Ceres City Manager Alex Terrazas is on administrative leave – which usually happens before they disappear for good, but then again nobody at City Hall is willing to say why.
Ceres Police Chief Rick Collins has been appointed interim city manager.
I hope the next city manager is one who will work with the press.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Tom Westbrook, Toby Wells, Art deWerk and Gary Napper – all who served as Ceres city managers – because they were friendly and accessible. I can’t say that was the case with Alex.
Terrazas was hired fresh after being terminated by the Los Banos City Council. When I tried to find out why, nobody in Los Banos would explain. When it’s a personnel matter nobody is going to say why Alex is gone.
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Your new state Assemblyman – Juan Alanis, a Latino Republican and member of the law enforcement community – told me that Democrats in Sacramento refuse to add a single day to sentencing.
This at a time when violent crime is increasing across the nation.
Radical Democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee last week killed bipartisan, common-sense bills to impose meaningful consequences on fentanyl traffickers who are killing hundreds of Californians every month with poison-laced counterfeit drugs. While the Committee did advance bills to create a task force to study the issue and increase coordination between different levels of law enforcement, Democrats sided with criminals and against innocent families by rejecting multiple bills to hold dealers accountable.
The committee killed: AB 367 (Maienschein) which would add a sentencing enhancement for fentanyl dealers who kill or seriously injure people they sell the drug to. They also killed AB 1058 (Jim Patterson) which would have increased penalties for those possessing large quantities of fentanyl.
The committee punted on two more bills, making it unlikely they will make a difference in the fentanyl epidemic.
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Blaming violent crime on guns and peaceful gun owners is akin to blaming alcohol and the responsible drinker for the DUI deaths. Yet, that’s how progressives wish to reduce crimes committed by people – by blaming the guns. The conservatives’ approach is to crack down on the lawbreaker.
Statistics show that black folks are much more likely to be victims of crime. White men are killed by guns at a rate of 3.15 per 100,000 while black men die at a rate of 48.1 per 100,000 – a staggering difference!
A Pew Research poll indicated that only 33 percent of white Democrats want to reduce crime, 63 percent of Latinos and 66 percent of blacks feel fighting crime should be more of a priority.
Criminal justice reform based on this nonsensical notion of “white privilege,” zero dollar bail policies and lax prosecutors who won’t prosecute only means more people become victims.
An example was the 24-year-old Selma Police officer who was shot to death in Fresno County in February by a dirt bag let out of after serving seven months of a 5-and-a-half-year sentence.
Then on Thursday a Fresno Police officer had ear partially torn off while attempting to arrest a burglary suspect released from Fresno County Jail earlier that morning. The criminal, Willis Monroe Randolph, 31, was out of jail despite being arrested five times in the past two weeks for vandalism, received stolen property and burglary. Apparently jail and prison is a revolving door thanks to failed policies enacted by Democrats in Sacramento and their refusal to lock up dangerous felons.
No wonder it’s hard to find police officers.
If you think that’s bad, look at Chicago where black on black crimes are through the roof and punishment is weak. So far this year 163 people killed in Chicago.
Consider this: two Chicago teens, 14, and 17 were only charged with misdemeanors after they stole a car and ran a red light and rammed into a family car, killing a 16-month-old child.
When you take away consequences for bad behavior, you only get more of it.
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I was a bit taken aback at the way Mayor Javier Lopez spoke to a citizen – and a U.S. military veteran to boot – at last week’s meeting.
Gene Yeakley and Mayor Lopez are not exactly members of their respective mutual admiration societies. In 2022 Yeakley got under the mayor’s skin when he complained about the city’s lack of enforcement against a pop-up event. Yeakley frequently issues complaints about code enforcement in Ceres, such as unlicensed street vendors. On Jan. 21, 2022 Lopez fired off an email to Yeakley and John Warren after they both complained about a lack of enforcement. The mayor’s email kind of tells you how he feels toward the two citizens: “Gentlemen, let’s be clear, in no shape or form will I continue to allow you gentlemen to disrespect my city staff, with your comments. In addition, in this matter at hand in which you both seem to believe you are the only priority. Regardless if it’s a pop event, local business for whom I support, the real evidence only shows how negative and anti-small businesses you are. In the end I also support freedom of speech and the right to have an opinion. These are yours. Our city council and city staff work day and day out to move this city forward. I’d suggest you be apart (sic) of the solution not apart (sic) of the problem....”
Which brings me to last week.
Apparently Lopez did not see Yeakley’s hand go up during the “Citizens Communications” section of the April 24 meeting. Yeakley raised his hand to ask a question at the outset of the Consent Agenda and the mayor wouldn’t allow Yeakley to state what the question was, saying, “Hold up, I run the meeting, not you. I’m asking you a question, is there an item you would like to pull, yes or no? And if it is, which number is it.”
Yeakley explained that he had a question about an item that wasn’t on the consent agenda to which the mayor replied: “Hold up, hold up. Did I say you can speak? You’re not taking over this meeting, okay? I will respect you but please hold off for one second.”
“That’s a public hearing so we’re not there yet.”
When it became apparent that he didn’t want to pull a consent item, Yeakley replied, “But I had …”
Lopez replied: “Point of order or I will have you removed. Sit down, sit down.”
“Oh that’s real nice,” shot back Yeakley. “That’d be nice for the Police Department, huh?”
Mayor Lopez: “Don’t be talking back to me like that sir. I gave you an opportunity to pull a consent item and you’re refusing to listen to me. I am the chair.”
This drama could have been avoided had the mayor simply acknowledge that he missed Yeakley’s hand up and didn’t call on him.
Yeakley later told me that he only wanted to ask why a citizen’s email was read during Citizens Communication when it was only germane to a public hearing further into the meeting.
I get along with both men. It would be nice to see more courtesy and less “I’m in control” demeanor from the mayor – especially toward a senior citizen who served his country in the armed services.
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Some progressives in power are truly disturbing people.
A Democrat transgender Minnesota state lawmaker – Rep. Leigh Finke – introduced a bill he calls the “Take Pride Act” that would remove language from his state’s Human Rights Act that declares pedophiles are not included in protections based on “sexual orientation.”
Finke, is one of the most manliest looking fake women I’ve seen. According to Wikipedia, “She (actually he is male) also edited two non-fiction books for Beaming Books, ‘Queerfully and Wonderfully Made’ and ‘Welcoming and Affirming’.”
It’s one thing to have weirdos getting elected to public office but it’s another when they begin offering protections to the perverse segments of society.
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Meanwhile, another transgender (why does it always seem to be men pretending to be women and not the other way around?) who managed to get elected to the state Legislature in Montana, flew off the handle the other day and was censured. Zooey Zephyr – who is an example of someone who was raised as a brat and taught you can be disrespectful to get whatever you want – protested a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for children. The key words here are “for children.”
You wouldn’t let a kid drive a car or own a gun so why would you trust they have the judgment about life-altering surgeries and hormone treatments?
Zephyr (born as Zachary Raasch) and he has lived up to his name when he incited a protest of LGBTQ+ folks in the chambers. He claimed Republicans would have “blood on their hands” if they passed the bill. Nothing like being dramatic for the TV cameras. While he is intelligent, he’s also arrogant, defiant, confused and mentally ill with a martyr complex.
Montana is not exactly a liberal bastion. It’s a very conservative state so how he won with 79.3 percent of the vote last November is explained by the fact that his district is in solidly blue Missoula, a town about the size of Turlock in a sea of red state voters. Young people, whose heads have been pumped with lies and distortions in public schools and universities all of their lives, have now hijacked politics in this country. Their TikTok attention span prevents them from doing any serious study of who they vote for, thus you have Zephyr in a position of power who then must be ostracized for his conduct.
What offends my sensibilities is how Politico reported this story: “Conservative Republicans have repeatedly misgendered Zephyr since the remarks by using incorrect pronouns to describe her.”
Later in the same article Politico quoted Rep. Joe Read saying, “There needs to be some consequences for what he has been doing,” before adding that Read “frequently but not always used incorrect pronouns when referring to the Democrat.”
I prefer to deal in realities so, no, conservatives are using the correct pronouns. Zephyr is a male. God gendered him as a male for he was born with a penis. He had a surgery to remove it and create a fake vagina. He has the DNA of a male. He has the bone structure of a man. He has a very manly face with long stringy hair. He also has an Adam’s apple. I don’t know what happened in his 34 years on the planet to make him “feel” like he is a woman but he is messed up.
Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, suggests the “completely leftist” media helped Zephyr by “uncritically repeating his claims and treating him as a hero, rather than critically examining his behavior and his personal story in an evenhanded manner.”
Carl writes on montanatalks.com “a more exhaustive search revealed a more disquieting story, one that shows a disturbed young man with a troubled past and a series of relationships with dubious characters.”
Raasch’s desires to run for office in Montana stems from his anger that the GOP attempted to ban “trans girls” from girls and women’s sports, contrary to both common sense and scientific evidence, that men who transition to female do not have an advantage in sports, a proposition increasingly rejected even by politically correct athletic bodies.”
Apparently Raasch played too many video games growing up. While at the University of Montana, he focused on his master’s thesis on transhumanism (the melding of man and machine through “technological enhancement” of the human body) but abandoned the work.
His Twitter account featured a disturbing anime cartoon with a woman positioned atop a reclined male, blood on his face and with Raasch’s words: “This is my ideal relationship with a man: one where I’m riding him, and also ready to end his life.”
The overwhelming number of Twitter followers suggested he seek help for his mental illness.
He is dating Anthony Reed (“Erin Reed”), another man pretending to be a woman. Reed got married to a woman, fathered a child and decided he wants to be a woman. Talk about putting yourself before others! He told his ex-wife that he wanted his child to call him Mom and she put her foot down, saying “I gave birth.”
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As society is focused on gender, schools are already turning out children who cannot compete on the world stage and now comes another recipe for disaster.
The Clark County School District in Las Vegas is going to “equitable grading.” In other words, give them an “A” for effort, not for actually mastering the subject.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “equitable grading” has the “aim to measure whether a student knows the classroom material by the end of a term without penalties for behavior, which, under the theory, can introduce bias. Homework is typically played down and students are given multiple opportunities to complete tests and assignments.
Proponents suggest that the grading system we all grew up with favors those with a stable home life and more hands-on parents. Well no duh that students who have hands-on parenting and a stable home life do better in school.
No, the grading system reflects – not favors – those who are being raised correctly.
Those who endorse “equitable grading” say it helps students with after-school responsibilities, such as a job or caring for siblings, as well as those with learning disabilities.
Dummying down is not the answer. A better approach is healing families of their dysfunction. As a country we need to start a campaign of truth: kids do better when raised by an active and engaged mother and father. Fathers are not expendable. When they are absent, they set up their own children for failure and this has nothing to do with race.
Michael Rinaldi, principal at Westhill High School in Stamford, Conn., where teachers began exploring different grading systems four years ago, said: “We’re giving children hope and the opportunity to learn right up until [the class is] officially over.”
No, what you’re doing is teaching kids to put in little effort and to be procrastinators.
Ask yourself, when you step onto an airliner, do you want the smartest kid in class flying the plane or do you want a kid who finished his studies in the nick of time, i.e., just to get by? How about your lawyers, pharmacists and doctors? You want quality folks there too.
Not all teachers are buying in – and they shouldn’t. Alyson Henderson, a high-school English teacher said, “If you go to a job in real life, you can’t pick and choose what tasks you want to do and only do the quote big ones. We’re really setting students up for a false sense of reality.”
Educators often come up with failed harebrained ideas over time.
When I went to school in the 1960s and learned how to spel, we were constantly given spelling quizzes of about 30 words per day and we were expected to spell them correctly. We weren’t given an A for effort. I became a pretty good speller.
When my daughter went to school 30 years later, teachers were asking her, “Jennifer, how do you think it should be spelled?” I cringed. Sounding out words doesn’t always work. Today my daughter is hot a great speller while words are how I make a living. I cannot possibly do my job waiting to the last minute to write an entire newspaper, but that’s what “equitable grading” is training kids to do.
This is what social justice looks like. A failed society.
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Whenever you increase taxes on something, you reduce activity on that something – including living.
Blue states are not doing well.
During 2021, 332,000 fled California with $29 billion in adjusted gross income.
New York lost 262,000 residents and $24.5 billion in income.
Illinois lost 105,000 residents with $10.8 billion.
Massachusetts lost 44,000 residents and $4.3 billion in incomes.
They fled to red states like Florida and Texas. Zero-income-tax Florida gained $39.2 billion—up from $23.7 billion in 2020 and $17.7 billion in 2019. About $9.8 billion of the total arrived from New York, $3.9 billion from Illinois, $3.7 billion from New Jersey and $3.5 billion from California.
Texas attracted a net $10.9 billion in 2021, which follows a gain of $6.3 billion in 2020 and $4 billion in 2019. Californians represented more than half of Texas’s income gain in 2021. The Golden State also sent $4.4 billion to Nevada, $2.7 billion to Arizona and $2 billion to Washington. Nevada and Washington don’t tax wages, and Arizona is phasing out its income tax.
The idiots in Sacramento don’t get it and they just double down on stupid. They want to impose a wealth tax on residents even after they leave the state – which is not constitutional.
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
