San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

The Return of the Faux ObamaScare Death Panel

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By Doug Porter

The future is now for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It’s survived a Supreme Court challenge, forty attempts at repeal or de-funding in the House of Representatives and another twenty or so in the US Senate.

Although the plan signed by the President in March, 2010 is essentially the same as health care reforms advocated by conservatives for many years, the fact that the word Obama is associated with this legislation (either that or because he’s black) has made the ACA a third rail for the GOP.

The Tea Party’s Freedom Works, the Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm, the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and a slew of other groups are mounting a furious effort to kill the implementation of the bill.

Now the cherry on top of this toxic propaganda sundae has appeared: the return of the Death Panel.  And nobody deserves the role of soda jerk in this circus parlor more than Sarah Palin.   [Read more…]

Corporate Education Reform Goes to College: San Francisco is the “Chicago of Higher Education”

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By Jim Miller

This summer few people outside of the Bay Area probably noted what was one of the most important stories about higher education in America: City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is losing its accreditation.

After years of wrangling, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), one of the seven regional accreditors in the western United States whose job it is to ensure the quality of higher education programs announced that CCSF was losing its accreditation in July of 2014.

Why should you care? Because ACCJC’s decision had very little to do with the quality of instruction and much more to do with imposing a new business model on community colleges that narrows their mission and opens the door to more privatization in American higher education. And San Francisco is being used as an example to intimidate other colleges to fall in line with ACCJC’s questionable “reform” agenda. Thus, what happened in San Francisco could happen in San Diego.   [Read more…]

The Border-Industrial Complex

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War profiteers have spied a new place they can militarize with their high-tech, high-cost weaponry.

By  / OtherWords.org

At last, both Republicans and Democrats are beginning to respond aggressively to economic needs. “It has been a tough time,” admits one Washington insider, applauding a new spending proposal that “could help out.”

Unfortunately, he and Congress aren’t referring to your tough times. No, no — they’re rushing to the aid of the multi-billion-dollar Military-Industrial Complex.

The government, you see, hasn’t been getting our nation into enough wars to satisfy the insatiable appetite of Northrop Grumman and its ilk for government money. So those war profiteers have spied a new place they can militarize with their high-tech, high-cost weaponry: The U.S.-Mexican border.   [Read more…]

Video Picks: Obama Torches GOP, 23 and 1/2 Hours and a Fox News Interview Fail

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It’s not all that often that President Barack Obama has truly gotten angry at his Republican counterparts. It’s been well-deserved on so many occasions, yet Obama seems to believe that civility and decency can somehow still get through to the GOP. In a press conference on Friday, Obama demonstrated some refreshing gusto, scolding the GOP for making “the idea of preventing [millions of Americans] from getting health care their holy grail.”

“Their number one priority, the one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care,” Obama said.   [Read more…]

Readers Write: Walk a Mile in Their Shoes

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By Tom Hunter

I spent five years living in vehicles at the beach in San Diego.

I knew the cops, I knew the dealers and I knew the homeless.

I was upper class, because I managed to hang onto a vehicle.  I made gas money by driving a hooker to her johns.  I was elated when the courts told the SDPD to stop ticketing people for being on the streets.  (The police have decided in practice that court order no longer applies).   [Read more…]

“In the Heights” Now Playing in San Diego

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San Diego… iNo me diga!

By Alejandra Enciso Guzmán

After an intense month of rehearsals and five days of preview shows, In the Heights had its opening night on Sunday, August 4th at the Lyceum stage in Horton Plaza. The multiple award winning musical had its first resident production in the county, thanks to the partnership between San Diego REP and the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA). In the Heights is directed by Sam Woodhouse and choreographed by Javier Velasco. The play is based on the book by Quiara Alegría Hudes and conceived by Lin- Manuel Miranda.

In the Heights is set in the vibrant community of New York’s Washington Heights. It is a community with immigrants from all over Latin America who face the day to day decision whether to keep on with traditions or leave them behind in this new place. We are introduced to barrio businesses and their owners where this tension plays out. Usnavi owns the corner bodega where he sells coffee, newspapers and miscellaneous along with his bratty yet very good hearted cousin Sonny. The Rosarios run a taxi dispatch and Daniela operates a hair salon.   [Read more…]

Tío Emilio and the Secrets of the Ancestors: Chapter 12 — Energy Connections

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“The seer sees that every man is in touch with everything else, not through his hands, but through a bunch of long fibers that shoot out in all directions from the center of his abdomen.” Don Juan, in A Separate Reality, by Carlos Castañeda.

By Richard Juarez

We were both so eager to start our next session with Don Emilio that the month just seemed to drag on and on. When the time to meet with him again finally arrived, Tony met me at my house and we ran to Nana and Tata’s.

“Good morning,” Don Emilio called to us we bounded up to the garden shed.

“Good morning, Don Emilio,” I answered as I stepped in and took my seat, breathing a little hard from the short run.
  [Read more…]

Field of View: A Walkabout in City Heights, Part I

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By Annie Lane

After spending a solid three hours wandering the streets of City Heights, I found that it’s possible to do so and still only see a fraction of what the charming, lived-in neighborhood has to offer.

Freeper and longtime City Heights resident Anna Daniels served as my guide, taking me on streets less traveled to see sights like the 47th Street Canyon, where a sign read, among other things, that no guns were allowed. We also visited the nearby Cambodian Buddhist Society of San Diego, its signature orange facade a stark contrast against the blue sky.   [Read more…]

Jazz in San Diego: Album Revue – Mike Wofford’s “It’s Personal”

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By John Lawrence

San Diego jazz musician Mike Wofford is best known for having been the accompanist for Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. He also was one of the promulgators of the west coast cool jazz sound, having played with the likes of Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne at the Hermosa Beach Lighthouse in the 1950s and 60s and later at Shelly’s club, the Manne-Hole, on North Cahuenga Blvd in Hollywood.

His current offering “It’s Personal” honors his wife, jazz flutist Holly Hofmann, who has been a major force in the presentation of jazz in San Diego for over two decades as well as, in my opinion, the best jazz flutist playing today. This album contains four originals by Mike and eight tunes from the jazz lexicon that are not often heard. This gives the album a fresh and vital quality which adds to the overall atmosphere of elegance, a Mike Wofford trademark. The time signatures are relaxed; the improvisations meld seamlessly with the tune statements, and the music flows effortlessly and creatively making this one of the best jazz albums of 2013.   [Read more…]

The Times They Are a Changin’ for Organized Labor

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By Doug Porter

The manifestations of union activism are changing in San Diego and around the country, and it’s time this story got some attention.  One of the biggest non-corporate interest groups—organized labor—is undergoing a fundamental reassessment of their role in society.

On the national level, the upcoming quadrennial AFL-CIO convention, set for Los Angeles next month, will most likely approve starting a process that will bring community, ethnic and environmental groups closer (and possibly in) to the fold.

Discussions with groups like the NAACP, La Raza and the Sierra Club are already ongoing about their role in such an umbrella grouping, including the possibility of  granting grass roots organizations “decision making power” within the AFLCIO, according to a July 27th Wall Street Journal article.   [Read more…]

City Heights From the Outside Looking In

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By Dana Driskill, SDFP Intern

Despite living only 60 miles north of San Diego for most of my life, I must admit that I feel like more like a tourist here than in Chicago where I’ve come to call home for the last two years. My name is Dana, and I’m a journalism and political science student at Northwestern University, spending the remaining weeks of my summer as an intern for the San Diego Free Press before I enter my third year of college. Before Chicago, I lived in the Murrieta/Temecula area, a stone’s throw north of the San Diego county line and right next to the Pechanga Indian Reservation.

My previous perception of San Diego is colored by my limited childhood and early adolescence experiences before graduating high school. When I hear San Diego, I think of Coronado’s endless white beaches, of Jason Mraz, of the Gaslamp District, of avocados and mouthwatering Mexican food, of Comic Con, of ill fated Padres games, and of my soccer playing years. What doesn’t come to mind, and what I’ve come to find out through a little exploration and the guidance of Google Maps, is that San Diego, like Chicago, is made up of dozens of communities with their own distinct attitude and history.

Driving along El Cajon Boulevard Tuesday, what I found most striking about City Heights is the absence of chain restaurants and stores. All my life, I’ve lived in areas where a Starbucks or McDonalds is on every street corner. Here, the main streets are lined with mom and pop shops, catering to every food taste and craving imaginable, from impossible to pronounce Vietnamese specialties to more familiar taquerillas and supermercados. The abundance of different cultures present in City Heights can best be exemplified by a Methodist Church that offers services in English, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Spanish.   [Read more…]

Ron Hicks: Soul Guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art

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The Guard of Art or the Art of Guard

by Mic Porte

Intriguing new summer expositions surprise and delight at the MCASD, Museum of Contemporary Art  in downtown San Diego.

The Color Field  by Liza Lou  welcomes you into the old train station. Beautiful and inviting, shimmering with thousands of glass beads in perspectives of color geometry, the installation was a collective art event involving museum art volunteers.  I would have liked to walk around the floor piece and enjoy the effect, but was frustrated by the velvet guard rope holding us to a one directional view.  I was delighted when the red trolley went by in the background, suddenly animating the red rectangles, and the field of color transformed from a country into a cityscape.

In The Very Large Array room, movements in the  permanent collection  (less is more?) and some new “old” pieces by San Diegan artist Manny Farber.  His soulful grey reflections, early works, are thoughtful and I would like to see a retrospective of his life works one of these days.  I also very much enjoy our unique border town artists that the museum has been collecting.

Browsing around this part of the exposition leads to some big black doors. You enter a big black room, with large grey canvas panels on the walls–sober graves?– a screen and Ron Hicks, Soul Guard.     [Read more…]

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