Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Want to see and hear what a real local hero has to say about Kelly Thomas and the FPOA Blueshirts? Check it out:
I don’t know about you, but I think if we had a few more Baxters and a few fewer Florys we would have had a whole helluva lot less trouble around here in the past year.
Yes, we know the cops and their family members love the FPD. But you know who else loves the Fullerton police enough to chip in for those blue shirts?
Take a look at the most recent donations to the FPOA political committee for the period ending 6/30/12. It includes some familiar names.
Manuel Ramos
Jay Cicinelli
Albert Rincon
Sound familiar?
On Tuesday the City Council is scheduled to discuss what they want to do about the embarrassing fact that the City charged an illegal 10% tax on our water bill for fifteen years, amassing a total rip-off that easily topped $25,000,000. The funds were deposited in General Fund and mostly went to pay for salaries and pensions of City employees that had absolutely nothing to do with the acquisition and transmission of water – the ostensible purpose of the levy. It even went to pay for four-star hotels for Councilmembers’ League of City junkets.
Some folks think reparations are due, in some fashion, to the rate payers that got ripped off. But how? A check in the mail? Lowered rates in the future? Repayment from the General Fund to the Water Fund?
The City doesn’t have $25 mil laying around, and rebates in the future for past indiscretions would certainly create inequities. Going back just a few years for reparations may be a logical and practical step. Repayment from the General Fund over time may be the only recourse and would certainly address the original purpose of the “in-lieu fee” which was the cost of delivering water to the people and businesses of Fullerton. However it should be pointed out that the the 10% that was raked off was never connected to the true cost of the water in the first place.
Another question to be dealt with is what is an applicable rate for miscellaneous City costs that are currently unrecompensed by the Water Fund? There isn’t much unaccounted for, and the “consultant” for the Water rate Ad Hoc Committee tried to cook up some phony percentage between 6 and 7 based largely on the cost of the City charging the Water Fund rent!
This raises all sorts of embarrassing questions about why the Water Utility was not permitted to acquire all this valuable real estate in the first place, dirt cheap, if now it is to be treated as a separate entity; and how a landlord can negotiate rent with his tenant when they are both one and the same person. In any case there is a new council that is a lot less likely to cave in to this sort of nonsense than the old stumblebums.
In any case, I want to mention a couple of things. First, the perpetrators of the scam need to be identified and chastised for their complicity in the tax: they would be all of the former councilmen of the last 15 years who let this happen; the city managers Jim Armstrong, Chris Meyer, and Joe Felz, who participated in the scheme and who either knew or should have known it was illegal; and let’s not forget Richard Jones, Esq., the City Attorney, who was there every single step of the way and damn well knew it was illegal. Second, Joe Felz’ obvious strategy of stalling and temporizing on this issue, aided and abetted by the Three Hollow Logs and Sharon Quirk, protracted the rip-off by another full year and compounded the problem even more, even as they knew the jig was up.
It should be interesting to see if any of our aspiring council candidates show up to share their wisdom on this subject.
What do you think?
Friends, here’s a repeat post by our esteemed JFD from last November. It is even more trenchant now that his former mistress has declared war on the only two really good councilmen Fullerton has had as long as I can remember – and that’s a long time.
– The Desert Rat
Whenever my former mistress got into a mood or had a couple too many G&Ts, and picked up that broomstick I always made myself as inconspicuous as possible. Looking down from doggie heaven I can see she hasn’t changed much. It’s good to know she still has that metal rod firmly stuck in there.
Here she is at the Fullerton City Council meeting during public comments handing out some cooked-up award to Pat McKinley.
Notice how she grieves for Fullerton because of the incivility to her “esteemed” councilmen, Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc (I gotta tell ya she never grieved after whacking my orbital bone with that broomstick, but that’s a another story altogether, eye blousing-wise).
Obviously she has set a rather low bar for estimation; if Old Doc HeeHaw can haul himself over it, I guess almost anybody can.
Apparently my former mistress doesn’t give much thought to the $350,000 settlement that a hand-picked McKinley cop cost the taxpayers of Fullerton because he sexually assaulted women in the backseat of his patrol car; or that McKinley thinks that it’s okay for a certain kind of woman to be so victimized; and that, according to Big Mac “it’s just touching. Not a good thing, but it ain’t a dangerous thing;” or that her esteemed councilmen turned over Fullerton to the cops to do with it as they liked – theft, beatings, perjury, false arrest, a killing.
Mrs. Flory somehow got an extra seven minutes to ramble on and on about all sorts of bullshit, whereas others get the microphone shut off after three. Looks like there really is a double standard there.
Anyway, there you have a fine representative of what’s left of Fullerton’s Old Guard liberals: stubborn, frightened, clueless, self-righteous, dwindling fast.
The Voice of OC(EA) is reporting here about the protest held in front of the Old Courthouse by NOW, the OCEA and others demanding that the State’s Attorney General look into the sexual mistreatment of female County workers at the hands of Carlos Bustamante and his superiors.
You’ll notice that one of the “others” was our own Mayor Sharon Quirk. Well, okay.
But wait! Almost immediately the name Albert Rincon sprung to mind. Who is Albert Rincon? He is the stand-up Fullerton cop that none of the FPD apologists ever want to talk about; the creep who was accused of serially molesting women in the backseat of his patrol car and who cost the taxpayers of Fullerton $350,000 to settle two of the cases.
Remember that these assaults took place during Quirk’s tenure on the council; and that Rincon, in response to numerous complaints from abused women, was merely required by his superiors to take patdown training classes; and that after the settlement was announced, Rincon was quietly permitted to walk away from the FPD – for entirely different reasons.
And what did the outraged Quirk do to investigate an institution that not only permitted, but virtually encouraged this predator? What did she do to bring justice to all the victims?
What’s that Sharon? We can’t hear you?
Next time she goes looking for female victims to stand up for, I humbly submit Quirk doesn’t have to look quite so far afield.
Well, here ya go: the last gasp of Fullerton’s Yellowing Observers? Could be. As my old friend Don Carlos Marx once said: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Imagine a world where you could establish your own police force. A force that doesn’t kill innocent human beings and pretend it never happened; one whose members don’t falsify evidence, or beat people up, or steal from the evidence room, or from TSA checkpoints.
Imagine a police department where male members don’t sexually assault women in their police cruisers, and in which evidence in a jail suicide is not destroyed; where the official spokeshole doesn’t peddle bullshit to non-inquisitive media with impunity. Imagine a department where no lazy or crooked cops ID the wrong man and send him to jail. Imagine a force where the chief doesn’t deny the undeniable; or where the chief can’t get a disability retirement for high blood pressure and an achy tummy.
Can you imagine such a world?
The folks who put to gather this website can’t.
They also can’t spell the name of their antagonist.
By the way, do feel that you have had one iota of control over the Culture of Corruption?
The natives are getting restless. Well, some of them, anyhow. It appears that a campaign to keep the Fullerton Police Department is underway. Here’s the Facebook site.
Obviously the cop union has decided to start promoting its own perpetuation since the union would cease to exist if, say, the OC Sheriff Department assumed a police services contract with Fullerton – as Yorba Linda just did. And the residents of Fullerton are paying over 30% more, per capita, for municipal policing than the good folks in the City of Gracious Living.
The union’s intention is no doubt to try to make “local control” a fall 2012 campaign issue – and that’s good. Given the behavior of the FPOA brethren and sistren the past couple of years, and budget-busting cost of the FPD to the taxpayers, reasonable people may well be wondering about alternatives.
A lot of people will be asking where was the “local control” when Veth Mam was framed? Where was it when Albert Rincon was molesting women in his patrol car? Where was it when Kelly Thomas was murdered?
On Sunday I had the opportunity to witness an amazing display of principle and courage. As many of you know, our neighbors to the south in Anaheim had the misfortune of yet another police killing of 25-year-old Manuel Diaz who was unarmed. Diaz is the 7th person killed by Anaheim cops this year. The killing sparked neighborhood protests, one of which I attended outside the Anaheim police station.
A group of anarchist protesters armed with short sticks approached police on horses in front of the police station where Anaheim Crusader Teresa Smith was standing and protesting. Teressa’s son, Cesar Cruz, was another victim who died at the hands of the APD in 2009. She’s been protesting and advocating for peace and justice every Sunday outside the Anaheim police station for the past two years.
The anarchists were carrying short broom sticks and had their faces covered with bandannas. As they approached, Teressa told the angry group of anarchist to put down the sticks and protest peacefully. Marlena Carrillo and Shelly Kearney with Kelly’s Army showed up to support Teressa and also encouraged the angry protesters to stand down.
The angry group calmed down and the rest of the protest went peacefully from that point on. No broken windows, no rocks or bottles, although the police did arrest several people for no apparent reason.
Sunday’s protest ended peacefully despite the ARMY of cops there prepared to maim and kill. That’s a direct result of the courage of a group of principled women who were driven by peace to advocate for peace.
Check this out:
The streets of Bagdad or Kabul? No, this occupying force is all dressed up with no place to go – except the mean streets of Anaheim, where the police department has done just about everything possible to take a bad situation and make it worse.
But what’s with all the paramilitary bullshit? Camouflage? Really? What the Hell have we let out country become? Why did we let a bunch of neo-conservative chickenhawks and cowardly statist liberals turn our nation into a place where the local street cops are parading around with all the latest military hardware Homeland Security could buy for them?
I don’t know about you, but the thought of a Cicinelli, a Wolfe, a Ramos, or a Hampton decked out like GI Joe, gives me nothing but apprehension. In Fullerton our new council needs to start scrutinizing this militarization of the flatfoots, and PDQ.