Politics indeed makes strange bedfellows, the old saying goes.

Let’s go back a year ago when time came for the Ceres City Council to appoint a member of the Ceres Planning Commission when the term of Ruldip “R.J.” Jammu was set to expire. Jammu wanted to remain on the commission and applied but was denied.

Jammu only served a year after being appointed in late 2022 to fill the vacancy left when Daniel Martinez was elected to the City Council. As far as I recall, Jammu never cast any “objectionable” votes on any matters that would trigger any council opposition, yet he was cast aside. Why? Apparently the mayor and Martinez – they were the applicant interview subcommittee – were eager to get Condit onboard. After all, Mayor Lopez became a bit cozy with Gary M. Condit’s big brother, Supervisor Channce Condit who was there to support Lopez at the mayor’s re-election October 2023 kickoff party at Blaker Brewing.

Gary Condit hadn’t even gotten his commission seat warm – he was appointed to a four-year seat – when he decided to take on the mayor following Troy Arrollo’s abrupt exit from the race. As it would turn out, getting appointed to the commission was Condit’s springboard to launch a very critical and effective campaign against Lopez for mayor this year.

Here, a year later, with two vacancies nearing, the council decidedto reinstate Jammu as a planning commissioner.

How rich the irony!

I’m not saying Condit wouldn’t be running for mayor had he not been appointed to the Planning Commission. He probably would have because that’s what Condits do – they run for office. But Lopez has probably asked himself on more than one occasion: “And this is the thanks I get?”

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Will Condit be elected Ceres’ next mayor? Don’t underestimate the Condit machine. He’s amassed the most campaign cash, mostly through his family’s political connections. His grandfather, of course, is the former disgraced congressman, his dad worked in state government circles and his brother and great uncle are county supervisors.

I can’t predict what will happen. It could be a tight race or a landslide in either direction. I didn’t think Javier Lopez would pull off his win over Bret Durossette in 2020 but Lopez received 8,753 votes to Durossette’s 6,924 votes, a difference of 1,829. Will Lopez continue to receive Latino support that got him elected four years ago?

I feel fairly confident in predicting that Councilwoman Rosalinda Vierra will come in third place. She hasn’t raised what the other two have and Condit sucked a lot of the air out of her campaign.

Could this election serve as Councilman Bret Silveira’s Waterloo? His push for the park gazebo at over a half million raised some ire in the community. And if you look the 2020 election results, Silveira collected 1,900 votes while his three opponents collectively pulled 2,840 votes. Do we read those 2,840 as “Never Silveira” voters? Were the 1,325 voters who supported the lame 2020 candidacy of Juan Pablo Vazquez doing so strictly because of his Hispanic surname and will they fill in the rectangle for Cerina Otero?

It’s going to be very interesting watching this election.

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At least one gentleman was upset by the editorial cartoon that we published last week to the point that he threatened legal action. Apparently he missed the lesson on the First Amendment and freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

By the way, the editorial cartoons I run are from the Daily Torch, the website of Americans for Limited Government.

The cartoon in question shows an angry Barack Obama holding a whip labeled “Shame” and exclaiming “Black men! Get back on the plantation!” as he points to a southern style mansion with a “D” above the gates leading to it.

The man upset by the cartoon left a message saying he was black. Apparently he missed the whole point of the cartoon, drawn in response to the former president’s shaming of black men who won’t vote for Kamala Harris and were voting for Donald Trump instead. Obama suggested that black men should vote for her because of her ethnicity, which is in a figurative sense suggesting that blacks should continue falling in line with their taskmasters, keeping them on the Democrat “plantation” so to speak.

It’s shameful for anyone to vote for candidates based on race and not on factors like temperament, substance and policy.

It’s shameful that a desperate Obama would mimic the 2020 Biden narrative that if you don’t vote for Democrats like him that “you’re not black enough.” What kind of nonsense is that? Can you imagine if Trump told whites that if they voted for Harris that they “aren’t white enough”? Hell fire and brimstone would rain down from the left wing liberal media.

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Mayor hopeful Gary Condit, who is a member of the Planning Commission, was probably hoping for a “gotcha moment” when he asked the city attorney last week about the appropriateness of Mayor Javier Lopez influencing the Planning Commission. 

In August Lopez dispatched friend Irene Ortiz, the vice president of the Ceres Chamber of Commerce, to a Planning Commission meeting in his absence and on his behalf to urge members to deny Pollo Campero’s plans to build on Hatch Road. Lopez didn’t want to see another chicken restaurant in that area. Lopez said the city doesn’t want to see a concentration of same businesses next to each other. Lopez seemed to threaten an appeal of commission approval and the “strong possibility that this establishment will not be able to open at this location.”

Condit sought clarification if Lopez’s actions were legal under the Brown Act.

The attorney said he sees “no violation” for a mayor to express opinions at a public meeting regardless if he is an elected official. Trying to twist arms behind closed doors is a different matter, however.

Condit, however, suggested the city needs to look into developing guidelines, saying “it’s a continued problem.” He feels there is a difference when a mayor tries to “wield influence over an independent board.”

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I’m perplexed by the voters in California. They know California is headed in the wrong direction, yet they keep electing the ones steering the ship of state in the wrong direction.

Gavin Newsom is sinking in popularity but that should have happened a long time ago because administration is a failure. His approval rating is now at 44 percent, meaning 56 percent disapprove, according to a poll taken by the Public Policy Institute of California. When asked about the direction of the state, Californians are more likely to be pessimistic than optimistic (60% wrong direction, 38% right direction). This has been true since June 2023. The poll revealed that those living in the Central Valley have a more negative view of the state’s future than Bay Area folks.

So why do so many voters continue to support the idea of a one-party system of governance in California? Why did voters not recall Newsom in 2021 like they did oust Gray Davis in 2003?

Why are there 62 Democrats and only 17 Republicans in the state Assembly? Why are there 31 Democrats in the state Senate and only nine Republicans? Apparently the majority of Californians are not happy with the direction of the state yet they keep electing the same single party into control. Democrats have unbridled power to enact policies that are not in the best interests of Californians.

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Did you hear what a federal judge in Virginia did last week? He ordered Virginia to put more than 1,600 people back on the state’s voter rolls after they were removed because they aren’t legal citizens.

The National Voter Registration Act requires states to stop systematically removing the names of ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election, known as a “quiet period,” to avoid errors that could take eligible voters off the rolls. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin says his state did not violate that law but did enforce a 2006 state law signed by a Democrat governor. Youngkin is not happy and said: “Only 11 days before a presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals – who self-identified themselves as noncitizens – back onto the voter rolls. Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.”

Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares accused Biden’s Justice Department of pulling a “shameful, politically motivated stunt” ahead of Election Day and stated “it should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter.”

It’s apparent that the Left continues pushing for non-citizens and illegal aliens to be able to vote, even though it’s unconstitutional.

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Speaking of hard-to-believe scenarios, it appears that the vast majority of voters want to reward Democrat Adam Schiff with a Senate seat after he lied to us all for years about Trump-Russia collusion while he served on the House Judiciary Committee. One poll shows Schiff ahead of Republican Steve Garvey by a 63 percent to 37 percent margin. 

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Prop 5 must be defeated. It’s the Left’s attempt to chisel away at the landmark Prop 13, the Jarvis-Gann Initiative that has kept the lid on property taxes in California. It’s a measure that would make it easier for officials to raise property taxes by lowering the threshold for approval, dropping it from two-thirds to 55 percent.

Prop 32 must be defeated. It would raise the minimum wage once again and drive up prices that are already too high. It would add to inflation.

Prop 33 must be defeated. It is an anti-private property rights measure that would actually cause an increase in rents by choking off investments.

Prop 35 is a tax increase on health care taxes.

Prop 36 must be passed. It would help undo Gavin Newsom’s Prop 46 which caused retail theft to go through the roof. It will empower criminals to seek drug rehabilitation since most people steal to support drug habits. It also does away with that insane treatment of theft of up to $950 as a misdemeanor.

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All indications suggest that Donald Trump will win the presidency next week for a second non-consecutive term. Some people will be in sheer meltdown, including a few anti-Trumpers in my own family. One will probably need to check himself into the psychiatric ward with Stage IV Trump Derangement Syndrome. I predict that leftist rioters will take to the streets of big cities in blue states. They won’t know what to do with themselves with the democratic process playing out.

Kamala Harris has not been able to excite many people in her campaign other than appeal to those who suffer from the MSNBC indoctrination of Orange Man Bad. She can’t articulate policy and she can’t speak coherently beyond her “but Donald Trump” word salads.

But the sheer rhetoric coming from the leftist media parrots is laughable. Trump held a rally in Madison Square Garden with 20,000 inside and 10,000 outside but if you listen to MSNBC you would believe that Trump only chose the location because the Nazis had a rally there in  1939. That the Madison Square Garden is an inherently fascistic venue is among the stupidest things we’ve heard in this failed campaign of hers. Funny how the media nut jobs failed make the same correlation when rock bands like Rolling Stones and Jackson 5 appeared there over the years or when JFK’s birthday party was held there in 1962, as well as the Democratic conventions of 1976, 1980, and 1992, and George W. Bush’s GOP convention of 2004.

Some of those media outlets need to be punished for their blatant shoveling of horse crap; viewers should abandon them and their dishonest platforms for dismal ratings.

Speaking of sheer phoniness, can you believe that they put Tim Walz up to live streaming like a gamer with AOC to appeal to young males? They also staged a phony scene in a bar where Harris sits at a bar to have a beer with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and says, “We need to make more ground with the men.” Harris then stops and suddenly acts like she just discovered that cameras were going and mics on and says, “Oh, we have microphones in here listening to everything; I didn’t realize that,” and Whitmer says, “You’ll bleep my f-words.” Wow, she is so cool, vote for her because she drinks beer and cusses. Our standards surely have slipped.

Harris was the first Democratic candidate to drop out of the 2020 race in 2019 because she wasn’t liked and had no real plans. NPR reported on Dec. 3, 2019: “Amid a crowded field filled with both moderate and progressive candidates, Harris struggled to carve out her own policy lane. She shifted positions several times on a defining issue for Democrats: health care. Harris initially backed the total elimination of private health insurance, only to later roll out a health care plan that allowed private plans as long as they met government standards.”

 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