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A Fifth Column Inside the FBI

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The Daily Beast’s Wayne Barrett has written a blockbuster of a story detailing the rebellion going on inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It’s a tale of active and former agents, many of them with ties to former NYC Mayor Rudy Guliani, whose actions amount to a law enforcement thumb on the scale of democracy.

Guliani’s law firm has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. The group’s leader, agent Rey Tariche, resigned from the FBI New York office on Monday following Director James Comey’s release of a memo saying the agency was once agin looking into Hillary Clinton.   [Read more…]

November 2016 Election Progressive Procrastinator Cheat Sheet

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So you’ve put off getting your act together about the election because it’s not as fun as watching cat videos on Facebook, right? Or you’ve been off the grid for six months. Or you just can’t stand all that political bullshit but need an “I Voted” sticker to impress your co-workers.

Now it’s time to vote and you have no friggin clue as to what’s what and who’s who. Or you’ve got questions. Or you’ve realized that it’s really, really, important to vote all the way down the ballot because not voting is how bad candidates get elected.

Fear not. We’re here to help. And if you don’t like our choices, we’ll tell you where to go for further information.   [Read more…]

UPDATED W/Trump Love: Let’s Turn Darrell Issa’s Birthday Party into a Retirement Celebration

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Today (November 1) is Congressman Darrell Issa’s sixty-third birthday.

He’s worked hard in recent years, using the powers of his office to deny Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke ability to testify on birth control and failing to come up with even one conclusive investigation into the Obama administration despite promising the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform would hold investigative hearings “seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks.”

The Republican leadership denied Issa’s request for an extended tenure as committee chair in 2014, due primarily to a lack of results. This wasn’t such a big deal back in the days of the Bush administration when Issa used his perch to block investigation of 22 million missing White House emails. But with Barack Obama in the driver’s seat, the party expected results and got nothing but posturing designed to build the Issa brand.   [Read more…]

Who’s Behind the Big Money Takeover of San Diego County Schools?

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Rick Shea versus Walmart and Company  

By Dr. Gregg Robinson, President, San Diego County Board of Education,
Dr. Jim Miller, Vice President, American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931

Somebody is trying to buy control of San Diego’s education system and few in the local media seem to have noticed until Sunday’s San Diego Union-Tribune finally covered it. The Voice of San Diego has been quiet on this front, perhaps because, as the SDUT article reports, its co-founder Buzz Woolley is part of the action. He and his fellow corporate education reformers have San Diego in their crosshairs and are spending big money to drive their agenda.

As Jeff Bryant recently reported at OurFuture.org, there is a huge amount of money behind this new corporate effort to “disrupt” public education:

As education historian Diane Ravitch explains on her personal blog, “Public education in California is under siege by people and organizations who want to privatize the schools, remove them from democratic control, and hand them over to the charter industry.”   [Read more…]

Barrio Logan vs the Stadium: Why it Matters

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By Mario Torero, Brent Beltrán, and Bill Adams / UrbDeZine

Barrio Logan is little known to most San Diegans – beyond being a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood near downtown. Yet it is one of San Diego’s most historically significant and culturally important neighborhoods.

In particular, it has national prominence for its role in the Chicano / Mexican-American civil rights movement. However, more than a Chicano historic asset, the neighborhood and it’s history stands as a monument to the resilience and survival of the nation’s minority and working class populations in the face of assaults and exploitation by the overwhelming power of the state and business interests.

In particular, many ethnic working-class urban neighborhoods across the country were destroyed or severely damaged by en masse relocation of their residents to build freeways and other neighborhood-destroying and suburb serving facilities. Barrio Logan repeatedly faced such assaults, and not only survived but like putting a bouquet of flowers in a tank cannon, sometimes made beauty and purpose out of injury. Nevertheless, once the second largest Mexican-American enclave in the U.S., it has shrunk to less than 5,000 people as a result of the loss of land to the freeways and industrial uses. It may not survive another such assault.   [Read more…]

Who Owns Councilmember Cody Campbell?

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Hint: They’re Not Vista Voters

Of the $16,874 from a total of 41 donors to Cody Campbell’s campaign for reelection to Vista’s City Council, only $2,640 came from city residents. He could thank the six of them by having them over for dinner.

To thank the others he will have to drive up the coast to Irvine and Newport Beach, after stopping in Oceanside to thank Mayor James Wood for his $300 donation and visiting other generous residents of Vista’s neighboring cities.

But take a closer look at the out-of-towners to get a clue to their affection for the politician.   [Read more…]

Trick or Treat? 2016 Donald Trump Election Edition

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The campaign season is almost over, and like an unsupervised five-year-old later in the evening on Halloween, most of us are sick of it.

Was it the candy corn or the M&M’s that pushed us over the edge? We’ll probably never know, but the one sure cure for all this queasiness is to cast your ballot. Consider it a metaphor for throwing up. Do it and you’ll feel better, honest.

As is true with hustling candy from strangers, one person’s political treat is another’s trick. So with that in mind, here’s a rundown of what I found in my bag of politics from over the weekend.   [Read more…]

The Transportation Justice Argument Against Measure A

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By Jim Miller

In weeks past, I have shared this space with colleagues from labor and the Climate Action Campaign, the Cleveland National Forest Foundation, the Sierra Club and SD 350, as well as the Environmental Health Coalition, all making the case against Measure A. This week, I am pleased to present the final guest column, this one from Mid-City CAN, yet another of the many labor, environmental, and community allies who are part of the Quality of Life Coalition opposing Measure A.   [Read more…]

“I’m Voting Today” Shouldn’t Be a Provocative Statement

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“What a difference this is. Just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election, and just give it to Trump, right? What are we even having it for?”–Donald J Trump, October 27, 2016

Right after I hit “publish” on this column, I’m headed to the post office to mail my ballot.

It will be filled out all the way through to the best of my ability because down-ballot races are important. It will have two stamps because we have a lot to vote on. It will be signed because it won’t count otherwise. It will be filled in with a pen, rather than a marker, so the ink doesn’t bleed thru and invalidate a vote. And it will be mailed in time to be included in the first election night results.

There are people out there who don’t want me (and you) to cast a ballot… Nihilists who say ‘elections don’t matter’ from behind the screen in their self-imposed intellectual prisons. Scornful sore losers, sure their petulant protest will bring about the collapse of the system. And the alt-right types who would destroy representative Democracy in favor of strong man rule.   [Read more…]

Ballot on Steroids: the Burden of Direct Democracy

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Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

Still haven’t tackled those 31 propositions on your bloated November ballot? I counted 17 state, 2 county, and 12 city proposals on my sample ballot – enough to drive anyone nuts.

If you’ve been beating up on yourself for procrastinating – STOP! You are not the problem. The problem is the way we’re overusing and abusing the supercharged, direct-democracy ballot tools we call the initiative and the referendum.

Yes, let’s debate the value of representative democracy versus direct democracy. And weigh the pros and cons of ballot-box planning. Let’s juggle reform options for the signature-gathering process. And agonize over how to finance ballot initiatives and candidates. But let’s save it for another day.

Today, let’s get down to business, starting with some facts about ballot propositions:   [Read more…]

Donald Trump Is a Serial Anti-Semite

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Trump’s chronic anti-Semitism is often overlooked among the laundry list of the GOP candidate’s bigotry and offensive comments

By Peter Dreier / AlterNet

When this campaign is over, let’s not forget Donald Trump’s steady use of anti-Semitic stereotypes and images throughout the campaign—ideas we can expect he’ll continue to use when the election is over and he tries to re-invent himself as the leader of a white supremacist nationalist movement and the public face of a new media empire (Trump TV?) with his supporters Roger Ailes (former head of Fox News who has a history of making anti-Semitic comments and was responsible for Fox News’ anti-Semitic crusade against the phony “war on Christmas”), Stephen Bannon (head of Breitbart News known for his own anti-Semitic remarks), and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer (the money behind Breitbart News).

Trump’s anti-Semitism comes in different shapes and sizes. He verbalizes it, encourages it, enables it, tolerates it, and makes excuses for it. What he doesn’t do is condemn it.   [Read more…]

Election Desperation Sets in for Beleaguered Republicans

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Barring unforeseen circumstances, Hillary Clinton will be elected as the next President of the United States on November 8, 2016. What remains to be seen is the margin of victory.

As of this morning, nearly 9 million people have already voted. Over the next week-and-a-half, as many as 40 million more people are going to head to the polls. Democrats are doing well in places like Virginia, Florida, Nevada and North Carolina. Republicans are outpacing 2012 levels in Ohio and Iowa. There is no path for Donald Trump if he loses just one of those states.

As much as some talking heads want us to believe the race for the nation’s top job is still an open question, it’s not. Watching some of these clowns try to spin the mounting evidence about the likely outcome would be humorous if it wasn’t so pathetic. And, of course, YOU still must vote.   [Read more…]

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