San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Columns / Editor's Picks

Atheists Take a Stand in East County

by

Atheist Groups Sponsor Billboard in Lemon Grove

Right alongside 94 East is a new bill board in Lemon Grove. It’s quite a shocker if all you’ve ever seen are commercial ads, for this one is about religion – in a way.

It states very clearly:

Atheism – A personal relationship with reality.

The new billboard is sponsored by a coalition of groups that adhere to atheism and it went up at the end of January. The billboard is east and near the Federal Blvd freeway exit off 94. The groups include The San Diego Coalition of Reason and American Atheists, who spent $4,000 on the billboard – which did not appear lit up at night.   [Read more…]

New Schools CFO: SD Unified Will Afford Armed Guards, School Prayer with Pocket Change

by

By Aaryn Belfer

“Poor guy, he doesn’t realize that being frank and open about our financial condition is discouraged around here. He will be taken to the wood shed.”
–Text message from San Diego Unified School District board member, Scott Barnett, predicting the fate of the new chief financial officer Stan Dobbs.

Only one weekend after “investigative journalist” Will Carless published his sycophantic Q&A with Stan “Data” Dobbs, school Superintendant Bill Kowba did damage control, issuing a relatively meek apology for Dobbs’ many erroneous statements. Data Dobbs was then quietly whisked away and fed into a wood chipper. Keeping with its pattern for sticking any warm body in the CFO position, San Diego Unified vetted and hired Dobbs’ replacement even before the blowhard’s left leg had been turned into mulch.

What follows is an exclusive interview with San Diego Unified’s newest Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Palin.   [Read more…]

SDG&E and Southern California Edison Up to Same Old Tricks: They Want You to Pay for Repairs to San Onofre

by

We have written before about how electric utility companies try to get ratepayers rather than stockholders to pay for repairs to their equipment.

In particular, we wrote previously how SDG&E appealed to the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) for a rate increase after the disastrous Witch Creek fire..

Now Southern California Edison (SCE) and SDG&E, majority and minority owners, respectively, are using the same playbook with regard to the repairs undertaken at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).   [Read more…]

Spilling the Beans: Overheard in San Diego Coffeehouses

by

by Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes

The day after President Obama’s reelection, I was in an affluent neighborhood coffeehouse trying to work. A table of loud businessmen in their early sixties proclaimed, “If the Democrats want to tax the wealthy, we’ll dump our stock, layoff our workers, and move our businesses overseas. We’ll see how the middle class likes that!” The angry tirade reminded me of a two-year-old who didn’t get his way.

I do a lot of work in coffeehouses around San Diego. I try not to listen in on people’s conversations, but when they are loud proclamations I can’t avoid hearing, I sometimes write down the outrageous things that come out of people’s mouths.

Recently, I reviewed my notes and realized they are a psychological cardiogram of our city. I decided to publish the most outlandish conversations in hopes of exposing the anger behind them.   [Read more…]

You Want to Arm My Teachers?

by

I think I have shown great restraint in not approaching the arming of schools, teachers, counselors, etc. After all, it has been some time since the mass killings at Sandy Hook. But the more I hear about this asinine approach – guess where my beliefs lie – the more I question the sanity of the American people.

I spent five long years becoming a teacher. A damn good teacher. I was a high school dropout – the day I turned 16 – because I was bored, frustrated and, for the most part invisible to my teachers and staff. (Perhaps that was because I ditched more days than I was in attendance, but I didn’t ditch to have fun; rather I ditched because I had a job that paid me good money and I didn’t see what school was going to teach me that I wasn’t already using in my job. (I was a pharmacy tech – although not called that back in the early 50’s – but worked close to 40 hours a week and had a car that I had to support.)

Because of my horrible experiences with school, I decided that I would become a teacher and motivate students to learn using highly innovative means to do so. It must have worked, because even today I hear from some of my students that were in my first classes (and that was back in the 60’s) and they tell me that they owe me a lot for understanding their needs and setting up personal objectives for them.   [Read more…]

Sex in San Diego: An Open Letter to Men Looking for Women in the Online World

by

It happened again today. I “met” a man online that sounded like a nice person. He had many of the attributes I am looking for in a companion, or so he said, and I agreed to meet him for lunch in a well-known restaurant in North County. (He lives in San Marcos and it was a good halfway place for us to meet.) We were both early; another nice attribute. He obviously had been there before, not because the waitress recognized him, but because he knew his way around the restaurant and we sat at “his favorite table.”

We chit-chatted as we made our selection from the menu and then he asked me the question that I have been asked four times already in my online dating experience: “I said on my profile that I was 72; I am really 82. Do you think I could pass for 72?”

Well, guys, I am tired of being nice. So I told him the truth.   [Read more…]

The Inexact Cartography of the Heart: Going Home

by

When neighbors in City Heights talk about going home, that home may be as close as Los Angeles or Tucson, or as far away as Vietnam, Eritrea or the Philippines. My neighbors have family in Mexico and make an annual December pilgrimage to Mexicali or Oaxaca so that their children can spend Christmas with their grandparents, their abuelos.

Distance, which translates into time and money, and unstable political circumstances in one’s home country are limiters on whether the wish to return home for a visit is ever realized. But beyond those considerations, can you go home if your home no longer exists?   [Read more…]

Digging Tunnels Under the 30 Foot Height Limit – Part 1

by

Height Limit Critic Sparks Debate But Important Exemptions Need to Be Acknowledged

This is the first part in a two-part series on the latest debate about the 30 foot height limit.

New Year’s confetti and the champagne glasses used celebrating the end of 2012 – a year that marked the 40th anniversary of the 30 foot height limit in San Diego – had barely been cleaned up when the assault on that height limit began. It all started in a January 3rd Voice of San Diego article questioning any positive attributes of the 30 foot limit.

Not exactly like a “D-Day” type assault, but more like a tunnel being dug – a tunnel designed to undermine the coastal height limit of 1972, writer Andrew Keatts questions the basic character of the height limit, declares that its essential rigidity will be necessarily and periodically questioned by a city yearning to break free, and gives voice to its critics. The critics believe that because of the 30 foot height limits, all kinds of problems plague San Diego, with rents and property values at the coast being too high.
  [Read more…]

Wall Street: From Too Big to Fail to Too Big to Jail

by

After the financial meltdown of 2008, the Bush administration shoveled tons of money into Wall Street as did the Federal Reserve. TARP, the Troubed Asset Relief Program, was a $700 billion carte blanche gift to Wall Street to prevent an imminent meltdown. This was engineered by Henry Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary.

But that was miniscule compared to what the Fed ponied up. A lawsuit by Bloomberg News forced the Fed to reveal that it had given $7.7 trillion to banks all over the world to prevent the looming crisis. And the Fed is still at it with its policy of Quantitative Easing (QE).

But while the banks have been bailed out and are still being given monthly money cards, they have not been held to account for the behavior that caused the financial crisis in the first place. No banker has gone to jail despite the massive fraud and corruption that they perpetrated and in fact are still perpetrating.   [Read more…]

Field of View: 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade – Then and Now

by

Tuesday, Jan. 22, saw the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, in which abortion was officially legalized.

Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest celebrated the anniversary with a fundraiser dinner that highlighted the past and present of the organization’s history, including it’s pro-choice fight for safe and legal access to reproductive healthcare.

Abby Silverman-Weiss, a local attorney and champion of reproductive rights, was honored as the 2013 Defender of Choice.

“Tonight is a tremendous sense of belonging and empowerment,” Silverman-Weiss said.   [Read more…]

Federal Court Denies Lawsuit Claiming Marijuana’s Medical Benefits

by

By Steven Wishnia / Alternet

Preserving the main legal barrier to medical marijuana, a federal appeals court on Jan. 22 rejected a lawsuit intended to force the Drug Enforcement Administration to move marijuana out of Schedule I, the federal law that classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug with no valid medical use.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that the medical-marijuana advocates who filed the suit—Americans for Safe Access, a California-based patient-advocacy group; the Coalition to Reschedule Cannabis, Patients Out of Time, and four individual medical users, including Air Force veteran Michael Krawitz—had not proved that the DEA’s decision to keep marijuana in Schedule I was “arbitrary and capricious.” The court held that marijuana had failed to meet the five standards the DEA sets for drugs to qualify as having a valid medical use.

  [Read more…]

To Bike or Not To Bike? That is a good question.

by

By Brigitte Taylor

I love the idea of cycling all over town and the trend to encourage people (and currently women, in particular, to ride bikes.

Ideas are great, but as a result of biking in Mission Valley, Old Town, North Park, Downtown, College Area, City Heights and various parts of the city, I definitely have a new take on what it means to share the road with vehicles. I used to ride my bike frequently until I was knocked off by a driver. Thankfully, I was not injured but after that, I limited my rides to mountain biking and bike paths where road sharing is not an issue.

I decided that it was time to start riding on city streets again last year. Riding my bike on El Cajon Boulevard, I must admit, can be daunting. Depending on where you are riding, some of the lanes are so narrow that the cars parked on the street will position a cyclist in the middle of the lane for vehicles meaning that we literally must share the same lane with vehicles. The traffic is quite rapid and, in my experience, people are fairly hasty and do not drive in a manner or speed that promotes comfortable riding of a bike in the middle of the street. I noted the streets have designated lanes for the bikes; however, these lanes are in or near the same spaces along with vehicles. While I have noted more courtesy among drivers, I still think there should be a designated area specifically for bicycles.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry