It’s a politician’s nature to be ambitious, and Fullerton City council person Pam Keller is a politician. Maybe even a pretty good one. She’s part of a fairly wide local network of activists and do-gooders and has, seemingly already put some of them to political use.
So what higher office might beckon? The idea of cracking into the exclusive club of congresscritters, a la Loretta Sanchez, has probably crossed her mind. Ed Royce is getting up there and the GOP is shrinking. Is that feasible? Dunno. Ed probably thinks so, but he’s afraid of his own shadow.
Six more weeks of winter?
State Assembly? State Senate? Paradoxically these may be even more difficult for Keller to crack than the Congress nut – simply because she would no doubt find herself running against other Democrats in primaries, including, perhaps even Sharon Quirk-Silva, who toyed for a bit with a run to replace Mike Duvall.
Well, we speculate for the fun of it. Keller’s first challenge is to get herself re-elected in 2010. And a big part of that challenge will be fighting off the inevitable OC GOP attack orchestrated by Royce that may likely target her unique, um, talent at mixing government, philanthropy and personal ambition.
One of our eagle-eyed Friends has noted that for the past two weeks The Fullerton News Tribune’s Barbara Giasone has written articles about a fellow named Marty Burbank doing good deeds, here and here.
Well good deed doing is fine, and we applaud good deed doers, but really, were either of these newsworthy in any real sense?
See, the problem we’re having is that Marty Burbank has shown himself to be a big City Hall cheerleader in the past year, here. And on top of that he’s running for Fullerton City Council in 2010. So is it more than just the coincidence of a local minor philanthropist getting his name in the paper? Hmm. Since we had never even heard of the guy (or any previous good deeds) until last summer may we be forgiven a little cynicism? But really, wouldn’t the same thing have occurred to Giasone? Maybe it did. And maybe she’s just passing along stuff from a campaign PR guy.
FFFF gets thousands of visitors from Google, each searching the web for bits of Fullerton knowledge. Usually those searches are related to local politicos, civic minutiae or nasty rumors. Visitors are led deep into our cyber lair, where they are either offended, entertained or mind-bent, depending on their disposition.
But sometimes folks come to our website after searching for some pretty strange stuff. Below we have categorized the most interesting FFFF searches of 2009.
You’re In the Right Place
These Googlers probably found what they were looking for:
The Original Tarantula Building
is linda ackerman a irvine carpetbagger or not? – This one was settled
I just came across this youtube clip from last summer. It is about our congresswoman Loretta Sanchez and her performance at some sort of “prayer vigil” organized last August, ostensibly to supplicate the Good Lord for the provision of universal health care.
As you can see, Loretta’s not real interested in praying, or even in keeping her big bazoo shut, but rather in the worst kind of political self-promotion. But Ms. Motormouth and her relationship with the Almighty is not the main topic here.
Instead I direct your attention to the promoters of this alleged “prayer vigil,” the Orange County Congregational Community Organization, known as OCCCO. Sound vaguely familiar? Last summer some of its members popped up out of the blue at a city council meeting to speak in favor of the proposed Redevelopment expansion. FFFF subsequently discovered that Pam Keller’s “Fullerton Collaborative” had bestowed $26,000 on the OCCCO for “community organizing.” Fullerton Harpoon wrote about this stuff here. The blog has already noted that Collaborative director (and Fullerton City Councilwoman) Pam Keller is a paid employee of the Fullerton School District.
You can see by the video that despite the presence of a somebody who looks likes he’s got a mitre on his head (A bishop?) these folks are really all about politics, too.
Apparently some folks in Fullerton such as Sharon Kennedy see nothing wrong with this happy intertwine of religion and the politics of cash, the laundering of government funds that ultimately find their way into overt political causes, and finally with the obvious attempt by Pam Keller to use the tangled network to help promote fraudulent and misguided “economic development” policy by the City. Actually these people seem to like the web.
I don’t like it, and neither should you. There is an insidious process going on here and it ain’t good.
One of our Friends just returned from a mind-dumbing tour of the red county blog where she came across these comments on a post about another life-like Sheriff candidate or other:
ANON
Says the same guy calling people Mullahs LOL…
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 12/23/09 – 12:31 PM »
…my comment is on-target, while Ltpar’s accusation is a straw man.
You FFFFers DO behave like Taliban mullahs. The reaction to any dissent from your blog’s fluid Koran — whatever it happens to be that particular day — is a hail of ad hominem attacks and personal denunciations.
It’s no wonder you’re all afraid to attach your names to your blog.
Let’s see if we’ve got this right. Some unknown commenter says something to annoy Cunningham and suddenly he claims it’s one of us! Too funny. What’s even funnier is that he claims we have a fluid “Koran” as the basis of our blog. Poor, dumb Jerb still doesn’t get it. We are not a partisan political blog. We want our electeds to act responsibly and with accountability. It’s only in the sad, slimy precincts of Red County where political party principles are supposed to hold sway. But of course they don’t.
Mr. Cunningham clearly needs professional help. And being the generous and big-hearted folks that we are at FFFF, we have once again retained the services of the renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Reinhold Ott, of the Schwabian Institut fur Psychologie in Tubingen, Germany, (at our own expense) to analyze Mr. Cunningham’s problem.
The penetrating gaze of Dr. Reinhold Ott
Says Herr Doktor Ott:
Although the information provided about this case is necessarily sparse, there is enough background material one may discover searching your blog to reach some conclusions, albeit tentative ones.
The subject has fairly obviously attained a mid-level of paranoia that is likely the result of unresolved id/superego issues that possibly extend back into childhood.
Being involved in politics as a fringe character has no doubt heightened a sense of impotence that exacerbates an underlying suspicion that the subject is a minor functionary, a mere tool if you will, in a large machine whose operators control him and many others like him.
Clinical exhibit A
The guilt/anger tension of suspecting to be manipulated will intensify the paranoiac delusion, as will the destructive underlying emotional attachment to the manipulators – yet another issue that likely reaches back into early stages of personality development.
In this case the subject lashes out at evidently disconnected or irrelevant targets while the principal cause of torment goes unaddressed. Such behavior is likely to continue until the underlying issues are resolved in a satisfactory manner.
Geez, thanks, Doc, I guess. Looks like this problem’s not going to be fixed anytime soon.
They really don't like it when you shine the light on 'em.
During the fall we had a lot of fun attacking the “Repuglicans,” local members of the Republican establishment who have made it their goal to milk a political system over which their party has control, and milk it for all it’s worth. The County of Orange is a Repuglican plantation, and we are all just pickin’ cotton for them.
Naturally we provided helpful definititons and illustrations of the breed, including such luminaries as Dick Ackerman, Scott Baugh, Tom Fuentes, and of course, Anaheims’s own, Kurt Pringle. If there’s a nickel on the table these fellas will go for it, and go for it hard.
The arrogance and hypocrisy of “small gummint” ‘pugs – of all shapes and sizes – making a living off of big government (and the bigger the size o’ government the better the living) is something rarely discussed at GOP Central Committee meetings, out of which the ‘pugs operate their rackets.
One name we haven’t spent a lot of time on (although we did last spring) is former State Senator John Lewis. Mr. Lewis is a campaign consultant. He is also a lobbyist at the County Hall of Administration. Gee, that’s very convenient. Get ’em elected, then lobby ’em for your clients. What an operation!
Lewis is currently in the process of losing one of his bonus boys on the County Board of Supervisors. 4th District Supervisor Chris Norby is moving on after seven fruitful years; and a couple years after that his other boy Bill Campbell will be gone too.
So Lewis needs a new boy, a tool, a yes vote on the Board and a friend behind the 3rd Floor scenes, ASAP. And Democrat Tom Daly is his new object of affection in what can be described as a symbiotic love affair. Just goes to show how shallow and useless are the “conservative” principles spouted by ‘pugs like Lewis and his altar boy Matthew J. Cunningham, who has wasted so much of our time with his many dodges and pirouettes around the basic fact.
(Interestingly Cunningham was making his usual avoid-the-subject-change-the-topic comments here on some issue or other, until one commenter suggested that perhaps his own wife had been offered a job in a future Daly administration. We’re looking into that one!)
For the Repuglicans there is no principle that can’t be bent way out of shape in the pursuit of business or political success – just look at Ackerman’s budget deals, or Ed Royce’s continued support of worthless RINO candidates on the Fullerton City Council. And now Lewis supports Daly “out of loyalty,” we are supposed to believe. Heya, John howzabout some loyalty to the the principles your party is supposed to stand for? Oh. Yeah. That’s right. Sorry.
Well, we can’t fix the world. We can’t even fix Orange County. But we can, and will spend a lot of time talking about John Lewis and Tom Daly in the next five months, or until Daly pulls the plug on his own campaign.
I don't mind being led around just as long as I don't know where they're taking me!
A few items in 2009 have caused me to reflect on the way things go in Fullerton, the way things have always gone, in fact. My poodle friends have a saying: la plus ca change, la plus c’est la meme chose. Man, that’s Fullerton all over!
In Fullerton, no screw-up, no cluster f, no civic disaster ever goes away if the city staff doesn’t want it to. They’ll dig in their heels and start the ol’ push-back as soon as it looks like something they really want is about to get torpedoed.
Consider the absolutely horrible decision to relocate the McDonald’s outlet at a jaw-dropping cost of six million bucks. Not even the most compliant council could swallow that one, and ours pulled the plug on it (so we thought, foolish us!) last summer. But within a a few weeks, the Redevelopment staff cooked up a “new” plan for the brainless “Fox Block” scheme. And guess what? It too, involved relocating McDonald’s – just not all the way to the corner. Geez, wasn’t anybody paying attention? That episode was so bad that it really crossed the line of insubordination. But did anybody on the council say a word? ‘Course not. This is Fullerton!
Of course the real problem is is the sort of people that we keep electing to the City Council. The mentally lame, the incompetent, the inert; people who by political and personal inclination identify with the bureaucracy instead of the citizens and taxpayers of Fullerton; people who dodge responsibility. Of the current crop, only Shawn Nelson really seems to take offense at being lied to and led around by the nose like a prize bull. And speaking of bull, Sharon Quirk seems to have finally realized that her advisors have their own agendas that more likely than not are incongruous with the interests of the rest of us. Well, that’s some progress, anyway.
What will 2010 bring? More of the same, no doubt. This is Fullerton. If there’s any hope for us the brain-dead gerontocracy must go. And by gerontocracy I mean the ossified geriatric thinking displayed by councilmembers of all ages, and the interests they represent. Of course Bankhead must go. Jones, too. And Keller. But if they’re replaced with stooges like Marty Burbank or Pat McKinley what the hell’s the difference?
Well let’s throw out a few issues to track to see how bad, or good, things will be in 2010 as far as accountability goes:
Will the council finally once and for all end the Fox Block scam?
Will Keller, Quirk, and Nelson stick to their promise to put the issue of term limits on the June ballot?
Will the council quit wasting time and energy on the idiotic Transportation Center master plan?
Will the council give up on the bogus Redevelopment expansion?
Will the council ditch the moronic “at-large” members of commissions altogether?
Will the council demand accountability on the UP park scandal before they sink another dime into more Redevelopment of it? Will they tell the city manager to quit making unilateral policy decisions?
Will the council have the courage (very little required really) to forget the useless UP ROW “trail”?
Will the council quit subsidizing and encouraging illegal behavior by downtown bars and dance halls?
Well, really, the list is endless and the Friends could no doubt supply their own favorites. Bon chance!
Well Friends, here they are – the 2009 Fringie Winners. You don’t really deserve this sort of punishment inflicted on you, but…well, hell, maybe you do! The competition was spirited in many of the categories. And by spirited I mean mind-numbingly depressing. And I’m just a dog! I had to take long breaks several times during the nomination and judging to water the fire hydrants along Brea Boulevard.
It was like getting hit with a broomstick all over again...
1. In the category of Least Distinguished Journalist it really wasn’t even close. The OC Register’s Frank Mickadeit took it going away for his complete lack of journalistic integrity. In the end the judges just didn’t feel that Sharon Kennedy or Barbara Giasone even really qualified as journalists. Martin Wisckol was given credit for showing up on the blog even tho’ it was merely to defend his embarrassing whoring for Ackerman, Inc.
2. In the category of the Worst Bureaucratic SNAFU, the judges were clearly impressed by not only the scope of thePoisoned Park disaster and its ongoing potential for more o’ same, but by city staff’s ability to avoid any and all responsibility for the multi-million dollar mess. Bravo, Mr. City Manager, you’re finally catching up with your predecessor, and that’s saying a lot!
3.Worst Vote of 2009. Bankhead, Jones, and Kellerfor the win of course, with their undying support of the Redevelopment expansion. And by win, of course, I mean disastrous loss for everyone outside the Redevelopment Department.
4. In the category of Scariest Ghost of Fullerton Past, we had an eerily close call. Yet despite the frightening surprise visitation from my former broomstick-wielding mistress Jan Flory, the judges were absolutely horrified by the noxious vapor of Linda LeQuire, conjured up by Ackerman Inc. out of some fetid and accursed burial ground, to smear Chris Norby. It didn’t work, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
5. In the category ofStupidest Statement Made in Publicwe again had a tough decision. In a year when Dick Jonessaid so many idiotic things and Pam Keller claimed (with a perfectly straight face) to be a “fiscal conservative,” a dark horse nominee grabbed the brass ring. And by dark horse nominee I mean the daffy, loud-mouthed nincompoop member of “Pam’s Posse”and her crazy-funny “why Pam should be mayor” rhetorical ramble through the brambles. Go ahead and watchit. We dares ya!
6. In the Government Small Change Adds Up category the award goes to the Roscoe’s Famous Nuisance Noise Study, a wonderful example of ill-conceived bureaucratic waste on a small scale that makes us really worried about the big stuff.
7. The Most Entertaining and/or Disturbing Image of 2009. Barney Wewak for the win. Aw, c’mon, was there ever any doubt? The picture even has a dog in it. Arf!
The Friends For Fullerton's Future Have Friends Around the World...
8. Best Vote 2009. This one was pretty easy for the judges since by the time they got around to this category they had inhaled copious amounts of medicinal weed acquired from the Dick & MaryJane Jones Dispensary. Our old friendSharon Quirk-Silvagets a double victory for seeing the proverbial light on the God-awful McDonald’s relocation; and also for opposing that fraudulent Redevelopment expansion.
9. Our final category is theMost Awful Political Candidate of 2009, and it goes to none other thanChris Norby for his abortive County Clerk campaign. Rarely had the judges seen such a blatant fixation on public sector job preservation and such a mismatch of skill set to position. The campaign slogan “Preserving Your Vital Records” was so insipid and so lame I have to lift my leg on it. Again. There. Clean up in aisle #9! Well deserved Fringie, indeed!
Finally, the Judging Committee decided to award three special Fringies in 2009 in order to recognize excessively, aesthetically unattractive behavior on the part of some of our political personalities.
10. Special Fringie #1. The call by Pam Kellerfor a City-run blog – with no bloggers – was such a wonderful monument to fatuousness and political tone-deafness that as a statement and an act it really was in a class by itself. You can enjoy our original post here and listen to Keller’s statement. Well done, Pam! You excelled yourself.
11. Special Fringie #2. Well of course we had to acknowledge Linda Ackerwomanwhose scampaign in the 72nd must be considered positively evil (yes the judges said evil!) by any normal person. This creature did not qualify in the most Awful Political Candidate category since the whole operation seemed more like a jail break than a campaign. Who knows how many hundreds of simoleons per vote this cipher and her Sacramento-organized goons wasted. Oh well. It least it wasn’t our dough!
12. Special Fringie #3. The judges believed that they would have been remiss without a tip o’ the Fringed cap to Congresscritter-for-life Ed Royce, the rat who managed to swim away from the giant suction-vortex of the sinking S.S. Ackerman and happily scampered up the waiting rope ladder onto the S.S. Norby. Well done little rodent!
And so friends, that concludes the 2009 Fringie Awards. We hope you have enjoyed them as much as we have enjoyed bringing them to you. And if you didn’t, tough.
Here’s looking forward to a new year filled with wonderful material from our favorite folks in Fullerton!
Okay we bought this gift in 2008, and we’ve already given it to you a couple of times, but like my former landlord used to say all the time: “still good!”
Here is one of our first pieces of anti-Dick Jones propaganda from the 2008 clowncil campaign. It really is still good. We took some grief from the staus quo lackeys and defenders like Sharon Kennedy, who actually went on to endorse this jackass; and from the 2009 Fringie award-winner Frank Mickadeit who was too busy ass-kissing Repuglican ass to acknowledge the problem of Doc Heehaw’s gaping, deep-fried brayings.
Anyway, enjoy this brilliant piece of political invective that uses the target’s own febrile rants as the basis of its humor.
Art Pedroza over at the the Orange Juice blog did a post today about the phantom candidate, Sue Perez, pulling a campaignus interruptus in a putative bid for the 34th State Senate seat currently held by Lou Correa. This was important to us for two reasons: part of the 34th District includes Fullerton. And Sue Perez lives in the 33rd District. We have already posted on this woman’s carpetbagging candidacy, here.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To return to the 33rd State Senate District.
Of course Art’s main thrust was to immediately poke holes in his newest target, Supervisor Janet Nguyen, who for some reason decided to let herself be named co-chair of this unknown wingnut’s effort. The other co-chair, frighteningly enough, was our own brainless scarecrow, 33rd District State Senator Mimi Walters, who, not coincidentally also championed the hollow, illegal candidacy of the Ackerwoman. Figures. Ah, more Repuglican values we can count on.
At any rate both of these co-chairs have been spared the humiliation of seeing their candidate get the living shit kicked out of her by Correa. So that worked out okay for them.
The story that is being circulated is that Perez has some baggage. Pedroza hazily speculates that this involves her carpetbagging and her husband’s appointment to the Anaheim Planning Commission by Lorri Galloway. This seems like small change to us, especially since Perez has apparently been employed by the bizzaros at the Trinity Broadcast Network.
Jaysus says "be elected!"
So poor Jerb Cunningham, who has spilled lotsa ink badmouthing Lou Correa, is still in search of a God-fearing candidate. Good luck little fella. Maybe your hero Dick “I don’t look so good in stripes” Ackerman can scrounge up another Lynn “the Bulldozer” Daucher for us.
what does the fullerton police department do right?
Just Plain Crazy
You FFFFers DO behave like Taliban mullahs. The reaction to any dissent from your blog’s fluid Koran — whatever it happens to be that particular day — is a hail of ad hominem attacks and personal denunciations.
It’s no wonder you’re all afraid to attach your names to your blog.