By Sid

Editor Doug Porter is on vacation for a week and the women at San Diego Free Press–Annie Lane, Barbara Zaragoza and Anna Daniels, are running the show until May 1. Doug not only writes “Starting Line” five days a week, he also edits and publishes submissions two days a week.  Yeah, the man deserves a vacation.

The news–local and beyond–continues to serve up cringe inducing reporting, oddities and insights.

ICYMI  Sara Libby’s scorching takedown of the all male panel. Over at Voice of San Diego, Sara Libby’s ‘What We Learned This Week’ provided a “3-Step Guide to Not Being Creepy Toward the Women You Interact With Professionally®” and firmly establishing the term “manel” in our lexicon.  Did you hear our cheers, Sara?

Sheer Twaddle Award: The coverage of renaming San Diego’s Robert E. Lee Elementary School.  Remember the effort last year to change the name of Robert E. Lee Elementary?

Both Fox5 and 10 News have provided an update on the process of the likely name change to Pacific View Leadership Elementary.  Both of these sources used a similar description of Robert E. Lee:

The school was named for the Civil War general when it opened in 1959 in honor of his contributions as an American soldier, according to the district. Lee was a longtime U.S. Army officer, but as a resident of Virginia, sided with the South in the war between the states.

Was this description lifted from a Texas history book? Time to pack it in if this is the preferred verbiage in style books. Let’s set the record straight– Robert E. Lee was a Confederate general during the Civil War who lead an army of sedition in defense of slavery.

Trump is a Jagoff.  Braddock Pennsylvania progressive Mayor John Fetterman recently ran for Senate and lost to Democrat Katy McGinty in the primaries.  By the mid- 70s the working class community of Braddock was hollowed out when the steel mills in the area started to close. The knock out punch was delivered by the Great Recession.

Fetterman’s fundraising campaign included t-shirts inscribed with “Trump is a Jagoff”.  The In These Times interview included a question about that:

Donald Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again.” Is there an alternative narrative that you’d like to advance?

My campaign has released a one-sentence press release calling Donald Trump a “jagoff ,” which is Western Pa. for jerk. Populism has a dark side and Donald Trump is mining that for all it’s worth by saying reprehensible things about Muslims, about immigrants, about you name it. If you get to live vicariously through that and cheer him on, I don’t expect to get your vote, and frankly, I don’t want it.

See if you can spot the t-shirt at one of the anti-Trump rallies on Friday.  How about #chalejagofftrump ?

Ubiquitous, invisible Veolia.  If you do a google search for “Veolia San Diego,” you get a listing for Veolia Water North America, Veolia Transportation and Veolia Environmental Services.  It is the largest water firm on the planet.  Donald Cohen at Capital & Main recently wrote that New York City officials have ended their contract with the company:

Sometimes winning is the end of a contract. New York City officials have announced that they will not renew a multimillion dollar contract with Veolia, a private French conglomerate, to manage the city’s waste­water treatment plants. The contract had come under fire from workers and safe-water advocates—and for good reason: Veolia has a track record of chemical explosions, sewage spills and soaring rate hikes across the world. New York City isn’t an outlier. In 2012 alone, 10 U.S. local governments took back operation of their water or sewer services from Veolia.

Privatization in San Diego is more ubiquitous than we suspect and and there is a need for much greater scrutiny than the local media is providing.