Good news for OC Republicans who frequent blogs: looks like my buddy Chip Hanlon let my other buddy Allan Bartlett post again. Sha-zam!
Bartlett’s near re-inaugural post makes for entertaining reading. It’s all about some dust up between Mike and Mary and a conservative drinkies hour with Chuck Devore as the featured attraction. Now I personally can’t imagine anything more dreary than drinks and Chuck Devore droning on (except maybe no drinks and Chuck Devore droning on), but that’s a whole ‘nother issue.
What’s really fun is the comments thread where the insiders have at it.
Damn, do we finally have a fun Republican blog in town?
It looks like our City Council is all set to discuss the topic of outside dining on Tuesday. Again.
It seems like only yesterday that the council handed over a public sidewalk to the Florentine Mob under the guise of an outdoor dining lease. The ink wasn’t even dry when Florentine started erecting a permanent, enclosed structure on our sidewalk! The Fullerton Shadow wrote all about it, here.
Sit down and grab some sidewalk, brother...
In 2007 the City gave the whole idea of outdoor dining permits second thought. But now with this gosh darn recession a-lingering the subject is cropping up again.
Well, somebody better go to this meeting to make sure no more public property is given away. After all “Dick” Jones and Don Bankhead chose to look the other way before, just to protect their incompetent staff. And Pat McKinley’s got lots of friends downtown, right?
Over the years we’ve learned that boldfaced spin and self-serving regurgitation of misinformation is a regular indulgence for those union mouthpieces over at the Liberal OC. Like most, we quickly grew tired trying to make sense of the noise emerging from the OCEA’s propaganda machine and so we’ve learned to ignore it. But every once in a while someone new comes along and gets sucked right into the blue vortex.
A few weeks ago, Chris Prevatt wrote this blurb supposedly “Busting the Myths” about how public employee pensions don’t cost us hardly anything and the real problem is… well something somewhere else. He backed that up with the audacious claim that public employee compensation only sucks up about 10% of California’s budget, a dubious statement which was then re-quoted by OCEA booster Nick Berardino in this letter to the OC Register.
Well somehow our perplexed new Friends over at UnionWatch.com stumbled upon Prevatt’s steaming pile and decided to break down this mythbuster’s logic. In a lengthy post based on conservative figures and some elementary math, the unnamed blogger discovered that the LiberalOC was off the mark by a factor of six. In fact, conservative calculations pinned public employee compensation at about 67% of California’s budget, far more than Prevatt’s 10%, putting public employees right back at the top of the lineup as a primary suspects in the case of California’s budget woes.
So nobody really knows if it was Prevatt or Berardino who initiated the transmission of this blatant error, but it doesn’t really matter. It served their purposes for a few moments and a couple of union adherents probably sucked it up and will continue to pass the falsehoods along. At least now the rest of us know better.
Yesterday Norberto Santana of the Voice of OC (EA) did a post on a report by a group called OCCORD that accused the cities of Santa Ana and Anaheim of “rubber stamp” planning. Among other things the planning commissions in these towns were identified as living preponderantly in small enclaves and it notes the undue influence of out-of-town developers.
I’m having a little trouble separating the message from the messenger. See, the troubles are real all right. We’ve seen the same operation in Fullerton, as with the creeps who are trying to ram Amerige Court and the hideous Jefferson Commons down our throats. Our electeds got their drinkies, and their boat rides and their thirty pieces of silver from slimers like Steve Sheldon; and we got the shaft. Yet while I can’t disagree with thing the obvious OCCORD conclusion that development in Anaheim and Santa Ana is all tied up by goons with financial ties to people like Kurt Pringle and Miguel Pulido, I have to wonder what it is OCCORD is really promoting.
A quick trip to OCCORD’s website rewards visitors with a list of boardmembers and contributors that reads like a veritable who’s who of leftist, labor, and low-income housing advocates. Here’s what they say they are about:
In Orange County, California, top-down economic development policy and institutionalized anti-immigrant sentiment have served to exclude low income, immigrant communities from government decisionmaking processes, and in many cities, rapid demographic changes have created a political environment in which people are increasingly disconnected from their elected representatives. As a result, income inequality is growing faster in our region than in the nation as a whole, and our sense of community is declining.
I notice with satisfaction the name of Lorri Galloway who not only has approved just about every developer-wet-dream megaplex put in front of her in Anaheim, but also supported SunCal’s mammoth project on Anaheim Boulevard with its sham veneer of “affordable housing.” And that may be a telling.
What else will she pull out of her cookie?
So what’s the real deal? OCCORD seems to be promoting authentic, popular participation in land use decision, of the sort promised by Pam Keller when she first ran for Fullerton City Council in 2006. Pam ended up voting for a bunch of megaprojects, herself, so maybe the whole thing is just some sort of make-people- feel-good-about-looking-like-they’re-trying-to-do-something-anything, scam. Or maybe they actually want “immigrant communities” to have input into decision making land use processes – especially the development of subsidized housing projects.
I think the mistake of swapping “top-down” development policy driven by developers, and that driven by the professional houseacrats and do-gooders, and social conscience hand wringers is a distinction without much of a difference. Overbuilt, overbearing, subsidized, architectural monstrosities built on public debt are bound to follow either way. Will OCCORD ever come out against the idiotic Redevelopment housing policies and ethnic cleansing pogroms? Not likely if there’s a jaw-droppingly expensive “affordable” project of some kind, any kind, at the end of the bureaucratic rainbow.
This post is a story about the City of Orange. Why is it relevant to Fullerton? Because the antagonist of the tale is none other than Matthew J. Cunningham who loves to pontificate about all things freedom-friendly, posing as he does as a champion of business and free enterprise, and property rights, yada yada yada; a typical OC repuglican, in fact: we all know now that Cunningham was pulling down a hefty six-figure income for many years from the ultra-liberal Children and Families Commission.
Cunningham’s loud brayings on all things conservative maybe even helped him get appointed to the Orange Planning Commission by Orange Councilman Jon Dumitru. But, alas, talk is cheap. Here’s Cunningham voting to shoot down a proposal for a cafe owner to have a live music until (gasp) midnight. Watch Mr. Friend of Freedom in action:
It also transpires that Cunningham and his wife have been lobbying in Orange, too. And that doesn’t look very good for somebody making discretionary decisions on behalf of the public of a city.
And in a rather stunning display of disloyalty Cunningham refused to support his patron, Dumitru, in his run for mayor last fall. In fact the little woman chipped in a hundred bucks to Dumitru’s opponent, Carolyn Cavecche.
It would appear that Mr. Dumitru has finally run out of patience with his appointee and has asked him step down. Word in the Orange Plaza is that Cunningham refuses to go quietly, perhaps believing he has the three votes necessary to remain on the commission despite the fact that he was personally selected by Dimitru. The F-you to his boss has instigated an effort by Dimitru to force the City Council to vote on the matter. Here’s the agenda item at this week’s council meeting.
Will Freedom Boy stay or go? And will he quit harassing business owners in Orange? Stay tuned for the fun!
Okay, we’ve had some harsh criticism of the Voice of OC in the past, but today Norberto Santana came out with a great expose about OC Fair-employed lobbyist Dick Ackerman, husband of former carpetbaggress Linda, both of whom are residents of Irvine.
I told the DA everything was on the up and up. And that's what he went with!
Last year our do-nothing DA whitewashed Ackerman’s role in the ’09 OC Fair sale matter, saying he didn’t lobby the Legislature in violation of State law. How did the DA reach this conclusion? It wasn’t through investigative work, that’s for damn sure. Naturally, Amen Corner repuglicans like Matthew J. Cunningham crowed when the whitewash came out, but they’ll be eating crow soon enough. See, Santana got hold of Ackerman’s Nossaman Law Firm’s original billing records. And even though those records were laundered through some “environmental” consulting firm called LSA, the details prove what we here at FFFF have known since the fall of 2009: Ackerman was acting as a lobbyist and that in 2010 the DA was covering it up. The Nossaman billing records show phone calls to members of the State Legislature at $500 an hour. And that was illegal.
I gotta eat the feathers, too?
We didn’t have the billing, of course. We just had Dicky-boy’s own words:
“In order for the fair to be sold, it would require budget language to authorize the state to sell it,” he said. “I did some preliminary work to get the language in the budget.”
Preliminary work? Well, that’s one way of describing it; and that pesky budget language sure wasn’t going to jump into the bill all by itself, now was it?
Well, Friends, don’t expect any legal remedies anytime soon. Just remember the name: Ackerman. When you hear it, or read it, or smell it, you can bet some monkey business is afoot.
We just received the following note from a visitor named “Otis T. Jacksone”:
In a belated blow to Linda Ackerman and Assclown Sidhu supporters, the Illinois court ruled that residency requirements are enforceable and Rahm Emanuel is therefore ineligible to run for mayor of Chicago. After years of rulings that created all sorts of loopholes in the 130 year old Illinois law, the supremes employed a little common sense and removed Emanuel from the ballot due to the fact he had lived in D.C. for the prior year. Illinois law requires a candidate to live in the district for one year before the election.
California should take note. The California constitution has long required a candidate to be a resident of his district one year prior to filing. The Sidhus and Ackermans of the world have ignored the law feeling it was unconstitutional. Maybe Illinois is on to something. No Carpetbaggers!
Looks like the City recently purchased some fancy letterhead. Too bad they spelled Bruce Whitaker’s name wrong. Jerry Brown probably won’t know the difference, but we do.
D’oh!
More on Crazy Doc Heehaw’s letter to the Gov later…
Several years ago this blog documented the shameful saga of Fullerton’s red light cameras, which were shut down after a judge declared that the city had been operating them illegally. That was an embarrassing moment for the mystified members of city council; even more so for the city attorney who lost in court and then stuck us with the bill.
The cameras were removed, but the poles and strobes still hang over Harbor Blvd today.
Muy bonita, Fullerton.
Should the city take them down?
Nope. Please leave them up forever as permanent monuments to magnificent and expensive failure, driven by a desperate quest for new revenue. Ah, wonderful new revenue streams… usually that means some gimmick conjured up to extract more money from the beleaguered public, promoted by tireless staff (and in this case, an eager red light camera salesman) and then executed by council with little regard for external consequences, all to avoid dealing with the real problem: excessive spending.
Any way, I see no sense in tearing down those poles. None at all.
