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Anti-Criminal Justice Reform Group Names San Diego’s Summer Stephan as DA of the Year

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San Diego’s interim District Attorney Summer Stephan has received an award from Crime Victims United as their Southern California District Attorney of the Year on Monday.

Local media coverage at CBS8, the Times of San Diego, and KUSI consisted of lightly edited versions of the press release issued by the public relations staff at the District Attorney’s office.

Not noted in the local coverage of Stephan’s award was the campaign being led by the awarding group to place a measure on the ballot rolling back portions of criminal justice reforms enacted by the legislature and California voters in recent years.   [Read more…]

Melissa Lozada-Oliva – ‘My Spanish’ | Video Worth Watching

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Continuing the National Poetry Month theme, from the 2015 Women of the World Poetry Slam, here’s Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s “My Spanish”.   [Read more…]

San Diego Politics in 2018: A Whiff of Racism, the Odor of Misogyny, the Stench of Entitlement

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Electoral contests in San Diego County government are coming into the final stretch. Mail-in voting is just a month away. A politics column and editorial board interviews at the Union-Tribune, along with the release of depositions from the now-settled lawsuits against labor leader Mickey Kasparian, have all contributed knowledge to what I’ll share today.

First up: a column by Michael Smolens on the race for District Attorney. He describes the contest as insider/reformer (Summer Stephan) versus outsider/advocate (Geneviéve Jones-Wright.

Smollens accurately describes Jone-Wright’s candidacy as the local manifestation of a national movement seeking to address the race and class bias of U.S. criminal justice system and notes the differences in style between the candidates.   [Read more…]

Shedding Light on Marshall Tuck’s Shady Money Trail

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Recently, when the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Marshall Tuck for Superintendent of Public Instruction, they did so because, according to their editorial board, he has “the skills and vision to bring about needed change” and would stand up to “the status quo” (read: teachers’ unions).  

While it has become quite common for mainstream corporate media outlets to blindly parrot the rhetoric of corporate education reformers, in this case, it is an exercise in doublethink of Trumpian proportions.  Far from being a populist outsider fighting the establishment, Tuck is the pure product of the billionaire class.

A few weeks back, I wrote about how Tuck’s bid for Superintendent of Public Instruction should not be allowed to slide under the radar because his effort to defeat his opponent, stalwart progressive Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, was a case study of the ways right-wing money is trying to infiltrate Democratic politics.  More specifically, I noted that “it’s not just the usual California members of the billionaire boys club that are backing Tuck this time.  

Updated 2018-10-09   [Read more…]

The Cases Against UFCW Local 135’s Mickey Kasparian: The Depositions

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On December 9, 2016 Sandy Naranjo was unjustly fired by UFCW Local 135 President Mickey Kasparian and subsequently filed a lawsuit. That firing and lawsuit lead to a chain of events that will soon culminate in the end of Kasparian’s Machiavellian grasp on San Diego’s progressive body politic.

Kasparian settled five civil cases against him. Yet, after all of this, there are still many within the local Democratic Party and a dwindling few within labor that still support him.

Below you will find all of the depositions, in chronological order, that have been made public. Including ones from Kasparian himself, Richard Barrera, Lori Kern, Sarah Saez, and Melody Godinez. Read them for yourself and judge whether or not Kasparian is a detriment to women, labor, and progressive politics in San Diego.   [Read more…]

Fifteen Years Later: Remembering the Invasion Of Baghdad | Readers Write

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By Kilian Colin

On April 9, 2003, I woke up to the sounds of bombs.

My bed was shaking and my sister, who was sleeping in the bed next to me, was awake crying and shaking in her bed. It was like an earthquake with very scary sounds. Shards of glass from the windows covered my bed. My parents ran into the room. My father said let’s go downstairs.

We lived in a 1-bedroom apartment on the second floor. We went downstairs and knocked on our neighbor’s door. He neighbor opened the door and let us inside his apartment without saying a word. He was clad only in underwear and held a copy of Quran in his hand. His name was Abo-Allaa.   [Read more…]

Libros – Grupo Pacuprá | Video Worth Watching

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Sometimes poetry is found in books. Sometimes music is found in poetry. Can it be that sometimes poetry is found in books as music? Here is the Columbian percussion group Grupo Pacuprá performing their work Libros.   [Read more…]

Looking Back at the Week: April 1-7

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This week’s edition of Looking Back at the Week contains articles, commentaries, columns, and other work by San Diego Free Press regulars, irregulars, columnists, cartoonists, at-large contributors, and locally and nationally sourced writers on National Poetry Month, Trump’s fraudulent voting fraud tales, the 16 trying to replace Issa, Weber’s police accountability bill, former UFCW employees speaking out against Kasparian, and lots of other grassroots news & progressive views from San Diego’s feisty, all volunteer, slightly funky, community news site.   [Read more…]

Learning to See: Gloomy Sunday – Seeing Art In the Ordinary | Video Worth Watching

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From the artist Memo Atken’s web page, a description of his series Learning to See informs us that it’s:

an ongoing series of works that use state-of-the-art Machine Learning algorithms as a means of reflecting on ourselves and how we make sense of the world. … Artificial neural networks loosely inspired by our own visual cortex look through surveillance cameras and try to make sense of what they are seeing. Of course they can see only what they already know. Just like us.

“What they know” are “tens of thousands of images scraped from the Google Art Project, containing scans from art collections and museums from all over the world.” That is how mundane objects such as cloths, keys, plugs and hands become transformed into seascapes, flowers and flames.

The music selected to accompany this visual exploration is Gloomy Sunday sung by Diamanda Galás, a San Diego native.   [Read more…]

Ethiopian Jazz Master Mulatu Astatke: Yekermo Sew | Video Worth Watching

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Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s recent post on Ethiopian jazz master Mulatu Astatke characterizes Yekermo Sew (“A Man of Experience and Wisdom”) as his signature piece.

[It] was featured in the soundtrack of American independent filmmaker and screenwriter Jim Jarmusch‘s 2005 film “Broken Flowers” and then circulated across the world. Composed following Mulatu’s return to Ethiopia in the later 1960s, “Yekermo Sew” takes its title from a traditional Ethiopian Christian new year’s blessing in Amharic, the national Ethiopian language.

  [Read more…]

Why Trump Tells California Voter Fraud Stories | Progressive Activist Calendar April 6 – 17, 2018

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 “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…]

Former UFCW Employees Urge Local Democratic Party to Stand With Women

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By Rosy Miner, Isaura Garcia, Odett McAdams, and Debbie Principe

We are former employees who worked under Mickey Kasparian, President of UFCW Local 135. For more than a year, we have stood with our sisters: Sandy Naranjo, Isabel Vasquez, Anabel Arauz, and more recently Melody Godinez, who all filed lawsuits with serious claims involving our former boss.

We have firsthand knowledge of what it is like to work for Kasparian, and we have volunteered for several Democratic candidates over the years.

Our Party has failed us in its handling of – or refusal to handle – him.   [Read more…]

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