Kevin Faulconer Campaign Lies, Fueled by Local Fat Cats

Can Big Bucks Create a Win for Losers?

Losers have two things going for them: lies and loot.

This axiom is easily acknowledged when looking at the candidacy of Donald J Trump and his ordained minions. Voters are being expected to overlook grift and incompetence as a torrent of untruths about the opposition and those perceived to support floods the media.  The idea is to inject uncertainty frosted with fear about voting. 

It’s the way losers do things. It’s not necessarily a partisan attribute, although the Republican party has largely adopted these tenets as strategy, you can’t overlook people like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose indictment is likely to be an international scandal. 

The untruths in this election year are getting bigger and bigger. We’ve gone from cringeworthy to yell-out-loud expressions of falsehoods. Back in the day we called them lies. Now, way too much of the news media seems to think it’s just not a big deal. Have you heard the one about gangs taking over the entire State of Colorado? I bet not.

A loser in electoral politics is not somebody who gets less votes, it’s somebody who promises voters everything and delivers almost nothing (except personal enrichment.) We, the people, win when we elect public servants who can get the job done.

Meet Republican Supervisorial candidate Kevin Faulconer, ex-San Diego Mayor. 

Meet so-called Independent candidate Larry Turner. 

They’re both running against incumbents who’ve not been slavishly following the dictates of the local real estate-based bourgeois. Both candidates are promising voters actions and policies they couldn’t fulfill with a magic wand and a million bucks. Both are boosted by so-called Independent Expenditures tasked with injecting negativity into their contests.

Speaking of a million dollars, that’s the amount The Lincoln Club of San Diego County received from a Point Loma attorney to help its causes this cycle – in particular to help give Larry Turner a boost in his race for mayor.

The Lincoln Club’s priority to this point has been Kevin Faulconer, but having these two as peas in a pod will give a boost to a backward-looking agenda concerning property development and the culture wars. 

I’m not saying these candidates are substantively going to beat the drum for the GOP’s racist and misogynistic agenda; that’s not the point of their quest for office.

It’s more likely that they’ll either ignore, slow down, or sabotage social initiatives; there’s no profit in demeaning specific groups. There is, however, plenty of money to be made in a real estate market that’s both overheated (residential) and distressed (retail/office space).

I’ll let Turner lie for the rest of this column (pun intended), and focus on Faulconer, a professional politician with a record of (mostly) losing elections and slight-of-hand advocacy for our local landed gentry.

First, let’s start with the lies. Faulconer’s handlers/advocates have resurrected the Duncan Hunter playbook, wherein seeming truths get stood on their head and distorted to make their opponents look inept or uncaring.

In the San Diego County Supervisorial race, the Big Lie mantra is about attendance. 

This is rich, coming from a candidate whose real work (on behalf of real estate magnates) was obscured by a cloud of indifference. When conflicts arose, our then-Mayor often opted for what he does well: media opportunities. That’s why the daily paper gave his administration a D- grade for accomplishments.

Faulconer had priorities as Mayor, they just weren’t what the public had every right to expect. That’s why he missed 84% of SANDAG meetings, where forward-looking decisions were made about transportation and infrastructure planning and no-showed for 97% of board meetings of the Metropolitan Transit System. 

Maybe SANDAG’s (theoretical) mileage tax would have never been considered with the highest elected official of the largest city in the county in the room. Maybe an on-the-ball board member might have noticed the discrepancies in accounting surrounding transportation issues. Who knows?

What Mayor Faulconer was “good” at were real estate deals. He failed to do diligence prior to the decision to invest in the 101 Ash Street building that came with the promise that a $10,000 power wash was all it needed before city employees could move in. To date, the building  –which sits empty– has cost the city $264 million. And doesn’t include the legal fees of all the lawsuits generated.

From Voice of San Diego’s report titled Real Estate Debacles Loomed Large on Faulconer’s Watch:

• In the aftermath of the deal, there’s been much speculation about Faulconer’s directives and potential concerns about the optics of doing a direct transaction with former 101 Ash minority owner Doug Manchester, a major supporter of Faulconer’s political campaigns and the 2008 state proposition to ban gay marriage.

• Calendar records released after a public-records request show Faulconer met with Manchester in the mayor’s office 10 days before the first City Council vote on the lease-to-own arrangement with middle-man seller Cisterra Development. Cisterra had cut a deal with then 101 Ash majority owner Sandy Shapery and Manchester to purchase the building. Cisterra executed the lease arrangement with the city on the same day the sale was consummated.

• The mayor’s calendar shows a 30-minute meeting with Manchester and fellow developer Perry Dealy on Oct. 7, 2016, labeled “Pacific Gateway/101 Ash Office Bldg.”

The list of his real estate blunders (that we know about) includes purchasing a former indoor sky-diving building (from Faulconer’s political supporters) as a hub for homeless services, and an industrial lot that turned out to be unsuitable for its intended purpose.

A city audit found his administration failed to follow best practices and conduct due diligence when spending hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate purchases. The audit also found that the administration left out or misrepresented key information. 

Faulconer’s backers, through Independent Expenditures, have spent more than $600,000 for mailers distorting or flat out lying about incumbent Terra Lawson-Remer’s job performance. They say she missed a high number of meetings of a homeless task force that she did not have a seat on. 

They’re also saying Lawson-Remer “missed over half of County Supervisor Meetings,” an easily disproved assertion 

Then there’s the usual horse poop about homeless issues. The number of homeless people living unsheltered has been consistently higher than those who moved off the streets. And that isn’t going to change in the near future because the underlying causes of homelessness are not something that can be solved by jailing people, hospitalization, or moving them to imagined internment camps.

Kevin Faulconer’s “facts” on declining homelessness during his mayoral terms rely on faulty data, apples to oranges comparison (county vs city), and ignoring the Grand Jury report on the city’s failures leading up to an epidemic of Hepatitis A.

In point of fact, the County of San Diego’s actions on the unhoused population have been steadily improving over the past four years. Unlike the City of San Diego Faulconer years, the county has a strategic plan for deploying its resources to address a host of issues connected to not having a place to live. While this is no “solution,” it shows that limited taxpayer dollars are being used in a thoughtful and humane manner.

FYI– Both Faulconer and Mayoral candidate Larry Turner make promises that lead to uneducated voters believing these men can “solve the problem.” They can’t and won’t be able to enact solutions for a problem waaay bigger than San Diego County. Or California, for that matter.

Don’t vote for losers. Trust me on this one.

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News You Outta Know

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Why closed borders in the US are dangerous by former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd

• People have always come to our borders in search of safety and opportunity. This is the reality when you live in the US. The constant talking points given by those of anti-immigrant beliefs is that “they should enter the legal way.” What they do not ever tell the public is that there are few legal ways to enter these days, very few. If there are not legal avenues, then CBP cannot conduct their inspections for national security at the ports and migrants are forced to cross illegally which leads to overwhelming the Border Patrol with the same inspections that should have been conducted at the ports by CBP.

• Trump’s policies created 3 to 4 years of a backlog of people waiting in Mexico and unable to access the legal methods of crossing. The Biden Administration has frankly been digging the asylum system out of the mess created by Trump. Those who came to our borders during Migration Protection Protocols and Title 42, were pushed to cross illegally when we closed the only legal avenues to safety. The data clearly shows that Trump's shuttering of the system was the impetus of the higher illegal crossings under the Biden Administration.

• If politicians want to increase illegal crossings and prevent CBP from doing inspections, if they want to make the border look out of control, they just have to close the legal avenues. If political leaders want to inspect people as they enter, know what they are doing and why they are here, then the government must provide a system that accomplishes this goal.

• This is why the asylum system and immigration system are integral to national security, and why I say a closed border is as dangerous as an open border.

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Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner by Brian Kaylor at A Public Witness

• There’s a massive new scandal that has political reporters buzzing. Vice President Kamala Harris won’t attend the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner.

• Seriously, there are dozens of articles framing this as a misstep by the Harris campaign. Every four years, the two presidential candidates show up for a fancy dinner in New York City where the men are expected to wear tuxedos and the women full-length dresses. The candidates are supposed to offer humorous remarks, telling good-natured jokes about themself and their opponent. All while the event, for which the cheap tickets are $5,000 each, raises millions of dollars for Catholic charities.

• Harris’s campaign said she would instead be campaigning in a swing state that day. Cue the media outrage that Harris won’t show up to an elite dinner reporters like to cover.

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Teaching Journal from 9/3 - 9/26 by Ryan Bradford at AwkwardSD
“Hey Mister, Have You Ever Seen a Chicken?”

• It was Spirit Week, and Monday was “Bring your favorite plushie” day. 

• As I was leaving school, there was a kid standing by the exit, and he said to me: “Hey mister, have you ever seen a chicken? Do you want to see one?” It was straight out of Stand By Me, heavy “You wanna see a dead body” vibes. 

• “A chicken?” I asked. 

• He unzipped his backpack and showed it to me. Inside, unmistakably, was a chicken. 

• “Is it alive?” I said. 

• “You think I’d bring a dead chick to school?” 

• I watched it breathe. Just a chicken asleep at the bottom of some kid’s backpack. 

• “It’s my emotional support chicken,” the kid said.