San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Greetings From the Cusp of TijuanDiego!

by

A Voice of Hope from the Place of Everywhere and Nowhere

By Michael Cheno Wickert

I’ve been trying to write my introduction for the San Diego Free Press for days now, but despite my ability to ramble on and on about so many topics, sitting down at a keyboard to write about myself is difficult. Therefore, I’ve decided to simply state that I am a father, a husband, and a teacher from Chula Vista. After many years of college and hard work as teachers, my wife and I were able to buy a nice house for our family. Now all the relatives can come and stay here without sleeping on the floor, and that’s a good feeling.

We sometimes refer to our home as the Refugee Camp because like our dogs and cats, our children were adopted. An unlikely bunch, we came together somehow and it is beautiful, but not always easy. Like the rest of our family, my wife and I were somewhat making it through life with the help of great people, but neither of us had a partner to fulfill that promise of happiness every morning as the sun rose and every evening as we drifted into sleep.

Our lives were not shipwrecks, they were more like messages in bottles bobbing up and down, following the currents until we came together; and little by little our little island grew into a home and then a family. Out of this wilderness, we found security in each other.   [Read more…]

Three Former Governors Call for CEQA Reform

by

by Robert Cruickshank/California High Speed Rail Blog

In a Sacramento Bee op-ed yesterday, former California Governors George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, and Gray Davis made a case for reforming the California Environmental Quality Act. When you add in Governor Jerry Brown, and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who has in the past expressed support for CEQA changes) you’ve got all five living California governors, with nearly 40 years of executive leadership, lined up behind changing the landmark law.

These former governors are absolutely right when they note that CEQA is sometimes abused by people who do not have environmentally friendly or sustainable goals in mind. We’ve seen this repeatedly, whether it’s a lawsuit blocking a bike master plan or the now-settled lawsuit from Chowchilla that used CEQA to attack the high speed rail project route because the tracks stood between the city and its desired sprawl. And transit advocates have repeatedly witnessed NIMBYs conflating their own aesthetic judgements with “environmental quality” and using that to delay or make more costly important transportation projects.   [Read more…]

Suicides in the Military Reach a New High

by

By Paula Hoffman-Villanueva/COMDSD.org

Just as Americans have, for over four decades, uncomfortably turned their heads when confronted with homeless Vietnam veterans in the street, people now hear of the escalating suicide rates of our current military and go on about their business. We thought recent reports alarming enough to revisit the subject in order to remind ourselves why counter-recruitment organizations are dedicated to informing young people about harsh military realities before they decide to enlist.

While experts struggle with this “epidemic” (a word used by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta), it is really quite obvious to peace activists what the problem is. Simply put, the emotional pain of war along with military demands can cause suicide.   [Read more…]

In Defying Anti-Tax Orthodoxy, California Voters and Schools Are Rewarded With Projected Budget Turnaround

by

After years of devastating funding cuts, California schools begin to get much needed relief.

California’s newfound budget security was made possible because last November, in what must have come as a complete shock to Republicans, California voters approved a plan—Prop 30—to raise taxes slightly on the wealthiest Californians in addition to temporarily raising the state sales tax, effectively spreading the pain to all Californians. This was a slap in the face to Republican orthodoxy, since the only acceptable thing to do with taxes is to cut them, if not eliminate them altogether.

When Gov. Brown released his budget proposal last month, the state’s legislative analyst concluded that California would still run a deficit of $1.9 billion for FY 2013 instead of the $25 billion of just a couple of years ago, but that if things continued on the same trajectory the state could be running significant budget surpluses in the following five years.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Judge’s Ruling Against Balboa Park Remake Raises Lots of Questions

by

Superior Court Judge Timothy Taylor made good yesterday on his earlier suggestions that the City of San Diego’s case for renovating the Plaza de Panama in Balboa Park wouldn’t pass a legal challenge.

San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith appeared in court for oral arguments last Friday, arguing that the City was free to reject protections offered by the area’s historic status because of the additional benefits construction of a by-pass and parking lot would provide.

Taylor’s 15 page ruling rejected that argument saying, “Respectfully, this strikes the court as re-writing the Municipal Code. The City Council did not enact language permitting alteration if it determined that the proposed alteration would result in a more reasonable beneficial use; rather, it required that there be no reasonable beneficial use absent the alteration.”

UPDATE: Via KPBS MidDay Report- “I’ve told the committee that the project is over,” (Irwin) Jacobs says. They’re not taking part in additional plans, activities.   [Read more…]

New Schools CFO: SD Unified Will Afford Armed Guards, School Prayer with Pocket Change

by

By Aaryn Belfer

“Poor guy, he doesn’t realize that being frank and open about our financial condition is discouraged around here. He will be taken to the wood shed.”
–Text message from San Diego Unified School District board member, Scott Barnett, predicting the fate of the new chief financial officer Stan Dobbs.

Only one weekend after “investigative journalist” Will Carless published his sycophantic Q&A with Stan “Data” Dobbs, school Superintendant Bill Kowba did damage control, issuing a relatively meek apology for Dobbs’ many erroneous statements. Data Dobbs was then quietly whisked away and fed into a wood chipper. Keeping with its pattern for sticking any warm body in the CFO position, San Diego Unified vetted and hired Dobbs’ replacement even before the blowhard’s left leg had been turned into mulch.

What follows is an exclusive interview with San Diego Unified’s newest Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Palin.   [Read more…]

SDG&E and Southern California Edison Up to Same Old Tricks: They Want You to Pay for Repairs to San Onofre

by

We have written before about how electric utility companies try to get ratepayers rather than stockholders to pay for repairs to their equipment.

In particular, we wrote previously how SDG&E appealed to the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) for a rate increase after the disastrous Witch Creek fire..

Now Southern California Edison (SCE) and SDG&E, majority and minority owners, respectively, are using the same playbook with regard to the repairs undertaken at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).   [Read more…]

Cosmic Collisions, Human Encounters

by

Reuben H. Fleet’s digital show Cosmic Collisions, viewed from earth

by Karen Kenyon

“Collisions, whether they are infinitesimal or massive, drive the evolution of cosmic objects in much the same way as natural selection or the collision of energetic particles with DNA drives the evolution of species,” Michael M. Shara, curator of the Cosmic Collisions show.

We may want to avoid collisions, but they are part of evolving life, and actually may lead to something positive. The new IMax film, Cosmic Collisions, now showing in an open-ended engagement at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park, explores this theme with extraordinary art and beauty.

We hope to never experience these harsh encounters, fearing collisions in space, but also in our human encounters — soul collisions (too much emotional pain); auto collisions (trouble, inconvenience, waste of time, perhaps physical pain, or cost!). We even want to avoid conflicts, or arguments.

But if we look up at the message in the heavens we can see that collisions are not always so bad, and whether constructive or catastrophic, they are part of the workings of the universe, they are inevitable.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – San Diego Schools’ CFO Takes a Long Walk on Voice of San Diego’s Short Pier

by

Since the voters spoke back in November and handed the proponents of darkness and austerity a resounding defeat, the forces of reaction throughout the State of California have been seeking to throw a monkey wrench into the process.

At San Diego’s UT, this process is blatant, with factually challenged front page articles suggesting that businesses are fleeing California followed by editorials citing the suppositions minted earlier as gospel truth.

With San Diego’s ‘independent’ news source, aka The Voice of San Diego, the propagation of the reactionary agenda is accomplished via mindless contrarianism. The need to push controversy overwhelms any need for fact checking; it’s okay to let public officials yell ‘fire’ in the schoolhouses of our city.

So it was with this sense of ‘newsworthiness’ that the VOSD published an interview on Friday with Stan “Data” Dobbs, the newly hired Chief Financial Officer for the San Diego School Unified School District.

After telling interviewer Will Carless that “I get bored quickly if I don’t have enough problems to solve”, Dobbs proceeds to create a whole lot of problems for the School District and, most likely, his future employment prospects.   [Read more…]

Grading Jerry Brown’s Education Agenda

by

It’s the beginning of the new semester at San Diego City College where I work, so I thought this would be a good time to evaluate some of Jerry Brown’s bold moves on the educational front.

In terms of funding, the passage of Proposition 30 has stopped much of the bleeding in schools and colleges across the state, but it still does not do enough to restore all that has been cut in recent years.

Therefore, despite some very good news, challenges remain ahead.

Come inside to see Gov. Brown’s Report Card…   [Read more…]

Enero Zapatista

by

Someone posted it on facebook, a picture of me silhouetted in a vision of rich colors, sharing a poem. I wanted to write about the experience when I first saw the striking image but didn’t know how to go about it right away.

Then it came to me as I was reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony,” a masterpiece about the Native American world, a brilliant tale about Tayo, an army veteran of mixed ancestry who returns to the reservation, scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II.
  [Read more…]

Spilling the Beans: Overheard in San Diego Coffeehouses

by

by Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes

The day after President Obama’s reelection, I was in an affluent neighborhood coffeehouse trying to work. A table of loud businessmen in their early sixties proclaimed, “If the Democrats want to tax the wealthy, we’ll dump our stock, layoff our workers, and move our businesses overseas. We’ll see how the middle class likes that!” The angry tirade reminded me of a two-year-old who didn’t get his way.

I do a lot of work in coffeehouses around San Diego. I try not to listen in on people’s conversations, but when they are loud proclamations I can’t avoid hearing, I sometimes write down the outrageous things that come out of people’s mouths.

Recently, I reviewed my notes and realized they are a psychological cardiogram of our city. I decided to publish the most outlandish conversations in hopes of exposing the anger behind them.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry