Feb 202024
 

Fortune should be running in some dark blue area, but imagine that she lives in El Dorado Hills. (I wonder why)

What have we learned thus far about Margaret Fortune:

  1. Led a protest that shut down the Bay Bridge
  2. Screams racism at every opportunity
  3. Is Easily connected to far-left progressive groups
  4. Is a member of the El Dorado County Democrat Party Executive Board.
  5. Is a national board member of a Jew-Hating Group whose leaders say, “We hope this cracker suffers”, calls Jews “Bloodsuckers” and referred Israel as “Hell”.

Easily found on the internet is Fortune’s bio in her own words. It is quite the far-left resume:

At the end of said resume, she touts being a member of the El Dorado County Resource Conservation District. But her record of “service” tells someone that she is trying to build a resume versus actual service.

Through August 2023, Margaret Fortune has only attended 6 of the 10 board meetings in 2023 for the El Dorado County Resource Conservation District Board. And she was absent from January 2024 meeting. https://www.eldoradorcd.org/meeting-minutes

(Note:  They stopped posting attendance after the August meeting) – Election date November 2022, first meeting Dec 2022 where she was sworn in. This is a big deal since this is the only elected office, and only real political tie to El Dorado county Fortune has!  If she can’t attend these meetings, how can we expect her to attend BOS meetings? Since Fortune is using her “service” on the El Dorado RCD to burnish her credibility and electability in all her political communications, it is completely legitimate to call BS and also to ask why the ElDo RCD has started hiding meeting attendance from the public… 

It gets better:

Margaret Fortune has lived in El Dorado Hills for 9 years but does not highlight any involvement in the El Dorado Hills community. She joined the El Dorado Hills Chamber of Commerce one week before she launched her candidacy for Board of Supervisors!

Dr. Margaret Fortune?

So let’s see – absentee board member of the El Do RCD?

Joined Chamber of Commerce a week before running?

… and has an “Honorary Doctorate” yet calls herself a Doctor? Sounds like we have some serious fraud going on here. I could find nothing anywhere showing that Fortune earned an actual degree. All I found is this:

Link Here to Web Page. Screenshot saved here in case she edits her webpage.

Here is the money quote: She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for her substantial contributions to the field of education.

Calling yourself a doctor when you did not earn the degree is a lie and insults all who actually did earn PHD’s. I’d tell her to be ashamed of herself, but I am sure by this point in my expose’ she is running around telling people your intrepid blogger is a racist. This is what flaming liberal activists do when they get caught. (Note that I wrote this sentence on 2-10-2024 and loaded this post for a future display date)

She is also CFO of the Sacramento Chapter of the Al Sharpton Jew-Hating Group:

While CFO of this group, the group was served with a delinquency notice for failing to file TWO tax returns.

In addition Fortune’s own school got lit up with a $25,000 fine that was later dismissed, but the litany of charges suggests that the school was shut down for a period of time in the interim. It appears from the document that they were operating without a license or a complete license for around 11 years at the time of the notice.

Finally, Fortune touts her involvement in St. Hope academy, that was founded by former Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. The school has been scandal-ridden. And this article from 2018.

So – what we have demonstrated here is that Margaret Fortune has demonstrated a personal pattern of outright lying. She has also made a career out of inflaming race issues, including serving on the board of an organization with a documented history of Jew-Hate. She has also lied about her qualifications and appears to be using the El Dorado RCD and El Dorado Chamber to make a false resume. Lastly, she has been a party to several legal actions for malfeasance by state agencies.

Beyond being a flaming leftist, we know that Fortune is dishonest, has a thin resume and can not be relied upon to manage anything. She should be rejected by the voters of ANY district much less El Dorado Hills.

Feb 152024
 

In our first installment of the series on Margaret Fortune, we detailed her irrefutable associations with the Progressive Alliance and the El Dorado County Democrat Party. There are even more entanglements in the life of this activist leftist democrat. She is also a state democrat party board member and delegate. Yikes.

When you look at this list of stuff you see clear patterns. This is certainly not the resume of a conservative by any way, shape or form. I am not sure what Fortune was thinking when she decided to spend a ton of money trying to re-invent herself to voters. Certainly she did not expect your intrepid blogger to call bs.

What jumps out to me is her out and proud association with the vile anti-semite Al Sharpton. This makes me wonder if Mz. Fortune is also a Hamas-supporting Ceasefire advocate too.

“Dr.” Margaret Fortune? Hmmm…

Let’s have a look at the feature plank of Fortune’s resume (which, I note has zero mention of her Charter School Advocacy on it):

Here is who Democrats are Praising when they Praise Al Sharpton.

Sharpton first became a major public figure during the 1987 Tawana Brawley case, in which he claimed the black teenage girl had been abducted and raped by a white gang that included an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County, Steven Pagones. In numerous media appearances Sharpton pointed the finger at Pagones and declared a racist cover-up by law enforcement — with zero evidence to support his claims. In 1988, a grand jury cleared Pagones of any wrongdoing, finding that the alleged incident never even happened. But the damage was already done. Pagones’s career as a prosecutor was over, he and his family were under constant death threats and his marriage eventually broke up under the resulting stresses. In 1998, Pagones won a defamation suit against Sharpton, but Sharpton refused to pay the $65,000 in damages owed, claiming he didn’t have the money. After nearly three years of foot dragging, Sharpton supporters paid the debt on his behalf, but he has never apologized to Pagones.

Given Fortune’s open hostility to the police, there is certainly a commonality here.

In July 1991, a controversy erupted when Leonard Jeffries, a professor at New York’s City College gave a speech blasting “rich Jews” for financing the slave trade and for controlling Hollywood so they could “put together a system of destruction for black people.”

Sharpton rushed to defend Jeffries, and in the middle of the swirling controversy, declared, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

A day after Sharpton made that comment, in August 1991, a Jewish driver accidentally ran over a 7-year-old black boy named Gavin Cato in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and an anti-Semitic riot broke out in which Jewish rabbinical scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death. Instead of calling for calm, Sharpton incited the rioters, leading marches in the streets that included chants of “No Justice, No Peace!” and “Kill the Jews!” At a funeral for the boy who had been run over, Sharpton said, “The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. … It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.” For those unfamiliar, “diamond merchants” was a thinly-veiled reference to Jewish jewelers.

In the words of Margaret Fortune:

Taken together, Weber’s bills offer a provocative challenge to a blue state where black youth struggle with the reality that they are targeted by the police, but not for school funding.

Different subjects, but the same style of over-the-top race baiting.

After an investigation, no indictment was made of the driver who had accidentally run over Cato, and he left for Israel. Sharpton flew there in an attempt to “hunt down” the driver and hand him a civil law suit. According to the Daily News, at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, a woman spotted Sharpton and shouted, “Go to hell!” Sharpton yelled back: “I am in hell already. I am in Israel.”

Fortune is on the Board of this dude’s “Charity”, the National Action Network.

About four years after the Crown Heights affair, in 1995, Al Sharpton through his National Action Network, injected himself in a landlord-tenant dispute in Harlem, which soon turned deadly. As recounted in Fred Siegel’s book Prince of the City, a black Pentecostal church raised the rent of its Jewish tenant, who owned the store Freddy’s Fashion Mart, so the Jewish owner in turn raised the rent on his black sub-tenant, who ran a record store. Sharpton immediately saw an opening for racial demagoguery, and went on radio, declaring, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.” His underling, Morris Powell, vowed, “This street will burn. We are going to see to it that this cracker suffers.”

Protesters led by Sharpton’s National Action Network picketed outside the store day after day, referring to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and threatening, “We’re going to burn and loot the Jews.” The demonstrators also struck matches and threw them into the store’s doorway. Two months into the protest, one of the demonstrators stormed into the store armed with a gun, and burned the place to the ground, killing seven people, and shooting himself.

This is the National Action Network. What a group for Margaret Fortune to be on the board of. While calling for Defunding the Police, the group calls for violence against Jews… and has a history of participation in actual violence.

Now we have more problems than just Fortune’s long history of being a flaming leftist. He membership in the board of directors of a proven racist and destructive organization should give everyone pause.

In case there is any question about where this blogger stands:

To the voters of El Dorado County, I hope you find these blogs about Margaret fortune informative and scary at the same time. She must be stopped.

To be continued…

Feb 122024
 

Yes, it is.

Margaret Fortune has spent some $30,000 on digital ads attempting to introduce herself as some Conservative to El Dorado County voters. She is outright lying.

It is not hard to prove the theory that she is attempting to deceive the conservative voters, as simple methods of tracking down information have released a treasure trove of information.

Well, now, isn’t that special! That is some pretty special company, Jessica Morse is a flaming leftist who has run for Congress a few times, and Sean Frame is another.

Here is more if you need further evidence of her allegiances and connections.

We are going to dive into Margaret Fortune in depth as the voters of El Dorado County District One need to know more about who Margaret Fortune is.

Let’s start with a column she wrote:

As I write this column, there are two stay-at-home orders in effect in major cities across California due to sickness — one for the coronavirus and the other for racism. The country is convulsing with civil un-rest because we all watched George Floyd murdered by the police on camera with a casual brutality that has become emblematic of the troubled relationship between Black Americans and police authority. Every generation has their story.

I was a student at UC Berkeley during the 1992 Rodney King protests. Having just been elected student body president, I led a protest that resulted in the shutdown of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. I remember being hauled off the freeway by two burly California Highway Patrol officers. Breaking down in tears, I felt far less emboldened than my chanting portrayed. The police let me go so I went to the offices of the Daily Cal to write a column, but I couldn’t put the words on the page to express how I felt. I sat there dumbstruck and frustrated, stinking from protesting in the streets.

There is ample evidence that while Fortune is correct in her stance about charter schools, her whole existence has been about pushing the race narrative and implying that everyone is out to get her and other people like her.

Even while writing a piece about opposing the teacher’s union-led effort to gut charter schools, the piece was laced with anti-police and overly broad statements:

Taken together, Weber’s bills offer a provocative challenge to a blue state where black youth struggle with the reality that they are targeted by the police, but not for school funding.

If you attack law enforcement, make broad statements about how they operate, and then support get-out-of-jail-free policies… it sure makes educating people impossible! But more fundamental is the $30,000 worth of deceptive ads where this extreme left-wing race-baiting, cop-hating progressive liberal democrat is trying to trick a conservative area into electing her.

So we have a candidate spending a ton of money trying to trick people who:

  1. Led a protest that shut down the Bay Bridge
  2. Screams racism at every opportunity
  3. Is Easily connected to far-left progressive groups
  4. Is a member of the El Dorado County Democrat Party Executive Board.

Do not be deceived; Margaret Fortune, while right about one issue, is so far left that she will wreck the community she is attempting to infiltrate.

To be continued…

Jun 222015
 

Well, well, well… I got sent a copy of a Grand Jury Report attacking (DRUMROLL) Ron “Mik” the supervisor in El Dorado’s First District.

It just so happens that “Mik” is all that stands between termed out Beth Gaines and her next government paycheck. Cozy.

The Grand Jury Report starts out like a political hit piece:

Before he was elected, Mikulaco was not known for his background and qualifications, but best known for standing on El Dorado Hills Boulevard with a sign urging drivers to vote for him. At first, that Depression-era sandwich board tactic seemed ineffective to many. Yet, Mikulaco was elected in 2012.

I guess Grand Juries are not subject to the rules of the real jury system? Or, perhaps, they can engage in the same sort of shilling and yellow journalism that the Placerville paper is famous for?

Well – I started asking questions as to why I felt like I was looking at a campaign hit piece.

I poked around and found out the shocking details – Local mega-donor and wealthy El Dorado County Businessman Ken Steers is an actual member of the Grand Jury!

I can write with a high level of confidence that Steers and Gaines likely have each other on speed-dial. Heck, Beth may be renting one of Steers’ rental properties in El Dorado Hills!

What did Ken Steers do to influence the outcome of this “report”? It really does not matter what eeeeevil things “Mik” is alleged to have done according to the report. The fingerprints of Ken Steers should make anyone take pause – especially with his political conflict of interest and the unprofessional language that the report starts with.

It would be like me sitting on the Placer Grand Jury recommending the disbarment of Jack Duran for eating too many donuts.

Missing from the Grand Jury Report is any mention of the malicious prosecution of Dan Dellinger. Things that make you go hmmmm… I wonder if Steers and company are going to ignore the pending lawsuit(s) against Mr’s. Pierson and Harn?

I also hear that the fish is starting to spoil…

To be continued…

Joe Harn Update – Files Lawsuit Against Political Opponents

 El Dorado County, Joe Harn  Comments Off on Joe Harn Update – Files Lawsuit Against Political Opponents
Mar 212015
 

I’ve written that Joe Harn is a bully. I’ve written about his temper and abusive pattern. Now he is suing a political opponent. Credit: Placerville Newswire

In an inexplicable move, Auditor/Controller Joe Harn initiates a lawsuit that is nearly impossible to win and one that calls his own actions into question.
On March 18th Courthouse News Service Reported “Small-Town NorCal Election Gets Nasty” by Barbara Wallace. The story reports on a lawsuit filed by Auditor/Controller Joe Harn related to campaign charges that he is a  a “sexual predator” and a “sociopath.”  The lawsuit is Joe Harn suing Chris McCaffree for comments he made in an email during Harn’s last campaign.  The original story wrote that neither Harn or McCaffree were available for comment.  We contacted McCaffree and he was unaware of the lawsuit and added that he had not been contacted by Harn, Harn’s legal representatives, or the Courthouse News Service.
Chris McCaffree has been a fixture in the community for many years and was most notable during a public investigation of a “Hostile Workplace” for El Dorado County employees where Joe Harn was a central figure of the investigation.  Chris McCaffree’s public testimony was given to the Board of Supervisors about two years ago. [http://eldorado.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=329 At bottom you can slide video to 00:27:50, 01:19:43 and 03:04:17 for relevant testimony from Chris]
McCaffree, a CPA, past Scout Master and father of five sons, is considered by most people who know him as almost “too nice”.  McCaffree has lived in El Dorado County for over 15 years and has enjoyed living here among good people – for the most part.  According to McCaffree, when he went to work for El Dorado County, he discovered that Joe Harn was making a complete mockery of what should be “Civil Servant’s” position of Auditor-Controller.
In McCaffree’s response to the lawsuit by Audtor-Controller, Joe Harn, defendant Chris McCaffre indicated that, “It is unfortunate that Joe Harn has brought this lawsuit against me.  I am normally a very nice guy, and it pains me to make Joe Harn a very public example of humiliation and disgrace in open view of all El Dorado County citizens who will follow this case.”
“The best defense to a Libel law suit is the truth – which will be made known very clearly now through the investigation and testimony of witnesses in this case.” explained McCaffree.
McCaffree insists that he believes what he wrote to be the truth and that he looks forward to proving that in court.  McCaffree says his only reluctance in addressing this lawsuit is due to the large number of people involved – “some will feel bad that they did not get a chance to give their testimonies against Joe Harn,” he said.
In addition to McCaffree’s own testimony, Mike Applegarth also testified about Joe Harn and gave supporting testimony to McCaffree’s claims. Applegarth was a highly placed analysit for the county that came forward to expose Joe Harn.  He did so on moral grounds and is widely known as an extremely ethical and moral man.  He has left the county since then and was immediately snapped up by another a city in Utah as their new top leader. [ http://eldorado.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=402 Move slider to 1:49:20 into the video]
In that public testimony a most unflattering picture is painted of entrenched political incumbent Joseph Harn as the primary “Bully” of the county and even the County Counsel testified that he was beyond the reach of most “Personnel” laws.
Harn’s lawsuit invites the public to come forward to testify for or against the behavior of Joe Harn as Chris McCaffree vows to include those that, “did not get a chance to give their testimonies against Joe Harn” at the County hearing, will in his response to Harn’s lawsuit.
Not only will the self-initiated Harn lawsuit put his own character in the spotlight, it is nearly impossible to win.
Proving Fault: Actual Malice and not just Negligence

Under U.S. law a plaintiff must prove that the defendant was at fault when he published the defamatory statement. In this case, Harn will need to prove that the defendant acted with actual malice not just negligence, because Joe Harn is a public official.
Celebrities, politicians, high-ranking or powerful government officials, and others with power in society are generally considered public figures/officials and are required to prove actual malice. Unlike these well-known and powerful individuals, your shy neighbor is likely to be a private figure who is only required to prove negligence if McCaffree published something defamatory about her.
Actual Malice:
In a legal sense, “actual malice” has nothing to do with ill will or disliking someone and wishing him harm. Rather, courts have defined “actual malice” in the defamation context as publishing a statement while either:
knowing that it is false;or acting with reckless disregard for the statement’s truth or falsity.
It should be noted that the actual malice standard focuses on the defendant’s actual state of mind at the time of publication. Unlike the negligence standard, the actual malice standard is not measured by what a reasonable person would have published or investigated prior to publication. Instead, the plaintiff must produce clear and convincing evidence that the defendant actually knew the information was false or entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication.
In making this determination, a court will look for evidence of the defendant’s state of mind at the time of publication and will likely examine the steps he took in researching, editing, and fact checking his work. It is generally not sufficient, however, for a plaintiff to merely show that the defendant didn’t like him, failed to contact her for comment, knew he had denied the information, relied on a single biased source, or failed to correct the statement after publication.
Not surprisingly, this is a very difficult standard for a plaintiff to establish. Indeed, in only a handful of cases over the last decades have plaintiffs been successful in establishing the requisite actual malice to prove defamation.
The actual malice standard applies when a defamatory statement concerns three general categories of individuals: public officials, all-purpose public figures, and limited-purpose public figures.
Public Officials
The “public officials” category includes politicians and high-ranking governmental figures, but also extends to government employees who have, or appear to the public to have, substantial responsibility for or control over the conduct of government affairs. Courts have interpreted these criteria broadly, extending the public figure classification to civil servants far down the government hierarchy.
In general, if an individual is classified as a public official, defamatory statements relating to any aspects of their lives must meet the actual malice standard of fault for there to be liability. Moreover, even after passage of time or leaving office, public officials must still meet the actual malice standard because the public has a continued interest in the misdeeds of its leaders.
The actual malice standard extends to statements touching on virtually any aspect of the public official’s life.
This untenable case may prove to be the undoing of Joe Harn as he already stands in public distrust after he enjoyed a very significant raise and bonus while he fights against the requested Cost of Living increases for county employees.  Will a public court case of his behavior, including witnesses testifying under oath, paint a picture of a man the voters simply cannot support for another term.  Will this testimony lead to a recall campaign against this old pol?
Time will determine that and we will keep you informed of developments.

Cris Alarcon.

(Disclosure, Cris Alarcon did participate in the campaign of Mike Owen, the most recent challenger to Joe Harn for the Office of Auditor/Controller in El Dorado County.  Unrelated, but concurrent to that campaign, in the course of a County Investigation of a Hostile Workplace, Chris McCaffree made the statements that Joe Harn is objecting to in this lawsuit)