The Great Fullerton Recall of 1994 removed A.B. “Buck” Catlin, Molly McClanahan, and Don Bankhead from the Fullerton City Council. The recall arose from citizen outrage against a series of utility taxes enacted during a recession. The rejection of the utility taxes ultimately saved Fullerton residents and businesses over $120 million.
The Old Boy Network of the Fullerton establishment held a fundraiser for their old boys at the Villa Del Sol the other night. We will be sharing our own video later if our boys in the White Van ever recover from their serial ingestion of raw opium poppies that admin now grows in his backyard.
Lookin' good in yellow! (Photo by Marisa Gerber OC Weekly)
In the meantime, here’s a story on the event from Marisa Gerber of the OC Weekly. She mordantly describes the anti-recall attendees:
a rather homogeneous crew of sexagenarians and older — gathered at a pricey fundraiser tonight to support three beleaguered city leaders.
As usual the best quote of the night come from high school graduate and architect of the Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department, Pat McKinley:
He can handle it, he said, adding that what frustrated him most was hearing people “who probably never graduated high school” bad-mouth the mayor, who used to be a doctor.
Oh, oh. The literary She Bear who gets $215,000 a year courtesy of the taxpayer for doing nothing is taking shots at the academic accomplishments of the recallers. Bad idea Chief. Some folks might start asking about the scholastic level of your police force!
Yesterday I talked to the Fair Political Practices Commission regarding the complaint filed against Tony Bushala by Tony Florentine. This complaint is actually posted as “Breaking News” on the anti-recall crowd’s ugly website.
So what’s the status of this Breaking News? Tony Florentine’s “complaint” was flatly rejected by the FPPC.
Truth was a concept that eluded him...
In effect, the complaint never made it past the receptionist. It seems that Tony Bushala’s actual transgression was over-reporting! The assertion was that an individual, major donor must file a brief Form 461. Bushala actually legally reported all of his activities using the more comprehensive Form 460 in forming General Purpose committees. In other words, Bushala worked harder than he needed to fully disclose all of his political activities.
The FPPC was not amused by Dick Ackerman's latest clownery.
The FPPC representative actually seemed amused that such a complaint would be filed and made it clear that she personally had fully explained all of these circumstances to somebody calling themselves a treasurer for the anti-recall.
In fact, the only reason to even look at the complaint would be to enjoy some of Florentine’s “evidence,” including humorous mailers leveled against his RINO pals in years past.
I can hardly blame these guys for throwing this worthless claim against the wall and then lying about the results. I would have no idea how to defend three RINO council members who have spent us into the enormous financial hole that we find ourselves in while pumping up the staffing, salaries and pensions of their primary supporters.
Watch this video clip of Fullerton City Councilman Bruce Whitaker explaining to David Nazar the lies, half-truths and distortions he’s been getting from his own employees about the Kelly Thomas murder.
Whitaker understands what we have understood all along: the Fullerton Police Department and its spokesman, union boss Andrew Goodrich, had no interest in telling anybody what really happened to the homeless victim Thomas on that hot July night in the Fullerton Transportation Center. The falsified reports, the return of the murderers to the street, and the lies peddled by Goodrich all point to one inescapable conclusion: the police department, stalled, lied, and temporized waiting for the scandal to go away.
Yes, Bruce, it must be really exasperating for an elected official to be stonewalled and sandbagged by a bunch of goons and thugs dressed up like policemen, and also by your City Manager and City Attorney who have handed over legal and managerial oversight of the police department to the cops themselves; and even more exasperating to know that the Three Dessicated Dinosaurs are committed to participate in protecting the crooked Culture of Corruption status quo.
Here’s a damn funny letter sent into the Fullerton Observer by clever wordsmith Anthony “Big Tony” Florentine, a local “family friendly” bar owner and notorious rules-dodger. He has hundreds of thousands of reasons to support his corrupt pals on the City Council since they turned a blind eye to his illegal night club operation and then actually subsidized a fire sprinkler main so he could keep liquoring up the cast of Doc HeeHaw’s Wild West Show.
You may also recall how Big Tony even managed to swipe a public sidewalk with the help of his pals on the city council – probably the most blatant swindle in the history of Fullerton.
Florentine has been giving the Three Dyspeptic Dinosaurs campaign contributions for years and years, so these profitable quid pro quos shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. But it sure makes it hard to believe this cut rate Tony Soprano’s sincerity when he says anybody else on the planet is “full of shit.”
The best part of his letter is how this cheap bastard bamboozles The Observer into giving him a free ad for his place of business. Anyway, here is Florentine’s letter:
I was at Smart & Final several weeks ago where Tony Bushala was sitting at a card table soliciting signatures for the recall. I greeted him, shook his hand, and told him I thought he was full of s**t, and that what he was doing to our City was BS.
I offered that his only interest in this tragedy is to get control of the City Council so he can foist development projects that may be of questionable value. Whereupon he lost it and went berserk, which he is wont to do when one disagrees with him.
My expletives were not meant to insult him (I’m sure that would be hard to do), I used language I knew he could understand and that described his condition and the content of his actions.
There was no one outside Joe Florentine’s restaurant soliciting signatures, and no one who came outside and spit on anyone. If that had been the case why wouldn’t they have called the Fullerton P.D., identified the person and had them arrested for assault?
The whole story is another Bushala-inspired fabrication meant to discredit someone he doesn’t like.
By the way Florentines’ has a delicious new value added menu with large portions and a family friendly atmosphere. Try it. You’ll like it.
Oh look! The She-Bear, Pat McKinley, is bestowing his wisdom upon the women of north Orange County tonight at a Soroptimist gathering at Brea City Hall, Meeting Room A, tonight at 7 pm. Here’s the announcement:
For $5 the She-Bear will explain all about women using their inner ursine instincts to beat off assaults from felonious He-Bears, and McKinley delves into his subject with all the psychological depth and expertise bestowed by a 12th grade education. It’s all about instinct, where Pat’s alleged street savvy trumps any real intellectual understanding of anything.
Lookin' out for the ladies, oh yeah!
I wonder if any of the attendees will ask Ex-Chief McPension why he, as boss of the Fullerton Police Department, hired the sexual predator Albert Ricon, and then permitted him to remain on the streets preying upon female victims after already having been identified in numerous complaints. Rincon’s MO was to falsely arrest women and sexually assault them in the back seat of his patrol car.
And I wonder if Pat will explain why the City of Fullerton just handed over half a million bucks to two of Rincon’s victims to settle a civil rights law suit against Rincon and the City; or why Federal Judge Andrew Guilford dressed down McMillion’s department for its signal failure to protect the women of Fullerton from Rincon.
Perhaps the best advice McKinley can give us ladies is to stay out of FPD squad cars.
We are informed by the anti-recall campaign website that a character named Bill Gillespie has filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission against the campaign to recall the Three Deaf Dinosaurs: Jones, Bankhead and McKinley.
Allegedly this complaint is 25 pages in length the gist of which is no registration is on record for a political organization called The Fullerton Recall Committee. The only trouble is these idiots don’t know the actual name of the recall committee!
The name of the recall committee is: Committee Supporting the Recall of Bankhead Jones and McKinley, it has been registered, and of course has an FPPC number. I have been informed by recall organizers that nobody has made any attempt to make expenditures under any other name and that materials requiring it include the name and number.
Are these people really as stupid as they seem, or is this just a lame attempt to throw up some sort of smoke screen? Hard to tell since they really are pretty dumb.
And as for Bill Gillespie, seen here partying with Miss Fullerton 1992, somebody needs to let him know that being a stooge for Dick Ackerman won’t be paying big dividends, and that there’s no fool like a an old fool.
Here’s Bill’s contact info, courtesy of the Fullerton Chamber of Commerce just in case you want to take him to task for his abject flunkydom:
How dumb do the out-of-town anti-recall clowns think the people of Fullerton are?
Very, apparently.
On their laughable website they put up “proof” that I have taken money from Redevelopment. How so, you ask? By sharing the resolution approving my 1992 lease at the the Santa Fe Depot. These chowderheads highlight a paragraph indicating the Redevelopment Agency’s commitment to contribute 18% to the renovation of the depot. Thanks guys for proving my contribution to renovate the City-owned building was a whopping 82%, or $340,000!! Now does that sound like anybody gave me a dime?
In today’s LA Times an unnamed source in has indicated that the settlement of a sexual battery case with two women is going to cost us (you taxpayers, finally get it?) half a million bucks.
You remember the case, right? The one where FPD cop Albert Rincon alleged serially sexually assaulted women in the back of his patrol car; the one where Federal Judge Andrew Guilford refused the City’s request to throw the case out and issued a scathing opinion about the City’s complicity in the series of attacks by placing Rincon back on the streets of Fullerton to attack other women. Yeah, that one.
$500,000 right out of our pockets to pay for just one out of control cop and his bosses in the FPD who covered up for him. That would certainly include our MIA Chief Sellers and his predecessor and current council member Pat McKinley. And what in the world have former Fullerton cop Don Bankehead and Mayor Dick Jones been doing on the City Council for the past 23 and 15 years, respectively. They certainly appear unwilling to take any responsibility for the police department over which they were supposed to be asserting civilian control.
Remember to remind the Tumescent Trio of these facts tonight.
Frequent commenter, blessusall stopped by yesterday to share a thought about the formal “apology” on today’s City Council Agenda. As you all know the apology was from the City to the Nordell family because last year a bunch of heavily armed FPD cops broke into their house by mistake in some sort of botched drug raid.
blessusall opined about the irony of this insincere apology (got only by dodged persistence by the Nordells) vis-a-vis all the other FPD misbehaving’ going on lately and suggested the City might:
Who else, indeed. These pages are strewn with the miscreance, mayhem, and murder perpetrated by Pat McKinley’s hirees and trainees. At this point even the most die-hard cop apologist must be wondering about the stuff that hasn’t even emerged yet, and how much all this crap is going to cost the taxpayers of Fullerton.
Apology? Hell, yes! And why not demand that apology tonight!
When I was a kid, liberals were all about civil rights, social justice, anti-police corruption, women’s rights, etc., etc., etc.
Maybe professorial tenure, home mortgage interest deductions, and appointment to a City Community Service Commission or Bicycle Committee tends to make one complaisant. I don’t know.
In the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder at the hands of the FPD, and the revelation of a potential serial sex offender in FPD uniform, Fullerton’s liberals have been silent as a graveyard. A great letter to the Fullerton Observer by a guy named Steve Baxter sums up the situation to perfection.
Maybe this silence marks the difference between a statist liberal and what is now being called a “progressive.” I don’t know.
But one thing I do know: the first category includes our esteemed Congressional She-Bear, Loretta Sanchez, whose district includes south-central Fullerton, as well as some of the locations where women allege they were sexually assaulted in the backseat of an FPD patrol car!
Here’s an e-mail from one of the recall petition signature gatherers who re-enforces the ugly truth that Ed Royce isn’t our only congressional problem.
I was at the Stater Brothers today with my recall petition and I had an interesting conversation with a 50-ish red-headed woman who happens to work for Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. I asked her if she was interested in signing my petition to recall our City Councilman and Mayor and was sort of shocked when she declined. As she was putting away her groceries I asked her what Ms. Sanchez position was on the recent events that had occurred in Fullerton, and she told me that Ms. Sanchez was staying out of the matter because it didn’t involve her constituents. I said that that was odd because I had voted for her in the last election and that I live in West Fullerton. She said that Loretta’s district only encompassed a sliver of Fullerton and that where Kelly Thomas was beaten to death was out of her district!
I sort of left it at that, however when I got home and checked the district map for Loretta Sanchez I saw that not only is my home in her district, but the site where Kelly Thomas was beaten to death is maybe 200 feet from the boundary.
Is there any way that you guys can inspire this champion of women’s rights to engage in what’s going on here in Fullerton? I got the distinct impression that Loretta Sanchez was looking to stay out of the fray and distance herself from what’s going on in her district, and I think that it’s important that she get involved or make a statement on what her position is pertaining to violations of Kelly Thomas’s civil rights, as well as the violation of the these recent allegations of sexual assault under color of authority by members of the the Fullerton Police department.
Best Regards,
p.s. I’ve changed my political affiliation to “decline to state” on my voter registration so there is no love lost on Loretta.
It’s pretty obvious that Ms. Sanchez has seen her main chance in trying to ignore things in Fullerton and hope like hell that no one will ever associate her with what was done, or in her case what hasn’t been done. Comically Ms. Loretta found time from her busy schedule to attend the Fullerton Library re-opening – a building also not in her district – while 500 feet away people of good will were protesting the murder of a helpless homeless man at the hands of the FPD.
Disgustingly, Sanchez seems a lot more interested in the civil rights of Vietnamese women (who live eight thousand miles outsider her district) than with her own constituents.
Sanchez could get the Department of Justice fired up with a phone call. But even that smallest of gestures would require a modicum of courage.
