Today the Register’s Frank Mickadeit penned an interesting column about Harry Sidhu’s desire to drop the county’s pending lawsuit that would eliminate a retroactive union pension spike. The same pension scheme that’s breaking our government.
The lawsuit, by the way, has already been filed and is pending review by the court. And yet Sidhu says “it’s a waste of money to go further”.
A waste of money? Imagine filing a lawsuit, doing discovery and depositions to the point where all that’s left is for a judge to decide if your case has merit to go to trial… and then you decide to drop the lawsuit?
It makes no sense, but that’s what Sidhu wants. And that’s what the unions want, too.
So far the Orange County public employee unions have spend over a million dollars in this year’s 4th District Supervisor’s election.
Doing what? Calling Shawn Nelson a pedophile supporter; claiming what a virtuous and honorable man Harry Sidhu is. A million bucks.
Lest anybody thinks these goons are going to give up their death grip on the taxpayers without a struggle had better think again. A million times.
Forget issues. They only care about their own selfish interests and Heaven forfend anybody suggests that a County paper shuffler shouldn’t be able to retire at 55 and enjoy most of his pay for rest of his life. Naturally these people are going to do everything they can to distract attention from the main issue of this campaign: unfunded liabilities on the taxpayers caused by public employee union greed and spineless politicians.
And so Hide and Seek Sidhu, carpetbagger and perjurer, the man who doesn’t even know what a defined benefit is suddenly a paragon of virtue; Nelson is an unspeakable monster.
There you have it. Fear and Loathing, and enough to go around.
Steven Greenhut just put out an impressive piece on the why the public employee unions are throwing everything they can behind Harry Sidhu.
While explaining Sidhu’s appeal to the union bosses, Greenhut writes:
Sidhu has no obvious principles that I can detect. He has agreed to drop OC’s lawsuit against the 2001 retroactive pension hike for deputy sheriffs, which has earned him the unending loyalty of the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs. He supports the high-speed rail boondoggle. He would not support the Prop. 90 eminent-domain reform. He talks like a conservative at times, but that’s typical in OC — talk like a conservative, then vote like a liberal on the really important stuff.
He closes with this excellent summation of consequences from an (unlikely) Sidhu victory:
If Sidhu wins in Orange County, then the unions will have won an enormous victory in arguably the most union-unfriendly area in the state. They will have made their point loud and clear: If you stand up to us, we will defeat you and will elect our own hand-picked candidate. Forget about pension reform and other union reform issues if they hold sway.
You can read the rest of “Unions use malleable Sidhu to flex power” on Greenhut’s CalWatchdog website.
The other day Red County blogger and First 5 fat-skimmer Matthew Cunningham eagerly scampered up to Fullerton to film a press event in front of the police department by a group called “Crime Victims United.” The group was making a laughable attempt to associate Shawn Nelson’s website with victims of crime.
With the help of my Friend and Red County blogger Chip Hanlon, FFFF did a little digging into the background of Crime Victims United to see what they were all about. When the curtain was pulled back, Chip discovered that several union lobbyists are also high-level staffers of this organization.
You see, Wayne Ordos is a political adviser who is listed as a staffer and attorney for Crime Victims United.
But Wayne is also the organizer for the OCEA political action committee.
Wayne’s claim to fame includes other union PAC’s such as “Minorities in Law Enforcement Independent Expenditure Committee” and “CAUSE Law Enforcement Independent Expenditure Committee.” Those PACs bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight for enormous union benefits to the detriment of taxpayers.
We don’t have time to go through the rest of the extensive list of staffers and board members at Crime Victims United, but I’ll bet that more union connections float to the top.
Here’s what matters in the end — the unions will stop at nothing to deceive voters into voting for a pro-union candidate like Harry Sidhu. But we’ll keep shining a light on the lies and deception until the unions are defeated and good leaders are elected.
Perhaps we can look forward to more combined efforts with Chip Hanlon’s Red County blog to fight perpetual government growth. With the awareness of the electorate, we can take the wind out of the unions’ sail and their candidate Harry “Carpetbagger” Sidhu for a Nelson victory.
It looks like the Sheriff’s union has been watching the same video clips that we have. You know… the ones where Sidhu stammers incoherently and fails to answer simple questions about union pensions.
That must be why they sent out this mailer with a photo of Harry sifting through a dictionary, as if to tell voters “Harry knows pensions. See, he looked it up!”
What a bumbling buffoon! It’s no wonder county unions can’t wait to sit at table with Harry Sidhu and negotiate their next pension spike.
One of the things we here at FFFF stand for is the idea of government accountability.
So naturally we were pretty sore when we saw the memo from County CEO Tom Mauk to the Board of Supervisors downplaying the disastrous purchase of the money pit at 433 W. Civic Center Dr. here.
Mauk finally produced the smoking gun—three years too late—an RDMD analysis estimating the needed cost to make the building functional. The amounts reached into the millions but for some reason this critical information, which was known to staff in June 2007, was withheld from the Board. Any guesses as to why?
View the memoEvidently Mr. Mauk is not interested in accountability. But we are, so please take note of the names of the people in the County Clerks office and the RDMD who were copied on this June 2007 memo. They are:
Phil Brigandi, Paul Lanning, Jean Pasco, Bob Wilson, Clark Shen, Mark Browning, Tony Ferrulli, Tony Mason, Michael Stein.
See any familiar names ? Jean Pasco in particular stands out since she was the clerk employee who acted as liaison with the Board in the matter of the building at 433 W. Civic.
This is not the story of an inadvertent error; no this was a deliberate attempt to mislead the Board of Supervisors and the evidence lies in the statements contained in the staff reports that deliberately mischaracterized the condition of the building and that were in fact untrue.
Hopefully the Board of Supervisors will be more interested in finding out what really happened and why crucial information that staff had been aware of for many months was intentionally withheld from them.
I was surprised when I heard that the Santa Ana Police Officer’s Association (SAPOA) pulled their endorsement for Hunt. Something in this story just didn’t sound right so I called Bill this morning to get his take:
Bill Hunt was hired by attorney Ricardo Nicol to help look at a criminal defense case of Victor Manuel Lua who is charged with a Santa Ana assault and robbery. Early on Nicol and Hunt found holes in the prosecutor’s case. The suspect was a known gang associate of the Santa Ana street gang known as F-Troop who has a prior conviction on his record. Right there most of us would say case closed, guilty as charged. However, the justice system doesn’t work that way.
In this case, Nicol and Hunt had to look a little deeper. The suspect had completed his four years of probation without any further legal troubles and appeared to be getting his life together. Ok, no violins please. At the time the crime occurred, the suspect was not in the vicinity. Hunt says the cell phone records don’t lie.
Further the original description was of two shaven head Latinos in blue jeans on a single bicycle. The suspect on trial was wearing basketball shorts and slippers (us older folks might remember them as thongs or shower shoes). A gun was used during the crime and no gun has been found since. Lua was in his truck just 400 feet from the crime scene when the officers decided he looked like he could be one of the described perpetrators because his head was shaven much like many other Latinos in Santa Ana and he had a criminal record. Also worth noting is that Lua was “caught” in what many describe as a rival gangs turf, implying that Lua isn’t actually in a gang nor was he associating with a gang at the time the assault and robbery occurred. Simply put, this is a case of mistaken identity which the evidence in the case reportedly proves.
R. Scott Moxley reported via OC Weekly that “But Hunt disputes the assertion, saying that he was hired to work on a robbery case and recently attended a preliminary hearing but did not testify. He also says that his client, Victor Manuel Lua, is innocent of the charges based on evidence he’s developed and that the gang allegation is tenuous at best: The 20-year-old Lua, he says, grew up in a Santa Ana neighborhood controlled by a criminal street gang and thus knows members but is not one himself.”
Hunt goes on to connect the dots for us. He thinks the DA began getting nervous when he started putting the pieces together and blowing up the prosecutions sure conviction. And we all know who the number two person at the DA’s Office is: Susan Schroeder, wife of Mike Schroeder.
Yes, the same Mike Schroeder that gave us convicted felon Mike Carona; the same Mike Schroeder who is pushing hard to give us Craig Hunter, an Anaheim PD deputy chief. It’s obvious at this point that it looks like the Santa Ana PD dropped the ball with their due diligence and investigation. And everyone knows when the PD looks bad the chief looks bad and so enters SAPD Chief Paul Walters, the possibly still disgruntled former sheriff’s candidate who appears to have finally given up on running and is now supporting Hutchens. You heard me correctly, he supports Sandra Hutchens.
Moxley reports this quote, “Our members are very upset with Mr. Hunt,” one officer told the Weekly on condition of anonymity. “He testified against us in court.” Why do you suppose the anonymity? Is he or she afraid of something? What could a police officer be scared of?
No doubt Santa Ana police officers are upset and embarrassed for being called out in court over what appears to be a rush to judgment by the officers and investigators.
The real irony rests in two final thoughts. First, Bill Hunt has caught a lot of flack from immigrant rights folks who say he is a racist and anti-Mexican. This case alone clearly debunks that myth. Second, SAPOA provides assistance to its members who are charged with breaches in departmental policy and crimes. Their defense attorneys rely on private investigators to dig for the truth and protect them from wrongful prosecution and punishment. It seems highly hypocritical that this association would use their misguided logic to fulfill the political agenda of a handful of miscreants who are only concerned with their consulting contracts and political livelihood. You would think that it would have occurred to someone in the SAPOA that Hunt, as a PI, might work on criminal cases. But I suppose the SAPOA board members were too wrapped up in other matters or just didn’t care to know.
An interesting side note to the SAPOA and Chief Walters is that the SAPOA supported Hunt and the Walters supports Hutchens. Why not endorse the same candidate? Assuming the SAPOA endorses another candidate, who will they choose? Will they go against their chief by supporting the card-carrying union member Craig Hunter or will they fall in lockstep with their boss? You would think the SAPOA would realize the error of their decision and help the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs (AOCDS) elect their candidate, Bill Hunt. I suppose the various OC law enforcement associations, though, are truly disconnected from one another and don’t see eye to eye except where wages and retirement are concerned.
By now we have all seen the campaign mailers produced by Hide-n-Seek Sidhu and his union pals asking what Shawn Nelson is hiding and that got me thinking about Harry Sidhu and what he might be hiding from the people of the 4th district.
So to be helpful I made a list:
1. Sidhu doesn’t live in this district and he doesn’t want you to know it.
2. Sidhu committed perjury twice when he claimed to have live at the Calabria apartments.
3. Sidhu is the public employee union candidate and his pals in the union are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to put their puppet in office.
4. Sidhu is barely intelligible and has no grasp of the basic functions of county government.
5. Sidhu is a perpetual office seeker who is constantly running for higher office.
6. Despite his claims to the contrary as an Anaheim city council member Sidhu has voted for dozens of fee and utility rate increases.
So there’s the Sidhu record. No wonder his handlers want to keep it a secret and I’ve only just scratched the surface.