtue signaling, to wit: it didn’t matter if something made sense, or was even legal, so long as it sent the message you believed in. Efficacy matters not; it’s the gesture that counts, see?
And so things like the Trail to Nowhere and the Wank on Wilshire were the Observer subjects not just of editorial approbation, but active organization and dissemination of misinformation.
These two characteristics lead, in course, to sanctimony and self-righteousness; and the belief that one’s political piety must be accompanied by active participation. These traits are to be expected in political parties and their minions, but are forbidden in the precincts of ethical journalism.
Okay, Joe, I hear you saying. But the Observer is not a professional journal or an ethical one, and we always knew it. Well, you’re right, of course. However this issue could be bigger than an illegal water tax here, a cop cover up there, or a look-the-other-way when a few million are wasted once in a while. This is about an honest election.
Yes, I was a phony from Day 1. And it was obvious…
FFFF knew almost immediately that the candidacy of Scott Markowitz was a scam. The facts were so clear and so pernicious that only one intelligent conclusion could be drawn. The man was a plant to interfere in an election by diverting Republican votes away from Linda Whitaker to Markowitz. The beneficiary of the scam was Vivian Jaramillo, the favored candidate of the Democrat Party and the Observer crowd. And the Kennedy Sisters never made any attempt to even explore the possibility that the obvious conclusion was correct.
Instead, the Kennedys, Soeur et Soeur, ignored the story in the Observer, and in internet conversations actually pretended that Markowitz was a legitimate candidate – until the news broke that he had been arrested for perjury. After Markowitz pleaded guilty to perjury they talked about how he “dropped out” of the race, even though his name was still on the ballot. Even then their emphasis turned to “unrelated” conspiracy theories” submitted to the DA by Tony Bushala.
See my badge? I’m a real reporter!!
In the meantime Sharon Kennedy had been active on social media trying extremely hard divert attention to the irrelevant. She posited the ridiculous idea that maybe Markowitz was afraid to leave his house for candidate forums because he feared for his safety – after a mean threat on a blog that somebody should go to his house and talk to him. She volunteered unsolicited information that her pal and fellow “Observer,” Diane Vena, was a “kind” person and that she simply signed the nomination papers of a MAGA-sounding Republican candidate “at the request of a friend.”
Sharon Kennedy’s conversation with Vena is where ethical debasement and self-righteous political ideology climbed onto the same small raft with honesty. What was said between them, precisely, we’ll never know. But we do know that the conversation had nothing about it that looked like honest journalism, and may well, in fact, have included both coaching, and a plan to respond to criticism from FFFF. If this is what happened then the Kennedys went from negligent reporting to participating in an effort to hide the activities of the conspirators in this slimy episode.
An honest person, let alone an “incubator of journalism,” would have gotten the name of the “friend” who convinced the evidently doltish Vena to sign Markowitz’s papers, even though she had already endorsed Vivian Jaramillo and actually appeared on the latter’s website. An honest journalist would also have gotten the name of the person who circulated the nomination papers. Maybe Sharon Kennedy did get the name, or names. But if she did, neither she nor her sister ever shared it with Observer readers.
So very popular…
It’s abundantly clear that the Fullerton Observer had no intention reporting on the Markowitz story. The aim was to distance the candidacy of their favored Vivian Jaramillo from what had really happened
I also note that in the same vein, the Kennedy Sisters have been completely mute about the massive influx of marijuana lobbyist cash into a pro-Jaramillo Independent Expenditure PAC, with the loot laundered through the national office of the grocery workers union. There’s another story we’ll never read about in the pages or website of the Fullerton Observer, although they have never shied away from reporting this sort of thing with the attendant innuendo when it came to people they didn’t like.
But very soon, I predict, we’ll hear all about the money contributed by Tony Bushala.
Those celebrating the impending defeat of Fullerton 4th District candidate, Vivian Jaramillo, may have been celebrating too soon.
Jaramillo, staunch defender of Fullerton’s underpaid and under-pensioned employees made a big gap closure yesterday, narrowing Jamie Valencia’s lead by more than half, down to a mere 55. She trails 2653 to 2708.
What accounts for the big blob of Jaramillo votes coming through the hose? I don’t know but those ballots were nowhere near the overall percentages, which suggests a ballot collection supposedly harvested by Fullerton School District food service union workers deployed OC Dem Central, and submitted as a batch.
Jamie Valencia
Whether this huge disparity will continue to erase Valencia’s election night lead remains to be seen. It doesn’t look good for Valencia, still it’s better to be ahead than behind, right?
Whitaker, Linda
Meantime, the total for candidate Linda Whitaker is 1442 and remains about the same – 1200 votes behind Valencia, more or less.
Patsy Markowitz. Left holding the empty bag, but he got his 15 minutes of fame…
And Scott Markowitz, the dummy surrogate for the Jaramillo campaign who pleaded guilty to perjury and “dropped out” is on his way to 900 votes, proving that his illegal presence on the ballot does indeed have an effect.
In the close Fullerton Elementary School Board race in D5, Sharon Quirk’s empire-building fortunes have taken a turn for the better as her hand-picked candidate Vanesa Estrella, has taken a 57 vote lead over incumbent and union-supported Leonel Talavares; a result, if it holds, that would mean zero practical difference to actual governance that will remain 90 minutes of gold star distribution and a rubber stamp on real district business.
The OC Registrar of Voters won’t report again until Monday at 5 pm.
The results of the November 2024 Fullerton elections are almost settled.
School bonds L and N passed comfortably. And why not? The districts used your money to educate you, and the beholden contractors, trades, architects et al. spent $300,000 to put us all farther into debt. Yea! Property taxes and rents and the cost of commerce are going up. But, hey, it’s all for the kids, right?
The designated driver is on the way…
In the City Council 2nd District election, Mayor Nick Dunlap pummeled the old warhorse, Jan Flory, whose try at a 4th time around the track came out of the gate without a rider. The result so far is a massive 28 point victory.
There seemed to be some confusion…
In the 1st District, incumbent Fred Jung walloped a guy named Matt Truxaw, who can now retreat back into the murky obscurity from which he was trolled by Ahmad Zahra. This one wasn’t close, either – a 44 point gap
Nurse Jamie looking good…
The 4th District is close – real close. Newcomer Jamie Valencia leads OC Dem Central darling Vivian “Kitty” Jaramillo, a woman whose candidacy was so shaky the Dem Party created a phony non-Latino candidate to help her out. Right now the difference is about 130 votes in Valencia’s favor. Can late mail-in ballots save Kitty’s litter? We’ll probably know by the end of the day. Linda Whitaker, who didn’t seem to campaign at all finished a distant third. But we see you there, Scott Markowitz, the perjurer set up to help Jaramillo. He has 766 votes right now, enough to suggest that his phony candidacy could be considered to be an effective element in the election. Cause for legal action? That would be fun.
The anointing oil was greasy and left fingerprints, and didn’t take…
A Valencia victory would certainly be the bitterest pill for Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles and all the other Dem small fry like Sharon Quirk and Josh Newman. More importantly, it would solidify a common sense approach to the stupidity and turbidity of City Hall inventions like the Trail to Nowhere, the Wank on Wilshire, the boutique hotel disaster, etc. Even more significantly it will affect the issue of liberal marijuana dispensaries in Fullerton – Zahra’s pet cause.
The Fullerton Observer Sisters can be counted on to bemoan a Jaramillo loss and blame evil developer influences for having the temerity to tell the truth about poor Kitty.
Looking Heavenward for help…
Speaking of Newman, he is currently losing his State Senate job to the dopey librarian from Irvine, Steven Choi, for which we would be eternally grateful if it holds. He would leave a ridiculous, gerrymandered district he couldn’t win as his lasting legacy. He’s 14,000 votes behind, which is a lot, but of course late ballot counts could change that over the days ahead – like they did for him in 2016.
The power couple looks a lot less powerful these days…
Quirk won as expected, but with a Jaramillo loss and the possible defeat of her hand-picked elementary school board candidate, Vanesa Estrella, she may have some political throw-weight problems, especially in a run for County Supervisor in two years. But that school board election is close. Incumbent Leonel Talavares is only ahead by 46 votes this morning.
Bye, bye, Sugar…
Another bright note is the victory of some guy named James Cho in another elementary school board race. He crushed forever incumbent Hilda Sugarman, and good riddance there, too. There may not be much of a practical difference but cleaning out the cobwebs is always a good idea.
Phony Fullerton 4th District candidate Scott Markowitz has been arrested by the DA and charged with perjury and falsification of public documents. Somebody other than Markowitz circulated his nominating papers, but he attested that he did.
Normally, in these types of situations that would be the end of the story. Except that in the case of Markowitz – a political unknown – he had help. How much coaching he got, and by whom, remains something of a mystery, but it’s obvious that his perjury was suborned by others.
I’d sell out my own mother for 10 votes, and I have…
We do know that one of his manipulators is the former Executive Director of the OC Democrat Party, one Ajay Mohan who accompanied Markowitz to the City Clerk’s office to pull papers. Was Mohan the circulator? Was it somebody else, somebody that the nominators trusted? Who wrote the carefully crafted and cynical MAGA statement Markowitz got on the ballot? Certainly not Markowitz.
Happy Jaramillo…
Who else may have benefitted from the scam will give us a clue to the extent of the election rigging. Vivian Jaramillo is the number one suspect since Markowitz’s candidacy was meant to attract non-Latino voters from Linda Whitaker.
I will get what I want, one way or another…
One layer deeper, we can discern the shadowy figure of Ahmad Zahra, Fullerton’s 5th District representative who desperately needs Jaramillo’s support to finally become America’s first gay, Arab, Muslim Mayor; and who also needs Jaramillo to finally bring home the marijuana dispensary bacon.
Then there’s Ada Briceno, the current Chairwoman of the OC Democrat Party, the group that endorsed Jaramillo without even talking to anybody else. There’s a big prestige issue here, the ambitious Briceno has a record – she was certainly aware of the Tony Castro scandal in 2022, when her ED Mohan created the fake Latino candidate in Fullerton’s 5th District to protect the egregious Ahmad Zahra.
Slithering things…
The name Aaruni Thakur has also been mentioned, in the comments section below. He deserves special attention. Apparently his family lives and owns property on Wooodcrest, not far from the abode of Scott Markowitz. He and his family have given a lot of money to Jaramillo, and his previous fake carpetbaggery in the 4th District in 2020 gives a fine example of his moral compass.
Above the lowly riffraff are politicians who have invested their political prestige in Jaramillo’s candidacy and who may want to protect that investment while also creating office holders beholden to them. These include Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk, State Senator Josh Newman, and Congressman Lou Correa. How shallow or how deep are the roots of the Markowitz Conspiracy?
Bushala says stop!
All of these issues are presented as a prelude to the topic of this post, which is a letter from Fullerton activist, Tony Bushala to the District Attorney Todd Spitzer asking that the investigation into the situation be continued to find out who got Markowitz to lie.
It’s very clear that at least one other person was involved in suborning perjury. One would have to be relentlessly stupid, a Kennedy Observer, in fact, to believe that Markowitz the political novice, himself was the sole director of this play; that he cooked up the plan; that he decided to create a campaign committee for appearances; that he decided to change his party affiliation; that he that he made sure his new affiliation was on his FPCC documents when it wasn’t required; that he, for some reason, needed and recruited a surrogate to circulate his petition; that he conceived and wrote his ballot statement; that he knew nothing else was required and quietly disappeared, his apologists at the Observer saying he was somehow “threatened” into hiding.
There is an old Latin apothegm: qui bono? Roughly translated the question asks “who benefits” from a given situation whose origins may not be completely clear. Well, let’s find out.
As FFFF has continually claimed, Markowitz was a set-up candidate, created by prominent Democrats to draw votes away from Linda Whitaker to help her opponent, Vivian Jaramillo.
I’d sell out my mother for 10 votes, and I have…
Apparently, Markowitz’s nominating signatures were collected by somebody else, but he signed the affidavit claiming he did. That’s perjury, and substantiates our conclusions about the rest of the sordid scheme.
Perjury is a felony, and whoever set him up for this had better hope that Markowitz is willing to keep his mouth shut. If he sings he may very well incriminate the people who dragged him into this perjury, in which case we would have a conspiracy to commit a crime, which is also a felony.
Another DA investigation…
Democrat Ajay Mohan is in this up to his eyeballs, of course. What about others? I keep hearing the names Ahmad Zahra and Aaruni Thakur, Ada Briceno and even Congressman Lou Correa.
On a clear day you can see forever…
Did Fullerton Observer Diane Vena know about this? She seems to have concocted tales to tell the gullible about the details of her participation. What about any of the other nominators? What about the Fullerton Observer itself, that has studiously avoided any mention of the perjury scandal.
The immediate question is what impact this will have on the 4th District election. Mass circulated campaign material has already tied Markowitz as a set up to help Jaramillo, so this is just more ammunition for the next couple of weeks. The beneficiaries of this news are obviously Linda Whitaker and Jamie Valencia, the former of which can point to the conspiracy as evidence of her own election chances.
A Friend sent in some images of a door hanger produced by 4th District Candidate Linda Whitaker. I don’t know if it’s two sides to the same one, so I’m calling it one hanger. It’s good to see Whitaker establishing a ground game.
On this side we see a picture that I’ve been told is a much younger Linda with City Hall in the background. I hate the use of old pictures by candidates and politicians who are much older-looking, but they all do it, of course. Here, Ms. Whitaker is touting her experience around City Hall for more than twenty years as the wife of outgoing Councilman Bruce Whitaker, although for some reason she omits reference to her husband. We are admonished that “we need to move forward.” From what to what isn’t stated
This hanger image shows Whitaker at various life stages and gives us some really non-specific promises. I would have like some specificity about how she’s going to work, not just the vague idea of work itself. Still, it seems in Fullerton you don’t win elections by annoying anybody with details, even if you have them.
The bottom picture on this side is simply bizarre. Thankfully, Linda has eschewed the usual stiff-gestured, in-the-can pictures with kids, oldsters, and various ethnicities. But I can’t imagine who the Whitaker campaign thinks is going to be impressed by the support of a superannuated motorcycle club.
Overall, the piece isn’t bad, motorcycle gang notwithstanding, and many folks may find it reassuring. It’s not too slick and doesn’t have the feel of an overproduced, fancy campaign piece.
If you were paying attention in 2022 you may recall that the City of Fullerton went through a redistricting process based on the results of the 2020 Census.
Jan Flory was here…
The legacy of Jan Flory’s “Bar Owner’s Map,” ostensibly created by Douchebag Supreme, Jeremy Popoff in 2016, was fresh in everybody’s mind. Three districts had been gerrymandered with tentacles to reach into downtown Fullerton – in violation of one of the basic tenets of district map making – compaction.
The train of thought was weak but it sure was short…
One consequence of the 2016 map was to give recently elected at-large Jesus Quirk-Silva a shot a running early for the first District 3 race in 2018 against Greg Sebourn, a race that Quirk-Silva won.
Why is this man clapping?
When 2022 rolled around and the Council created a redistricting committee Fullerton’s lefties squealed in displeasure that Sebourn was appointed to it. He’s going to make a district that he can run in, cutting out Quirk-Silva, so they said. How dastardly. Members of the committee must forswear not to run in a district they created, so they said.
Out with the old…
Well, the districts were cleaned up, Quirk-Silva who had been gerrymandered into D3 was removed from it, and Sebourn didn’t run again.
She wants what you have…
But one fact seems to have gone unnoticed by all the self-righteous libs clamoring against the Council, the new map and against Sebourn. And that fact is that current Council candidate, Vivian Jaramillo, the person who sued the City to make a district she could run in, was also on the Redistricting Committee.
Not only did she support new gerrymandered maps that would protect Quirk-Silva, she supported the district she is now running in. How’s that for ironic hypocrisy?
But it’s not surprising. In their sanctimonious world, the boohoos of Fullerton’s left can’t accept the possibility that their own interests and beliefs might be effected by any sort self-serving or let alone bad behavior, which is why no one mentions the unethical and possibly illegal effort by Team Jaramillo to work a phony candidate on the ballot, a sham candidate whose only job is to divert votes from candidate Linda Whitaker.
