Gene Yeakley and John Warren need to lighten up a bit.
Gene continues to pressure the city to mandate the use of face masks in public despite being the county saying it’s up to each business. In fact, the county has now said they’re looking the other way if businesses want to open up.
Now John Warren wants to shut down the Fourth of July celebrations, i.e., eliminate fireworks sales. John writes: “This is not so much about our constitutional rights, those are not being taken away and will always be in place.” He says that as our rights HAVE BEEN unjustly suspended.
Let’s see, we’ve ruining spring break, vacations, weddings, funerals, disrupted schools and colleges, killed Ceres Street Faire 2020, blown up graduations, the California State Fair, closed Disneyland, Magic Mountain and any theme park, closed the beaches, state parks and the Stanislaus County Fair. You can’t go see any athletic contest, no football, basketball or baseball games. The state’s Dictator-in-chief Gavin Newsom won’t let you walk out into the woods where there isn’t a human to cough on you for the next 20 miles. And now the COVID killjoys want to prevent citizens – who can walk into a cannabis shop and buy pot or a Walmart to buy pantyhose or wallpaper – from buying safe and sane fireworks and blow them off as they social distance in their yards? This is insanity, folks. Do you see how some have bought into the lie?
If Mr. Yeakley and Mr. Warren are too afraid to live, they need to stay home or don hazmat suits when they go down to the Save Mart to buy groceries. The rest of us have freedoms we want to enjoy.
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It’s becoming clearer every day that liberals generally support the continued lock-down of our jobs and lives and pursuit of happiness while the conservatives want to reopen everything.
Hardly anything new here. We’ve known that Democrats love to restrict freedoms, whether it’s your choice of buying a Happy Meal for your kids, ordering any size soda of your choice, and forcing you to wear a helmet if you don’t want. They are trying to outlaw smoking in your own home
The same old leftist partisans are shaming me – and you thought the Left doesn’t believe in shaming – because I see the COVID-19 lock-down as a huge sham foisted upon the people.
Fed up with the government control and the destruction of small businesses, Turlock conservatives protested the lock-down two weekends ago. They have a right to be angry and a right to protest despite what the liberals say. In response came a petulant response in a letter to the editor written by an Allan Perez. I don’t know Allan but I’d bet he’s a hard carrying member of the Democrat Party. He said the protest was an “absolute embarrassment … for the city of Turlock.” He insultingly called the protestors “smooth-brained losers” who “committed an incredible act of selfishness.”
Perez lambasted the protest occurring in a city which has the highest number of COIVD-19 cases in Stanislaus County. He said Turlock “is in no position to be mewling for a loosening of restrictions.”
Mr. Perez conveniently forgets to mention that Turlock has high numbers because of what’s occurring inside the confines of one facility – the Turlock Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. So why would you lock an entire city down because of a problem that’s mostly occurring inside of a single facility?
Perez even makes the bizarre claim that hotter weather “doesn’t change anything.” Well, he’s wrong about that too. UV light is proven to kill viruses.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen driving around in their cars with their masks on and being dumbfounded. I’ve seen single people walking around nobody with a mask on. The only explanation is that they have bought into the Deep State media narrative that this boogie man virus is going to fly up their nose on the fluttering of wind.
Perez insists the “antique shop will still be there when this is over,” which was his way of slamming the older and wiser segment of the population who recognizes a horse crap narrative when they see it.
Isolate where you need to isolate. Turlock Nursing should be kept locked down. But don’t lock down Ceres schools or Newman salons or the Riverbank theater because of it. If Los Angeles County is the problem, extend restrictions but don’t lock them down and certainly free us up in Stanislaus County which has extremely low numbers.
Let’s talk numbers that the Deep State media won’t report. Half of the counties in America have zero cases. Of the closed cases in the USA, 312,513 have recovered and 86,244 have died. Of those 27,403 have been in New York and 9,946 in New Jersey just across the Hudson River.
California has had 73,172 cases and yet 3,032 deaths. So do a little math and you see the deaths represent 0.0414 percent of all cases.
If you divide California’s death county of 3,032 and divide it by California’s population of 39,927,315 you see that 0.00007594 percent of Californians have succumbed to COVID-19.
The likes of Democrat Andy Constantinou of Ceres claim I’ll feel differently if somebody I know dies of COVID-19. Well, I don’t know anyone who has even gotten COVID-19 let alone died from it. But I have known people killed in car crashes and it doesn’t make me fear riding in a car even though I have better odds of dying that way than from a virus most healthy get over. Is my demand that the lock-down be lifted saying I don’t care about people? Not at all, but what it does say is YOU isolate yourself if YOU think COVID-19 would be the nail in YOUR coffin.
I’m not sure why so many are willing to trade their liberties for longevity. I suppose I take a fatalistic approach to this so-called pandemic. I’d go to Disneyland tomorrow without a mask if they opened it. I have a better chance of lightning striking me and killing me than of coronavirus nailing me.
To get a little preachy, I wish people would be more concerned about where their souls go after they die than obsess over hand washing, mask wearing and social distancing. Given that the fatality rate of all life is 100 percent and something is going to take every one of us down, it’s amazing how many people give no thought about God and heaven and hell. I rest in my belief that Jesus is the only savior who can save men from the pit, or hell, because of what he did on the cross.
I have had almost seven years to ponder the final days of my wife who was living life as happily as she ever had before only to receive the sorrowful news of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Some very dark days followed. She heroically faced her death sentence and at one point a four-month isolation in her hospital room in San Francisco. She questioned God why this was happening but never once doubted that God was preparing a room in his mansion for her as mentioned in John 14:2. She knew the words of Paul: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” It was ironic, to me, that as she lay in a hospital bed in our home the sounds of Fourth of July fireworks were tapping on the window. She passed just two-and-half hours into the morning, achieving the ultimate independence from a world racked with evil, pain and suffering.
None of us have a right to be safe. It’s a chimera and government does not have the ability to guarantee our safety – nor can we expect it.
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State Attorney General Xavier Becerra just keeps on keeping on.
He is a walking contradiction. During this whole COVID-19 thing he has supported shutting down our workplaces, allowing people to be late on their mortgages, student loans, you name it. But the second President Trump announces a temporary policy of the EPA to relax enforcement of violations of environmental statutes and regulations during the pandemic, sue-happy Becerra takes aim at the White House again. He claims the action will attack people’s respiratory systems. Not sure how that’s the case since the Newsom Regime has kept everybody locked in under house arrest.
But Becerra is nothing more than a progressive liberal who has tried to stop Trump at every turn. How many lawsuits has he filed suit now? 70 times? 80 times?
Remember this jackal is suing Trump because the president thinks our Valley should be able to use the water in our reservoirs to grow food. But Becerra thinks Delta smelt are more important. This is the same man who last year successfully blocked Westlands Water District from taking action to raise the Shasta Dam for greater water storage. His reason? It would have covered Indian burial grounds. Maybe he’s never heard of cemeteries being moved? Or does he just care more about fish in the McCloud River and not people being able to farm?
His man also blocked the U.S. government from withholding funds for sanctuary states and cities. Becerra also was opposed to immigrants being vetted from questionable nations and he tried to block the building of the wall at the southern border based on so-called environmental excuses.
California, why in God’s name did you vote for this man?
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Josh Harder might be looking at last week’s 25th Congressional District special election outcome, and be a little worried. In the special election to replace Rep. Katie Hill (who resigned over leaked revenge-porn nude photos) Republican and political newcomer Mike Garcia handily defeated Democrat Assemblywoman Christy Smith 56 to 44 percent. The media declared this to be referendum on Trump since Garcia supports Trump and Trump endorsed Garcia.
The 25th went from Republican to Democrat in 2016. Now it’s back in Republican hands. Garcia’s victory marked the first time the GOP has flipped a California district red in 22 years.
Likewise in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District, Trump backed GOP candidate Tom Tiffany danced all over Democrat Tricia Zunker last week by a margin of 14 percent.
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I may be a community journalist but I happen to think our national news media outlets have an agenda with just about any story they report. They lobbed nothing but softballs at Obama for eight years, protected Jeffrey Epstein, badger Trump at every press conference, overwhelmingly write negative slants in articles, offer sympathetic reports on illegal aliens, a steady drip of climate change drivel and are on the lockdown bandwagon.
That’s why I appreciate the work of Project Veritas, a watchdog of the media and government bureaucracies. Recently they exposed CBS News for queuing a line-up of cars at a Grand Rapids health clinic for good video on demand for coronavirus testing. Whether it was CBS or the Cherry Health Center, nobody knows for sure but CBS pulled the video.
Why do we see reporters wearing masks for TV shots when nobody else is around? Is it just about presenting scary optics?
Liberty University is now suing the New York Times for a false article reporting how they responded to the pandemic lock-down. In their attempt to discredit the Christian university, The Times claimed 12 students got COVID-19, which was an absolute falsehood. Liberty president Jerry Falwell, Jr., Tweeted: “Prime example of why you never believe anything @nytimes says about @LibertyU. Complete liars.”
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So it appears that the whole Russian collusion story was precisely a Deep State attempt to discredit and remove Donald Trump from office. Moreover, recently released documents reveal that Obama himself targeted Michael Flynn, Obama’s Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency whom he fired in 2014 for alleged insubordination. Flynn says he was fired because he was hard on ISIS and Obama was not.
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The governor’s May 12 criteria for re-opening society came under heavy criticism statewide. Santa Barbara County Public Health Director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso called the Newsom’s new reopening criteria “unreasonable” and “insurmountable.”
That Board of Supervisors, comprised of three Democrats, one Republican and one NPP, voted unanimously to send a letter to the governor objecting to his one-size-fits-all reopening criteria. The letter also points out the state’s “conflicting approach” of forcing the counties to increase testing, while also not allowing counties to open if that increased testing results in an increase in the number of positive COVID-19 cases.
According to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times, 95 percent of Californians live in counties that cannot meet the governor’s criteria.
I believe we have an ego maniac in Sacramento who is enjoying the lockdown, the daily spotlight of the press briefings and the power he wields.
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As a result of Newsom’s Neutering of California the state budget is looking at a $54 billion hole. He wants his mismanagement of the state budget to fall on U.S. taxpayers and is demanding Trump hand over billions. I say: Governor, manage your own fiscal house in order. I suspect he saw the shutting down of the California economy so that he can seek federal money to bail out the state in its unfunded pension liabilities. According to the California Policy Center, the total of unfunded pensions in California is at $846 billion, not the official estimate of $316 billion. But even using only the officially reported estimates, California’s state and local governments are about $1 trillion in debt.
The federal government does not need to pay out a dime to get California Democrats out of the financial grave they’ve dug. Californians need to face the consequences for failing to elect fiscally responsible officials.
Of course, Gavey’s buddies in the teachers union don’t want to see any cuts, which is like saying I should be able to keep my bedroom when I lose my mortgage.
In a press release issued on Thursday, California Teachers Association President E. Toby Boyd issued a statement calling for Nancy Pelosi’s federal government shakedown. What’s a billion here, a trillion there, Boyd seems to be saying.
But when you don’t have it, you don’t spend it. California Democrats have been spending money like drunken sailors. Things like $900,000 apiece on all electric buses. Things like the 12,000 Caltrans employees making more than $100,000 annually. Things like the $73 million to provide healthcare to illegal aliens who snuck across the border and started reproducing. Things like allocating $23 billion in taxpayer funds to service illegal immigrants. Things like the more than $6 billion spent on high-speed rail few people will use – if its’s completed.
What a crock!
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Leave it to the Bee to publish a story about Latinos having a disproportionate percentage of COVID-19 cases. The article suggests that while Latinos are 47 percent of the county’s population they comprise 64 percent of the cases. The Bee suggests “The impact of the coronavirus has been lighter in neighborhoods with higher incomes.”
It has little to do with race and everything to do with education levels and skill sets. The health of lower income people is always a notch below those who make lots of money. If you make a lot of money you tend to be better educated and your health tends to be better. Just look at Colorado’s health compared to Mississippi’s.
Sandra Hernandez, chief executive officer of the California Health Care Foundation, is quoted as saying: “Latinos are more vulnerable because they face greater barriers to health and are more likely to be working in essential service roles.” Of course she suggests that illegal aliens are afraid to stop working because there is no safety net and they don’t want to be discovered and deported.
And what’s this about greater barriers to health? Have you seen the clientele at Golden Valley Health Centers of which there are three in Ceres alone?
Just about every “essential worker” I’ve come into contact with are white people, typically younger than me.
Have Hispanics really gotten the message about safe practices? Are they just not observing social distancing since multiple families live in the same household? And what about the elephant in the room, being the high incidence of type 2 diabetes in the Hispanic community (largely because of diet) which makes coronavirus harder to defeat?
Class warfare stories like this always end with the idea that “government is not doing enough and throwing enough money at the downtrodden.”
There are a lot of babies suckling on mama government and the minute you pull them away they start screaming. This is what socialism looks like.
At least Jerry Brown had the right idea: lower your expectations – this time of what government will do for you. Stand out of our way, government.
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Ever the optimist, President Trump has the accelerated goal of coming up with a vaccine. Never fear, the naysayers in the Democrat Party poo-pooed the idea. One headline on Friday read: “Trump reveals vaccine could be created by end of the year.” Next it this headline; “Dems skeptical of Trump vaccine plans.”
It’s almost as though they’re hoping Trump fails at getting a vaccine.
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
