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The Starting Line – Death by Street Planning on El Cajon Boulevard

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By Doug Porter

It was late Wednesday night on the 2800 block of El Cajon Boulevard. A 53 year old man jaywalked as he walked out from a Wendy’s fast food restaurant and was struck by a white Nissan sedan. Despite attempts by EMTs called to the scene, the man died. Police say alcohol was not a factor in the accident and that charges are unlikely to be filed against the driver of the vehicle.

This might seem like a straightforward argument against jaywalking, but it is actually indicative of a much larger problem. El Cajon Boulevard is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly streets in San Diego.

The place where the jaywalker died lacks pedestrian crossings at nearby intersections. It’s unsafe at any speed for pedestrians and, at 40 miles per hour (the speed most people, including me, drive on EC Blvd), a pedestrian has only a 15% chance of surviving an accident.

Inside: Cindy Marten’s Laptop Stolen, Burning Down Kansas, Gun Control and Hollyweirdness   [Read more…]

Pacific Beach Planning Group and Local Residents Fight Bar Expansions

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By Sub-committee

Wednesday, April 10, Bill Allen – owner of the Crystal Pier Motel – and other residents called a press conference at the pier to help expose a simmering problem in Pacific Beach to the larger community. Allen and many other concerned residents have over the last while voiced their complaints about Scott Slaga – owner of the 710 Club (ex-Blind Melons) near the Crystal Pier – in his efforts to obtain a sidewalk encroachment variance for his establishment.

Allen and the complaining residents have issues caused, they contend, by encroachments for bars, problems such as the high crime stats and high noise impact, to lowered property values to no room on the sidewalks for people to walk to the beach.

This is all in preparation for the city council vote today, April 11, on whether or not to allow Slaga to obtain his sidewalk encroachment variance.
  [Read more…]

West Coast Babies Suffer Thyroid Problems After Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown

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fukushima fallout mapChildren born in Pacific coastal states in 2011 may be at greatest risk.

By Anne Hurley / msn Healthy Living

It’s already well known how devastating the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown was for Japan — dramatic spikes in radiation-related illnesses, an increase in likely cancer deaths over the next several years, and pollution which may never truly be cleaned up.

A new study suggests what many worldwide have feared — that the devastation from the traveling radiation has in fact sickened infants in other countries, including babies born shortly after the incident in Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Unregulated, Unsafe, Unfair – the GOP Vision for California

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By Doug Porter

One of the favored propaganda ploys of conservative pundits over the past year or so has been the ‘everybody’s leaving California for Texas’ meme. This all started with an article in the ultra conserve National Review by former assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who left the Golden State for the Lone Star State after finishing third in the 2010 GOP primary race for US Senate.

“California may be dreaming, but Texas is working” said DeVore, who went on to tell a tale of woe including high taxes, burdensome regulations and a bloated bureaucracy that stood in sharp contrast to the lean, mean Texas machine.

And so it began. Thousands of businesses were fleeing “Taxifornia” for the freedom offered by Rick Perry’s Republican mecca, so we were told. By early in 2013, media accounts of a minor ad buy urging businesses to consider relocation to Texas painted a picture of a grand exodus underway.

Today’s report on National Public Radio by Wade Goodwin on the construction industry in Texas paints a sad portrait of the real costs of the GOP’s prosperity paradise.   [Read more…]

What’s an EcoDistrict Anyway? North Park prepares to become first in San Diego

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North Park in the first stages of becoming the first sustainable-focused neighborhood in San Diego following the U.S. lead of Portland, OR.  Tonight (Wednesday, April 10th) there will be an informational meeting for community members to learn about the project.  The meeting will be at Sea Rocket Bistro (3382 30th Street, 92104) from 5:30 – 7:30 PM and $3 drafts and $2 street tacos will be available.

I recently talked with Paulina Lis, who is heading up the North Park EcoDistrict project along with colleague Jennifer Owens, to learn more about the project.  (The North Park EcoDistrict is currently in ‘start-up’ mode and the official website, northparkecodistrict.com, is under construction. In the interim the best source for information on the EcoDistrict is the Facebook page.)  Paulina directed me to the Portland Sustainability Institute (PSI) as a primary source for information on what an EcoDistrict is and what Portland has been doing.   [Read more…]

5 Things You Need to Know About the Immigration Agreement

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by Jackie Tortora, AFL-CIO/Originally published at Labor’s Edge

It was announced over the weekend the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” came to an agreement in principle on a major aspect of creating a commonsense immigration process that benefits all workers.

This agreement includes a new kind of worker visa program called the W-Visa, which will work for everyone, not just employers.

Here are five things you need to know about this new employer-based visa:   [Read more…]

Tuesday the Ninth 45 Years Ago – an Historic Day for the San Diego Free Press

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By Frank Gormlie

When it finally dawned on me that today was Tuesday, the ninth of April – I began immediately having flashbacks – not hallucinogenic ones – but ones that surrounded another Tuesday the 9th – a Tuesday the ninth of April exactly 45 years ago. It’s a date that has poignancy for us at the San Diego Free Press and for all of our readers and contributors.

For it was this day 45 years ago – itself just a few days after Martin Luther King was assassinated – that students at UCSD decided once and for all to begin publishing an underground newspaper, called the San Diego Free Press.

If we go back four and a half decades to that time, you’d find me as a new sophomore at the University of California at San Diego – totally unpoliticized, walking around in a daze, a definite neophyte in the land of politics. I had just left the US Army and had transferred right into the bowels of left-wing radicalism as I began taking classes from philosophy professor Herbert Marcuse. He and his graduate student assistants were beginning to fill my brain with all kinds of new thoughts – but I was still new to it all, still very wet behind my ears, more interested in completing my courses than in understanding what was going on across the country in 1968.   [Read more…]

The San Diego Nine Walk in the Footsteps of Martin Luther King

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The San Diego Nine picked the perfect week for a hunger strike.  They may not have known it, but the ghosts of Memphis were haunting the Mission Valley Hilton.  What’s the connection?

Last week was the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was murdered in Memphis where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers.  As I noted in my column for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in January, the real MLK is frequently neglected in favor of a distorted picture of a vanilla saint who just wanted us all to get along.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed, King was a provocateur who wanted to disturb us about America’s hypocritical racial inequality AND its shameful class divide.  King died fighting for the rights of poor workers of color because he thought nothing was a better example of what he wanted the Poor People’s Campaign to be than the sanitation workers’ strike.  Their fight was a call not just for legal civil rights for black people, but a cry for economic justice for all.   [Read more…]

Is San Diego Going to Implement a Great Bicycle Network?

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By Beryl Forman & Sam Ollinger

Last year, SANDAG began the work of implementing their Early Action Projects that are part of their 2050 Regional Bicycle Plan. Within the City of San Diego, SANDAG is currently working on the design of the Uptown  and the North Park/Mid-City  regional bike projects both of which are currently in the design phase of implementation.

The design phase of the implementation process to date has included putting together the working group composed of over 40 individuals representing a wide variety of stakeholder interests for each of the two urban core projects. The draft plan initially presented by SANDAG to the working group provided a skeleton of a map that was designed to get the working group efforts to coalesce around some specifics on where they thought the bicycle facilities to be implemented would be most effective and most utilized.
  [Read more…]

Why People Are Protesting Drones in San Diego

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The New York Times has posted an excerpt on-line from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” to be published by Penguin Press on Tuesday.

The story starts out telling us the story of Net Muhammad, a Pashtun rebel hiding in the South Waziristan province of Pakistan. His death in June 2004, along with several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16 was the opening salvo in what has become the newest secret war.   [Read more…]

Kinya Letting Her Light Shine in Honor of MLK

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It was already a beautiful day as I observed the sun shining through the window and then I clicked into facebook where these words brightened my outlook even more: “Today, I marched with his son to symbolize that the struggle is not over and our will to fight has not died. You did not die in vain…R.I.P. Martin Luther King Jr.”

My granddaughter, Kinya, shared such sentiments after a march in Memphis where Martin was felled 45 years to the day. It warms my heart that she took part in such an assemblage, considering that my progeny, unlike me, are not among those who hit the streets with slogans and songs in pursuit of justice and dignity. They just don’t do that. But I don’t despair because I know they care and pursue a better world in their own ways – as loving people, I’m proud to say.   [Read more…]

San Diego Street Trees: My Love-Hate Relationship with Palm Trees

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A requiem for the palm at the end of the mind

Street trees in urban areas are important. They provide a human scale to our surroundings and soften the mind numbing linearity of vast expanses of concrete. They clean the air we breathe and provide much appreciated shade. On an often unconscious level they impact our feelings about a street or neighborhood’s economic status and safety, which is to say its desirability as a place to walk or live.

A specific iconic tree can define where we live on a particular street or in the city of San Diego itself. For many residents of Ocean Beach, that iconic image is of a Torrey Pine. I can remember a spectacular late afternoon descent over the downtown cityscape which had been turned into a massive violet bouquet of blossoming jacaranda. And of course, there are the eucalyptus in Balboa Park and lining Park Boulevard.

But the ultimate iconic image in San Diego is of palm trees. A line of sixty foot palm trees silhouetted against the sky is a stirring sight, but it can only be appreciated from a distance and therein is the palm tree problem. Walking under or close to them day in and day out is a sure way to kill your palm tree passion.
  [Read more…]

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