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Here comes socialism pushed by Josh Harder
Opinion

Another head-scratcher: Last week Councilman Channce Condit cast the lone vote against hiring two part-time water conservationists on a regular basis versus the current temporary basis of six months.

Condit asked if the water patrollers could cite code enforcement violations but he probably didn’t know that it’s illegal to use water enterprise funds on uses outside of the water division. The city manager told Condit that there were problems with his idea and when it came to a vote, Condit was the only one voting no.


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I warned you it was coming. Democrat socialist Josh Harder last week pushed for his government-run healthcare scheme.

Harder said: “At over $10,000 spent per person annually, the U.S. spends more money on healthcare than any other industrialized nation. Nevertheless, the quality of our healthcare is much worse—the life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than other nations, while our infant mortality rate is much higher.”

I beg to differ, Mr. Harder, but American healthcare is the best in the world. That’s why the government-run socialist medicine recipient head to the United States to get treatment. In its 2015 report, “Leaving Canada for Medical Care,” the Fraser Institute said difficulties in obtaining timely medical care at home is, increasingly, leading Canadians to seek it abroad. “It is possible [they] may have left the country to avoid some of the adverse medical consequences of waiting for care, such as worsening of their condition, poorer outcomes following treatment, disability, or death,” the report says. “Some may leave simply to avoid delay and to make a quicker return to normal life.”

Harder now wants to make it harder for us all to get quality healthcare in a timely fashion by controlling healthcare.

Mr. Harder is using scare tactics as he portrays our healthcare system as horrible by throwing in life expectancy since there are more broad reaching factors like Americans’ high-fat diets and sedentary lifestyles. And while it’s true that the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is higher than Canada, Switzerland, the U.K., France, Australia, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Japan, the reasons are varied like congenital malformations, low birth weight, chromosomal abnormalities, SIDS, accidents, and other factors. A more honest discussion won’t blame healthcare but social and structural conditions that lead to high rates of infant mortality, feels Dr. Paul Jarris, chief medical officer for the March of Dimes. Higher infant mortality is linked to parents’ poor education, low income, unsafe housing, and run-down and unsafe neighborhoods. In honest terms, babies growing up to indigent communities have a higher chance of dying. But we all know what the welfare system in our country has been breeding for decades.

And when Harder says that “nearly 30 million Americans are uninsured” I have to question why given all the exchanges set up by the mandate of Obamacare and if you didn’t the IRS fined you up the wazoo.

Ask yourself if you think the government can run healthcare any better than the DMV, the Veteran’s Affairs, the EPA and Social Security. Then tell me you want government-run healthcare.

They also have no way to pay for their scheme other than raise taxes.


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It looks like the LGBTQ-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Z community has opened a big can of worms. In their quest to push for the normalization and acceptance of boys claiming to be girls, seems it’s caused a slight problem in competitive sports.

Take the example of Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, two Connecticut boys who claim to be women even though they have male parts. Miller took first and Yearwood took second place in the indoor track girls’ 55-meter sprint.

Selina Soule (a real female) had to tread delicately between being politically correct and denouncing the unfair biological advantages a male has over a female because of testosterone levels when she said: “We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing. I fully support and am happy for these athletes for being true to themselves. They should have the right to express themselves in school, but athletics have always had extra rules to keep the competition fair.”

No matter. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletics Conference allows boys to run in girls’ races (and vice versa) based on “gender identity.”

So there you go, the Left wants tolerance and inclusion – at the expense of those who really play fair. It’s really no different than making society put up with bathroom switches by confused individuals.

By the way, Yearwood and Miller both look and talk like males – because they are – with the difference of wearing long hair and makeup. I’d bet its’s more to do with them wanting to gain attention and stand out more than wanting to be girls.

Do you sometimes wonder what our world is doing to our kids?

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Did you hear this? Some human debris has been lacing innocuous videos for kids with this disturbing looking character named MoMo which is urging kids to kill themselves. Momo was reported to have infiltrated YouTube, appearing in children’s cartoon Peppa Pig and clips of the video game Fortnite. The disturbing challenges have been linked to the death of a 12-year-old girl in Argentina. Momo promoting children to do dangerous tasks such as turn the gas on or to find and take medicine tablets. What  sick people.


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A case of insanity in our education system? The principal of Kings Valley Academy II in Tulare thinks blue or red colors are unacceptable for student attire – even if a small part of a logo for the 2019 World Ag Expo on a sweatshirt. Jaevhen Ferrumpau, 15, was told to remove his sweatshirt, which depicts a dairy cow, tractors and grape and cotton crops with “World Ag Expo” in blue lettering.

I find it a bit contradictory that the Kings Valley Academy logo is in blue and their website has both blue and red in it.

It seems like an abandonment of common sense in California’s heartland.


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I enjoy history and belong to several history groups on Facebook where members randomly share old photos and articles. In the California History FB page, one user posted a photo of the Baldwin Hills dam break of 1963. It was an historic event in which five persons were killed and 277 homes were destroyed. The whole discussion blew up when an Occupy Wall Street socialist type, Jocelyn J Miner, had to turn it racial by posting: “Left unsaid - the affected Baldwin Hills neighborhood’s population was largely black and Latino.” Justifiably, her attempt to make the dam break all about race prompted a number of how-dare-you responses. Steve Fraiser aptly posted: “Dam failure does not discriminate.” One apologist suggested Miner was only bringing it up as “an historical and contextual reference.” Sur-r-r-r-e.


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I’m surprised California wasn’t the first. The North Carolina State Legislature is considering a change in the grading system for the state’s public schools. Under North Carolina’s House Bill 145, the 15-point scale would replace the 10-point scale for grades commonly used for decades and would mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade for schools, a far cry from the current 60 percent failure mark.

The new grading scale would impact school evaluation scores, not student grades. In other words, it would allow crappy schools to go about their business with no consequences. I had a hunch which party had proposed this and I was right. Democrats Wesley Harris, John Autry, Brandon Lofton and Christy Clark were the four primary sponsors.


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We’ve never seen such a radical group of Democrats running for president in 2020. They want to abolish the Electoral College (because Trump won because of it), they want to pack the courts (because they feel there are too many conservatives on it) and they want to end Senate filibusters. When they can’t win fairly they want to change the rules. What else can we expect from a party that believes it’s okay to let babies who’ve been purposely aborted and still breathing outside the womb die; and the party that wants to eliminate jet planes and cows because they fart.


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The 116th Congress may be the most diverse but maybe the most irrational. There’s the ridiculous Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Orcasio-Cortez. Then I question the logic of Muslim and Minnesota Congresswoman Iihan Omar. She suggested that Trump’s impeachment is “inevitable” but didn’t explain why she felt there were any grounds for doing so. But then she had to go and condemn and discredit Vice President Mike Pence. She said “Pence is an ideologue, and the ideology he holds is more terrifying to me and my constituents.” You might know that the ideology Pence holds is actually a theology, that of Christianity. Omar might as well say our Founding Fathers were terrifying as well but then again she was born in Somalia in 1981 and has little experience delving into American history. 

Frankly Omar scares the hell out of me. She is an enemy of Israel, wants no border security, wants to scale back the military, wants to abolish ICE, and supports free college, sanctuary cities and Medicare for all. She is the liberal’s liberal.

It’s no wonder why some Americans fall for this swill; writers with zero objectivity writing for such liberal sites as the Huffington Post present her as some sort new enlightened answer for the country’s ails when she’s really a kook who is out of touch. Let me quote the swill from Andy Campbell’s piece: “Critics have long held that the beliefs of Pence and his family pose a threat to ethnic and religious minorities, and especially the LGBTQ community. (His wife, Karen, took a job at a school that discriminates against LGBTQ students and staff, for example, and Pence himself keeps racists close by.)”

Unchecked rhetoric that reads like a news story flows out of that rag site. Let’s get real. Karen Pence worked for a private Christian school that had entrance standards for personal conduct based on Christian principles. By Campbell’s definition, anyone believing the Bible is a racist and bigot.


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Lots of exceptional families like charter schools. So why are Democrat lawmakers always gunning for them? They have a new catch phrase, “kids, not profits.” Spare me. Some of the best students I’ve come across are charter school kids.

Democrats, in bed with the teachers unions, would love nothing more than shut down charter schools altogether. In their view, charters rob taxpayer money away from union teachers and we all know they have an insatiable appetite for more and more tax money.

You can just see it seething in the latest press release from the California Teachers Association. That group titled their release, applauding their Democratic puppets for “passing bill aimed at ending waste, fraud and abuse hurting students.”

California Teachers Association President Eric Heins  said he’s glad SB 126 “gets us closer to ending the waste, fraud and abuse that has taken millions in much-needed funding and resources from our students.” They went on to applaud AB 1505, AB 1506, AB 1507 and AB 1508 – all designed the neuter charter schools.


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I don’t watch a lot of TV but have you ever noticed that many commercials make the white male the buffoon? It’s acceptable for white men to be made the stupid ones, dumber than the women in the commercials but you rarely see women or black or Asian men ever made fun of. Test it out.

And notice too more and more how brands are featuring gay and interracial couples in their ads? The same goes for TV shows.

As a fan of “Survivor,” I suspect there is a formula for the cast: always have the sculptured babes who prance around in bras and short shorts, always have the studs in their 20’s and 30’s, always an Asian female, two blacks (man and woman), typically a Latino woman, a white Southern guy with more accent than brains, the washed up mom or dad who shouldn’t wear any bare midriff, and your representative gay or two. I’ve been struck by how many gays make it on the show given the cast is small and yet there are only about 4 percent in the LBGT community. Using those stats, one should only see a gay person in every one out of four shows. For such a small cast of players, gay players seem disproportionately over-represented, but let’s face it, that’s how CBS wants things. It’s not exactly run by a conservative think tank.

Since pot smoking is now main stream, when will Survivor introduce its first stoner complete with sob story as the strains of the violin play along?


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You have to admire the optimism displayed by Republicans in Sacramento who are outnumbered in a big way.

State Senator Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, officially began her new role as Senate Republican Leader on Friday. I like what she said: “Californians have a lot to be proud of, yet polling shows 53 percent of people don’t want to be in the Golden State anymore and are considering fleeing to other states. Republicans collectively represent 29 strong in the legislature and we will work to make California affordable and promote opportunity for all.

“I look forward to working with the Senate pro Tem and the new governor as we find common ground such as solving the housing crisis, addressing frivolous litigation that stifles job growth, and fighting for the rights of our vulnerable developmentally disabled communities.”

The California State Senate has 28 Democrats and 10 Republicans. The California State Assembly has 61 Democrats and 19 Republicans. Now maybe you can see why so many bad laws are getting passed.


This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA. How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com