The day before the election seems like a real good time to replay this sparkling jewel of a video; the one in which Patdown Pat McKinley admits his own failure to lead. It’s got to be real hard for any anti-recall stooges to suck up this one!! When you vote remember this McKinley proclamation: “Council people don’t lead.”
Also, enjoy watching Patdown Pat’s sociopathic neck ligaments strain as he utters the damning indictment “failure to lead.”
– Joe Sipowicz
Here’s an illuminating admission by soon-to-be-recalled Councilmember “Patdown” Pat McKinley. The accusation that he has failed to lead fails to resonate with McPension since he denies that he is on the City Council to be a leader. The snippet below was culled from a long interview with the good folks at FullertonStories, here.
Well, Friends, there you have it. And you have a great example of why it’s almost always a bad idea to elect former staff members into political office.
And out of his own mouth McKinley admits and proclaims his own dismal failure to lead.
It’s not easy to do damage control when you keep inviting more questions that you are pretending to answer. Of course when you are dealing with the incurious stooges at the OC Register maybe you believe you’re getting away with it.
The latest episode in the FPD PR campaign is an attempt by Acting Chief Dan Hughes to deflect criticism by acknowledging the error of letting his cops watch the Kelly Thomas murder video before writing their reports, a thing he finally admits he’s never heard of before.
Hughes said he argued against letting the officers watch the tape, in part because civilians suspected of misconduct would not be given the same opportunity. He said he did not think it was illegal or unethical, but did fear it would erode public trust in the investigation. “That was a mistake from our department,” he said.
Here we see Danny Boy defending himself: he argued with some unnamed somebody, somewhere, somehow, against letting the killers watch the video, but we are meant to believe that he was overruled. But by whom? Chief Sellers wasn’t there. Was he contacted? He was Hughes’ only boss. Was it a fellow captain? If so what was that man’s name? Lou Ponsi doesn’t seem to be very curious. Of course there is the very real possibility that Hughes is just lying to protect himself well after the fact. And notice that the mistake was made by “the department” an entity that can’t be disciplined.
Eleven months after the fact Hughes would have us believe he was oh, so concerned about the severity of the incident. And yet we now know that last fall, many weeks after Hughes had seen the video and heard the audio, he was insinuating to protesters that the after they actually viewed the video their outrage would be mollified. Hmm.
The rest of the story is just a pathetic attempt to take credit for the investigation and ultimate prosecution of Ramos and Cicinelli. Read this tripe and try not to barf:
But even as the officers collected their thoughts, crime-scene technicians and detectives were picking over the scene of the bloody confrontation with Kelly Thomas as if it had been an officer-involved shooting, Hughes said. The criminal case now facing two of those officers, he said, was built in large part on the police work done by their own department.
And more:
But, he said, it was Fullerton police work that put Fullerton police officers in criminal court. He pointed to the words of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas: “They went to the scene, they preserved the evidence, they did all the things they were supposed to do.”
A video of the confrontation spliced with audio from the officers’ recordings, produced by the Fullerton police, was the centerpiece of a recent preliminary hearing for Ramos and Cicinelli. They were ordered to stand trial, Ramos on charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, Cicinelli on charges of involuntary manslaughter and excessive force.
“It doesn’t matter who the defendants are,” Hughes said. “We are part of the prosecution team.”
Oh, brother, what a load of unadulterated bullshit passed along by the compliant scribes at the Register. Nobody “picked over” anything. We’ve already shown pictures of cops trampling all over the crime scene, and as far as collecting evidence is concerned, the only things collected were the cell phones and camera film of witnesses who happened to record the murder. The idea of the FPD investigating itself is utterly comical.
And, ultimately it’s still all about “poor communication,” really. Not much worse than a little bad luck if you think about it.
“I don’t believe there was any intention at all to mislead our community,” Hughes said. But, he added, “we should have did a better job” of communicating – a common theme in his account of the aftermath of Kelly Thomas’ death. In the future, he said, he and his top commanders will handle public communication duties during major incidents.
The department, he said, “did a very poor job of communicating to the community.”
Unfortunately the slug who was tasked with public communication, and who failed so dismally either through incompetence or malice, was actually just promoted a few weeks ago. What’s that Dan, we can’t hear you?
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out just a couple of the of the other instances of biased writing by the pathetic little fool, Ponsi. We have seen the obnoxious description of the cops “collecting their thoughts” as opposed to, say, “getting their stories straight.” You can’t note how Thomas is described as “rangy” a term that is certainly more threatening than “skinny,” because this has now been removed out of the post. But there is still the utterly objectionable use of the phrase: “As the confrontation escalated,” a literary device meant to deflect responsibility for the crime from the cops Ramos and Wolfe to some unknown cosmic force. Things just happen.
A fence sitting, cardboard candidate? On June 5th you get to decide.
Perusing the latest yellowing Fullerton Observer I noticed how various candidates responded to the question “How Would You have Handled The Kelly Thomas Situation?”
First the Three Bald Tires, poster boys for utter leadership failure, were given the chance to reflect on their actions, or lack of same. They offered up the same old “we were told by our lawyer not to say anything” tripe. On his way out the saloon doors Doc Hee Haw managed to serve up this beaut: “I regret that some have acted to circumvent the constitutional laws of justice,” as if to reassure himself that the whole gol’dern commotion was the fault of some “lynch-type mob” and had nothing to do with his own incompetence and fat mouth.
The candidates were all pretty uniform in their responses with the glaring exception of Doug Chaffee, who spooned out this idiotic pabulum:
“I am a strong advocate of community oriented policing. In a community oriented policing system, police officers partner with neighborhoods to build trust and positive community relationships. The system generates mutual respect between residents and police. Being pro-active, the focus is on preventing crime, as opposed to merely reacting to it, and results in a safer City.”
What?
Not a single word about Kelly Thomas or his family, the brutal way in which he was killed, the conspiracy of silence in the aftermath, the disinformation peddled by Goodrich, the cops who were returned to duty, the disappearing police chief, the sick police chief, the pensioned-off police chief, or the charges of murder and manslaughter brought against the two cops by the DA. No explanation from Doug that Kelly was not committing a crime, and that the only criminals on the scene were members of the Fullerton Police Department.
Some have asked where Chaffee has been for these past nine months. I know. He’s been hiding from his own pale shadow.
It is apparent to me that this man is an empty suit, a coward and a damned fool. On the council he would be hardly better than McKinley himself. The last thing Fullerton needs is another superannuated do-nothing, say-nothing, stand-for-nothing yellow observer in office.
By taking the more generous retirement plan that was presented to him as a County employee, Supervisor Shawn Nelson has created an onslaught of Internet outrage from the Blue and Red blogs.
Nelson says it was an accident. Was it? County policy requires that all new employees sign up for one of two plans: the old 2.7 @ 55 or the new 1.62 @ 65 that so far, almost nobody has signed up for at all. If you don’t choose, they will choose for you – 1.62 @ 65. Every single new hire in the County government is presented with this scenario.
Oops. That's gonna hurt tomorrow morning.
In any case, Nelson’s decision highlights the dismal failure of Orange County’s alleged pension reform. When presented with two disparate retirement choices, what rational human being would pick the lesser?
If a guy like Shawn Nelson won’t do it, why would ANY public employee go for the option that is ultimately less generous – except, most likely, long-time employee pension abusers?
When union leaders originally hatched this goofy alternative plan, pension experts warned that new employees would not select a 401(k) style plan when offered alongside a traditional, elaborate government pension. Boy, were they right. But the unions and the supervisors went along with it anyway, just so they could notch pension reform in their pathetic pistol grips.
The bottom line: nobody wants a lesser benefit when they can choose a better one. Orange County’s much ballyhooed pension reform has completely failed because employees can simply avoid it altogether. What a joke.
But back to Nelson. He was presumably elected to represent taxpayers in union negotiations. I do not recall Nelson making any promises regarding his own pension. That would have been nothing more than a distraction from the real issue, as evidenced by Supervisor Pat Bates. Bates promised to not take a pension and followed through with it, but subsequently has done nothing to stop the real problem: runaway entitlements for every employee in the county! All 20,000 of them.
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!
For dyed-in-the-wool government apologists like Dick Jones, Jan Flory, Dick Ackerman, Sharon Kennedy, Don Bankhead, et al., Redevelopment blunders are conveniently overlooked, when possible; when not possible, some lame defense is mounted, such as: mistakes were made (passive voice obligatory) but we learned and moved on; hindsight is 20/20 (Molly McClanahan’s motto vivendi); the problem was not too much Redevelopment, but too little!
But when any reasonable person contemplates the collection of Redevelopment disasters along Harbor Blvd. between Valencia Drive and the old Union Pacific overpass, the only conclusion he or she could draw is that the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency should have been shuttered years ago, and the perpetrators of the manifest failures crowded onto a small raft and set adrift with the Japanese Current.
We have already described in nauseating detail the “Paseo Park” debacle; and the Allen Hotel fiasco; we haven’t yet had time to talk about the “El Sombrero” pocket park give away (we will).
But instead of wasting too many perfectly good words, we will share with you Friends a Redevelopment pictorial essay with just a little piquant commentary.
First there’s the strip center known as Gregg’s Plaza. Brick veneer, of course. Even the veneer is so disgusted it’s trying to jump off the building.
The standards of the RDRC were established early.Pop goes the brick veneer...
Across the street is the Allen Furniture Store. When they got their rehab loan somebody forgot to tell them that a storefront is a storefront – not a jailhouse. So why are there bars on the dinky little windows? And pink stucco?
Stone walls do not a prison make; nor iron bars a cage...
Jumping back across the street we re-introduce ourselves to the egregious Allen Hotel, perhaps the biggest Redevelopment boondoggle of all, a mess that we have already admirably documented, here. As we noted then, the add-on was unspeakably awful (and expensive). The front is, well, pretty awful, too.
The once and present tenement...
It could have been worse. Well, no, it couldn't...
What was sold, in part, as an “historic preservation” project ended up violating just about every standard in the book. The original windows were ripped out and replaced with vinyl sashes; the transoms were destroyed and replaced with sheets of plastic and surface applied strips supposed to simulate leaded glass.
Just say something. They'll believe anything...
Across Harbor we discover the “El Sombrero Plaza,” another sock in the face to any Fullerton windshield tourist. Forget the stupidity of the sideways orientation and the Mission Revival On Acid stylings (which attain a kind of crazy Mariachi deliciousness); this development included the give away of part the adjacent public green space so they have parking for a restaurant. The owner never did develop a restaurant, of course (more on that story later).
Ay, caramba! The extra parking that was supposed to be for a restaurant is now used for a storage container!
And finally we come to exhausted collapse at another one of the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency’s low points. And by low point we mean the complete, unmitigated disaster of the Union Pacific Park, ably chronicled here; and in a whole series here, here, and here.
Maybe the less said, the better...
The poisoned park: dead as a doornail. An aesthetic, pratical, and policy disaster. And no one has ever stood up to take responsibility for the total waste of millions of dollars.
Embarrassing from the beginning. How many $100,000 pensioners had their fingers in this pie?
Well, there you have it, Friends. Redevelopment in action; Redevelopment creating blight, not eradicating it. No accountability. None. Zero. Zilch. And some people wonder why FFFF has sued to keep Redevelopment from expanding.
I’ve been watching Fullerton politics and governance for for a long time – since 2008 or 2009, in fact. One thing that has consistently struck me is the way in which Fullerton’s elected officials have completely and almost happily abdicated their responsibility to determine the direction of policy.
It has always been the goal, in principle if not in practice in modern representative democracy, that policy would be established by electeds, and administrated through a protected civil service bureaucracy.
Determining policy – the philosophical direction you want the town to take – isn’t easy in the “City Manager” form of government, a form deliberately created to remove any sort of executive authority from elected representatives. But with that set-up came something else, too: the difficulty of people’s representatives in establishing policy direction, and doing it without violating the Brown Act strictures on open meetings.
Nevertheless, the responsibility is still there, even if it easier to have photo ops, and ribbon cuttings and the like. Sadly our electeds have failed; failed with remarkable banality and complacency. Former Councilman and Fullerton Police Chief Pat McKinley once illustrated the point when challenged for his “failure to lead.” He exclaimed that councilmen weren’t there to lead – that was the City Manager’s job.
Lately the policy role abdication has been seen with the regurgitated, spit out, re-consumed and regurgitated again noise ordinance, an ongoing embarrassment that has plagued honest citizens for over fifteen years. I read the staff report on the recent noise effort, a report that justifies a decision to actually increase acceptable levels, protect offenders by including an ambient noise mask, and locates the noise metering away from the source whence it can be muddled by an equally noisy neighbor.
The staff report is nothing but a list of events that have occurred since 2009 when the City Council last expressed a coherent position. Nowhere in the staff report is there any discussion on the policy decisions behind any of the activities. Why not? Because there weren’t any. In the same way that the incredibly costly, drunken binge known as Downtown Fullerton has escaped any intelligent policy conversation, the noise nuisance issue, a subset of the former, has evaded policy discussion as City staff – behind the scenes – has diligently avoided doing anything to enforce existing code, and worked very hard to reduce the requirements.
So what has happened is a vacuum in which each new action seems disembodied from policy conversation; that’s because it is. And our council steadfastly refused to have an open and honest conversation of what it wants, abdicating its responsibilities.
One size fits all…
There is a long list of issues that our elected representatives should be addressing from an overarching policy level and aren’t. This sort of thing takes thought; and some hard work in ascertaining whether your city employees are really doing the thing you want; or not, as in the case of the Trail to Nowhere. It’s easier just to ram through the Consent Calendar on the nod, rubberstamp the ridiculous, clean your plate like good kids, and move on to the photo ops and the trophy ceremonies.
The opponents of the Fullerton Recall, just like their predecessors in 1994, keep yammering about the “proper” use of the recall process. According to these worthy folks, the power of recall is only to be exercised in cases where an office holder has perpetrated malfeasance in office. Their argument is self-serving. And wrong. Here is what the State Constitution actually says, clearly and succinctly:
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION ARTICLE 2 VOTING, INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM, AND RECALL SEC. 13.
Recall is the power of the electors to remove an elective officer.
And that’s it. The rest is all about the technical procedure of doing it. There is no discussion of when recall is appropriate or when it may be used. None. From this terse definition we may reasonably infer that any use of recall is appropriate when the electorate deems it to be so. But what about malfeasance in office? That’s why we have a criminal code!
Of course it hardly needs to be pointed out that the Fullerton Recall has several great reasons to get rid of the Three Dithering Dinosaurs, including failure to lead, creating and tolerating a Culture of Corruption in the FPD, backing an illegal tax on your water for 15 years, and of course, let us not forget, all those insider deals to cronies and campaign contributors in which they gave away streets, sidewalks and government subsidies worth millions.
Anyway, next time you hear somebody like Molly McClanahan or Jan Flory cluck-clucking about this, be sure to to ask them if they’ve ever even bothered to read the State’s Constitution.
The following is an open letter from Chris Thompson of the Fullerton Recall to Larry Bennett, the Chairman of Protect Fullerton – Recall No (the anti-recall campaign). It was emailed directly to Larry a few moments ago.
Dear Larry Bennett,
As one of the supporters of the Fullerton Recall, I would like to publicly invite the leaders of the anti-recall committee known as Protect Fullerton – Recall No to debate the issues of this campaign. We believe that the public would benefit tremendously from your organization answering our questions publicly and openly and by the leaders of the Fullerton Recall answering yours. We are utterly open to any venue, format, time or circumstance as long as a public vetting of ideas, issues and values is the goal. Our preference would be to include the three council members involved, but we are willing to debate only the anti-recall supporters and leaders. In the hope of encouraging your participation, we are willing to call for recall supporters to stand down and even disallow protests and signage if the law allows. In fact, if it is your preference, a forum could be held in a closed environment so long as both sides are allowed to video the event in its entirety. We are willing to discuss format, rules and participants and are likely to defer to your wishes as long as the forum allows for bringing our assertions and yours into the light of day.
We have made many assertions about Pat McKinley, Don Bankhead and Dick Jones’ failure to lead. You have answered with many claims of self-interest and political axe-grinding by recall supporters. I think one thing that you and I can and will agree on is that the truth of these claims are very important to the Fullerton community.
Simply stated, if Tony Bushala is pursuing this recall for the sake of his own business interests at the expense of the taxpayers, it absolutely serves the voters of Fullerton to be educated on this reality. In fact, if I become convinced of this, I will cease to be a political ally of Tony’s. In turn, if McKinley, Bankhead and Jones have placed the protection of… and interests of public employee unions and their supporters ahead of the interests of the voters, this should be brought to light.
If right and truth are on your side, I can see little downside to this proposal for your campaign. I know that you have my number and email Larry. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Chris Thompson, Representative The Fullerton Recall
Here’s the entire episode of today’s Inside OC show; it’s a full blown battle of wits on why the recallees deserve to be thrown out of office in the wake of their catastrophic failure to lead.
In it you will find a furious debate between Chris Thompson and the anti-recall team’s Chief Distraction Officer, Larry Bennett, along with Bruce Whitaker’s accusation of an FPD cover-up in the aftermath of the Kelly Thomas murder.
Finally, the show closes with a sad, sad interview with Pat McKinley, who claims he still doesn’t understand the accusations against him and his police department, although he does summon enough mental clarity to remind us that Officer Manny Ramos’ criminal defense attorney is very highly regarded.
