Yesterday, October 16th was the 50th anniversary of one of the most iconic political sports images—the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The contemporaneous response to that gesture was derision and disciplinary action. Both Gold Medal winner Tommie Smith and Bronze medalist John Carlos were prohibited from participating in any future Olympics events, both lost their jobs after returning from Mexico, and their families received death threats. Time has confirmed the power of their statement though, with the event being memorialized in film (Salute), in sculptures and at various ceremonies commemorating the event. [Read more…]
The How and Why of Measure YY, the San Diego Unified School District Bond Ask
Back in the old days before Proposition 13, local schools were funded locally. School boards had the authority to raise property tax rates, constrained by the understanding that the electorate would vote them out come election time if they went too far.
In practice, this meant school districts with lower property values ended up with inferior education facilities and programs. Court cases in the 1970’s began the erosion of local control in the cause of rectifying these inequities; Prop 13 put the state in the driver’s seat.
School boards can no longer levy property taxes. They can, however, ask voters to support local funding for schools through parcel taxes and bond measures. And in the majority of cases, voters have agreed with this method of filling the holes blown through local education budgets. [Read more…]
A Letter to Duncan Hunter from an Aspirationally Corrupt Admirer
By Brett Warnke
October 2018
Dear Dunc,
May I call you Dunc? I want to be familiar with you. I want to know you. I’ll tell you the straight stuff: I want to be a crook.
As it stands, I’m a greedy teacher. I know! Children, facts, unions, books!
It’s all so frightfully boring, so paperwork-y and tedious. Some of my children are homeless. They live in vans. Sometimes I show them pictures of your sprawling Alpine home just to make them feel bad about not being born rich, like you.
I’m on my way, Dunc. With enough practice in the dark arts of shell-game financing, I can be the new you. True, as it stands, I have to actually go to work and buy my own groceries. Mostly canned goods. You golf and have sex with multiple partners around Washington and spend campaign money on yourself. #GOALS.
And, well, that’s why I need your help, Dunc.
I want you to assist me in my sinister mission to be the most awful and corrupt man to pound San Diego County’s crumbling pavement! (True, I’ll need to save up for decent shoes because of our poor streets, but I digress!)
Now, who would know better how to achieve this than you, right? I must admit it squarely: I’ve been following you. But not only you. Your wife, Margaret, and your many, many lovers. I may rent a room, a shabby barn of a place, but I have followed you in your “crimes.”
Some Big Developments | My Reporter’s Life, Part Two
I didn’t know that the police beat was one of the tests normally applied to newcomers until the San Diego Evening Tribune editors released me from it after six months and, to my surprise, had me cover the County Board of Supervisors.
Developers had been pumping out two-story stuccoes amidst the chapparaled and original Spanish land grants to the east and the north of the city. The collapse of C. Arnholt Smith’s US National Bank was at this time the largest bank failure in US history, so I was a bit surprised to be assigned to cover the Board of Supervisors; after having been in town only 12 months or so I figured I didn’t know f-all about the county.
The Union had a former Associated Press guy covering the Supervisors, a veteran not easily excited or cowed by the job, and he helped me out, as if I were his kid brother, maybe 15 years younger.
Don’t worry, he’d tell me, nothing really happens here. You’ll be fine. Something like that. [Read more…]
UPDATED With Suggestions | An Explainer on Electing Judges in California
What to do about voting for or against judges is a thing this year. I’m hoping today’s column will answer some of the questions readers have asked in recent days.
The attention paid to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing has made a lot of people take notice of the judicial contests appearing on their ballots. At least that is what I assume is going on, having researched and/or produced a half-dozen or so voter guides since 2012.
San Diegans who have heard, read, or seen campaign materials about many candidates and propositions open up the ballot and are confounded by seeing 16 judicial contests for people they know nothing about. (There’s a seventeenth contest, and we’ll get to it further down in the story.)
Who are these people listed for California’s Court of Appeals and Supreme Court and why are we being asked to vote on them? [Read more…]
Pain and Suffering at the SDPD | My Reporter’s Life, Part One
I worked for the San Diego Evening Tribune for approximately eight years and 11 months. I was just 13 months short of being vested in the retirement program when I quit. That’s okay.
If I’d stayed on at the paper I might have gone fully crazy.
I was 28 when the Trib hired me out of a small-town daily in New Jersey’s rural northwest. I think somewhere I still have a picture of myself at the Sussex County Fair — taken by the staff photographer who’d accompanied me — as I tried to milk a Holstein. Standard stuff for small-town dailies back then.
I asked the wise guy Italian Assistant Managing Editor named Larry Lusitana why he’d hired me, and he said: “We’ve had good luck with people from New Jersey.” It was only after I’d left the paper that I found out Lusitana was from that state. [Read more…]
Trump on 60 Minutes: “I’m President and You’re Not”
By Mark Sumner / Daily Kos
In a lengthy interview broadcast on Sunday evening, Leslie Stahl presented Donald Trump a long series of questions. Though she occasionally got answers—many of them unrelated to what was asked—and many of those answers were deeply laced with equal parts ignorance and arrogance, the most horrifying part of the whole event was how familiar it all seemed. 60 Minutes with Donald Trump seemed much like every other minute with Donald Trump. And that’s a problem.
In all the questions she asked, Stahl discovered … nothing, really. Trump hates the press. We knew that. Trump is ready to claim that he knows more about science than the scientists. We knew that. He says he understands the military better than his generals. We knew that. When pressed on any issue he resorts to attacking the “unfairness” of the press rather than provide a straight answer. We knew that.
Though the interview did serve as a reminder of Trump’s readiness to pretend to knowledge he doesn’t have, his utter inability to admit the truth even when caught in an obvious lie, and his horrifying incoherence in attempting to describe even the simplest facets of policy, there was perhaps just one moment that broke through. [Read more…]
53,000 Voter Registrations On Hold In Georgia, 70% African American | Video Worth Watching
Here’s this week’s case of Republican voter suppression. From the MSNBC YouTube page:
AP reports that more than 53,000 residents have had their registrations on hold thanks to a policy that requires their applications to “precisely match” info from other state agencies. Reasons could be mundane as a “dropped hyphen in a last name.” 70% of the people on the list are African Americans.
My Meeting with Escondido Mayor Sam Abed Was Worse Than Expected
By Wendy Wilson / Alianza North County
Most people in Escondido are not required to meet with the mayor. I had to and was outraged. The following account is all from one meeting with Sam Abed. It gives you a good idea of who he is and what drives his policies.
As the local arts agency representative, my task was to present data about cultural tourism in Escondido and North County.
At the start of my meeting with Mayor Abed, he told me right off…My first priority as mayor is my personal finances. [Read more…]
How Bad is Congressman Duncan Hunter? Let Us Count the Ways…
By D. Weisman / Escondido Grapevine,
Duncan Hunter was named filthiest grifter in Congress by the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), but his son Duane — who started going by the same Duncan Hunter name to fool voters in 2008 — seems to have outdone his father.
After three decades of like-father-like-son criminal grift, voters in California’s 50th Congressional District finally, at long last, have a legitimate opportunity to throw out the bum(s).
Vote for Ammar Campa-Najjar as if your life depended on it because it does.
Number one reason to vote against Hunter is his 60-count federal indictment for the criminal grift of illegally using at least $250,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses.
[Read more…]
The Union-Tribune’s False Narrative on Education and the Race for Superintendent of Public Instruction
A recent editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune called for electing a former banker and charter school chief as Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI). Following a familiar destroy public education (DPE) script; the editor creates a false crisis as the predicate for an urgent need to elect charter school executive, Marshall Tuck, over California State Assemblyman, Tony Thurmond.
Another Phony Baloney Education Crisis.The piece opens by stating:
“The 21st century has been a transformative time in public education. While most educators were disappointed with the mixed results of the 2002 federal law that linked aid to improving test scores — the No Child Left Behind Act — some states have seen dramatic progress. In union strongholds like Massachusetts and New Jersey, and in nonunion states like Florida and Texas, reforms that emphasize accountability from students, parents, teachers and administrators alike — and that use evidence-based best practices to standardize and improve teaching tactics — have boosted student achievement. These four states’ 2017 scores in the massive National Assessment of Educational Progress confirm this success.”
Stunningly a group that cheered on the federal take-over of public education by the No Child Left Behind ACT (NCLB) admits the results were “mixed.” “Mixed” is a soft way of characterizing the abject and destructive failure that was NCLB. The editor implies that NCLB theory actually worked when citing the use of “evidence-based best practices to standardize and improve teaching tactics” as the reason for improved scores by the good schools on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing. [Read more…]
Senator Diane Feinstein Latest Target of Trump Rally’s “Lock Her Up” Chant
“It’s not just an assault on norms, the rule of law, and due process they claim to love, it’s a downright creepy attempt at intimidating women.”
By Julia Conley / Common Dreams
Two days after apologizing to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “on behalf of our nation” for subjecting him to one Senate hearing and a brief FBI probe into several sexual assault allegations against him before allowing him to be confirmed to his lifetime appointment, President Donald Trump clearly dropped the pretense of defending “due process” as he laughed along as audience members chanted “Lock her up!” after he criticized Sen. Dianne Feinstein in Iowa on Tuesday night.
At Trump’s suggestion during a campaign-style rally in Council Bluffs that Feinstein leaked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s letter regarding her allegations to the press, the audience erupted in the chant as the president smirked and seemed to enjoy the moment. [Read more…]
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