‘Brilliant’ – California’s elected legislators vote to keep repeat offenders here
Dear Editor,
We need more criminals in California! That’s the position the state legislature is taking with the passage of AB 4 which prohibits state and local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) when illegal immigrants are arrested for a crime.
The bill is designed to limit the federal agency from enforcing immigration laws resulting in the release of criminals rather than their deportation.
When Cook County, Illinois passed a similar law, ICE Director, John Morton wrote, “ICE is aware of some of the additional crimes being committed by these recidivist criminal aliens after such jurisdictions have chosen to release them back into their communities rather than into federal custody. These crimes include the possession of controlled substance, money laundering, burglary, spousal battery, aggravated driving under the influence, and even attempted murder.”
John Morton went on to state that such laws violate federal laws, making AB 4 unconstitutional.
Gov. Brown vetoed a similar bill last year, but AB 4 was designed to change some of the things that he found most objectionable. Regardless of the changes made, this legislation is still despicable and will have the obvious effect of increasing crime.
Hopefully, the governor will have more common sense than the legislature and veto AB 4.
Bill Cool, Corona del Mar
Socialist transit policies gobbling up tax dollars and draining the local economy
Dear Editor,
As summer fades into autumn, I’m marking 50 years since first seeing Gilroy, and watching what local government has done since 1963.
While recognizing some success in retail, government persecution of industry, trade and commerce has left segments of our local economy in shambles. Under the genius leadership of City Hall and the Valley Transportation Authority, industrial manufacturing sites became the socialist transit hub. That sucking sound you hear is our tax dollars going down the drain inspired by former Supervisor Rod (or more accurately “Red”) Diridon, so accurately derided by former councilman and Dispatch columnist Bob Dillon for his boondoggle philosophy.
Sadly for Gilroy’s small business owners, that “Red” philosophy has been embraced by City Hall and the County Board of Supervisors, and VTA, so as a result this is the largest urban area on the North American continent without intermodal facilities. That old “Salad Bowl Express” that I traced for produce shippers in the ‘70s at Union Pacific Railroad is only an historic memorial to the late Al Navaroli’s innovation. Our local leaders today subscribe to VTA public-sector “solutions,” which have earned it “worst in the nation” status in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of all the nation’s transit agencies.
But like medieval physicians calling for more blood-sucking leeches to cure dying patients, our municipal leadership steers us into deeper debt with greater and greater socialist “solutions.”
Our local leaders have shown us, in 50 years, that they refuse to learn from history, and would have us suffer the same fate as the USSR.
It’s becoming so bad that Bill Lindsteadt’s retail revolution gains are entirely offset by the insolvency and bankruptcies generated by tax-and-spend-a-holics. As I wrote to the Gilroy Chamber’s Government Review Committee in 1998, the tax-a-holics’ policy is a new version of Pandora’s Box, just as surely as Red Diridon’s Bullet Train is a Trojan Horse. Unless we alter course, the next 50 years won’t be worth staying around to see. Caveat viator.
Joseph P. Thompson, Gilroy
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