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Is Big Oil Too Big to Tax in California?

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Soon our national political discourse will be dominated by the nightmarish sequester debate with the Republicans’ doomsday austerity strategy being countered by the Democrats’ austerity-lite program that draws from the eternal verity of Simpson-Bowles. God help us.

Standing in stark contrast to the reigning austerity-lite crowd inside the Democratic Party is perhaps the brightest progressive hope in the country, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Rather than playing the populist note to bash Republicans and then retreating to safe, chamber of commerce approved positions that put Social Security and Medicare “on the table” like many of her colleagues in the Democratic Party, Warren is consistently taking it to the 1% whenever she can, and she really means it.   [Read more…]

Bonny Russell, a Woman for our Times (December 23, 1943 – January 14, 2013)

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For Bonny Russell’s Celebration of Life on 2-17-13 at the Unitarian Universalist Church

Jan says about Bonny,
her wife, her love:

“She brought with her an open and loving heart,
the ability to listen deeply,
and a passion
for addressing injustice and inequality.”
…
Come Inside for the rest of Ernie’s beautiful poem…   [Read more…]

Arctic Methane: A Global Environmental Disaster in the Making

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By Frank Thomas

In the 1970s, permafrost Arctic sea ice at its lowest point covered about half of the Arctic ocean surface. But it has been on an alarming declining trend over recent decades, now covering at its lowest point 25% of the Arctic ocean surface – or half of its previous area and thickness.

This rapid warming of the Arctic region creates a near term world threat of a major sub-sea methane release that could intensify global warming to irreversible levels along with high fossil fuel C02 emissions.   [Read more…]

Who said girls can’t play rugby?

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My first introduction to Rugby was when my grandson-in-law, Ben, sent me a picture of him with the blackest eye I had ever seen after winning a Championship Rugby match in Australia. Having all daughters I was almost sickened by seeing this handsome man’s face marred by a “shiner” so large that it almost obliterated his face.

When, five years later, my 17 year old granddaughter informed me that she was going out for the rugby team with the San Diego Young Aztecs (SDYA) my first thought was of Ben and all the cuts, scrapes and bruises he had during the rugby season. (I shouldn’t have been surprised at Molly’s choice. Her Aunt Lynn, my middle daughter, was the first female on the Water Polo team out of Pt. Loma High many years ago.) Still, the remembrance of Ben’s pictures was at the forefront of my mind.

The San Diego Young Aztec Rugby Club was started by its visionary founder Nevin Kleege. He had a dream about starting up youth rugby, in a meaningful way, here in San Diego. Seven years ago six children showed up to practice, and today they serve over 600 children (from 5-19 years old) in our community.   [Read more…]

A City Heights Response to the State of the Union Address (and the Responses to the State of the Union Address)

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I crawled groggily out of bed this morning and ambled out to the kitchen. My Beloved turned to me and said “I don’t know how many more State of the Unions I can handle.” Last night we listened to President Obama’s hour long speech, then Republican Savior-in-Training Senator Marco Rubio’s, followed by Congressman Rand Paul’s, as the voice of the Tea Party, which is the other white meat of the Republican party. Afterward, we smoked.

The Designated Survivor One odd little factoid that was revealed during the pre-speech(es) buildup was that Energy Secretary Steven Chu was selected to skip this year’s address.

Because the president, vice president, lawmakers, Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices and members of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff are all sitting together in a confined space in the Capitol, one Cabinet member is chosen to skip the speech every year.

The concept of a designated survivor is an interesting one.   [Read more…]

My Bloody Valentine

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It’s the Monday before Valentine’s Day and merchants across America are happily preparing for our annual romance-driven consumer frenzy.  Indeed this schmaltzy commodification of love is worth around $14.7 billion dollars a year with much of it ending in the predictable disappointment that comes when we realize that our frantic, frequently anxious lives just don’t measure up to the prepackaged saccharine dreams we are sold.

Valentine’s Day is the sanctification of an empty, soul-killing romance narrative, a celebration of the notion that the most precious and intangible human emotion can be summoned by the magic of the sexless dollar.  In sum, as currently constituted, Valentine’s Day is where real love goes to die.

The roots of what we think of when we think about buying something to signify love are as American as apple pie, and we might trace the origins of the total commercialization of romance to 1913 when Hallmark began to mass market Valentine’s Day cards as we know them.  This commercial landmark was preceded by the work of Esther Howland who, in 1850, first started to produce and sell Valentines, starting the move away from exchanging personally crafted cards or even poems to trading commodities made by someone else.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Republicans at War: “Grab the popcorn, pop a beer, sit back and enjoy this goat rodeo”

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Long simmering tensions between Republican Party stalwarts and their Tea Party allies have emerged from the backrooms of politics over the last few days. The announcement that Karl Rove’s new group, the Conservative Victory Project, aims to weed out ‘unelectable’ candidates has the Tea Party set in a frenzy.

Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for the Victory Project, claims that the new group won’t pick its opponents according to ideology — rather, electability. The Tea Party types aren’t buying it, and a coalition of conservative leaders is demanding the new organization fire Collegio, for calling Brent Bozell, a pundit who runs the conservative Media Research Center, a “hater” in a recent radio interview.

The coalition includes Phyllis Schlafly, Tony Perkins, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, Manuel Miranda and Richard Viguerie — all big names in the conservative ‘grassroots’ world. A letter attacking Rove/Collegio, signed by the aforementioned names and a score of other big names, brought the dispute out in the open, saying, “You obviously mean to have a war with conservatives and the Tea Party. Let it start here.”

INSIDE: TEXAS STUPIDITY, ISSA FOR THE GIPPER, FILNER FOR THE TREE HUGGERS, ROSE CREEK FEST & more…   [Read more…]

Atheists Take a Stand in East County

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Atheist Groups Sponsor Billboard in Lemon Grove

Right alongside 94 East is a new bill board in Lemon Grove. It’s quite a shocker if all you’ve ever seen are commercial ads, for this one is about religion – in a way.

It states very clearly:

Atheism – A personal relationship with reality.

The new billboard is sponsored by a coalition of groups that adhere to atheism and it went up at the end of January. The billboard is east and near the Federal Blvd freeway exit off 94. The groups include The San Diego Coalition of Reason and American Atheists, who spent $4,000 on the billboard – which did not appear lit up at night.   [Read more…]

Greetings From the Cusp of TijuanDiego!

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A Voice of Hope from the Place of Everywhere and Nowhere

By Michael Cheno Wickert

I’ve been trying to write my introduction for the San Diego Free Press for days now, but despite my ability to ramble on and on about so many topics, sitting down at a keyboard to write about myself is difficult. Therefore, I’ve decided to simply state that I am a father, a husband, and a teacher from Chula Vista. After many years of college and hard work as teachers, my wife and I were able to buy a nice house for our family. Now all the relatives can come and stay here without sleeping on the floor, and that’s a good feeling.

We sometimes refer to our home as the Refugee Camp because like our dogs and cats, our children were adopted. An unlikely bunch, we came together somehow and it is beautiful, but not always easy. Like the rest of our family, my wife and I were somewhat making it through life with the help of great people, but neither of us had a partner to fulfill that promise of happiness every morning as the sun rose and every evening as we drifted into sleep.

Our lives were not shipwrecks, they were more like messages in bottles bobbing up and down, following the currents until we came together; and little by little our little island grew into a home and then a family. Out of this wilderness, we found security in each other.   [Read more…]

In Defying Anti-Tax Orthodoxy, California Voters and Schools Are Rewarded With Projected Budget Turnaround

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After years of devastating funding cuts, California schools begin to get much needed relief.

California’s newfound budget security was made possible because last November, in what must have come as a complete shock to Republicans, California voters approved a plan—Prop 30—to raise taxes slightly on the wealthiest Californians in addition to temporarily raising the state sales tax, effectively spreading the pain to all Californians. This was a slap in the face to Republican orthodoxy, since the only acceptable thing to do with taxes is to cut them, if not eliminate them altogether.

When Gov. Brown released his budget proposal last month, the state’s legislative analyst concluded that California would still run a deficit of $1.9 billion for FY 2013 instead of the $25 billion of just a couple of years ago, but that if things continued on the same trajectory the state could be running significant budget surpluses in the following five years.   [Read more…]

New Schools CFO: SD Unified Will Afford Armed Guards, School Prayer with Pocket Change

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By Aaryn Belfer

“Poor guy, he doesn’t realize that being frank and open about our financial condition is discouraged around here. He will be taken to the wood shed.”
–Text message from San Diego Unified School District board member, Scott Barnett, predicting the fate of the new chief financial officer Stan Dobbs.

Only one weekend after “investigative journalist” Will Carless published his sycophantic Q&A with Stan “Data” Dobbs, school Superintendant Bill Kowba did damage control, issuing a relatively meek apology for Dobbs’ many erroneous statements. Data Dobbs was then quietly whisked away and fed into a wood chipper. Keeping with its pattern for sticking any warm body in the CFO position, San Diego Unified vetted and hired Dobbs’ replacement even before the blowhard’s left leg had been turned into mulch.

What follows is an exclusive interview with San Diego Unified’s newest Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Palin.   [Read more…]

Cosmic Collisions, Human Encounters

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Reuben H. Fleet’s digital show Cosmic Collisions, viewed from earth

by Karen Kenyon

“Collisions, whether they are infinitesimal or massive, drive the evolution of cosmic objects in much the same way as natural selection or the collision of energetic particles with DNA drives the evolution of species,” Michael M. Shara, curator of the Cosmic Collisions show.

We may want to avoid collisions, but they are part of evolving life, and actually may lead to something positive. The new IMax film, Cosmic Collisions, now showing in an open-ended engagement at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park, explores this theme with extraordinary art and beauty.

We hope to never experience these harsh encounters, fearing collisions in space, but also in our human encounters — soul collisions (too much emotional pain); auto collisions (trouble, inconvenience, waste of time, perhaps physical pain, or cost!). We even want to avoid conflicts, or arguments.

But if we look up at the message in the heavens we can see that collisions are not always so bad, and whether constructive or catastrophic, they are part of the workings of the universe, they are inevitable.   [Read more…]

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