By Brett Warnke
Delegates who walked out of the convention to protest the DNC host a rally at City Hall. Speakers emotionally describe their commitment to Bernie Sanders despite his having endorsed Hillary Clinton yesterday on the floor of Wells Fargo Convention Center. [Read more…]
Carolina Martinez / Environmental Health Coalition
Located in San Diego County’s second oldest city, Old Town National City remains a primarily low-income Latino neighborhood with evolving surroundings. Over the past 50 years, the community has changed from a mainly residential neighborhood to a mixture of auto-related businesses located around schools and homes. Auto-body shops in residential neighborhoods burden the health of the community by emitting toxic pollution into the air we breathe.
In 2005, our community decided to combat conflicting land use and bring health back to the community with a vision for a vibrant and toxic-free neighborhood. Our plans included affordable housing within walking distance of a transit center, construction that wouldn’t damage Paradise Creek and a healthy community park to replace polluted grounds. [Read more…]
By South OB Girl / OB Rag
While thousands of people were attending Comic-Con last week, Marvel Comics announced the release of a new comic book series on Friday July 22. The superheroes will be women. And the series is being written by women. George Gene Gustines, writing in The New York Times July 23rd issue, did an interesting review of the series, entitled, “Marvel Shines a Spotlight on Women.”
Wakanda is a fictional African country, and the world of the Marvel series, Black Panther. World of Wakanda will be a companion series. And will premiere in November.
The current Black Panther series is written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, author and a national correspondent for The Atlantic. The new comic will be written by two women, who are writing comics for the first time: the feminist writer Roxane Gay and the poet Yona Harvey. [Read more…]
By Vera Sanchez and Sunny Rey
It is a kid’s dream to stand on an Olympic podium and have their nation’s flag wave high as he smiles at his family. Cody Miller, of Billings, Montana, qualified on June 27th for the Men’s 100m Breaststroke coming from behind to secure his spot on the Olympic swim team. This year’s games will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil beginning August 5th, 2016.
The road for Cody did not come easy. [Read more…]
By David Akadjian / Daily Kos
While taking a short break from work this afternoon, I ran into my next door neighbor. She is an older lady who is about as liberal as I am. She said to me, “I’m afraid Trump is going to win.”
Recently, I’ve heard this from a couple of other people as well. It’s wise to never discount intuition—especially when I have the same feeling. So I started thinking about why I feel this way, as we often intuit things before we’re able to explain them. This was how I wrote about how “Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere” in August 2015. This is just how people’s brains work.
So I threw aside the piece I was going to write this week to think about why. [Read more…]
When I was a graduate student at UCSD, my adviser, Irwin Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm and local billionaire, advised me that at the end of my second year there enrolled in a PhD program, there would be a “filtering out procedure.” Jacobs, the ultimate meritocrat, thought nothing about the disruption of lives that would be caused by having them filtered out.
Some of these people had sacrificed to come there leaving good jobs; some of them had families to support. I felt somewhat responsible because I had persuaded some of them to enroll in that program. But Jacobs had no qualms about filtering them out if they didn’t meet his high standards and didn’t deserve to be in the ranks of the ‘best and the brightest.’
My point was why did they admit them into the program in the first place if they didn’t think they were good enough to be designated PhDs?
As she looks back at the last thirty-five years, Skorepa says her most important achievement is that people have pride living in San Ysidro. She’s also proud of “always being ahead of the curve–designing programs, services and events that rock the boat, turn the boat over or send the boat home.”
Whether it’s pollution created at the San Ysidro Port of Entry due to wait times, pressing for more parkland in San Ysidro or establishing an art gallery where most people wouldn’t think to have one, Andrea’s out-of-the-box approach has had a lasting impact.
Moreover, Skorepa brought affordable housing to the South Bay over the decades. Casa Familiar has 451 units at Park Haven and another over 300 units in Villa Nueva. They also have affordable housing for seniors and continue to urge the city for increasing the available affordable units. [Read more…]
By Brett Warnke
On Monday, storm clouds hung over Philadelphia as Democratic delegates arrived to Wells Fargo Center at AT&T Station south of downtown to a protesting crowd virulently against a Hillary nomination. Over 1,000 protestors, most with Bernie Sanders shirts or stickers, were in high dudgeon after revelations of tilted tables and bias within the DNC.
Gone was the sense of hope and inspiration I’d seen at Bernie rallies in San Diego. What remained were conversations among clusters of Bernie die-hards about “tilted tables” and “election fraud.” The crowd was angry and Bernie signs shook with desperate vigor. But Monday had the feel of a stopped station wagon, a father behind the wheel, screaming at the glaring dead end sign. [Read more…]
Maria and I just spent 38 days in Europe with a stop in Philly on the way home, a vacation that had a combination of both joy and misery and ended with notions of hope.
It began with a man driving us from the Madrid-Barajas Airport to our hotel, talking about politics all the while. He wanted us to know that Spaniards, as we Americans do, have a few Donald Trumps around town. He had a lot to say about our president, a man he admired “for how he stepped up and got the U.S. out of the recession.” He finished his praise with “Great man, that Obama.”
All that made us feel very welcomed and eager to explore the city. As soon as we got our luggage in the room we strolled along streets and plazas built a very long time ago, and dined on the tastiest of tapas. We got a good nights sleep and got up the next morning in an easygoing mood, ready to take in as much as we could.
Then came Orlando, news that weakened our knees. [Read more…]
As you turn onto Hollister Road in Imperial Beach, and go into the Tijuana River Valley, you feel like you are in a different world. It feels like the dusty countryside in Mexico, and a place where non-conformists live. This is where you will find Ferdinand’s Familia, a sanctuary for large and small animals, run by an unusual couple.
Ferdinand, the peaceful bull, is a good symbol for this place that was founded by vegetarian peace activists, Michael Pratt and Janice Jordan. They have shared the same vision in life for 19 years. Both are members of the San Diego Peace and Freedom Party.
Ferdinand’s Familia first started in 2008 in their home and with rental stalls. However, as word got out and they began to rescue more neglected and abandoned animals, they realized they needed a larger property of their own and the present sanctuary opened in 2012. [Read more…]
Editor: This is a continuation of the debate over the future of Fiesta Island. It began with op-eds in the San Diego Union-Tribune, and we helped it along with our earlier post. Here below, Judith Swink rebuts the rebuttals.
By Judith Swink
Improvements on Fiesta Island will happen eventually because they must.
The 1994 Mission Bay Park Master Plan carried forward that intention from the previous master plans. The proposed Fiesta Island improvements will make the island more useful and inviting to a much larger number of people than just those who want to use it as it is today. It is a key tenet of both the Mission Bay Park Master Plan and the California Coastal Act that coastal recreation areas be developed to enable use and access for everyone.
A Local Coastal Program amendment in 2002, in conjunction with approval of the Sea World Master Plan by the Coastal Commission requires the City to develop Fiesta Island as proposed in the 1994 Mission Bay Park Master Plan and LCP. [Read more…]
Will Donald Trump have Hillary Clinton arrested if he is elected in November? His base sure wants it.
With loud chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” reverberating through the cavernous arena at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the delegates displayed for millions of viewers the war cry of the assemblage.
Whenever Trump or Chris Christie or anyone else among the second and third-string speakers on stage called the Democratic Party nominee out for alleged “crimes”, the chant would go up. [Read more…]
