Not surprising to see a downtown liquor purveyor supporting one of their own. Flory helped turn downtown Fullerton into an open air bar.
Here is Sharon Quirk heaping praises on her supporters in the FPOA. She is proud of her police force. Why? She doesn’t really say.
Is it the fact that they are one of the most expensive police forces, per capita in Orange County?
Is it the hard work of “Alby Al” Albert Rincon, the serial molester of women detainees?
Is it the hard work of Kenton Hampton who beat up and arrested and had prosecuted an innocent man?
Is it the hard work of Miguel “Sonny Black” Saliceo who through malice or laziness ID’d the wrong man who spen 5 months in jail?
Is it the hard work of Andrew Goodrich who kept spinning half-truths and outright lies during his rancid tenure as PIO?
Is it the hard work of the cops who tried to pin a completely bogus hit and run rap on George Bushala?
Is it the hard work of the on-duty cops who, on 2010 started dumping obscenity laced threats on the FFFF blog?
Is it the hard work of Todd Major who ripped off Explorers to feed hi pill habit?
Is it the hard work of Kelly Mejia who tried to steal an Ipad by hiding under her bag of chicken at a Miami TSA checkpoint?
Is it the hard work of April Baughman who ripped off the evidence room for years without detection?
Is it the hard work of Manuel Ramos, the grossly obese killer of Kelly Thomas?
Is it the hard work of Joe Wolfe, the cop who initiated the assault on Kelly Thomas with his baton?
Is it the hard work of Jay Cicinelli who tased KT numerous times and then beat his face to jelly.
Is it the hard work of Hampton, Blatney and Craig who appeared on the scene long enough to add their weight to the chest compression that killed Kelly?
Is it the hard work of the watch commander, Tom “Tango” Basham who watched the KT killing unfold?
Is it the hard work of Danny Hughes, the Fullerton Six boss who told them they had done a good job and put them back on the street?
Well, that’s enough slime for today.
So what would you do to get the Fullerton cop union endorsement?
It seems that Jan Flory is bringing a little bit of charming Chicago politics to Fullerton, i.e. raiding cemeteries for supporters. Now you know why we have a category called “Deadheads.”
Here is Flory’s 2012 voter guide:
Opps. Bob Root is dead. So is Gwen Ferguson; likewise Majorie Pogue!
Did you spot any others?
Also of high amusement value are the names of me and my ex-wife! How I got on the list is anybody’s guess since I have never given Flory authorization to use my name for anything.
I believe this is just a matter of utter incompetence, but it isn’t surprising. When Flory says she is ten years older and 10 years better she is half right.
An alert Friend snapped this pic at the recent candidates’ night out.
It would seem that poor Don Bankhead is becoming less and less capable of staying awake during public events.
Somebody captured this campaign sign recently. It suggests one of three things.
1) Don Bankhead is a liar who wants people to think he is an incumbent; or,
2) Bankhead belongs in a memory care unit since he can’t remember that he was recalled four months ago and is no longer on the City Council; or,
3) he is too cheap to buy new campaign signs and is using old ones.
Well, which is it?
It sure as hell isn’t you. Or any other taxpayer or citizen. Nope. Here she is holding forth on who really matters to her. Her idea of ‘reform” is to place the interests of the City’s workers ahead of yours.
In an era of bloated salaries and, crippling pension burdens on the taxpayer and their great-great grandkids Jan Flory cares first and foremost about the plight of unionized government workers!
Did we put words in this dinosaur’s mouth? Nope. She did it all by herself.
As a woman I have to say I found Jan Flory’s observation about Travis Kiger being intimidated by strong, older women pretty comical. The inference of course is that Jan Flory is a strong, older woman; and that as a corollary, Travis is a weak, younger man, possibly, Flory speculated, because his mommy didn’t nurse him long enough.
And now I ask you to dispel the image of Jan Flory nursing anything (warm blooded) herself to gain mommy experience, as I pursue my essay.
The implication that Travis Kiger is weak, and is in any way fearful of Jan Flory, I leave until the end to address. First I will start with Mrs. Flory’s self-description.
I note that Mrs. Flory bolts out of the starting gate with the implication that she is the victim of ageism and sexism. I am no longer offended by limousine liberals whipping out victimhood status, although generally they apply it to which ever class or race they happen to be pandering to.
Jan Flory isn’t “older.” She is old. She is probably in her seventies. That’s a fact and it’s germane, given the total lack of leadership and intellectual perspicacity, delivered by her “esteemed” elderly friends Bankhead, Jones and McKinley who were also in their eighth decade.
Age is a reality. You can try to hide it with lots of cosmetic surgery, but you can’t hide an ossified mindset locked in forty-year time lag. It reveals itself in rigid thought and its addiction to empty clichés, and meaningless abstractions.
Flory is strong, she says. Must we take her word for it? As a structural engineer I know that some materials such as unreinforced concrete or cast iron appear very strong; and so they are – in compression. Yet they lack strength in tension. They are not flexible and their very rigidity makes them comparatively brittle. And brittle is a term I would apply to the speech and demeanor of Jan Flory at the City Council microphone. Perhaps there is an underlying hysteria waiting to erupt. If it ever does, the crack-up will not be pretty, either.
“Strong” people of neither gender advertise their strength. The fact that Mrs. Flory finds it necessary to do so is a pretty clear indication of an underlying insecurity and inherent weakness.
It seems to have escaped Mrs. Flory’s notice that people may dislike her not because she is a strong, older woman, but because she seems to be an inflexible, humorless, mean, self-righteous scold – a veritable literary stereotype, in fact.
And then there is the Flory Record to consider, amply described on the pages of FFFF. Her previous years on the Fullerton City Council are informed by failure. Flory voted to approve an illegal tax on our water for six years; which also means she never balanced a legitimate budget. She gave away City property and streets worth millions to her developer friends. She voted to retroactively spike the pensions of “public safety” employees, burying the taxpayers and citizens under a multi-hundred million dollar mountain of unfunded pension liability.
And then there is the Flory Inaction: totally MIA about the murder of the mentally ill homeless man at the hands of Fullerton cops. Is that the behavior of a “strong, older woman” or the pitiful cowardice of an entropic, conscienceless fossil? What does Jan Flory think about the crime wave perpetrated by members of the Fullerton Police Department, including the sexual assaults by Albert Rincon that even elicited disgust from a federal judge? Well we do know that she actually gave her pal ex-Chief Pat McKinley an award of some kind after all the bad FPD news and after a multi-hundred thousand dollar settlement was reached in the Rincon matter.
As with many of Fullerton’s “strong, older women (and men)” it has been more important for Flory to back the sclerotic Fullerton establishment to the hilt, rathert than uncover the stinky morass in the FPD. Flory actually wants to hire more cops without reforming the department. Flory seems to think somebody in Fullerton really wants this retrograde attitude. Of course the voters will decide, but I doubt anybody wants to backtrack to the days of complete unaccountability in City Hall that marked the Flory years.
Now as far as Travis Kiger is concerned I will say this. He is one of the most courageous people I know. He has endured the threats and vulgar vituperation of the FPOA trolls on this site with equanimity. They have attacked him and his family, posting his home address long before he was a public figure. He has never backed down. That’s because he believes in principles, one of which is taking responsibility for his decisions. That’s pretty refreshing. And that’s strength.
Travis is thirty-three years old. I sincerely doubt if Jan Flory has embraced a new idea in over forty.
I have always been fascinated by the urge for government employees and their die-hard supporters to cling to the notion of collective bargaining as some sort of birthright. The ability for public employees to unionize is actually not even that old, but is a comparatively recent and curious chapter in the history of organized labor.
Classical Marxist doctrine holds that in the capitalist phase of history there are two elements contributing to economic activity. There are capital and labor; the first representing the bourgeois investment class (and their managerial overseers); the second is the workforce that sells its labor to the former. Naturally, the cost of labor , the investment of the capitalists, and the return the latter is willing to accept determine the supply side cost of goods.
The Marxists believed that capital habitually exploited an oversupply of labor through poor working conditions and long hours of employment. There was certainly evidence to support this contention and the capitalists did their best to outlaw labor “combination” through their control of legislatures.
(For the sake of argument I will happily stipulate the socialist fact in evidence.)
Of course labor did combine.
But the idea of government workers unionizing did not enter the into the equation. Why? For several reasons, one of which is succinctly stated by the most effective liberal in American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt realized that people who work for the government cannot hold the same employer/employee relationship since their employer is the people as a sovereign whole. Clearly the idea of collective bargaining, and particularly militant union tactics used against the citizenry was abhorrent to old FDR himself.
Another related problem is that government employees do not fit into the labor-capital equation, since the “capitalist” investor in their operation is none other than the taxpayers and citizens – and not a natural adversary in an economic system. And public employees were granted civil service protection and security to make up for comparatively modest wages.
And then there is the problem of the complete public sector labor monopoly. Producers of goods compete with each other in marketplaces that, among other things, sets a value on product that helps determine the cost of labor. No such balance exists in the public sector where nothing is for sale and there is no competition in the labor market at all.
The ability to unionize and the concomitant ability to engage in collective political action has enabled the public sector labor monopoly to elect its favored candidates at all levels, and subsequently to exact greater and greater salaries and benefits for themselves; and always using the argument that all they seek is parity with the private sector. Yet never have they jettisoned the civil service protections that makes in almost impossible to fire an incompetent public worker.
Most comical are the “management” unions that represent the upper tier employees who oversee the lower, and whose own interests in running the “company” are inexplicably linked with the benefits conferred upon the latter!
And so dear Friends, next time you see a “retired” 50 year old cop who was granted almost 100% of his salary as a pension, and who was given two decades of retroactive benefits, ask him whom he has to thank. I guarantee it won’t be you, or even the other public employees who negotiated his benefits on your behalf; nor even the lackeys on the city council like Don Bankhead, Dick Jones, and Jan Flory whom his union got elected. Nuh, uh. He will thank an anonymous “system” that has created this mess and that has virtually bankrupt California and threatens almost every municipality in the state.
Well, we know who to thank.
An alert FFFF reader just noticed some comments placed on Jan Flory’s Facebook page that should be of interest to all Fullertonians who are interested in Flory and her supporters.
Here’s a semi-literate comment, aimed at the Boss:
Sonny Black because there they are all puppets and thats how BUSHALA told them to vote!!!!
4 hours ago via mobile · 2
And another the next day:
Sonny Black KIGER AKA BUSHALA SHOULD JUST APPOINT HIS WIFE OR COUSIN OR BROTHER!!!! BUT IM SURE THEY WOULDNT WANT TO APPEAR TRANSPARENT!!!! hahahhaha
“Sonny Black.” Hmm. Now where have I head that moniker? Oh, right, it’s the Facebook handle of Miguel “Sonny” Siliceo, made notorious on these pages as the cop who pinned a rap on Emanuel Martinez that landed him in the county lock-up for five months. The only trouble was that the eye-witness had actually ID’d a completely different person. Whether Mr. Siliceo was just stupid and lazy, or corrupt is a matter for speculation; but an innocent guy spent five months in jail for no legal reason thanks to Sonny. Oh, well.
Subsequently Sonny removed tell-tale traces of his identity, but oops! Too late.
For extra fun here is a picture of “Sonny Black,” enjoying some very close personal time with his Facebook pal, “Alby Al” Albert Rincon at a downtown bar.