May the Fourth Be with You!
By Olympia Andrade Beltrán
My husband and I are sci-fi nerds. There. I said it. We share a deep love for Star Wars that started in our youth. I was only a year old when Star Wars came out, and four years old when Empire Strikes Back was released… but I remember Return of the Jedi as the most mesmerizing, fantastic movie experience in all of my short 7 years on this planet. [Read more…]
By Carlos Batara
There are no winners in wars. It’s just a matter of degree.
Both sides lose. One side loses less.
During my law school days, one of my best friends and I discussed this topic quiet often. He had served multiple terms of duty in Vietnam and been wounded twice. I was a dove and anti-war protester. [Read more…]
Editor Note: The Civic San Diego Board of Directors is meeting today, April 29 at 1 pm to discuss adoption of their Community Benefit Policy (Item 8). You can read that policy here. The Community Budget Alliance supports a more concrete and comprehensive policy to address and protect the concerns of city of San Diego residents. A comparison chart of both policies is included at the end of their letter.
Dear Civic San Diego Board Members,
In light of the dissolution of the redevelopment agencies, the City of San Diego has a responsibility to establish clear policies and standards for publicly subsidized community economic development. In October 2014, the Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods committee directed Civic San Diego to conduct a community outreach process. The goal of that process was to gather public feedback about what should go into a Community Benefits Policy for community economic development and to bring back recommendations for a policy in March 2015.
The Community Budget Alliance expressed concerns that the outreach process was not broad, robust or inclusive and shared these concerns with members of the City Council. [Read more…]
By Joe Flynn
Editor Note: Mr. Flynn’s article is a response to Taking a Wide Lens on Mission Valley by Mary Lydon, published in Voice of San Diego.
A wide angle lens may not be the appropriate analogy for this discussion. It seems a telephoto lens for a close up was used here focusing on providing a stadium for the Chargers. The rest of the picture is fuzzy. What is troubling about these discussions is that they begin and end with the assumption that the city owned land in Mission Valley, now improved with Qualcomm Stadium is “dedicated for sports facility use.”
Perhaps parkland can be dedicated and forever reserved for public park uses, but other city owned land can and should be viewed as a public asset to be used for the most critical public needs. [Read more…]
By Regnad Kcin
High-profile San Diego lawyer Cory Briggs has engaged in egregious false matrimony, according to a months-long EyeNewSores investigation.
A host of experts assert that Briggs has made questionable and possibly fraudulent deals while claiming the woman he’s shacked up is his wife. The EyeNewSores team will examine these deals in future weeks, publishing exclusive headlines revealing a side to this so-called public interest lawyer that some may find shocking.
EyeNewSores has discovered that Briggs, a key figure in the resignation of former Mayor Bob Filner, may or may not have battered his alleged ‘wife,’ according to sources close to a high profile attorney and elected official famous for his ethics and fair play. [Read more…]
by Dan Bacher
The mainstream media, state officials and corporate “environmental” groups have for years tried to portray California as the “green” leader of the nation. In reality, California suffers from some of the greatest environmental degradation of any state in the nation, since corporate agribusiness, the oil industry and other big money interests control the majority of the state’s politicians and exert inordinate influence over the state’s environmental policies.
California is currently in a state of emergency, with NASA scientists saying that California has only about one year of water left in reserves, according to Food and Water Watch. This is largely due to the gross mismanagement of California’s reservoirs, rivers and groundwater supplies, during a record drought, to serve the 1 percent. [Read more…]
By Pedro Pietri
Pedro Pietri, El Reverendo de la Iglesia de la Madre de los Tomates and the Spanglish Metaphor Consultant of the Latin Insomniacs Motorcycle Club Without Motorcycles, was born in Puerto Rico in 1944 and grew up in Harlem. He first read Puerto Rican Obituary in 1969 at a Young Lords Party rally in New York. In 1973 Monthly Review Press published his first collection of poetry, Puerto Rican Obituary. He, along with Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Victor Hernandez Cruz and many others were an integral part of the Nuyorican Poetry Movement. On March 2, 2004 he died of cancer mid-flight on his way back to New York after spending time at an experimental cancer treatment facility in Tijuana, Mexico. While in Tijuana he was cared for by his brother Joe Pietri, longtime friend, poet, and former San Diego resident Jesus “Papoleto” Melendez, and the folks at Calaca Press including future San Diego Free Press writer and Editorial Board member Brent E. Beltrán. [Read more…]
Plaintiffs seek community benefits and oversight of public funds
Editor Note: SDFP readers have requested more information about the legal complaint filed by the San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council and Dr. Murtaza Baxamusa, a CivicSD Boardmember. We are providing their news release and a link to the complete filing below without analysis at this time.
The Petitioners are requesting legal declarations from the Superior Court which clarify the duties and responsibilities between the City of San Diego and CivicSD in regard to economic and community development. The legal complaint also seeks by its lawsuit to create public transparency over public-private development, safeguard taxpayers with oversight of public resources, and establish a baseline of community benefits for development derived from public resources. [Read more…]
By Tara Evonne Trudell
crossing
the mojave desert
I dreamed
my people
moving through
heat waves
and hunger pains
mothers fathers
children
willing life
dying to cross
a line
drawn in sand
drones hovering in air
dangerous spy tactics
always monitoring
the calculation
in military moves [Read more…]
By Jim Moreno
Grief is an inconvenient companion,
In the grocery store line, in the middle of a sentence,
Hanging clothes on the line, it doesn’t care,
It grabs you by your lapels, It grabs you by your throat,
It low blows your gut, It shakes you and shakes you,
Fills your eyes with rain, then suddenly,
It lets you go. Just like that―gone.
It doesn’t care where it flows,
It must gush & flow; return later when you
Least expect it and shake you and shake you again. [Read more…]
By Sonia Gutierrez
Knock, knock, knock.
America, there are children
knocking at your door.
Can you hear their soft
knocks like conch
shells, whispering
in your ears?
Weep, weep, weep.
Can you hear
the children whimpering?
Their moist eyes
yearning to see friendly TV-gringo-houses
swing their front doors
wide open. [Read more…]
By Barbara Zaragoza / South Bay Compass
Welcome to my “ethnic enclave” tour of the border! I’ve been fascinated by how many different languages, cultures and religious groups exist along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Today, I focus on the Chinese.
Mexicali is the capital of Baja California and it’s a booming city of around 1 million residents. The city also has a unique claim to fame: La Chinesca or the largest Chinatown in Mexico.
The Chinese influence remains substantial here, even as there are perhaps fewer than 5,000 full blooded Chinese and three times that number of mixed Chinese-Mexicans.
[Read more…]
