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Archives for July 2012

Nuclear Dread on Both Sides of the Pacific – Japan and San Onofre

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By Michael Steinberg

For those of an apocalyptic bent, the beginning of the final half of 2012 was near perfect.

True, the walls didn’t all come tumbling down, though those retaining the spent nuclear fuel pool atop Fukushima Unit 4 were bulging. But the signs seemed to be everywhere, from the eastern shores of Japan to the west coast of California.

The most widely reported such event was the July 1 restart of a Japanese commercial nuclear power reactor at the Ohi nuclear plant. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda pushed for this restart, despite a massive protest in front of his office in Tokyo only days before. Digital Journal reported that 200,000 protested there on June 29   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Mayoral Race, Part Three: Sex, Lies and Video Tape

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By Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner
Political suicide is not an acceptable option. There are billionaire puppeteers on the national scene who groomed Carl DeMaio to be their “vehicle,” their instrument for a right-wing takeover ofSan Diego. The Koch brothers are alter egos of Te and Do…Bo and Peep…The Two…. As they say in my birthplace, fuggedaboudit.

There are big-business/ downtownSan Diegointerests who believe they can keep Carl DeMaio in check… reined in… serving their interests… doing their bidding. It’s a delusional fantasy. He’s got richer, more powerful masters to please.

There are sincere and good people in San Diego who cry out for meaningful pension reform and mistakenly believe that Carl DeMaio can take them to the “next level.” His message is untrue. His true agenda is not reforming but dismantling public institutions of government. It’s a new-age form of anarchy.   [Read more…]

Deporting the Hand That Feeds Us: How Anti-Immigrant Laws Are Causing a Farm Labor Shortage

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If Americans won’t do the work, and the U.S. successfully keeps undocumented immigrants out of the country, then who will do it?

AlterNet / By Jill Richardson 
While researching her 2012 book The American Way of Eating, journalist Tracie McMillan decided to try her hand at picking grapes, sorting peaches and cutting garlic. The experience resulted in heatstroke, tendonitis and long-term damage to her right arm. In only one job – sorting peaches – was she paid minimum wage. That was also the only job where her employer was aware she was an undercover journalist. She left two jobs rather quickly, but stuck with the garlic job for six weeks until she literally could not use her right arm for anything and she became worried she might permanently damage it.

The harsh conditions and poor pay for farmwork are nothing new in American history. Before Mexicans worked on America’s large farms, the U.S. used a different group of immigrants: slaves from Africa and their descendants.
  [Read more…]

San Diego’s Mayoral Race, Part Two: Sex, Lies, and Videotape

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By Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

For the past few years the man who would be San Diego’s highest elected official has been leading a bifurcated life.

In public, Carl DeMaio remains a populist avatar of fiscal rectitude and righteous tea-party values.   In private, DeMaio is now the live-in mate of the publisher of San Diego Gay and Lesbian News and SD Pix magazine.  This partner is a controversial and successful videographer and photo cataloguer of social and party events in the gay community, a go-to man.

This is not a casual relationship.  Carl DeMaio and his partner have shared ‘promise rings.’  They share DeMaio’s home in Rancho Bernardo.   [Read more…]

Pictorial: Sunday at the Hillcrest Farmers Market

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In our house we much of the grocery shopping on the weekends, and this includes regular trips to the Hillcrest Farmers Market. It’s always a thrill to come down the hill from Washington Street to the point where you can see the magnificence of the market spread out along Normal Street. Typically there are more than 140 vendors, selling everything from raspberries to falafel to hand puppets. Much of the produce is locally grown and virtually everything is sold with the kind of pride that only comes from having a personal connection with your product.  There are Farmers Markets throughout San Diego County every day of the week and even a magazine (Edible San Diego) that keeps up with all the seasonal events associated with locavorism. Here’s a handy list of those markets and their days/hours of operation.

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Hillcrest Market. Besides being one of the larger markets in town, they have a robust web site, complete with a list of all their sellers and even a blog that shares impressions of the weekly event.  I took a boatload of photos last Sunday that I’d like to share with you here. Bon appetit!   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Mayoral Race, Part One: Sex, Lies and Videotape

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By Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

Does anyone out there remember the doomsday cult called Heaven’s Gate — UFO-believers led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, aka “The Two,” aka “Te and Do,” aka “Bo and Peep”? Heaven’s Gate cult members were ascetic “vehicles” on a journey to the “next level.” Their shared delusions and willing submission to authoritarian leaders came to a shocking end in a tragic group suicide. This happened in 1996. Only videotapes remain, documenting their stay in and departure from San Diego.

Yes, truth can be stranger than fiction. But if you think it can’t get even stranger, consider this: we’ve got another Hale Bopp scenario on our hands. This time it involves billionaire corporate investors with an anointed “vehicle” who happens to be running for mayor of San Diego. This could be the plot for a 3rd rate horror film but I’m afraid it’s real. Here’s what’s going on:

A group of of multi-million/billionaires — well-known for their anti-tax, anti-government, anti-labor, anti-regulation, anti-pension, anti-public, anti-environmental, pro-privatization proclivities — have targeted the city of San Diego for political takeover. Their goal is not greater efficiency or raising the standard of living. Their goal is to transfer the control, ownership, and wealth embedded in the city’s valuable public assets straight into private corporate hands. Their goal is a new world order. Their goal is to use San Diego as a launching pad.   [Read more…]

An Unwelcome Insight

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As I have been aging, I have spent more time thinking about my Mother and Father. I will not dwell on my mother, because there are not many good things I can say about her. (After you read about my father you will probably say there aren’t many good things to say about him either.) Suffice it to say that my mother was a social butterfly; more concerned with appearances than substance. She was a pianist and she and her sister were Leonard Bernstein’s first music teachers. Her parents were immigrants from Russia and Poland, and my grandfather was one of the nicest people I had ever met. My grandmother had a mean streak – which was inherited by my mother – and not nearly as nice as Grandpa. My mother and father were very wealthy – more about that in a moment – and I had my own governess until I was seven years old.

We lived just on the border of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles; yet I was culturally deprived. I had never been north of the San Fernando Valley; east of East Los Angeles; or south of San Pedro.. I had been sent to Girl Scout camp on Catalina, where I proceeded to get seasick from the time we left San Pedro until the return. I was always left in the care of the governess or the maid. When my mother married my father, an immigrant from Budapest, she became a “decorator to the stars” and it was not unusual to have celebrities in the house daily, nor was it unusual for her to take me on some of her jobs to “show me off.”   [Read more…]

Now Playing at the Old Globe: The Trials of Darwin

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by Mel Freilicher

In the furor of attempting to clean out my disastrously cluttered home office before school starts again, I came across a recent issue of the National Education Association’s magazine dedicated entirely to teaching Darwin. Before tossing it, I read some astonishing and depressing statistics about the high percentage of Americans who disbelieve in evolution (including, if I recall correctly, about 25% of those with a college education, and more than 50% of those without one). Mostly that issue detailed how teachers might use the mass of scientific evidence from a wide array of disciplines to make the case for Darwin.

That this case still needs to be made is in itself bizarre, of course, since “The Origin of the Species” was published in 1859.  It can’t be accounted for simply by the many home-schooled children of fundamentalists, or by graduates of Christian academies such as the chain that unsuccessfully brought litigation against the UC system a few years back for not accepting their creationism course as a legitimate science entry requirement.  Even before the right wing’s aggressive and sustained push to control local school boards, many public schools in conservative regions had been teaching evolution– as a thoroughly discredited theory; I vividly remember one student (she’s now a science writer!) from a small, predominantly Mormon town in northern California who was totally shocked when she came to UCSD, and learned that such debunking was hardly a universally accepted truth.   [Read more…]

Romney’s 2002 testimony contradicts financial disclosure documents and Bain claims by campaign staff

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by Jed Lewison / Daily Kos

On his financial disclosure documents, Mitt Romney claims he retired from Bain Capital after he started work on the Salt Lake Winter Olympics. “Since February 11, 1999,” the document states, “Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way.”

As we’ve learned over the past couple of weeks, Romney actually remained the sole owner and top corporate officer for Bain Capital until 2002, when he signed a retroactive severance agreement—one that continues to pay him $20 million annually, to this very day. His campaign’sexplanation?

This is nothing more than a quirk in the law. When Governor Romney took over the Olympics, he was not involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way. He was too busy working to make the Olympic Games among the most successful ever held.

Well, if you call owning the firm and remaining its top corporate officer “a quirk in the law,” then I guess it’s a quirk, all right. But it’s the kind of quirk that completely undermines the campaign’s and the candidate’s claim to have been completely severed from Bain as of Feb. 11, 1999.

And now there’s more.
  [Read more…]

The Starting Line – UT-San Diego Derides Balboa Park Plan Opposition as “Idiotic”; LAPD Bust Up Occupy Artwalk Artists

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The dark lords of Mission Valley know what’s best for us…. Our daily newspaper says that opponents of the Jacobs/Saunders plan for Balboa Park are being “idiotic”.  The paper featured an editorial yesterday entitled “Idiotic, Let Us Count the Ways”.  The Editorial Board pasted that label on Councilwoman Sherri Lightner and Congressman/Mayoral candidate Bob Filner, D-San Diego, among others, for their opposition to the current arrangement. Questions about the process involved in approving the plan, its legality and its shaky financial assumptions, apparently weren’t worth considering by the UT’s opinion makers in Mission Valley as they pursued an agenda that is, at its core, anti-democratic and plutocratic in nature.

Opposition in the community was deep and widespread, with comments about the project running as high as 25 to 1 against.  Are all those people idiots? There was considerable frustration and anger sparked by the perception that opponents were simply being ignored at every step of the way. It’s not surprising that everyday people started to feel like this scenario was simply a show designed to legitimize the City’s special relationship with a Very Wealthy Individual. Passions ran high, and as our reporter Andy Cohen tried to point out, some individuals –on both sides of this issue– may have crossed the line in terms of expressing their disagreement in polite terms.  The fact is that hardly anybody disagrees with the kernel of truth at the center of this debate—that cars need to be removed from the core of Balboa Park. The question was (and is), how do we get there?

The UT-San Diego editorial made it perfectly clear that citizen input will be derided and disparaged in these sorts of instances. Good luck to anybody who dares oppose their grand visions for a shiny new stadium downtown or publisher Doug Manchester’s plans for mega development along the San Diego river—if they called people idiotic for speaking out against the Balboa Park plan, lord only knows what words they’ll come up with for opponents of their own pet projects.   [Read more…]

Field of View: Building the Second San Salvador

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There’s more than airport construction happening along Harbor Drive. The San Diego Maritime Museum, together with the Port and City of San Diego, are building a replica of the San Salvador—the flagship vessel of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo as he explored the west coast. The full-sized ship, which will be fully functional and historically accurate, is slated for completion by November 2013. It is an all-volunteer project.   [Read more…]

Balboa Park Project Appears to be Illegal, Places Park’s National Historic Landmark Status in Jeopardy

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Deeply flawed plan could cost San Diego tens of millions of dollars.

The Irwin Jacobs plan to transform San Diego’s Balboa Park may be illegal according to the City Municipal Code. In her statements to the City Council at the July 9th City Council meeting, Susan Brandt-Hawley, an attorney who worked with the Save Our Heritage Organisation in challenging the project, warned the members that in supporting the plan they would be in violation of the law.

In question are two particular sub-sections of the Municipal Code.   [Read more…]

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