Things are starting to get intense in election races. Mail-in ballots will go out May 7th, and June 5th is election day.

The day you go to vote used to be a big deal.  I remember back in my younger days (when I lived in Washington DC) friends would gather for cocktails before going to walk the gauntlet outside our designated polling place.  We called it VWI. (Just joking) Mailing your ballot was called absentee voting, seemingly reserved for overseas military and those wealthy enough to plan jaunts to exotic places.

By the time the local media decides to go to polling places on election “day,” as many as 75% of voters will have already cast their ballots. Smart campaigns know this, and that’s why you’ll see an uptick in advertising, direct mail, and those ever-so-pesky phone calls in coming weeks. (Pro Tip: Casting your ballot stops the phone calls and most of the mail.)

So who are all these people on the ballot? Why should you care? And how do you know you’re not voting for the wrong person?   [Read more…]

Dig deep enough into any of the issues of the day and you’ll find they all have one thing in common: economics. Yes, indeed, money makes the world go around. And the fact is most of us are getting a smaller piece of the economic pie as the years go by.

Our fearless leader’s tax reform package is worthless and 73% of the American people have already figured that out. Take the illusion of empowerment out of all the ‘reforms’ (of either political party) and what’s left is more wealth for the people who already have it

The contemporary conversations starting back in the days of Occupy about the 99% have evolved. Nowadays we speak of economic justice. Generally speaking, these discussions center on the reallocation of government resources to alleviate the most blatant examples of those falling through the so-called safety net.   [Read more…]

Things are breaking fast this morning as I’m writing this post. So I’m only going to leave this plan of action here, in the likely event President Trump fires Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as is widely expected.

March for Truth—an organization that is working with dozens of advocacy groups to organize rapid response protests has partnered with MoveOn.org, Public Citizen, Indivisible and many others to prepare emergency ‘Nobody is Above the Law’ rallies that will happen directly following the firing of the special counsel should it occur. There are already events in 800+ cities and communities scheduled across the country—more than 300,000 people are prepared to take to the streets.

By firing Mueller or Rosenstein, the president would trigger a full-fledged constitutional crisis by asserting that he is above the law. The hours following the firing will determine whether he is proved right.   [Read more…]

 “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…]

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…]