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America at a Crossroads: The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time

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Will the Supreme Court reinstate the “separate but equal” doctrine that was overturned in 1951?

The Supreme Court of the United States today takes up the first of two cases involving the rights of gays and lesbians to marry. Today, they heard oral arguments in Hollingsworth v Perry, the challenge to California’s Prop 8, banning same sex marriage. On Wednesday, the justices will hear arguments in United States v Windsor, the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

It boils down to this: Should gays and lesbians have the same rights as straight people? Or should we as a society be allowed to discriminate against them because of who they are? In reality it is an issue that has implications that extend far beyond whether or not the marriages of gays and lesbians should be legally recognized. It is no different than the civil rights fight of the 60’s, where African Americans were routinely discriminated against for no other reason than the color of their skin.

This is a losing battle for social conservatives who continue to want to drag this country back to the 1950’s, and they know it. Our society has evolved on marriage equality, doing almost a complete 180 even since Prop 8 passed with just over 52% of the vote in 2008, despite polling showing at the time that 51% of Californians accepted same sex marriage. Prop 8 reinstated the ban on gay marriage in California that had been overruled by state courts.   [Read more…]

10 Years of Lying About the Iraq War Has to Stop Now – Bush and Cheney and Co. Must Be Held Accountable for the Sake of America

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From the OB Rag

Ten years of lying about the Iraq war has to stop now – immediately. The government – our government – lied to us, the America people, about the reasons they said it was necessary to go to war with Iraq – a country that was not threatening us. One decade ago to this day, their lies produced action: the “shock and awe” “bunker-busters” unleashed on the capital of Iraq, March 19th, 2003.

They lied to cover up their invasion of Iraq a decade ago to this day.

And now ten years later, after more than 4400 Americans killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, 30,000 Americans injured, after we have spent over $3 Trillion dollars, we have come to the realization that, if America is to be honest with itself, we must now demand that someone be held accountable for these lies and the wastes of lives and resources.

Those to be held accountable, of course, must include the leaders of our government at that time: George W. Bush, President, and Dick Cheney, Vice-President and those who demanded the war which includes then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.   [Read more…]

Ten Years On: A Dying Mother, The Invasion of Iraq, and Samsay on the Porch

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Memory is a capricious thing- it shuffles all of those cards that signify the days, weeks and years of our lives and lays them out in a manner that doesn’t necessarily cleave to chronology– or even the truth.

 

I cut the deck, turn two cards face up on the table- the Queen of Hearts and the Jack of Clubs. It is March 13, 2003. I say that with certainty even though I do not trust my memory.

I have finished zipping up my suitcase and am nervously walking around the house stroking the cats and staring at the art on the walls as if it were for the last time. I will be taking a red eye flight to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. My brother and sister have persuaded me that our mother is close to death. I would have one more chance at total denial of that indisputable fact.

My normal propensity for high drama was heightened significantly by the war drums that had been sounding for weeks, the rumblings that we were about to go to war, to invade Iraq. The sheer loathsomeness of Bush-Cheney had turned into something much darker, frightening and utterly incomprehensible. I was going to be 3,000 miles from My Beloved and my home while George W. Bush was explaining why war was necessary and inevitable.

So there you have the setting- The Queen of Hearts. The Jack of Clubs. But now one more card- The Joker. City Heights is always the Wild Card, the Joker, that becomes part of the mix. This place that I have called home for longer than anywhere else is a shape shifting character that looms large in my life, and so it was on March 13, 2003.   [Read more…]

Hotel Interests Battle to Preserve Business As Usual in TMD Fight

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Mayor seeks to turn over a new leaf in San Diego governance.

For decades San Diego has been governed by the principle that what’s good for our big corporate employers is good for San Diego as a whole, resulting in an arguably outsized influence by private moneyed interests over our elected officials, often leading to sweetheart deals and diminished public control over public assets.

That characterization manifested itself in last November’s mayoral election. The ballot reflected not only a choice between Carl DeMaio and Bob Filner, Republican and Democrat, last November’s election offered a referendum on the way San Diegans wanted business conducted at City Hall on their behalf. DeMaio represented a move even further toward deference to the Doug Manchesters of the region, while Filner offered a shift in focus toward neighborhood development over corporate development; a middle out approach rather than a top down approach.

Bob Filner won convincingly, signaling that San Diego was anxious for a change, with the fight over the Tourism and Marketing District reflective of the changes represented by Filner’s election.   [Read more…]

Former ATF Agent Talks Straw Purchasers, Background Checks and the NRA’s Relentless Attacks on Gun Laws

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by Kimberley Beatty

Starting in 1990, I was a federal agent with both the DEA and ATF. My first assignment was with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms at their Richmond, Virginia office. At that time Virginia was a major source for illegal gun trafficking to urban centers in the eastern United States.

Over an 18 month period, 1,627 guns were obtained from crime scenes in New York. 41% of those guns had been purchased in Virginia and 10% of those guns were traced to 1 store in Richmond, called the Virginia Police Equipment Co. That gun shop was not far from the federal building where I worked.

Weak federal gun laws permitted out-of-state criminals to purchase large quantities of weapons from gun stores by using straw purchasers. The straw purchasers were often drug addicts needing money to fuel their habit or a poor single mom. When confronted by law enforcement the straw purchaser would first claim their cache of guns had been stolen and then admit to buying them for out-of-state drug dealers, gunrunners and other criminals, often known only by first names.   [Read more…]

Should We Be Outsourcing Public Higher Education in California?

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Suggesting we drop existing standards for the wild west of market based online education will do for education what deregulation did for banks and the stock market.  

Last week State Senator Darrell Steinberg proposed what he thinks of as a bold new way to reshape higher education in California and to deal with the bottleneck of students who have trouble getting into “gateway” classes in our community colleges and universities.  What is Steinberg’s answer to our access ills?  Sadly, it is outsourcing higher education to the corporate interests who have long been aggressively lobbying to get a piece of the publically funded pie that is California’s public education system.   [Read more…]

Desde la Logan Yo Soy Chicano… Thanks to Mesa College Chicano Studies

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By Brent E.  Beltrán

I’m a Chicano but I haven’t always been. Prior to self identifying myself as one I didn’t really know who I was culturally. I grew up in a bi-cultural family. But didn’t really embrace either.

Mesa College is where my Chicano life began. And to this day I still maintain relations with the department. My compadre Manuel J. Vélez is a tenured professor there. And so is my good friend Dr. César López who is now the head of the department. I take joy in hearing about the positive things that are taking place there. The most recent news was announced on Friday, March 8, día de la mujer internacional, about longtime San Diego activist Gracia Molina de Pick donating $80,000 to the Mesa College Chicana/o Studies Endowment.   [Read more…]

Health Insurance Scams Leave People High and Dry

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 Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group make hundred of millions selling useless mini-med policies

Part Two of a series on the Business of Health

In Part 1 we told about how hospitals have a huge computer file called a Chargemaster that details prices for every possible item a hospital can charge for. These prices don’t have anything to do with reality because in fact there is no market for health care services.

In a truly capitalist economy there would be a competitive market by means of which people could check prices and choose the service that’s the most reasonable in terms of price and other factors. It’s called price discovery.

Hospital charges represent a dark market just like over the counter derivatives because it’s next to impossible to get hospitals to reveal their prices for any of their services. According to an extensive article in Time, the author was given the brushoff and even told it was illegal every time he tried to get pricing information. Therefore, the Chargemaster details prices that are sky high and out of sight compared to the paying abilities of most Americans.

In Part 2 we will cover the plight of many folks who thought they had sufficient health insurance coverage only to be told that their insurance policies were useless and they would be required to pay cash upfront if they wanted to access hospital services.
  [Read more…]

In America We Have the Power to Change (Thoughts of Freedom)

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Freedom. What a concept, huh? One of the sweetest words in the world’s vocabulary.

I learned a long time ago that the pursuit of freedom will make one do almost anything. Sometimes in the spur of a moment. I used to love to hear my maternal grandfather tell about how he woke up one day on a sharecropper’s plot of land in Hawkinsville, Georgia, thinking to himself, “God, I don’t know what all is out there in this world but I just know You created something better than this.”

At about the same time “big boss man” came riding up on his horse rallying what were supposed to be “free men” to the fields, “yelling and spitting tobacco every which-a-away” my grandfather would say and the next thing he knew he had snatched the man off his horse, gave him the ass-kicking of his life and then ran for that very life until he reached the Gulf of Mexico – to what, he didn’t know. He just knew he had to be free.

I thought of him a little while back at a forum at the Malcolm X Library that featured four of a group of people who stand tall in my mind and soul: The Freedom Riders.   [Read more…]

Where’s Planning in San Diego? Moving Beyond Process and Delivering Results

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By Beryl Forman

Once San Diego fulfilled its quest of becoming a sprawled out metropolis, narrow minded city officials questioned the purpose of future planning. To some, development is equivalent to planning, so with no more available land to build, the value of planning was in question. Aside from accepting that our county had become a sprawling mess, good planners would argue that the objective of contemporary urban planning is to ‘Return to the Center”, to improve the life and environment our city’s dense urban neighborhoods. With a new found interest in urban living, San Diego’s city leaders and urban planners alike are proudly re-examining the purpose of planning.

To expand on this subject, panelists Bill Anderson, former director of Planning for the City of San Diego, along with Mike Stepner, former city architect, and Howard Blackson, local urban designer seen at the forefront our city’s urban issues, spoke at February’s C3 (Citizens Coordinate for Century 3) breakfast dialogue.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – End Welfare for UT-San Diego’s Owner and his Friends; Raise the Minimum Wage

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Today’s UT-San Diego editorial represents the height of hypocrisy.

Titled ‘Minimum wage hikes deliver maximum pain to the poor’, it goes on to tell us in no uncertain terms about the terrible things that will follow should Congress act on a bill introduced on Tuesday by Democratic Senators Tom Harkin of Iowa and George Miller of California that would raise the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 — and add an annual adjustment to keep pace with the cost-of-living index.

At the heart of the issue over wages is a business model that relies upon ‘corporate welfare’ either through tax breaks or subsidies (including their labor costs).  Aside from the fact that it’s remarkably short-sighted, such a business philosophy also leads to increases in wealth differential. They get richer, everybody else gets poorer. And that’s exactly what’s happening in the US today.   [Read more…]

San Diego For Free: City Farmers Nursery – Plant Paradise in City Heights

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A weekly column dedicated to sharing the best sights and activities in San Diego at the best price – free! We have a great city and you don’t need to break the bank to experience it.

City Farmers Nursery

Address: 4832 Home Avenue, City Heights CA 92105
Hours: Monday – Saturday 9 AM – 5 PM, Sunday 9 AM – 3 PM

Best For: Gardeners, do-it-yourselfers, fresh produce eaters, learners

Serving San Diego for over 40 years, City Farmers Nursery is a one-of-a-kind destination in the heart of San Diego. The nursery features a wide selection of plants including sections devoted to California native plants, butterfly gardens, fruit trees, garden selections, and many more. All of the plants in the nursery are raised organically and the staff is extremely helpful and knowledgeable. If you are buying a plant at City Farmers you can be confident it will grow in your yard – they test every product on-site and don’t sell plants unless they are proven to be well-suited for the San Diego climate.   [Read more…]

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