San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Politics

The Starting Line – It’s D-Day for Balboa Park as the San Diego City Council Votes on Parking Garage

by

Today’s the Day…. The San Diego City Council will vote this afternoon at 2pm on the Irwin Jacobs sponsored proposal to building a by-pass roadway coming off the Cabrillo Bridge and a fee based parking garage.  Should the anticipated revenues from the parking structure fall short of expectations, city taxpayers will be expected to pony up for day-to-day operating costs and payments for bonds used to finance the deal. As part of its on-going campaign to support the use of taxpayer dollars for big and shiny structures that pump up the egos of our City’s mega-rich, the local daily paper has endorsed the plan, with editorial page editor William Osborne tweeting “A big opportunity that won’t come again. Don’t let it slip by, San Diego.”

There are plenty of people opposed to the Balboa Park plan, despite its promise to remove traffic congestion from Plaza de Panama.  Congressman/Mayoral candidate Bob Filner has promised to speak out against the plan at today’s hearings. A protest outside City Hall is scheduled for noon and preservationist groups are urging people to attend the hearing and speak out against the proposal.  Additionally there is a petition against the plan circulating that you can sign here. Additional coverage in the San Diego Free Press can be found here.   [Read more…]

The Balboa Park Controversy: Cats, birds, and bridges

by

By Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

I don’t know how the City Council hearing on the Balboa Park/Jacobs bypass bridge, scheduled for Monday afternoon, will end up.

I don’t know how many people will show up to support the Jacobs plan and how many will be there to condemn it.

I don’t know what the final vote will be if, indeed, there is a final vote.

But this I do know. We’re getting exactly what we should expect to get when private business is brought in to solve a public problem.

Irwin Jacobs has been at the receiving end of criticism, potshots, and denunciation since he stepped in to take care of traffic and parking problems at theLaurel Streetentrance toBalboaPark. But it’s misplaced fury.

It reminds me of the first time the cat deposited a dead bird on my kitchen floor. The kids yelled at poor pussy, berated her, told her she was bad.   [Read more…]

Ted Nugent’s Latest Idiotic Comment: ‘Perhaps We’d Be Better Off if the South Won the Civil War’

by

AlterNet | By Angela Lee

Romney endorser/American rock singer Ted Nugent already has a long history of outlandish political statements, but now appears to have taken his BS to a whole new level.  In a Washington Times op-ed blasting Obamacare, Nugent suggested today that America would have been a better country had the South won the Civil War:

 Because our legislative, judicial and executive branches of government hold the 10th Amendment in contempt, I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War. Our Founding Fathers’ concept of limited government is dead.

  [Read more…]

NAFTA on Steroids

by

San Diego In World Spotlight Due to Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations

By Lori Wallach / The Nation (Article appeared in the July 16-23, 2012 edition)

While the Occupy movement has forced a public discussion of extreme corporate influence on every aspect of our lives, behind closed doors corporate America is implementing a stealth strategy to formalize its rule in a truly horrifying manner. The mechanism is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Negotiations have been conducted in extreme secrecy, so you are in good company if you have never heard of it. But the thirteenth round of negotiations between the United States and eight Pacific Rim nations will be held in San Diego in early July.

The TPP has been cleverly misbranded as a trade agreement (yawn) by its corporate boosters. As a result, since George W. Bush initiated negotiations in 2008, it has cruised along under the radar. The Obama administration initially paused the talks, ostensibly to develop a new approach compatible with candidate Obama’s pledges to replace the old NAFTA-based trade model. But by late 2009, talks restarted just where Bush had left off.   [Read more…]

You may be dysfunctional, but you’re still my fellow American…

by

Musings on the Fourth of July

By Bill Guy
Neighbors invite us newbies to the annual cul-de-sac Independence Day party. Pot luck in the park. Bring your lawn chairs, celebrate the holiday. Get to know your neighbors better. Quite a mix. Mostly retired folk or those countin’ it down. One younger couple with two grade school boys and a gorgeous little girl with mocha skin, topaz eyes and Shirley Temple curls. Two couples obviously long-time SoCal denizens. Others sporting tans, but still betraying back-east accents. Expatriate Brits, Asians, Okies via Massachusetts and Tennessee, and an Illini married to an Islander. Maybe a Hispanic hombre, but then again, he might be an Italian uomo.

Food was great. Traditional favorites like hot dogs, potato salad, deviled eggs. But also tasty dishes from newcomers’ kitchens cooking other cultures. Scotch Eggs, Asian noodles, salsa. Cheesecake with blueberries and strawberries, peach cobbler, chocolate covered strawberries soaked all night in vodka. Later, we could watch the city’s fireworks from our back yards.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – League of Women Voters Stymied by UT-SD’s “Two Bumper Stickers and a Tweet” Letter Policy

by

July 6, 2012—The miniaturization of the UT-SD letters to the editor. Yesterday we heard from some friends associated with the League of Women Voters who were aghast because our local daily had rejected their letter to the editor due to its length. Meh, we said at first, you ought to be able to express yourself in 250 words or less (which used to be the standard at the paper) so there’s room for more letters. Then we learned that UT-SD’s rules have changed—letters to the editor are now limited to 125 words. Here’s the UT’s rejection letter:

We limit letters for print publication to 125 words. If you would like to shorten your letter and resubmit it to letters@utsandiego.com it will be considered for publication. We will retain your original for possible posting online.

 Thank you for taking the time to submit your comments

 Joe Taylor | Letters Editor 

 As one of our sources said, “that’s two bumper stickers and a tweet”. Of course, when our contacts started counting the number of words in yesterday’s letters, they came up with three missives that exceeded that limit, with 128, 142, and 157 words respectively. So, as a public service, we’re going to publish the original letter in its entirety here today. The public deserves to hear more than UT publisher Doug Manchester’s vision for our city.   [Read more…]

Labor Calls Out Scheme to Sabotage Living Wage Ordinance

by

By Nadin Abbott
July 5, 2012 (San Diego)– When the San Diego City Council spun off the Convention Center to the San Diego Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CONVIS), labor leaders feared that CONVIS would try to maximize profits by getting around provisions such as the living wage ordinance. These fears came to fruition when item 5:8 of the contract “struck out the provision that SDCVB shall comply with the City of San Diego Living Wage ordinance.”

According to Lorena Gonzales, Secretary-Treasurer/CEO of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, “we must have a discussion on quality of life.” Gonzales also emphasized that workers on minimum wage are subsidized by the rest of us, since we have to pay for food stamps, section eight housing and Emergency Room visits, and turn over is higher as well.

What we need, Gonzales added, “are good jobs for all San Diegans.”   [Read more…]

The Starting Line — UT- San Diego Recycles Two Week Old Story on Front Page

by

July 5, 2012- The story on the front page of today’s daily newspaper looked familiar. So familiar, in fact, that I initially thought the paper had lifted it—at least in part—from some other local source, possibly the Reader or KPBS. The article told the tale of an ascendant duo of mystery writers, Michele Scott and Andrew E. Kaufman, who recently discovered quite by accident that they lived within a quarter mile of each other in Jamul and have now decided to collaborate on a book. The lede to the story was so memorable (“Fresh from the freaky-but-true files:…) that I went ahead and searched the web, thinking surely there must be some kind of plagiarism going on. But that turned out not to be the case. What I discovered was that the story was originally published in the UT-SD on June 19th.  In other words, the paper was re-cycling the news. That’s one way to save money, I guess. UPDATE The UT has told Poynter.org that the story was only published online June 19th. That still doesn’t explain away recycling a two plus week old story and putting it on the front page of your print edition. It’s called a NEWSpaper, not a recycling bin for online features.   [Read more…]

Bitch Session

by

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt /  Excuse Me, I’m Writing

Warning for the faint of heart: Adult language ahead.

We were a small group, three women and three men, assembled at a coffeehouse last week to talk about a business venture. We were mostly strangers to each other, but for the meeting’s host. Still, the inevitable quests to establish credibility were civil and benign.

Except that, in the course of our discussion about media targeting females, one of the folks pointed out that it would be very important to prevent our programming from turning into bitch sessions.

Yep, “bitch sessions,” and, alas, others concurred with the advice.

It was a noticeably dicey choice of terms in our particular context, and a perfectly illustrative example of the ingrained prejudice women continue to experience in everything from our public institutions to our conversational English to our graffiti.
  [Read more…]

“Save KLSD:” The Corporate Consolidation of America’s Airwaves

by

San Diego’s last progressive talk radio station a victim of the loosening of media ownership laws

Talk radio has become big business in the last decade and a half, particularly conservative talk radio, which has seen an explosion in popularity and influence. Progressive talk radio? Not so much.

San Diegans have become accustomed to the conservative stylings of locally owned 760 KFMB and the not so locally owned KOGO 600. When you’re looking for news in this city, there are no other choices. You’re stuck with the nonsensical, anti-government, sensationalist, and sometimes maniacal ramblings of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Hedgecock. But that wasn’t always the case. For a brief while, San Diego did have a progressive talk radio station to call its own: 1360 KLSD (for “Liberal San Diego,” as we are informed by radio and television news personality Bree Walker).

KLSD at one point was the home of San Diego personalities like Stacy Taylor and Jon Elliott. It was also San Diego’s home to Air America Radio, the national syndication outfit that brought voices such as Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes, and Al Franken, now a United States Senator from Minnesota, to the airwaves.   [Read more…]

California to Mortgage Lenders: The Party’s Over!

by

California became the first state in the country yesterday to enact tough consumer protection legislation holding home mortgage lenders to a higher standard that will help financially troubled borrowers stay in their homes. The legislation, SB 900 and AB 278, will make California the first state to prohibit lenders from “dual tracking,” the practice of negotiating with clients to modify a mortgage while concurrently pursuing foreclosure, outlaw “robosigning”, allow state agencies and private citizens to sue financial companies if lenders willfully or recklessly violate the law, and simplify dealings between homeowners and banks by requiring a single customer representative for consumers to work with. The bill requires all lenders to abide by a number of provisions of the national mortgage settlement negotiated by state attorneys general earlier this year to rein in foreclosure abuses.

The Assembly approved the legislation on a 53-25 vote, and the Senate voted 25-13.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Wingnuttia on Parade; Vignettes from the Fringe

by

July 3, 2012 – The politics of the absurd… No matter what the issue, from health care to immigration, conspiracy theories email chain letters, and lies direct from the mouths of politicians abound. We’ve been saving up little snippets from these alternative realties for a while now, and today seems as good as any to air them out. After all, we’ll be celebrating the birthday of this great nation tomorrow and what better way to do it than to take a walk on the wild side of free speech. Remember, just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it’s true.

Kindergarten crime wave…Let’s start up in the great state of New Hampshire, where Representative Bob Kingsbury reported that, after careful study, he had concluded that kindergarten attendance contributes to higher crime rates, among other things. Kingsley told his colleagues in the state legislature last week that he’s been working on a theory since 1996, when he analyzed local crime rates and compared them to a list of communities that offered public kindergarten. “We’re taking children away from their mothers too soon,” Kingsbury concluded.  Kingsbury also associated the rise of crime to the decline of gun ownership and the fact that boxing is no longer taught in school or offered as a sport. Perhaps that’s why kids who attend kindergarten earn an extra $39,100 over a lifetime–they steal it.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry