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San Diego Residents: Keep San Onofre Shut Down

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By Michael Steinberg

A recent poll of Southern California residents found that most of them want to keep the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant shut down . The poll also found that the residents don’t trust its majority owner and operator, Southern California Edison, to keep safety as its first priority at the nuke plant.

” A strong majority of Edison customers want to keep San Onofre shut down and almost half don’t trust Edison to put safety before profit,” environmental group Friends of the Earth reported on October 1.

Friends of the Earth (foe.org) commissioned David Binder Research to carry out the poll. The company talked to 700 registered voters in the counties San Onofre provides electricity to.

The results: “58% of respondents said they oppose reopening the plant…Only 32% said San Onofe should reopen,” Friends of the Earth reported.   [Read more…]

Eyewitness Account: Man Dies After Fatal Stabbing in Sherman Heights

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by Remigia (Remy) Bermúdez

According to witnesses, passers-by and police officers, at approximately 5:30pm on Monday (October 1st) an altercation that started in Logan Heights at 22nd Street and the southern side of Imperial Avenue resulted on a man stumbling down at the corner of 22nd and L Streets in Sherman Heights bleeding from repeated stab wounds. According to a SDPD press release, sent to this San Diego Free Press’s (SDFP) contributing writer, the man died en route to the hospital.  Homicide detective Lt. Duran added, “The deceased victim has been identified, but his name will be withheld until his family can be notified.”

 It was like a scene from a movie, as the SDPD corded off the area with yellow plastic tape, topping fences of surrounding properties in the eastern and western sides was 22nd Street from L Street heading southerly through what appeared to be Commercial Avenue. The area remained cordoned off from around 6pm Monday evening through Tuesday’s morning hours of October 2nd to protect evidence from being disturbed, according to SDPD officers.

The first media on the scene was the San Diego Free Press, as this contributing writer lives nearby.    [Read more…]

Vigil for Valeria “Munique” Alvarado – Young Mother Killed by Border Patrol

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Question is raised – is this our ‘Trayvon Martin’?

Nearly two hundred people attended the vigil for Valeria “Munique” Tachiquin Alvarado in Chula Vista Monday early evening. Family, friends, supporters and strangers – and the media – gathered at the intersection of Moss Street and Oaklawn Avenue – where she was shot to death by a plainclothes border patrol agent on Friday afternoon, September 28th, while in her car.

The 32 year old mother of 5 had been fatally killed during some kind of interaction with the agent. Reports of what happened differed wildly. And during the at times emotional vigil family members, including the young woman’s father, called for answers and justice.

Speaking first, Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee spoke about the evening being a sober one. He said the community vigil “was called by the family to remember her life and bear testimony to the tragedy that occurred 72 hours ago. They demand justice.”   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Want to Make San Diego More Bike Friendly? Lose the Helmets!

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There’s been a lot of discussion in San Diego lately about making the city more bike friendly.  Mayor Sanders held a media event not long ago touting a public “bike sharing’ program, a low cost rental system that could encompass downtown, the beach areas and midtown by next spring.  Three bike ‘corrals” that allow riders to safely park their bicycle in crowded urban neighborhoods have been opened recently. And it would appear that the people in charge of the area’s roads are starting to take a more serious look at making the streets more user friendly to riders.

From the venerable New York Times Sunday Review comes an article suggesting that, if we truly want to succeed in making the San Diego area more bike-centric, we should look at what many will consider a heretical idea: lose the helmets.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line –GOP Voter Registration Fraud Program Continues to Unfold; Is There a San Diego Connection?

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Does anybody remember the Fox News generated story about voter fraud allegedly perpetrated by ACORN during the 2008 election cycle? The sum total of their evidence was that individuals were attempting to scam the voter registration system by turning in falsified forms. No monies from the Democratic Party were ever tied to ACORN, nor was there proof that any of the fake voters actually attempted to vote.

It should be noted that actual voter fraud (where somebody casts an illegal vote), despite regular histrionics by right wing zealots, is exceedingly rare.

Now there is a nation-wide voter registration scandal unfolding involving companies directly funded by both State and National Republican Party groups, and over at Fox News there’s not a peep to be heard.   [Read more…]

California Prisons, a Profitable Industry

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by John Lawrence

We’ve been incarcerating more of our citizens than any other country in the world. 2.3 million Americans are presently behind bars. Since 1970 the number of people incarcerated in the US has grown by 700%. Even though we are 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the prisoners in the world. Most of those incarcerated are there for minor drug offenses including possession of small amounts of marijuana. 9.2% of African-American adults were in prison in 2008. One in six Latino men will spend part of their life behind bars. The for profit prison-industrial-complex has grown mainly due to the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has become a war on drug users, non-violent offenders and poor people even though a majority of drug users are affluent.
  [Read more…]

The Starting Line—‘Someone Could Go to Jail for This’; Newspaper CEO Denies Threatening Email to San Diego Port Commissioner

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The scandal surrounding heavy handed tactics by San Diego businessmen backing a football stadium proposal continued to spread yesterday as Port Commissioner Scott Peters released what appears to be a threatening email from UT-San Diego CEO John Lynch.

The August 9th email from Lynch, asks Peters about his stance on a proposed long term lease at the 10Th Avenue Marine Terminal, and warns of a campaign led by San Diego’s daily newspaper to disband the Port Authority should backers of the proposed stadium not approve of his vote. The UT-San Diego, owned by downtown developer Doug Manchester and operated by John Lynch, has made construction of a football stadium at the port site one of its top editorial priorities.   [Read more…]

GREGG ROBINSON: Candidate for County Board of Education

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By Mel Freilicher

Gregg Robinson is running as a candidate for the County Board of Education. He has dedicated his life to addressing, and working toward redressing, the growing inaccessibility of educational opportunities due to poverty. This is reflected in his scholarly research and publications, his career as a teacher as well as his ongoing involvement in community organizations.

Gregg’s Ph.D. is from UCSD: he has spent the last 22 years as a sociology professor at Grossmont College. Before that, he worked at UT San Antonio; Austin State; University of Maryland at Eastern Shore, and as a substitute teacher for the SD Unified school district. So while he speaks from experience, eloquently and directly, about issues concerning income gap and educational access and success, he also easily cites major studies from schools like Stanford or UCLA to substantiate his positions.   [Read more…]

San Diego Ashford University Ex-Employee Writes About Getting Shafted

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(Editor’s Note: We received this letter in response to a story that we ran this week about Bridgepoint Education/Ashford University laying off hundred of employees here in the San Diego area. Our premise for the original story was that Bridgepont/Ashford was just another in a long series of morally bankrupt corporations that have been touted as the darlings of the San Diego establishment. Our correspondent, who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous, certainly does a good job of making the case for us.)

As a former employee of Ashford University, I am very upset with the way we were treated, lied to and disposed of by a company that found legal loop holes in the system that allowed them to take advantage of 450 people.

I was hired early in the summer and was told that we should not worry about the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) denial of the company’s application for accreditation, and that Ashford had already started making corrections to get the approval the next time around.
  [Read more…]

Get Out the Vote with Sarah Silverman and Samuel L Jackson: Nana, Guns and a Wake Up Call

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WARNING: The following videos are not safe for the work place.

The past few weeks have provided a gold mine of incisive, laugh out loud political analysis of the election season. SNL has taken on the war against women, undecided voters, and Ann Romney, and we are left looking forward to so much more.

Sarah Silverman’s Let My People Vote and Samuel L Jackson’s Wake the F**k Up are political satire with an unequivocal message …   [Read more…]

The Starting Line —Hey San Diego! Don’t Miss Out on an Opportunity Called Politifest

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Those of us who are active in politics rarely acknowledge the reality that, regardless of our views, we are a distinct minority. It is all too easy to make the jump from, say, knowing that the quality of life is an important consideration for San Diegans, to the assumption that everybody actually has an opinion or gives enough of a damn to think about the issue.

So when an event occurs whose purpose is to raise consciousness about getting out and actually doing something, I think it’s a Big Deal. Voice of San Diego’s Politifest, at Liberty Station (Point Loma) this Saturday starting at about 10 am, is a one stop no risk opportunity for anybody that grasps the importance of citizenship to get involved. There will be eighty plus organizations with people willing to expound about their cause, give you a brochure or two and, if you’re willing, sign you up for future activities.   [Read more…]

SEMPRA Energy Wants Ratepayers to Pay for Their Negligence

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It’s standard operating procedure for San Diego based SEMPRA Energy, parent corporation of San Diego Gas and Electric, to delay costly maintenance and then, when there is a breakdown in the system such as the 2007 Witch Creek Fire which burned 198,000 acres, killed two people, injured 40 firefighters and destroyed more than 1,100 homes, to go to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and get a ruling that would allow them to charge the ratepayers for costs associated with that disaster.

So SEMPRA’s strategy is very simple. Don’t spend the money on maintenance and then, when a disaster happens, go to the CPUC whose members it has wined and dined, and ask for a rate increase so that the ratepayers, not SEMPRA, pays for the costs associated with the disaster such as paying off homeowners whose homes have been burned down in the fire. Hey, it’s cheaper than doing routine maintenance.   [Read more…]

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