From Indivisible San Diego:
More than six hundred San Diegans marched from Dog Beach to the Ocean Beach Pier this morning with a demand to impeach President Trump. The protesters created a performance art project by standing in patterns to spell the messages “RESIST!” and “IMPEACH!” on the sand. Drone cameraman Caleb Serban-Lawler of Sabre Springs captured the images.
[Read more…]
By Lauren McCauley / Common Dreams
Amid reports that House Republicans are keeping their draft healthcare legislation in a secret location, Congressional lawmakers on Thursday convened an actual search party to find the Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal and replacement bill. [Read more…]
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, former Senator from Alabama, campaign advisor, and current Attorney General is generating the latest waft of smoke from the smoldering garbage fire, also known as the Trump administration’s Russia scandal.
During his nomination hearings, the then-Senator from Alabama failed to disclose two occasions when he met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to the Washington Post.
A New York Times story published today adds more fuel to the fire, saying European intelligence agencies warned the US about meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump. [Read more…]
By Norma Chavez-Peterson, Executive Director / ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties
The majority of the San Diego City Council demonstrated an inexcusable failure in leadership yesterday [February 27] in their decision to accept the 2-year independent study of police traffic stop data, but disregard its recommendations.
The Council had before them the results of an SDSU study, requested by former Councilmember Marti Emerald in 2015 to address community concerns about racial profiling by San Diego Police Department officers, wherein researchers independently examined more than 200,000 records of police traffic stops over two years. Among their findings was clear evidence of racial disparity in what happens after a driver is stopped. [Read more…]
By Kelly Macias / Daily Kos
Last week, I wrote a story about how Republicans in Congress are trying to reform the free breakfast program in schools. This is not new. Republicans have been trying for quite some time to cut this and other similar programs like free lunch, citing concerns about fraud and wasted expenses. Of course, just like their claims of supposed “illegal voting” that needs to be stopped, they have no real evidence that fraud of this type exists.
If you look at their motives, this actually has nothing to do with waste and everything to do with the stigmatization of poverty. [Read more…]
President Donald Trump’s first address to a joint session of congress was everything his handlers hoped it would be. It was largely based on falsehoods or exaggerations, as fact checks from the Associated Press, the New York Times, and Politifact document, but couched in less threatening rhetoric.
He stayed on script, starting with things Democrats have a hard time opposing like being against hate crimes and for education, then moving to placate the base with Islamic terrorism horror stories and a new homeland security unit for the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.
Most importantly, Trump didn’t attack the media, giving them an opening to normalize the administration and acquire brownie points by saying things like the speech sounded ‘muscular,’ or the occasion marked (yet another) a ‘pivot point.’ [Read more…]
By Murtaza Baxamusa / Rooflines, the Shelterforce blog
It is often convenient to blame city planners for the affordable housing crisis. After all, those affected have no other public forum to vent their concerns, least of all toward those who are profiting off of the crisis on a project-by-project basis. Sadly, this blame is often misguided, because planners do not produce housing.
A case study of the profit-maximizing, decision-making that is driving the affordability crisis is downtown San Diego. Construction cranes are up all over, and a $6.4 billion development juggernaut is rolling through. Nearly 10,000 new units have been permitted by the downtown planning board over the last four years, and the fast and generous permit approval process is cited as a model by developers for other regions. [Read more…]
By Don Greene / djgreene.net
On February 20th, the Department of Homeland Security released two new memorandums for its agents. The memorandums increase the arbitrary authority of the agents in the field and reduce the rights of those who are arrested to almost zero. The ghost of immigration policies past is slowly creeping into our national dialogue once again. Though the Obama administration racked up a high tally of undocumented immigrants it deported, those who were deported were criminals or those who had deportation orders issued.
Over the last week, the Trump administration has begun a crackdown on undocumented immigrants of all sorts and those who had been able to come out of the shadows of fear and anxiety are quickly heading back to those all too familiar places. We have only begun to see what steps the current administration is willing to take to carry out campaign promises of “building a wall” and getting rid of some “bad hombres.” [Read more…]
Republicans on the San Diego City Council united yesterday to oppose an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit before the United States Supreme Court involving the rights of transgender students.
The brief supports Gavin Grimm, a transgender student suing a county district in Virginia for the right to use public facilities, including boys bathrooms, in public schools.
Support came from the council’s five Democrats. Council members Chris Cate and Mark Kersey abstained. Lori Zapf simply didn’t show up. Republican Scott Sherman, who is termed out, voted to oppose the motion. [Read more…]
There’s some kind of a sick and nefarious game being played out on national politics right now. It’s called, “Special Prosecutor, Special Prosecutor, Who’s Got the Special Prosecutor?”
Even as Congressman Darrel Issa walked back part of his solitary Republican call for a special prosecutor to look into Trump’s ties to Russia, White House press spokesguy Sean Spicer, was denying the need for one and that it would all be a waste of time. When pressed by a reporter to respond to Issa’s call for a special investigator, at a news briefing Monday, Feb. 27, Spicer said:
“A special prosecutor for what?” [Read more…]
At the February 24th meeting of SANDAG, the San Diego Association of Governments, the Board of Directors comprised of the 18 jurisdictions of San Diego County, heard an explanation of the bad forecast used to anticipate revenue generated from Proposition A, the 1/2 cent sales tax increases which failed on the November 2016 ballot.
Ray Major, SANDAG’s head of technology services and chief economist, explained through a series of power point slides the problems which he has uncovered in the formulas used by the agency to forecast revenues and other economic indicators. Only having been in the post for a little over a year, Major described finding a problem with the Retail Sales Tax estimates, which generated the emails the Voice of San Diego published in their story.
The Board took this opportunity to express their concerns and request an independent investigation into the details surrounding who knew what and when and why the Board had not been made aware of the mistake much sooner. [Read more…]
By Bob Dorn
Hi. I’m a robot?
Are you amazed I can talk like a freshman on speed?
Don’t be. It’s all just zeroes and ones, yeses and nos, exes and minuses that can account for the way I so humanly can flick my long blonde hair over my earpiece, or, in the case of my boyfriend, yell Wahoo!!! when there’s a story about the Chargers pledging $1 million for a new stadium on the waterfront. [Read more…]
![Woman holding sign: "We [heart] Obamacare"](https://i0.wp.com/sandiegofreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/We_Love_Obamacare.jpg?fit=300%2C225&ssl=1)
