There used to be a Sacramento news station that ran a PSA at the outset of its 10 p.m. evening news broadcast of an empty swing in a dark park with a voiceover, “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?”
Apparently there are a lot of disrespectful young criminals in the making whose parents have no clue where they are and they’re causing problems. A Keyes woman posted on Facebook last week that some hooligans walked all over her car leaving shoe prints and her house windows were egged. Apparently she wasn’t the only victim.
I know it’s summer and some parents have let up on tracking their kids but I’ve written my share of stories where kids are picked up by police in stolen cars. It’s important to know who your kids hang out with.
A truly tragic story out of Turlock occurred on June 11 when a teenager was shot to death after his friend was playing with a gun that accidentally discharged into his chest. The friends had been telling the boy to put away a gun, that it wasn’t a toy. The gun went off in a house across the street from Jura’s Pizza and now his friend is dead and he’s up for manslaughter.
The boy is the son of a convenience store clerk who for years has rung up my morning soda.
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Did you hear that Sacramento Democrats want to restrict when our police can use lethal force against suspects?
They are pushing AB 931 that would raise the bar when an officer may use deadly force from “reasonable” to “necessary.”
I know there are bad cops just like there are bad doctors and lawyers and they must be dealt with. But the assault on our police by the left is inexcusable.
You know a sick and perverted mindset when the lawmakers like Sen. Steve Bradford, D-Gardena, express that, “It always blows me away that law enforcement only fear for their life when they are facing black and brown people. It blows me away me when black and brown men and women don’t even get to the jail. They don’t even get a chance to be arrested.”
Talk about promulgating a race war!
Steve really can’t believe that, can he? He’s posturing for political purposes, right? No clear thinking person can come up with that illogical conclusion. The list of white people killed by police is a long one. According to The Washington Post, so far this year, 192 white people have been shot to death by American police officers out of 491. How many blacks? 90! So Sen. Bradford, that means you are full of crap!
Off the top of my head I can recall that Ceres Police had to fatally shoot white suspects in Kenneth Michael Duckett (Feb. 26, 1998) and Ronnie Dale Cadwell Jr. (Jan. 2, 1998). Their white skin color had nothing to do with police shooting them; it had everything to do with reaching for a weapon or charging an officer while armed. And when Latino suspect Albert Thompson was killed by Ceres Police on Jan. 5, 2016) it was because he was reaching for a black hand torch in the dark that strongly could be mistaken for a gun.
State Senator Holly Mitchell, a Democrat from LA, reprehensibly confronted a representative of Peace Officers Research Association of California (PORAC) after he said the bill didn’t have money to train officers to respond to the new standard but noted that officers had better trained on how to handle suspects with mental health issues. She answered with this repulsive statement: “Perhaps mental health is politically an easier pill to swallow than race-based bias.”
The inference that officers only shoot minorities because they are minorities and not because they are doing stupid things like not complying with orders or they are reaching for their gun or they charge an officer is nothing but divisive race baiting and flies in the face of facts.
The Democrats and its extension in the media needs to end this narrative that police only fear black people and Mexican people. This divisive rhetoric is doing nothing but fanning the flames against law enforcement. It’s also discrediting the national media, which is suffering from already low credibility.
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Do I detect a major panic settling in the Democrat Party – the same one that is supposed to have a blue wave coming? T.J. Cox, the Democrat carpetbagger who abandoned his quest to unseat 10th Congressional District Congressman Jeff Denham here to take on Congressman David Valadao, a Republican in Hanford, sent a campaign fundraising appeal email out last week that notes how he is “stunned” that Ivanka Trump raised a staggering $3.1 million for the Republicans in June 18 in Fresno. His fundraising letter calls for a donation of any amount. He writes: “If we’re going to flip this California seat WE MUST prove that this blue wave is real by matching their deep-pocketed donors with our grassroots energy. Can you donate now to elect T.J. Cox to Congress and send Trump’s loyal foot soldier packing?”
I tell you that I don’t see a blue wave. TJ sounds desperate indeed.
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I know we were used to loosey goosey policy under Obama but why is Trump catching hell for enforcing immigration laws passed by Congress under the Clinton Administration? Answer: Because the media is trying everything to make Trump – their public enemy #1 – look bad. The media coverage of the illegal-immigration issue has always been accompanied by emotionally manipulative falsehoods.
For one thing, the media failed to report that the Flores court decision determined that the U.S. cannot detain children for more than 20 days, which means children get separated from their parents.
Look, the detained immigrant children were mostly separated by their parents when they sent them on their way in an effort to win asylum. Truth is that 10,000 of the 12,000 of these poor mistreated kids “in cages” were sent away from their Central and South American parents and telling them to make it to America and ask for asylum – which was an Obama loophole.
It’s interesting how the media piled on Trump, even though it was a Clinton era policy adopted by Congress.
State Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo stated this: “Separating children from their parents is not only cruel, but it is inhumane. It is an abuse to children.”
Well, well, well. The Los Angeles Democrat herself was brought to the U.S. illegally and yet she is serving in our state Legislature. How does that work?
I wonder if Wendy thinks it’s wrong to separate children from their parents if they, say, get arrested and incarcerated from committing armed robbery or rape or murder? Is that still inhumane?
A Border Patrol guard noted that our country’s protective handling of the children is more humane than parents sending girls to traverse Mexico to reach the U.S. border with birth control pills because they know they will be raped along the journey.
Democrats clamored for Trump to do something so he issued an executive order. They then screamed that he couldn’t do that.
Their concern is truly not about children other than using them as a tool to promote amnesty for all illegals and to fight the border wall.
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Speaking of this border children insanity, listen to this insanity from your insane state Attorney General Xavier Becerra. On Friday he announced is suing the Trump Administration to challenge the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) recent action relating to Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
He actually had the audacity to say that preventing these low-skilled refugees from countries like El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti and Nicaragua would be harmful to us, saying specifically “Our nation would be poorer without them.”
Poorer without poor refugees? How do you like his twisted logic? Yet, Crazy Becerra gets 45.6 percent of the vote.
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There is a letter on A4 from an Oakdale person who took me to task for saying there has been no proof of Trump collusion with Russia. I am absolutely correct when I say there has been no proof of collusion except for the collusion of Hillary Clinton conspiring to oust Bernie Sanders out of a nomination – and that the FBI conspired to manufacture ways to get rid of Trump.
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Boys will be boys. Contractor Stewart Engineering of Redding is in hot water after its workers rolled a giant boulder down a hillside at Emerald Bay in South Lake Tahoe and it hit a tree and knocked some pine cones out of it. It was videotaped, with juvenile kind of laughter. KCRA made a big deal about it, like it was the environmental disaster of the year. Let’s get real. Rocks and boulders fall all their own and damage trees and bushes. The tree was scarred and probably will live, as will the planet.
Stewart Engineering was hired by Caltrans for $4 million to do road improvements on a portion of Highway 89 at Emerald Bay and install a 192-foot retaining wall. I’m surprised environmentalists aren’t calling the retaining wall a threat to the world.
Some of the stuff that’s considered news today leaves me shaking my head. If it’s dramatic footage – like that of parents engaged in a brawl at a youth sporting event – then it gets aired on local or national TV. It gets the clicks and makes the money. It’s kind of a sad system that we play to a prurient element of society.
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Should restaurants be forced by the government to pay fast-food workers a minimum wage? As the disparity between my salary and a fast-food worker gets narrower and narrower in California, I’d answer that as a simple no. I’ve never believed the government should dictate what a business pays its employee when the market determines the price of labor.
Here is how an encounter I just had moments ago with a cashier at Wendy’s on Geer Road in Turlock. I stand at the register, waiting for her attention as she’s telling her co-worker that her mom is 43 – twice.
Me: “I’d like a single, no cheese.”
The simple order seems to cause to befuddle the clerk who pauses and searches the keyboard and discovers the right key,saying“Oh,” and then grins.
Me: “I’d also like a side salad with ranch, and a large soda.”
(So far I’ve slowly ordered three things and she can’t seem to retain any of it).
Clerk: “You say you wanted a salad with ranch?”
Me: “That’s what I said. And I want a large soda.”
Clerk: “Okay, so you want a single cheese with no cheese.”
Me: “No, I didn’t say I wanted a single cheese. I said no cheese on my single.”
Clerk: “Do you just want to make a meal?”
I’m thinking the combo means the salad is a sub for fries and I say, “Yeah, if it works out cheaper, sure.”
Clerk: “What size?”
Me: “Size on what? On the drink? A large.”
She rings me up and when the tray comes to me it has a large serving of fries that dwarfs my burger. Ah, no wonder it was over $10. I take it back to the counter and tell the other woman, possibly her manager, that I didn’t want fries. She apologized and said, “You wanted a substitute, right?” Yep.
I wait while the fries are lifted off my tray and change is counted back in my hand.
Hey, young people who work in fast food, take some advice from a much older person. Just listen to your customers. And, no your job isn’t worth $15 an hour – especially since I have to pay more for my burger to subsidize incompetence.
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While dining inside, Wendy’s big screen TV – why does every restaurant in America think they need to have a TV? – is tuned into CNN and their leftist talking heads are ripping on our First Lady for wearing a jacket that read, “I really don’t care. Do u?” While Michelle Obama walked on water in the minds of these so-called journalists, Melania Trump is ripped by these overpaid talking heads every time the poor woman turns around. It’s enough the make the average American ill.
If Trump could actually walk on water half this country would either accuse him of scaring fish or not being able to swim, illegally defying the laws of gravity or having a messianic complex. If he cured cancer they would condemn him for not having done it sooner, or accuse him of only trying to spare his rich friends.
Do you have any feedback about this column? Let Jeff know by emailing him at jeffb@cerescourier.com. He will read it, promise.
