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Supreme Insanity: How the High Court is Killing Your Democracy

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By Jim Miller

Last week was a very bad week for American democracy. With the McCutcheon v. FEC decision, the Supreme Court of the United States dealt a sweeping blow to existing campaign finance laws that seek to limit the influx of money in American politics.

In the wake of the Citizens United case that opened the door for big spending by Super PACS and dark money, this ruling takes another step towards plutocracy by striking down overall limits on campaign contributions. By doing so McCutcheon rudely thrusts us further into a new Gilded Age where our economy and our politics are thoroughly dominated by a small minority of the opulent.

Senator Bernie Sanders put it best when he observed that, “The Supreme Court is paving the way toward an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson will control our political process.” And that’s why it’s increasingly hard to get anything good for everyday people done in Washington D.C., even when a healthy majority of Americans approve of a given policy.   [Read more…]

Legalizing Marijuana Doesn’t Increase Crime

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Crime stats show homicide and assault rates actually tend to decrease near dispensaries. 

By April M. Short / AlterNet

The facts are in: legalizing medical marijuana does not increase crime rates, according to historical crime statistics. The results of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas, show that not only do crime rates not increase in states that legalize pot, the rates of certain crimes tend to drop. As the researchers concluded in the study, legalization “may be correlated with a reduction in homicide and assault rates” in some areas.

The study results are published in a March 26 article in the journal PLOS One. They analyze the association between medical marijuana legalization and state crime rates for all Part I offenses in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for the 11 states that legalized medical marijuana between 1990 and 2006. As the Washington Post notes in a March 26 article, crime across the US was already “ broadly falling” during this time period, but the study took a closer look and was able to conclude that there was no recognizable increase in crime in any of those states following legalization. The study looked specifically at the differences between the 11 states, as well as the differences within each of those states before and after legalization. It controlled for outside influences on crime rates, including income and education levels, employment and poverty rates, urban demographics, age, the number of police officers on duty and per capita prison inmate population. It also factored in beer consumption per-capita using data from the Beer Institute.   [Read more…]

Across America, Attacks on Pregnant Women’s Rights On the Rise

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Marlise Muñoz was removed from life support, but a growing pattern of state intervention in pregnancies threatens women from Alabama to Wisconsin.

By Michele Bratcher Goodwin / Alternet

In Texas, hospital officials refused for over two months to remove 33-year-old Marlise Muñoz, who was declared brain dead, from life support because of her pregnancy. A court ruling on Friday ordered John Peter Smith Hospital to take Munoz off life support in accordance with the family’s wishes, and her body was disconnected from machines on Sunday, Jan. 26.

The tragedy of Muñoz’s case is that it fits a terrible pattern of state interventions in women’s pregnancies.   [Read more…]

Sunshine Week: It’s Not About the Weather in San Diego

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By Doug Porter

Sunshine Week is not another tourism promotion for San Diego. It’s about open government. The public’s right to know. And if there’s one place in the country that could use more of this type of sunshine, it’s San Diego.

America’s Finest City, as boosters are wont to call it, has a sordid history of corrupt mayors, underhanded deals blessed by city hall, and failed civic leadership. As in past decades, local apologists would like to have us believe this is all old news or, at worst, ending with the removal of the most recent ex-Mayor-who-can-not-be-named.

Today we’ll take a look at recent events connected with more open governance on the local scene, or at least the illusion thereof. Yesterday (Tuesday, March 18th)  included two seemingly contradictory events that speak to the popular notion of keeping the activities of government accessible to those of us who ultimately pay for it.   [Read more…]

Movement Building and Challenging Mass Incarceration

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Is it time for community members to work with an often overwhelmed public defender system to keep people out of prison in the U.S.? One organizer in California says, “Yes.” 

By Raj Jayadev / Special to Equal Voice News

I recently received a spoken word piece called “The New Jim Crows” from an unlikely source – a public defender in North Carolina named Danny Spiegel. The title pays tribute to Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book: “The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Spiegel’s poem is an outpouring of the heartache and frustrations of his occupation – how he is forced to bear witness to, and at times feel complicit in, the damage of mass incarceration.

The refrain goes:

Yeah I’m a public pretender,
pretending to be defending to the best of my ability,
trying not to be a liability
when my caseload’s in the infinities

Through rhyme, Spiegel passionately tells the story of his clients – the young teen Melissa, who is tracked from foster care into jail, the schizophrenic who ends up locked in a cell rather than in treatment, the broken families of the failed war on drugs.   [Read more…]

Vladimir P’s Got Nothing on Bonnie D – Spin to Win Charged in Deputy DAs’ Unanimous Endorsement

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By Doug Porter

Vladimir Putin may know how to rig an election, as his minions probably did in pulling off 97% approval for Crimean secession from the Ukraine this past weekend, but District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis know how to spin one: don’t bother with actual votes, just claim a unanimous victory.

Following a February vote from the San Diego Deputy District Attorneys Association, the Dumanis campaign issued a press release declaring, “Deputy District Attorneys Announce Unanimous Endorsement of DA Bonnie Dumanis, ” followed by “BREAKING: Deputy DAs unanimously endorse Dumanis” on Twitter.

UT-San Diego ran with a story saying that the board of the Deputy DAs Association unanimously endorsed the incumbent.   [Read more…]

San Diego Charter Teachers: Bullying Contributed to Death of Colleague

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School Board meeting not ‘the time or place’ to discuss confidential personnel matter of a Teach for America instructor, says Harriet Tubman Principal

By Doug Porter

I didn’t write the headline for today’s column. It’s a headline at Education Week, a nationally recognized print and digital (edweek.org) publication. With a staff of over 70 and budget of over $13 million annually, it’s hardly the product of some basement blogger. Amazingly, it’s about a story nobody else in the San Diego media seems to have covered.

The EdWeek story is about a meeting of the San Diego Unified School Board on Tuesday, March 11th. The charter for the Harriet Tubman Village Charter School was up for renewal. A group of  parents, teachers and students wearing blue bravely stood up before the Trustees and proceeded to raise serious questions about the way the school is operated.

Accusations were made suggesting violations of both the Education Code and State Law by the school’s administration. And the suggestion was made that the bullying tactics and leadership style at Harriet Tubman contributed to the death of Sarah Jenkins, “a young, bright, dedicated, caring first year teacher at Tubman.”   [Read more…]

Bringing an End to State Sanctioned Sexual Assault, Rape Culture and Law Enforcement Impunity

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By Cathy Mendonça  / United Against Police Terror

The San Diego police department’s scandal involving officers accused of preying on women who they came in contact with while in uniform and on duty needs to be addressed.

First, former officer Anthony Arevalos is serving an eight year sentence for molesting female drivers during traffic stops in the Gaslamp quarter from 2009 to 2011. As a result, Chief William Lansdowne implemented changes within the department to help uncover the potential for other rogue officers to go unnoticed.

Then, on Feb. 9, Officer Christopher Hays was booked on criminal charges in connection with inappropriate pat downs that prosecutors allege were done for his sexual gratification.   [Read more…]

Arizona Swims against the Tide of Growing Equality

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Gov. Brewer’s veto of a measure that would have legalized discrimination against the LGBT community, atheists, and others was about capitalism, not compassion.

By Pamela Powers Hannley / OtherWords

The choice for Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was clear: “religious freedom” or the 2015 Super Bowl.

Just when it looked as if social conservatives would force the state into taking a giant leap backward in the fight for LGBT equality, Brewer vetoed a blatantly anti-gay bill.

Both chambers of the Arizona Legislature recently passed a bill that would legalize discrimination against gays and lesbians on the basis of religion.   [Read more…]

Thou Shalt Not Challenge a Sitting Judge and Other Legal Oddities (Updated)

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By Doug Porter

The story in last Friday’s UT-San Diego seemed pretty straightforward: the local legal establishment closed ranks, telling Carla Keehn that she wasn’t welcome to challenge incumbent Superior Court Judge Lisa Schall.

The newspaper’s account stemmed from a decision by the Tom Homann Law Association, a group for gay and lesbian legal professionals, to withdraw an earlier endorsement. It seemed a little odd, but not too far out of line in a city where truth and reality are regularly mangled in the quest to keep business as usual on track.

The San Diego Free Press ran a profile of candidate Keehn early February. Contributor Eva Posner met Keehn, found her to be an interesting person and wrote a profile. She certainly didn’t seem to be any kind of troublemaker, having worked in the US Attorney’s Office in San Diego as a federal prosecutor since 1995.

So I thought this political shunning might make fore an interesting item for one of my daily columns. Then two things happened: the SDPD misconduct scandal reached a peak and I started getting emails by the inbox full about this judicial race. I decided to hold off writing the story until I poked around a bit.   [Read more…]

Damning Report on Border Patrol Use of Force Obtained by LA Times

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By Southern Border Communities Coalition 

Southern border communities continue to call for transparency from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after the Los Angeles Times published a story on a report critiquing the agency’s use of force policy. The story indicated that reporters have reviewed a copy of the Police Executive Review Forum’s (PERF) report, a document that has been withheld from the public.

The PERF Report – an independent review by the Police Executive Research Forum commissioned by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection — evidently says border agents deliberately provoked confrontations that led to avoidable violence.

“Today’s revealing information by the Los Angeles Times, while damning, is not shocking to southern border communities,” states Christian Ramírez, Director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC).   [Read more…]

Grasp the Roots: What’s Wrong With the SDPD?

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By Will Falk

Bad is getting worse with the San Diego Police Department.

New allegations surfaced over the weekend that yet another San Diego Police officer has been sexually abusing women while on duty.

Then, the Austin, TX police chief hinted at problems with the SDPD when he insinuated that a 24 year-old jogger who was detained for failing to properly yield her identification was lucky arresting officers did not sexually assault her.

People everywhere in San Diego are asking with shock in their voices, “What is going on with the police?”   [Read more…]

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