Monday, July 6, 2009

John Williams breaks out his smelly brown Crayon

John Williams—SOCCCD trustee and OC Public Administrator/Guardian—is nothing if not stupid. And so, a month after the OC Grand Jury noisily noted that, as Administrator/Guardian, Williams is an incompetent boob and brazen cronyizer (and a week after the GJ offered a second scathing rebuke, when Williams changed nothing), Mr. Dolt has come out swinging with his trusty bag of gas:

Public guardian fires back against mismanagement claims

According to the Reg’s Jennifer Muir, in his response, issued today,
Williams laid out his department's accomplishments and cited details in the report that he says are incorrect. [He spotted a split infinitive.] He said he took pains to explain complicated and technical procedures to grand jurors, but they just didn't understand.

That’s likely because John's IQ is very low, and he doesn’t understand this crap himself, so naturally his 'splainin' goes nowhere. (I once saw him with a box of Cracker Jack; he was eating the prize.)

Williams, who is joined on the SOCCCD board by former OC GOP chief Tom Fuentes, is of course a part of Fuentes’ world-o’-corrupt-an’-cynical-an’-butt-ugly cronies (WOCACABUC for short), and so, naturally, in 2005,
County Supervisor John Moorlach supported reorganizing the public administrator and public guardian roles into their own agency…. He also supported a change in 2007 that made whoever was elected to the public administrator job the ex-officio public guardian.

Yeah, that’s how this crew operates. Williams may be a dolt, but he does know how to suck on the public teat and milk it for all its worth. (Check out his five-hundred dollar a night stays in hotels—he especially likes to travel to Orlando—paid for by the taxpayers.) So, amazingly, he got elected to a minor county office, but it has somehow morphed into a big freakin’ job—with a nifty car allowance too!—and he now makes some serious bucks.

Only problem is that he’s fouled things up so badly that even his powerful right-wing friends can’t fix things for ‘im:
"We are very troubled," [Moorlach chief of staff Mario] Mainero said. "We need to sit down and read through Williams' response, and try to decide where we're going." [Lemme save you the trouble: we’re going to Orlando.] In the first report, grand jurors accused Williams of nearly doubling management costs and promoting an employee within a year of retirement, costing the county more than $1 million more for the employee's pension. The report also alleges the public administrator squandered the estate of a person who had died. Last week, grand jurors issued a second scathing report, accusing Williams of continuing the poor management practices, even after being warned.

So, anyway, Johnny has now responded in writing, which means that he had to break out the crayons and start scribblin’ for an hour or two. Using the smelly brown crayon, he has scrawled that
the grand jury reported that [his] office took four years to resolve the estate of a man who had died. … "The public administrator office didn't even handle this case," Williams wrote in his response. He also defended his staffing levels, saying they're in line with other county agencies and that the grand jury comparisons are misleading. He denied pension spiking and said his office has saved the county money.

Yeah, Williams thinks that a denial is a kind of argument, but a really good kind cuz it involves fewer words: "Did not!"

We all know where this is headed, and it ain't Orlando. Will John "Brown Boy" Williams be vindicated? No freakin' way. If you wait long enough, all the denizens of Fuentes/Schroeder World end up in jail or at least on the public’s brownest shit list. Tommy, I think, is headed for hell. I'm an agnostic, but I've already asked the Lord if I can watch.

Williams has two months to respond to the second grand jury report. I can’t wait.

I should mention that in recent years, Williams has fallen out of favor with Tom Fuentes and his nasty crew. Not long ago, Fuentes got his pal Steve Greenhut at the Reg to slam Williams for bein' a RINO (Williams is so cheap that he plays nice with the faculty union to get it to fund his campaigns).

Yeah, but I still blame Fuentes and his ugly and appalling cronyistic machinations. You'd better hope there's no God, Tommy Boy. Near as I can tell, the Lord is down on your M.O., bigtime.

Day 21 of the wait for "dollar details"

"They're free, Pops!"

Um, this can't be good. Snarling packs of oldsters over at Leisure World (aka Laguna Woods Village) claim that Saddleback College is swiping state money with light-on-instruction (aka "fake") oldster PE classes with big enrollments (lots of repeat customers, comin' and goin' promiscuously). But wait! The college can answer all that (cuz, like, most o' those geezers like these courses!). And, besides, Saddleback will get back to the Reg reporter with "dollar details"!

Oh good.

Well, OK. But it's been three weeks!

UPDATE:

See data buried in story?

Empathize with your enemy

As you know, Robert McNamara has died (Robert S. McNamara, Former Defense Secretary, Dies at 93).

Below are two excerpts from Errol Morris’s stunning 2003 film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

In the first segment, McNamara discusses the moral paradoxes of war. In the second, oddly enough, he advises that we empathize with our enemy.




About 60,000 American soldiers died during Mr. McNamara's war.
Perhaps 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...