Dems shouldn’t fall into socialist trap

Don’t let Ocasio-Cortez’s win fool you. Democrats should keep calm and cater to the center.

That’s what the Los Angeles Times editorial page columnist, Doyle McManus, writes in that newspaper’s July 5 issue.

“Democrats are anxious and divided,” he goes on. “They’re worried about polls forecasting that the battle for Congress will be tight, not the “blue wave” blowout they’ve dreamed of.

Part of those dreams is the win by Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York City State Senate race. The 28-year-old defeated an experienced Democratic incumbent by spouting socialist brainstorms such as free medical care for all and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, aka ICE. She doesn’t think that having completely open borders would be a problem.

Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez should take some illegal immigrants home for a stay, feed them free food, give them a place to sleep and pay their legal bills with her own money if they happen to get into trouble. That’s pretty well what ICE does now, dealing with illegal border crossers.

A fairly large percentage of illegal crossers happen to be crooks, by the way. If you abolish ICE, who would round those people up and get them back to Mexico?

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Part of The Madera Tribune’s staff took a moment on Thursday to join newspaper staffs from throughout the nation in a moment of silence at 11:33 a.m. our time, to honor the five newspaper employees of the Annapolis, Maryland, Capital Gazette — who were killed at that day and hour the previous week when a man with a grudge against the paper walked in on them with a shotgun and started firing.

Newspaper offices, television stations and radio stations over the years have been targeted by people who didn’t like what they had read, heard or seen.

In the old days, rival editors sometimes would square off with pistols and shoot it out, usually running out of ammunition before they hit anything.

The infrequency with which this happens should not allow journalists — or anyone else in a public-service job — to be unaware of what’s going on around them.

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Kudos to the Madera Police Department for its effort to stamp out illegal fireworks. Some fairly respectable people turn into idiots on the 4th of July and set off those big fireworks as though they weren’t violating every noise ordinance in the city and posing a danger to their neighbors.

Let’s hope the police department continues its efforts next year and makes it too expensive for most of those knuckleheads to keep up their bad habits.