GUEST OPINION If this isn’t against the law, it should be!

There is an organization that I have featured on my KZSB AM 1290 radio show over the years known as OpenTheBooks.com, a project of American Transparency, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

OpenTheBooks.com works hard “to capture and post all disclosed spending at every level of government — federal, state and local.”

In 2022, the organization filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act requests and captured 25 million public employee pension and salary records. They also broke open the California state checkbook for the first time in American history despite the stonewalling of state officials. They are worthy of your attention and financial support.

The latest spending spree

OpenTheBooks.com disclosed revealed an incredibly tangled web of political grift in an endless cycle, all having to do with Gov. Gavin Newsom and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Here are the details of their report.

Jennifer Newsom runs two companies, a nonprofit named The Representation Project, which licenses gender justice films along with dealing with issues involving children’s mental health concerns in curricula featured in public schools throughout the nation. This nonprofit is funded in part by scores of state vendors who were also solicited to fund Gavin Newsom’s political campaigns, which is a story all by itself. Ms. Newsom also writes and directs the gender identity films via her for-profit company, Girls Club Entertainment, which she sells through the nonprofit to schools.

But that is only one-half of the story. When Gavin Newsom was elected, he created the Office of the First Partner, with a budget of more than $1 million per year, through which Jennifer Newsom lobbied the state government, via her husband the governor, for some $5 billion in state funding for K-12 mental health services that funded 10,000 school counselors. “Coincidentally,” thereby, the director of the California Association of School Counselors and the California Board of Education adopted guidance that recommended her films and curriculum be licensed and used in classrooms.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the films Ms. Newsom are peddling to our school children contain two types of pornography: sexual and political. Specifically, the films depict strippers and bondage, discipline (or domination), sadism and masochism (as a type of sexual practice) as it warns children as young as 11 years old about the dangers of watching the same. Not only that, but the film also includes the website addresses of porn sites including Porn Hub, MassiveCams, BDSM.XXX, and Brazzers.com.

Furthermore, one lesson for middle and high schoolers includes the “genderbread person,” who aims to show children how biological sex, “gender expression,” “sexual attraction” and “gender identity” exist on a spectrum, which can be mixed and matched.

The political porn content of the films urges students to become political and social advocates who will urge their fellow students to vote for politicians, like Gavin Newsom, who just happens to appear in the films, who support a “care economy” while it pushes a guilt complex on students who are benefitting from their privilege at the expense of the oppressed within our society. Ironically, a good part of the mental health crisis among school-aged children was generated by Gavin Newsom’s brutal lockdown of our society, including school closures and the requirement to wear masks everywhere we were. The first partner even admitted the same in a 2020 report she coproduced indicating teens are experiencing a tremendous loss due to school closure and social distancing. which has led to feelings of denial, anger and depression in our children.

Open The Books Founder Adam Andrzejewski summed it up quite well when he stated that “the Newsoms create the problems, solve the problems and cash checks along the way.”

The Jan. 6 sham

For two years, Democrats, antiTrump Republicans, the FBI and newspapers gaslighted and told lies about what happened at the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. As a result, many Americans were brainwashed into thinking an insurrection had taken place. It was a sham, a lie.

One of the most egregious examples of the corruption was the sham Jan. 6 Committee that told lie after lie. The Jan. 6 Committee had seen all the videos about that day at the capitol.

They knew that Brian Sicknick was not murdered but died of natural causes some other day. They knew that Fed Ray Epps lied in sworn testimony and was the leader starting and encouraging people to go into the Capitol building.

They knew that most of the people in the building were wandering peacefully. They knew that Jacob Chansley “QAnon Shaman” was not leading an insurrection but was getting escorted through the Capitol by the Capitol police. And they knew that a clip of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., was deceptively edited to accuse him of cowardly running away from the Capitol.

In conclusion, the unselect, biased Jan. 6 committee was a scam.

It is now known as “ criminal fabricators of this most important day.”

Going forward, what needs to happen? Will there be other shocking developments? Will the videos be released to the public? Will people be investigated, arrested and charged (former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff and former U.S. Rep. Adam Kingzinger)? Will documentaries be made? But most important, will the flow of information keep coming about the corruption of the federal government and the corporate media? Time will tell.

If our republic is to survive, this type of corruption must never happen again.

Diana and Don Thorn Carpinteria

time for Orcutt to incorporate

The citizens of Orcutt are fed up with the actions of the city of Santa Maria as they attempt to annex the Richard’s Ranch property into the city. It is located next to State Route 135 and Union Valley Parkway. The parkway already has significant traffic that creates loud noise that makes it hard to sleep at night for those that live, like me, next to this roadway. If approved, traffic will increase by 20,780 trips per day creating more unwanted noise. This area has long been part of the Orcutt community plan with nothing to do with the city of Santa Maria.

Also, Righetti High School is now at 145% of capacity. When students are going to and from school, we now have difficulty pulling out of our neighborhood onto Foster Road. If approved these added students will make it “exponentially” worse!

What is the basis of this ill conceived gobble by the city of Santa Maria? What is motivating their actions? Let’s look at the project! It is a project consisting of 400 apartments, 95 town homes, and a retail commercial center.

The city of Santa Maria wants to annex this property for two reasons-tax revenue and state housing mandates, both at Orcutt’s expense.

Orcutt now has 34 Key sites in the Orcutt Community Plan. Any changes need to be made by the citizens of Orcutt, not Santa Maria. There is no doubt that dwellers in this project will use Orcutt’s resources such as schools, law enforcement, fire and rescue, parks, trails and roadways. All will be overwhelmed at the expense of Orcutt citizens without representation.

How does Santa Maria exercise this authority over Orcutt?

Years ago Santa Maria and a supervisor from Santa Maria decided that Orcutt did not need state water. They have continued to control growth with a grip on water through the years even though Orcutt has its own vast supply of underground water. Every time a new development comes along, Santa Maria uses the “Monopoly Water Card” and refuses to sell water unless the project is annexed.

Today Orcutt residents have more expendable income than Santa Maria and, in fact, support elements of Santa Maria’s economy such as Costco, Home Depot/ Lowes, car dealerships, big box stores, hospitals, etc. Santa Maria reaps the benefits via taxes without providing services to Orcutt.

While Santa Maria tore down its historic downtown and it still struggles to survive, Orcutt did the opposite. Orcutt residents formed the “Old Town Orcutt Revitalization Association” and transformed Old Town Orcutt into a thriving historical downtown.

Join me in assembling a group to incorporate Orcutt, which was established in 1904. If we’re successful, Orcutt would become the third largest city in Santa Barbara County — larger than Guadalupe, Buellton, Solvang, Carpinteria, Goleta and Lompoc. Contact Steve LeBard to join our group at 805-7141165

Ken McCalip

Northern Santa Barbara County native

Editor’s note: Mr. McCalip holds bachelor and doctorate degrees in history, cultural geography, and law from various California universities. He can be reached at kennethmccalip@yahoo.com.

Parents and children are the GOP’s future

The Republican Party’s slow transformation from the Bordeauxsipping party of Acela Corridor suburbanites into the beer-drinking party of working-class Rust Belt-ers and Sun Belt-ers has been picking up some steam lately.

And as the GOP’s divorce from the Chamber of Commerce over irreconcilable cultural differences accelerates, a golden opportunity has emerged to recast the GOP not in a 1980s-era image of supply-side tax-cutting, but in a revamped image of the party that focuses on supporting parental rights and protecting vulnerable children from modern society’s depredations.

plurality of Republicans surveyed consider opioids and fentanyl to be the single greatest threat to U.S. public health, and at least some in the party are coming around to acting accordingly.

Some 40 years ago, at the age of around 30, I made my first attempt to run for public office, but not your typical public office.

The Goleta Water Board in those days was about the only thing that had any teeth to qualify as some form of government for the unincorporated area. It met in a tiny room as part of the water district’s offices, and for all I know still does. But the days of controversy surrounding the municipality are long gone.

All those many years ago, it was the biggest thing going in the county. Water was the weapon of choice to prevent any development from taking place. The hippies of Isla Vista and the strengthening environmental movement moved in to take control of the water board and therefore take control of all county development decisions. No water, no building.

In those days, instead of the customary term of today being called a racist for everything, back then the ugly word was “developer.” Once you were tagged with that title, you were regarded as poison, and no amount of bleach could clean you up.

Forming the incorporated city of Goleta was sparked by the water board’s abuse of power. Many of us saw it was time to get some real selfgovernance. After failing twice to get a seat on the water board, defeated by the kids at UCSB and cheating, I made a run for the new city council.

The first attempt to form a city failed, but I won my city council seat for a city that didn’t exist.

Where am I going with this?

The greatest weapon the left and environmentalists had, and still do, were the UCSB students.

They played to their ignorance and planted all kinds of propaganda seeds that bloomed in their minds and once they flowered, there was nothing to reverse the thinking. Same thing is still happening today all across the country.

I don’t know if I should have taken it as a compliment, but during one of my campaigns, Jane Fonda spoke out against me and my running mate at a rally at the UCSB quad. She was at her peak in her movie career, and so was her activism (traitor in Vietnam). She stirred things up talking about everything from saving the whales to fighting the building of nuclear power plants.

Josh Hammer

Besides securing the U.S.Mexico border once and for all, perhaps the other single most effective action the federal government could take on this front would be to formally designate the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Last month, a coalition of 21 red-state attorneys general sent a formal letter to President Joe Biden, exhorting him to instruct his State Department to do precisely that.

protect vulnerable children from irremediable third-party harm, Republicans must once and for all break free of stale libertarian bromides and act to exorcise the woke demon from corporate America.

The approach of Florida

Gov. Ron DeSantis has been instructive on this front, including his championing of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which targets workplace wokeism, and, perhaps most illustratively, his muchpublicized 2022 fight with The Walt Disney Co. over Disney’s support for elementary school gender ideology indoctrination.

Ms. Fonda starred in a popular and controversial film, “The China Syndrome,” (how ironic) — a 1979 propaganda film warning us of the dangers of nuclear plants. Most people, including Jane, didn’t understand nuclear power anymore than anyone else, and we got suckered and scared into believing that these plants were going to kill us all.

Of course, it never happened, and nuclear power plants have proven to be one of the safest and cleanest forms of energy around the world.

Some recent examples hint that the GOP may be moving beyond mere rhetorical platitude and into the realm of concrete policy and action.

The No. 1 killer today of Americans aged 18-45 years old is fentanyl trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, as some Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans pointed out recently during a hearing with hapless Attorney General Merrick Garland. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll showed that a 37%

Aside from fentanyl, which has brought annual drug overdose deaths to a horrifying 106,000 from a 1992 low of just over 5,000, there is currently no greater threat to vulnerable children than the varying tentacles of the woke ideology.

The federal government is a destructive peddler of wokeism, as President Biden’s recent “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” executive order demonstrates, but corporate wokeism is an arguably even greater threat. Accordingly, as the imperative of the hour, in order to help parents

After the recent formal abolition of Disney’s semi-autonomous Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida, Gov. DeSantis took to The Wall Street Journal on to explain the move’s necessity: “The regrettable upshot of the woke ascendancy is that publicly traded corporations have become combatants in battles over American politics and culture, almost invariably siding with leftist causes.” Accordingly, “policies that benefit corporate America don’t necessarily serve the interests of America’s people and economy.”

Translation: The somewhat apocryphal (mis)quote often attributed to President Calvin

Please see HAMMER on C4

In California, despite that knowledge, all nuclear power plants have been either shut down or lived out their lives, except one.

The Diablo Canyon Power Plant was to be the last on the list. That was until Gov. Gavin Newsom had a moment of clarity realizing California doesn’t have enough energy sources to sustain it during peak periods. Losing 10% to 15% of our energy supply during a summer heat wave would be catastrophic. And it would not play well into his all electric state plans.

As it is, making all cars electric by 2035 is a propaganda