Having been in newspapers for 42 years, I was taken aback a bit by comments made on separate occasions recently by two people – my son while camping, and Councilman Daniel Martinez at the July 22 Ceres City Council meeting.
During a recent camping trip I brought along some discarded copies of the Ceres Courier for use to start camp fires. Bret picked up a copy and said, “Wow, this takes me back. I haven’t seen one of these in years.”
He meant newspapers in general, not just the Courier.
He clarified by saying, “Most people read the news online.”
Okay, yeah, but there are some dinosaurs like me who still like holding paper and ink in hand. It’s what folks born in the 1960s or before do.
I’ve resisted the glare of tablets and still love the experience of reading cloth-covered books, how they smell, the page turning, the ability to slip a bookmark inside and set it aside at night.
But if my son is honest, his generation is the one of headline reading only. Besides, there are so many fringe online news sources that you have to question legitimacy and integrity. In short, there’s lots of unvetted news on the internet – especially when it comes to politics.
Councilman Martinez’s remark came as he was talking about ways the city could notify the public of yard sale addresses if the city holds a citywide yard sale. He said: “Get a map created, put it online, share it in the Courier a week before the event with the Courier put(ting) it on the front page since a lot of people in our community still do religiously read that paper.”
The “still do” comment sort of stunned me. Like when did it become vogue to not read newspapers?
While I’m glad Martinez acknowledged that people still “religiously read” the Courier, I felt sadness that his inflexion is that most people don’t read us, like reading a paper is some old fashioned activity relegated to the retirees at the old folks home.
Sure, you can dispense with reading newspapers but you’re cheating yourself out of knowledge that is important to know. Local news is important because actions that your city government, school district and county takes has a more direct bearing on your life than the actions of state or national government.
I stand by the John Adams quote that I ran on page A4 of last week’s Courier: “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right and a desire to know.”
In other words, an ignorant society will become an enslaved one.
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What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear Harley-Davidson? Earth shaking machines and masculine men? Tractor Supply? Hard-working men and women toiling with their hands in fields, in orchards and on ranches. Home Depot? Crafty men shopping for building supplies. I’ve oversimplified it but you know what I mean. So why in the hell would these dimwitted corporate CEOs go Woke to embrace the notion that boys can be girls and girls boys? Did they not see what happened to Bud Light?
CEO Jochen Zeitz has led Harley-Davidson into some dark places, including openly supporting “the equality act” which would allow men into girl’s bathrooms, sports and locker-rooms; funded an all ages “pride” event that featured a “rage room“ next to drag queen story time; forced 1,800 employees to do virtual training on how to become LGBTQ+ allies; was a founding member of Wisconsin’s LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce which opposed a law that would’ve banned sex changes for kids in Wisconsin on behalf of the businesses they represent, and more like sending some white male employees to a White Male ONLY woke diversity training program or partnering for the annual “Pride Ride.”
Hopefully Harley’s customer base will speak loud and clear by inflicting damage on sales.
I, for one, am frankly tired of companies pushing values contrary the values most of us hold. Their purpose is to sell products and services, not appease the weird nonsense of the purple-haired Woke crowd.
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Hey California taxpayers, did you know the money you work hard to make – which is taken so freely by your government – may soon be used to buy cell phones for illegal aliens? Apparently it wasn’t enough to give free healthcare.
The state Public Utilities Commission wants all people in California to be able to have access to a state cell phone service subsidy program even if they don’t have a Social Security card and that would include all who snuck across the border.
These subsidies come out of our pockets.
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Meetings of the Ceres Planning Commission continue to be cancelled for a lack of business –while stipends are paid to its five members.
The commission is supposed to meet on the first and third Mondays of the month but so far this year the commission has met only five times with 12 meetings cancellations.
City Manager Doug Dunford reported to me “there’s nothing going on right now,” adding “we’re trying to kick-start some stuff so there’s more stuff coming up.”
While crickets are chirping in Ceres, Modesto is seeing quite a few housing projects. Earlier this year the Modesto Planning Commission approved a 191-lot subdivision at Floyd and Oakdale roads. Development of a 527-home project east of the Modesto Amtrak station is getting underway. And Modesto is looking at Tivoli, a 450-acre master planned community east of Oakdale Road, north of Sylvan Avenue.
Building is taking place at a slow pace in Hughson where KB Homes is developing the 56-acre Homes Orchards at Parkwood. Once the project is fully built out within four to five years, Hughson will have 299 additional homes and an estimated 900 to 1,000 new residents.
If I was representing the city, I’d start questioning why there is little to no residential development happening in Ceres.
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Has the owner of the unsightly Mitchell Square shopping center at Mitchell and Fowler roads ever stood back and taken an honest look at its deplorable state? He/she should be embarrassed.
Go on Google street view and move around that location. As you know, Google stitches together images taken at different times. One view shows a nice grass strip that once graced the center with a tree on the corner. (I forgot it looked that nice at one time but apparently this was before the days of the state telling businesses that they can’t water landscaping strips.) Today the nice grass strip has been replaced by weed-scattered gravel which onlu partially covers the black plastic that is showing and decaying in places. It’s a true example of blight caused by an owner who has essentially signals the community, “I don’t give a crap if I look like a slum lord.”
It’s a sad look that could easily be remedied by decent landscaping, regular trash pick-ups and a fresh coat of paint other than Baby Crap Yellow.
By the way, what DID happen to the Ceres Beautification Action Committee pushed by Channce Condit in 2019?
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The progressives who think that raising the fast-food minimum-wage to $20 in California was a great thing were only fooling themselves. Paying $20 an hour is screwing the workers who are losing their job.
Not only am I seeing far fewer people having lunch or dinner inside fast-food places – they can’t afford prices caused by minimum-wage hikes – but Taco Bell has announced that it will be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to take orders in drive-thru lanes so they don’t have to pay $20 an hour to a human to do the work. Currently, more than 100 Taco Bell restaurants in the U.S. use voice AI. Taco Bell had nearly 7,700 U.S. locations at the end of 2023, according to company filings.
Isn’t it sad that we won’t even be able to have human interaction when we go to a restaurant? It’s bad enough that we have AI voices processing our insurance payments over the phone but now we’ll be screaming into the Taco Bell order device, “That’s not what I said!”
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We have a letter writer over on page A4 named Alvaro Franco who doesn’t understand how anyone could vote for Trump. My question is how could anyone vote for Harris?
Alvaro states he is a moderate Democrat who supports a Republican to represent him in Congress but not a Republican president who Duarte supports. As puzzling as that is, Franco appears hung up on Trump’s wealth, saying he “has a vile affinity to opulence” and questioning that he is concerned about the little guy.
I can’t argue with someone whose mind is made up but there are sure a lot of middle- and lower-income Americans who absolutely trust that Trump and the Republicans are more interested in getting government out of our lives and pocketbooks than the Democrats.
Franco cites the stock market as being healthier than when Trump was in office.(It just took a dump on Monday for fears of a Harris presidency and all the corporate taxation she will bring about). Economists would not agree that the stock market is an indicator of economic health but everyday Americans are barely making it because of the higher costs of living.
Yes, inflation is slowing down but it’s still rising and those high prices are NOT going to revert back to the Trump era. It doesn’t work like that.
Franco doesn’t think Biden should take the blame for inflation, saying it was all COVID related. Any politician who supported wildly massive debt spending programs like the CARES Act and ARPA are to blame for inflation, which is what happens when government prints too much money and it’s worth less.
Failing to rein in spending along with Trump and most every recent president, Congress is also guilty for causing the national debt to rise.
Under Trump, the national debt increased by $8.18 trillion and was at $28.4 trillion when he left office.
Under Biden the national debt has soared to $35 trillion. Every 100 days, the national debt increases by $1 trillion! That is unsustainable and should concern every American!
What is the point of a healthy stock market if your retirement funds are being gobbled up by inflation by the time you retire?
Franco doesn’t understand why the Biden/Harris administration takes the blame for the immigration crisis, saying Trump didn’t finish the wall.
Trump built 455 miles of the border wall. He asked Congress for $18 billion more but was denied.
Biden pledged during his 2020 presidential campaign that his administration would not build “another foot of wall.” In fact, Biden sold off wall building materials.
In October, Biden changed his tune that the border wall wasn’t effective – in time before the 2024 election year – and announced he was building 20 more miles, claiming was forced to because it was money appropriated.
But a wall is only but one tool to keep out foreign invaders. As soon as Biden became president he signaled that the USA was going to accept refugees and they came a’comin’.
In May 2023 Biden ended Trump’s Title 42 which undid the basic right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border for 38 months. Biden also ended the “Remain in Mexico”policy which required some asylum-seekers to be sent back to Mexico during immigration proceedings. Biden also enacted a catch-and-release into the U.S. policy. It’s estimated that this policy has resulted in 8 million illegal migrants streaming across our border under Biden. Ask yourself where these people are living given America’s housing shortage.
On top of that Gov. Newsom extended free healthcare to 700,000 illegals, creating California as an even greater magnet for more illegals.
If you wonder why fentanyl deaths are an issue, look to the southern border. In 2022, 73,654 people died from a fentanyl overdose in the U.S., more than double the amount of deaths from three years prior in 2019. Fentanyl deaths have increased every year for the past decade, but 2022 marked the smallest year-over-year growth at 4.3%.
Lastly, Franco’s letter claims Trump’s White House chief strategist Steve Bannon decided to raise money for a wall “only to defraud investors and later be charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering because he used hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal expenses, despite assurances the money would be used for the wall.”
Bannon pleaded not guilty to charges that he defrauded donors who gave money to the nonprofit “We Build the Wall” group. He has not been convicted (the trial is to start in December) and surprise, surprise, the one pressing those charges is the corrupt Manhattan DA Alvin Briggs, the well-established Trump antagonist who prosecuted the Stormy Daniels hush money case in an election year.
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It smacks of desperation when you’re the president of the United States – a lame duck one at that – and try to make changes to the Supreme Court because you don’t like how they’ve ruled on important cases. The Supreme Court has been working to limit the size of the federal government which does not sit well with the progressives in the White House. So Biden is proposing changes that will never see the light of day since the founding fathers have a system that is quite adequate. He does not like the fact that Trump appointed constitutional justices so he wants to strike the serve as long as they wish for a limit of 18 years and he wants to be able to appoint new justices every two years.
This is where knowing history comes into play as a way to be very wary of grabbing desperate. In 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court because he did not like how they were ruling on many of his New Deal programs of his, there was a hue and cry against his plan. Fortunately, FDR‘s plan to pack to court failed miserably. Within five weeks of FDR’s announcement, the “court-packing plan,” as it came to be known, was heading toward a dead-end in the Senate. By June 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee had sent a report with a negative recommendation to the full Senate. “The bill is an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country. . . . It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches of the government,” the report read.
Biden is merely posturing because he knows that he cannot get Congress to go along with it nor would he have enough votes to ratify the change in the Constitution at the state level.
This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or 209 Multimedia Corporation. How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com
