On Moonlighting with Martha, OC Sheriff Candidate Bill Hunt, a 22 year year veteran of the Orange County Sheriff’s Dept in CA, he stood up of for his values and his chosen profession, law enforcement, administration to former Sheriff Michael S. Carona in 2006. That decision cost him his career. And now he’s back!
Also, John Seiler of Calwatchdog.com on the Greek fable of bankrupt dysfunctional California, and its stooge legislators who work desperately to make things worse.
And me Tony Bushala (admin), on the power of blogging to fight back against corruption, deceit and abuse of power.
On Tuesday Fullerton held a groundbreaking ceremony on the $10 million Main Library Expansion and approved the first round of construction contracts.
Fullerton resident Helen Logan sent us her thoughts on the expansion. They are printed below.
Before the library drains more precious tax dollars into its “Meet the Jetsons” architecture, Fullerton’s city council should be made aware of other futuristic stuff like the Kindle, the iPad and the Nook that can download hundreds of books right into our hands. With the advent of internet technology, libraries and their staff are nothing more than appendages to our society.
Our tax dollars would best be spent helping Fullerton’s residents afford the future by defraying the costs of laptops, internet services, and other digital reading devices.
The city of Fullerton should partner with local businesses to reduce the cost of internet technology to its residents. This move would directly benefit our residents and stimulate Fullerton’s business sector.
Fullerton’s city council members’ approval of this library expansion exposes their ignorance that books and knowledge may only be found in an actual building. Expansion of the Fullerton library is a growing monument to the dinosaurs who rule our city from their seats on our town’s city council.
UPDATE: I came across this earlier post today as I was thinking about all the political mail paid for by the “public employee unions” telling you what a great guy Harry Sidhu is and what a bad guy Shawn Nelson is. This video is worth a replay. Sidhu has an almost limitless capacity for clownish behavior — a perfect fit for the union circus.
Here’s another classic “what did he say?” mumble moment brought to you by Harry Sidhu at the GOP Central Committee meeting last week. We think he believes in public employee unions, but not in his ability to say no to them if they give him dough (directly) – so Honest Harry says he hasn’t and won’t take it. Even though he has been taking it ever since he first got elected in 2004!
In any case he says he won’t ‘take their money now. But just a few days before he had gone hat in hand to the Sheriff Deputy’s union to get their endorsement – and a big monetary expenditure via their IE, and he knows he got it. This is perfectly consistent with the profile of a politician without an ethical fiber in his being.
And that makes him a first class hypocritical hair ball and a worthy candidate for the John Lewis crowd to support.
A Friend sent in an interesting newspaper clipping this week. It looks like Sharon Kennedy is trying to obligate the city of Fullerton to pay her Observer rag for posting public notices.
Back in March the city council decided to stop paying local newspapers to print public notices in order to prevent layoffs. An obscure set of state laws deem that Fullerton has no local “newspaper of record” and thus is not required to waste money on ad space in the back of newspapers for notices that could just be posted on the Internet.
But now it appears that Kennedy is anxious to latch on to the city teat and get her hands on the $40,000 per year that the city is currently saving. She will appear before a judge next month in hopes that her wretched rag will be bestowed with some judicial legitimacy.
Unfortunately Kennedy has failed to read the very simple laws that define a newspaper of general circulation.
For one, the paper has to be printed at least weekly. The Observer is printed bi-weekly and monthly during the summer.
Second, it has to be physically printed inside the city. The Observer is printed elsewhere.
Third, it must have “substantial distribution to paid subscribers.” The Observer is free.
And finally, the paper must have “maintained a minimum coverage of local or telegraphic news and intelligence of a general character of not less than 25 percent of its total.” We’ve said it before: most of the stuff printed in the Observer is opinion disguised as news.
If Kennedy succeeds in her wacky court case, it will force the city to pay her for publishing public notices. Perhaps the city will dispatch someone to the hearing to make sure she doesn’t get away with it.
A Friend and devoted mother sent us this personal note regarding attorney Gerald Klein who is running for OC Superior Court Judge in June.
I hired Gerald Klein to handle my child custody battle six years ago because I believed that he would be the best choice to protect me and my daughter’s rights through representation. Through the years since, I have only known Mr. Klein to be tough, fair, and objective in the court room. What stands out most about Gerald Klein is his impartiality. I remember expressing ill feelings towards my ex-husband to him one day. He stopped me mid sentence and told me that my attitude was not going to benefit my daughter at all. It was then that I realized how much he truly cared, not just for my case, but for my child’s best interest as well. When I found out that Gerald Klein is running for judge in June, I felt compelled to share how deserving of this position he is.
Among his accomplishments, he founded Kid’s First in 1996. It is a program for separated or divorced parents and their children. Both parents attend this 8 week course together with their children to help the kids cope with changes in the family.
Klein has been practicing law for 33 years and has sat as a temporary volunteer judge in Orange and Los Angeles counties since 1981. He is active in the community and he also teaches Family Law and Community Property as a part-time professor at a local law school. Although I only witnessed his expertise in family law, he is familiar with many types of law as he had a general practice in his early years.
It’s not easy to look like you’re taking responsibility for some screw up or other when in reality you’re trying to spin as fast as you can to avoid accountability. But that’s exactly what seasoned bureaucrats do, and that’s precisely what County CEO Tom Mauk is up to now. It’s same old song: mistakes were made (passive voice, no subject of sentence), but corrective action is being implemented.
I have gotten hold of Mauk’s report to the Board of Supervisors about the massive fiasco in the County’s acquisition of the money pit at 433 West Civic Center – at the behest of the other Tom, County Clerk Tom Daly.
It would seem that the Board was never given crucial information about the true costs of remodel and remodel/expansion of the building. This data is shown in Attachment A to Mauk’s report, and is damning. Mauk doesn’t really even say he’s sorry for not passing critical cost information to the Board. The projected amounts developed by the County RDMD were significant – in the millions – and congruent with the ultimate figures presented by Kishimoto Architects, hired by Daly after the sale went through.
What information the Board was given was rosy: work on the building would be relatively minor, that the building was “reasonably maintained,” and that renovation would be done by Daly.
Wrong on all counts.
But everything is still okay, see, because the County has been using the lot for parking and has saved a whopping $26,000 a year. Mauk wraps up his report with this whopper:
“In the meantime, it does appear that having the property in our inventory is a positive outcome.”
Well only in government bureaucracies is wasting $2,100,000 on a near worthless property considered a positive outcome. I can only hope some Supervisor who really wants to supervise something will ask Mauk to quantify that statement. Mr. Moorlach?
Mauk may choose to do the Texas two-step around the truth, but I won’t. Check out the list of people CC’d at the bottom of that RDMD memo. The County Clerk was well aware of the millions needed to make that building functional and yet disclosed none of it to the Board; neither did the RDMD staff who created it. How come this happened? Mauk doesn’t bother to inform his readers. Hopefully the Board will be curious.
Ooops!
Was Daly hoping his $60,000 investment in Townsend and Associates was going to pay off with a big State grant that would cover the true costs to relocate the archives? If so that idea sure bombed big time.
What is inescapable is the conclusion that both the Clerk’s Department and the RDMD deliberately withheld the true financial implications of this acquisition in order to get the Board to go along with it. Is there another explanation? It would also appear that Mr. Mauk would now like the whole thing whitewashed.
So that’s the story. Now, who’s going to do something about it?
While several county departments have to endure furloughs and layoffs, “Manager of the Year” Tom Daly seems to be on a mission to continue to waste public money the taxpayers be damned. We recently learned that a remodeling project for a “marriage ceremony and passport application acceptance room” is near completion. The cost to tax-payers: $73,000 plus change. For a remodel. Of a room. I’m pretty sure we won’t hear a peep from OCEA and it’s head thug, Nick “Bullhorn” Beradino. I’m still hoping Nick misplaced the bullhorn in some nook or cranny and is frantically looking for it..
I would like to invite OCEA members and the general public to come and see for themselves how this wastrel continues to shove his crazy spending down the taxpayers’ collective throat. From the looks of it, no expense was spared. But you be the judge.
The location is: Old Orange County Courthouse, 2nd floor
211 West Santa Ana Blvd., Santa Ana, CA 92701
And while you are at it, drive by the $2.1 million money pit Tom bought 2-years ago for his Sports Hall of Shame, at:
433 Civic Center Drive
Santa Ana, CA 92701
After you soil yourselves in anger, call Tom Daly at (714) 834-2248 and let him know how you feel about this wasteful spending.
I am providing the address because I want to make sure that the OCEA and Nick Berardino don’t get lost on their way to protest this wasteful spending just like they did the Board of Supervisor’s remodel last year.
Nick, if you need to borrow a bullhorn let me know. OCEA needs to tell Tom that this has to stop. The voters need to send Tommy boy a strong message this June. Vote career politician and free-spending Tom Daly out of office!!
By the way, it would interesting to know what the Board of Supervisors know about this latest misadventure. Wanna call up and ask?
There's a little stick in back that makes my head swivel.
Sometimes its hard to tell whether certain people are stupid or lazy. Or maybe a little of both. Take, for instance, County Supervisor Bill Campbell who is currently the Chairman of the OC Children and Families Commission.
As a commissioner he has approved big PR contracts to his political pal Matthew J. Cunningham whom he also appointed to the County Parks Commission. And I mean really big contracts. And apparently free of either competition or real scrutiny.
Part of Cunningham’s job is to ghost write pro-commission “op-ed” pieces for politicians across the political spectrum who either can’t be bothered, or who are too illiterate to do it themselves. The topic of these scribblings is always the same: protect the tax revenue!
Here’s an invoice where Mr. Conservative Republican Wordsmith is wordsmithing hard for – Bill Campbell!
And looky here, we’ve uncovered the fruits of Mr. Cunningham’s labors in the OC Register.
There are some fun quotes about rigorous audits and Grand Jury approbation that come a-tumblin’ out of the old mannequin’s mouth, but these are my faves:
“I can say unequivocally that if state government emulated the prudent, sensible and farsighted operations and budgeting practices of the Children and Families Commission, there would be no state budget crisis.”
Uh, yeah, like handing out a $200K per year PR contract that enables your pal to put semi-intelligent words in your mouth for $200 an hour.
“…while our commission contracts out as many functions as possible so more dollars go toward funding services rather than bureaucracy.”
See comment above. Contracting out unnecessary PR crap for $200 an hour services like facebook updates, going to lunch with Steve Greenhut, and passing out toothbrushes. Newsflash Bill – that robs funding. Contracting out for unnecessary services is incompetent. Directing that largess to a political crony is despicable.
“Taxpayers should cast a critical eye on the idea of abolishing such county Children and Families commissions, which are locally accountable and manage their budgets responsibly…”
Uh huh. Yeah. Sure, Bill. You pass out hundreds of thousands annually for lobbying and PR most of which seems to be mysteriously directed outside Orange County. Well, Campbell also seems to be one of the masterminds behind the unintentionally hilarious Harry Sidhu for Supervisor campaign. And that, in a nutshell, really tells you all you need to know about that sawdust head.
And finally a free wordsmithing tip to the Wordsmith: when you’re going to put words in the mouth of numbskull try to avoid words like “panoply” and “unequivocally.”
I got an e-mail today from a friend of mine from Anaheim who isn’t all that politically active, but who saw the 4th District Supervisor WAND forum and has seen the videos of Hide and Seek Sidhu on our website.
One is the loneliest number.
Shock and dismay would be two good words to describe this woman’s impression of Sidhu. But I’ll let her speak in her own words:
I am aware that money is really all it takes to run a political campaign, but I have to say I am really and truly amazed by the campaign of Harry Sidhu. I know he doesn’t live in the district and I know he made up several addresses in order to run in the 4th. Okay. That’s pretty awful.
But what’s really bad is that the man is completely incoherent, has no grasp of any issues, and can only read what has been written for him on index cards. It’s pathetic. I would feel sorry for him if he hadn’t brought this embarrassment on himself. In fact, I really doubt if the man has a sense of shame at all.
At the WAND forum all I heard from this character were platitudes of the emptiest kind and even most of those were irrelevant. His performance at the GOP Central Committee meeting was humiliating – and embarrassing for everybody.
Keep up the pressure on this candidacy. You are doing an great job exposing this empty suit for what he is – an over ambitious, ignorant carpetbagger.
