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Arrest Jerry Brown & state AG for justice obstruction
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The letter writing campaign continues.

We've been getting a steady diet of letters from Ceres High School students calling for the city to do something to improve pedestrian safety on Fifth Street.

The city is doing its part in searching for grant monies to add safety features on that stretch. No further letters are necessary to get the same point across.

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California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra might as well be president of Mexico. He came out last week and said he would prosecute employers who help in federal immigration sweeps.

Whose side is he on? Going after hard-working established business owners with fines of up to $10,000 if they help ICE agents go after those who broke the law by jumping the border to take away our jobs? Is he kidding? Why does he bend over backwards for illegal aliens while viciously attacking California citizens?

Becerra said employers who "voluntarily start giving up information about their employees or access to their employees in ways that contradict our new California laws, they subject themselves to actions by my office. We will prosecute those who violate the law."

Um, he means state law, obviously not federal law.

President Trump has a right to go after those who violate the higher law - U.S. law - and should arrest and convict Gov. Brown and Xavier Becerra and others who are harboring fugitives of the law.

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Hold the press. Becerra's office just sent another email and it's confirmed - he is nuts.

On Friday he blasted Acting Director Mick Mulvaney of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for requesting a total of $0 for the second-quarter budget of his agency.

Every quarter, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau formally requests its operating funds from the Federal Reserve. Last quarter, former director Richard Cordray (Obama appointee) asked for $217.1 million. Mulvaney said that the bureau has $177 million in the bank, enough to cover the $145 million the bureau has budgeted for its second quarter. Mulvaney, who is also Trump's budget director, noted that instead of advancing the funds to the bureau, the Feds could return them to the Treasury and reduce the deficit.

I like Mulvaney's attitude. He noted that his request for zero new funds and saving "approximately $145 million may not make much of a dent in the deficit, the men and women at the Bureau are proud to do their part to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars."

If only Becerra had this same attitude when he spends scads of money suing everybody and anybody with whom he tries to shut down.

Becerra, who seems more concerned about disparaging President Trump than doing his job, is a debauched partisan hack.

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The Control Nazis in Sacramento - er, that would be the Democrats in the state Legislature - are at it again. Assemblyman Ian Calderon wants all sit-down restaurants to quit serving plastic straws.

Has Mr. Calderon been to a restaurant and been given a glass with lipstick visible on the rim? I have and the idea of a straw is most appealing.

Calderon cites that up to 500 million plastic straws are used every day in America and tossed away, adding to the flow of trash to landfills. I wonder when he will strike upon the idea of banning condoms because they are daily, used once, and tossed into the waste stream. I'm surprised he hasn't done a study about how many of those have entered the waste stream.

Do these people lie awake at night thinking of ways to make a name for their selves - so they can run for higher office - by enacting bans against things as common as drinking straws?

My burning question is why did the genius exempt fast-food restaurants from his bill? Does he not realize that the vast majority of straws are being generated from fast-food restaurants?

Instead of having government force another mandate, why not allow private industry to come up with its own solution, such as biodegradable straws? A couple of years ago I was in Yosemite and saw biodegradable (cardboard) pen barrels and thought it was a neat little thing. There are biodegradable straws on the market too.

I also wonder why the state hasn't pushed for a bigger menace to the waste stream than drinking straws when the bigger problem is that of disposable diapers. The Union of Concerned Scientists has estimated about 18 billion diapers are thrown into landfills every year. And a 1998 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that diapers made up 3.4 million tons of waste, or 2.1 percent of U.S. garbage in landfills that year.

Think how much trash could be eliminated if parents of the pampered generation employed the use of cloth diapers like my generation and those before me.

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Did you see the brazen callousness of the illegal alien who was in a Sacramento Superior Court room answering to charges that he killed two deputies in 2014? The boldness of this evil monster made my blood boil. With a stupid wide smile on his ugly mug, Luis Enrique Monroy Bracamontes, 37, told the court, "I wish I had killed more of the mother-------s (referring to police). I will break out soon and I will kill more, kill whoever gets in front of me...There's no need for a f---ing trial."

I agree, with an admission like that, let's bypass the trial and take this loser straight to the electric chair and zap away.

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I chuckled when I saw on Facebook how Steven Matthew Wallace started a new group, the Keyes Community Watch & Incident Group, "in hopes to dwindle down crime, thief's (sic), tweekers, an (sic) a holes lol." A further explanation of Wallace's was this: "As a small community, it is sometimes up to us to clean up our small town. This page is to bring awareness to the crime, tweekers, a--holes illegally parking, ext... Please post in English. Feel free to post anything Keyes related."

It seems Trump isn't the only one using that word.

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Speaking of Trump's choice of words, hey, I got what he was saying with the alleged "s---hole" comment. While the Democrats feign outrage over the word he may have used, and are trying to make the president sound racist, I've often asked myself why we are letting the lowest skilled and neediest people into our country. They end up taking more than they give and we, the taxpayers, are expected to foot the bill. Perhaps the Democrats just want to broaden their support base of needy people dependent on the government money trough.

If you've ever visited Ellis Island, you got a taste of how difficult it was once to get into the United States. The bar was very high. If came across on the boat and had a disease, you were detained. If you didn't have a job or a sponsor family, you were barred access. Some actually had to take an intelligence test and if you didn't pass, you were shipped back from you came. Today we've gone the other way and seem to have no standard. We have thrown the gates open and make the impoverished our financial responsibility. It's got to stop. That's precisely the issue Donald Trump was elected on.

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Is social media being engineered to strip out conservative messages? According to James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas, hidden videos show Twitter engineers freely talk about how they invade privacy in snooping inside direct messages as well as try blocking messages that are conservative in nature, such as pro-gun, anti-gay marriage and criticize Black Lives Matter.

Twitter distanced itself from the employees or former employees in the video but unleashed on O'Keefe, saying, "We deplore the deceptive and underhanded tactics by which this footage was obtained and selectively edited to fit a predetermined narrative." Isn't this kind of like shooting the messenger and forget the message?
If you can believe this, Twitter's algorithms apparently look for words like "American" and "the American flag" seek to target certain users and politically censor them.

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At times I just wonder if American society - particular that of our college campuses - has lost its collective mind. Did you hear about this? A radical left-wing student group at the University of Texas in Austin (Austin is like Texas' version of San Francisco) is proposing a rebrand of "Law Enforcement Appreciation Day" into "Law Enforcement Incineration Day." That's right, they are advocating setting cops on fire. The so-called Autonomous Student Network Austin, an Antifa group, pushed the proposal in a recent tweet, accompanied by a picture of a French police riot police officer engulfed in flames after someone threw a Molotov cocktail at him last year. On its Facebook page, ASN Austin calls itself "an organization that seeks to promote student autonomy through direct action tactics." Direct action refers to physical violence against the police and anyone perceived as a "fascist."

The students should be studying history in class more. Their tactics fit right in with the definition of fascism.
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Michelle Kehoe doesn't like my column style where I handpick comments posted on our Facebook page and offer a reply on the printed pages of the Courier. Keep in mind, these are opinions others are posting publicly on our Facebook page, usually in response to something I have written. Michelle suggests that the "Ceres Courier better step up the journalistic integrity if it is charging a subscription." She then writes, "Stop printing people's opinions with whom you disagree as a shaming technique and easy on the right-wing bias. It's pretty obvious to anyone who took a critical thinking class in college."

I went to college, too, where I learned about the techniques of propaganda: bandwagon, glittering generalities, name-calling and card-stacking.

Printing others' comments and adding my own commentary, in her words, is now "a shaming technique." Didn't they teach debate in college? Michelle needs to go back and read my column of Jan. 10 again, if she read it at all. I didn't even the shame the man who called me an "idiot" for my view on pot. I'm curious, Michelle, if you are confused on who is shaming who.

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You have to ask yourself why Sacramento lawmakers with a ‘D' behind their name want to see babies aborted.

I mean, abortion is already legal but really, a law that requires crisis pregnancy centers that are licensed health clinics to notify patients about state programs that can help low-income women pay for prenatal care, contraception...and abortions. Clinics that fail to post the required state notice face civil penalties. In late 2015, two centers - A Woman's Friend Pregnancy Resource Clinic of Marysville, and the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Northern California - filed a suit challenging the law. The suit says the regulations violate both freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

So why is it that Democrats go out of their way to encourage women to seek abortions? You have to ask yourself what the motive is in wanting to see more women seeking the killing of their fetuses.

Does anyone have an answer? (This is where you can weigh in, Michelle Kehoe).

Do you have any feedback about this column? Let Jeff know by emailing him at jeffb@cerescourier.com. He will read it, promise.