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Miramar Airshow Sells War: Just Don’t Go!

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By Gil Field / San Diego Veterans for Peace

Local veterans, friends and supporters from the San Diego Veterans For Peace are in their third year of a five year educational outreach encouraging the public to stay home and not attend the annual Miramar Air Show this month.

Veterans believe that the Miramar Air Show glorifies war with an exciting show of speed, power and noise. It celebrates the skills and machinery that exist to kill, maim and destroy. The show is very dangerous …. 10% of all Blue Angel pilots have been killed in shows or accidents. Miramar jets have already crashed in San Diego neighborhoods. Lastly, the show is a misleading recruiting tool for our youth and exists to allow defense contractors to showcase and sell their latest tools of death.   [Read more…]

‘I Have a Dream’ at the San Diego-Mexico Border and Reflections on 1968

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By Rev. Richard Lawrence

1968 came back to me when I stood with Martin Luther King, III, at the Border on August 28 and listened to folks on the other side of the Border holler in pure delight that the day had finally come when a black leader stood tall in the fight for a just immigration policy.

King, III, took us back to his father’s “I Have a Dream Speech” fifty-five years ago and reminded us that there’s no room for leaders who separate children from their parents in the world his father envisioned. No. Dr. King wanted to build bridges, not barriers, to freedom.   [Read more…]

Memories of a Doctor on the ‘Front Lines’ During Chicago 1968

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By Jeoffry B. Gordon, M.D. / OB Rag

Fifty years ago this week, I was in Chitown.

Having just finished my medical internship and working several years with the famous pediatrician Dr. Ben Spock on anti-war issues, I was in a white coat among the checkered blue caped and the robins-egg blue-helmeted police and real people.

I will never forget walking along the lines of scared, sweating teenage national guardsmen with fixed bayonets, trying to calm them down by talking about how we were all brothers, and now remembering Kent State – I think, Thank God, there was never a charge by them.   [Read more…]

Stewed: ‘We Want to See Lips and Eyes From the Back of the Plane’

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Sexism and the Airline Industry

[Video In Article]

Lee Perry, a local San Diegan who worked for PSA Airlines in the late 1960s, is quick to confirm the airline industry’s strict employment requirements with regard to women at the time. Perry recalls her experience with PSA Airlines like this:

They told us exactly what to weigh, and would check to see if we were tall enough. We couldn’t go 5 pounds over or under, or we could get suspended. They had a weight chart, and they decided among themselves if we were “light,” “medium,” or “heavy boned” … that might give us a couple-pound leeway.

We had to wear exactly the makeup they wanted for us. This meant some got Merle Norman if they had a bad complexion, and the rest of us got Clairol face makeup, which they don’t even make anymore. We had to wear the “PSA Green” eye shadow and the “PSA Orange” lipstick. I remember it as 24 Karat Orange by Clairol.   [Read more…]

Ammar Campa-Najjar Responds to Fox News Smear and Fear Clickbait Headline

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Editor’s Note: Ammar Campa-Najjar has been in the news a lot since Congressman Duncan Hunter was indicted for illegally diverting a quarter million dollars in campaign funds for his personal use. Since there is no way to remove the incumbent from the ballot at this time, Republicans have come up with a “save the seat” strategy. Hunter will resign should he win the November election, clearing the way for a special election in the spring. In order to ensure that GOP voters in the 50th Congressional District don’t have second thoughts about voting for a crook, Faux News used the headline on this story to gin up some fear. 

Below is Ammar’s response along with a commentary from Pastor Paul Dabdoub attesting to the candidate’s moral character. For the record, Campa-Najjar never met the man in question, since the grandfather that Fox News has raised from the dead died two decades before the candidate was born. 

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Duncan Hunter Jr. must be desperate. He has to dig back three generations to attack me, all I have to do is look back three days ago at his indictment. Hunter is betting it all on the idea that the people in my district are a bunch of bigoted, backward people. I say don’t underestimate the people of the 50th, I’ve risen to occasion — they will too.

  [Read more…]

Are We Facing Generational Guilt in the Time of Trump? | Readers Write

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By Karin Brennan

My mother was born in Germany in 1931.  Her childhood was dictated, literally, by the rise of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Hitler’s Youth organization, which had 50,000 members at the beginning of 1933, had over 2 million members (children) by the end of that year. In 1936, the Nazis systematically shut down or banned all other youth groups, including the Boy Scouts.

Instead, all children had to join the Hitler Youth. Anyone who refused to join was punished, so by 1939, more than 90 percent of German children were members. My mother was 8 at this point, and an official member of the Hitler Youth. Her memory of this time was spotty … she recalls having to take physical fitness tests in the cold lakes of Bavaria, and some marching.

She remembers friends suddenly disappearing from her school and no one would ever say why. She was 13 when her city was bombed, near the end of the war. The city was Munich, and in very close proximity to the city was the longest running concentration camp, Dachau, which operated from 1933 to 1945.   [Read more…]

Matt Brower for Judge | Candidate Profiles for the November 2018 Ballot

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Editor’s Note: The San Diego Free Press has asked three dozen candidates in key electoral contests from throughout the county for submissions explaining why they think progressive-leaning voters should consider voting for them. Many of these candidates are running in down-ballot contests often overlooked by voters.

I am challenging Gary Kreep in the upcoming November election for Seat 37 – California Superior Court Judge. This race stands out as the only one of six county-wide races from the June primary to advance to the general election in November. No matter where you live in San Diego County this race will appear on your ballot.

I began running for this seat when I saw the Commission on Judicial Performance had censured Judge Kreep in August of 2017 for committing over two dozen violations of the Cannons on Judicial Ethics that govern the behavior of judges in our local courts. Though these ethical violations were varied the ones that caught my attention were those involving unprofessional and disrespectful treatment toward women and minorities in court by Judge Kreep. I was already aware that Judge Kreep had participated in a lawsuit to prohibit President Obama’s name from appearing on the ballot in 2012 premised on the debunked theory that our nation’s first black president’s birth certificate lacked authenticity. This was known commonly as the birther movement. Once I became aware of the nature of Judge Kreep’s ethics violations it confirmed my suspicions regarding his worldview and made it clear to me he needed to be removed from his position of authority in our community.   [Read more…]

Group Asks District Attorney Stephan to Recuse Her Office from Investigation into Earl McNeil’s Death

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Monica Montgomery, Tasha Williamson, Mark Lane, Yusef Miller, and other community members held a press conference on Wednesday to publicly request that District Attorney Summer Stephan recuse herself and her office from the investigation into Earl McNeil’s death while in the custody of the National Police Department.

On August 10, 2018 the National City Police Department turned the investigation into Mr. McNeil’s death over to the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office. They are also asking DA Stephan to re-open every case where Earl McNeil was used as a law enforcement informant for the Office. 
  [Read more…]

After the Day San Diego’s Establishment Shattered; Lessons to Be Learned and a Way Forward

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By Cory Briggs

Something really good for San Diegans happened last Thursday: The rabid, asinine pursuit of a convention center expansion on the waterfront hit a concrete wall at 100 miles per hour.  But that wasn’t the best part about Kevin Faulconer’s last-minute effort to put a “citizens’ initiative” on the November 2018 ballot after an “unprecedented coalition” failed in its “Herculean effort” to gather enough signatures to clear the mark. 

For San Diegans, the best thing that could have happened was for The Establishment – the usual special-interest suspects on the right and the left who run City Hall – to break into a thousand tiny pieces.  That is indeed what happened.  Hallelujah!

I’m sure that my Twitter feed and e-mail inbox will start blowing up as soon as people read that last paragraph, if not before they finish this one.  I’m going to be accused of being anti-worker because, as those who had front-row seats to The Establishment’s demise last week know, some of the biggest names in San Diego’s labor movement were part of the “unprecedented coalition” that crashed and burned.  Many of them I consider good friends; outside City Hall, if I needed the shirts off their backs, they’d give them to me without hesitation (and vice-versa).   [Read more…]

Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center: Victory for Barrio Logan, San Diego History, Culture

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By Josie Talamantez

The community of Logan Heights/Barrio Logan has been the driving economic work force for the City of San Diego for over 100 years and has paid the price of discrimination, marginalization, and isolation through segregation practices for the majority of that time.

Chicano Park became a tipping point in our relationship with the powers that be and now close to 50 years later we are prepared to tell our story and the wonderful contributions our community and community members have added to the well being of the City, State and Nation.   [Read more…]

SB 964 Will Require Largest U.S. Pensions to Report on Climate Risk

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By Laura Sisk-Hackworth / SanDiego350

A landmark bill in the California legislature, SB 964, defines climate-related financial risk in law for the first time and requires the boards of the two largest public pension funds in the nation to report on this risk every three years. The importance of this bill is that it gives the public a way to respond to the boards’ consideration of climate risk and its investments in key industries. It also protects state employees and our economy from potentially devastating financial losses that could result from climate change.   [Read more…]

Azalea Park Murals Offer a Mini-Survey of Gloria ‘Glow’ Muriel’s Work, Part II

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Probably the most fascinating of Gloria Muriel’s murals in the alley is one she did with friends this year. Framing a large, classic “Glow” woman, a series of faces, beginning with two softly rendered women, evolve into hard-edged geometric faces that burst into triangular forms, all of which are bracketed by semi-circles floating over black space, a kind of evolutionary progression of humanity in time and space over chaos.

When I say this one appears to have a fully developed storyline, Muriel laughs.   [Read more…]

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