Something Wicked This Way Comes Archives - Page 28 of 50

November 22, 2019November 22, 2019Ahmad Zahra

Meanwhile, Back @ the Ranch – Part 2

You pay the mortgage, we live in the palace…

When a government sues its own citizens you have the spectacle of a taxpayer having to pay for for his defense and pay for the legal attack upon him. And what a sad, Kafkaesque sight it is.

Another disgusting passion play is when governments use your money to try to propagandize you for their scheme to take more of your money.

And so very recently the Fullerton City Manager Ken Domer paid to survey the local gentry about the state of the city.

Dear Resident:

The City of Fullerton has hired an independent public opinion research company to conduct a public opinion survey to obtain feedback on key issues facing the City and identify residents’ priorities.

Thank you for participating in this important research. Please click here to take the survey or copy and paste the link below into your web browser.

https://opinions-survey.com/index.php/survey/index/sid/242328/newtest/Y/lang/en/token/3065BT818751

Your participation and responses to this survey will be completely confidential. The identity of individual respondents and their individual answers to survey questions will not be shared with City staff or officials.

Please do not forward the survey link to others or share it to social media as it is personalized for each recipient of this invitation to ensure that the survey link will only work once.

Sincerely,

Kenneth A. Domer
City Manager
City of Fullerton

It’s a good thing the City has so much money to play with.

Lo and Behold! The survey is nothing other than:

An attempt to get you to prioritize the various messes the politician and bureaucrats have created, and,
Ignore the biggest problem – a vastly expensive, often criminal, and completely irredeemable police department; and,
Subtly offer a 1% sales tax as a way to fix the problems; and,
Failing that, howdja feel about a .75% sales tax? And,
Gather that prioritization information you gave them to fashion their propaganda campaign for the inevitable tax.

The heart of the City celebrates another impending victory…

My advice is to ignore the survey except for amusement purposes and remember that we will have school district bond proposals on the ballot in 2020 as the insatiable maws of local government takes ever more and returns ever less.

November 18, 2019November 19, 2019Behind Closed Doors

Monday Photo Fun & Caption Contest!

by Jan Florys Dog35 Comments

I knew trouble was brewing when I saw this picture. My former mistress and her drinking buddies. Normally when the drinking began I would crawl under the sofa.

Well, what the hell. You humans provide the caption. I mean really, what can I, a poor dead dog add to this?

November 12, 2019Bruce Whitaker

Where’s Whitaker?

by Joe Sipowicz23 Comments

It seems Fullerton has a new problem. According to Councilmember Bruce Whitaker, the City Attorney lied when he publicly proclaimed last Tuesday that the City Council voted 5-0 in September to initiate legal action against Joshua Ferguson, David Curlee, FFFF, and a bunch of Does to be named later.

Here’s how it is described by the Voice of OC’s Spencer Custudio:

Meanwhile, there are questions in Fullerton about how the City Council first authorized the lawsuit against Ferguson.

At the Nov. 5 meeting, City Attorney Dick Jones said the councilmembers voted unanimously to file the lawsuit against Ferguson and the blog.

“In an effort to clarify any Brown Act violations, the fact that City Council on Sept. 17, 2019, met on a motion made by Mayor (Jesus) Silva and seconded Mr. (Ahmad) Zahra, on a 5-0 vote, the City Council approved the filing of a writ to seek a temporary restraining order against the main defendants,” Jones said.

But, that unanimous vote is wrong, according to Councilman Bruce Whitaker

“When they say I voted to approve this lawsuit, I say that’s not true,” Whitaker said.

In fact, Whitaker was the only dissenting vote when the Council majority doubled-down on the lawsuit during the Nov. 5 closed session portion of the meeting.

Somebody is lying, and if I had to guess it is our City Attorney Richard “Dick” Jones. At this point I’m now wondering if a vote took place at all back on September 17th. It would be just like Jones to try to create a September “vote” to cover his wide expanding ass, when no real vote even happened.

Still, for somebody who claims he was maligned in public by his own lawyer, Bruce Whitaker was pretty damn passive when Jones made his comment about a unanimous vote. So who’s telling the truth? Who knows? But I bet it isn’t Dick Jones, who is neck-deep in the lawsuit his own incompetence caused, and by which he is actually profiting.

November 7, 2019November 7, 2019Ahmad Zahra

City Blows Off Brown Act – Until Caught

by Joe Sipowicz2 Comments

The shy City rodent finally emerges from its hole…

Yep, just as we surmised, the City of Fullerton illegally ignored California’s Brown Act – a law made to protect us citizens from our own government. I posted here about the secret agenda item and the lack of reporting out, as required by law.

dick-jones — Staying awake…helpful, but not required.

So a recap: on September 17, 2019, the City Council of Fullerton, hiding behind closed doors, both raised the subject of suing FFFF and Fullerton citizens, and then took action – both without a whisper to the public about what had happened in this filthy little Star Chamber.

Another good month’s billing of the suckers!

How do I know? Because in a Voice of OC story today, our grossly overpaid and incompetent City Attorney, Richard “Dick” Jones, said so. Here’s the proof:

And at this Tuesday’s Council meeting, Dick Jones, head city attorney, disclosed that the Council voted Sept. 17 to sue Ferguson over the documents.

It was the first time the city publicly disclosed the closed session vote, as required by state law, despite the vote happening nearly two months ago.

I’m a bird, I’m a plane, I’m a lawyer. I’m a lawyer!

So two months after the violation, and with the local and national media getting wind of the unconstitutional lawsuit travesty, our esteemed City Attorney decided he’d better get his client to, you know, follow the law. In this case, the City has felt zero compunction about labeling us as unethical thieves while they themselves are completely incapable of doing anything competently or ethically.

October 25, 2019Ahmad Zahra

Transparency 101

by Joe Sipowicz17 Comments

As many Friends now know, the City of Fullerton has decided to move on from bullying language to actually sue FFFF. Here’s a summation from The Voice of OC.

Ken Domer — Domer. So much less there than meets the eye.

The City has also posted a ponderous press release on its website, written in the high dudgeon of a bureaucrat whom you suspect already realizes that diverting attention from his own bungling by blaming somebody else, may be harder to pull off than he had hoped. Here’s our $230,000 per year City Manager Ken Domer trying desperately to seize some sort of high moral ground:

“The City was forced into taking legal action to protect the privacy of current and former employees and the public, and to ensure compliance with applicable law to include the California Public Records Act,” stated Fullerton City Manager, Ken Domer. “We are working aggressively on behalf of those affected and took immediate actions to put in place a more secure information technology environment. These actions support our philosophy of transparent access to information while protecting confidential information from the unethical and illegal actions of a few.”

Now I don’t know about you, Friends, but I find the words “unethical” and “illegal” to be pretty funny tumbling out of the mouth of Domer, whose only aim in his short tenure in Fullerton seems to have been to fight a rear-guard action against transparency. Domer’s self-righteous indignation is comical coming from the lackey of serial liars on the City Council – people like Jan Flory who is, and always has been, dangerously allergic to the truth; like Jennifer Fitzgerald who has not yet seen an ethical barrier she couldn’t sidestep; and like Doug “Bud” Chaffee who was complicit in his wife’s phony carpetbagging address and stealing campaign signs she didn’t like.

The budget is balanced and the cops are tip-top. Or else.

We need only reflect on the way the City has bent over backwards to cover-up the scandal of Wild Ride Joe Felz to know that what Domer is peddling about is utter bullshit.

And as further proof (if we needed any), let us pause for a moment to consider the following snippet from Domer’s press release:

Based on evidence uncovered in our internal investigation and direction from the City Council, the City Attorney’s Office has now filed a complaint in Superior Court seeking a temporary restraining order against the involved Blog and its contributors.

Say what? Direction from the City Council? When O’ when did that ever occur? The issue of whether or not to take FFFF to court has never been publicly agendized and never voted on by the City Council. The subject has never been discussed by our marble-mouthed City Attorney, Dick Jones reporting out of Closed Session.

Domer says he has a “philosophy” of transparent access to information. His actions give us a crystal-clear view of what that philosophy really is: stall, hide, deceive, misrepresent, and ass-cover.

October 15, 2019Boohooism

Pilfering Paulette On The Comeback Trail

by Mr. Peabody7 Comments

Most people, after having been nabbed committing trespass and theft would at least lay low for a respectable period of time.

Paulette Stolen Sign — Caught Red Handed

But Paulette Marshall Chaffee, the former carpetbagging sign thief who quit the Fullerton City Council race less than a year ago is not respectable. She has decided to run for the Orange County Board of Education, a fairly obscure and almost totally opaque local agency.

One of our attentive Friends actually received a push poll promoting this miscreant. Just in case you don’t know a push poll is one of those phony calls that ask questions like: “if you knew Paulette Marshall invented a cure for cancer would you be more or less likely to vote for her?”

Paulette Sign Thief — Oops, She Did it Again

Well, I have a question of my own: what in the world are this woman’s qualifications? She can’t even steal campaign signs without getting busted.

Paulette and her doddering husband Doug “Bud” Chaffee have a long history of arrogance and indifference to the people of Fullerton, and so this move shouldn’t be too surprising.

And neither should it be surprising that we, the good folks at FFFF, will be conducting our own outreach: if you knew Paulette Marshall Chaffee plead guilty to theft would you be more or less likely to vote for her?

October 12, 2019Ahmad Zahra

The High Price of Building Our Future

by Fullerton Engineer6 Comments

It may have been expensive, but it sure was unnecessary…

I watched this little gem of a clip from Bill Maher’s cable show last night. Bill rails against the added cost laden on to stuff simply because people can get away with it it.

In particular Maher notes the exorbitant cost of government projects, namely housing for the homeless and infrastructure where the “soft costs” including the inevitable army of “consultants” and lobbyists drives up the cost to absurdly comical levels. For the cost of building an “affordable” housing unit you could easily buy some homeless dude a condominium.

For those of us paying attention in Fullerton we have seen this in spades:

Five million bucks for a couple of traction elevators at the depot. Two million bucks for some crappy, rickety wood stairs at Hillcrest Park. The better part of a million bucks for a decorative bridge over the muddy ditch known as Brea Creek. Etc, etc., etc. The fact that these vanity efforts were totally unnecessary just adds insult to the injurious price tag.

The fact is that government building projects are grossly over-managed. There are architects and engineers galore; there are construction managers; there are general contractor’s project managers and superintendents coming out of the woodwork. And then there are the government’s “project managers” who manage virtually nothing but have blanketed themselves with warm layers of external “expertise” to insulate themselves against the inevitable sideways momentum of their next disaster.

Meanwhile the politicians who are elected to watch out for our interests are too lazy, ignorant, indifferent, or self-interested to give a damn.

September 28, 2019October 18, 2019Ahmad Zahra

The Bullshit of “Anticipated Litigation”

by Joe Sipowicz6 Comments

nothing to see here more along

California’s Brown Act specifically enumerates when public agencies can meet in secret (Closed Session, they call it) away from the prying eyes of the nuisancy public that pays for the whole show. One of these exempt categories is “litigation,” in which secrecy is deemed to be okie-dokie. The problem is that government agencies, when given an inch will invariably take a mile.

But when you fail to specifically constrain the arm of government, they will invariably flex those muscles. And so it is that “litigation” has come to include anticipated litigation which, of course, could cover just about anything, anywhere, at any time. And that label seems to give the City of Fullerton reason to believe it can omit the names of anticipated litigants. The anticipated litigants must, necessarily remain in the dark about what the government is about to do to them, while the government, for its part, gets a jump on its adversary. Of course this isn’t right, but what do rights have to do with the City of Fullerton government?

Let’s first take a look at the City’s Closed Session agenda for September 17:

Opacity from a “transparent” government…

Notice the final two items have been draped in the magical shroud of “anticipated litigation.” We may wonder what the Big Mystery is. Rumors are circulating that at least one of the the items in question is the City’s desire to sue humble little us, Friends for Fullerton’s Future, and that the council has voted to do so. Could that really be true? FFFF, of course, would be the last to know. But the City Attorney made no mention of such doings while “reporting out,” from the Closed Session. If they’re true, what are we to make of the rumors?

Roosevelt Palmer Esq., Seeking Five Sisters…

The City has already sent a couple of laughable nastigrams in our direction, both of which were duly ignored, so litigation is plausible, but only if the City initiates it. This means that it is the City instigating, not reacting to likely litigation, and begs the question of why this issue would not be a matter for public discourse. And it also suggests that it is the city manager and his bumbling lawyers who will have advocated this harassment to cover up their own corruption they didn’t want exposed.

Well, I’m sure that covering up its clownish behavior is the last thing the esteemed council, upright city manager and brilliant city lawyers would ever do, so it seems pretty certain everything will be made clear. One way or another.

September 24, 2019Ahmad Zahra

Priorities, Priorities…

by Mr. Peabody29 Comments

Today the Voice of OC has outlined Tuesday’s Fullerton City Council vote to give the Culture of Corruption a vote of confidence. That’s right, Friends the police department with the worst corruption record in Orange County is getting a general pay raise. A big one in fact.

One of these people is a tax and spender. So is the other…

First we get to hear the obligatory boohoo tale from our imbecile mayor, Jesus Silva about how a cop with a growing family just can’t afford to live with the paltry crumbs doled out by the taxpayers of Fullerton.

Then we get to hear from our $230,000 a year City Manager, Ken Domer, as he focuses his keen, analytical mind on the issue:

“We’re about 18th in pay, but we’re also the sixth largest city in Orange County. So our pay is clearly not where it should be,” Domer said.

Notice how this dull blade conflates city population with deserved cop pay? This is just insulting. Is he that stupid or just have that low opinion of our intelligence? And notice the language: “clearly not where it should be” as if perhaps his moronic formula is actually validated somewhere by a scale he just made up. No, Domer, what’s not where it should be is the monster salary we pay you not to be stupid – or at least not to say stupid things that end up in the media.

If anybody cares, the vote was 4-1 with Bruce Whitaker voting no. The rest, of course, went along for the ride, even though the City’s finances are so precarious Silva is promising a new tax on the ballot next year. And no doubt the cop union that is more interested in keeping dues paying members than in the well-being of our city will be backing it big time.

And as our decrepit roads and infrastructure deteriorate ever farther, they will be used by the cops and the bureaucrats to leverage more revenue from us. Revenue that will go right back into employee compensation for the people who brought us the bad roads in the first place, and who have cultivated and protected the FPD Culture of Corruption.

September 19, 2019September 19, 2019Ahmad Zahra

The Taxman Cometh

by Mr. Peabody50 Comments

Folks here at FFFF have been prognosticating a new tax for several years. Even as councilcreatures Jennifer Fitzgerald and Jan Flory lied to the public by telling them the budget was balanced, we’ve been watching the strategic reserve fund dwindle away to almost nothing, leveling off last year only because so many positions were vacant.

The fact is that ever-escalating “public safety” pay and benefits, and a ruinous CalPERS pension debt have created what budget bean counters call a structural deficit; meaning, that the annual red-ink baths are a permanent condition that you can’t weasel your way out of selling marginal city-owned properties.

And so the harsh and inescapable reality has finally come home, like a wayward vulture, to roost. And harsh realities always trump the happy lies of politicians. It’s just a matter of time.

Silva 2018 Meddling

And that is why so many people have begun to hear stories that Councilcreature Jesus “Don’t Call Me Jeesis” Silva is sending up the trial balloon of a sales tax on the November 2020 general election ballot. The choice of that date is cynical since the General Election is will produce an electorate much more sympathetic to tax and spend policies of liberals like Silva, Ahmad Zahra, Flory and of course Fitzgerald. The seeds will be officially sown during the 2020-21 budget kabuki next spring. I am giving huge odds.

It’s going to happen. Zahra and Silva are not up for re-election so they must figure they’re safe; Flory is the lamest of lame ducks, a flightless bird, in fact, and thoughtful Friends have already suggested that she was put back on the council precisely for an automatic yes vote on a new tax. After all Flory’s first love has always been public emplyees.

And this leaves Fitzgerald, an erstwhile Republican free to oppose the vote putting the tax on the ballot in order to unburden herself of running for re-election with the tax monkey on her back – exactly where it belongs.

The pieces are now pretty much in place. The only question is how much the FPD Culture of Corruption and their buddies lounging in the “firehouse” are willing to invest in their shakedown.