My deepest sympathies go out to the family of Ramon Alvarez of Piru upon hearing of the drowning death of Ramon and his son Nelson Alvarez.
Rest in peace Ramon and Nelson.

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The entire city council and city staff are anxious to welcome our newly hired City Manager, David Wayne Rowlands. Mr. Rowlands will be taking over his new duties on August 12. From all reports, without exception and from many sources, Mr. Rowlands is an outstanding city manager. We wish him a warm welcome to Fillmore and every success.

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On a less auspicious theme, it’s hard to sort through President Obama’s growing stack of critical foreign and domestic failures to determine which is most serious. All of them betray the trust and confidence of the American people and jeopardize our health, safety, and traditional moral ideals. From selling guns to drug cartels, causing the death of our ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, the IRS scandal, the info-data tapping, double cost of Obamacare, and on, and on.

Expect more because Obama has no idea what the consequences of his foolish policies will be.

I do have a contrary take on the data sweeps, however. I agree with some conservatives about the necessity and legality of this massive federal undertaking.

Information tapping may be of questionable value (according to some new reports) but if they are providing significant intel in the war against worldwide Islamist-Jihadist butchery (let’s call it as it is) I think we have to tolerate the loss of privacy. If it turns out that serious abuses arise from this program then those should be addressed with harsh punishment. But we all should understand our vulnerability to insidious global Jihadist terrorism.

Just recently, reports are addressing the alarming news that thousands of Soviet era SA-7 surface-to-air missiles are in terrorist hands. The threat was known early on in the Lybia rebellion. This weapon alone would seriously challenge our defense against Islamist terrorism because it can take down an airliner from about a mile-and-a-half distance.

Obama refuses to identify Islamist anti-infidel terrorism as the problem. Since he is our commander in chief this places America at great risk for any number of attacks. I have to hope that the NSA’s PRISM system is at least targeting China, our prime enemy, as well as the murderous Islamic terrorist states seeking to kill-off Judeo-Christian civilization. We have to choose between privacy and an effective terrorist defense. I would choose survival, with as much control as possible over outfits like the NSA.