Molly McClannahan used to call Alan Morton “The Conscience of Fullerton.”
At some point back in the 1990’s, the city retained an expensive consultant to design a sign to be painted on the Union Pacific bridge (my idea) over Harbor Blvd. Alan voluntarily designed the “Welcome to Downtown Fullerton” sign on his home computer, saving the city thousands of dollars.
Alan would constantly question city staff’s wisdom of using legal size paper for staff reports instead of letter size, which is what they use today. Staff’s answer was that they had no choice because the file cabinets were designed for legal size paper.
One of my all time favorite council meetings (I’ll have to YouTube it someday) was when Alan chucked an illegally placed Sa For Council sign during the public comments and the sign almost hit Sa en la cabesa. You go Alan!
I believe it was the great recall that really got Alan energized as an activist. From there, it was off to the races for Alan. He continuously ragged on the council to televise council meetings, and now they are. He would speak on almost every important item on the council’s agenda. His activism helped save Fullerton taxpayers millions of dollars.
Recently, at the ripe age of 86, Alan was having breakfast with three of his buddies. While chatting with one of the servers, Alan took a deep breath and that was it for our feisty old Friend. Alan gave of himself and asked for nothing in return. People like Alan Morton are Fullerton’s Future.
The Friends won a minor victory in the courtroom today as our motion to (s)quash a subpoena was granted by an Orange County Superior Court judge. The subpoena would have compelled us to reveal identifying information of a blog commenter to an Anaheim city employee, who is suing an anonymous John Doe for defamation.
Quash. Such a cool word.
A series of arguments filed just before the hearing centered on the inherent nature of Friends for Fullerton’s Future itself. Is it a business, an unincorporated association, a global shadow conspiracy, or just an Internet domain? The judge didn’t want to go there. And really, who can blame him?
So we won on a technicality and the plaintiff vowed to serve the subpoena again. Outside the courtroom we implored her to focus on the nasty stuff left on other websites and drop the case against FFFF’s comparatively mild missive, leaving it to whither away into Internet nothingness where is just may well belong.
Will she listen? Doubtful. She seems as hardheaded as we are.
Just when I thought it would be a good idea for me to hang it up from Fullerton politics, this sign showed up in and around Fullerton.
Good grief! Someone really took the time to make and plant these comical things. And that got me to re-thinking my role in Fullerton. Geez, thinks I, if these people believe I’m so powerful that they are willing to give me this sort of free publicity, maybe I should leverage that celebrity in the future.
And so I have decided that I must and will stay involved. There’s too much at stake and my gang and I are having too much fun. I guess it’s a calling!
Oh, and just a reminder: Chris Thompson was the #1 top vote getter in all Fullerton races including city council.
Although it’s a bit late, I want to add my voice to the chorus congratulating Chris Thompson and Bruce Whitaker for their impressive elections to the Fullerton School District Board and the Fullerton City Council, respectively.
Chris Thompson out-polled every other candidate in Fullerton by a mile, despite his opponents’ support from the teachers union.
The Fullerton School District Board of Trustees has been a sinkhole for years, poulated by liberals and Ed Royce RINOs. And of course the Fullerton City Council…well the less said about that the better, but Whitaker will be running that show in no time.
I expect good things and real, effective change from both of them. I know I won’t be disappointed.
An apt symbol of the completely futile and humiliating 4th District supervisorial campaign of Hide and Seek Harry Sidhu, perjurer, carpetbagger, and assclown.
Sidhu started out 2010 by lying on two voter registration forms about his completely phony “residency” at the Calabria, a crappy stucco box owned by a buddy on Lincoln Avenue, in West Anaheim. We blew the whistle on that fraud.
We never even saw him...
Later we were treated to the spectacle of Hairball pretending to move into a second 4th District crib – in a marginal neighborhood across the street from Garden Grove.
Sidhu then decided that his new abode virtually required him to run for the GOP Central Committee for the 69th Assembly District – yet another district in which he didn’t live. He stashed a campaign worker into fake residence #2 to make it look legit.
The Boss filed a complaint with OC’s top cop. The DA turned a blind eye, claiming that for all he knew Sidhu meant to live there until he changed his mind, a lie made evident by Sidhu’s registration BEFORE HE EVER MOVED SO MUCH AS A FUTON INTO THE PLACE.
There was plenty of Sidhu methane to go around.
Oh how the ‘pugs tried to confuse the issue! Matthew J. Cunningham claimed the purported length of tenure was too short to matter and immediately changed the subject.
Will work for flame-broiled chicken...
Meanwhile, Sidhu assembled a veritable rogues gallery of supporters who thought they could get something out of a Sidhu victory. Other ‘pug hangers on were hired by Sidhu’s squad to attack Nelson. We had a lot of fun with one in particular, some cretin from Santa Ana named Thomas Gordon.
And Sidhu was a long way from being finished. Act II was on the way.
Let me entertain you...
Sidhu’s numerous and manifest assclowneries culminated in a performance at the GOP nominating meeting that was so jaw-droppingly pathetic that some folks were actually looking around for a humane dose of sodium pentobarbital.
The unions poured over a million bucks of their members’ dues to get Sidhu in office, but the effort was a tough sell. No matter how hard somebody tries to sell you a vehicle, sometimes you figure it’s better just to get out and walk.
The 2010 Sidhu. Take it for a spin?
The June Primary rolled around and the inevitable occurred: Fullerton’s Shawn Nelson just about cleared the field. The only thing left standing was a pathetic, grinning buffoon who was too stupid to realize he had drawn the ultimate booby prize: a runoff election in November against Nelson. And the folks who actually lived in the 69th Assembly District humiliated Sidhu by asskicking the assclown into last place in the Central Committee election.
You bet how much on that horse!?
Sidhu was mercifully quiet for a couple of months. Then his new campaign manager, Chris Jones, a tool of the worst OC repuglicans tried to salvage Curt Pringle’s and John Lewises rotten investment.
Well two jobs were lost - Sidhu's and his campaign manager's!
It didn’t work. How could it? Another drubbing. Chris Jones said it was because they just didn’t have enough money. Right. A bozo who keeps peacocks and dinosaurs on his “elegant estate” couldn’t cough up the dough. Didn’t Sidhu say that money was no object back in June? No, the real problem was the product. Unsaleable at any price.
The final numbers aren’t in, but the results are crystal clear: Shawn Nelson 63%, Hairbag Sidhu 37%. A twenty-six point break. And a wonderful public service was rendered by Nelson that is so valuable we can’t put a price on it – sending Sidhu to the electoral showers.
Nope. No assclowns in our town.
Will Sidhu be back? A pathetic egomaniac like this is hard to get rid of. But one thing we can guarantee: he will never bother the Fourth District again.
The GOP Initiatives Endorsement Committee met this past Saturday to debate whether it should recommend to the State GOP to endorse Proposition 22.
Watch and see what happened during the questions and answer period. The proponents for Yes on 22 focused their argument on misdirected “local control,” and the fear that if it doesn’t pass Arnold Schwarzenegger will raid the cities’ Redevelopment funds and give them away to the schools. Hooray! The only problem is that by the time this is voted on Arnold will about as lame a duck as Daffy, and probably already reading the script for Terminator 5.
Did the most vocal Yes on 22 proponent, Jon Fleischman (hot dog alert @ 3:18), really think the voting members in the room would be dumb enough to buy that “Arnold will cook up a bad budget” line? Well, they did – the vote was 9 Ayes and 8 Noes. However, good news came on Sunday when the recommendation of the Initiatives Committee was tossed out by the GOP party who gave a thumbs down to the Prop 22 proponents.
Check out Chuck Devore, one of the few non-repuglicans in office. He gets it.
And yes, I really do have to wonder if Fleischman was on the Yes on 22 payroll. The Howard Jarvis group was no doubt bought off by the purchase of a slate mailer.
Measure M will be on the ballot in November, but the arguments presented in the official voter materials will be a bit one-sided.
Nobody submitted an argument against the measure to enact term limits against Fullerton city council members.
Was anti-term limit incumbent Dinosaur Don Bankhead asleep at the switch, or was he actaully smart enough to disassociate him self with that position during an election campaign? Who knows?
I really like spinkles on my frogurt...
Sharon Quirk-Silva authored the opinion in support of the measure, which summarizes them as:
Term limits increase the number of competitive elections
Term limits bring in more opportunities to serve in public office
Term limits disfavor seniority
Term limits promote fresh ideas
Of course, she missed the most important purpose of term limits: they will end the seemingly endless political careers of staff yes-men: folks like Don Bankhead and Dick Jones, who have tormented taxpayers for decades by voting for almost every single boondoggle and corporate welfare project put in front of them.
Whadya know. A promise was kept...
And for that we thank SQS for sticking by the promise she made way back in January of 2009.
Previously we noted the Fullerton Observer’s legal maneuvering in an attempt to add itself to the city payroll. Last week we found out that Sharon Kennedy’s court filing had been met with objections by both the Orange County Register and the City of Fullerton.
The City’s objection is based on the same points we brought up a few weeks ago – namely, the Observer is not printed within the city, it is not printed weekly and it doesn’t have a bona fide list of paying subscribers as required by law. That’s three strikes for the Observer.
The city calls into question Sharon Kennedy’s own filing, where we learn that the Observer boasts a whopping 598 paid subscribers and a monthly online distribution that rivals FFFF’s daily hits.
Next we have an objection filed by OC Register attorneys, which finds fault with the notice that Kennedy filed for her own hearing. The Register sums up the problem by saying “It is ironic that the Petitioner [Fullerton Observer] is seeking to publish important legal notices, yet cannot even publish its own Notice correctly.”
Kennedy pushed out her hearing to the end of July. I suspect she will drop it all together rather than suffer further embarrassment.
Bottom line: Kennedy’s dying cause here is to get the Fullerton Observer onto the city payroll. We’ve already demonstrated the paper’s inability to criticize city staff, engage in any kind of investigative journalism within city hall or participate objective reporting all while claiming that it is a legitimate newspaper. It’s hard to imagine any of these conditions improving should Kennedy’s paper wind up on the taxpayer’s dole.
That’s a saying my grandfather had to suggest the futility of trying to do a job with the wrong tool. And in this case the tool in question is Mr. Hide and Seek Sidhu, the bogus 4th District candidate with the fake addresses, the gibberish, the all ’round assclownery.
All new episodes coming in the fall!
By now you may have heard that Sidhu got his clown’s ass handed to him last night By Fullerton’s Shawn Nelson in the 4th District Supervisor’s election. It was a solid 12% margin for Nelson – after the unions had spent $1.5 million to smear him and promote the lame Sidhu.
But the Sidhu product was, and is so worthless that it can’t be peddled at any price. The more money pumped into it, the worse it looked. As we predicted all along, Sidhu’s campaign managers have soaked poor Harry and will continue to do so all long as he keeps writing checks that don’t bounce. But come September union bosses Wayne Quint and Nick “Bullhorn” Berardino will have to ask themselves whether they want to waste any more of their dough trying to sell a car that has no wheels and no engine.
Well, it’s true they’re not the brightest bulbs on the tree, but as the Good Book says, the writing is on the wall. And then Harry will have to go it alone; and all the money squandered will be his.
Oh, and we’ll be checking up to see if he’s actually living at Lucky Way.
We agree with this statement from the Register: “The two most important issues, we believe, are public employee union pension reform and continuing a lawsuit that challenges a retroactive pension spike for sheriff’s deputies. If the lawsuit prevails, it will have implications in California and nationwide. Mr. Nelson is the only candidate to pledge to pursue both issues.”
