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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…]

What Would We Do Without Wishful Thinking?

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In last week’s column I noted how the tax increases on the 1% included in the “fiscal cliff” deal amounted to little more than the political equivalent of a love tap for the rich because upper income tax rates remain much closer to their historic lows than to their mid-twentieth century highs.  This is disheartening because, as the political narrative shifts toward some form of austerity in the name of deficit reduction, our country’s historically high level of economic inequality remains deeply entrenched and there simply will not be enough revenue to engage in a robust progressive program centered around “nation building at home” as President Obama likes to say.

In sum, the unemployment crisis and other key social and economic needs will take a back seat to deficit reduction and the battles will not be about whether an austerity agenda is the right course for America but rather what form of austerity program we should pursue.  While there is an impressive list of eloquent critics (from Paul Krugman and Robert Reich to Joseph Stiglitz and Bernie Sanders) bemoaning this wrong-headed approach, we seem destined to ignore them and head down a road that spares the comfortable while further burdening the afflicted.   In elite opinion circles, it’s a bipartisan consensus.   Sure the wing nuts on the right are crazy but the even the Democrats are largely wedded to the gospel of Simpson-Bowles.

But isn’t this bitter medicine that will make us all better in the long run?  No, it’s bad policy that amounts to a not too-thinly-veiled class war.    [Read more…]

The Starting Line – ‘Second Amendment’ Nuts on a Roll: Gunnuttia Sweeps the Nation

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As Vice-President Joe Biden’s task force has been meeting with pro-gun and gun safety groups over the past week, it’s dawned on the extremists in the mix that something more than rhetoric might actually happen in the wake of last months school shooting in Connecticut.

The report that some actions to regulate or oversee gun/ammo sales might come about through executive order has sent some advocates into a frothing frenzy. Today’s column will focus on their statements and attempt to place these firearm fanatics into a context that makes sense.

This week in gunnutia kicked off when Radio Host Alex Jones went on a scathing pro-gun tirade on Piers Morgan’s CNN show, saying: “1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! Doesn’t matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street, begging for ’em to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them. Do you understand?!”   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Hunger Coalition: Working to End Hunger

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By Brigitte Taylor

The San Diego Hunger Coalition (“SDHC”) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving access to and participation in federal food programs. They educate and advocate on the local, state and national levels with a vision of extinguishing hunger and malnutrition within the County.

In light of the flurry of charitable acts that traditionally emphasize holiday giving, I wanted to explore what we can do on an ongoing basis to assist local food and nourishment-related programs any time of the year.   [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…]

Extreme Weather Watch: 2012 Was Warmest Year Ever For US

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The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees above normal and a full degree higher than the previous warmest year recorded — 1998 — NOAA said in a recent report. All 48 states in the contiguous U.S. had above-average annual temperatures last year, including 19 that broke annual records, from Connecticut through Utah.

It was also a historic year for “extreme” weather, scientists with the federal agency said. With 11 disasters that surpassed $1 billion in losses, including Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Isaac, and tornadoes across the Great Plains, Texas, and the Southeast and OhioValley, NOAA said 2012 was second only to 1998 in the agency’s “extreme” weather index. However, the dollar costs may well indeed pass the 1998 level because of the severity of the events.

The average temperature for the US was 55.3 degrees, one full degree hotter than the previous record in 1998 and 3.2 degrees hotter than the 20th century average. Nineteen states — including Texas, New York, Ohio and Oklahoma — had their highest annual average temperatures on record; 26 others had years that ranked in the top-10 hottest ever.   [Read more…]

Some ‘Why?’ Questions – Part 3 of a Cultural Comparison: Gun Violence in the US and Europe

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Continued from Part 2
By Frank Thomas and John Lawrence

WHY does America’s weakly regulated gun culture vs. that in Europe correlate to out-of-sight gun homicide rates in the U.S.? One WHY answer is that there are higher levels of U.S. criminality compared to England, Switzerland, Norway, and other EU countries … illustrated by the number of U.S. citizens in prison per 100,000 population of  750 ± vs. 100 ± in the EU! (see European Institute for Crime Prevention & Control, “International Statistics on Crime and Justice,” 2010).

Our sub-cultures of violent and less violent crime justify for many Americans the constitutional argument of self-defense, thus allowing high cartridge capacity, semi-automatic firearms of all sorts to roll off gun manufacturers’ production lines. We are at a crossroads … where it’s not only the high gun ownership level that contributes to high homicide rates but also the high level of crime and military-style killings by the emotionally unbalanced (as occurred in Newtown) that motivate more people to acquire guns for self-defense.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Junior Seau Autopsy Confirms Brain Damage: Is this the Beginning of the End for Pro-Football?

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Former San Diego Charger Junior Seau was suffering from chronic brain damage when he committed suicide, according to reports on ESPN/ABC news this morning. The deceased linebacker’s brain was examined by researchers with the National Institute of Health (NIH) who concluded he was afflicted with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease that can lead to dementia, memory loss and depression.

Seau’s ex-wife told ESPN that the family was informed the disease resulted from “a lot of head-to-head collisions over the course of 20 years of playing in the NFL. And that it gradually, you know, developed the deterioration of his brain and his ability to think logically.”

INSIDE: Carl DeMaio: He’s Baaack, The Science of Trolls, Did the AIG Lawsuit Have Merit?   [Read more…]

The United States has a Massive, Crippling Spending Addiction…Or Not

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Government spending is at historical low levels despite hysterical insistence to the contrary

Last week Congress struck a deal on the fiscal cliff deal that staved off tax increases to the still-struggling middle class. It wasn’t exactly the deal most Democrats expected, but it did at least temporarily solve a self-inflicted crisis. But the fight over the fiscal cliff tax rates was only the beginning of the battle for America’s fiscal soul, and the lines are already being drawn via Republican puffery on the debt ceiling and the sequestration cuts that were put off for two months. The arguments on the Republican side are getting more and more ridiculous, and sounding more and more desperate.

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The Starting Line – The Sound of One Hand Clapping at UT-San Diego

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We’ll start off today by talking about UT-San Diego, always one of my favorite topics. With advent of the New Year there are changes afoot at our local daily newspaper, changes that have me scratching my head… But hey, they’re the experts, right?

I learned via Twitter yesterday that Manchester’s minions are now required to gain management approval should any TV or radio station ask them to comment on pretty much anything. It seems as though UT-San Diego has done a deal with Clear Channel, one of the mega-corporate media meisters. Although they operate a half-dozen or so outlets locally, what we’re really talking about is giving KOGO (home to Rush Limbaugh and other righties in San Diego) and XTRA Sports radio first shot at any UT staffers.

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Some Factual Gun Statistics – Part 2 of A Cultural Comparison: Gun Violence In The US And Europe

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By Frank Thomas and John Lawrence

Continued from Part 1

In almost every measurable statistic whether it be gun ownership, gun homicide rate or total firearm-related deaths including suicides and accidents, the US leads the world in deadly gun violence. Although statistics show that a firearm in the household is more likely to be used on a family member than an intruder, the NRA promotes gun ownership as a means of self-protection and as a crime deterrent.

Britain has a much stricter gun control culture with relatively few guns in households.   [Read more…]

Why I Became a Volunteer Coordinator for the 2013 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count

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I didn’t expect my life to change as a result of my research for articles about homelessness for The Huffington Post. But that’s exactly what happened.

In the course of my research, I contacted several lead agencies of Continuums of Care (CoCs) in California to learn about their responsibilities.

As you may know, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires each Continuum of Care (CoC), a group of service providers with a lead agency, to conduct a biennial Count during the last ten days of January, of homeless people living within its geographical area. Some CoCs, including the one in San Diego, California, conduct their Counts annually even though they are not required by HUD to do so.

  [Read more…]

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