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Decertification of Barrio Logan Planning Group Election a Civil Rights Issue, Say Activists

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From the OB Rag

The Peninsula planning board is not the only community planning panel in the city that’s having conflicts. Over in Barrio Logan, there’s some really funky stuff going on these days.

Consider this: in the middle of counting ballots for the most recent annual election to the Barrio Logan Planning Committee held on March 18th – all counting stopped.

Why?

If you asked the current leaders of the planning group, they would’ve said there needed to be another election – a re-election – because activists with the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) were handing out election fliers too close to the voting.   [Read more…]

Art Students Use Light to Turn Trump’s Border Prototypes Into Art | Video Worth Watching

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This Voice of San Diego video by Adriana Heldiz features Southwestern College professor Perry Vasquez introducing us to highlights of an art project that incorporates the controversial border wall prototypes near the U.S.-Mexico border at Otay Mesa. The project was a collaboration among Vasquez’ students and two other local artists: Jill Holslin and Andrew Sturm.

Jill Holslin is also an occasional contributor to the San Diego Free Press and Perry Vasquez is the artist and illustrator for San Diego Free Press columnist Jim Miller’s latest publication: Last Days in Ocean Beach (City Works Press, 2018).   [Read more…]

Why Trump Tells California Voter Fraud Stories | Progressive Activist Calendar April 6 – 17, 2018

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 “In many places, like California, the same person votes many times. You probably heard about that. They always like to say ‘oh that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people.” — President Donald Trump, April 5, 2018.

I knew something was up in the voter fraud rumor mill as I checked our daily statistics in the morning. There it was: hundreds of people searching and ending up at an article from a few years back in our archives on voting in California.

Voter suppression has become a core strategy for Republicans in recent years, and if they can’t figure out a way to block people from casting their ballots, this kind of rhetoric is used in the hope of people just staying home.   [Read more…]

Assemblywoman Shirley Weber’s Police Accountability Bill Couldn’t Come at a Better Time

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On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, it seems appropriate to write about gun violence and the haters who enable it. Three local events relate to this topic, and there is some news of national interest I’ll add along the way:

  • Two bills introduced in the State Legislature, aim to bring California’s police use-of-force law into the 21st century and open a gap in the Blue Wall of silence surrounding investigations into police misconduct.
  • High school students from Carlsbad and San Clemente joined the weekly protests outside Congressman Darrell Issa’s Vista office to present a petition asking him to hold a town hall to address gun violence and school shootings.
  • San Diego resident Nasim Aghdam was named as the shooter following an afternoon of terror at YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters. Three people suffered gunshot wounds and police found Aghdam dead of apparently self-inflicted wounds.

  [Read more…]

Immigration Advocates Say Yes to California Values in Escondido As Trump Pumps Up His Base

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On Wednesday, the Escondido City Council is expected to vote on joining the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block the California Values Act and other state laws protecting immigrants.

The ACLU and immigration rights activists will hold a 3pm press conference, followed by an Indivisible-supported rally supporting the state law and the region’s immigrant community, which was recently targeted by ICE raids that arrested more than 100 residents.

The San Diego County Supervisors will meet in closed session on April 17 to join the lawsuit. The only event at the County building related to this vote at this point is in support of the Trump administration’s stance, organized by the Border Patriots, the same group of we’re-not-racists who’ve been targeting Chicano Park in recent months.   [Read more…]

County Supes Set to Join Trump’s War on Brown People | Progressive Activist Calendar March 30 – April 9, 2018

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We can no longer afford to ignore the County of San Diego in the struggle against the policies of the Trump administration.

San Diego’s Republican County Supervisors are proposing to join Attorney General Jeff Sessions lawsuit challenging our state’s stance against the administration’s racist policies. These actions will be considered in a closed session on April 17. The vote will likely be 3-2 in favor our using the County’s moral authority and our tax dollars in support of bigotry.

In addition to supporting the use of immigration enforcement as an instrument of terror, the Supes are proposing to consider supporting the administration’s quest to use the 2020 census to ask every American household to record which members of their family are US citizens.   [Read more…]

Puerto Rico’s ‘Taller Salud’ FEMAle Led Disaster Recovery Project | Video Worth Watching

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It has been six months after hurricane Maria and the island of Puerto Rico is still struggling with massive infrastructure issues. Samantha Bee takes her show on the road to Puerto Rico to investigate. This segment features Allana Harking investigating a group of women in Loíza, Puerto Rico who, in the absence of Federal FEMA assistance, began asking the community what their most pressing concerns were. Discovering that a frequent answer was the lack of a roof, they set about mitigating those concerns by installing tarps to provide protection.   [Read more…]

Activist Dolores Huerta and Carlos Santana Have a Decades-Long Relationship | Video Worth Watching

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Over a montage of excerpts from the documentary Dolores, we hear from Dolores Huerta and one of her long-time supporters and the producer of the documentary, Carlos Santana, for whom she is the “Queen of Light”.   [Read more…]

2020 Census Citizenship Question Amounts to a ‘Sabotage’ of Democracy

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By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

In a move denounced by immigrant rights advocates and legal experts as an effort to “undercount communities of color” that could have an enormous impact on the drawing of congressional districts, the Trump administration announced late Monday that the 2020 Census will ask respondents whether or not they are U.S. citizens.

“This is an attempt to racially rig the census,” argued Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn in a statement after the move was made public in a late-night press release by the Commerce Department. “An accurate census is essential in the redrawing of our congressional and legislative districts and budgeting decisions that impact our schools, hospitals, roads, and veterans.”

Shortly after the decision to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census was announced, California Attorney General Xavier Beccera joined civil rights advocates in condemning the move and filed suit against the Trump administration, arguing that inclusion of the question is “not just a bad idea—it is illegal.”   [Read more…]

In the Wake of the March for Our Lives, Let’s Talk About Criminal Justice Reform in San Diego

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This moment in time is about so much more than gun reform. It’s about political reform. It’s about criminal justice reform. And that’s what I’m going to focus on today, in light of recent events in Sacramento and along with what’s (or not) happening locally.

San Diego is lucky in that we have candidates for County Sheriff (Dave Myers) and District Attorney (Geneviéve Jones-Wright) in the June primary who stand on the side of criminal justice reform.

Assemblyman Todd Gloria and San Francisco’s David Chiu have joined forces with statewide Indivisible groups in partnership with ACLU of Northern California and the American Friends Service Committee to co-sponsor AB3131.

The bill would create oversight and ensure transparency on the sale of surplus military equipment to police departments statewide. This is important because President Trump and Jeff Sessions have rolled back an Obama executive order limiting the sale of surplus military equipment to state and local police departments.   [Read more…]

La Mesa City Council Adopts Strong Climate Action Plan

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SD350 Volunteers learn what grassroots organizing can accomplish

By Angela Deegan / SanDiego350

On March 13, the City Council of La Mesa unanimously adopted a strong Climate Action Plan (CAP), with a goal of 100 percent clean energy. This victory came after three years of persistent advocacy and organizing efforts by SanDiego350 La Mesa volunteers and allied organizations.

The SanDiego350 La Mesa CAP campaign began with our attendance at a meeting of the Environmental Sustainability Commission in early 2015. This was where the first draft of the Plan was released. Along with Climate Action Campaign, we identified numerous deficiencies in the Plan — it lacked a goal of 100 percent clean energy and didn’t identify Community Choice Energy (CCE) as a strategy. In addition, the time frame of 2020 was too short, too many measures were identified as voluntary, and, for the most part, the plan was not enforceable.   [Read more…]

Marching for Our Lives in San Diego & Other Places | Photo Gallery

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Initial estimates say 10,000 people participated in the March for Our Lives rally at the County Administration Building on the waterfront in San Diego on Saturday morning. Locally, there were also marches in Escondido, Encinitas, Carlsbad, and Temecula.

There were over 830 March for Our Lives events on six continents. In Washington, DC, 800,000 people marched. In New York City, 175,000 people marched. Twenty thousand people took to the streets in Boston.

Today’s post is mostly pictures from around the world, with a few snippets from news coverage I saw.   [Read more…]

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