By Guest Columnist Michael Ceremello, Former Vice-Mayor/Councilmember from the City of Dixon

My intention has always been to concentrate on one or two issues in a column.  The lack of integrity amongst our leaders prevents this as there seems to be an endless stream of topics I can assail.  This week is no different.  Either the publisher needs to expand his publishing dates to accommodate my voluminous factually based opinion pieces or you get to wade through the morass exfoliated singularly.

I have told you many times in this column just what type of person Jack Batchelor is and why he doesn’t deserve to be mayor.  Many of you think this is a case of sour grapes but I was saying this a year before running against him in the last election.  Now we have proof positive of his demented reasoning which may be extrapolated to apply to all of us as citizens of Dixon.

From the actual video of the last council meeting, at 54 minutes in, during a discussion of modifications to be made to Dixon’s leash law ordinance Jack states: “What it could end up being is that people who have that experience will take actions on their own to make sure that that dog never does that again.  You know, in the 70’s I use to hunt pheasants in Stockton and I had an English Pointer and the dog was trained, was a good hunting dog and stuff, but every now and then she’d get crazy and she’d go running off.  So what did I do?  I shot her.  Now I didn’t kill her but you shoot them in the rear end with #7 birdshot and they don’t do that any more …

Well you know I think people will begin to take issues who have been attacked by dogs or had their animals attacked by a dog and they can’t find anybody that is responsible.  The next time it happens, and I would hope they wouldn’t take matters into their own hands, but I wouldn’t be surprised …”

Now do you know who the real Jack Batchelor is?  From his own statement it would appear that he advocates vigilante justice, while he “hopes” it won’t occur.  Ever see Strother Martin in the movie Cool Hand Luke?  Like Jack who was an assistant warden, Strother attempted to break a convict’s spirit when they attempted to escape from his hell hole prison.  His famous line was “What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men..”  Strother’s solution?  He killed Paul Newman’s character.  The similarities are amazing.

I have often heard that serial killers start off by abusing animals or pulling the wings off of flies.  Anything that is viewed as less than you, you can do whatever you want to it.  Isn’t that the way Jack has gone through life.  He views his prisoners as less than himself.  He views the citizens of Dixon much the same as in “you aren’t smart enough to vote on this”.  Jack’s solution is to hurt those who refuse to obey his commands.

While there was some chuckling when Jack made this statement, my sources tell me many in this town weren’t all that amused when they read the front page OF THE ONLY REAL NEWSPAPER IN DIXON.  How is it that the Tribune, Vacaville Repeater, Fairfield Daily Repulsive, and even the best real paper outside of Dixon, the Sac Bee, missed this?  But that is an aside.  My question to those of you who recognize animal cruelty and animal abuse when they see it is why are you more concerned about animals than the citizens of this town?  Further, how could you have been fooled into voting for this guy or even called him a friend?  The answer?

Maybe you are as sick as he is …