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How to Win the Social Security Argument at Thanksgiving Dinner in 5 Easy Steps

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 By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet

Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence. Social Security is fiscally fit, prudently managed and does not add to the deficit because by law it must be completely detached from the federal operating budget. Obviously, it is needed more than ever in a time of increasing job insecurity and disappearing pensions. It helps our economy thrive and boosts the productivity of working Americans. And yet the sharks are in a frenzy to shred it in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” discussions.

The most popular red herring Social Security hustlers have unleashed into the waters of public discourse has grown into such a massive whale of a lie that liberals frequently subscribe to it. The idea goes like this: We need to somehow “fix” Social Security because people are living longer – “fix” in this context being code for “cut.”
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Border Patrol Story About Chula Vista Shooting Death Unraveling

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A new witness has come forward in the shooting death of 32-year-old Munique Tachiquin. According to accounts by Border Patrol officers, the mother of five was shot after she attempted to run over a plain clothes agent attempting to serve a warrant.
Prince Watson, a former Marine and Iraqi War veteran who lives nearby, told TV10/ABC News that he was reluctant to come forward, but said his sense of civic responsibility compelled him   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – San Diego County Sheriff Stonewalls Freedom Of Information Requests About Drones

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A national effort to track drone deployment by domestic law enforcement agencies has run into a brick wall with the San Diego County Sheriffs, who have refused to provide information about efforts to purchase Scout UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle).

The Electronic Freedom Foundation and MuckRock.com have sent over 200 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to local governments and police departments, seeking to find out information on domestic drone utilization, according to a story in OpposingViews.com.

Although the San Diego Sheriffs office initially denied possessing any documents relevant to the collection effort, an email from manufacturer, Datron World Communications, to Seattle police quoted technical information from a bid that was sent to local officials.

Inside: Angry Republicans, Running Democrats, Border Patrol Cover Up Unraveling
Notice: I’ll be taking the weekend off. See you Monday, news junkies.   [Read more…]

Ted Lieu, the VLF and the supermajority

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Senator backs down from car tax discussion

by Brian Leubitz/Calitics.com

If you ever wonder about the gaping hole in our budget that we’ve been trying to close for the last decade or so, there is one part of that larger pie that is bigger than the rest. That is the Vehicle License Fee. Back when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running in the recall election, it was dubbed simply the “car tax.”

And give him credit for this, when elected he did, in fact, slash the “car tax.” We were able to backfill with a few years of budgetary “smoke and mirrors” but the hole was stubborn. And when 2007-8’s big recession hit, we were proverbial budgetary roadkill. The cuts just couldn’t come fast enough to match the speed of declining revenue, given that we had already made cuts to cover the loss of the VLF revenue.   [Read more…]

Border Economy to see Greater Emphasis under Filner Administration

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Also, is the UT-San Diego editorial bias leeching into the newsroom?

Mayor-Elect Bob Filner announced last Friday that he was going to open an office just south of the border in Tijuana. Some people scratched their heads and asked “why?” Some people undoubtedly were infuriated because they thought it was just another stupid move by an ultra-liberal politician to kowtow to the illegal immigrant population and cede more of our own nation’s authority to foreign entities. After all, we’re ‘Mericans, and we don’t take a back seat to nobody, and all these stinkin’ liberals can go to hell if they don’t believe in the superiority of ‘Merica!

Still, there were others who no doubt thought, “Now why didn’t we do this sooner?” And that’s a very good question. The City of Tijuana, apparently, has an office right here in Downtown San Diego. We are two major cities, each with a population of roughly 1.3 million people, and separated only by a demarcation line on a map (and a very large fence). Look to the south from Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach and you’re staring not at other parts of San Diego, but at the hills of Tijuana.

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We all know about the editorial bent of the UT-San Diego; how rabidly right wing they are. As in the craziest of the crazy Tea Party right wing. This is the editorial board that predicted that Mitt Romney would win the presidency “in a landslide,” over Barack Obama (Obama won in a landslide). This is also the editorial page that presented us with an apocalyptic view of post-election America entitled “A Eulogy For America,” lamenting that “there are dark days ahead for the country,” and that “this country has been remolded by socialists and communists who have wormed their way into our government, news media, and our education system. “

This is the kind of irrational, far right wing, Tea Party lunacy that has absolutely zero foundation in reality that we’ve come to expect from the UT-San Diego opinion pages since “Lynchester” (apologies to Doug Porter, but I’ve grown fond of said moniker instead of “The Dougchester) purchased the paper. I mean, Fox News and the World Net Daily ain’t got nothin’ on Lynchester’s publication. But we don’t expect this kind of thing from the newsroom.   [Read more…]

Desperately Seeking Scandal: The GOP and the Motivation Behind the Benghazi Freakout

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Watching the ongoing freakout and paranoid conspiracy-mongering over the Benghazi attack by numerous Republicans and conservatives, the rest of us over in Planet Reality watching this have been scratching our heads wondering what’s causing this meltdown.

Now, in the cases of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the diagnosis for their behavior is pretty easy to pinpoint (the latter is terrified of a primary challenge in 2014 and thinks picking a fight with the evil Kenyan Muslim Anti-Christ is the ticket to survival, while the former is an angry, bitter, spiteful old bastard who is lashing out any way he can in the hopes of causing damage to “the One” who stole his precious widdle Presidency).

But what of the other GOPers, the folks like Limbaugh, Hannity, the folks at Fox News (which should be renamed The All-Benghazi Network these days) and the rest? What is their motivation, besides the obvious one of lashing out in anger after Obama’s reelection?   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – North Park Shooting Prompted by Death Wish

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It seemed like a nightmare in the making for residents of North Park on Saturday night. A man in a camouflage suit wandered about near the intersection of Louisiana and University Aves. firing a rifle.

I was headed down University Avenue on my way to get a pizza not long after it happened. The street was completely blocked off; there were enough flashing lights going off so that it was immediately clear this was no traffic stop or disturbing the peace call.

I live in North Park. For all of its ups and downs as a hipster neighborhood (at least that’s what Forbes calls it) it’s a pretty safe place to live. Whatever was going on here was obviously more than the delayed conclusion of a bar fight.

It didn’t take long, via Twitter, to find out the reason for the commotion: a man carrying a rifle had been shot by police.   [Read more…]

How to Go Over the Fiscal Cliff and Still Avoid Recession

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Create an Infrastructure Bank and Transition from a Wartime to a Peacetime Economy

The deal that Congress and the President made that created the so-called fiscal cliff may not be so bad after all. In fact it has many good elements: raising taxes on the rich which will reduce burgeoning inequality in the US, deficit reduction and reduction of the bloated military-industrial complex budget.

The one thing that many experts are worried about is that taking this much money out of the economy will create a recession. However, increased economic activity that would offset the fiscal cliff provisions can come about with increased leveraged spending on infrastructure development. A relatively small amount of government money when combined with money from private investors can goose the economy while preserving the good elements of the fiscal cliff deal.   [Read more…]

Bilbray Concedes: Peters Elected to Represent CA 52

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UPDATED Democratic challenger unseats longtime Republican incumbent.

According to a report first published by the UT-San Diego, Republican Representative Brian Bilbray has conceded his race for reelection to Democratic challenger Scott Peters.

As the polls closed on Election Day and as the vote counts began coming in from the Registrar of Voters, Bilbray maintained a lead throughout the night. But the margin started shrinking as more precincts reported in. As the clock ticked toward midnight on Nov. 7, the two candidates were separated by a mere 13 votes. By 1:30am, Peters had gained a 321 vote advantage.

It was a lead he would never relinquish, and that would continue to grow as the Registrar turned its focus to mail-in and absentee ballots. As of last night, that margin stood at 3,877 votes in favor of Scott Peters.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line—1000 Walmart Black Friday Protests Starting Early

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Protests aimed at disrupting Black Friday sales events at Walmart stores around the country began yesterday with walk-outs at a number of stores and the promise of more actions in the lead-up to what is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year.

Employees at six Seattle area Walmart stores walked off the job yesterday, protesting what they say is low pay, too few hours and retaliation by managers against workers who speak out. Another walkout is in progress at a warehouse supply location in Mira Loma, California and picket lines are in place this morning at a Walmart store in Dallas, Texas.

Inside: Dave Roberts In at County Supes, Tony Young Out at City Council, SDEA Recall Petitions Filed, IB Parents Cry Foul

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The Starting Line – Anti Union Group Cries Foul Over Convention Center Expansion

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The Associated Builders and Contractors of San Diego, a local chapter of a national right wing anti union group, has responded to prompts from the SD-UT editorial page by demanding that the city of San Diego release details of a recently reached agreement between a private contractor and organized labor.

KPBS reports that the ABC group is claiming that the deal gives unions control of the expansion of San Diego’s Convention Center project. They are demanding details of the agreement, hoping to prove that the city government played a role in brokering the agreement, which could then be construed as being in violation of a ballot measure passed earlier this year banning Project Labor Agreements on government projects.   [Read more…]

The Elections are Over. Will City Heights Get “Stuff” with their Pizza?

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Last Tuesday I walked the four blocks from my house to Euclid Elementary School in City Heights to vote. The election notices were in five different languages and the citizens lined up in the hallway were conversing in those languages. Young people had small children in tow and pushed baby carriages. Elderly people moved slowly using canes and walkers. The poll workers were all young and ethnically and racially diverse; the voting process went smoothly and quickly. Despite all of my anxieties regarding the electoral outcomes, I felt that “rush of democracy” Megan Burks described so well in her Speak City Heights article about election day in City Heights.   [Read more…]

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