According to our Friend Scott Moxley over at the OC Weekly, the mother of Kelly Thomas, Cathy Thomas has sued our illustrious District Attorney, Tony Rackauckas. It seems she wants to gain access to materials collected by the DA about the murder of her son by officers of the Fullerton Police Department.
Naturally, the DA said no, forcing Ms. Thomas to sue.
It sure would be nice for someone outside of law enforcement to takle a look at just how the DA came up with the dubious theory that only two cops were implicated in criminal activity; that Officer Joe Wolfe had no idea what was going on just 15 feet from where he was standing; or why he exculpated Hampton and Blatney who not only made made no effort to stop Cicinelli’s tasering and beatdown on Kelly, but seemed to have piled on; his take on the role of Sergeant Craig who seems to have coordinated mop-up operations while the dying man was waiting for hospital transportation; his reasoning behind not charging superiors in a blatant criminal conspiracy to cover up the misdeeds of the McKinley Six.
Amid Fullerton’s water rate debacle the City’s representative on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California announced Tuesday that he is stepping down. After representing the City of Fullerton for 24 years on the MWD Board of Directors, Jim Blake says he is done.
Jim Blake
It is rumored that Fullerton’s retired city manager Chris Meyer is looking to be appointed as Blake’s replacement but that will require a majority vote by the Fullerton City Council. Since City Council Members Bankhead and Jones appointed Meyer as City Manager in 2002, there is little doubt that they wouldn’t give him the MWD nod as well.
However, with Fullerton’s water rates under scrutiny and an illegal tax being batted about City Hall for justification, you have to wonder how much of the water mess can be attributed to Meyer- not to mention the rest of the City’s countless woes.
An appointment of Meyer to the MWD Board might bring further outcry to City Hall, something the new Mayor might wish to avoid. Since August the Council members have been cussed at, cursed at, sworn up and down, and yelled at. They are now being held accountable for their general lack of leadership by a campaign to recall three members, Mayor Pro Tem Pat McKinley, and members Don Bankhead and F. Dick Jones.
Many believe that the appointment should be filled by a current council member so that they can be held responsible by Fullerton voters for their actions on the Board. Currently, Blake is answerable only to the Fullerton City Council.
If the appointment is to be held by a non-council member, then the process should be open to ALL candidates equally like any other council appointment to a commission or committee.
Whoever is appointed will be tasked with a massive budgetary shortfall that rivals Sacramento’s. The appointee will be asked for double-digit rate hikes and even more spending. They need to know the water industry and even more about public policy and long-term investment solutions. They need to know Fullerton and not just through the myopic eyes of service clubs.
Fullerton deserves an accountable and credible representative on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
Due to reasonable requests from Friends for additional images, the Nominating Committee reopened the selection process and has generously included additional images for consideration.
– JFD
In one of our most popular categories our Nominating Committee considered images from 2011 that aggravated our collective angst, that seared our frayed synapses, and that moved us to laughter, rage, tears, blood and sweat. Such mind-numbing work can only be assuaged by mind-numbing medication, and so the Committee found itself self-medicating frequently and without any of the controls imposed by people who control controlled substances. Controcontrolcontrolcontrolcontr…okay where was I?
Oh, yeah. Best Image Fringie® 2011. Here are your nominees:
Large and in charge.
1. Smirking police spokesorifice Andrew Goodrich. This image of utterly smug self-satisfaction, bloated self-worth, utter disdain for the civilians that pay his engorged salary and pension, and utter disdain for the truth came to symbolize a dysfunctional police department. Image and behavior in perfect synchronization. This picture is going to be hard to beat.
Avast ye scarvy dogs. Wanta swap wives?
2. Ahoy there, matey. Back in late summer former Fullerton police sergeant Arthur Wiechmann deigned to visit our humble blog to defend the killers Ramos and Cicinelli. He left a slime trail that was quickly traced back to his own website. And what we found there was pretty creepy. In case you were wondering, yes, Swinging Loverboy is a proud member of Fullerton’s $100,000 club.
3. Until their mug shots graced world-wide news media there was no face to the cop side of the brutal beating death of Kelly Thomas. When Ramos and Cicinelli became the Faces of Fullerton to the world, the true extent of Pat McKinley’s disastrous stretch as Chief of Police became evident to all except the most delusional. If you can discern an iota of humanity in these photos, God bless you.
Ah herebah duhclare this ship launched gahdammit.
4. Back in September Fullerton opened it’s new library remodel and conference room. While only a few hundred feet away a “lynch-type mob” protested the murder-by-cop of an innocent man, a crazed Doc Heehaw and His Business as Usual Co. got tough with an over-sized scissors. Which just goes to show that when the going gets tough, the tough get to cutting ribbons.
7. The She Bear, Pat McMcKinley lumbered through our collective consciousness in 2011, leaving copious amounts of She Bear scat in his wake. This picture resonated with the Nominating Committee as one of the great reflections of hypocrisy anybody could recall. See, if you’re one of Pat’s “Special Ladies,” you are not credible and your claims to have been sexually assaulted by one of McKinley’s cops is unbelievable.
Living high on the hog...
8. This cheerful image of former City Manager Chris Meyer surfaced in connection with the bloatation of Fullerton’s $100,000 pension club. Meyer cashes a $14,300 pension check each and every month so he doesn’t have to worry where his next meal is coming from. As City Manager the Meyer oversaw a Fullerton Police Department that sank into its current Culture of Corruption.
Just doin' his job. Then off to Starbucks for a breakfast croissant.
9. Thanks to Friend JT for reminding us of this fun still harvested from an entertaining video about police union boss Barry Coffman handing out citations for “excessive horn honking” a new Vehicle Code violation cooked up by the Fullerton Police Department to harass protesters. For sheer overfed haplessness there’s just no getting around this image. That the haplessness is accompanied by a badge, a gun, arrogance, and self-entitlement should give all freedom-loving people cause to reflect.
When the sun rose on January 1, 2011, who could have foreseen the strange and disturbing circumstance that would produce a veritable cavalcade of scary ghosts from Fullerton’s olden days.
Sweet Baby Jebus!
And who knew that so many vaporous remnants of Fullerton’s horse and buggy days would be putting in appearances to remind us of the bad old days before talking pictures and x-rays.
Damn Recall!
Rebels Attack Fort Sumpter
1. First we heard the name A.B. “Buck” Catlin, supporter of the anti-recall crew, and inveterate staff stooge/big government RINO when he was on the City Council in the 1880s. Catlin was a proud supporter of every Redevelopment boondoggle in Fullerton’s history; and some that were so hare-brained even his pals wouldn’t support them. How frightful! Good Old Buck was recalled alongside Don Bankhead and Molly McClanahan for promoting a totally unnecessary utility tax. Wow, things don’t change much around here, do they? Shriek!
2. Another scary ghost reappeared to support the Three Dithering Dinosaurs: the hideous spectral phenomenon known as Linda LeQuire. Linda’s image does not appear in mirrors or photographs so you’ll just have to take our word for it. She also popped up to haunt Fullerton two years ago, so I guess we’re just going to have to get used to these biennial visitations! Brrrr!
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a noxious vapor.
3. Then there was the horrifying and serial re-appearances of my former, broomstick wielding mistress, Jan Flory. Like her former colleagues she too glady voted to approve an illegal 10% tax on your water bills. Even her offspring are creepy. That’s enough to make you cough up your kibble! EEK!
4. Some purists may quibble that Molly McClanahan can’t possibly be a eerie apparition since she is actually an elected member of the North Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees. But if that isn’t an insubstantial graveyard I don’t know what is. Like Catlin, and Bankhead, McClanahan was recalled in 1994 for backing that shameful utility tax; her eerie manifestation in defense of the indefensible Three Sluggish Sloths says all that need be said about this transparent emanation.
5. And finally, in 2011 we were treated to a horrifying visitation from the Great Beyond in the vacuous form of former city councilwoman Pam Keller. Don’t be fooled by any apparent substance. There’s no there, there.
First she showed up to scream union slogans into a radio show mike; later she appeared at a city council meeting in some sort of cryogenic suit. If that don’t send you shrieking into the night then I don’t know from Milk Bones. Boo!
Feel free to run screaming into the night, yourself.
FFFF had a chance to sit down with councilmember Bruce Whitaker to let him explain how the police department and city management deliberately withheld critical information and misled elected decision makers in the immediate aftermath of the Kelly Thomas death.
As you listen, be sure to reflect on the atmosphere of fear and distrust that permeated Fullerton in the weeks immediately following the murder; remember that we were told to remain calm and patient, and that we were to trust our leaders who supposedly had access to all the information that we did not.
Later we found out that our leaders knew nothing, and the city let accused killers roam free with badges and guns while we were kept in the dark.
Normally a non-election year would mean that the pickings for political stoogery would be pretty slim. But 2011 is not a normal non-election year, and the advent of a vigorous Recall campaign has produced that rarest of phenomena: the Off-year Stooge. And so we present the Fringie® nominees in the next category: Creepiest Political Stooge 2011.
The Nominating Committee labored long and hard to come up with the nominees, and we owe them a sincere debt of gratitude. For it could not have been easy pondering the visages and miscreance of these small-town hacks and poltroons. And that may explain the 11 empty bottles of akavit laying around the Editorial Boardroom floor the next morning.
It prefers mealworms.
1. Right out of the chute the Anti-recall forces deployed the limited talents of the unctuous Jim Alexander to attack the character of the Recall leader. Alexander is a reptilian homunculus with a reputation as a small-time bag man for developers who want to grease the City Council.
Celebrate good times: Sizzler Early Bird Special, then lights out at 7:30 PM.
2. Then the same group of uberklowns engaged a four-foot tall gnome-fossil named Bill Gillespie to annoy the FPPC with a hollow complaint drummed up by Dick Ackerman, ironnically the subject of a legitimate FPPC complaint himself for illegal lobbying!
Yo, T! We want our sidewalk back!
3. But they weren’t done. Next they employed the oleaginous services of Anthony “Big Tony” Florentine to lodge yet another empty complaint with the FPPC. You remember this paragon of virtue, right? He’s the guy who built an addition to his bar on a public sidewalk and got the City Council – including Dick Jones and Don Bankhead – to go along with the hijacking.
Otiose and odious. A bad combination.
4. And finally we come to Larry Bennett, the moral bellwether of the anti-recall campaign; a man who earnestly pretends to care about such things as probity and honesty, and yet who lends his name to the worst prevarications cooked up by the amphibio-pus sac, Dave Ellis, and who oversees a website that is nothing more than a pathetic collection of outright lies only made amusing by the unintentional comedic value of the amateur site.
Bennett has distinguished himself by challenging Fullerton water rate payers to find evidence of the hidden illegal 10% tax on their water bills. Of course they can’t find it. It’s hidden, jackass. It’s not on the water bill. And that’s why it’s illegal.
These are your nominees. There will be no winners, only losers. Until we have a Recall, that is.
Sweet, iridescent, radioactive Jebus, how can one choose from such a wealth of material? 2011 may never be surpassed for dumb stuff uttered by our representatives. The Nominating Committe ruminated long and hard to come up with the nominees. And by ruminating long and hard I mean they did major bong rips into the wee hours. And speaking of wee, here are your nominees.
2. And then there was this pearl from F. Dick, likening the peaceful Kelly Thomas killing protesters to “a lynch-type mob.” Ouch.
Would the Reign of Error never come to an end?
3. The Nominating Committee insisted that King Don Bankhead the First be recognized for the idiotic statement that Fullerton would “biterally” be a ghost town without Redevelopment, and then lying about having said it! Oops! Caught on video!
Gimme a sec'.The longer I think the dumber it will be...
4. Not to be out done by his superannuated colleagues, the comparatively spry Pat McPension uttered perhaps the stupidest and most odious comment of all, when, after noting he had gotten “bloused” eyes himself, claiming that Kelly’s facial injuries were not life threatening.
5. Then, of course, there was the breathtakingly stupid utterance at the Soroptomist She Bear Pow-wow that left everyone speechless, essentially insinuating that perv-cop Albert Rincon’s victims deserved what they got, and in any case sexual battery by a cop “ain’t a dangerous thing.” Well, actually, hardly anyone was speechless after that.
Those socks aren't going to knit themselves!
6. And finally, to round out our nominees, the committee just couldn’t overlook the predictably irrelevant observation from councilwoman Sharon Quirk-Silva that homeless people really need socks. Yes, Sharon, they probably do, and many other things, besides. But they would also appreciate not being beaten to death for no reason by your police force, if it’s not too much trouble.
Well Friends, them’s yer nominees in this all-important Fringie® category. Feel free to opine in the comments thread, as always!
Thanks to the knuckleheads for advertising the Recall! Saturday was a record breaking day for signature gathering. I say it’s time for another fundraiser!
And thanks to the help of one of our intrepid Friends, the clip below shows you some highlights from the last fundraiser. Watch the big money developers silently scuttle by; listen to the slow-motion simpleminded mental unwinding by Jan Flory; and hear from two of the dinosaurs, themselves. F. “Dick” Jones gets deeply Scriptural but really shallow when it comes to facts. Don Bankhead is as confused and/or untruthful as ever – the illegal 10% water tax is still being collected. Enjoy.
Say what you like about Don Bankhead, but you have admit the old coot is a treasure trove of Recall campaign material. Here is King Bankhead objecting to having his image and words captured for posterity by Sherri, a Recall campaign stalwart. I guess if I were as dim as the King, I wouldn’t want anybody recording what I said, either.
Two great lines.
First: “I’m a private person when I’m not working or on duty.” On duty?! He still thinks he’s a cop, which explains where his first misplaced loyalties are. Of course his “duty” is to represent all of Fullerton, even the victims of criminal behavior by the police, not just the public safety unions who support his political campaigns.
Then: I still have public…private rights to live by.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? Bankhead’s sudden shyness never stopped this oaf from approving City spy cameras set up to take our pictures without asking our consent. More nonsense from Mr. Scrambled Eggs for Brains.
And finally, why is Bankhead parked in a handicapped spot? We know all about his fake “disability” scam, but really, his sense of entitlement, even fraudulently come by, is remarkable.
Yes, Friends, it’s that time of year again when we announce the nominations for the 3rd Annual Fringie Awards®, followed by the decisions by our esteemed selection committee.
Announcement of the nominees in all of the exciting categories will commence on Monday, so be sure to stay tuned for all of the fun.
If this doesn’t make you want to go lift your leg on a Fullerton fire hydrant or city councilman, then there is definitely something wrong with you.
5. And finally, in 2011 we were treated to a horrifying visitation from the Great Beyond in the vacuous form of former city councilwoman Pam Keller. Don’t be fooled by any apparent substance. There’s no there, there.
