San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

San Diego for Free: Free Brewing Tour at Ballast Point Brewing

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A weekly column dedicated to sharing the best sights and activities in San Diego at the best price – free! We have a great city and you don’t need to break the bank to experience it.

Ballast Point Brewing & Spirits
Website: http://www.ballastpoint.com
Address & Neighborhood: 10051 Old Grove Road, San Diego, CA 92131; Scripps Ranch

Best For: Beer drinkers, politicians, gregarious types, kind souls
Free tour times: Daily at 12:00pm, 2pm, 5pm

San Diego is home to many breweries and it seems like a new one opens nearly every week. Per the local beer-centric magazine WestCoaster, there are currently 60 operating brew houses in San Diego County and an additional 27 in planning or development. With San Diego Beer Week beginning tomorrow, 11/2, and running through 11/11 I thought a free activity related to San Diego’s suds scene would be appropriate. There are also an incredible amount of events going on during Beer Week – check the website for more information.

Touring a brewery is an opportunity to learn about the brewing process and about the history of the brewery and the styles of beer they produce. Although the brewing process portion of tours can get repetitive if you’ve been on a couple before I find it interesting to experience the personality of a brewery that comes through on a tour, and the opportunity to try some their wares at the conclusion.   [Read more…]

Día de los Muertos Is a Reunion of our Past, Present, and Future Relations

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This is a Response to Brent E. Beltrán’s article, “Desde la Logan: Día de los Muertos, We Commemorate Our Dead”

By Remigia Bermúdez

With El Día de los Muertos just around the corner from the celebration of life for Aztleca, one can could surmise that indeed it was a well-deserved farewell as much as it was a “thank you to” and a “welcome for” Aztleca. Diligently, he danzó over 40 years every Día de los Muertos at Chicano Park, honoring those who passed on. And on October 27 of this year, it was others who dansarón (danced) for him for the first time since the 1970’s when the first Toltecas en Aztlán started las danzas indígenas de nuestros antepasados precolombinos (the indigenous dances of our pre-colombian forefathers).   [Read more…]

Sex In San Diego: How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement

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Patheos / By Libby Anne

The spring of my sophomore year of college I was president of my university’s Students for Life chapter. The fall of my junior year of college I cut my ties with the pro-life movement. Five years later I have lost the last shred of faith I had in that movement. This is my story.

I was raised in the sort of evangelical family where abortion is the number one political issue. I grew up believing that abortion was murder, and when I stopped identifying as pro-life I initially still believed that. Why, then, did I stop identifying as pro-life? Quite simply, I learned that increasing contraceptive use, not banning abortion, was the key to decreasing the number of abortions. Given that the pro-life movement focuses on banning abortion and is generally opposed to advocating greater contraceptive use, I knew that I no longer fit. I also knew that my biggest allies in decreasing the number of abortions were those who supported increased birth control use – in other words, pro-choice progressives. And so I stopped calling myself pro-life.   [Read more…]

Busloads of Foreign Looking People and Fraudulent Voting Assistance: Paranoia at the Polls and the City Heights Vote

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This past weekend I suddenly became conscious of a quotidian, unremarkable occurrence in City Heights. I was walking to the number 7 bus stop on University Avenue when a large van with the words Alliance for African Assistance turned down the street. Earlier that morning a mini-van pulled up next door with a small group that socializes regularly with my ethnic Chinese neighbors.

But this weekend I wondered if vans, mini-vans and even buses will be used to get citizens in City Heights to the polls on election day. I hope so.   [Read more…]

Why Carl DeMaio Has Made San Diego the “Battleground City” for his Radical Privatization Agenda

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DeMaio Carries the Radical Right’s Agenda of the Private Ownership of (Our) Government

It was in the middle of April back in 2011, and a couple hundred local Republican bigwigs were holding a gala “unity night” at the Kona Kai on Shelter Island. Mayor Jerry Sanders was joining Republican Councilman Kevin Faulconer, other honchos and establishment types from the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, the Lincoln Club, the Taxpayers Association, plus cadres of right-wing activists – all coming together in an orgy of unified puffery. They had come together to celebrate the launch of a ballot initiative that would severely undercut the power of public sector unions to bargain for their members in San Diego.

One of the heroes and firebrands of the local rightwing, Carl DeMaio got up and made a speech. Somewhere in his spiel, he challenged the gathering with a question – a question that would define the coming year and months in San Diego. DeMaio – a City Councilman – called upon his audience and asked them: “Are you ready to make San Diego the Wisconsin of the West?” His fellow Republicans cheered. They were ready, as was described by the rightward SDRostra.com
  [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Zombie Attack in San Diego Underway

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Halloween is more than a trick or treating event for hundreds of Marines, Navy special ops types, soldiers, police and firefighters in San Diego today as they confront a nightmarish invasion of the living dead.

The 44 acre Paradise Point Resort on Mission Bay will be the site of a Hollywood-style production of a zombie attack as part of an emergency response training program. It’s just one part of five-day counterterrorism summit run by the Halo Corporation as an approved training event by the Homeland Security Grant Program and the Urban Areas Security Initiative. Participants (or in most cases, government agencies) are coughing up a $1,000 registration fee. The session runs through Friday.

In keeping with the holiday aura surrounding this program, the keynote speaker at the conference is a retired top spook — former CIA Director Michael Hayden.   [Read more…]

Sandra Fluke, My New Hero

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It was so nice at Balboa Park the other day. Sunny. Warm. Bright. People wearing smiles every where I looked. We were gathered at 6th and Laurel for a Rally for Women’s Health, featuring Sandra Fluke, a woman who gained fame for being shunned by a group with no shame who ran a sham they call the United States House of Representatives’ House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

These Big Time Charlies wouldn’t let her speak to them about reproductive freedom for women because, according to them, she had no “expertise.” And she pretty much had to tell them “Hello! I’m a woman, you know, and how much ‘expertise’ y’all got regarding a woman’s needs, I might ask, considering that every single one of you is a man?” Not to mention, (to counter what their smartassed answer to the question is likely to be) men who have not evolved much when it comes to ways of thinking things female beyond their junior high days.   [Read more…]

Advice to Bob Filner: Stop Vilifying Dean Spanos and the Chargers

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The San Diego mayoral candidate’s clumsy statements about the team owner are not helpful, or wise. Update: Watch KUSI Debate

I like Bob Filner. I think he’s been an outstanding representative of our region in Congress, and I think he’ll make a very good mayor. I’ve enjoyed the several interactions that I’ve had with him during his campaign for mayor. I think he’s the right candidate to look to in order to create a better economic environment for all of San Diego. This online publication recently endorsed Bob Filner, and I fully and completely support that endorsement. I wrote the damn thing, after all!

So yes, I will be voting for Bob Filner on Nov. 6. No question whatsoever about it.

There is one thing, though, that I do wish Filner would clean up his act about. During a debate last night on KUSI between Filner and his opponent, Carl DeMaio, the question was posed about the candidates’ support for a new stadium for the Chargers. Both opposed public subsidies, although DeMaio supports the idea of a sports entertainment complex that will include a new football stadium. “But it has to be privately funded,” he said.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – 17,000 Readers Said “No More”: UT-San Diego Sunday Circulation Plunges (UPDATED)

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Since taking over ownership of San Diego’s daily newspaper last year Publisher Doug Manchester and CEO John Lynch have responded to criticisms that their style of far right advocacy might be alienating readers by claiming that readership was rising.

Sorry guys. The people don’t love your act. The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) numbers for the year ending this last September are in. Last years’ Sunday circulation beats this year’s Sunday circulation by 17,051 copies, including digital and ‘branded’ editions.

Sunday editions in the newspaper world are critical barometers. Sunday is the day that advertisers crave. Readers typically have more time to peruse the paper and copies of the paper are more likely to be shared. So losing readership on a Sunday is a big deal.   [Read more…]

Fighting the Bias of the ‘Voice of San Diego’

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by Larry Remer

 How would you feel if you were a baseball player in the World Series and you found out that the first base umpire was on the payroll of the other team?

That’s kind of how I feel about the Voice of San Diego’s coverage of Proposition Z.

I am running the Yes on Prop. Z campaign; and for months I’ve sparred with reporters and editors from ‘Voice of San Diego’ about the negative slant of their coverage. And they just parried back and defended what they’d written, as reporters usually do when campaigns and public agencies complain their stories.   [Read more…]

Women for Romney? (Plus: Official Republican Party Rape Advisory Chart)

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By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“How can women possibly vote for Romney and Ryan?” She looked dismayed, my friend, and I understood how she felt.

How indeed, with the 2012 campaigns’ incessant flow of prejudicial comments spewing from white, male Republican mouths to splatter women with such idiotic statements:

As, abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman’s life and “Health of the mother has become a tool for abortions anytime, under any reason” (Rep. Joe Walsh, running for re-election); pregnancy that results from rape is a “gift from God” (Richard Mourdock, U.S. Senate candidate*); “forcible rape” is just “stock language” (Rep. Paul Ryan, vice presidential candidate); “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” (Rep. Todd Akin, running for U.S. Senate);…   [Read more…]

The Starting Line –Three Halloween Stories About Politics That Should Send Chills Up Your Spine

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Politics takes a back seat today as the nation casts its eyes towards the East Coast and mid-west , which are under assault by Hurricane Sandy barreling from the southeast and an early winter storm coming in from the northwest. Here on the left coast life goes on and there are headlines to report.

The Giants won, the Chargers suck and there are too many political commercials on TV this week. That about covers it for today.

In the absence of any major breaking news, I’m putting out three stories that illustrate what a tangled web the media can spin when it comes to politics.   [Read more…]

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