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Kavanaugh & The GOP Boys: Why 70% of Rapes Aren’t Reported | Progressive Calendar Sept. 21- Oct 1, 2018

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Donald Trump and his enablers know the statistics from experience and rely on it to shield their groping, harassment, and pussy-grabbing. And now they are exploiting this reality in their quest to place a man on the nation’s highest court who’s history indicates he’ll do everything possible to further subjugate women. 

There are well-established facts about sexual assault and its aftermath: only 310 out of every 1,000 rapes are reported. Of those rapes reported to police, just 57 lead to arrests, 11 are referred to prosecutors, seven lead to felony convictions, and six lead to incarceration for the rapist. Victims of rape have long-lasting consequences, including PTSD, suicidal thoughts, problems at work or school, drug use, and more. 

I have no way of knowing how the vote on Kavanaugh will turn out. I do know that, whatever the outcome, the old white guys in DC have further motivated millions of women to make sure to vote in the upcoming elections. 

Now’s the time to make a plan to vote, and to encourage your friends to do so. Mail-in ballots go out in less than two weeks. Even though most of them won’t appear on every ballot, there are more than six hundred people running for office in San Diego County alone. Opportunities to learn about and engage with campaigns and issues are popping up everywhere. All you have to do is pay attention.   [Read more…]

Child Detention Funded with Cuts to Cancer Research, Head Start, and Women’s Shelters

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By Julia Conley / Common Dreams

Along with tens of thousands of children and families, cancer patients, Americans with substance abuse disorders, and victims of domestic violence are among the casualties of President Donald Trump’s detention of young immigrants—according to government documents outlining the administration’s plan to divert millions of dollars away from programs serving those populations.

Yahoo News reported that in order to continue detaining more than 13,000 children currently in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is proposing that up to $266 million be taken from other government health programs.   [Read more…]

Former Senior Border Patrol Agent Speaks Out On Corruption | Video Worth Watching

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The Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC) has created a new video series which they’re calling “Breaking the Green Line”. It features a former senior Border Patrol agent (1995-2001) who left the agency due to the rampant corruption and culture of impunity. She is now sharing her first-hand experiences to shed light on the Federal government’s most corrupt, abusive, and out of control agency.   [Read more…]

California’s Recycling Crisis: China Doesn’t Want Our Trash Anymore

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It’s a sad fact of our Californian recycling world – China no longer wants our trash.

China used to be California’s — and the world’s — largest overseas market for recyclables, but in January, China began not accepting “contaminated” material it once brought to its shores. For China, now, if the recycled material is one-half of 1% contaminated, it’s too impure for recycling.

CalRecyle – which runs California’s recycling program – stated in a bulletin in August:

“This policy change is already starting to have adverse impacts on California, and is resulting in more material being stockpiled at solid waste facilities and recycling centers or disposed of in landfills.”   [Read more…]

Candidate Canvassing Campaigns Blitzing the County | Progressive Activist Calendar September 14 – 24, 2018

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With more than two dozen canvassing efforts planned for the coming days, Nathan Fletcher, Tommy Hough, Monica Montgomery, Dr. Jen Campbell, Ammar Campa-Najjar, Mike Levin, Todd Gloria, Chris Ward, Dr. Akilah Weber, Alejandra Sotelo-Solis, Mona Rios, Jose Rodriguez, Cori Schumaker, Tasha Boerner Horvath, James Elia, and Sunday Gover all want a little help from their friends with talking to voters throughout San Diego. And if you read through the listings below, you’ll find there’s also a celebrity coming to town to knock on doors.

Getting out the vote is serious business in San Diego this year. There’s still time to join campaigns. If you’re not able, be sure to be encouraging should they knock on your door. Contacting voters is the absolute best way to win an election and this level of pre-election activity is unprecedented in my experience.
  [Read more…]

Climate Change, Clogged Drains, and Lorie Zapf

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By Jordan Beane

On September 13th, the Union-Tribune released their interviews with our District 2 candidates, Dr. Jennifer Campbell and current District 2 City Councilmember Lorie Zapf. In Zapf’s interview, there were a lot of specific questions about the Climate Action Plan, it’s goals and more.

However, I believe the UT should have asked her a simpler question: Do you, Councilmember Zapf, believe in climate change?

Our Republican representative wants you to believe she cares about this existential threat and its impact on San Diego. She, along with the rest of the city council, voted to approve San Diego’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) in 2015. She mentioned the CAP in an op-ed. She even used the word “climate”  in a tweet once (the only time she’s done so in 1,700+ missives). She and the Lincoln Club (San Diego’s version of the Koch Brothers) flooded the mailboxes of District 2 with the same two images of Zapf cleaning out the San Diego River, portraying our Republican representative as an environmental champion.   [Read more…]

Storm Surge Meets Virtual Reality Technology – The Weather Channel Animation | Video Worth Watching

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The Weather Channel shared on its Twitter feed this impressive animation designed to illustrate the impact of various levels of storm surge. For the curious, Wired has the backstory on How The Weather Channel Made That Insane Storm Surge Animation, describing the technology that made the production of the video possible.   [Read more…]

Trump Blames Democrats After University Study Reports 3000 Hurricane Deaths in Puerto Rico

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“Only Donald Trump could see the tragedy in Puerto Rico and conclude that he is the victim.”
—Sen. Ed Markey

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

President Donald Trump has been “lying about Puerto Rico from the start to make himself look better,” and on Thursday morning Trump lied once more by falsely claiming that a widely accepted academic study showing that nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans died as a result of Hurricane Maria was “done by the Democrats” in an attempt to make him “look as bad as possible.”

In a pair of tweets, Trump insisted that “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, after the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers.”

“This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico,” Trump added. “If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”   [Read more…]

Refugees Cast in ‘The Jungle’, an Earnest Play about Migrant Camp Life in Calais

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As a response to its successful run at the Young Vic (December 2017-January 2018), The Jungle opened at Playhouse Theatre in London in June 2018 for a 20-week engagement. Created by Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy and directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, The Jungle tells the stories of the inhabitants of the makeshift camp in Calais, France, known as the Jungle.

The Jungle was an unofficial refugee camp with more than 8,000 individuals from over 17 countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, Egypt, Chad, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kurdistan, and Iran. The inhabitants of the camp were awaiting a chance to cross the Channel to the UK.   [Read more…]

President Trump Admin Took Millions From FEMA For ICE Detentions | Video Worth Watching

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From the MSNBC YouTube website:

Senator Jeff Merkley talks with Rachel Maddow about a document showing that the Trump administration took ten million dollars from FEMA’s budget ahead of the 2018 hurricane season and gave it to ICE to pay for detentions.

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Are You Willing to Look Past Gavin Newsom’s Smile and Carl DeMaio’s Frown in the General Election?

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Sometimes the most influential contests on your ballot are the ones you haven’t heard much about. Let’s fix that.

Are you psyched to vote for Sunday Gover or Paloma Aquirre in the upcoming general election? How about Cory Schumacher or Akilah Weber? James Elias or Jeff Griffith? (I’ll say more about them below.)

What? You’ve never heard of them? Chances are good they won’t be on your ballot unless you live in a small city or less urbanized part of the county. But there will be a host of names, regardless of where you reside, worth learning about in the coming weeks.   [Read more…]

America’s Finest Tourist Plantation Workers Struggle to Make It … But Nobody’s at the Barricades

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Anger Beneath the Postcard?

It should come as no surprise to anyone who ventures outside San Diego’s hermetically sealed and relentlessly marketed image of itself as a carefree paradise by the sea that the reality of our city is quite different than the happy fantasy.  A recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) confirmed this recently when it released a report that noted of America’s Finest City, “45% of San Diegans fall into an auspicious category: people who work full time and still struggle with poverty.

The local news coverage of this report understandably focused on the poverty numbers and how here and elsewhere in California, people are losing faith in the American Dream.   Digging deeper into the report, we also learn that working Californians suffer great housing insecurity, feel disposable as employees, have negative workplace experiences, and aren’t sure they’ll ever be able to retire.  While these are all noteworthy and grim details, several other things, buried toward the end of the study, give some signs of hope but also present a central challenge.   [Read more…]

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