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Don’t Be Distracted by a Word: The Issue Is Racism – Progressive Activist Calendar – January 12 -22, 2018

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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” – James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

Donald Trump could seek asylum in Moscow tomorrow, and the programs built on the legacy of hate that he embodies would continue to advance.

There is a connection between the City of El Cajon’s schemes to starve out the homeless, County DA Summer Stephan’s blind eye toward law enforcement officers malfeasance, the resurrection of the war on crime nationally, and a ‘whites first’ immigration policy.   [Read more…]

One Down, One to Go OR Will Darrell Replace Duncan?

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It’s possible both the 49th and the 50th district Congressional seats could end up remaining Republican.

Messages of congratulations for people who’d persisted and protested outside Rep. Darrell Issa’s office for over a year rolled in from all over the country yesterday.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted “Now that he’s actually retiring, they’re celebrating by teaching other activists about what they did,” and shared a 15 tweet how-to thread from San Diego Indivisible.   [Read more…]

UCSD Student and DACA Recipient in ICE Custody After Taking a Wrong Turn at the Border

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By Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients don’t have until March 2018 for Congress to act on the DREAM Act. As it is, many don’t even have until tomorrow:

UCSD student and DACA recipient Orr Yakobi was detained Sunday by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) after making a wrong turn near the U.S. Mexico Border coming back from San Ysidro.

First reported by 10News, Yakobi and his friend Ryan Hakim were visiting the Las Americas outlet mall in San Ysidro on Sunday near the border. On the way back, they accidentally took the 805 South freeway instead of the 805 North, which forced them into Mexico. When they turned around, Border Patrol officers flagged their car and detained Yakobi.   [Read more…]

BREAKING: Trump’s Coming to San Diego to Visit His Beloved Border Wall

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Multiple news outlets are reporting on plans for the President to visit San Diego for a look at border wall prototypes sometime after his January 30th State of the Union address. A visit planned for this week was canceled after an opportunity arose to attend the Georgia – Alabama college championship game in Atlanta.

In recent days the administration has taken a noticeably harder line on the border, using a request for $18 billion in funding for the wall as a precondition to any agreement on Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program ended by Trump offering protections to undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as youth.

Speaking from Camp David last weekend, Trump told reporters, “We want the wall. The wall’s going to happen or we’re not going to have DACA.”   [Read more…]

The 2018 Women’s March is All About Voting and Seeking Office

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By Sher Watts Spooner / Daily Kos

It’s time to get out the pussy hats again. And make sure you pair them with voter registration cards. Last year’s Women’s March, held Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, drew an estimated 4.2 million protestors in more than 650 marches around the country and even more around the globe. It has been described as the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. The marches provided an outlet for people across the country to vent dissatisfaction with Trump, to express extreme disappointment in the election results, and to launch a new nationwide movement to energize people (especially women) to take action.

The 2018 marches, scheduled for the weekend of Jan. 20 and 21, might be even bigger.

San Diego Marches:

  • Saturday, Jan. 20, 10 a.m. Women’s March San Diego/Hear Our Vote. County Administration Building. More Info.
  • Saturday, Jan. 20, 10 a.m.  Women’s March North County San Diego. Palomar College (San Marcos) More Info.

  [Read more…]

Rep. Duncan Hunter Lets Loose in TV Interview – Progressive Activist Calendar, January 6-16, 2018

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Congressman Duncan Hunter’s Thursday morning interview with Good Morning San Diego on KUSI was amazing. The Indivisible Team San Diego had a field day with his comments, issuing a press release so good that I’m borrowing heavily from it for the intro to today’s column.

When a suspect complains about prosecutorial prejudice while the investigation is still ongoing, it’s a sign bad things are coming, like indictments or even jail time. And that’s exactly what the East County Congressman did, blaming individuals in the Department of Justice for intentionally delaying the resolution of their criminal investigation into misuse of his campaign funds.

The Congressman blamed the career ambitions of federal investigators who, he said, seek fame, and aim to do maximum damage to his campaign by dragging out the investigation into the 2018 election year.   [Read more…]

Attn Darrell Issa: The 1950’s Called – They Want Their Politics Back

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Congressman Darrell Issa is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to counter nationally publicized weekly protests outside his Vista offices, according to emails obtained by the San Diego Free Press.

This week Issa called in ‘the troops,’ summoned from a veterans association armed with some red-baiting slogans. News crews from Fox and KUSI were called to the scene in hopes of gaining coverage of a counterprotest coordinated with the North County Congressman.

The opposition rally, organized by emails sent out by a local affiliate of the California Military Officers Association (CALMOAA), drew all of 18 people who stood across the street from the over 400 anti-Issa/Trump protesters.
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Ticking Time Bomb at San Onofre Nuclear Plant

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The seaside nuclear reactors at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Clemente were permanently shut down in 2013 following steam generator malfunction. What to do with the 3.6 million pounds of highly radioactive waste remains an epic problem, however, pitting concerned citizens against Southern California Edison, the California Coastal Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Edison operates San Onofre, the Coastal Commission is charged with protecting the coastline, and the NRC is responsible for long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel and protecting the public.

The Problem
A reactor’s spent nuclear fuel must be stored safely for 250,000 years to allow the radioactivity to dissipate. San Onofre’s nuclear waste has been stored in containers 20 feet under water in cooling pools for at least five years, the standard procedure for on-site temporary storage. Long-term storage necessitates transfer to fortified dry-storage canisters for eventual transportation to a permanent national storage site which, under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the federal government is under obligation to construct.   [Read more…]

San Diego 2018: What the Democratic Party Leadership Must Do

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The times, they are a-changin’.

Last weekend, the Union-Tribune editorial board called out the leadership of the county’s Democratic Party for enabling men who sexually harass women. You can’t know how weird it felt to have read the dead tree version of this editorial and having to admit it read like something I could have written.

In years past, I would have just chalked up such criticism to the urgings of the UT’s Republican masters looking to stir the pot. By putting their criticism in the context of what’s been happening nationally with high profile cases of sexual harassment and boorish behavior, the UT showed me this was more than partisan sniping.   [Read more…]

A Call to the American Resistance | Video Worth Watching

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“The power they took from the people will be returned to the people”. Charlie Chaplin’s character at the end of the film The Great Dictator is mistaken for the autocratic leader of a fictitious European country who is about to address his troops who have invaded a neighboring country. Chaplin’s imposter seizes the opportunity to declare that he (as the dictator) has had a change of heart. He then delivers a monologue exhorting the troops to not let themselves be treated as cattle, not let themselves be used as cannon fodder, and with the love of humanity in their hearts, to fight not for slavery, but to fight for liberty.   [Read more…]

Librotraficantes: Smuggling Banned Books back into Public Schools and Communities

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“Arizona banned our history. We decided to make more.”

By Anna Daniels

Editor Note: So here’s some good news in 2017–a Federal judge declared Arizona’s ban on Mexican-American ethnic studies unconstitutional. The legal battle took seven years, which goes to show that sustained resistance + access to legal remedies = progressive wins. The following article was published in 2014.

If you can ban one book, why not ban a whole bunch of them? Back in 2012 the Tucson Arizona public school system embraced the more is better approach when it eliminated the Mexican American Studies Program from the K-12 curriculum.

The LA Times reported that “The Tucson school board voted to end the program after Arizona’s education chief had ruled the district in violation of a controversial state law banning classes designed for a particular ethnic group or that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.” The Tuscon school district stood to lose $14 million in state education funds, which no doubt squelched a more robust debate on the topic of intellectual freedom and education.

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Will You Spare a Few Seconds to Help Homeless People in San Diego?

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Editor Note: This Starting Line originally published on December 15, 2016 details the plight of homeless people and steps to solve the problem of homelessness as well as some thoughts on national issues.

Today I’m giving over most of my column to Women Occupy, who have crafted a petition to Mayor Kevin Faulconer to actually do something ‘not mean’ for our rapidly growing homeless population.

Yesterday I sat in on a meeting with homeless advocates and heard a litany of horror stories about how the growth of the population of unhoused humans in San Diego is directly related to policy decisions made at city hall. I’ll report more on what I learned at a later date.

Will this petition end homelessness? Nope. But it could well be –if enough people sign it and YOU tell your friends about it– a step in the right direction. Only in movies has a single action ever righted a wrong. Change occurs because of thousands of little actions. Make signing this petition your contribution to a better San Diego. It only takes a few seconds.

CLICK TO SIGN HERE

  [Read more…]

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