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Ballot Box Basics for San Diegans: What You Need to Know About the 2016 California Primary

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Massive Voter Turnout Expected

California’s June elections are looking to be like the OK Corral of presidential primary contests this year. With Senators Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders both besting their party’s frontrunners by 13 points in Tuesday’s Wisconsin voting, the Golden State’s large lode of delegates is rapidly gaining in significance.

Better than 600,000 Californians have registered to vote online or updated their information in the last three months, says California Secretary of State Alex Padilla in a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown. One unnamed campaign has reportedly requested 200,000 registration forms, according to Padilla, and he’s looking for an additional $32 million to handle predicted major surges in turnout for both the June 7 California primary and Nov. 8 general election.   [Read more…]

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Diego Chapter

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By Barbara Zaragoza

They’re witty. They’re irreverent. Their fully professed Sister names range from Sister Hungry Bitch to Sister Hysterectoria. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Diego Chapter seek “to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt.”

They’ve been called drag queens. They’ve been called a sorority of gay men. As a matter of fact, to be a Sister is a calling and their focus is on helping community members who have been marginalized or ignored.   [Read more…]

Highways, Not Skyways Motivate Voters in SANDAG Polling for Ballot Measure

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In just a few short weeks, the Board of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) will vote on placing a half-cent sales tax increase on the November ballot. At stake are billions of additional dollars for transportation projects in coming decades.

The regional government group has released results from a just completed Competitive Edge survey of 1201 local voters, weighted for voting history, survey mode, age, party, gender, and subregion.

The ‘Good News’ is that there appears to be enough of a consensus to reach the two-thirds majority required for passage. The ‘Bad News” is that the 68% supporting the idea dwindles to 62% once arguments against it are presented. (But the trend is in the right direction if you’re an optimist.)   [Read more…]

RIP Joe Marillo, San Diego’s Godfather of Jazz

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Joe Marillo passed away Saturday, March 26. Born in Niagara Falls, NY, 83 years ago, he moved to San Diego in 1974 from Las Vegas where he had played in show bands for 10 years. He started out playing saxophone in Atlantic City, NJ while swinging from a trapeze.

He was dedicated to bringing straight ahead, mainstream jazz to San Diego for almost 50 years both with his virtuoso playing and his skills as a presenter and impresario. He received the San Diego Music Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.

After moving here from Las Vegas, Joe immediately started playing and performing in San Diego clubs. I first saw and heard him at Chuck’s Steak House in La Jolla where Joe lived “in the ghetto” for his entire life.   [Read more…]

San Diego is Led Around by the Nose

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How about taking a break from our city’s inane preoccupation with a behemoth sports palace for the San Diego Chargers?

And let’s give ourselves a break from the fiasco called a “Convadium,” a zany proposal to link a convention center annex to a new football stadium just down the street from our 18-acre ballpark. Talk about blocking pedestrian access! Talk about walling off the heart of downtown!
What self-respecting city in the USA would fall for such a ludicrous proposal?

So let’s NOT to take a break from simple questions like: Why are we even thinking about cramming a mammoth new football stadium into our modestly-proportioned, pedestrian-starved downtown streets? What rational person would want to do such a dumb thing to our city? Are we nuts, or what?   [Read more…]

First Look: City of San Diego June 2016 Primary Ballot

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The 2016 primary season is officially upon us. Today I’m presenting a quick review of what San Diego City voters can expect to see on June 7 (Or earlier if voting by mail). This is just the first of what will be many columns and articles over the next two months. And, yes, we’ll be talking about other contests throughout the region.

After months of hand-wringing in the pundit class, we now have two viable challengers to incumbent Mayor Kevin Faulconer. Odd-numbered city council districts are up for grabs, and three of those will choosing somebody new to represent residents.

There are ballot measures A thru I, most of which are updates to the City Charter. Just about the time your eyes will want to glaze over from all the legalese coming from Measure G, there will be two significant choices to follow. Stay Awake. These are important decisions.   [Read more…]

Assault on Public Employee Unions Fizzles at the Supreme Court

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Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association Gets Split Decision 

Rebecca Friedrichs, the elementary school teacher honored with a ‘Torch of Freedom Award’ at the San Diego County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner last weekend, won’t be celebrating this weekend.

This morning, in a single-sentence order, the Supreme Court announced that the judgment of a lower court rejecting an effort to defund public sector unions “is affirmed by an equally divided court.”. A four-decade-old opinion protecting public sector unions will live to see another day.

Friederichs and nine other teachers served as plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by the conservative Center for Individual Rights (CIR) and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. The claim being made was that the free speech rights of non-union members entitled them to contribute nothing to the costs of representation, even if they’d already opted out of fees supporting unions’ political activities.   [Read more…]

Financial Parasites Have Become Neo-Feudal Landlords

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Classical economics divided income into two types: earned and unearned. Earned income came from productive labor combined with capital investment. Unearned income was considered parasitical and consisted of rent, interest and dividends. It was not considered as adding to GDP but as subtracting from it. It was money made by manipulating money much as feudal landlords made their money in what has been called a rentier economy.

Today, most of the money earned by the 1% driving the income inequality gap is being made in the financialized, rentier economy but is now considered earned income. New methods have been devised to make money not by productive labor and investment but by manipulating financial instruments. One such manipulation consists of stock buybacks.   [Read more…]

Four Men Run For Southwest Chula Vista’s District 4 …

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… Attendance Boundary Debate Still Rages, and Townhomes Replace RVs in Imperial Beach

Last year, a seven member commission created four districts in Chula Vista. Prior to that, elections for all 5 of the city council seats were determined at large. In this election cycle, three council members are not up for re-election: Mayor Mary Salas, Councilman John McCann of District 1 and Councilwoman Patricia Aguilar of District 2.

District 4, or Southwest Chula Vista, is often considered the most underserved part of the city. Four men are running for the position: Mike Diaz, Rudy Ramirez, Eduardo Reyes and Emanuel Soto. The Chula Vista Star News posted their bios. Only residents of District 4 will be able to vote for the candidates in the June 7, 2016 elections. If you are a Chula Vista resident, you can find out more about the candidates and register to vote here.   [Read more…]

The Language of Pinyon-Juniper Trees

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After two months of struggling to write anything coherent about pinyon-juniper forests, I was on the verge of giving up.

Members of the group I am campaigning with to stop pinyon-juniper deforestation began brainstorming about applying for grants to support the campaign. Many of the grants they discovered required us to demonstrate that pinyon-juniper deforestation harmed wildlife populations, poisoned water supplies, or had a tangible effect on human populations.

Thinking that I could support our grant application process with an essay, I sat down many times to write about the countless beings that call pinyon-juniper forests home. But, I never wrote anything worth reading.

It took me a long time to figure out why.   [Read more…]

Study Shows Why Women Janitors and Security Guards Are At Risk

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By Debra Varnado / Capital & Main

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education are shining a light on troubling conditions they uncovered in the state’s property services industry. Their new report, Race to the Bottom: How Low‐Road Subcontracting Affects Working Conditions in California’s Property Services Industry, was released last week.

Women janitors and security guards in the industry— a rapidly growing sector of the state’s economy– are at increased risk of violence and sexual harassment, due to a combination of factors that allow the problems, as the study claims, “to occur and to remain unchecked.”   [Read more…]

Si Se Puede! Sanders Wows Diverse Crowd in San Diego

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The big news yesterday wasn’t that Senator Bernie Sanders spoke in San Diego. It was the diverse crowd of 13,000 plus people who put their lives on hold for a day to stand up for a better world.

The line to get into the San Diego Convention Center started in the wee hours of the morning. By the time the doors opened at 4pm the line stretched forever. Halls D&E were filled with the first ten thousand or so people in line, and an overflow room was opened. And then a second overflow room was opened.

It is an article of faith among some Sanders supporters that their candidate gets short changed by the media. Today we’ll examine a sampling of local mainstream coverage of yesterday’s events.   [Read more…]

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