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Archives for August 2012

East County Communities Want Answers from SDG&E on “Mitigation Grants”

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Meeting August 7 in Deerhorn Valley on fire mitigation funds

By Kim Hamilton / East County Magazine / August 6, 2012

Deerhorn Valley–We are now well into a perilous fire season. SDG&E, in its guise as the “Sunrise Powerlink Fire Mitigation Group,” has notified some 1,300 at-risk homeowners along the Powerlink that they are “potentially qualified to receive grant funds for the creation of defensible space or structure hardening…” Up to $2,000 per parcel is being made available on a yearly basis.

Make no mistake: this is not done out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor will it eliminate the increased danger we now face from Powerlink. It was simply a requirement for approval. A “partial mitigation.”

We, the at-risk and soon-to-be-crushed (as our Governor threatened last week), need answers to some serious questions about these “grants”:
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Back here in the reality based reality….

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“Papa Doug’s” UT San Diego Editorial Board pens a fantastical version of existence with no connection to the world we live in.

In politics, just like in life, we have choices to make. Some of us choose to make those choices based on the facts as they exist, some of us make choices based on the facts as we wish them to be. For the better part of three decades now, the Republican Party has based their decision making process on the latter. From their near maniacal belief in supply side economics (or “trickle down” economics, or my favorite “voodoo economics” as then candidate George H. W. Bush called it) to their insistence that they’re party represents a “higher morality,” there seems to be little connection with the reality the rest of us live in.

Last weekend San Diego’s esteemed daily fishwrap ran an editorial entitled “Romney in a Landslide.” It reads more like a religious proclamation than a bold prediction; a fantasy conjured up in the halls of the Mission Valley fortress newly rededicated to Republican virtue.   [Read more…]

The Dark Side of the Rainbow

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by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Writing about prejudice can be a challenge. I was born into a happy little privileged space. I’m basically a nice white gal, a daughter of the hegemonic norm. What the hell do I know from prejudice, right? There’s racism, homophobia, misogyny, classism, ageism, a vast spectrum of “otherisms” — the dark side of the rainbow — all of them designating certain groups of people as “other.” And I write a lot about them, 25% of my columns, I just figured out, despite my pallid skin, humdrum heteronormativity, and prissily privileged class.

That’s not to say that one must be victimized to crave justice for all; neither does it suggest that I’ve never been the target of prejudice. My body parts of the female persuasion make me a daily bull’s-eye for the slings and arrows of misogyny. My advocacy for LGBT civil rights makes me a target for car window bashers. I once married a Puerto Rican and was promptly removed from several invitation lists (omissions admittedly devoid of disappointment). And I’ve witnessed the resulting issue of that union, my daughter, struggle with the rampant prejudice so freely expressed by the otherists in our Southern California community.   [Read more…]

Homelessness: Man’s Inhumanity to Man

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There is no question that every political issue has at least two sides – the pros and the cons. Issues involving homelessness are no different. However, when weighing the impact of both sides of homelessness issues, often one side appears to have a greater impact upon humanity than the other. In other words, in analyzing the issues of homelessness, the sides are not necessarily even. In fact, sometimes the impact of the political decisions relating to homelessness can be cruel.

For example, there are municipal ordinances in many cities prohibiting sleeping on public land, including beaches and parks. On the positive side, these laws protect public property from overuse – an important goal so that members of these communities can continue to share open spaces. However, homeless people may experience the impact of these laws as depriving them of a legal place to sleep.   [Read more…]

Bulletin: Alleged Sikh Temple Shooter Former Member of Skinhead Band

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by Mark Potok / Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch
The man who allegedly murdered six people at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee yesterday, identified in media reports as Wade Michael Page, was a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.

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A Quick Trip to Costco (Morena) to Buy Gas

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A member of my widow support group, Irene, came over this morning because we were both feeling lonely, and I was making breakfast – “Dutch Babies” for my students and thought she’d like to join us. After eating, we decided to go up to Ft. Rosecrans and “see” our husband’s and tell them what they missed. They were waiting for us in their little “niche” and we bawled them out for leaving us when they did. (Interestingly enough we did not know Irene and Johnny; Irene and I met in our support group, but the “wall” that Bob and Johnny are in are very close to each other and we presume that they “meet” often and discuss the dirty trick they played on us, their wives.

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Hiroshima / Nagasaki Remembered – Veterans for Peace

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By Barry Ladendorf
In many parts of the world, people will pause to commemorate what happened 67 years ago on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed the most diabolical weapon in the history of mankind on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later on August 9th, the same hellish fire consumed the city of Nagasaki. It is estimated that 250,000 people died as a result of the bombs. As many as 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. How will Americans remember this day?   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – ‘Obama Launches Unprovoked Attack on Mars’

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Okay, I made that headline up… The reality here is that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sent a one ton landing craft–the size of a small SUV- 154 million miles and landed it on target. Mars rover Curiosity is equipped with a collection of powerful instruments, including 17 cameras (four of which were made in San Diego), lasers and a radiation detector. It features equipment that can bore into rock and ingest samples, drawing them into an on-board chemistry lab and transmitting detailed analyses back to Earth. The mission cost an estimated $2.5 billion, slightly more than one third the $7 billion that Americans spend on potato chips annually.  Yesterday’s landing day coincided with the birthday of Neil Armstrong, the first moon walker. (And don’t worry, there is coverage of the UT-SD’s silly Sunday editorial predicting a Romney landslide below!)   [Read more…]

Reader Rant: The Chicken and the Cross

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Editors Note: Sometimes we get letters from readers that we think deserve a life of their own. So we publish them as ‘Reader Rants’. Send us your thoughts, and if we like them, we’ll run them. Be warned – the selection process is totally subjective.

The century of hate began with the prosecution of Oscar Wilde on account of his homosexual relations. No matter how brilliant or entertaining the writer who loved women but felt attracted to men, Wilde would be sentenced to prison. His homosexuality did not bother him, but the persecution destroyed him.

The hounding of gays continues to this day.

For some reason the treatment became greatly amplified during WWII.   [Read more…]

Why a Major Food Organization Is Teaming Up With Monsanto and Friends to Block Your Right to Know What’s in Your Food

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Big Food companies like ConAgra, Smucker, Hormel, Kellogg, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo want to block Proposition 37

[The California Ballot Initiative to label genetically engineered food is] “a serious, long-term threat to the viability of agricultural biotechnology. Defeating the Initiative is GMA’s single highest priority this year.”  — Pamela Bailey, President of Grocery Manufacturers Association, speech to the American Soybean Association, July 9, 2012

This November, Californians will vote for or against Prop 37, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act. The outcome of that vote will likely determine whether the U.S. will one day join the nearly 50 other countries that allow their citizens to choose between genetically engineered and non-genetically engineered food through the enactment of laws requiring mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

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Almost Half of All New War Vets Are Filing Injury Claims

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Military recruiters are known for minimizing the personal risk associated with joining the armed forces. They are very good at exploiting any sense of invincibility that comes from the average teenager’s lack of direct experience with death or serious injury. If necessary, a recruiter will admit to a young person that bad things do sometimes happen in the military, but they only happen to people who are too “weak” or “stupid” to survive the challenges of being a proud member of the U.S. (insert the military branch here).   [Read more…]

U.S. Border Patrol Gone Wild: “If the U.S. is not a Police State now, it soon will be!”

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By Herman Baca / President, Committee on Chicano Rights

The stopping, detaining, and the senior citizen abuse of 96 year old ex.-Governor (1974-77), of Arizona, Raul Castro along with his wife and Ms. Anne Doan (driver) by the U.S. Border Patrol raises legal and constitutional questions that the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR) has requested the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate. The history of the U.S. Border Patrol… the agency was organized in 1924 and is the only national police force in the U.S.  The agency was created specifically to deal with persons of Mexican ancestry and was modeled after the infamous Texas Rangers that served as the private army for Texas cattle barons and agricultural business interests. Their primary enforcement job was to insure that no person of Mexican ancestry (citizens, documented, or undocumented) got to “uppity” and started to demand the same rights, wages or working conditions as their Anglo counterparts. Since 1924 that law enforcement job has been carried out nationally by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Bert Corona, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, Cesar Chavez and numerous others have rightfully labeled the U.S. Border Patrol, “the Gestapo of the Mexican People.”
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