San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Homelessness Can’t Be Solved with Fines and Arrests

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By John Tharp & Maria Foscarinis / OtherWords 

When San Diego resident Gerald Stark’s rent increased and he couldn’t afford another apartment, the retired union pipefitter moved into his RV.

But because he lacked an address, San Diego law made it almost impossible for him to park his RV legally. Soon the city confiscated it, leaving him out on the streets.

There, he was ticketed for violating another law prohibiting sleeping in public. Faced with thousands of dollars in fines and fees he was unable to pay, Stark lived every day in fear of being arrested — for simply trying to survive.   [Read more…]

An American Traveler’s Experience with Europe’s ‘Failing Healthcare System’

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By Karin Brennan

One inattentive moment was all it took to alter a long-planned, three-week European vacation. On my first morning in Amsterdam, I missed a step when heading for breakfast in my hotel. The next thing I knew, I was on the tile floor, dazed and bleeding. I immediately knew it was not good and that a hospital visit was in my immediate future. But, in Amsterdam? What would this cost? What kind of care would I get? As a taxi took my husband and I to the closest hospital, I was more than a little apprehensive.

What follows is my firsthand experience with the (emergency) healthcare systems in the Netherlands and Germany.   [Read more…]

This Is What Voter Suppression Looks Like | Video Worth Watching

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From the Black Voters Matter Facebook page:
Voter suppression is real, y’all and it happened to us today in Louisville, Georgia in Jefferson County. We had a whole busload of beautiful black elders ready to go vote when the county commisionner shut us down and made our elders get off the bus without having the chance to vote. This is voter suppression pure and simple. These elders have been through this time and time again so today was fuel to our fire! Instead of bring five family members and friends, they’re gonna bring twenty! Can’t stop, won’t stop. When we work together, we win. Share this video for us to get out the word that we need a record turnout in Georgia from now untiol Election Day! And tell us if and where you voted yet in the comments!!   [Read more…]

The Duncan Hunter(s) and Various Other Threats to Our National Security

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Any doubts about Congressional candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar’s moral code should have been resolved on Tuesday, as the 29-year-old Democrat shook Duncan Hunter, Sr.’s hand after listening to the old man lie to the assembled news media in the shadow of the USS Midway on San Diego’s waterfront.

If Campa-Najjar was the terrorist threat the retired Congressman made him out to be, he should have punched the old son of a bitch in the face right then and there. Hell, that’s what I would have been at least tempted to do if I’d been anywhere nearby. (I guess that’s why nobody’s clamoring for me to run for office.)

Instead, Duncan Hunter Jr’s challenger has issued what he says is his final statement on what the Washington Post called “the most vile political ad of this year’s midterm elections.”

“The FBI throughly vetted me, my family history and connections. After doing so, they determined my allegiances to the United States were unquestionable and I was given security clearance to serve in the federal government as recent as 2016. I am not a security threat, Duncan Hunter is, however.”
  [Read more…]

The Ups and The Downs | My Reporter’s Life, Part Three

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By the late 1970s, I was brought back into the newsroom to do general assignment reporting, a kind of sideways move. I could handle breaking stuff, and innocent features (like my seven-day case of hiccups) but the editors might have figured I offered too much trouble on the beats — police, higher education and investigations.

Once again on the day shift, I made it to journalism’s summa cum laude, or maybe just the magna version.

On September 25, 1978, a fully-loaded PSA liner crashed into a private Cessna in its approach path to Lindbergh Field, leaving 144 dead, most of them the airliner’s passengers. The first call sent all of us to the east windows of the Copley Building, where we could see the white smoke towering over North Park.

I forced myself to ask to go to the scene but the city editor told me to stay and take the reports from the staff sent to the scene, the two of them so horrified I recommended they do what I’d done at less bloody scenes: locate the fireman in a yellow hazard suit or a plainclothes suit and walk toward either or both, looking neither left nor right. They’d have the answers.   [Read more…]

Fanita Ranch Development Opposed by Santee City Council District 1 Candidate

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Evlyn Andrade-Heymsfield is vying for Santee’s District 1 City Council seat. Rumor has it, she is giving eight-year incumbent Rob McNelis a run for his money. 

People in District 1 can’t turn their heads without seeing signs that read, “Evlyn.” She’s running on her first name, not only because her last name is unwieldy for some tongues, but because she truly is on a first-name basis with so many of the voters. 

Santee, which always had an at-large, citywide voting system, was divided into four election districts in April of 2018. The smaller voting pool of the district system has enabled newcomer candidates, like Evlyn, to hit every resident’s door.    [Read more…]

Longtime I.B. Resident Supports Paloma Aguirre for City Council | 2018 Candidate Profiles | Readers Write

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By Drew Douglas

My family lived five blocks from the ocean in the heart of Imperial Beach when I was born, and there I was raised for most of my formative years. Life in our beach town was always closely tied to the waves and the tides, and it still is. It defined much of my childhood. Skateboarding or riding our bikes to the beach wasn’t just a ritual, it was a luxury we took for granted.

Walking home from the beach on a sunny summer afternoon, wearing a bathing suit, draped in a towel, the warm sun on your skin still freckled with dried salt and sand from the ocean — this is quintessential Imperial Beach. But we have continually battled a constant threat to this tranquility. And it hasn’t just hampered our way of life, it has hindered the economic growth of the community.

They say “all politics are local” but too often we become so engrossed in national political spectacles that we forget about our own backyard. I spent many a summer and winter day on the beaches of I.B. swimming, bodyboarding, fishing with my father from the pier, climbing on the rocks of the jetties to watch the sunset with friends or just soaking up the sun in the sand.   [Read more…]

I Keep Thinking of Christine

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I keep thinking of Christine,
her story of a man
cupping his hand
over her mouth
so she couldn’t scream
and expose his scheme
to forcefully
have his way with her
like so many men have done
for eons
in human history.
And for decades she didn’t scream,
except for those
inaudible screams that echo in
those dark places inside
human beings
where we try to hide
pain that’s hard to confront,   [Read more…]

Iconic ‘Black Power’ Salute at Olympics Marks 50th Anniversary | Video Worth Watching

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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

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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

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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.”

  [Read more…]

Some Big Developments | My Reporter’s Life, Part Two

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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…]

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