Once in a while we here at FFFF like to pluck a particularly trenchant comment from a thread to give it the attention it deserves.
Here is a great comment from one of our readers who cuts to the chase about the crazy, spittle-flecked ravings of Jay Cicinelli’s step-father, John Huelsman, the other night. Huelsman is some demento who supposedly used to be a cop in Anaheim – a claim that is perfectly believable.
This Huelsman character is clearly bonkers. But his twisted argument has been appearing on these pages from FPD cop trolls since the summer of 2011.
Enjoy some clarity of thought:
#192 by Finally, Justice for Kelly on September 22, 2012
With regard to Huelsman, I have to say I find this specimen to be all too typical of police intelligence.
First he confuses “the court system” to be somehow connected to Kelly Thomas, conveniently overlooking the awkward fact that his out-of-control son-in-law acted as judge, jury and executioner on the night of 7/5/11. And this is the whole point of the public outrage: Kelly was denied justice thanks to the Fullerton Six. He is dead. The justice system has no bearing on Kelly.
The justice system however, does have Cicinelli in its clutches, although woefully undercharged by our pathetic DA. And the court of public opinion has and will continue to condemn a Culture of Corruption that has festered in the FPD. Flory can deny it. Hughes can deny it. Quirk can deny it. Goodrich, Coffman and Gennaco can deny it. The cowards left and right can deny it. But we know the truth.
And the truth will set us free; it will not however, set Wolfe, Ramos or Cicinelli free.
Here is a fun image I just harvested from the Orange Juice blog, apparently the creation of local liberal activist Stephan Baxter who has gotten it into his noggin that Fullerton politicians should be held accountable for their actions (or to be more precise, their inaction) in the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder at the hands of members of the FPD. Funny the ideas some folks have.
Even more disturbing to some, Baxter doesn’t seem to care that the object of his scorn happens to be an old Democrat war horse named Jan Flory. who really loves the FPD.
Since I do not want to be accused of being sexist I shall refrain from a literary reference to Macbeth. I would note however that there is not enough brainpower in this picture to light a match.
Two observations. First “Kitty” Jaramillo seems to think it is “time for a change.” She never seemed to think it was time for a change when the FPD was beating people to death, so that tells you all you need to know about her, even if you didn’t know she was a well-pensioned former City employee.
Somebody better tell Mrs. Flory to quit wearing those rayon muu muu things and those cheap plastic beads. They scream out 1973. Which is probably when she bought them. Meeeeow. Hiss!!!!
P.S. Friends, for an added treat enjoy this picture of FPOA boss and serial prevaricator (or hoplessly incompetent) Andrew Goodrich proclaiming the Jaramillo buffet safe for FPOA consumption.
As a woman I have to say I found Jan Flory’s observation about Travis Kiger being intimidated by strong, older women pretty comical. The inference of course is that Jan Flory is a strong, older woman; and that as a corollary, Travis is a weak, younger man, possibly, Flory speculated, because his mommy didn’t nurse him long enough.
And now I ask you to dispel the image of Jan Flory nursing anything (warm blooded) herself to gain mommy experience, as I pursue my essay.
The implication that Travis Kiger is weak, and is in any way fearful of Jan Flory, I leave until the end to address. First I will start with Mrs. Flory’s self-description.
I note that Mrs. Flory bolts out of the starting gate with the implication that she is the victim of ageism and sexism. I am no longer offended by limousine liberals whipping out victimhood status, although generally they apply it to which ever class or race they happen to be pandering to.
Jan Flory isn’t “older.” She is old. She is probably in her seventies. That’s a fact and it’s germane, given the total lack of leadership and intellectual perspicacity, delivered by her “esteemed” elderly friends Bankhead, Jones and McKinley who were also in their eighth decade.
Age is a reality. You can try to hide it with lots of cosmetic surgery, but you can’t hide an ossified mindset locked in forty-year time lag. It reveals itself in rigid thought and its addiction to empty clichés, and meaningless abstractions.
Flory is strong, she says. Must we take her word for it? As a structural engineer I know that some materials such as unreinforced concrete or cast iron appear very strong; and so they are – in compression. Yet they lack strength in tension. They are not flexible and their very rigidity makes them comparatively brittle. And brittle is a term I would apply to the speech and demeanor of Jan Flory at the City Council microphone. Perhaps there is an underlying hysteria waiting to erupt. If it ever does, the crack-up will not be pretty, either.
“Strong” people of neither gender advertise their strength. The fact that Mrs. Flory finds it necessary to do so is a pretty clear indication of an underlying insecurity and inherent weakness.
It seems to have escaped Mrs. Flory’s notice that people may dislike her not because she is a strong, older woman, but because she seems to be an inflexible, humorless, mean, self-righteous scold – a veritable literary stereotype, in fact.
And then there is the Flory Record to consider, amply described on the pages of FFFF. Her previous years on the Fullerton City Council are informed by failure. Flory voted to approve an illegal tax on our water for six years; which also means she never balanced a legitimate budget. She gave away City property and streets worth millions to her developer friends. She voted to retroactively spike the pensions of “public safety” employees, burying the taxpayers and citizens under a multi-hundred million dollar mountain of unfunded pension liability.
And then there is the Flory Inaction: totally MIA about the murder of the mentally ill homeless man at the hands of Fullerton cops. Is that the behavior of a “strong, older woman” or the pitiful cowardice of an entropic, conscienceless fossil? What does Jan Flory think about the crime wave perpetrated by members of the Fullerton Police Department, including the sexual assaults by Albert Rincon that even elicited disgust from a federal judge? Well we do know that she actually gave her pal ex-Chief Pat McKinley an award of some kind after all the bad FPD news and after a multi-hundred thousand dollar settlement was reached in the Rincon matter.
As with many of Fullerton’s “strong, older women (and men)” it has been more important for Flory to back the sclerotic Fullerton establishment to the hilt, rathert than uncover the stinky morass in the FPD. Flory actually wants to hire more cops without reforming the department. Flory seems to think somebody in Fullerton really wants this retrograde attitude. Of course the voters will decide, but I doubt anybody wants to backtrack to the days of complete unaccountability in City Hall that marked the Flory years.
Now as far as Travis Kiger is concerned I will say this. He is one of the most courageous people I know. He has endured the threats and vulgar vituperation of the FPOA trolls on this site with equanimity. They have attacked him and his family, posting his home address long before he was a public figure. He has never backed down. That’s because he believes in principles, one of which is taking responsibility for his decisions. That’s pretty refreshing. And that’s strength.
Travis is thirty-three years old. I sincerely doubt if Jan Flory has embraced a new idea in over forty.
Jan Flory seems to have a problem with strong younger men. Take a look at what her fundraising letter has to say about me:
I have always been fascinated by the urge for government employees and their die-hard supporters to cling to the notion of collective bargaining as some sort of birthright. The ability for public employees to unionize is actually not even that old, but is a comparatively recent and curious chapter in the history of organized labor.
Classical Marxist doctrine holds that in the capitalist phase of history there are two elements contributing to economic activity. There are capital and labor; the first representing the bourgeois investment class (and their managerial overseers); the second is the workforce that sells its labor to the former. Naturally, the cost of labor , the investment of the capitalists, and the return the latter is willing to accept determine the supply side cost of goods.
The Marxists believed that capital habitually exploited an oversupply of labor through poor working conditions and long hours of employment. There was certainly evidence to support this contention and the capitalists did their best to outlaw labor “combination” through their control of legislatures.
(For the sake of argument I will happily stipulate the socialist fact in evidence.)
Of course labor did combine.
But the idea of government workers unionizing did not enter the into the equation. Why? For several reasons, one of which is succinctly stated by the most effective liberal in American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt realized that people who work for the government cannot hold the same employer/employee relationship since their employer is the people as a sovereign whole. Clearly the idea of collective bargaining, and particularly militant union tactics used against the citizenry was abhorrent to old FDR himself.
Another related problem is that government employees do not fit into the labor-capital equation, since the “capitalist” investor in their operation is none other than the taxpayers and citizens – and not a natural adversary in an economic system. And public employees were granted civil service protection and security to make up for comparatively modest wages.
And then there is the problem of the complete public sector labor monopoly. Producers of goods compete with each other in marketplaces that, among other things, sets a value on product that helps determine the cost of labor. No such balance exists in the public sector where nothing is for sale and there is no competition in the labor market at all.
The ability to unionize and the concomitant ability to engage in collective political action has enabled the public sector labor monopoly to elect its favored candidates at all levels, and subsequently to exact greater and greater salaries and benefits for themselves; and always using the argument that all they seek is parity with the private sector. Yet never have they jettisoned the civil service protections that makes in almost impossible to fire an incompetent public worker.
Most comical are the “management” unions that represent the upper tier employees who oversee the lower, and whose own interests in running the “company” are inexplicably linked with the benefits conferred upon the latter!
And so dear Friends, next time you see a “retired” 50 year old cop who was granted almost 100% of his salary as a pension, and who was given two decades of retroactive benefits, ask him whom he has to thank. I guarantee it won’t be you, or even the other public employees who negotiated his benefits on your behalf; nor even the lackeys on the city council like Don Bankhead, Dick Jones, and Jan Flory whom his union got elected. Nuh, uh. He will thank an anonymous “system” that has created this mess and that has virtually bankrupt California and threatens almost every municipality in the state.
Well, we know who to thank.
There certainly was a lot of boohooing and breast beating at the Fullerton City Council meeting last week in response to the Council majority pulling the plug on a State DUI grant.
The cops mobilized their MADD allies to tell all the horrible stories of drunk driving mayhem. The only problem was that that’s not the point, no matter how much the liberal spendthrifts like Jan Flory would love to throw at her pals in the FPOA for overtime.
Yes, the real issue is the efficacy of DUI checkpoints in the first place, and something even more sinister: the use of DUI checkpoints to seize vehicles belonging to unlicensed drivers, as detailed in this OC Register story from 2010 that cites an actual, honest-to-goodness study at Berkeley. Apparently the impound/towing fees are immense, as are the fines. We already know about the tens of millions of overtime every year in the state, mostly for cops to stand around.
The cop addiction to all this gravy might explain this video of a public forum in Pomona where the topic of DUI/vehicle seizures is being discussed. Naturally a proud member of the police association is there to scream at those who might object.
Hmm. Sergeant O’Malley?
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.
Last night the OC GOP Central Committee endorsed incumbent Fullerton City Councilmembers Bruce Whitaker and Travis Kiger for re-election in November.
From a practical standpoint that’s good news for Whitaker and Kiger. The party still carries a lot of weight in Fullerton elections as demonstrated by leland Wilson’s blow-out of Jan Flory in 2002, and even Pat McKinley’s razor-thin victory over Doug Chaffee in 2010.