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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…]

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…]

Death by Ally

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Mission Failure: Afghanistan. A message written in blood that no one wants to hear.

by Tom Engelhardt/TomDispatch.com

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21? It would dominate the news. We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here.

Well, the equivalent has happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the superhero movies). It even has a name: green-on-blue violence. In 2012 — and twice last week — Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security guards, largely in units being trained or mentored by the U.S. or its NATO allies, have turned their guns on those mentors, the people who are funding, supporting, and teaching them, and pulled the trigger.   [Read more…]

Conservatives Undermining Our Economic Recovery

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by Adam Hersh / Center for American Progress

Today’s weak economic growth numbers were as predictable as they are disheartening, and the blame lies squarely with those who opposed the president’s American Jobs Act nearly a year ago—and have in fact opposed an array of sensible economic policies to expand public investments that create jobs and economic growth ever since President Barack Obama took office.

But first the “news.” The $15.6 trillion U.S. economy slowed in the three months through June 2012. U.S. gross domestic product, or GDP—the sum total of all goods and services produced by workers and equipment in the United States—grew at 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2012. We are growing, but slowing. And this must renew policymakers’ urgency for action to prevent our economy from dipping further.   [Read more…]

Poor Blundering Mitt: The Pirates of Bainzance Redux

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by revbludge / Daily Kos

(To the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Oh, is there not one maiden breast?” from The Pirates of Penzance)

Mitt Romney:
Oh, is there not one British breast,
That does not sense my superiority,
And show uncommon interest
In treating me like visiting royalty?

What Briton on this islet small would not grant my vocation
To shine upon this dinky stage as a world-class elder statesman?
Yes, an elder statesman!

Oh is there not one Briton, please
In this whole “Anglo-Saxon land,”
Who’ll not regard my expertise
Olympic-wise, as something grand?

As unprepared as you must be
To run the Games without disaster
I’ll tutor M-I-Six for free;
They’ll quickly learn from ME, the master,
Learn from Mitt the master!
more inside…   [Read more…]

“Tobacco Can Cure Smoking” And Other Highlights Of ALEC’s Annual Meeting in Salt Lake

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by Brendan Fischer and Mary Bottari / PR Watch

“Can Tobacco Cure Smoking?” is the title of a workshop this morning led by the tobacco industry-backed Dr. Brad Rodu, who is trained as a dentist but has the title “Chair of Tobacco Harm Reduction Research” at the University of Louisville, a program primarily funded by U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co., an ALEC member and manufacturer of smokeless tobacco brands like Copenhagen and Skoal. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Heartland Institute, the Illinois-based think tank thatattracted attention earlier this year for making billboards that likened those who believe in man-made climate change to mass murderers and terrorists.

Rodu’s research supports the idea that smokers should replace cigarettes with smokeless chewing tobacco or “snus” moist tobacco packets — a “free market” solution to reducing smoking that would allow tobacco companies to continue profiting off of addiction.
  [Read more…]

Dark Money Political Groups Target Voters Based on Their Internet Habits

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by Lois Beckett / ProPublica

Lauren Berns was browsing Talking Points Memo when he saw an ad with President Obama’s face. “Stop the Reckless Spending,” the ad read, and in smaller print, Paid for by Crossroads GPS.    Berns was surprised. Why was Crossroads GPS, a group that powerful Republican strategist Karl Rove helped found,advertising on a liberal-leaning political website? Looking closely at the ad, Berns saw a small blue triangle in the upper-left hand corner. He knew what that meant: this ad wasn’t being shown to every person who read that page. It was being targeted to him in particular. Tax-exempt groups like Crossroads GPS have become among the biggest players in this year’s election.  They’re often called “dark money” groups, because they can raise accept unlimited amounts of money and never have to disclose their donors.

These groups are spending massively on television spots attacking different candidates. These ads are often highly publicized and get plenty of media attention.

But these same dark money groups are also quietly expanding their online advertising efforts, using sophisticated targeting tactics to send their ads to specific kinds of people.

Who they’re targeting, and what data they’re using, is secret.   [Read more…]

Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial to Get Wired

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by Frances Zimmerman

Influential and privately-funded Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial Association (VMA) got backing Monday afternoon from the volunteer citizens advisory group at La Jolla Parks and Beaches (LJP&B) to install an electrical easement at the City of San Diego’s 118-acre Mount Soledad Natural Park.

The motion, made by LJP&B members Dan Allen and seconded by John Beaver, passed 9 to 3. An earlier motion to deny the VMA’s request to install lighting failed 10 to 3. A representative of the Sierra Club was among those who spoke against electrification, citing light pollution and negative effects on celestial observation.   [Read more…]

Sex In San Diego: Teaching Sex In the Classroom

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RH Reality Check / Martha Kempner

Middle school and high school sexuality courses frequently become the subject of controversy most often because parents become upset after they learn of something said or done in class that they deem too explicit. By the time young people get to college, however, much of this potential for controversy fades for a number of reasons; parents are less involved, it is more acceptable for college students to be sexually active, and there is an understanding that human sexuality courses are voluntary — students know what they are getting into. Still, every once and awhile, the national media or perhaps worse a state politician gets wind of something that has happened in a college classroom and we start to debate again how far is too far in college sex education.   [Read more…]

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