The latest victims of America’s gun madness are students at Santa Fe High School, about 30 miles outside of Houston, Texas. As I’m writing this, the death count is at ten, with more at local hospitals being treated for injuries. 

The shooter, who is in custody, was found with an AR-15 style rifle, a pistol, a shotgun, and pipe bombs.
 

Today’s outrage raises the count to twenty-two school shooting events in 2018. Ten of these have happened since the February massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Today’s outrage happened just one week after NRA President (and felon) Oliver North called the Parkland kids terrorists, and two weeks after Donald Trump and Mike Pence were shilling at the NRA convention and inciting violence.   [Read more…]

At an election rally in Indiana, this week supporters of the President were chanting “lock her up” as he went on stage, referring to his opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton. The pre-midterm event also including a suggestion from the stage that extending Trump’s presidency beyond two terms was a viable option.

Our environment is being fouled, the rule of law is being degraded, personal greed has replaced service to the nation, extremists and bigotry are venerated, and increasing oppression by race, gender, and class are the order of the day.  And, oh yeah, how’s that $1.50 a week in increased income from ‘tax reform’ doing when it comes to escalating insurance premiums (Trumpcare) and soaring gas prices (backing out of the Iran deal)?

Think the gas tax was bad? Just wait until you see what instability in the Middle East does to prices at the pump. Donald Trump’s name won’t be on the primary election ballot, but the names of his enablers will be.    [Read more…]

The Union-Tribune and Times of San Diego have both posted stories about a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit filed on Thursday.  A San Carlos Albertsons is alleged to have created a hostile work environment and harassed Hispanic employees by forbidding them from speaking Spanish on the premises, even to each other on break or to Spanish-speaking customers.

From the Times of San Diego:

Beginning in late 2012, the Albertsons store on Lake Murray Boulevard near Navajo Road prohibited employees from speaking Spanish around non-Spanish speakers, including when they spoke to Spanish-speaking customers and during breaks, the suit said.   [Read more…]

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…]

It’s off to the races time. The June Primary races, that is.

The deadline for candidates to file has passed, and now it’s time or the sorting process to begin. Over the past few months, various organizations have vetted candidates. Some have already made endorsements. (We’ll have a list of who likes who posted next week.) Others are still in the process.

There is already a major controversy in Democratic circles triggered by endorsements announced by Micky Kasparian’s rump labor organization, the Working Families Council. I will write more on this shortly.   [Read more…]