Today’s the Day…. The San Diego City Council will vote this afternoon at 2pm on the Irwin Jacobs sponsored proposal to building a by-pass roadway coming off the Cabrillo Bridge and a fee based parking garage. Should the anticipated revenues from the parking structure fall short of expectations, city taxpayers will be expected to pony up for day-to-day operating costs and payments for bonds used to finance the deal. As part of its on-going campaign to support the use of taxpayer dollars for big and shiny structures that pump up the egos of our City’s mega-rich, the local daily paper has endorsed the plan, with editorial page editor William Osborne tweeting “A big opportunity that won’t come again. Don’t let it slip by, San Diego.”
There are plenty of people opposed to the Balboa Park plan, despite its promise to remove traffic congestion from Plaza de Panama. Congressman/Mayoral candidate Bob Filner has promised to speak out against the plan at today’s hearings. A protest outside City Hall is scheduled for noon and preservationist groups are urging people to attend the hearing and speak out against the proposal. Additionally there is a petition against the plan circulating that you can sign here. Additional coverage in the San Diego Free Press can be found here.
Here on the left coast… Friday’s LA Times reports that videos of San Diego Big Bay Bust fireworks display had been viewed close to 4 million times on YouTube. User Andrew92106, whose video was seen more than two million times, told the paper that that this was his first posting at the popular site. He shot it while at a party for Karl Strauss Brewing.
And back east…. The twits were tweeting last night as news of today’s New York Times media reporter David Carr’s missive made the interwebs. The Times piece cites the SD-UT’s recycling of a two week old story from its web site to the front page of its print edition–first mentioned in this column last week and picked up nationally by journo watchdog Poynter.org—as an example of “cracks in publishing operations that are both hilarious and terrifying”. Carr’s point that, “great journalism, on any platform, is the one sure hedge against irrelevancy” went unheralded as apologists for dead tree journalism rushed to defend the local paper.
Back to the future at the Daily Fishwrap… One need look no further than the demonstrations in downtown this week weekend to understand the role that “non-coverage” plays in the UT-SD’s right wing agenda. A Saturday Tea Party rally against the Affordable Health Care Act featuring Rep. Brian Bilbray garnered a pre-demonstration article (321 words) and coverage in Sunday’s print edition (Page one, Local section, 1024 words), with a photo gallery and two videos posted online. A week-long protest with two rallies and five days of teach-ins in connection with the Trans Pacific Partnership trade negotiations, featuring Rep. (and Mayoral Candidate) Bob Filner got a (84 words) mention at the end of an article in Tuesdays (Filner’s presence was ignored) paper and an article (209 words) on page B-5 in Sunday’s paper that ballyhooed a single arrest that took place.
The race is (finally) over….Former Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña has endorsed primary foe Scott Peters for Congress in the general election for his run against sitting GOP Congressman Brian Bilbrary.
GOP Plan Says No Food Stamps for Car Owners…. Forty six million Americans (half are children) rely on food stamps to feed themselves. Now Congressional Republicans have decided to cut off eligibility to qualify for assistance by eliminating “categorical eligibility” which means that a family living at or below the poverty line that owns a dependable car will be cut off of food assistance. The GOP plan for food stamps means that, a dependable automobile will now be figured in to the family’s income. When they are near the eligibility cut-off point, even a moderately-priced used car will put them over income limits for food stamps. This also means that several hundred thousand low-income children will lose access to free or reduced-priced school meals based on the same rule.
Thus low-income families will be forced to choose between owning a dependable car to commute to their jobs and feeding their families. Since taking control of the House in 2011, Republicans have worked diligently to portray any social safety net spending as wasteful. They are unfazed by a UNICEF report that ranked the United States in second place among advanced economies with 23.1% of children living in poverty, right behind Latvia. The GOP has sought to perpetuate the falsehood that African Americans and Latinos make up the lion’s share of food stamp recipients; the reality is that, out of 46-million Americans living in poverty, 31 million are white, ten million are African American, and the rest are Hispanic and Asian.
Truthiness in the world of Romney… It was an interesting weekend for Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. As he supped with the notorious Koch brothers in the Hamptons, the press was chattering about the tough love the contender was receiving from his own side of the aisle. Harsh words from moguls Richard Welch and Rupert Murdoch coupled with a harsh editorial in the Wall Street Journal weren’t the kind of thing a candidate wants to hear. And then there was the Speaker of the House as reported in Capitol Hill’s Roll Call:
…at a June 30 fundraiser in Wheeling, W.Va., Speaker John Boehner offered a surprisingly frank assessment of the dynamic that surprised some in the audience. Aside from Romney’s “friends, relatives and fellow Mormons,” Boehner said, most people will be motivated to vote for him in opposition to Obama.
The Ohio Republican made the remarks when an unidentified woman asked during a question-and-answer session: “Can you make me love Mitt Romney?” “No,” Boehner said. “Listen, we’re just politicians. I wasn’t elected to play God. The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney.”
Not to be outdone by the GOP, Maryland’s Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley offered up this memorable quote Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week”:
“I’ve never known of a Swiss bank account to build an American bridge, a Swiss bank account to create American jobs, or Swiss bank accounts to rebuild the levies to protect the people of New Orleans. That’s not an economic strategy for moving our country forward.”
On This Day: In 1877 Alexander Graham Bell, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, Thomas Sanders and Thomas Watson formed the Bell Telephone Company. In 1997 Boxer Mike Tyson was banned from the ring and fined $3 million for biting the ear of opponent Evander Holyfield. In 1995 the Grateful Dead gave their last concert with Jerry Garcia at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Garcia died the next month of a heart attack.
Eat Fresh! Today’s Farmers’ Markets: Escondido (Welk Resort 8860 Lawrence Welk Drive) 3 – 7 pm
I read the Daily Fishwrap(s) so you don’t have to… Catch “the Starting Line” Monday thru Friday right here at San Diego Free Press (dot) org. Send your hate mail and ideas to DougPorter@SanDiegoFreePress.
Doug Porter
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Rethuglican values at their anti-American people finest…….
It was good to have spent the day downtown on one of the hottest issues of our time, the preservation of the historic integrity of Balboa Park. For some time now the behind the scenes machinations have been working their way toward this day of decision on the part of our S.D. City Council Members. Many members of fine organizations like dan Soderberg’s Neighborhood Coalition to save Balboa Park, Bruce Coon’s organization, SOHO, and Jeanne Brown’s League of Women Voters, have been fighting the good fight, and were their with members of their groups, yesterday. I was also impressed by the turnout of young people, many from the Occupy Together Movement, locally, who came to lend their support to those who chose to speak against the Jacobs-Sanders Campaign to fundamentally change Balboa Park.
I went without my nap, my normal food intake, and my workout at the gym, to spend endless hours mostly listening to a lot of development executives and cultural institution CEOs fawn over one one of the one per cent in our midst, Qualcomm owner and billionaire, Irwin Jacobs. These folks know which side their institutional bread is buttered on, so they spoke, to a similar script in most cases, in favor of a landscape damaging centenniel bridge, a transportation arrangement in Balboa Park that encourages more traffic through it, and the dreaded spectre of the innauguration of PAID PARKING, which had been prohibited by the park’s founding agreements.
We spent the better part of the first hour viewing a littany of propaganda about how the Jacobs Plan for the park was the best thing since sliced bread, but it was unconvincing to most people who have seriously studied what this plan will do to the park and the people who regularly use it. Of course, they proportioned time for opponents of the plan to speak their minds, also. However, only Mel Shapiro and Mike Aguire, truly spoke their minds about how this City Council had been bought and sold by this pretentious philanthropist. Just like he received naming rights for Quolcomm Stadium, there no doubt will be a statue or a wall with his name on it somewhere in one of the eight new buildings to be erected in our cherished park.
They bragged about the 200 meetings they had about this matter all over town, but failed to say how little the public input was taken into consideration in formulating the Jacobs Plan, or any slight modification in it that they deigned to make. It was the way plutocracies turn democracy on its head in an inverted totalitarianism, as Sheldon Wolin would say. In any case, only one Council Member, Sherri Lightner, was able to speak truth to power and vote against this major usurpation of civic financial power, as Bob Filner so ably put it, and she has a massive Right Wing machine working against her re-election in the fall.
It was a real civics lesson on how democracy doesn’t work in the so-called nation’s finest city (that money can buy)!!!