Matters concerning local libraries don't normally attract this kind of attention, but in this era of far-left Occupy protests, anything goes.

The Simi Valley City Council is considering privatizing the local library, drawing the ire of liberal bloggers and Democratic Party officials.  The usual left-wing groups will turn out to protest their dissatisfaction with the plan, which is par for the course. But what's interesting here is who else is rallying support against the privatization plan.

A website called raisethefist.com, which is littered with red stars (must be Macy's fans), links to the Simi protest's Facebook event page. Judging by the website's contents, its editors apparently are big supporters of the Occupy movement as well as Copwatch, a self-described "revolutionary" organization that encourages visitors to its website to "Check-a-pig."  The Facebook link on raisethefist.com was created by the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, which describes itself as a "non-commercial, non corporate, anti-capitalist collective."

What probably happened is that either a local organizer or protester sent a press release of sorts to the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, which probably maintains a list of far-left websites, such as raisethefist.com, that it can post free advertisements on.

It's interesting to note, however, that issues interesting to supposedly mainstream Democrats are also embraced by radical anti-police, revolutionary groups.

On the heels of Simi Valley's decision to approve a pilot E-Verify for city workers, VC  Community College District President Bob Huber proposed that county colleges follow suit.

Huber is also running for mayor, and has made a campaign issue out of E-Verify, which is a free government program that analyzes employee information to evaluate whether they are eligible to work in this country. It has a 96 percent accuracy rate, which pretty much makes its adoption a no-brainer.

However, a fellow board member wondered how much time it would take to scan each employee's documents, estimating five minutes per person at a minimum.

"I want to find out how much time our employees would be taking on it," the Star quoted the board member as saying. "We're not overloaded with classified employees now. Time is money."

If that's a concern, let me volunteer to do it. I'll find time to use the free online utility. Let's get this thing done and stop quibbling.

When Simi Valley's City Council, which includes Huber's opponent Steve Sojka, voted to adopt E-Verify in "an emotionally charged" meeting, it became the first city in Ventura County to do so.

Opponents contend that E-Verify isn't accurate. However, a study commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security shows that E-Verify catches 46 percent of illegal aliens it comes across. Not a home run, but if every company adopted E-Verify and we were able to catch half of all the illegal aliens working in those companies we'd be doing pretty good, because right now that number is ZERO percent. I'd guess that the reason that E-Verify doesn't catch the other half is because the illegals are using real, stolen identification information.

Certainly we don't want to be saying people are illegal when they are really legal. E-Verify avoids false positives 99.3 percent of the time. That's just about as close to perfect as you can get.

So the program sounds like it works pretty darn well. So my offer is out there--if cost is an issue for the college district, I will volunteer my time, and I'm sure others would do the same, to work on this program for you.