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San Diego Burning: The Facts We Hate

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By Jim Miller

It was a little bit of hell on earth. With searing heat in the triple digits replacing May gray and fires sprouting up all over the county, San Diego’s mellow vibe turned menacing last week. As many of us, this author included, worried about the safety of friends and family members in harm’s way, it was hard not to be struck by a painful sense of déjà vu. We’ve been here before—three times in a little more than a decade. But not everybody felt that way.

The immediate response from County Supervisor Bill Horn was to raise the specter of arson when he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in 20 years, and I’ve had one or two fires but never anything like this.”

Upping the ante on Horn’s uninformed speculation, the far right fringes of the Internet jumped straight to conspiracy mode, sounding the alarm that our most recent firestorm could be the act of Islamic terrorists.   [Read more…]

My Maria and SDSU’s CBB Multicultural Community Counseling and Social Justice Education Program

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By Ernie McCray

She’s really something, my Maria. Maria Nieto-Senour. College professor by way of the Mexican barrios of San Antonio and Austin and the inner-cities of Detroit. Mo-Town.

At any moment she’ll be retired which means she gets to hang out with me more. I can’t wait because she’s fun to be around and she’s about as loving a human being as one could be.  

That loving nature of hers has served her well as the Director of a master’s degree program at San Diego State University called CBB (Community-Based Block).

  [Read more…]

A History of Neighborhood House in Logan Heights: Jane Addams and the 1930’s

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SDFP exclusive series The History of Neighborhood House: From 1918 to the occupation in 1972

By Maria E. Garcia

Jane Addams was born in 1860 to a prosperous Northern Illinois family. As a young child she had tuberculosis of the spine. This health problem would affect her the rest of her life. Her father was a founding member of the Republican Party. Her dream of becoming a doctor died after her first year of medical school due to health problems and a nervous breakdown. So why would this woman who wanted to be a doctor and came from a rather wealthy family have any role or influence in San Diego, California? Why would she have any roots in a settlement house in the middle of a Mexican Barrio?

In 1887 she read a magazine article about a settlement house. It became her dream to establish one. She and her close friend Ellen Gates opened Hull House in Chicago. Many women who came from wealthy families and were in the college in the 1920’s developed a similar interest and involvement. College had made them progressive in their thinking. They had a sincere interest in social issues as well as a desire to help immigrants and the less fortunate.

This social philosophy took root in San Diego among various educated, wealthy women who included Helen Marston.
  [Read more…]

Memory Against Forgetting: The May 1970 Peace Memorial at UCSD

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Editor: the following is based on a speech delivered by the author, Niall Twohig on last Friday, May 9th, in front of a group of fifty gathered in Revelle Plaza at UC San Diego to unveil The May 1970 Peace Memorial. The Memorial is dedicated to George Winne, who immolated himself and died as a protest against the Vietnam War in May of 1970, plus it’s dedicated to those students who carried on the May 1970 Student Strike.

By Niall Twohig

Why a memorial for May 1970? Why a memorial for peace? Why now?

To suggest some answers, I want to ask you, the reader, to take an imaginative leap back in time to May 1970.

In order to make this leap, we have to remember that the U.S. was waging an unpopular proxy war in Southeast Asia, made all the more unpopular after the invasion of Cambodia at the end of April.

If we found ourselves transported to May 1970, this would be all too apparent. We would see the images?the aerial views of bombs upon bombs pulverizing the Vietnamese countryside, images of GIs burning huts, footage of badly burnt villagers running from the firestorm of napalm, photos of rows upon rows of mutilated bodies scattered in the fields and anonymous soldiers packed away in coffins draped in stars and stripes.   [Read more…]

Dumanis, Schall and Dronenburg: Three Bad Apples Needing to Be Voted Out of Office

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The Fifth and Final Installment of  A Progressive Procrastinators 2014 Primary Guide  

By Doug Porter

In a perfect world we’d all be voting FOR candidates in elections. Instead, we voters are all-too-often mesmerized by the aura of incumbency. A figurative wink and a familiar smile replace judicious judgement. Sometimes it becomes necessary to take a stand, using the power of the ballot box to say ‘enough!’ This is one of those times.

In the upcoming June 3rd primary there are three incumbents who I believe ought to be voted out of office: District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, County Assessor/Clerk/Recorder Ernest J. Dronenburg, Jr. and Superior Court Judge Lisa Schall.

The particulars on each these bad apples differ, but the thing they all have in common is that they’ve misused the powers vested in them by the voters. Today, in the fifth and final installment in this series I’ll examine their records and offer up some better choices.   [Read more…]

Latest Right-Wing Propaganda Ploy: Bullies of the Christian Right Pretend They’re Oppressed

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They act like they’re the real victims.

By Amanda Marcotte / AlterNet

The religious right has many potent weapons in its arsenal—sanctimony, bigot-pandering, and dishonesty rank right up at the top—but lately, pretending to be victimized seems to top the list. We have a soundbite-driven, points-scoring political culture that resists deeper analysis of the issues, making it perfect for bad actors to muddy up the issues. All you do is accuse your opposition of doing what you, in fact, are actually doing. If you want to oppress people, claim you’re being oppressed. If you want to deprive people of their rights, whine about how your rights are supposedly under attack. The idea is to confuse audiences about who is actually oppressing who long enough that they give up actually bothering to learn the truth. Unfortunately, it can be devastatingly effective propaganda.   [Read more…]

Pilots Come Clean: Drone Warfare Is Riddled with Tragic, Bloody Errors

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Imagine if the drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen had a human face all the time.

By Pratap Chatterjee / AlterNet via Tom Dispatch 

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.   [Read more…]

Clear Channel Responds to Political Pressure, Quashes Billboard Ads for Judicial Candidate

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This story has been updated to include a response from Clear Channel.

By Doug Porter

Four Billboards paid for by former prosecutor Carla Keehn in support of her candidacy for San Diego County Superior Court Seat 20 were summarily removed on Friday by the Clear Channel Outdoor corporation just two days after being erected.

The candidate says the company  “received pressure to take the billboards down and they would not tell me from whom the pressure came.” This action is consistent with earlier assertions made by Keehn about surreptitious efforts by incumbent Judge Lisa Schall and/or her supporters to deny or withdraw endorsements for the challenger.  

The outdoor advertising panels were reserved five months ago by Keehn’s campaign. Payment was made and artwork for the billboards was delivered in April.  The billboards went up at four locations on Wednesday, May 7th. They were removed Friday, May 9th.   [Read more…]

The CIA Aided Polio’s Comeback–but Media Have Forgotten the Story

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By  / Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting 

Polio had been battled to near-extinction after decades of effort, but this year the WHO confirmed 68 new cases and declared it an international public health emergency. Nearly 80 percent of those cases are in Pakistan.

Why is this? According to the New York Times‘ Donald McNeil Jr. (5/6/14), “Polio has never been eliminated there, Taliban factions have forbidden vaccinations in North Waziristan for years, and those elsewhere have murdered vaccine teams.” McNeil also quotes a WHO spokesperson towards the top of the piece: “So we’re saying to the Pakistanis, the Syrians and the Cameroonians, ‘You’ve really got to get your acts together.”‘

The Times underlined the emergency today in an editorial, explaining that Pakistan has such high numbers “largely because Taliban factions have forbidden vaccinations in conservative tribal areas and attacked healthcare workers elsewhere.”

  [Read more…]

Orca Profiles in Captivity: No. 6 of the San Diego 10

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By Cara Wilson-Granat / OB Rag

(Sixth in a series)

This is the sixth in a series of ten in which we meet one of the San Diego 10 orcas and hear from an advocate who continues to be one of the voices of these imprisoned voiceless, never stopping until the whole world listens.

This week’s Advocate is Steve Christianson. After reading about Prisoner #6, Shouka, please scroll down this article and “meet” one of the top San Diego 10 Prisoner Advocates. [Here is Prisoner Orca Profile #1 and #2, #3 ,#4and #5 .]

Prisoner #6: Shouka

Age: 21

Imagine living in quiet desperation in solitary confinement for 10 YEARS. Pretty horrendous, right? The crime for such enforced aloneness? Nothing more than being held captive by those who considered her merely a source of entertainment and breeding opportunity for them. Nothing else. Just a money commodity. That’s Shouka’s story–the first orca to be born at Marineland in Antibes, France on February 25, 1993.

  [Read more…]

The Bottom Falls Out of Papa Doug’s Publishing Platform

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By Doug Porter

Thirty three thousand. That’s the average daily decline in newspaper sales for UT-San Diego over the past six months according to the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulation).

Don Bauder at the Reader broke the news late last week:

For the six month period ended March 31, 2014, compared with the six months ended March 31, 2013, Sunday circulation dropped from 425,000 to 362,166. (These data include branded editions and digital.) On Monday, the decline was from 222,572 to 196,062. On Tuesday, the drop was from 226,400 to 182,516. On Wednesday, the decline was from 230,151 to 192,751. Thursday’s drop was from 285,474 to 249,201. Friday’s decline was from 288,385 to 243,201. [There’s more detail at Bauder’s piece]

  [Read more…]

Seduced and Reduced By The Weather

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By Bob Dorn

Aren’t we really just being chumps for weather reports?

Last week was hell. I tuned in every night to the weather forecasts, and that for me IS hell; all that almost-innocent T&A, witless humor and mirthless studio laughter, chartreuse simulations of doppler radar defining drizzle somewhere I don’t live, the pictures of puppies being sprayed in the back yard… these people get paid to do this stuff.

(I’ll bet the guys who managed to choose ‘lectric chartreuse don’t get paid as much as the on-air hooters and hootees do.)

These people are all over the map, without a weather map.   [Read more…]

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