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Women in Ground Combat Service: Victory for Women’s Rights?

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By Kathy Gilberd / Draft NOtices /April-June 2013,

In January, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the lifting of the Combat Exclusion Policy (CEP), which formally excluded women from ground combat service in the military. Panetta’s action, which reflected the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will give women potential access to over 230,000 positions previously closed to them.

In his announcement Panetta also said, “We are moving forward with a plan to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service.” The lifting of the exclusion policy follows a 2012 decision to open more than 14,000 additional positions to women, allowing them to serve in select positions in ground combat units at the brigade.

The change is not immediate, however. While the services must submit plans for integration by this May, the overall plan is set to phase in through 2016, and it may not be universal.   [Read more…]

Golden Hill: “Tis a Picture Worth Seeing”

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By Jim Miller

May is Golden Hill month here at the San Diego Free Press where we will do our collective best to spotlight one of San Diego’s oldest and most dynamic communities. 

A particularly interesting question we will be engaging is how the imagined community of Greater Golden Hill that is shared by many long time residents as well as entities such as the Golden Hill Community Development Corporation conflicts with the official separation of Golden Hill from South Park.

The more narrow designation of Golden Hill’s boundaries sets Interstate 5 as the western border and 34th Street where A, B, and C Streets end as its easternmost limit.  To the south, the Martin Luther King Jr. freeway separates Golden Hill from its neighbors in ShermanHeights and Grant Hill while Russ Boulevard and A Street mark its northern border.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Hell Froze Over: UT-San Diego Endorsed Labor Leader Lorena Gonzalez

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By Doug Porter 

I checked the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fools Day this morning after reading an editorial in UT-San Diego endorsing Lorena Gonzalez in the race for the 80th District Assembly seat.

There are, after all, only two Democrats, officially in the race and I fully expected the paper would pass up the opportunity to say anything encouraging about either of them. (There is, I’m told, also a write-in campaign by a Republican.)

Their endorsement was apparently triggered by Gonzalez’s positions on ‘job creation’.  Rather than play into the conservative meme that ‘jobs’ and ‘the environment’ are mutually exclusive propositions, she told them during an extensive interview that policies  respecting both are possible.

As much as I hate to do this, I’m going to agree with the UT-San Diego’s choice of candidates in this race, although for different reasons.  Lorena Gonzalez has done a terrific job of actually ‘leading’ labor in this town into areas way outside their traditional comfort zone.

I don’t know how the UT-SD missed this, but her efforts to get out the vote and involvement with grassroots organizing outside the walls of the Labor Council offices are a major reason why Democrats are an ascendant force in this town.

If she was smart enough to fool them, just think how good she’ll be with those dumbasses up in Sacramento.

INSIDE: Fighting Test to the Test, Junior Seau’s Brain, and the GOP’s Rube Goldberg Immigration plan.   [Read more…]

What’s in a Name? Five San Diego Neighborhoods in Search of an Identity

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By Avital Aboody 

About one year ago I moved from Los Angeles to San Diego and began working as the Project Coordinator for the Greater Logan Heights Community Partnership (GLHCP), a collaborative of community-based organizations serving Logan Heights, Memorial, Sherman Heights, Grant Hill and Stockton. These five neighborhoods are bounded by Route 94 to the north, 1-15 to the east, and 1-5 the south and west.

The GLHCP is an outgrowth of the Neighborhood First Initiative piloted by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) in 2008. The group formed as an earnest effort to unite community-based organizations and empower residents to take action to create sustainable change in their neighborhood. Before taking this job, I had never heard of any of these neighborhoods, let alone the varying names that are used to refer to them collectively. But as I launched into my work, I quickly learned the significance of names in this community.   [Read more…]

City Councilman David Alvarez: How I See Barrio Logan

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By David Alvarez
District 8 City Council Representative

The community of Barrio Logan, of which I grew up in, is one of the oldest and most culturally-rich urban neighborhoods in San Diego. From historic beginnings to the vibrant mix of uses and people who reside and work in Barrio Logan, the neighborhood has played a vital role in the City’s development. The Barrio Logan community is a living example of the change and evolution that have continuously shaped the area’s cultural heritage, development patterns, economic opportunities, and social fabric.

Barrio Logan has a long history as a working-class waterfront community. Its early days as a base of homes and businesses for primarily Mexican immigrant workers helped shape the community into an important working waterfront neighborhood. As the community built up around maritime uses, such as tuna canning, military industries, and the Navy, the influx of Mexican migrant workers created a dominant presence in Barrio Logan in the 1910s and 1920s.   [Read more…]

Trying to Stay Wise at 75

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By Ernie McCray

Just turned 75.
As I think about being a year older,
my first thought is
I’m so glad to be alive.
No jive.   [Read more…]

Chicano Park Mural Recognizes the Father of the Immigration Movement: Bert Corona

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By David Avalos / La Prensa San Diego / April 19, 2013

This week the bipartisan group of Senators known as the “Gang of Eight” put their plan for “comprehensive immigration reform” before the USAmerican public, and once again served the Chicana/o community a Mexican Combo Platter steaming with piles of beefed-up border security smothered in drones, refried Bracero guest worker programs, and microwaved workplace enforcement.

Citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants in the country without legally adjusted status, (“amnesty” to conservatives) went sour when gang member Marco Rubio told Fox News “it will be cheaper, faster and easier for people to go back home and wait 10 years than it will be to go through this process that I’ve outlined.”

Herman Baca of the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR) feels the Chicana/o community has no voice in the debate because it has forgotten the lessons of Bert Corona who introduced the foundational ideas and approaches to establishing immigrant labor rights in this country.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Koch Brothers’ Coachella Failure-fest Set for this Weekend

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By Doug Porter

This weekend (Apr 28-29) hundreds of business executives and wealthy conservative donors will descend upon the Coachella Valley, hoping to forge a strategy to turn last fall’s drubbing of conservative candidates into future victories. I imagine the crowd will be considerably different from what locals have seen over the past two weeks.

Since 2003 billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch have been hosting regular retreats at luxury resorts seeking to focus the resources and energy of wealthy and politically ambitious conservatives in the US.

Their latest invitation-only gathering, originally scheduled for January, was postponed.   [Read more…]

It’s Spring and the McKinley School Garden is the Best Kind of Green

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A Trip to the Octopus’ Garden

By Karen Kenyon

It’s a sunny day and McKinley Elementary School has a little paradise in its back lot.

No Adam and Eve — but trees and plants that bring knowledge of the earth and its abundance.

And organic, as well! Here is a garden with edible plants and seasonal flowers (lettuce, carrots, radishes, artichokes, fava beans — daisies, sweet peas, California poppies – and even a lemon tree with gorgeous lemons) all surrounded by a sea-themed mural created from broken tiles, pottery, and mirrors. Words that define the International Baccelaureate School’s values weave their way into the patterns of the mural —Respect, Tolerance, Creativity, Imagination, Curiosity….

This area, called “The Octopus’ Garden” is watched over by a large mosaic octopus whose tentacles seem to reach out to enclose visitors with a kindly hug as they enter this magical space.   [Read more…]

Jam Sessions with Bill Caballero at Barrio Logan’s Voz Alta

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by Bob Dorn

“At my jam everyone’s equal; nobody’s better than anybody else.”

What Bill Caballero is really saying is that the floor at Voz Alta Project in Barrio Logan is open to the worst players in San Diego, even if only for a moment. And, so long as they learn from their failures they’ll almost certainly win a few more choruses with the house band if they have the nerve to try and catch Caballero’s eye the next time they come to the jam.

No more than 1000 square feet of space within the building at 1754 National Ave., Voz Alta is where some of San Diego’s best musicians might drop by to sit in with the house band Caballero leads every Thursday night. It costs nothing to get in (tips are appreciated), though musicians often have to leave their pride behind at the doorway. The house band (which sometimes includes local music journeymen Kiko Cornejo Sr. and his son Kiko Jr. on timbales/percussion, Andy Esparza on bass, Ignacio Arango on guitar, Paul Lopez on congas/percussion and others) minus leader Caballero get a part of the tip jar; the hackers and nobodies must await their turn in the appropriate agony of anticipation.   [Read more…]

Why Do You Have a Fence in Front of Your Home?

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Thoughts on defensible spaces and private places

By Anna Daniels

A few days ago I realized that every single piece of residential property on my City Heights block, save one, has a fence and or a gate between the residence and the street. The business at the end of the block is also completely fenced.

I only became conscious of this fact after spending a number of hours last month walking along the side streets north of University Avenue a few blocks east and west of 30th Street in North Park. This area looks in many ways like the City Heights side streets off of University Avenue, farther to the east, where I now live. There are the same generic craftsman style detached houses and two story multi-unit apartments and condos, for the most part built more recently.

But these North Park side streets look different aesthetically in terms of the colors of paints utilized and kinds of landscaping; and they look different in terms of overall appearance than the area where I live. I was really struck by the fact that so many of the residences in this part of North Park, close to a busy commercial area, still do not have fences in front of the property.

So why are there so many fences in some parts of San Diego, and less or so few in others? Why are there so many more fences in the mid-city areas than there were thirty years ago, when I moved here? Do fences make good neighbors? Do fences make good neighborhoods?   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Unregulated, Unsafe, Unfair – the GOP Vision for California

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By Doug Porter

One of the favored propaganda ploys of conservative pundits over the past year or so has been the ‘everybody’s leaving California for Texas’ meme. This all started with an article in the ultra conserve National Review by former assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who left the Golden State for the Lone Star State after finishing third in the 2010 GOP primary race for US Senate.

“California may be dreaming, but Texas is working” said DeVore, who went on to tell a tale of woe including high taxes, burdensome regulations and a bloated bureaucracy that stood in sharp contrast to the lean, mean Texas machine.

And so it began. Thousands of businesses were fleeing “Taxifornia” for the freedom offered by Rick Perry’s Republican mecca, so we were told. By early in 2013, media accounts of a minor ad buy urging businesses to consider relocation to Texas painted a picture of a grand exodus underway.

Today’s report on National Public Radio by Wade Goodwin on the construction industry in Texas paints a sad portrait of the real costs of the GOP’s prosperity paradise.   [Read more…]

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