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The One Infographic You Need To See for Black Friday

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Catherine Ruetschlin at Demos

With more than 15 million workers in the sector, and leverage over workplace standards across the supply chain, retail wields enormous influence on Americans’ standard of living and the nation’s economic outlook. It connects producers and consumers, workers and jobs, and local social and economic development to the larger US economy. And over the next decade, retail will be the second largest source of new jobs in the United States.

Given the vital role retail plays in our economy, the question of whether employees in the sector are compensated at a level that promotes American prosperity is of national importance. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical retail sales person earns just $21,000 per year. Cashiers earn even less, bringing home an annual income of just $18,500.   [Read more…]

How to Win the Social Security Argument at Thanksgiving Dinner in 5 Easy Steps

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 By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet

Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence. Social Security is fiscally fit, prudently managed and does not add to the deficit because by law it must be completely detached from the federal operating budget. Obviously, it is needed more than ever in a time of increasing job insecurity and disappearing pensions. It helps our economy thrive and boosts the productivity of working Americans. And yet the sharks are in a frenzy to shred it in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” discussions.

The most popular red herring Social Security hustlers have unleashed into the waters of public discourse has grown into such a massive whale of a lie that liberals frequently subscribe to it. The idea goes like this: We need to somehow “fix” Social Security because people are living longer – “fix” in this context being code for “cut.”
  [Read more…]

Angry Republican Calls for San Diego Party Leader’s Ouster

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A GOP activist from Carmel Mountain Ranch is pushing for San Diego Republican Party leader Tony Krvaric’s ouster, citing the party’s losses in the recent elections.

Karen Grube, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the party’s Central Committee from the 77th Assembly District back in June has created a Facebook page entitled Tony, You’re Fired hoping to rally other GOP members to her cause.   [Read more…]

Border Patrol Story About Chula Vista Shooting Death Unraveling

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A new witness has come forward in the shooting death of 32-year-old Munique Tachiquin. According to accounts by Border Patrol officers, the mother of five was shot after she attempted to run over a plain clothes agent attempting to serve a warrant.
Prince Watson, a former Marine and Iraqi War veteran who lives nearby, told TV10/ABC News that he was reluctant to come forward, but said his sense of civic responsibility compelled him   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – San Diego County Sheriff Stonewalls Freedom Of Information Requests About Drones

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A national effort to track drone deployment by domestic law enforcement agencies has run into a brick wall with the San Diego County Sheriffs, who have refused to provide information about efforts to purchase Scout UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle).

The Electronic Freedom Foundation and MuckRock.com have sent over 200 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to local governments and police departments, seeking to find out information on domestic drone utilization, according to a story in OpposingViews.com.

Although the San Diego Sheriffs office initially denied possessing any documents relevant to the collection effort, an email from manufacturer, Datron World Communications, to Seattle police quoted technical information from a bid that was sent to local officials.

Inside: Angry Republicans, Running Democrats, Border Patrol Cover Up Unraveling
Notice: I’ll be taking the weekend off. See you Monday, news junkies.   [Read more…]

Ted Lieu, the VLF and the supermajority

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Senator backs down from car tax discussion

by Brian Leubitz/Calitics.com

If you ever wonder about the gaping hole in our budget that we’ve been trying to close for the last decade or so, there is one part of that larger pie that is bigger than the rest. That is the Vehicle License Fee. Back when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running in the recall election, it was dubbed simply the “car tax.”

And give him credit for this, when elected he did, in fact, slash the “car tax.” We were able to backfill with a few years of budgetary “smoke and mirrors” but the hole was stubborn. And when 2007-8’s big recession hit, we were proverbial budgetary roadkill. The cuts just couldn’t come fast enough to match the speed of declining revenue, given that we had already made cuts to cover the loss of the VLF revenue.   [Read more…]

Desperately Seeking Scandal: The GOP and the Motivation Behind the Benghazi Freakout

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Watching the ongoing freakout and paranoid conspiracy-mongering over the Benghazi attack by numerous Republicans and conservatives, the rest of us over in Planet Reality watching this have been scratching our heads wondering what’s causing this meltdown.

Now, in the cases of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the diagnosis for their behavior is pretty easy to pinpoint (the latter is terrified of a primary challenge in 2014 and thinks picking a fight with the evil Kenyan Muslim Anti-Christ is the ticket to survival, while the former is an angry, bitter, spiteful old bastard who is lashing out any way he can in the hopes of causing damage to “the One” who stole his precious widdle Presidency).

But what of the other GOPers, the folks like Limbaugh, Hannity, the folks at Fox News (which should be renamed The All-Benghazi Network these days) and the rest? What is their motivation, besides the obvious one of lashing out in anger after Obama’s reelection?   [Read more…]

Desde la Logan: The Roots Factory Spreads It’s Artistic Branches From DJing and Serigraphy to the Barrio Film Festival

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By Brent E. Beltrán
In a broken down alley, between Newton Avenue and Main Street just off Cesar Chavez, adjacent to Ryan Bros. Coffee where Chuey’s Restaurant and Cantina once thrived, lays a factory whose workers create ideas with their bare hands and phat minds. A welcoming place where roots grow through creative souls. Roots that provide my working class community cultural nourishment. Artistic soup for a culturally hungry people.

This place, known as The Roots Factory, was founded through sheer heart and determination by Roberto Hernandez (aka Bob Green) and Ana Morales (aka Ana Brown). Since January 2011, these Chicano renaissance artists have used the factory as a weapon in their struggle to bring art to the masses of Barrio Logan and beyond. If Chicano Park is the parent of Barrio Logan arts and culture then places like The Roots Factory, Voz Alta and The Spot are it’s prolific children. These three arts organizations form a symbiotic cultural trinity producing vast quantities of much needed artistic happenings.   [Read more…]

Too Many Twinkies and Other Befucklement

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By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

After the failure of a billion-dollar-plus wholesale bakery, a strident presidential election,a celebrated sex scandal (which would not be scandalous in countries less publicly vested in the whereabouts of folks’ dickles), and voter support for same-sex marriage in four states, thoughtful study and analysis of the outcomes is warranted. And what better place to find due consideration of lesson’s learned and key takeaways than in the media. Recent news stories and releases offered the following insights.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – North Park Shooting Prompted by Death Wish

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It seemed like a nightmare in the making for residents of North Park on Saturday night. A man in a camouflage suit wandered about near the intersection of Louisiana and University Aves. firing a rifle.

I was headed down University Avenue on my way to get a pizza not long after it happened. The street was completely blocked off; there were enough flashing lights going off so that it was immediately clear this was no traffic stop or disturbing the peace call.

I live in North Park. For all of its ups and downs as a hipster neighborhood (at least that’s what Forbes calls it) it’s a pretty safe place to live. Whatever was going on here was obviously more than the delayed conclusion of a bar fight.

It didn’t take long, via Twitter, to find out the reason for the commotion: a man carrying a rifle had been shot by police.   [Read more…]

Giving Thanks in San Diego

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It’s Thanksgiving week and lots of progressives are still feeling giddy about the near clean sweep in the recent election. But, I’m going to take a break from politics this time and focus on what we have to be grateful for here in San Diego other than our new political landscape. Despite the historically problematic origins of the Thanksgiving holiday, it never hurts to take stock. So here’s a random list of some cherished things ranging from the profligate to the profound…   [Read more…]

How the Left Can Become a True Political Force to Be Reckoned With

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By Bill Fletcher, Jr., Carl Davidson / Alternet / Nov. 13, 2012

The 2012 elections may prove to have been a watershed in several different respects. Despite the efforts by the political Right to suppress the Democratic electorate, something very strange happened: voters, angered by the attacks on their rights, turned out in even greater force in favor of Democratic candidates. The deeper phenomenon is that the changing demographics of the USA also became more evident—45% of Obama voters were people of color, and young voters turned out in large numbers in key counties.

Unfortunately for the political Left, these events unfolded with the Left having limited visibility and a limited impact—except indirectly through certain mass organizations—on the outcome.   [Read more…]

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