Don's Tuesday Column

                 THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   3/27/2018

              Republican dinner, kids march, Facebook

Do you want a reason to plan to attend the 17^th Annual Red, White and Blue Dinner where Tehama County Republicans salute Tehama County Agriculture? Keep reading, mark the date, Saturday, April 14, and write down the phone numbers: 865-2666 and 200-0091.

It can be a bit frustrating, to say the least, to be surrounded by fellow Tehama County residents that vote overwhelmingly for candidates and propositions in line with our conservatism: Republicans for Sacramento, the House, U.S. Senate, and President, traditional marriage and so on. Then the reality hits that you can vote for conservatism and still not get it, as evidenced by the abominable “Omnibus” (Abom-nibus?) budget bill just passed and signed by President Trump.

The measured reaction—after the ranting from the usual talkers on radio and cable shows ebbs—should be to regroup, retrench, buck up and look for the “silver lining,” if there is one. In our case, there is a pony under all the barnyard manure: our own Representative Doug LaMalfa, who voted against the Omnibus-spending monstrosity. Hats off to Doug for not going along with the “beltway crowd,” as they hold hands and jump of the fiscal cliff.

That said, the invitations are in the mail but the mailing list does not include all prospective attendees. If you receive one, do use the reservation section as soon as possible so head counts can be tallied for the caterer, Rockin’ Ricks BBQ. April 14 is just around the corner so here are highlights for the night: Starting at 5:30, you’ll be able to socialize with fellow Republicans, and make offers on an abundance of nifty, practical or even whimsical “silent auction” items contributed by Tehama County businesses. What you are really doing is supporting our scholarship program and outreach budget.

Local radio impresario Cal Hunter will be the MC and deliver a patriotic message; our National Anthem will be sung, veterans saluted and a prayer and invocation will be led by Pastor Gilbert DeLao of Calvary Chapel. All will occur at the Veteran’s Memorial Hall, 735 Oak Street.

This year’s Guest Speaker will be local (from Glenn County) rancher, Shannon Douglass, 1^st Vice President of the California Farm Bureau Federation. As co-owner of Douglass Ranch, she works to raise beef cattle, sunflowers, pumpkins, corn and forage crops. Her background includes directing the Glenn County Farm Bureau, CFBF Young Farmers and Ranchers State Committee, as well as numerous other Youth, Leadership, county fair and employment advocacy positions.

That’s April 14; tickets are $45 per person, with tables for 4 or 8 available for your group. Call Linda Alston at 530-865-2666 or Jerry Crow at 530-200-0091. These are always one of the high points in the local calendar; you’ll be among friends, elected officials and candidates.

Writing on Saturday, the day of the national march by students for banning guns, err school safety, everything I wrote for last week’s column applies even more. The usual leftist organizing groups, public employee unions, anti-gun activists and liberal-run cities with buses to spare are staging a march featuring liberal youth that will not advocate a single policy that would have saved lives in Florida or any other mass shooting. Armed school personnel would have worked; undoing the grossly misdirected relaxation of school discipline under the guise of keeping minority miscreants from experiencing the consequences of criminal misbehavior—that would be a start. I see a long plan to radicalize the young.

The MSN quickly shunted away news that a 17-year old shooter with a grudge (who would have had his gun regardless of bans on sales to those under-21) was stopped, before inflicting more damage, by a school resource officer in Maryland. Good guy with gun stops bad kid with gun. It works almost every time it’s tried. “Liberalism: When you believe immature teenagers don’t know enough about guns to own them, but know enough about guns to make laws about whether you should own guns” (Patriot Journal). Hating the NRA solves nothing; it deflects attention from the real problems.

We have two liberal hypocrisy awards this week: 1) Outrage over Facebook data being used by Republican Trump; 2) Cued-up caterwauling over President Trump’s call to Russia’s Putin.

Apparently it was not well known that a celebrated part of Barack Obama’s second presidential win was the massive effort to coordinate with Facebook to build the biggest database in history. Included were the minute details of prospective voters’ online activity—all to precisely target voters most susceptible to political pitches tailored to their “profile.” Are you shocked to learn that all those “free” services, apps and sites consider you to be as much a product as a customer?

“Facebook sells ads based on what it knows about you. That’s its core business. To think otherwise is foolish…In 2007 Zuckerberg opened the Facebook platform to outside developers, who would then write their own applications to interact with users and gain access to their data on a wide scale…As The Washington Post reports, Barack Obama’s campaign made use of the same mechanisms to build its formidable social media organization.

“The New York Times reported in 2013 that Team Obama’s activities in data mining triggered alarms at Facebook.” They shrugged it off, expecting it to stop after Nov. 7 (Ed Morrisey, Theweek.com). Richard Viguerie pioneered direct mailing for Reagan’s campaigns. Door-to-door voter outreach utilizes extensive data to target individuals with select messages. Big deal.

Barack Obama congratulated 1) Vladimir Putin, 2) Turkey’s strong man, Islamist Erdogan, 3) Egypt’s wannabe Islamic dictator Morsi, 4) current strongman al Sisi and 5) America’s Islamic enemy-in-Iran, Rouhani—all questionable elections. Obama couldn’t bring himself to congratulate America’s only Middle East ally, who won an open and fair election: Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu.

Kicker: “The same people who insisted that Bill Clinton’s sex life was nobody else’s business, won’t shut up about Stormy Daniels” (Imgflip.com)