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The Urgency of Transgender Safety, Legal Protections

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Local ACLU joins suit against El Cajon Crunch Fitness Center

It is hard, if not impossible, to maintain awareness and then do something about the constant erosion of civil rights of minority populations in our country. The Trump administration never sleeps when it comes to undermining current laws or attempting to supplant them with cruel new ones, the Constitution be damned.

Recent news, both locally and national have underscored the degree to which transgender women and men sustain some of the worst weaponized bigotry and intolerance imaginable. They are paying with their lives, their employment opportunities and their ability to simply exist in society–you know, the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness guaranteed to each one of us.   [Read more…]

Chaos and Cruelty at the Border

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We have become the barbarians at the gate

As if ripping children from their parents’ arms, locking them up in cages or sending them to facilities on the other side of the country weren’t the absolute low point of the Trump administrations response to immigrants seeking asylum, we are now tear gassing children.

Let that sink in for a moment. We are tear gassing children, who were reported as running screaming and crying from the tear gas canisters shot into Mexico, a foreign country, by US Border Patrol. (Imagine this situation reversed, with Mexico lobbying canisters into the US.)

There is essentially no operative immigration policy in this country.
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My Big Hairy Kosher Cuban Turkey

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It is not an auspicious sign when the turkey is not only NOT in the oven on time, but a feverish online search has ensued with the frantic words “where find blowtorch thanksgiving san diego.”

I was really looking forward to roasting a turkey this year. My husband and I have a brand new stove that replaced the old one with the inoperable oven that has functioned as a storage unit for over a decade. The fragrance of roasting turkey is one of the best smells that life offers; my olfactory senses were primed. But the taste of turkey is often something quite different.

Despite the successful attempts to make turkey breasts gigantic, culinary engineering has been less successful in assuring breast meat that doesn’t taste like a Mojave Desert burger. Getting and cooking a flavorful turkey has always been hit and miss for me. I have tried every kind of turkey available. Or at least I thought I had.

Doug Porter, who is not only a SDFP editor but also a stellar cook, recommended that I try a kosher turkey instead of the usual commercial fare.   [Read more…]

With Labored Breath: The Polluted Legacy of the Steel Mills

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For the children of steel

The Atlantic recently ran an article about the long term impacts of the now largely defunct steel industry in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Braddock resident Tony Buba has produced a short documentary about the environmental racism that has created an overlooked health crisis among residents in the area, particularly among African Americans who were segregated in neighborhoods closest to the mills. The incidences of cancer and lung disease are shocking.

For those of us who lived in any one of the mill towns dotting the Monongahela River (Mon Valley) in southwestern Pennsylvania and lost loved ones to those diseases, the statistics are heartbreaking. The Trump administration’s attempts to roll back EPA air pollution standards and bring back asbestos are enraging.   [Read more…]

Editor Interrupted

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SDFP editors Annie Lane and Doug Porter are taking a well deserved, week long vacation. Editor (and husband) Rich Kacmar and I have assumed the control panel in their absence. If everything had gone as intended, our line up today would not be noticeably different from prior days, with the exception of the absence of Doug’s Starting Line column.

But the day has not gone as intended. In between posting and an attempt at writing was the morning feeding of a cat colony which includes outside cats and inside cats. When Orlando, one of the outside cats, did not show up for breakfast I carried his food tray out to the back yard where I found him intently looking at something by the garage. A tiny black kitten was tucked into the grass next to the garage.   [Read more…]

A Freeway Runs Through It: A City Heights-Barrio Logan Conversation

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Resistance, Vision and Community

Chicano Park exists in Barrio Logan because of the construction of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge and the loss of property and displacement of lives that it caused. The community responded in a powerful, unique way. Residents couldn’t stop the construction, but they did lay claim to the land beneath the immense concrete pillars that enabled travelers above to make their way across the Coronado Bridge, oblivious to the transformation occurring below them. The land that was being readied for a California Highway Patrol substation was re-claimed as a long promised park. The reclamation began as a twelve day occupation that involved hundreds of people.

City Heights was likewise changed forever when eight city blocks along 40th Street- people’s homes and businesses–were scoured from the face of the earth in the early 1990’s to make way for the last connecting link of I-15, which extends from Canada to Mexico. City Heights would become a scorched earth community divided by an enormous ditch in keeping with Caltrans signature construction style.   [Read more…]

Trump’s Long Shadow Falls on San Diego Immigrants, Refugees, Muslims

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From City Heights Town Hall to Airport Protest

“Tell me what democracy looks like!”

“This is what democracy looks like!”

The chant ran up and down the whole length of Terminal 2 of San Diego’s Lindbergh Airport, up and down the opposite side of the terminal and could be heard on the second floor walkway. Three lines of cars ran between the two and those cars honked their horns while passengers waved flags and held signs outside of the windows.

An estimated 2,000 of us put our bodies on the public sidewalks of the airport to protest the fear and chaos engendered by Trump’s recent executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim countries.   [Read more…]

Who Are You Going to Believe? Trump, Truth, Citizens and the Press

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The unveiling of the Ministry of Truth

There are 1,457 days left in the Trump presidency, assuming that he doesn’t get bored and quit, is impeached or that the skies rain glass upon us all.

Trump’s inaugural address “(Liberal) Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” made it clear that he is only interested in his adoring base–the 46% of the voting public who narrowly installed him in the White House. The strategy among his handlers is clearly to let Trump be Trump while they roll up their sleeves and dismantle our democratic institutions.

The massive Women’s March in Washington on the first day of the Trump presidency was successful on many levels, not the least of which is that it got under Trump’s thin skin–bigly. The half million or so people who showed up were not Trump’s adoring base.   [Read more…]

Why Don’t San Diego Restaurants Add ‘Free Market’ Surcharges to Customer Bills?

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High-end SD restaurants poised to add surcharge for “government mandated” costs to business

Over the past ten years consumers have absorbed higher costs at the check-out counter for all manner of goods. Remember when gasoline costs spiked and affected more than just gas at the pump? Everything from the potted plants at the local nursery to grocery items reflected an attendant price increase. Remember when the cost of coffee went up? What about the shortage of cheese and how that was reflected in higher consumer costs?

These consumer cost increases reflect everything from volatility in the commodity market to shortages caused by natural disasters to price fixing. We weren’t handed restaurant checks or grocery bills with a surcharge added for “free market” or “act of god” or “corporate greed.”

So why are some San Diego restaurants considering a surcharge on bills to cover the most recent “government mandated” wage hike which raises the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour?
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AARP’s Spineless Response to Social Security, Medicare Privatization Threat

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AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, recently sent a call to action letter to its members about the need to secure future Social Security benefits. That opening line should have generated a sigh of relief from AARP’s 37.8 million members over the age of 50 who have been following the rumblings from the new Republican Congress to privatize Medicare and Social Security.

Read a little further and you find out that AARP is not alerting us to the potential unraveling in 2017 of two wildly popular and essential components of our social safety net–but rather the potential insolvency of Social Security in 2034. Imagine that your house has been doused in gasoline and an arsonist is standing close by with a box of matches but you are being told that your problem is that you aren’t saving enough money to tent the place for termites seventeen years into the future.   [Read more…]

Left Behind: Myrtle Cole’s Committee Appointments and City Heights

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San Diego City Councilwoman Myrtle Cole’s contentious election as Council President last week culminated with her appointments to the various City Council committees. Few of us know that these committees exist or what they do, but by the time issues are brought before the full City Council for legislative action they have been discussed and pretty much finalized in a committee.

Cole’s appointments to the Public Services and Livable Neighborhood (PS&L) committee denies a seat at the table for those of us who live in communities south of 8. Her selection of Councilmembers Chris Cate (chair), Lorie Zapf (vice chair), Barbary Bry, and Chris Ward is enraging, deeply concerning and unacceptable.   [Read more…]

Skyrocketing Rents, Same Old Housing Stock in City Heights

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Seventeen hundred dollars. Seventeen hundred dollars has become the standard monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment in City Heights. Over the past six months many residents who were paying around fourteen hundred dollars a month for a two bedroom apartment saw their monthly rents suddenly increase– by hundreds of dollars.

The increase in rents does not reflect a sudden investment by the property owners in additional amenities associated with gentrification. Property owners are raising the rent simply because they can. It’s the same housing stock, sometimes poorly maintained, at rental prices that are out of reach in a community with an average household income of thirty-three thousand dollars per year.   [Read more…]

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