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Final San Diego City Budget Hearing Today – Monday, June 11th – Modest Increases Anticipated for Core Services

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The San Diego City Council will cast its final vote at 2:00 pm today – June 11th – on Mayor Jerry Sanders’ budget for fiscal year 2013. Sanders released his budget in April. Stronger than projected although still modest revenue increases this past year enabled Sanders to address General Fund cuts that have occurred with regularity over the past years, with libraries and park and recreation being hit particularly hard.

The City Council held two public hearings since April on the budget. Council members then released their own budget recommendations with input from the Office of Independent Budget Analysis (IBA). Mayor Sanders subsequently released a revised budget in May. The City Council will vote on that revised budget today.   [Read more…]

June Gloom: Why Wisconsin Labor’s Recall Loss is Everyone’s Loss

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s overwhelming recall victory could signal the demise of the middle class nationwide.

As Doug Porter aptly observed in his election post-mortem last week, big money spoke loudly in the big races on June 5th. This is nothing new but what happened in Wisconsin was truly historic. It was a soul-crushing defeat—not unexpected, but a gut punch nonetheless. Labor’s loss in the recall battle against Governor Scott Walker will surely go down as a key sequel to the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike for unionized public sector workers in America. Indeed, Governor Walker clearly said that he wanted to emulate that model, and he just won a very big battle in the war against collective bargaining in the United States.   [Read more…]

Ramona School Board Finds Easy Target: Public Unions

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By Dave Patterson / Special to the San Diego Free Press

Nothing bold, nothing new.

The seminal message delivered at the Ramona School board meeting on June 7th, 2012, was that the problem is the unions. While concessions from the unions will certainly be part of it, the real solution is much more complex. Too bad that the Administration and all but one of the school board members were willing to turn away from the reality, and instead cast a stone at a politically reliable target, public unions.

Dawn Perfect, the lone dissenter in approval of the 2012~2013 budget, remarked courageously that the administration had failed to produce a plan toward future solvency, paraphrasing here. The County schools executive told the board that the deficit projections are “huge” for years 13~14, and “beyond belief” for 14~15. They warned that if the school board fails to reign in the budget the state will take over and everyone will lose, particularly our children.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line-UT San Diego Gets the Evil NY Times Eye

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June 11, 2012—New York Times media reporter/columnist David Carr has penned a largely critical review of “Papa Doug” Manchester’s media machinations since his purchase last year of the Union-Trib. The article starts out talking about the “growing worry” that the sickly state of dead tree journalism could create circumstances that would allow moneyed interests to take over newspapers and use their perceived integrity to “prosecute a political and commercial agenda.”

Carr goes on to assert that San Diego is Exhibit A for that fear since last year when Manchester purchased the paper, saying that nowadays the UT-SD “often seems like a brochure for his various interests.” He goes on to cite several examples where the Daily Fishwrap has transcended reportage and ridden roughshod over miscreants perceived to have gotten in the way of Papa Doug’s agenda. Chief executive John Lynch is quoted as saying “we make no apologies” for the paper’s activities and asserting that there is a “clear line of demarcation between our editorials and our news”.   [Read more…]

The Myth of Exorbitance in the San Diego Police Department

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In San Diego and elsewhere across the country, public employees are the bane of conservatives’ existence, including, as we found out, police and fire services.

The SDPD is having a major retention problem. And when their own union tried to do something to alleviate the problem, they were rebuffed because it didn’t fit the political narrative of the day: That unions are bad; unions are always bad; unions are greedy and are only out for themselves and their members, never mind what’s good for the city at large. Unions make city services too expensive. The Carl DeMaio crowd’s rhetoric is that unions need to be decimated in order for the city to even be able to function.   [Read more…]

Dumanis to prosecute Zoo koalas for dealing eucalyptus

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Erstwhile mayoral candidate turns focus to criminal element from Down Under

Bouncing back from her last-place finish in San Diego’s mayoral primary, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis announced plans to prosecute members of a “eucalyptus distribution ring” at the city’s world-famous zoo.   [Read more…]

Denial of Service Attack Responsible for Registrar of Voters Website Crash

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According to a Channel 6 report, a firewall issue caused the San Diego County Registrar of Voters website to crash shortly after the first batch of election results were posted Tuesday night, June 5th.  The County is conducting an investigation into the source of the attack. IT services provider Hewlett Packard determined that there were […]

Peed Takes the Lead

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SDROV updates election results to include some absentee ballots. Plus: Saldaña vs. Peters update.

Updated results (and reported first by “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, no less) on the Garland Peed vs. birther king Gary Kreep: The San Diego County Registrar of Voters has released new figures showing that Garland Peed, the longtime San Diego prosecutor, has taken a slim lead in his quest to become a Superior Court judge:   [Read more…]

California Primary: San Diego Conservatives Are Celebrating Way Too Early

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Since Primary election eve, when the results were coming in, San Diego conservatives have been celebrating their perceived “victories”. Me thinks they are celebrating way too early, as the results are not as favorable to the GOP and their extremist friends as they think it was. Check this out.

First, the California Primary was one of the lowest voter turn-outs in history – 36% – if not the lowest. Low turn-outs tend to favor conservatives, whereas large turn-0uts favor Democrats and liberals. And Democrats did stay away from the polls, as there was no big-ticket item on the ballot. Sure, Barack Obama was on it but he was a shoe-in. And Senator Dianne Feinstein was on it as well, but she didn’t have any serious challengers. Yes, there were two state-wide measures – and one of them – Prop 28 – which does aid democracy just a tad -passed handily – but how can anyone get excited about a tax on tobacco.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line—Are We Ready for an Alien Invasion?

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June 7, 2012—In keeping with my perceived reality that most of us are in overload mode with regard to election coverage, The Starting Line will talk about defense, science and technology issues today. We’ll get back into the muck tomorrow, I promise.

Does the Pentagon have the right weapons to fight off an alien invasion? No, but they’re working on it, says Foreign Policy magazine, in a short but sweet review of some of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency ) more sci-fi kind of projects. These projects include lots of ideas that are not ready for prime time, but show promise for future use by the military.

Perhaps the closest to realization are weapons-grade lasers. The stumbling block with this project thus far is that they can work but are too big to be of use in an actual fight. If the aliens have super fast flying saucers, DARPA’s Falcon HTV-2 might be able to keep up with them. It is an unmanned, rocket-launched, maneuverable aircraft that glides through the Earth’s atmosphere at incredibly fast speeds, as fast as Mach 20 (approximately 13,000 miles per hour). It’s actual been tested, but not successfully.   [Read more…]

Sign Petition: Support a Resolution to Reverse Citizens United

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We are asking for San Diegans – and ONLY SAN DIEGANS – to help out by signing our new Change.org petition.

The petition asks that the San Diego City Council support a resolution to amend the constitution and reverse Citizens United. After all, corporations are not people and money is not free speech!   [Read more…]

Close Encounter with Lorie Zapf

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The San Diego City Council District 6 representative demonstrates a disturbing lack of knowledge on important issues.

Last night at Golden Hall, San Diego’s election central, I had the opportunity to participate in a live-blog along with the writers from CityBeat and contributors from SD Rostra, the OB Rag/SDFP, along with several other politically active contributors from around the San Diego. It was a great time, with perspectives from all over the political spectrum (but most of us were pretty squarely on the liberal side).   [Read more…]

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