FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Category: About Us
Intelligent, Responsible, and Accountable. These are the general qualities we seek in our elected representatives – plus the independence and integrity required to be effective leaders.We intend to support candidates in Fullerton who possess the willingness and ability to use their independent intelligence in weighing public matters; who will be responsible to his or her constituents; and who will insist on accountability for all the actions that he or she takes. We will actively oppose incumbents who have failed to demonstrate the qualities described above; who fail to remember that they are servants of the public; who believe that being a “team player” is more important than principle; who don’t have the courage to stand on principle when it means standing alone; who are not humble enough to admit error and are incapable of learning from their mistakes; and those who fail to treat constituents with the respect and dignity they deserve. And we will oppose candidates who through their words or actions indicate that they would not provide intelligent and responsible leadership, accountable to citizens of Fullerton. If you agree with our philosophy, you are a friend of Fullerton’s future.
We just received this e-mail from a nice lady who recognizes the contribution of FFFF and Kelly’s Army in regards to the way the Fullerton police interacts with mentally ill folks.
Subject: keep up the pressure
I would like to thank you and Ron Thomas for all your efforts. I am the mother of a mentally ill son who just recently (Dec 4, 2011) had contact with Fullerton PD due to his illness and the way it was manage was amazing and human. They actually contacted his father for assistance with him and to get a better understanding of his history. I truly believe this is a result of the actions Ron Thomas and you are making. Thank you doesn’t even begin to cover it. Although I personally am not a citizen of Fullerton, I want you to know that I think what you are doing matters and hopefully spreads to get the kind of changes that are need when Police are dealing with mentally ill people. I know I am becomming more active in those changes in the small ways that I can. Keep up the pressure and the good work. This is one mother who thinks you are heroes.
We get a lot of e-mails from folks all over the place. The following, from a guy named Howard, is not atypical. A familiar thread is the theme of municipal cultures of corruption and lack of leadership across the republic.
Name: Howard McLay
Privacy: You may publish this under my name
Subject: Fullerton Leadership Mess
Since the death of Kelly Thomas, I have read the FFFF blog weekly.
I’m amazed at the depth of coverage of this clowncil.
I am also amazed at the height of the corruption and spending within the city.
This leads to an amazement of “How did it get this bad” considering all the info published in the FFFF blog.
This is not a criticism by any means of the good people involved or the people of Fullerton. For I live in Wayne County Mich where there is a FBI investigation ongoing with our leader, and the world knows about the Detroit mayor.
So my amazement is really…how in the world did our government get so lax in oversight, in checks and balances, to have these messes all across America.
My hope is that your recall, and the investigation into the killing of Kelly, comes to a just ending. Keep up the pressure!
Howard, thanks for the kind words and well-wishes. We will indeed keep up the pressure!
I'll be happy to take your money and waste it. Been doing that for years.
How many tens of thousands of dollars of Pat McKinley’s pension bucks have Anti-recall leaders “Dick” Ackerman and Dave “Dick” Ellis squandered so far?
The metamorphosis into an oxygen breathing life form conferred no added intelligence.
Tens of thousands? Here’s a hopeful blurb from Dick Ellis’ pathetic website:
Rescission Cards Flood In After Mailer Exposes Over 80 Bushala Code Enforcement Violations Click here to view
Uh, yeah, right. Those were the cards wishfully cast out, blindly, into a sea of possible Recall signatories. The idea was that some folks would take back their recall signatures when they learned what a monster Tony Bushala is.
The “flood” turned out to be more of a trickle that evaporated before it could even form a puddle.
Now that signatures have been submitted, we also know the fruits of Dick Ackerman’s campaign genius: 145 cards returned for each of the Three Dithering Dinosaurs. 145. And many of those are the names of dead jazz musicians, infamous criminals, and assorted fictional movie characters living at impossible addresses.
Consider that when compared to over 17,000 signatures gathered for the Recall on each of the Ossified Fossils and you will understand the breadth and depth of the Anti-recall failure. And be sure to recall Pat McKinley’s winning margin in 2010 – 90 votes.
How many tens of thousands of dollars were wasted on the Anti-recall mass mailing efforts? I don’t know. But I suggest that if you want to find out, you inquire of the experts in wasting our money: Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley.
Friends, over the past couple of months you may have noticed anonymous comments on some of our posts referring to “George” and “Jorge” and some sort of hit-and-run issue. Those comments referred to my brother George and came from inside the FPD. I let them go. Then. But not now.
This is a cautionary tale about a Culture of Corruption in the FPD that encourages the harassment of law abiding citizens. Getting a ticket from Barry Coffman for “excessive horning” is bad enough. Getting prosecuted for a non-existing “crime” is intolerable. Unfortunately this sort of thing has become business as usual with the FPD. It appears to be not only tolerated, but encouraged. And that’s what happens when the civilian authority abdicates its responsibility to oversee the cops.
Here’s the story.
Back on the morning of February 28, 2011 my brother George was driving east down Walnut Avenue, and turned right into the driveway of our office building parking lot. A car had parked quite close to the entry of the driveway, and as he turned in he heard a distinctive sound. After parking he noticed that the front bumper of the car was lying in the street.
He was pretty sure he hadn’t hit the car in any way, and there was no other damage to that car, or to his own vehicle; and he noticed that the bumper had been jerry-rigged at some point to stay on with sheet metal screws. He believed his right front tire just hit the thing as it lay in the roadway.
George kept watch on the car, and later in the afternoon a woman came to pick it up. He explained the situation and told Mrs. Bumper that he didn’t think he was responsible, but that he would help put the bumper back on with secure connections to the chassis the next day. She was grateful and drove off.
The next day her husband showed up and demanded that George buy him a new bumper. George suggested he go away and take his bumper with him.
Mr. Bumper filed a police report and soon George was interrogated by a couple of FPD cops. He told his story for the third time. The next thing he knew he was being charged by the District Attorney with Hit and Run, Unsafe Turn and Illegal Tampering With A Vehicle!
Story recap: No hit. No run. No unsafe turn. No tampering. No evidence. No witness. No nothing. Yet our esteemed DA, following the advice of FPD, had decided to prosecute my brother.
Of course George had to hire a lawyer who made six different court appearances on this idiotic “case.” Finally the DA blinked and offered George the DNA “spit and acquit” deal he makes with campaign-contributing food poisoners. George said no. With a trial date looming the DA’s office just dropped the whole thing on September 20th.
Too bad, in a way. I really looked forward to seeing those FPD clowns on the stand to explain and defend their evidence. Now the public will never see the facts behind what can only be described as a malicious attempt to intimidate and harass me through my brother.
Well, guess what, boys? It didn’t work.
How much police, DA and court time and money was completely wasted in this effort to try to push around a citizen and taxpayer? Who knows? Five different DA employees had their spoons in this soup, as well as judges, bailiffs, court scribes, etc.
But I know one thing. There is an entrenched Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department that runs pretty deep, and it needs to end soon!
Oh, oh! The truth almost escaped her mouth! (Image generously borrowed from Fullerton Stories)
It is July 22, 2011 and now-MIA Chief Sellers gets an e-mail from City Hall’s version of Andrew Goodrich, city publicist, Syliva Palmer.
She’s subsequently fled the the scene of the crime, and won’t have to answer embarrassing questions about this correspondence – like her insinuation that Councilman Bruce Whitaker leaked inside information to FFFF in a post. Apparently the otiose Palmer was too lazy to actually read the post, and too stupid to follow the link to The Fullertonian – the ones who actually caught Goodrich in the broken bones lie.
But so what if Whitaker had actually had a hand in disseminating the truth? The outright lie about Fullerton cops suffering broken bones was propagated by Goodrich, clearly with the blessing of Sellers and Plamer, and now we may safely assume, Palmer’s boss City Manager, Joe Felz. Perhaps with the blessing of the Three Dead Tree Stumps, too. That would certainly fit the truth-challenged profile of Pat McKinley.
Note also that Palmer laments the fact that the media didn’t talk to other reliable councilmen who, presumably were only too happy to toe the party line.
UPDATE: Here’s a vintage FFFF post from several years ago. I promised to re-run it once in a while. It’s been about 28 months so here ya go!
Dear Friends:
The other day we got an e-mail from a thoughtful friend who said that he agreed with much of what we post about here, but is pained to hear folks attacked for “style and presentation” rather than policy, and that in the end we “have to work together to build a better community and the personal attacks only make that process more difficult in the end.”
I have to chuckle just a bit when somebody says “your attacks are personal.” That’s another way of saying we name names, express our outrage colorfully, and want accountability, something that has been sorely lacking in Fullerton for as long as I can remember. And I, for one, take that personally. Nobody likes to be called stupid, but when you act like you’re infallible and yet keep doing stupid or thoughtless things you not only invite ridicule, you deserve it. We use satire, sarcasm, and attempts at humor because these are good tools to get our points across – something you can’t do being brushed off at a council meeting twice a month. We want to get people’s attention – everyone’s.
And so I set out to tell the Fullerton story from my perspective, and the perspective of others who felt the same way I did, and those who had been effectively excluded from the decision making process. We decided that we would tell the truth, as we saw it by describing facts and presenting the names of people who took bad decisions or who acted in their own interests instead of the interest of the public. That sounds like taking on a pretty big responsibility, and I didn’t do it lightly, nor do I believe that I am better than any one else. But I have this forum and I intend to keep up the pressure on our electeds and their staff to take responsibility for their actions. We have invited comment or correction from anybody – something you’ve never yet seen happen at City Hall.
In closing, it is our intention to help build a better community for Fullerton’s future. But we’re going to do it our way. Sometimes you’ve got to knock over a few Sacred Cows to clear the road.
We've got a pretty sweet gig here, and we're not moving on our own!
Now that the Governor’s decision to put the kibosh on Redevelopment in California has been upheld by the State Supreme Court, our lawsuit to stop the illegal expansion of Fullerton’s Redevelopment project area is becoming something of a moot point.
Too bad, because we really wanted the City to try to defend its ridiculous findings of blight in front of a judge.
Well, we’re not going to forget that the bogus attempt was made, and made hard by Fullerton’s Redevelopment junkies – Bankhead, Jones and McKinley. These guys are absolutely hooked on government creating dimwitted master plans, buying into stupid boondoggles and handing out taxpayer subsidies and freebies to their pals and campaign contributors.
In the coming months we will be sure to remind Fullerton citizens of the City’s history of expensive Redevelopment failures and the part played in these disasters by our “esteemed” City Council.
Well, Friends, 2011 was a record year for our humble little blog. We’ve had 2,013,945 visitors, and counting. I wonder what next year will bring for a blog that all began here, the day I questioned the ridiculous and deteriorating Redevelopment Styrofoam light fixtures at the downtown plaza.
See what I mean?
Styrofoam, the Redevelopment material of choice...
That was just three short years ago, and since then we’ve taken on every Sacred Cow of Fullerton’s reactionary old guard – from ridiculous Redevelopment boondogglery to a police department stewed in rampant corruption. And we’re not done yet, not by a long shot.
Stick around as we continue to poniard the pompous and demand accountability from the unaccountable. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll experience a whole range of emotions. We promise.
Last night my compadre the Harpoon penned an angry response to words attributed to outgoing “Acting” Chief Kevin Hamilton that Fullerton was “a town under attack.”
It was a good try, but Harpoon missed the point. Fullerton is under attack!
Fullerton is under attack by a rogue police force that couldn’t control its own uniformed hoodlums, even if it wanted to. And apparently it doesn’t.
Fullerton is under attack by a sclerotic trio of antiquated imbeciles who will never take responsibility for their own failure of leadership.
Fullerton is under attack by a bureaucracy that has fraudulently duped the water rate payers for at least 15 years by tacking on a 10% tax on their water bills without a single effort to inform them about it. Every step of the way in this squalid scam the City Council nodded agreement, and said nothing.
Fullerton is under attack from the Redevelopment Army of jobbers, fixers, bag, men, whores, and other assorted camp followers who want to divert funds from necessary public use into the pockets of favored “developers,” consultants, and lobbyists. And our Three Sclerotic Tree Sloths? Bamboozled? Of course not. These supposedly staunch conservatives are hooked on the smack of Central Government Economic Planning like a street hype is to his junk.Jones even referred to Redevelopment money as candy to be handed out to deserving kids.
Think the threat is false? Even now the Three Dry Wells are pursuing a legal battle to illegally broaden Fullerton’s Redevelopment zone into areas where there is no blight, a basic legal requirement.
Fullerton is under attack by an ignorant, somnolent, rude, self-righteous Turgid Trio that has left the city’s infrastructure a mess, the citizens in fear of their safety, and budget reserves depleted.
Yes Fullerton is under attack. Harpoon got one thing right. We are Fullerton. And we’re fighting back
Yes, Friends, it’s that time of year again when we announce the nominations for the 3rd Annual Fringie Awards®, followed by the decisions by our esteemed selection committee.
Announcement of the nominees in all of the exciting categories will commence on Monday, so be sure to stay tuned for all of the fun.
If this doesn’t make you want to go lift your leg on a Fullerton fire hydrant or city councilman, then there is definitely something wrong with you.
In the coming months we will be sure to remind Fullerton citizens of the City’s history of expensive Redevelopment failures and the part played in these disasters by our “esteemed” City Council.
