Boohooism Archives - Page 28 of 29 - Friends For Fullerton's Future

January 17, 2010January 17, 2010Boohooism

Say What’s An Executive Director Do, Anyway?

Update: Ten days ago I posted this piece about the Fullerton Collaborative’s empty on-line calendar. I opined that maybe it was the executive director’s job to keep it updated, and archly suggested that maybe there wouldn’t be that much on it anyway. We received the usual irrelevant and hardly coherent comment-blather from Collaborative member Minard Duncan informing us all about the wonderful work Keller does.

Well, the calendar is still empty for all of 2010! Apparently Minard didn’t bother to let Keller know that the on-line public has no immediate information about what the Collaborative is up to; or, if he did, Keller decided that she was too busy to catch us up on what she’s planning for 2010. C’mon, Pam. You can’t be that busy!

The Fullerton Collaborative’s website calendar page declares ever so earnestly:

There are so many ways to get involved in our community. During the next few months there will be many fundraisers and community events to benefit local non-profit organizations and educational institutions.

And yet a perusal of the monthly calendars shows nothing. Blank. A completely clean slate, clean for all of 2010, in fact. Check it out if don’t believe me.

Now maybe I’m sort of funny this way, but I figure if you’ve got an executive director whom you are paying over $50K (for a part-time job) that individual ought to be able to at least take a few moments out of her busy day to fill in some of the blanks on the calendar. I mean, that’s Pam Keller’s job isn’t it?

pamkeller — I just got tired of doing it. Nobody ever reads that calendar, anyway...

Of course if Keller actually does get around to filling out the calendar, then fellow collaborators and even the public may find out how little fifty-thou buys you nowadays, executive director-wise.

As this blog noticed last year, Keller is not a Collaborative employee, but a Fullerton School District employee contracted to work for the Collaborative – where her job entails raising money from members and donors to pay the FSD for her dubious services. Sweet gig. No boss, no oversight, not even much paperwork.

Maybe in 2010 she can get around to filling in the Collaborative calendar.

January 13, 2010January 13, 2010Boohooism

Minard Duncan and the Doctrine of Unaccountability

by Mr. Peabody9 Comments

A few days ago on this post about Pam Keller’s blank Collaborative calendar, we received a visit from FSD trustee Minard Duncan. As is usual, Minard’s visit was vacuous and inane. Just about what you’d expect from an educrat. Minard admitted his comments were just made to “rile” us up.

But what was really interesting was when Minard dropped this spud on the Friends, unwittingly revealing a mindset that reveals all the things wrong with Fullerton’s elected representatives:

School board members do not have any power as individuals. It takes three board members out of a five member board agreeing on an issue to have authority. We are the boss of the district superintendent and no one else but not as individuals only as a collective board.

See, Minard indicates that authority (power) is only to be exercised by a majority, and, moreover, through the conduit of a Superintendent – thus effectively removing the “elected” from actually having to do much of anything except hire a single underling and ratify his decisions. And of course the consequence of Minard-think is that the responsibility and accountability attendant upon elected office is conveniently dissipated through delegation to a host of protected bureaucrats who are never held accountable either.

But whoever thought that the absence of a majority meant that a boardmember was somehow robbed of any of the authority vested in him by the electorate? While it takes a board majority to act affirmatively on a specific issue, the authority of an elected is indivisible. Minard is not just a third of a potential majority, nor does he represent only a theoretical one fifth of the property tax payers and parents – although he doesn’t seem to grasp this idea.

It is each boardmember’s responsibility to concern himself with everything that goes on in his district and to take responsibility for it.

Minard-think leads to the complete dereliction of responsibility that seems to obtain not only at the FSD, but also at Fullerton City Hall, too, where electeds delegate responsibility right along with the authority they invest in their City Manager. And of course as any honest council watcher knows, the Council, through laziness and/or inclination, is completely in thrall to the Chief Bureaucrat who is supposed to be working for them. It’s rather like the Stockholm Syndrome.

And you know what? A lot of electeds and their bureaucratic masters sure seem to like it that way.

January 5, 2010January 5, 2010Boohooism

The OCCCO Scam

by The Desert Rat7 Comments

Earlier today a Friend tipped us off to this self-serving video produced by OCCCO (Orange County Congregation Community Organization) touting its alleged accomplishments. The whole thing is really embarrassing. Trying to take credit for Anaheim’s “$100,000,000” housing policy is just laughable.

But when this group of group of lefty do-gooders bragged about their successful petition to the Fullerton City Council for west Fullerton to be included in the fraudulent Redevelopment expansion, some of us in the editorial room got pissed off. Cut to the 7:30 mark of the youtube clip to avoid a lot of uber-mind-numbing drivel.

Pam Keller4 — Oh yeah, I got a posse and man are they dumb...

First, we have already demonstrated the not too coincidental elevation of some woman called Lee Chalker to the Board of Directors of the Fullerton Collaborative with her sudden interest in Redevelopment issues, here; could any reasonable human being believe that Chalker and her OCCCO pals weren’t persuaded by Collaborative Executive Director and City Council woman Keller to go to public meetings and pimp something they knew absolutely nothing about? They got $26,000 bucks a couple of years ago for “community organizing” from Keller so maybe they figured they owed her, quid pro quo.

But to take credit for their stoogery in a fraudulent political act as an accomplishment not only suggests a complete lack of real accomplishment, but it also suggests a moral bankruptcy, too. Either that or a really low level of intelligence.

Well, really, what did you expect?

January 4, 2010January 4, 2010Behind Closed Doors

“Fiscal Conservative” Pam Keller Blows More Than $1200 Bucks At Local League Of Cities Meeting

by The Desert Rat40 Comments

If it's in my interest, it's in the public's interest, too! — If it's in my interest, it's in the public interest, too!

Hoo Boy! So this is how a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative squanders our money.

In the fall of 2008 Pam Keller attended the California League of Cities Annual Meeting, a useless agglomeration of bureaucrats and bureaucrat lovin’ electeds who like to micromanage everybody’s life while we pay for it.

The event was held at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach, a luxury hotel, exactly 26.1 miles from Fullerton. The distance is so vast that Pam decided to stay at the hotel for three nights and amassed a bill of $1236.10. Check out the payment vouchers, the hotel invoice, and even a handwritten request for nine buck’s reimbursement for parking, here.

Seems Pam also took along a guest, and, among other treats, they may have availed themselves of a trip to the LB Aquarium that was included in the deal.

Even if we disregard the questionable usefulness of attending one of these taxpayer funded boondoggles, what on earth was the need for Keller to stay at a hotel whose drive-time distance Mapquest lists at a mere 28 minutes?

And I have to wonder how all of Keller’s lefty knee-jerk supporters could possibly countenance this sort of profligacy of public money. $1,200 could be used collaboratively to feed a lot of homeless people, right?

Now to be perfectly fair (I am a very fair person), Fullerton’s two RINOs, Don Bankhead and Dick Jones also attended this conference and also racked up big bills. At least Jones went alone.

Friends, this is likely not the only Keller taxpayer-funded junket and rest assured, we will be providing examples of others in the very near future if we find them.

January 4, 2010January 4, 2010Boohooism

Babs Giasone Hits New High in Low

by The Fullerton Shadow7 Comments

And by low we mean a really, really, rock-bottom sort of low.

A helpful Friend shared this link to a Barbara Giasone News Tribune, er, “article” from 12/21/09 about some former florist delivery boy and long-mustache contest award winner who showed up at the Fullerton Library impersonating Gene Simmons of the 1970 rock band KISS. This seems to be his current means of employment. Good thing Barbara was on the scene to relay the crucial breaking news to her readers. What if we had missed this? Ha! Just think of all that time other reporters have wasted going to journalism school!

But seriously (!) now, Friends, we’re a city of 140,000 people and this is the sort of thing the Register/News Tribune newshawks think Fullertonians want to see:

Another scoop for Babs... — Another big scoop for Babs...

But what do we know? This is the same “journalist” who was recently recognized by some sort of “Women in Leadership” event for her achievements. And Pam Keller has publicly praised her as “our wonderful Barbara Giasone.” Perhaps this is exactly the kind of thing Fullertonians want to see! If so, it is the kind of thing we deserve.

Well, maybe not all of us.

December 28, 2009December 28, 2009Boohooism

Just One, Big Happy Family

by The Desert Rat14 Comments

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.

Comments?

December 24, 2009December 28, 2009Boohooism

In Fullerton It’s Only Over When Staff Says Its Over

by Jan Florys Dog6 Comments

I don't mind being led around just so long as I don't know where I'm going. — 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!

December 19, 2009December 30, 2009Behind Closed Doors

Another Disaster in the Making

by The Fullerton Shadow9 Comments

How come our electeds don’t seem to be able to grasp simple concepts; why have they no resistance to the bureaucratic sales pitch; why must they obscure their own ignorance in a cloud of asinine nonsense or outright lies?

Last Tuesday night the Fullerton City Council/Redevelopment Agency approved the idiotic Richman housing project, a staff-concocted, no-bid, pet project that proposes to subsidize ownership of condos. The vote was 3-1, Sharon Quirk-Silva, dissenting. Shawn Nelson took a powder.

Why is this project idiotic? First we believe that the ownership of a house is something that should be available equally, and not doled out by the government to its own selected recipients.

Second, the units in this project will have to be perpetually restricted to people whose income levels qualify. Perfect: perpetual housing bureaucracy! The necessary deed restrictions are a pretty significant encumbrance and will just add to the financial shakiness of the whole enchilada. But without these restrictions the original buyers would be in line for a massive windfall courtesy of all of us, when they sell.

A third point, as was admirably developed by Sharon Quirk-Silva, the proposed occupancy restrictions would very likely disqualify people who need housing the most. Which leads to the fourth point. These units will not count against Fullerton’s most neglected RHNA category – low and very low income. Which leads to:

Five. Dick Jones claimed that approving the Richman project is required to satisfy some legal mandate – it is THE LAW. That’s just a tin-plated, bald-faced lie. The SCAG RHNA allocations are goals, not a legal mandate. Cities are required by the State HCD to provide evidence of programs used to achieve those goals – not specific projects. And, in any case hypocritically, this project does not address the most urgent RHNA category of all which means that for folks who profess to really like this sort of thing, an opportunity has been lost.

Finally, FFFF has tried to promote better, more sustainable design in government-subsidized projects. And this project just promises more of the same old architectural crap we’ve been getting all along.

And now that we contemplate this fiasco, we feel the need for a last minute adendum to the Fringie Worst Vote category.

December 19, 2009December 28, 2009Boohooism

Two Peas In A Pod

by admin9 Comments

Today the Friends were amused by the photograph below that came across our wire. Now many things can be drawn from the visual, however, since a picture says a thousand words we thought we would just post it for all to see. Let the picture do the talking for itself sort of thing.

Pam Keller with Pelosi
Our staff Opthamologist has suggested a little trick while observing the photo. Stare straight at the photo for thirty seconds while repeating the words from Pam Keller “I am a fiscal conservative” over and over and see if your eyes go crossed.

December 13, 2009December 28, 200972nd Election

The Candidates Should be Ashamed of Their Ballot Statements

by Mr. Peabody17 Comments

I was talking to a co-worker the other day about the 72nd AD Special Election Sample ballot that came out last week. He expressed a feeling of disgust about the statements of the two traditional party candidates. I asked him to write up a post on the subject and he obliged. Here it is. The images were added by yours truly.

The Republican and Democrat candidates for the 72nd Assembly District Election ought to be ashamed of their ballot statements. But shame, as we learned from the example of Mike Duvall, is an emotion with a real low threshold for most politicians.

Let’s first examine Chris Norby’s ballot statement. He mentions how his opposition to higher taxes has earned him the endorsement of Tom McClintock and Ed Royce. Ed Royce? What kind of nonsense is this? A few weeks ago Ed Royce was supporting the lying, fraudulent, carpetbagging campaign of Linda Ackerman. And now Norby is bragging about the value of the endorsement from this empty little suit?

Norby touts his “vote” to place immigration agents in County jails to weed out illegal aliens. Why INS agents are needed to “identify” aliens is unclear and what, exactly they are doing in the jails remains a mystery. Well “whoop-de-do” as Archie Bunker once said. This is not an accomplishment, just pandering to the rabid anti-immigrant crowd, and Norby should know better.

Norby also takes credit for “spearheading” “improvements” to the 5 and 22 freeways as Chairman of the OCTA, even though both projects were in the works long before Norby showed up; and of course, the 22 was months and months behind schedule until the OCTA bureaucrats and the contractor worked out a massive, mutual face-saving change order that cost the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

So much for Norby.

Now, let’s take a look at the ballot statement of Norby’s opponent, Democrat John MacMurray.

MacMurray graduated from donkey college... — Why don't they send donkeys to college? Because nobody likes a smart ass.

As a public school teacher should we expect more from MacMurray than a clumsy metaphor? Of course not! For MacMurray the awkward concept is the “three-legged table” supported equally by the three balanced legs of private sector, non-profit sector, and public sector. Everybody who has ever seen a three legged table please raise his hand. Apparently, John is worried about using the word “stool,” which is what his statement starts to smell like in the very first sentence.

I have great reservations about Mr. MacMurray’s invention of a “non-profit sector,” especially after the FFFF discoveries about how Fullerton’s Pam Keller has so effectively blurred the line between non-profit and public sector – so as to make the distinction in the mind of a liberal, non-existent.

MacMurray’s assertion that “we keep cutting support for our education system and cutting access to it” is obviously designed to generate outrage in the noblest liberal breast, but it’s a lie. Proposition 98 provides that a guaranteed percentage of the State budget goes to “education.” At least it goes to education spending. Any overall budget reductions are the fault of MacMurray’s spend-crazy Democrats in the Legislature who just can’t say nyet to the demands of public employee unions.

Cliches, lies, nonsense. Can’t we finally get an honest and intelligent ballot statement from the two candidates who are able to pay for one? Guess not. Not yet, anyway.