Josh Harder is now in Congress. He signaled his liberal agenda on Day One, right after taking the oath.

Here is his statement and my response in parathesis:

“Today is a special day because of the people who sent me here (ballot harvesting worked well for you). Central Valley families deserve a representative who will put their interests first, (we already had one in Denham) and that will be my goal as long as I serve in Congress (which hopefully is one term). That means that from the start, I’ll focus on bi-partisan solutions (judging by your words at the debates I see you offering zero concessions to Republicans or the president and plenty of obstruction) to help lift up all our community members (code word for pull up the bottom by stealing from the top?). And it starts with a bill to re-open the government (you’d better not unless it contains border wall funding).

 “There’s a lot we need to do right away for the Central Valley (like ridding the streets of gang vermin). We need to find ways to grow our economy and bring better-paying jobs to our community (so quit punishing successful businesses, raising the minimum wage and taxing corporations to the point they leave the country). We must tackle the absurd spike in prescription drug costs and make health care more affordable (try limiting medical malpractice lawsuits for a start). We need 21st century solutions for protecting our water (how about the 19th century method of building dams, Joshy?) and to support our farmers (okay, repeal burdensome environmental regulations on them). And we must find a sensible solution to border security (by building that unscalable wall your party is blocking) that keeps our communities safe (then don’t support Sanctuary States like you do, Josh) while treating everyone with dignity and fairness (what you mean is continue shielding aliens from ICE when they get arrested and don’t deport criminal illegal aliens). These are ideas everyone can get behind (not me), and they will be my compass as I deliver (more taxes) for the community that sent me here (you won by scaring seniors and enamoring youth who want free college and free medical).”

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Our culture and now Congress is really infested with some dangerous demagogues. By definition they are political leaders who seek support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

There’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist nitwit who acts like she’s all that. Then there’s filthy-mouthed Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to make it to Congress. Palestine has long been an enemy of Israel so that might explain why she told supporters this: “Don’t you ever, ever, let anybody take away your roots, your culture, who you are. Ever. Because when you, people love you and you win. And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama, look. You won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t,’ because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherf-----.”

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The precedent has been set: Kill a cop in Stanislaus County and your best defense is hire an attorney to claim you’re mentally incompetent.

David Machado, the Nov. 13, 2016 killer of Deputy Dennis Wallace hasn’t gone to trial because he went the route of the “nutso defense.” He’s mentally incompetent, my foot. If he would have sprayed bullets randomly at cars while driving down Geer Road I’d say he may have been nuts, but there’s nothing mentally incompetent about a thug blowing away a cop because he doesn’t want to go to jail.

The thug who murdered Newman Police Cpl. Ronil Singh is also not mentally incompetent. His ugly mug posing with firearms was symbolic of this man’s evil and is evidence that he was nothing more than a thug gang banger, not a deranged lunatic. He certainly was certainly competent enough to guzzle beer and shoot at police.

Machado and Paulo Virgen Mendoza (or whatever his name is because he said he goes by different names) should both be executed – right after their trials.

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There are some truly misguided souls in our land.

When Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson in Massachusetts called for Congress to fund the border wall to protect Americans from criminal illegal aliens in the aftermath of the murder of a Newman Police Officer, some feigned outrage. Ric Rheaume II wrote that Hodgson was “not putting politics aside” and not working for his constituents.”

Since when is national security for all Americans a political matter that must be set aside? While all sorts of vermin are crossing our border the world must be laughing at the ridiculousness of our gutless Congress.

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Nothing shocks me any more about California’s leftist politics. It’s just too bad that the sheeple don’t see how they’re being scammed and victimized in the process.

It’s bad enough that Gov. Brown and his cohorts have forbidden police to communicate with the federal ICE officials with regard to criminal aliens, but their policies have helped to kill a Newman Police officer.

Now we have a new law going into effect that further insures voter fraud can occur more easily.

I’m talking about AB 306 which Brown signed into law last summer and which was passed with mostly Democrats supporting it and mostly Republicans voting against it. You would be surprised to know that Anna Caballero, our new state senator, bucked her party to vote against it.

As you know, the practice of ballot harvesting has made a huge difference for the Democrats who are paying to hound, encourage, cajole or in some cases buy off voters. Now AB 306 makes it even easier.

While many states make it illegal to harvest ballots (i.e., collect ballots and hand them in for the voter), the exception is usually a family member can do so. So if Aunt Millie is a shut-in and wants to vote she can let a son or daughter or grandson turn it in. Many states realize that there’s far too much potential for fraud when you let any stranger turn in ballots. In California the law has been that the person handing in a ballot for Aunt Millie must be identified and sign the outside of the ballot envelope. Not any longer.

State Assemblywoman (now state Senator) Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (yep, Democrat) is so enamored by the thought of Democrats stealing more elections that she wrote AB 306 to excuse the person turning in the ballot from filling out name, relationship and signature on the outside of the ballot envelope! If you think ballot harvesting was a problem in November, think of how more flagrant the problem will be in the future.

Hey, Democrat lawmakers, don’t you think you’ve already got the state offices bottled up enough to where you don’t need to make overt moves for more voter fraud?

In their attempt to get their poorest constituents to vote, Democrats now want to ensure that taxpayers pay the postage on all those ballots. I’ve never balked at paying for a stamp to mail in my ballot. It’s my honor as a voter. Some voters feel there should be no cost to them, in either effort or cost of a stamp or the time to do the reading. That can lead to the same poor quality voting on behalf of those who aren’t invested in even the slightest research in casting an intelligent vote or paying for a stamp. Instead, you get votes cast from what people see in biased media sources.

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Don’t get me wrong here, please. I’m very happy that the murderer of Newman Police Cpl. Ronal Singh has been apprehended – and quickly. Sheriff Adam Christianson, who retired on Monday with the entry of a new Sheriff Jeff Dirkse, spent his final days in office basking in the national glory of the quick capture and mentioned how he got “things done” and was “never more than a step behind” the suspect and how “everybody was out looking for this individual.”

Great, but as Christianson left office I can’t forget that a private citizen named Lauren Grace London, 25, was murdered, burned and dumped in an orchard behind Central Valley High School in March 2015 yet there didn’t seem to be that same full-court press to capture her murderer. Sheriff Christianson told me in February 2016 that: “We will solve this case … I am confident that we will make an arrest in this case but it’s just going to take more time.”

It’s been nearly three years since Christianson made that statement and nearly four years since London’s murder. How much more time? Or is this a cold case that is never served justice?

* * * * *

Lee Brandt, who is both a Christian and a conservative in Ceres, shared a Facebook post with this message: “Ca. Police Officer Ronil Singh has been murdered by an illegal alien who was aided by 8 other illegals, all from a sanctuary city. Not one Democrat has questioned the sanctuary city or illegal sanctuary policies which allowed this. Not one single Democrat has blamed the gun. Not one. Think about it…”

The vast majority of Americans support the wall and stronger border security as well as gun rights. Most people hear the deafening silence in the Democrat Party and saw how Democrat leaders refused to listen last week as Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Neilsen spelled out the dangers of unbridled illegal immigration. They just want Trump to be so wrong they turn a blind eye to a serious problem.

The blindness trickles down to the local level where partisan sniping goes on in social media. Bonnie Silveria, a former Ceres city official, answered Brandt: “And your president never takes on the American white males who have slaughtered black, Jewish and the majority of police killed last year. Hmmmm.”

Whoa, did Bonnie really go there? Step over the line to make this an issue of calling out race and failing to acknowledge  that liberal policies ARE protecting criminals who have snuck into our land? That’s so typical of the left to make this an issue of race and not of national sovereignty and national protection.

What “slaughter” of blacks, Jews and police is Bonnie Silveria talking about? When has that occurred?

Slaughter, by definition, refers to the killing of a large number of people or animals in a cruel or violent way such as a massacre. Was there a recent slaughter? The last I remember was the 2017 Las Vegas shooting where 59 were killed and 422 were wounded, and Trump did strongly condemn the actions of the shooter, Stephen Paddock (who is white), as “pure evil.” After saying he prayed for a day in which the innocent are safe from hatred and from fear, he also personally visited the families of victims.

The only other slaughter I can think of was the Orlando gay nightclub massacre of June 12, 2016 committed by jihadist Omar Mateen who killed 49 and injured 53 others. Trump wasn’t president then.

A total of 47 (some say 52) U.S. law enforcement officers died on the job in 2018. In October President Trump addressed the International Association of Chiefs of Police and called for capital punishment for criminals who murder officers – regardless of ethnicity, I might add. Calling the murder of an officer “a wound inflicted on our entire nation,” the president said he wanted convicted cop killers to be executed as rapidly as possible.

When you have a liberal policy like California that fosters a presence of gang members, drug cartels and thugs from other countries, it needs to be called out for what it is. Our government’s chief role is in protecting Americans from foreign and internal threats, whether from the military or law enforcement or border patrol. By failing to protect the homeland elected officials are, to me, guilty of treason.

* * * * *

How much more evidence do you need that the Democrat Party is the benefactor of loosey-goosey voter laws than in North Carolina? Voters there will be asked to show photo ID when they go to the polls. Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill but the Republican-led state Senate overrode his veto. Cooper defied the will of the voters who passed voter ID by a 55 percent majority. One liberal in that state, the Rev. William Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign, complained that the bill was unnecessary and instead of trying to battle voter fraud that the state should have pushed liberal causes like expanding Medicaid and forcing businesses to pay employees more money to work.

* * * * *

Gov. Brown, good riddance. Thank God for term limits. You did so much damage in your last days in office, one of them being allowing a local murderer to be considered for parole in 12 years. Sean Benge was a “lifer” but you apparently have a problem with punishing people for horrific crimes. It bothers you to see Charlie Manson types growing old in prison so you made ways for some to get out early, like for Benge.

Sean Benge blasted away a Ceres man with a shotgun in 2005. He’s a cold-hearted killer. The courts said he needed to rot behind bars. You, Gov. Brown, felt sorry for him, so you reduced his sentence from life in prison without the possibility of parole to 25 years to life with the possibility of parole.

When asked why the leniency, Brown told the Sacramento Bee, that the number of people who are serving long and life sentences in California has “just skyrocketed.”  Well, yeah, because his party and their judges don’t want to see heinous crimes rewarded with a one-way trip to the gas chamber! Brown also complained that California went from 12 state prisons to 35, from 25,000 inmates to 128,000. That’s because bleeding heart lawmakers don’t want border security and 26 percent of U.S. prison space is occupied by criminals who crept across the border.

It’s also because soft-on-crime legislators like Brown have cheapened life by making sentences less severe for the taking of life and thus signaling to all the other murderous thugs that they will receive “mercy” in California courts.

California is truly in sorry hands, especially now that our new governor has decided to attack the sane policies of our president as Gov. Nuisance welcomes more illegal aliens into the state. While saying he needs to make rural California feel a part of the state’s family, he just attacked our horse sense and values.

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