Over at the Red County blog Cynthia Ward shares a fun hit piece on the 4th District claim jumping assclown from the 3rd District – Harry Sidhu. It basically sums up all we’ve been saying about Hide ‘N Seek Sidhu with regard to fake addresses, crazy ambition all out of proportion to any real ability, and only a passing familiarity with the truth. They were too nice to mention the perjury deal and the DA investigation, but that’s okay.
The best part, as Ms. Ward points out, is the map with the push pins showing offices that office hound Sidhu has been whoring around for in the past few years. The pattern sort of looks like a flock of geese flying south – which is where Sidhu’s campaign is heading. The piece archly notes that space precludes them from going back more than 3 years!
And then of course, there’s the giant, disembodied Sidhu head floating over OC, signifying massive ego and inflation with lighter-than-air gas. The voters never get tired of this:
Geez, I really love that pic. Almost as much as this one:
The public relations and tax revenue fixated OC Children and Families Commission needs oversight. How do I know? Because of the amount of money these people pay to PR types and lobbyists – who just happen to be pals of Commission members. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, in fact.
Last year the Riverside County Board of Supervisors addressed the same issue when their “First 5” Commission members were busted for distributing grants to their own organizations. Here’s a 2009 article from The Riverside Press-Telegram that talks about the problem. The solution proposed by the Riverside BOS was to subsume their “First Five” Commission into the County government structure.
Whether or not this sort of thing has been going on in OC is not known without a complete shakeout. But what is known is that the Commission has been paying for things like toothbrush distribution and facebook editing at a rate of $200 per hour – to a Matthew Cunningham, a pal of the current Commission Chairman, and a running board occupant of the John Lewis political machine.
Then there’s the small matter of the hundreds of thousands contracted for lobbying services to Phil Isenberg as well as our own local big-government gold digger – Anaheim Mayor for Hire, Curt Pringle.
When you awake you will feel completely refreshed...
It’s high time to place this Commission in a chain of command that puts ultimate responsibility in the hands of elected representatives – people who will have to account for grants and contracts awarded to political operatives, and to decide what sort of political lobbying, if any, is appropriate. And that would be the County Board of Supervisors.
The largest monthly tax-payer funded haul for local Kiducrat spokesman Matthew Cunningham seems to be January 2010, when he racked up an impressive $10,840 to wordsmith and social network as a PR shill for the big-government OC Children and Families Commission. Click on the document below to see what a “conservative” Republican wordsmith does for a living – apart from writing op-ed pieces for liberal Democrats.
My favorite line item is the last one – a blanket $800 charged for “account management” for the month, whatever that may entail. Say what? You mean the folks in charge bought into that baloney? Oh that’s right – nobody seems to be in charge at all.
But hey! It’s all about the kids, right?
It's all about making people feel good about themselves.
With every passing second it become more and more obvious that the Children and Families Commission is in dire need of some outside oversight to stop this exorbitant waste of money on overpriced PR efforts doled out to political operatives.
More fun stuff from one of OCs repuglican welfare state spongers, Matthew J. Cunningham. $4,200 in 8 days, to be precise. And ten references to Facebook updates.
Funny how stuff kids do for free can be mined by a well-connected political operative for big bucks. Well it’s big bucks when you charge 200 clams per hour and have no competition.
I ran the table at the Children and Families Commission. Nobody seemed to notice.
What’s really startling is that the Children and Families Commission kiducrats are willing to pay somebody that exorbitant rate for a “social network” medium “work” that will have a completely negligible effect. Not negligible, you say? Prove it says I.
Oh, yeah. Be sure to reflect upon Mr. Conservative Republican’s daily billing totals and note the inevitable “account management,” whatever the hell that is. Who knew being a kiducrat payed so well?
We finally heard back from the District Attorney on the matter of our complaint that Harry Sidhu committed perjury and fraud when he swore on voter registration forms (twice) that he lived at the beautiful Calabria Apartments – instead of his “Elegant Yorba Estate” in the 3rd Supervisor’s District.
Only problem is that he never set foot in the place...
Their “investigation” (if you want to call it that) concluded that “there is insufficient evidence to prove Mr. Sidhu committed any crimes.” Hmm. Apparently statements from Calabria residents saying they never saw Sidhu there and that the apartment had been empty for a year weren’t persuasive to a DAs office that habitually ignores funny business perpetrated by politicians. Still, it’s important to remember that nobody at the DAs office is in any way saying that there is evidence that Sidhu did live there. So no exoneration for Hide and Seek.
All lies, I tell you!
Well, it wasn’t as if anybody really expected Tony Rackaukas’ department actually to do anything, so there’s no reason to be surprised.
Still, the fact are inescapable. In his insatiable hunger for elective office in a district in which he doesn’t live, Harry Sidhu cooked up a fake address in a crummy apartment on Lincoln Avenue in West Anaheim next to a pool hall, and lied about it on voter registration forms – twice.
Ironically, we see at the bottom of this letter from the DA that ol’ Hide and Seek Sidhu employed one of those evil defense attorneys his supporters are always railing against. But they can come in handy can’t they?
Apparently part of Matthew Cunningham’s deal as wordsmith to the OC Children and Families Commission is to fill other functions from time to time – such as Ambassador to the Diocese of Orange with Dental Portfolio.
Here, in October and November 2007 we find Mr. Conservative Republican billing the taxpayers $200 an hour as coordinator of toothbrush distribution:
It seems as if the Commission was eager to insinuate itself into Catholic schools, too.
But did it not occur to anybody auditing these invoices at the Commission that it was a wee bit inappropriate to pay somebody that exorbitant rate to talk to somebody at the Diocese about handing out toothbrushes? Was anybody at the Commission even reviewing these invoices at all?
By the way, anybody out there know how many toothbrushes you can get wholesale for $200? Oy vey! Just more lax or non-existing oversight by our friends on the Commission.
Ironically, in the fall of 2007 Mr. Cunningham was hard at work in the trenches as a loyal foot soldier for the Diocese. But that’s a whole other matter.
I had some hopes for “The Voice of OC” as a source of information in Orange County, even though it was started by a former Democratic officeholder and funded by the County employee’s union.
Then on Friday I read Norberto Santana’s follow up to an earlier post about a poll repuglican John Lewis supposedly did that included results showing Sheriff candidate Bill Hunt within 1% of Sandra Hutchens. The problem was that neither the undecideds nor a % for Craig Hunter were released. How come? Lewis said he was restrained from saying. But it rendered the numbers pretty meaningless.
Instead of telling Lewis to cram his bogus “poll,” Santana gave the guy some more free publicity – whether there was even a real poll or not. And almost no inquisitiveness into who Lewis was working for or even if (as is quite likely) he’s just working for himself.
Well Santa was too incurious to press the matter, but I’ll speculate freely. I’m pretty sure Lewis is not working for Hutchens or he wouldn’t have released the numbers at all; ditto Hunter. Is he working for Hunt? Pretty unlikely since the unindicted members of Team Carona still show little but disdain for Hunt who would be unlikely to pay Lewis to do a poll in any case.
So who has the money and the resources to hire Lewis? The AOCDS union does, and since they are backing Hunt it would make sense – although the missing Hunter data would remain odd indeed – unless he, too were catching up with Hutchens. It would also make sense since the union is also backing a candidate in another important June race.
If Lewis were working for the his old Measure D pals the Lewis poll results in the 4th Supervisor’s race will indeed be interesting. If they are even released, it’s a safe bet that Harry Sidhu will miraculously receive credible numbers despite a campaign marked by perjury, carpetbagging, ignorance, and general buffoonery. Shawn Nelson is bound to come out badly since neither the AOCSD nor Lewis can tolerate a Nelson victory. Or are we too cynical about Lewis doing a phony “push poll”? Maybe. But we do recommend counting your fingers if you ever have to shake his hand.
Anyway, Lewis also has a way of working on spec so he can make lobbying calls later, so maybe he’s just trolling. What his motivations for hiding the Hunter data might be will become clear by early June.
Over at the RedCounty blog, Matthew J. Cunningham’s posts are becoming increasingly dronish and petulant – just like always seems to happen when an election nears.
His latest post about the OCGOP Central Committee endorsement of Shawn Nelson is a case in point. Apparently he wasn’t at this big event (could it be because he’s not yet ready to explain his huge windfall from The Meathead’s Children and Families commission?). So he’s getting his talking points from somebody who was – probably lonely Sidhu supporter and John Lewis partner Matt Holder.
You would think that when your bosses candidate gets wiped out 47-8 you would just keep your mouth shut and say nothing. But not our motormouth buddy – who goes on and on and on about how the thing is unfair and Nelson just won because he did better at the forum, how the questions weren’t good, how it was all due to political whipping and how Sidhu, not Nelson has been fully vetted through the last election cycle (? Nelson’s been through three!).
Not a single word from Cunningham about carpetbagging, perjury and perpetual candidacy! Did it not occur to Cunningham that maybe, just maybe the OCGOP Central Committee members were turned off by Sidhu’s voter registration fraud, and his two bogus addresses on top of his inarticulate, scripted performances.
Well, too bad for Cunningham and Lewis and Sidhu, but that genie is out of the bottle and ain’t going back in. So just accept it and quit yer bitchin’.
Anyhow, congrats from inside the electrified fence of the Desert Rat compound out on beautiful Screech Owl Road to Nelson for an important victory.
Over three weeks a go we made a public records request of the City of Anaheim to produce the phone log, the work product, and e-mails of a woman named Annie Mezzacappa.
Now you may well wonder who this individual is and what this has to do with anything pertinent. Ms. Mezzacappa is the personal assistant to Anaheim Councilman Harry Sidhu and she is a part-time public employee. It is rumored that it is she, not the virtually unintelligible Sidhu who scripts his performances. Yet, she is also his campaign employee and she is the contact person on all those e-mail blasts Sidhu sends out touting his endorsement by some dude or other from Stanton. See the potential problem? We were kind of curious to see if a public employee might just be doing Sidhu’s campaign business out of the Anaheim City Hall, and even on company time.
I tell you this is nothing but candidate intimidation...
Anyway, our Intrepid Travis just got a letter from the Anaheim Deputy City Attorney. Mezzacappa’s phone log is ready. But after 24 days they are denying the request for 6 months of emails and work product because:
“The request is vague, overboard and uncertain in that it fails to request an “identifiable” record.”
Total BS. They seem to be saying that unless you can tell them exactly the document you want they’ll just say screw you. And they get to determine what is “overboard.” And that really defeats the purpose of requesting public records, doesn’t it?
We’ll be picking up those phone logs and let you know if anything fun pops up. In the meantime, we aren’t giving up on those other records, either.
Responding to mounting criticism about taking a bunch of property along the proposed right-of-way for its multibillion dollar boondoggle, the California High Speed Rail Authority took a step back the other day and voted 6-1 to entertain a shared track option previously discarded when they thought nobody was paying attention. Read all about it in the LA Times.
Even lobbyist and fixer Curt Pringle, the termed-out Mayor of Anaheim, joined the majority. Is he perhaps starting to fear a Buena Park, Fullerton, and Anaheim backlash that might spoil all of his crafty electoral machinations for 2010?
Well, it’s a step in the right direction, but it still begs the question of bureaucratic and rolling stock cost vis-a-vis minimal travel time gains to downtown LA.
The lone “no” vote came from Quintin L. Kopp, the former Bay Area politician who also advocated for the controversial BART extension to the San Francisco Airport. Apparently Kopp thinks it’s too late to be smart – always a bad sign.
Geez, I really love that pic. Almost as much as this one:
