Search Results for: zahra

About a week and a half a go the Fullerton Observer ran an update on their earlier propaganda about the rebuilding of the Union Pacific Park. You may remember the slight-of-hand article that mischaracterized the history of the park. FFFF pointed out that it wasn’t the toxic soil issue that closed the park. Rather it was the derelict state of the majority of the park that hadn’t been closed at all.

Truslow residents will surely remember that the park had become a magnet for drunks, druggies, and FTT gang members who claimed it as their own turf. The City Manager, Joe “Wild Ride” Felz decided to put up a fence around the whole disaster, and forget about it. And it’s been that way ever since.

On September 13th a horde of volunteers showed up to install a “Kaboom Park” – prefab plastic kiddie equipment surrounded by what look like wood chips to cushion the fall of the young children. Three pitiable sycamore saplings were planted.

The whole thing was an exercise in political, public mobilization since a little crew could have done the job in a few hours, but that would have missed the point: a bountiful opportunity for speeches, selfless volunteering, photo ops, demonstrations, and of course the usual liberal hosannas about “public health” and “underserved communities.”

Two weeks later the Kaboom park sits there alone, still fenced off from the community who is said by the Kennedy Sisters to have longingly waited for the park’s re-opening. When is the fence coming down? I bet nobody has asked. Sometime in the near future the rest of the park is supposed to be worked on. Will it be after that? Was the Kaboom operation just an empty feel-good gesture to show that something, anything was happening?

It seems to me that this little playground assembly should have been the last thing to go in, not the first. But what do I know about parks? Surely not as much as City Hall does.

Anyway, several local politicians showed up to get their picture taken, including Ahmad Zahra of course, who never misses a self-promotional opportunity. He reportedly didn’t stay to actually do any work – not even to claw at the dirt with a rake or to give moral support. He supposedly left after the pictures were taken.

The future of the re-opened park, whenever the fence comes down, doesn’t look promising. Nobody has asked about the condition and influence of the social pathologies that caused the park to be closed by Felz in the first place. Everyone has decided to conveniently forget the true history of the park

The rundown “Trail Phase 1” hasn’t been cleaned up and is usually occupied by somebody selling drugs of some sort. The Harbor bridge leading to the park from the east is a disgusting mess of graffiti, trash and broken light fixtures. Fullerton Tokers Town is still around, still marking its territory with regularity.

Last month FFFF published a post about how sweet, fresh Elijah Manassero scribbled an article for the Fullerton Observer attacking Mayor Fred Jung for misusing Fullerton’s city seal. A little later we noted with some amusement that the young sapling Manassero posted his string of attacks on the council majority and the Bushala family on a subReddit that swiped…Fullerton’s city seal!

Well, it appears that somebody, somewhere took notice of the problem. Sometime in the past week the subReddit page quit using the city seal and replaced it with this image.

Hmm. Now that looks sort of familiar. Oops!

Turns out the newly adopted image of r/Fullerton is a protected trademark, registered by the City with the United State Patent and Trademark Office over 20 years ago! Ouch.

Now that’s not very good is it? More bad behavior by r/Fullerton and hypocrisy from their frequent contributor, youthful Elijah.

I don’t think that the dainty fleur Elijah cares much about the sort of legal niceties involved with intellectual property theft, and probably knows even less about this sort of thing than he does about commercial leases (BTW, has fresh young Elijah sought legal recourse about the Bushala depot lease like he said he would, or was that just the loud screeching of a baby paper tiger?).

The irony of a self-righteous purveyor of prevarication getting tangled up in this sort of embarrassment is palpable. However, Fullerton Boohoo characters are not known for the kind of self-introspection needed to understand irony. After all, they celebrate the deadbeat Ahmad Zahra’s brainy outpourings, despite his getting busted for plagiarism – another kind of intellectual theft.

Shana Charles, Fullerton D3’s councilperson and ceaseless gas bag is running for re-election. She threw a kickoff party a few days ago.

The usual suspects appeared. The same suspects, in fact, who tried real hard to get Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo elected and failed.

In fact some folks are speculating about the role of Dr. Shana’s husband, Andre, in recruiting the phony candidate and perjurer, Scott Markowitz last year. Mr. Charles got a nifty $4000 from the marijuana lobby to do something for them working on the failed Jaramillo effort.

When she was elected in 2022 she squeaked by in a three-way race with the help of the emergency services union. Will they help her again? They love front runners and incumbents although they did supported Jamie Valencia over the OCDEM darling Cannabis Kitty.

I have to wonder what her goal is, besides getting sycophants to call her “Dr. Charles.” Even if her pal Ahmad Zahra sticks around and somehow wins re-election, she’ll be a minority player – again – at least for 2 years, unless Mayor Fred Jung wins the County Supervisor election and a replacement is needed at the start of 2027. An appointment or election is not likely to provide a third vote.

I’ve gotten used to Charles’ endless bloviation, bragging and idiotic observations. But on the bright side she hasn’t been able to do any permanent damage – yet.

Here’s the text of a recent City of Fullerton press release about upcoming activity at the dismal Union Pacific Park on Truslow Avenue. See if you can read it without gagging.

The City of Fullerton Parks & Recreation Department, Smile Generation®, and KABOOM! are teaming up to bring a new kid-designed, community-built playground to Union Pacific Park—revitalizing a beloved neighborhood space and ensuring local children have a safe, inspiring place to play.

On Saturday, September 13, volunteers come together to construct the playground in a single day, with a ribbon-cutting and photo opportunities at 2:30 pm. The build begins at 8:30 am at Union Pacific Park, 121 W. Truslow Ave., Fullerton, CA 92832. Media and community members are invited to attend and experience the transformation in real time.

“Union Pacific Park’s reopening represents a new chapter for this neighborhood,” says Edgar Rosales, Fullerton Parks & Recreation. “The new playground will be at the heart of the park—where children can play, and families can connect and grow.”

Union Pacific Park, which had been closed due to past soil contamination, has since been fully remediated and declared safe for public use—clearing the way for its exciting rebirth as a vibrant community hub.

This project also advances KABOOM!’s 25 in 5 Initiative to End Playspace Inequity, a nationwide effort to ensure every child—especially those in under-resourced communities—benefits from the physical, social, and mental health advantages of play. Smile Generation joins as a proud partner committed to community wellness.

Let’s just ignore the tsunami of silly bureaucrat-speak about under-resourced neighborhoods, new chapters, vibrant community hubs, families connecting and growing, inspiring places to play, and the like. That’s just the sort of hyped-up rhetorical nonsense you’d expect from any semi-literate municipal scribe. It’s actually pretty funny in an unintended way.

But what’s this nonsense about the park being closed for “remediation” of contaminated soil, but now having been declared safe? That’s just a damned lie. The remediation happened at least 15 long years ago. The fact is that City Hall kept the park closed due its attractive quality to borrachos, drug addicts, Fullerton Toker Towners, and homeless vagrants. It’s been sitting there, a ugly monument to the incompetence of Fullerton’s six-figure pensioners, and two generations of city councils that never bothered ask any questions.

This multi-million dollar disgrace is not a “beloved neighborhood space.” Nobody asked for it. Nobody wanted it outside City Hall employees with other people’s money to waste.

And now the current city council is poised to dump more millions into the beloved space even though there is nothing changed from the societal pathologies that kept it closed in the first place. And nothing has changed about the City’s inability to properly maintain the parks it already has.

Oh well, I guess this makes sense in a certain perverse way. The council just agreed to blow 2.5 million bucks on the Trail to Nowhere without a single backward glance to note the complete failure of the UP Park and the embarrassing “Phase I” of the so-called trail that doesn’t even connect to Phase II. The current council seems no more curious about past failures than their predecessors. In fact, they’re doubling down on the previous Union Park fiasco. The only difference is they seem to want to fail in smaller increments.

It’s really not very hard to submit the necessary campaign finance and statement of economic interest forms required of candidates and elected representatives. But apparently it is for Shana Charles, who has evidently been busy with other stuff over her summer break, social justice warrioring, for one. Even with a kindly nudge from the Fullerton City Clerk.

Form 460s (campaign financial activity) for the first half of 2025 were due by July 31, 2025.

It’s now five weeks later and per the City Clerk’s webpage, Shana Charles still hasn’t submitted the required form, her last submittal being for the second half of last year.

Even more interesting is the fact that the CC’s site shows no annual Form 700 (Statement of Economic Interest) from Charles since February, 2024. She’s over six months late.

To be fair, Dunlap and Jung show being one and two months behind in their annual 700, but Zahra is a whopping seven months late, so there’s something not right in the City Clerk’s office, either in the enforcement or the recording of this stuff.

The irony here is that Charles’s (and Zahra’s) followers are always nattering about transparency this, and transparency that. But the application of the concept is selective, as shown by the Fullerton Observer Sisters and their new Jimmy Olsen, the impressionable, young Elijah Mannasero.

Last Tuesday the Fullerton City Council voted 4-0 in closed session to file an amicus brief in support of the Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem lawsuit filed by the ACLU, et al. against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for their violations of basic civil rights.

Turns out the aye vote was cast by Zahra, Charles, Jung, and Valencia. Dunlap apparently found it impossible to vote one way or the other.

A good chunk of Fullerton’s liberal brigade was on hand to exhort the Council to support the lawsuit and they took the opportunity to do so for an hour and half. When the Council finally “reported out” of closed session the announcement of the decision produced applause.

This was the right decision.

Whatever one thinks about illegal immigrants and their place in American society and our economy, there’s no escaping two basic facts. Everyone has the rights of due process in the United States per the 5th Amendment. We are all protected against unfounded search and seizure by the 4th Amendment. Case closed.

What we have been seeing in California is the wanton disregard for the Constitution by a lawless administration that has zero respect for it, and is more interested in exercising a race-based reign of terror by a collection of masked and heavily armed goons. The State of California and the municipalities therein have a moral obligation to say something and do something, at least.

I guess your position on this issue depends on what you really believe about yourself. If you’re willing to support the war being waged on our streets by anonymous, unaccountable, and violent agents of the federal government – a veritable Geheime Staatspolizei; if you are willing to see the federal government send its troops to patrol the streets of America in peacetime, you are living in the wrong country.

Yesterday U.S. District Judge Fernando Aelle-Rocha hit cannabis lobbyist Melahat Rafiei with a six month jail sentence and a $10,000 fine for fraud. In reality she had already pleaded guilty to trying to bribe two Irvine councilmembers to help her client – somebody in the local marijuana cartel. This seems like a light penalty for what she admitted.

Her adherents (she has some thanks to her years of disingenuous self-promotion in Democrat politics) claim that her ratting out some of Anaheim’s crooks should have meant no jail time at all.

What will this mean for the dope lobby in Fullerton? Hard to say. We know that the business has insinuated itself into Fullerton. Ahmad Zahra appointed one of its political spokesholes, Derek Smith to the Fiscal Sustainability Ad Hoc Committee. And the Dutiful Doctor from Damascus has been an active and open drum-beater for the marijuana dispensary cause for years. He actually recommended Rafiei as a lobbyist to at least one commercial property owner that I know. How many others have there been?

We also know that Zahra and the dope lobby worked real hard to elect Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo (above) last fall. Had Jaramillo won we would have MJ stores in Fullerton, possibly 100 feet from your house.

People have been speculating about Zahra’s ties to the local Marijuana Trust. How beholden is he? Ditto Sheena Charles, whose husband, Andre, got a tidy $4,000 from the marijuana worker union’s PAC, “Working Families for Jaramillo.”

The Fullerton Observer and their followers have been vocal about the political influence of Tony Bushala, but have been completely silent about the long reach of the MJ cartel into Fullerton politics. I don’t wonder why.

The August 19th Fullerton City Council meeting has a few sort of interesting items.

First, we have the Closed Session topic of Fullerton joining the class action lawsuit against ICE behavior on our streets.

This is interesting because it aligns with the “transparency” protest cooked up by the Kennedy Sisters long before the agenda was even published. Obviously Zahra and Charles leaked confidential attorney-client information from the City Attorney as to why this should be discussed first behind a closed door, as Harpoon insinuated in the linked post, above.

Anyhow, whatever happens behind this closed door will soon be leaked by Zahra and Charles to Fullerton Boohoo, some of whom will show up to blow three minutes (each) of everybody’s time with the usual rhetoric. But now the rhetoric will be about the lack of transparency of Jung, Valencia, and Dunlap.

Consent Calendar Item 12 is so poorly written it’s impossible to understand. Are “Downtown Parking Program Funds” just dumped into the General Fund (10) and then doled out to the appropriate downtown projects? The agenda report gives no separate accounting. If those funds are buried in the General Fund, why? Why aren’t they just placed in their own enterprise fund to begin with? Are downtown parking revenues being used to pay General Fund responsibilities? Typical opacity. Don’t expect anybody on the City Council to inquire, and don’t expect Young Elijah Manassero to demand transparency with his special brand of tender earnestness

Consent Calendar Item #14 deals with the usual pea-under-the-walnut shell budgeting for “Phase 2” work on the dismal disaster formally known as the UP Park – The Poison Park in FFFF jargon. The slow and incredibly expensive death march has begun with no mention of why the park was fenced off decades ago. The staff report just says “the park closed approximately 20 years ago” as if the park just decided to close itself. The City closed the park with zero fanfare because it was a complete fiasco from the beginning, a multi-million dollar monument to six-figure bureaucratic failure; a thing something nobody outside City Hall asked for or wanted.

The really bad part about this item is how the Council is being asked to transfer another $300,000 to the project. Why? More mission cost creep, of course.

Item 21 is the start of something big. Fullerton’s trash service contract is coming up in June, 2027 and staff wants to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP). The RFP solicitation document itself remains a mystery to the public because it isn’t attached to the agenda. Sorry.

These contracts with trash haulers involve huge amounts of money over the term of agreements. Hundreds of millions. Republic Services is our current “vendor,” grandfathered in from the old MG Disposal operation, if you go back far enough. Republic’s foot in the door may not help in obtaining future contract. It recently underwent a work stoppage by Teamsters workers in solidarity with Republic employees in…Boston. We were the ones affected.

Another Republic problem, apparently, has been their continued unwillingness to come to terms with the City about stuff required by a state mandate, as described in the staff report.

Oops. Making the City look bad to the pointy heads in Sacramento is no way to endear yourself to city staff. The inclusion of this episode in the staff report can’t be good news for the good folks at Republic.

Republic has, no doubt, been busy greasing the Fullerton council axle recently, and no doubt others will soon follow.

Tomorrow’s Fullerton City Council meeting has been cancelled. How come? I don’t know why.

I do know that the first meeting in July was cancelled, and the first meeting in September, the day after Labor Day holiday, is often cancelled in that circumstance.

Even if the agenda were light it seems like a better strategy to have meetings so as to reduce the length of other meetings, which can be excruciatingly long.

At least some of Fullerton Boohoo isn’t happy about the cancellation. One of them emailed to alert Fr. Dennis Kriz, who seems to have forwarded her message to the City Council. This was intercepted by the Boys in the White van and is faithfully reported below.

Aha. Our old friend Diane Vena. The woman who nominated phony MAGA candidate Scott Markowitz in last year’s 4th District election. She did this while still endorsing Vivian Jaramillo on the latter’s website. Why Vena contacted his holiness is unknown but she seems to be upset. Somebody rattled her cage about the ICE lawsuit issue. That must have been “Dr.” Ahmad Zahra and/or Shana Charles.

Somebody told Vena that “the council” didn’t cancel the meeting, but that “someone” cancelled it to attend something called the National Night Out, whatever that is. Council meetings are often cancelled without the whole council deciding. In fact a special meeting would have to be called to do that, so that’s just dumb.

What’s really interesting is how Vena got her information, and who gave it to her.

Damn City Hall is leaking like a sieve.

There is something entertaining when a professional know-it-all runs into somebody who isn’t going to accept her bullshit.

And so we have the hilarious spectacle of Shana Charles – cloistered, third-rate academic – confronting and over-talking George Bushala, Jr. because she doesn’t like his answers about how come he hasn’t built a restaurant on the Bushala Brothers, Inc., portion of the Santa Fe Depot loading dock. Enjoy the video:

Somehow Shana, who has never ventured a nickle into anything, thinks BBI should have built a fancy restaurant (like Trevor’s at the Tracks!) despite the stonewalling of staff, and the animosity of Jennifer Fitzgerald, Jan Flory, and Ahmad Zahra. Then there’s the little problem of economic recessions in the early 2000s and 2008-2012, the real estate crash in 2007, and the COVID disaster in 2020-2002.

It has also escaped poor Shana’s feeble intellectual grasp that the City’s portion of the loading dock – east of the centerline of Pomona Avenue, is structurally connected to the Bushala leasehold, an awkward situation that is obviously an impediment to development. It’s going to take a million bucks to build out – something no one would do under the present situation.

Shana actually believes there is a “structure” suitable for a restaurant – instead of an unenclosed, unsound, ramshackle frame on a concrete bulkhead with no utilities.

When you know what you’re talking about, the whole cooked-up lease “controversy” is ridiculous.

Shana has the ignorant audacity to mention people who ran COVID businesses out of their kitchen, a comment so fucking stupid that it doesn’t even need repudiation.

The final sentence from Bushala is classic: “that’s why you don’t do what I do.”

What Dr. Charles does is talk self-important ideological blather to vacant-faced students looking for an easy elective, and whose multiple choice tests are graded by a computer.