• Double charging on tax?
Has anybody noticed that when you buy the Modesto Bee out of the vending machine it says the sales tax is already added but yet when you go into a lot of stores like AM/PM and Chevron and 7-Eleven and the Dollar Tree and buy the paper they're charging you 75 cents plus tax? So isn't that like getting a double tax or are they making that six cents profit to put in their own pocket? I'd like to know why they can get away with that.
• The Grinch visited Shushan Drive
The Grinch visited our street last night between 11 p.m. and midnight. Unfortunately, none of us who live here were walking patrol. Our neighbor has had two or three bad years when she really didn't feel up to decorating for Christmas. This year, she decided she would decorate in spite of herself and maybe recapture some of that Christmas spirit of years past. She and her husband, her son and one of his friends worked very hard to make a beautiful display of the things she had accumulated over the years. Santa Claus and a Snowman were watching over the manger scene and all was very well lighted. Had any of us been looking out our windows at the appropriate time, we might have saved the decorations. As it is, we all woke up this morning to the bare front of her house, with lights broken and Santa and the snowman gone....only God and the thief knows where.
If someone in your family came up with Christmas decorations for your house and they have no explanations as to where they found them, you might check to see if they were stolen from Shushan Drive. I'm sure my friend would love to have her memories back, and we who live on this street would like to know there is someone out there with a conscience.
To the thief, shame on you! If you were so hard up for decorations, you could probably have asked anyone on the street and we would have helped you get some of your own without stealing them.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and an acquaintance with the One whose birth we celebrate. You stole the decorations, but you didn't steal the spirit of Christmas!
• Senators trifle with our freedoms
This is an open letter to California U.S. Senators, you each earned only a 10 percent voting record in The New American magazine Freedom Index based on the U.S. Constitution! According to your oaths of office, it should be 100 percent. With all due respect, Californians are masters of the U.S. Constitution. You are our employees, so California how do you feel about your employees earning an "F" on their voting record, and what right have they to so trifle with our freedoms? Some call it opinion but is that word not used to defame painful truth?
• Questions state's fire-fighting policy
Hooray for Leo Grillo and in the news, an actor who runs an animal sanctuary in Acton that was threatened by the recent Station Fire in the greater Los Angeles area. He is calling for an independent investigation of USFS and CalFire's inadequate response. He said any investigation should also examine the lack of a more aggressive air assault later in the fire.
This is a huge problem of an entrenched, amoral fire-industrial complex bureaucracy (U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire) that has been running protracted wildfires like this for power and profit and refusing the Supertanker aircraft final solution to stopping wildfire. We must contact every public official there is and demand a continuing independent investigation.
Has anybody noticed that when you buy the Modesto Bee out of the vending machine it says the sales tax is already added but yet when you go into a lot of stores like AM/PM and Chevron and 7-Eleven and the Dollar Tree and buy the paper they're charging you 75 cents plus tax? So isn't that like getting a double tax or are they making that six cents profit to put in their own pocket? I'd like to know why they can get away with that.
• The Grinch visited Shushan Drive
The Grinch visited our street last night between 11 p.m. and midnight. Unfortunately, none of us who live here were walking patrol. Our neighbor has had two or three bad years when she really didn't feel up to decorating for Christmas. This year, she decided she would decorate in spite of herself and maybe recapture some of that Christmas spirit of years past. She and her husband, her son and one of his friends worked very hard to make a beautiful display of the things she had accumulated over the years. Santa Claus and a Snowman were watching over the manger scene and all was very well lighted. Had any of us been looking out our windows at the appropriate time, we might have saved the decorations. As it is, we all woke up this morning to the bare front of her house, with lights broken and Santa and the snowman gone....only God and the thief knows where.
If someone in your family came up with Christmas decorations for your house and they have no explanations as to where they found them, you might check to see if they were stolen from Shushan Drive. I'm sure my friend would love to have her memories back, and we who live on this street would like to know there is someone out there with a conscience.
To the thief, shame on you! If you were so hard up for decorations, you could probably have asked anyone on the street and we would have helped you get some of your own without stealing them.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and an acquaintance with the One whose birth we celebrate. You stole the decorations, but you didn't steal the spirit of Christmas!
• Senators trifle with our freedoms
This is an open letter to California U.S. Senators, you each earned only a 10 percent voting record in The New American magazine Freedom Index based on the U.S. Constitution! According to your oaths of office, it should be 100 percent. With all due respect, Californians are masters of the U.S. Constitution. You are our employees, so California how do you feel about your employees earning an "F" on their voting record, and what right have they to so trifle with our freedoms? Some call it opinion but is that word not used to defame painful truth?
• Questions state's fire-fighting policy
Hooray for Leo Grillo and in the news, an actor who runs an animal sanctuary in Acton that was threatened by the recent Station Fire in the greater Los Angeles area. He is calling for an independent investigation of USFS and CalFire's inadequate response. He said any investigation should also examine the lack of a more aggressive air assault later in the fire.
This is a huge problem of an entrenched, amoral fire-industrial complex bureaucracy (U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire) that has been running protracted wildfires like this for power and profit and refusing the Supertanker aircraft final solution to stopping wildfire. We must contact every public official there is and demand a continuing independent investigation.
