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Archives for August 2012

Anti-Nuke Activists Strike Deal With Labor Over San Onofre Outage: Call for Independent Review and Hearing Before Restart

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Safety Advocates Strike Exceptional Pact with Labor

One of the items approved on the agenda of the California Democratic Party’s Executive Board meeting in Anaheim this past weekend was a resolution that calls for an independent design review and public hearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decides to restart either Units 2 or 3.

The resolution was a compromise worked out between anti-nuke activists and labor advocates over the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant since its outages earlier this year. Here’s the final wording:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the California Democratic Party calls for an independent design review prior to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to permit a restart of either Unit 2 or 3, culminating in an adjudicatory hearing including discovery, testimony and cross-examination by independent experts on whether it is safe to restart the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant before it makes a decision on whether to permit a restart of either Unit 2 or 3.

Based on a final consensus between anti-nuke advocates and the Labor Caucus of the state party, the resolution is remarkable because for the first time since the crisis at San Onofre, labor advocates and union reps have come together to address the array of issues that has been forced upon them.   [Read more…]

‘Hands Across the Sand’ Protest of Offshore Drilling Scheduled for Aug. 4 in La Jolla

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The San Diego Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation continues its involvement in the international movement opposed to any new offshore drilling – called “Hands Across the Sands” – by sponsoring its annual local protest here in San Diego.

The demonstration will be at noon on Saturday, August 4th in La Jolla. Here is the facebook page for the La Jolla protest. Protest organizers say any increase in offshore drilling will add to the degradation of the sea and marine life.

Also planned is a Hands Across the Sand action at the Oceanside Pier up in Oceanside, at the same time. And here is the facebook page for that event. San Clemente will also hold theirs.

Haley Jain Haggerstone, the local chapter coordinator, told the media:

“We are asking San Diegans to help us draw a line in the sand, literally and figuratively, to demonstrate our opposition to offshore drilling and support for clean energy alternatives. The future of our oceans, waves and beaches depends on it.”

  [Read more…]

Field of View: Saturday at Mariner’s Point

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Mariner’s Point is a fun place to spend a Saturday, whether you want to picnic on the grass or venture out on the bay.

You’ll share the expansive spot with other families, and even the occasional event–like a recent USA Free Style Martial Arts performance that took place. Some of those kids scared me with their fierce looks and startling kiai. But after an intense demonstration, they cooled down with a squirt gun fight fitting of summer.

All photos by Annie Lane.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Controversies Plague Local, National GOP Campaigns

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It may be August, but the back and forth between political campaigns continues at a pace that leads us to wonder just how crazy things will get come post-Labor Day, which is when these sorts of contests usually heat up. Here in San Diego, today’s coverage highlights differences of opinion within the GOP regarding the ‘non-partisan’ race for Mayor of San Diego, which is actually hyper-partisan this year. And on the national scene, Democrats continue to dog presumptive GOP candidate Mitt Romney with allegations designed to raise questions about his character. So join me today as we take a peek into the sausage making process that passes for selecting our leaders in this day and age.

“I hope Tom enjoys his 30 pieces of silver…” Political consultant Tom Shepard’s decision to sign on with Mayoral candidate Bob Filner continues to have repercussions on the local political scene. Republican Party leader Tony Kraric’s comment over at conserv blog SDRostra comparing Shepard to Judas unleashed a lively exchange (this is excerpted, there’s plenty more over at their site) :

From Tony Krvaric…Long-time Republican consultant Tom Shepard today signed on as a consultant for Bob Filner. Yes, you read that right and no, this is not a joke. This is a betrayal of our entire reform effort that so many have been working on for so long.

That said, I have no doubt that we will prevail in November because Carl DeMaio is a superior candidate and the voters are with us on the issues. Plus, Tom’s two latest campaigns in the City of San Diego were abysmal failures; Proposition D (sales tax increase) and a certain failed mayoral campaign.

I hope Tom enjoys his 30 pieces of silver.

Best, Tony

P.S. The Republican Party of San Diego County will not do business with him ever again as long as I remain chairman. Elephants don’t forget – and principles matter.

more inside…   [Read more…]

The Starting Line — Fighting the ‘Homosexual Agenda’ at Chick-fil-A in San Diego

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The national Chick-fil-A controversy rolled into the San Diego media headlights yesterday as thousands of people lined up to buy deep fried chicken sandwiches at local outlets. Some felt they were making a statement (incorrectly, as it turns out) in support of the first amendment, as some big-city mayors have publicly stated that Chick-fil-A would not be welcome to set up shop in their cities. Others joined the lines at the fast food outlets because of religious beliefs. And still others were motivated by deeper feelings of animosity towards homosexuals; feelings that most of us would describe as outright bigotry.

The UT San Diego’s Roger Hedgecock, coming off of an on-air love-fest with publisher Doug Manchester (don’t worry, it was very manlyfawning), aired taped interviews with customers from the restaurant’s midway district location. He went on to describe the Chick-fil-A ‘Customer Appreciation Day’ as part of the battle against the ‘homosexual agenda’, warning that ‘they’ were trying to take over.   [Read more…]

Bilbray shreds environment amid sprint to center

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by Lucas O’Connor/Two Cathedrals

Some predictable theatre played out in Washington over the last week, as the House GOP took up legislation to waive environmental protections and give the Department of Homeland Security unlimited access to national parks within 100 miles of the border. That would effectively impose martial law over national parks near the border. It passed, with the support of Brian Bilbray.

Purely by coincidence, the debate over whether to essentially declare a state of immigration emergency to overrule environmental laws comes just days after President Obama announced a policy shift to provide relief from deportation to immigrant young adults brought to this country by their parents at an early age.   [Read more…]

CA GOP Continues its Death Spiral, Seeks Help From Prop 32 Supporters

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California Republican Party faces fiscal, organizing questions, banks on special exemptions.

by Brian Leubitz/Calitics.com

The California Republican Party is in something of a desperate situation. They hold no statewide offices, and then they had a story in the New York Times titled “Republican Party in California Is Caught in Cycle of Decline.”

That’s never a good thing, especially when it is combined with a follow-up from the San Francisco Chronicle with some worrying financial numbers. Without getting deeply into the nitty, gritty, it is pretty bad. They are expected to reveal a deficit of nearly half a million dollars, and are considering closing their Sacramento office.   [Read more…]

Sex In San Diego: The Original Sexual Revolution

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by Laura Miller / Salon

Academic history — the kind backed up by piles of primary-source research and hedged with cautionary remarks — is often useful, but rarely fascinating. Most of it, however, isn’t about a subject as perennially engaging as Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s. The Oxford historian’s new book, “The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution,” describes how sex became modern in 18th-century England, a transformation that explains “the profound chasm between our present attitudes to sex and those that prevailed for most of western history.” We tend to think of sex as something primal and unchanging, but as Dabhoiwala tells it, nothing could be further from the truth.

“The Origin of Sex” begins with an anecdote from 1612. An unmarried couple accused of fornication and bastardy (producing an illegitimate child) were dragged before the magistrates. They were convicted, then sentenced to be stripped naked to the waist, “whipped from the Gatehouse in Westminster unto Temple Bar” before the jeering public and then banished from the city — severed from their families, former friends, and previous occupations. Publicly shamed and condemned, their lives as they knew them were over.   [Read more…]

U-T San Diego Misrepresents Work by San Diego River Park Foundation – It Does Not Roust the Homeless

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Having just gotten off the phone with Richard Dhu, program manager at the San Diego River Park Foundation, I found I had to totally re-orient the article I was writing on whether his clean river program rousts the homeless from the San Diego River area. It does not do that, he said.

I had called him because of a U-T San Diego article written by Mike Lee about the Foundation’s latest river clean-up. In his article, posted July 27th, Lee – it appears – misrepresented what the Foundation is doing. In his opening sentence, Lee spells out his perspective:

“The San Diego River Park Foundation is launching a yearlong cleanup initiative in the Mission Valley Preserve to reduce homeless camps and garbage that gathers along the river’s lower stretch.” (My emphasis.)

“That’s not what we’re doing,” Richard told me this morning when I asked him about Lee’s article. Richard told me that is not what he told Lee. There is nothing about dealing with the homeless in his group’s mission statement, plus, Richard said, they receive grant monies and not any for rousting homeless people.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line — Three Things the UT-San Diego Doesn’t Want You to Know

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Welcome to August, San Diego. Let’s start the month off right by cutting through the crap that publisher UT-San Diego Doug Manchester and his motley crews of spinmeisters are trying to pass off as reality. Sometimes they simply ignore news that has importance to wide swaths of the population, sometimes they simply twist the truth, and sometimes they simply lie. We’ve got great examples of all these ‘truth bending’ techniques, and hope you’ll come along for the ride. There are “lie-sickness’ bags available for those of you who feel may feel ill as we proceed along on our journey, please feel free to use them….

If you read today’s daily newspaper for our fair city you wouldn’t know that today is a momentous day for an estimated 47 million women in the United States. If you merely browsed the front page (or heard Carl DeMaio doing his ‘victory lap’ on the local electronic media), you might be under the impression that all systems were “go” for an overhaul of the City’s pension system. And if you were a regular reader, you might be under the impression that our region’s economic security was endangered by looming cuts in the defense budget, cuts that certainly must be the fault of our current Commander in Chief. Let’s start with the biggie…

August 1st marks the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions that affect women in this country over the course of the coming year. Every health insurance policy provided by employers must now include a package of preventive and diagnostic care for women without co-pays or deductibles.   [Read more…]

Cal Fire: Wind Turbine Generator Caused Wildland Fire that Charred 367 Acres

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by Miriam Raftery/East County Magazine

July 31, 2012 (San Diego’s East County) – With County Supervisors poised to consider approval of Tule Wind and a wind ordinance that could open much of fire-prone East County to wind energy development, a wildland fire that started at a wind turbine facility in Riverside County last month provides fuel for opponents concerned about fire risks posed by industrial-scale wind projects.

“The fire started with the windmill itself,” Captain Greg Ewing with Cal Fire/Riverside Fire Department informed ECM today.

Despite extensive area cleared around the base of each turbine, Ewing said, the blaze still spread into a wildland fire that swiftly engulfed 367 acres. If not for prompt reporting by a witness, it could have been far worse.   [Read more…]

GOP’s Three Biggest Fears in 2012

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Only an insecure and ideologically bankrupt political party has to game the rules to stay in power.

by Steven Rosenfeld/AlterNet

As the 2012 presidential campaign takes a breather, we need to consider why today’s Republicans are no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt or Richard Nixon, but instead a truly toxic aberration.

As James Fallows noted a year ago in the Atlantic, the modern GOP’s biggest sin is discarding “political norms” that everyone once understood would hurt the country—such as not paying 74,000 federal air traffic controllers and construction workers to attack labor unions, a drama that played out last August.

Since then the GOP’s bad behavior has only worsened. In the introduction to their recent book, It’s Even Worse Than It Appears, centrists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote, “However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”   [Read more…]

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