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The Starting Line – Republicans at War: “Grab the popcorn, pop a beer, sit back and enjoy this goat rodeo”

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Long simmering tensions between Republican Party stalwarts and their Tea Party allies have emerged from the backrooms of politics over the last few days. The announcement that Karl Rove’s new group, the Conservative Victory Project, aims to weed out ‘unelectable’ candidates has the Tea Party set in a frenzy.

Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for the Victory Project, claims that the new group won’t pick its opponents according to ideology — rather, electability. The Tea Party types aren’t buying it, and a coalition of conservative leaders is demanding the new organization fire Collegio, for calling Brent Bozell, a pundit who runs the conservative Media Research Center, a “hater” in a recent radio interview.

The coalition includes Phyllis Schlafly, Tony Perkins, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, Manuel Miranda and Richard Viguerie — all big names in the conservative ‘grassroots’ world. A letter attacking Rove/Collegio, signed by the aforementioned names and a score of other big names, brought the dispute out in the open, saying, “You obviously mean to have a war with conservatives and the Tea Party. Let it start here.”

INSIDE: TEXAS STUPIDITY, ISSA FOR THE GIPPER, FILNER FOR THE TREE HUGGERS, ROSE CREEK FEST & more…   [Read more…]

Republicans Have a New Scheme to Rig the Electoral College: Winner-Take-All in Their Red States

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Divide Dem Votes, Winner-Take-All for GOP in Pennsylvania

By John Nichols / The Nation / February 5, 2013

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus has been blunt about his determination to rig the Electoral College. So it should come as no surprise that, even after his partisan minions were “named and shamed” into distancing themselves from an initial strategy for gaming presidential politics, key Republicans have returned with another plan to make it possible for a GOP loser to “win” the 2016 presidential race.

Thwarted in an effort to assign electoral votes based on the results from gerrymandered congressional districts, Republicans are now proposing a “proportional representation” plan that offers another avenue to assign substantial numbers of electoral votes to Republican nominees who lose key swing states such as Pennsylvania.
  [Read more…]

The Starting Line – A Slow Death for the Post Office, Courtesy of the US Congress

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It won’t be long now.  CBS News reported this morning that the United States Post Office is ending Saturday delivery of first-class and will phase out the practice by the end of this summer. Effective August 1st, all first-class mail—which includes pretty much all letters, bills, cards, and catalogs—will only be delivered on weekdays.

Packages, express, and Priority Mail will still get delivered on the weekend. The change will mark the end of weekend deliveries for the first time in 150 years.

It didn’t have to be this way. Yes, the times have changed. The days of mail as the primary means of long distance communication and sending money are over. And the Post Office knows that. They’re just not allowed to do anything about it.   [Read more…]

Three Former Governors Call for CEQA Reform

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by Robert Cruickshank/California High Speed Rail Blog

In a Sacramento Bee op-ed yesterday, former California Governors George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, and Gray Davis made a case for reforming the California Environmental Quality Act. When you add in Governor Jerry Brown, and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who has in the past expressed support for CEQA changes) you’ve got all five living California governors, with nearly 40 years of executive leadership, lined up behind changing the landmark law.

These former governors are absolutely right when they note that CEQA is sometimes abused by people who do not have environmentally friendly or sustainable goals in mind. We’ve seen this repeatedly, whether it’s a lawsuit blocking a bike master plan or the now-settled lawsuit from Chowchilla that used CEQA to attack the high speed rail project route because the tracks stood between the city and its desired sprawl. And transit advocates have repeatedly witnessed NIMBYs conflating their own aesthetic judgements with “environmental quality” and using that to delay or make more costly important transportation projects.   [Read more…]

Suicides in the Military Reach a New High

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By Paula Hoffman-Villanueva/COMDSD.org

Just as Americans have, for over four decades, uncomfortably turned their heads when confronted with homeless Vietnam veterans in the street, people now hear of the escalating suicide rates of our current military and go on about their business. We thought recent reports alarming enough to revisit the subject in order to remind ourselves why counter-recruitment organizations are dedicated to informing young people about harsh military realities before they decide to enlist.

While experts struggle with this “epidemic” (a word used by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta), it is really quite obvious to peace activists what the problem is. Simply put, the emotional pain of war along with military demands can cause suicide.   [Read more…]

In Defying Anti-Tax Orthodoxy, California Voters and Schools Are Rewarded With Projected Budget Turnaround

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After years of devastating funding cuts, California schools begin to get much needed relief.

California’s newfound budget security was made possible because last November, in what must have come as a complete shock to Republicans, California voters approved a plan—Prop 30—to raise taxes slightly on the wealthiest Californians in addition to temporarily raising the state sales tax, effectively spreading the pain to all Californians. This was a slap in the face to Republican orthodoxy, since the only acceptable thing to do with taxes is to cut them, if not eliminate them altogether.

When Gov. Brown released his budget proposal last month, the state’s legislative analyst concluded that California would still run a deficit of $1.9 billion for FY 2013 instead of the $25 billion of just a couple of years ago, but that if things continued on the same trajectory the state could be running significant budget surpluses in the following five years.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Judge’s Ruling Against Balboa Park Remake Raises Lots of Questions

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Superior Court Judge Timothy Taylor made good yesterday on his earlier suggestions that the City of San Diego’s case for renovating the Plaza de Panama in Balboa Park wouldn’t pass a legal challenge.

San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith appeared in court for oral arguments last Friday, arguing that the City was free to reject protections offered by the area’s historic status because of the additional benefits construction of a by-pass and parking lot would provide.

Taylor’s 15 page ruling rejected that argument saying, “Respectfully, this strikes the court as re-writing the Municipal Code. The City Council did not enact language permitting alteration if it determined that the proposed alteration would result in a more reasonable beneficial use; rather, it required that there be no reasonable beneficial use absent the alteration.”

UPDATE: Via KPBS MidDay Report- “I’ve told the committee that the project is over,” (Irwin) Jacobs says. They’re not taking part in additional plans, activities.   [Read more…]

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

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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

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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…]

The Starting Line – San Diego Schools’ CFO Takes a Long Walk on Voice of San Diego’s Short Pier

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Since the voters spoke back in November and handed the proponents of darkness and austerity a resounding defeat, the forces of reaction throughout the State of California have been seeking to throw a monkey wrench into the process.

At San Diego’s UT, this process is blatant, with factually challenged front page articles suggesting that businesses are fleeing California followed by editorials citing the suppositions minted earlier as gospel truth.

With San Diego’s ‘independent’ news source, aka The Voice of San Diego, the propagation of the reactionary agenda is accomplished via mindless contrarianism. The need to push controversy overwhelms any need for fact checking; it’s okay to let public officials yell ‘fire’ in the schoolhouses of our city.

So it was with this sense of ‘newsworthiness’ that the VOSD published an interview on Friday with Stan “Data” Dobbs, the newly hired Chief Financial Officer for the San Diego School Unified School District.

After telling interviewer Will Carless that “I get bored quickly if I don’t have enough problems to solve”, Dobbs proceeds to create a whole lot of problems for the School District and, most likely, his future employment prospects.   [Read more…]

Grading Jerry Brown’s Education Agenda

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It’s the beginning of the new semester at San Diego City College where I work, so I thought this would be a good time to evaluate some of Jerry Brown’s bold moves on the educational front.

In terms of funding, the passage of Proposition 30 has stopped much of the bleeding in schools and colleges across the state, but it still does not do enough to restore all that has been cut in recent years.

Therefore, despite some very good news, challenges remain ahead.

Come inside to see Gov. Brown’s Report Card…   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – The Sky is Falling! UT-San Diego Taxifornia Version

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Our local daily is featuring an article today hewing to its meme that the end is nigh for the Golden State in the wake of voter support for raising taxes in the last election. Here’s the lede:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry quietly came to San Diego last week to lure biotech companies seeking to escape from higher income taxes under Proposition 30 to the Lone Star State.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say there are no negatives about California, at least we don’t have schools being required to use text books that whitewash the McCarthy era and fail to mention the slave trade. There’s another side of the story…

INSIDE: HEDGECOCK BOYCOTT ON, IMMIGRATION WARS, SOURING ON THE SUPERBOWL…   [Read more…]

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