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Clybourne Park at the San Diego Repertory Theatre – A Review of the Friday Night Performance

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By Jim Bliesner

The first act of Clybourn Park, now at the San Diego Repertory Theatre is about “white flight” or “block busting” set in 1959. The second act is about “gentrification” and “new urbanism” set in 2009. In the first act a black family is buying a home in a traditionally Caucasian neighborhood. In the second act, the same house is being sold by a black couple to a young Caucasian couple moving back into the city wanting to remodel and add onto the old house. If this was San Diego the play would be called Sherman Heights or Golden Hill and cover the same period. The play is about a real phenomenon across the American urban landscape and alive today.   [Read more…]

Monsanto’s Earnings Nearly Double as They Create a Farming Monopoly

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By Charlotte Silver / Al Jazeera / Alternet

Last week Monsanto  announced staggering profits from 2012 to celebratory shareholders while American farmers filed into Washington, DC to challenge the Biotech giant’s right to sue farmers whose fields have become contaminated with Monsanto’s seeds. On January 10 oral arguments began before the U.S. Court of Appeals to decide whether to reverse the cases’ dismissal last February.

Monsanto’s earnings nearly doubled analysts’ projections and its total revenue reached $2.94bn at the end of 2012. The increased price of Roundup herbicide, continued market domination in the United States and, perhaps most significant, expanded markets in Latin America are all contributing factors to Monsanto’s booming business.   [Read more…]

Taking On the Government Tyranny Gun Control Prophecy

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By Doug Porter It’s about time somebody took on the tinfoil set and their arguments about tyranny coming soon to the US of A.  John Stewart did so last night. My favorite part was where Stewart said conservatives appeared to be “confusing tyranny with the unpleasant burning sensation of losing democratic elections.” Watch. The Daily Show with […]

The Starting Line – Shooting Down False Arguments About Gun Control, Starting With the UT-San Diego Editorial Board

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Clearly these guys at UT-San Diego can’t read. The local daily runs an editorial on gun laws and can’t even get their facts straight. Why? Because they obviously can’t comprehend a simple press release.

Here’s what the UT-San Diego said, trying to shore up their gun control arguments with numbers:

While a new Gallup poll shows support for tougher gun laws has increased to 38 percent, the same poll shows 48 percent of Americans like laws as they are or want them loosened.

Except that’s NOT what the Gallup poll said.   [Read more…]

Sex in San Diego: 10 Key Court Decisions That Protect Our Sexual Freedom

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By Alex Henderson / Alternet

If the Christian Right had its way, the United States would be a fundamentalist theocracy in which contraception, homosexuality, abortion, sexually explicit hip-hop lyrics and all adult pornography were illegal. But making the U.S. that much of a theocracy would mean overturning a lot of major Supreme Court decisions. Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has had many rulings that helped to advance sexual freedom in the United States   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Doctor, Doctor! Give Me the News! Mayor Bob’s Cure for the Urban Blues

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There were a flock of SD Free Press writers at the Balboa Theater last night for Mayor Bob Filner’s first State of the City speech. I’m sure that we’ll provide a variety of viewpoints and plenty of detail as the week goes on. So I’ll skip the details in my report this morning.

I chose to understand Dr. Bob’s speech as a healing moment. He reached out. He promised progress. He didn’t demonize anybody or incite fear to talk about hard choices.

Filner’s metaphor of the City as a healing patient was spot on. What impressed me most was his bedside manner. Bob Filner didn’t have to share the spotlight with Nathan Fletcher, the City Council, the first lady, and the citizens he honored for their public service last night.

But he did. Together, San Diegans can build a great future. Divided, we’ll be going nowhere.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Life in the Slow Lane: San Diegans Spend More Time on the Road than Angelenos

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The Equinox Center, a local think tank focusing on quality of life issues, is expected to release its 2013 Quality of Life Dashboard report for the region on Thursday, January, 17th. A sneak peak at this year’s findings, first reported by Michael Chen of 10News, gives a glimpse into the realities of San Diego from behind the wheel.

The Sustainable San Diego Blog reports on their findings:

 **On average we travel more miles every day than the average Californian.

(San Diego numbers remain higher than Los Angeles County’s, at an average of 12.8 miles per day compared to 10.7 in LA.  More residents of LA take public transit (6.2%) to commute to work compared to San Diego (3.0%)).

**After 4 years of decline, the average San Diegan now spends nearly 40 hours per year sitting in traffic – that’s a full work week.

BREAKING NEWS: Official Drinking Game for State of the City address by Mayor available here. Remember, it’s a school night. (h/t @RachelLaing)   [Read more…]

Filner Farts at the Cotillion

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Can the Voice of San Diego “Tame” the Mayor?  

By Bob Dorn

“He’s abrasive, aggressive, impolitic, caustic, truculent, brash…” That’s from the second sentence Liam Dillon wrote for the Voice of San Diego of July 30.  The first  sentence was,  “Bob Filner stabs you in the front and stabs you in the back.”

The U-T characterized Mayor Bob Filner on October 27, just before the election, as “Brash. Abrasive. Combative.”

The next day, the LA Times more equitably described both Filner and his opponent, Carl DeMaio, as “abrasive personalities.”

Among the self-styled responsible press of San Diego, things calmed down a bit after Filner won the election early in November.  But the honeymoon lasted less than three weeks when, on Nov. 21, VOSD was back at it, calling Filner “loud, abrasive and about as liberal as you can get without running an LGBT studies department.”   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Mayor Bob ‘Teflon’ Filner’s Awesome Adventures

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One month into his term, San Diego’s newly elected Mayor was seemingly up sh*t’s creek without a paddle.

The local press was hounding him. He’d failed to cough up a list of administration appointees on demand, technically violating California’s Public Records Act.  A dust up between Filner and City Council President Todd Gloria lead to a UT-San Diego editorial calling the Mayor a bully. And an appearance before a group supporting access for medical marijuana patients had the twitterati convinced that he’d committed a grave political sin.

Here it is a week later and it’s all coming up roses for Mayor Bob. Talk about your political Teflon.   [Read more…]

Getting the Most Out of the San Diego Free Press

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Our goal here at the San Diego Free Press is to keep you up to date on issues that affect San Diego and the surrounding areas of the county. There are a lot of features here at the San Diego Free Press to help you find what you’re looking for and connect with the authors and other readers…

I’ve just created a new page to help you, our readers, navigate the site. Some of the things that are covered are:

  • Links in the upper and lower Navigation Bars
  • Categories, Topics and neighborhoods
  • How to find the Archives
  • Information about Authors and how to connect with them
  • Subscribing to the SDFP
  • Sharing and connecting with others

Each of these items is explored in greater detail in the new page which you can access anytime by clicking the Site Navigation link at the very top of the page. So what are you waiting for? Get the most out of the San Diego Free Press!

We welcome your feedback!   [Read more…]

Two Sets of Two Moms on My Mind

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After receiving an invite to a baby shower
for my rather new friends, Alanna and Jan,
I thought to myself: Man,
it’s so nice to have lived
to see a new day
when human beings who are lesbian or gay
can more and more
feel that they
don’t have to tuck themselves away
uncomfortably in shadows of dark places
where no one should ever have to reside,
let alone stay –
What I’m getting at is, hey, the “closet” back in my day
was as crowded as Yankee Stadium
on opening day.   [Read more…]

Film Review: Smiling Through the Apocalypse, and the Sixties (at the Palm Spring Films Festival, January 3-13)

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By Bob Dorn

Apparently, we made it through the Apocalypse. It wasn’t the most recent one, predicted to accompany the exhaustion of the Mayan and Olmec peoples’ Long Count calendar last December. Instead, it was the one so many of us lived through starting some 50 years ago, the one we like to say lasted a decade, the 60s.

Back then, half of us seemed to aspire to higher consciousness and the other half of us learned to run from people who told us to travel astrally, or to go to Vietnam to kill Vietnamese, or to get a PhD in business management or to go out of our minds simply to find out what that might be like.   [Read more…]

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