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Thank You UC Berkeley Students and Community for Confronting Racist

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This Is Not an Issue of “Free Speech” for a White Nationalist with Connections to the White House

Risking becoming the lone voice in today’s wilderness, we say today that somebody has to say “thank you” to the UC Berkeley students and community members who demonstrated against the white nationalist Breitbart News senior editor back on Wednesday, February 1st, and helped cause the campus to cancel the talk by Milo Yiannopoulos.

So, thank you.

The whole incident has now blown up, with claims the protesters violated free speech, with Trump threatening to cut off funds to UC Berkeley – which he cannot do unilaterally – and the subsequent push-back against him from school and California officials.   [Read more…]

Gov. Brown: ‘California is Not Turning Back. Not Now, Not Ever.’

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State of the State Address / Office of the Governor

This is California, the sixth most powerful economy in the world. One out of every eight Americans lives right here and 27 percent – almost eleven million – were born in a foreign land.

When California does well, America does well. And when California hurts, America hurts.

As the English poet, John Donne, said almost 400 years ago: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

A few moments ago, I swore into office our new attorney general. Like so many others, he is the son of immigrants who saw California as a place where, through grit and determination, they could realize their dreams. And they are not alone, millions of Californians have come here from Mexico and a hundred other countries, making our state what it is today: vibrant, even turbulent, and a beacon of hope to the rest of the world.

We don’t have a Statue of Liberty with its inscription: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” But we do have the Golden Gate and a spirit of adventure and openness that has welcomed – since the Gold Rush of 1848 – one wave of immigration after another.   [Read more…]

Southwestern College Students Struggle With Homelessness

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By Cristofer Garcia / The Southwestern College Sun

Georgia really wanted to earn a good grade in a class she loved. So she turned on the overhead light and spread her books across the dashboard of her car. It was cold, her mother was asleep and they were parked near the Chula Vista Marina. Georgia was homeless, but loved being a college student.

Georgia (a pseudonym) is a 19-year-old nursing student and one of the 32 percent of California college students experiencing housing insecurity. A recent study by the College Equity Assessment Lab (CCEAL), a research lab under the Interwork Institute at San Diego State University, found that homeless students across California are silently facing a grim struggle to survive.

Southwestern College is no stranger to the problem.   [Read more…]

The Final Assault on Public Education is On in Earnest

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During the halcyon days of the Trump transition period, the Education Committee confirmation hearing of Betsy DeVos stood out as perhaps the most jarring example of the craven cynicism that defines the new regime.

The headlines said it all, with nearly every major media outlet noting DeVos’s scant qualifications and terrible performance with extreme skepticism. The New York Times expressed “Big Worries About Betsy DeVos” while the New Yorker outlined “Betsy DeVos and the Plan to Break Public Schools.” Over at the Washington Post, they wrote “Six Astonishing Things Betsy DeVos Said—and Refused to Say—at her Confirmation Hearing” as Esquire opined that “The Betsy DeVos Hearing Was an Insult to Democracy.” The Los Angeles Times editorial, “Betsy DeVos Embarassed Herself and Should Be Rejected by the Senate” pithily observed that “what disqualifies her is her lack of understanding of existing law and policy, and her inability to address them thoughtfully.”

But, of course, the new leader of the free world was undaunted by all of this as he signed a stack of executive orders, one of which was his formal nomination of DeVos for Secretary of Education, saying simply, “Ah Betsy, Education. Right?”   [Read more…]

Free College Tuition in New York State? There’s Good News At The State Level

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Taking a page out of the Bernie Sanders playbook, Governor Andrew Cuomo, with Bernie Sanders standing by his side, proposed free university tuition in New York state for residents making less than $125,000 a year. New York on the east coast and California on the west are taking the lead in preserving and advancing progressive values in the Trump era which will probably see conservative values extolled at the Federal level. But Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren and others will do all they can to block Republican efforts to shred the safety net for poor and middle Americans. Meanwhile, state and local governments in progressive states will do all they can to advance the cause of values that benefit average Americans.   [Read more…]

Senator Elizabeth Warren Denounces Trump’s “Horrifying” Education Pick

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By Deirdre Fulton / Common Dreams

In a scathing memo sent Monday to Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) joined a growing chorus of opposition to the nominee, probing her past support for “privatizing and defunding K-12 education” as well as her “paper-thin record on higher education and student debt.”

“There is no precedent for an Education Department secretary nominee with your lack of experience in public education,” Warren wrote (pdf) to DeVos ahead of the billionaire’s Wednesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, on which the senator sits.   [Read more…]

The Hip School Where the Arts Rule

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By Ernie McCray

I had moments not too long ago when I thought that I just might not be around in 2017 – based on the complete lack of energy I was enduring day after day, with my belly under siege by some bacteria that just didn’t want to leave.

But I’m still here on the scene, happy as a lark, slowly getting back to my routines. Wanting to write something regarding my making it to 2017, I checked a writing prompt website and chose number 17 of the choices, as a symbol for 2017, and it read: “In 400 words create your ideal place.”

That put me in a nice place because the prompt could have been something like “Write a 150 word profile on somebody named ‘Margaret Mallory’” or write about “something wrapped” which would have called on more creativity than I wanted to own. I just wanted to kick the new year off in a nice tone.   [Read more…]

The Year of ‘Post-Truth’

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Thanks to fake news and hyper partisanship, many of us can no longer distinguish facts from opinions — or lies.

By Jill Richardson / OtherWords

“Post-Truth.” The Oxford English Dictionary named this its word of the year for 2016.

This was a year when campaign lies — most, though not all, coming out of the Donald’s mouth — were so numerous that fact checking became nearly impossible.

Yes, each individual statement could be fact checked. But there were so many rapid-fire falsehoods that it was impossible to debunk them one by one on TV without devoting entire shows to just that.   [Read more…]

Trump’s Plan to Make Education Great Again: Abandon Public Schools

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President-elect Trump described his choice for Secretary of Education in a Nov. 23 tweet as a “passionate education advocate,” who will “break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families.” Tweeting her reply, Betsy DeVos vowed to work with Trump “on his vision to make American education great again.”

Will tweets follow, identifying those years of greatness, together with the plan to return to them? Don’t hold your breath.

Over the last half century eight presidents (four Democrats, four Republicans) recognized the shortcomings of American education.   [Read more…]

American Dreamtime for San Diego Refugees

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By Nat Krieger

The story being read out loud in the room is illustrated with black, gray, and white sketches. It is about a man who visits the land of his birth. He brings his wife and son. The man is shown greeting a grandmother who he knew as a younger person before. Before.

Does that picture really explain before to a ninth grader with almost no English who has arrived in San Diego from a refugee camp in Thailand three weeks before? We need a bridge and Paw, a junior at Hoover High provides one.   [Read more…]

Chilling ‘Professor Watchlist’ Aims to ‘Expose’ Leftist Educators

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By Deidre Fulton / Common Dreams

“I am dangerous not to America but to the people soon to be in charge of it.”

So says one of roughly 200 college professors recently named to a conservative website’s “Professor Watchlist”—a round-up of academics accused of “discriminat[ing] against conservative students and advanc[ing] leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The list is based on “pre-existing news stories,” though readers are encouraged to “submit a tip” if they become aware of “professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”

The list, which first appeared on November 21, is a project of right-wing non-profit Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a group whose stated mission “is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.”

According to a blog post written by the organization’s founder and executive director Charlie Kirk: “Throughout the next 120 days, Turning Point USA will be running ads to make sure students, faculty, and administrators see that these professors made the Professor Watchlist…We believe these people need to be exposed.”   [Read more…]

What’s in Our Mailbag?

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Welcome to the San Diego Free Press’ newest column! We don’t make a habit of publishing press releases and, because we are all-volunteer run, we simply don’t have the resources to cover every event or topic of interest. What’s in our Mailbag? is a consolidation of information we’ve been sent from organizations or individuals we think is important to share.

Inside:

Police Presence in School Has Negative Effect on Students

Vote No on Measure B, a letter to the editor from the League of Women Voters

Legislative Hearing on Progress of Law Allowing Community Colleges to Offer B.A. Degrees

  [Read more…]

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