The rough surface belied the literary genius lurking beneath...
How else can I explain the weird post put up on the Mauve County blog by a guy called Thomas Anthony Gordon accusing me of “voter intimidation?”
You see I busted Gordo last week for being the guy who was circulating last minute petitions for Harry Sidhu’s carpetbagging effort to get himself elected to the GOP Central Committee for yet another district (69th AD) that he doesn’t live in. Sean Mill over at the OJ Blog has also done a post on the comical doings of Gordo.
Gordon responded by claiming that my publishing the petition forms was a species of intimidation. Imagine that! Sharing a public document – with the public! The horror! Does Gordon really think these worthy folks might be ashamed at promoting the circus carnie campaigns of Hide and Seek Sidhu?
My loyal troops will follow me almost anywhere if the price is right...
And could it really be that the charming Gordon is really just ashamed at being found out to be the lackey of the perjurer Sidhu? Well, that would presuppose a sense of shame, as Joe Sipowicz would say.
Still he didn’t really believe anybody was going to swallow that load, did he?
There is a precinct walk event for Shawn Nelson next Saturday, March 27th which meets at Hillcrest Park. We will gather at 12:30PM for lunch and the walking will begin at 1:30PM. I believe we’re meeting in the main picnic area at the base of the hill. The place isn’t that big. You’ll see us.
A precinct can usually be walked within 2 or 3 hours, however you could certainly do part of it and finish later. Shawn needs our help on this. Shawn is a great guy and has many friends, however as a businessman and family man with many responsibilities, he’s not a professional politician who has made it his life’s work to do nothing more than develop warm and fuzzy relationships from people who want something from him. He just works hard for his family, his employees and for the taxpayers.
Let’s get this guy elected to to County Supervisor so that we have some continued defense against the insane power of public employee unions. Organizations like Friends for Fullerton’s Future and the Fullerton Association of Concerned Taxpayers are groups who fight for better government without regard for personal gain. Nearly all of those involved in groups like ours support Shawn because he is one of us.
Last week Sheriff candidate Craig Hunter pointed to our Bill Hunt interview on Facebook, ridiculing his opponent’s assertion that a Sheriff does not have to bend to the will of the DEA when it violates states’ rights.
Hunter asks “What kind of leader would put his deputies at odds with the DEA over a poorly written law?”
The answer, of course, is a leader who respects the Constitution and values the rights of his constituents over the intrusive tendencies of an overreaching federal bureaucracy.
What did they want me to say?
So now we know that Craig Hunter does not respect the will of California voters, who have overwhelmingly asserted that medicinal marijuana should be available to patients. Instead, he defers to the federal government, which has blown at least $2.5 trillion dollars over four decades of the “War on Drugs” with almost nothing to show for it. Illegal drugs are now cheaper, stronger and easier to obtain than any other time in American history.
If this is the kind of “leadership” that we can expect from Hunter? An automatic deference to any other agency claiming to hold authority, no matter how detrimental it might be to the citizens who he is sworn to protect?
There is, however, one satisfying statement made in Hunter’s Facebook — he says that all voters should read our blog. Thanks for your support, Craig!
If somebody were teaching a class of young bureaucrats and politicians on the art of how to really screw something up and get a way with it, he might very well use the County of Orange’s acquisition of the building at 433 Civic Center West as textbook material.
Maybe we can...aw, Hell, tear it down.
As we have detailed here, the building was purchased at the beginning of 2008 for $2.1 million by the Board of Supervisors, at the behest of County Clerk, Tom Daly. The ostensible purpose was to accommodate the overflow of paper in the County’s archives, of which Daly is chief custodian.
The job requires no qualifications except getting the most votes.
Somehow, almost inexplicably, the County staff in the then RDMD building and real estate sections claimed to have checked out the building and found it acceptable; the County CEO Tom Mauk recommended to the Supervisors an “as-is” purchase, another inexplicable decision. As later events revealed, the County staff’s involvement in this acquisition was utterly disastrous and placed the Board in what has become an acutely embarrassing situation.
So why did the so-called professionals make the determinations they did? There aren’t a lot of choices. They were either lobbied by Daly; or they simply did what they thought Daly wanted them to do; or they are completely incompetent and should be immediately terminated for gross negligence.
Who did what, now?What? Why? How?Good thing the Ackermans never found out.
I also note that the Board of Supervisors are endowed with ample budgets to employ able and competent staff. So what happened to these all these gifted people? Chris Norby, John Moorlach, and Janet Nguyen each voted for this. Where were their personal staff members? Was there not one competent person among all these well-paid supervisorial aides who could have raised a red-flag? How come not one of the Supervisor’s aides walked a couple hundred yards to examine a decrepit building that staff was recommending purchase, as-is? And why didn’t an “as-is” purchase raise a serious red flag to the Supervisors themselves, all three of whom purport themselves to be fiscal conservatives? Would any three of these folks buy property with their own money “as-is?”
And how come none of these same Supervisors argued for an examination of alternatives to acquiring real estate to house the paper overflow?
Or was “rubber stamping” simply the modus vivendi of these Superviors and their direct employees? I think we have to assume that the same narrow possibilities that apply to the bureaucrats above, also apply to the Supervisors and their personal staffs.
Sometime in 2009 the County hired Kishimoto Architects to do a space and physical assessment of 433 Civic Center West. We can only speculate at this point what caused this to occur, but since a competent assessment of a property normally occurs before and not after a property is purchased, I really have to wonder. But the building was acquired “as-is.”
Kishimoto’s assessment was grim. The building failed to meet the County Clerk’s space needs; and it was deficient or obsolete in every conceivable way and can’t be used by the public. It will cost additional millions to make it work; but the original investment appears to be a dead loss, given the scope and cost to fix the building.
Off we go, into the Wild Blue Yonder...
And here’s the rub, accountability-wise. So many people have their fingerprints all over this disaster that it becomes virtually impossible to pin effective culpability on anybody, and hence, accountability. Tom Daly is the prime architect of this fiasco, to be sure; but as his adherents are quick to point out, staff recommended this and the Board approved it.
I didn't do it...
So Daly can shrug and point to the incompetent staff. Staff is always protected as the poor, under-compensated civil servants that they are; and after all they were just following direction, they’ll say. Plus, the lax overseer of the RDMD has slinked off to retirement with a massive, inflation-linked pension.
Bryan Speegle. The door didn't hit him on the way out.
The Supervisors’ aides can shrug it off, too. Daly wanted it, not us; plus, our crack County staff said everything was hunky dory. And besides we were out at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast schmoozing with the locals.
It was Norby's fault. That's why I'm putting all these new people in his office.
And what of the Supervisors themselves, who are responsible to nobody but the voters, and who have so signally failed them? Norby has already moved on, and Moorlach faces no opposition for re-election this fall. Janet Nguyen is the only one who is going to have to answer to the electorate on this issue. She’d better.
Every now and then word filters back to us about some zany corn pone antics by our own beloved municipal treasure, Dick Jones, at the County Vector Control District meetings. See, Jones is supposed to be representing us in this agency whose mission to do battle with the evil forces of rats, ants, and mosquitoes.
Our sources inform us that at the last meeting’s closed session that was addressing the future of the arrogant General Manger, Gerard Goedhart, Jones just lost it, stood up, declared that he was quitting, and left the room. Fellow boardmembers were nonplussed, to say the least.
Good grief. Just last year this same nincompoop popped his cork at a meeting.
Now, apparently, he just quit. He’s still got 21 months to go in his “term” on the Board.
Maybe it’s all for the best. And maybe Jones is actually onto something. If he can’t handle the annoyance without petulant outbursts, he should go. And he really ought to think about resigning from the City Council while he’s at it.
I knew it wouldn’t be long before Matthew J. Cunningham started glossing over the fact that his boy Harry Sidhu committed perjury twice when he falsified voter registration documents. After all, his boss John Lewis is now one of the piglets sucking the mama sow dry.
The one on the left...
It didn’t take very long.
He’s up to his old tricks again: diversion, obfuscation, and trying to change the subject. First he says Tony Bushala is Shawn Nelson’s neighbor. Irrelevant to anything, and of course not even true. But let’s not let facts get in the way of defending the indefensible. His point, perfectly predictable coming from this self-appointed paragon of morality, is that the whole thing is only political, as if Sidhu’s signature on an official document means, you know, nothing.
The registration was so brief that it doesn't count. Sidhu gets a re-do.
Apparently, the concept of perjury is a really flexible concept for Cunningham who seems willing to concede that his boy never lived at the beautiful Calabria Apartments. It was only a “brief registration,” you see. Brief registration? Damn, it was only 30 days! But what’s that got to do with anything? The registration was never aligned with any residency. It was a fraud. An outright lie. But are we to accept that the concept of the truth only kicks in when it’s convenient for Sidhu?
Well, good luck selling that bullshit to anybody smarter than Brett Barbre.
My word is my bond. Trust me.
A second post addresses the breathtaking revelation that Bushala’s investigation into the Sidhu scam was conducted by Sheriff candidate Bill Hunt. Wow, now there’s a great discovery, Columbus. Bushala put the guy’s letterhead in his post! Another example of Cunningham dodge ball, having zero to do with the fact that his boy Sidhu falsified public documents. Of course Cunningham proceeds to insinuate that something fishy is going on because one of our bloggers at FFFF has been posting positive stuff for Hunt’s Sheriff campaign.
Um, Chip, I think I have something I need to tell you...
Say what? Influence peddling, and profiting from same, is Cunningham’s line of work, not ours. Nothing to disclose here. I’m not even voting for Hunt.
Pathetic. Sorrowful. Deceitful. Hypocritical. Did I say shameful. No. That would imply a sense of shame.
It looks as if Mr. Cunningham has really decided to plumb the depths of irrelevance and hypocrisy. Let’s wait and count the hours until Cunningham spits out one of his patented “the guy’s not to be trusted” posts against someone who is running against a John Lewis candidate.
Well its a free country. And pretty soon for him, it’s going to be a really lonely one.
Let’s set aside the whole trustworthiness, perjury, incarceration problems of Harry Sidhu for a moment. Well, not the trustworthy thing.
When I learned other day about Sidhu carpetbagging two different districts in the same election I was intrigued. See, he’s carpetbagging the 4th Supervisorial District as we all know. It turns out he is also carpetbagging the 69th Assembly District in order to try to get himself on the GOP Central Committee for that district.
The idea here seems to be to maximize Smilin’ Sidhu’s exposure to the electorate in the 4th District election, and hence get more votes for the universal Mayor Pro Tem.
My first thought was, gee, how much overlap is there between those two districts? How many Republican votes are there in that overlap, anyhow? Very many? But most importantly, if he gets elected to the Central Committee, what kind of living and lifestyle opportunities is that going to leave the rich dude and his family who really live in an “elegant estate” in the Anaheim Hills?
Swimmin' pools, movie stars...
The answer is not many. The only overlap is a strip of territory that extends north from where Sudhu is pretending to live now, through central Anaheim between Harbor Boulevard and East Street. It gets as far north as Sycamore. Much of this turf is commercial and industrial, and much of it, well, barrio. And all of it is pretty marginal for a guy who currently owns his own tennis court, swimming pool, aviary, and a boat called the The Taj Mahal. The shopping carts won’t impress visitors, that’s for sure.
Of course Sidhu could move into our friend Colony Rabble’s neighborhood and remodel a vintage home. But how likely is that? Harry better hope the pit bulls don’t get the peacocks.
A gift subscription?
If Sidhu wins a place on the GOP Central Committee, will he just stay put as a renter on Lucky Way (that so far hasn’t been very lucky for him)? Or, what seems a lot more likely, will he just immediately quit and head back to the hills?
Any way you slice it, it’s a pretty reasonable conclusion that his GOP Central Committee bid is just another Sidhu scam – a petty vote grubbing scheme in which the utterly arrogant Sidhu thumbs his nose at Republicans in the 69th Assembly District whom he has zero intention of representing.
If they really wanted to punish Sidhu, the Republicans in this District should elect him to the Central Committee – and roll out the welcome mat.
Last year we laughed at Dick Jones’ plan to dig trenches all over Fullerton and form his own fiber optic Internet service. As predicted, the appointed Technology Working Group failed to pull in the magical Federal stimulus dollars to launch this terribly unnecessary project. Lobbyists were consulted, fits were thrown, but in the end we were saved from yet another boondoggle thanks to a faltering economy.
With that loss behind them, we had hoped that the TWG would rest on it’s laurels of creating the nearly useless and unused downtown wireless network, which they had finished building just moments before every single coffee shop, restaurant and bar offered their own wireless for free.
What's a gigabit? Sounds neat.
But then Google gave these gullible go-getters a new glimmer of hope. Last month the Mountain View technology behemoth announced a “contest” of sorts – the winning city will get to have Google come out and rewire a portion of the city for free as some sort of yet-to-be-explained telecom experiment.
Within a month, at least a hundred cities across the country (each presumably guided by its’ own version of a clueless technology commission) had announced interest in submitting an RFP for the contest. And so the corporate boot-licking stunts begin; Topeka, Kansas renamed their city “Google” for a month, Baltimore has appointed a “Google Czar” and Peoria has had its’ “Google Day“.
Yeah, we need that!
I suppose it’s fine if a couple of starry-eyed “technology fixes everything” types want to go against the odds, coddle Google and fill out a long RFP. In fact, knock yourselves out if you have nothing better to do.
But at best, Fullerton faces 100-to-1 odds and has no idea what Google is actually giving to the winning city. Please, please do not let Dick Jones waste a dime of our tax dollars on consultants or staff time for this high-tech Hail Mary.
Umm...
Ooops, too late. The Redevelopment and Community Development departments are already working it. Perhaps they just need something to do.
Every week they insult my intelligence all over again. Why do they do that?
I really thought the OC Register/Fullerton News Tribune had gone about as far south as was humanly possible. I was wrong. Yesterday they produced an on-line “piece” by a “columnist” named Dennis Bode.
It was dressed up to look like an article about remodeling your house – which is about as newsworthy as tulips in the front yard. Pretty soon the article started talking about house prices and foreclosures and REO’s, etc. Upon closer inspection it turns out the thing is nothing but a real estate come-on by Bode who, it turns out, is a real estate agent.
Sweet Emancipator, are they joking? Was this an infomercial that somehow missed the “advertisement” label and got put in the news tab, instead? Or has the Register/News Tribune descended to printing ads under the guise of news? Other ads on the page are clearly labeled “advertisement.”
Did Mr. Bode pay for that ad? I have to wonder.
This is beyond incompetent and lazy. This is unethical. But what do I know? I’m just a dead dog with a bust-up eye socket and a bad under bite. Arf.
Fans of Bill Hunt for Sheriff are invited to participate in Operation Overpass on Friday afternoon from 3:30 to 6:00 pm. Freeway overpasses all across Orange County will swarm with supporters holding up signs for Bill Hunt during rush hour. The Friends at FFFF have chosen the overpass of the 57 freeway at Yorba Linda Blvd to show our support.
Park in the Target parking lot on Yorba Linda Boulevard and head up the sidewalk to the overpass. We will have signs ready to go.
And while we’re talking about Bill Hunt, here is a new video that describes Hunt’s challenge to the Sheriff-turned-convicted-felon Michael Carona in 2006.
