San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

CA GOP Continues its Death Spiral, Seeks Help From Prop 32 Supporters

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California Republican Party faces fiscal, organizing questions, banks on special exemptions.

by Brian Leubitz/Calitics.com

The California Republican Party is in something of a desperate situation. They hold no statewide offices, and then they had a story in the New York Times titled “Republican Party in California Is Caught in Cycle of Decline.”

That’s never a good thing, especially when it is combined with a follow-up from the San Francisco Chronicle with some worrying financial numbers. Without getting deeply into the nitty, gritty, it is pretty bad. They are expected to reveal a deficit of nearly half a million dollars, and are considering closing their Sacramento office.   [Read more…]

Sex In San Diego: The Original Sexual Revolution

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by Laura Miller / Salon

Academic history — the kind backed up by piles of primary-source research and hedged with cautionary remarks — is often useful, but rarely fascinating. Most of it, however, isn’t about a subject as perennially engaging as Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s. The Oxford historian’s new book, “The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution,” describes how sex became modern in 18th-century England, a transformation that explains “the profound chasm between our present attitudes to sex and those that prevailed for most of western history.” We tend to think of sex as something primal and unchanging, but as Dabhoiwala tells it, nothing could be further from the truth.

“The Origin of Sex” begins with an anecdote from 1612. An unmarried couple accused of fornication and bastardy (producing an illegitimate child) were dragged before the magistrates. They were convicted, then sentenced to be stripped naked to the waist, “whipped from the Gatehouse in Westminster unto Temple Bar” before the jeering public and then banished from the city — severed from their families, former friends, and previous occupations. Publicly shamed and condemned, their lives as they knew them were over.   [Read more…]

U-T San Diego Misrepresents Work by San Diego River Park Foundation – It Does Not Roust the Homeless

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Having just gotten off the phone with Richard Dhu, program manager at the San Diego River Park Foundation, I found I had to totally re-orient the article I was writing on whether his clean river program rousts the homeless from the San Diego River area. It does not do that, he said.

I had called him because of a U-T San Diego article written by Mike Lee about the Foundation’s latest river clean-up. In his article, posted July 27th, Lee – it appears – misrepresented what the Foundation is doing. In his opening sentence, Lee spells out his perspective:

“The San Diego River Park Foundation is launching a yearlong cleanup initiative in the Mission Valley Preserve to reduce homeless camps and garbage that gathers along the river’s lower stretch.” (My emphasis.)

“That’s not what we’re doing,” Richard told me this morning when I asked him about Lee’s article. Richard told me that is not what he told Lee. There is nothing about dealing with the homeless in his group’s mission statement, plus, Richard said, they receive grant monies and not any for rousting homeless people.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line — Three Things the UT-San Diego Doesn’t Want You to Know

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Welcome to August, San Diego. Let’s start the month off right by cutting through the crap that publisher UT-San Diego Doug Manchester and his motley crews of spinmeisters are trying to pass off as reality. Sometimes they simply ignore news that has importance to wide swaths of the population, sometimes they simply twist the truth, and sometimes they simply lie. We’ve got great examples of all these ‘truth bending’ techniques, and hope you’ll come along for the ride. There are “lie-sickness’ bags available for those of you who feel may feel ill as we proceed along on our journey, please feel free to use them….

If you read today’s daily newspaper for our fair city you wouldn’t know that today is a momentous day for an estimated 47 million women in the United States. If you merely browsed the front page (or heard Carl DeMaio doing his ‘victory lap’ on the local electronic media), you might be under the impression that all systems were “go” for an overhaul of the City’s pension system. And if you were a regular reader, you might be under the impression that our region’s economic security was endangered by looming cuts in the defense budget, cuts that certainly must be the fault of our current Commander in Chief. Let’s start with the biggie…

August 1st marks the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions that affect women in this country over the course of the coming year. Every health insurance policy provided by employers must now include a package of preventive and diagnostic care for women without co-pays or deductibles.   [Read more…]

Cal Fire: Wind Turbine Generator Caused Wildland Fire that Charred 367 Acres

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by Miriam Raftery/East County Magazine

July 31, 2012 (San Diego’s East County) – With County Supervisors poised to consider approval of Tule Wind and a wind ordinance that could open much of fire-prone East County to wind energy development, a wildland fire that started at a wind turbine facility in Riverside County last month provides fuel for opponents concerned about fire risks posed by industrial-scale wind projects.

“The fire started with the windmill itself,” Captain Greg Ewing with Cal Fire/Riverside Fire Department informed ECM today.

Despite extensive area cleared around the base of each turbine, Ewing said, the blaze still spread into a wildland fire that swiftly engulfed 367 acres. If not for prompt reporting by a witness, it could have been far worse.   [Read more…]

GOP’s Three Biggest Fears in 2012

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Only an insecure and ideologically bankrupt political party has to game the rules to stay in power.

by Steven Rosenfeld/AlterNet

As the 2012 presidential campaign takes a breather, we need to consider why today’s Republicans are no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt or Richard Nixon, but instead a truly toxic aberration.

As James Fallows noted a year ago in the Atlantic, the modern GOP’s biggest sin is discarding “political norms” that everyone once understood would hurt the country—such as not paying 74,000 federal air traffic controllers and construction workers to attack labor unions, a drama that played out last August.

Since then the GOP’s bad behavior has only worsened. In the introduction to their recent book, It’s Even Worse Than It Appears, centrists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote, “However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”   [Read more…]

Death by Ally

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Mission Failure: Afghanistan. A message written in blood that no one wants to hear.

by Tom Engelhardt/TomDispatch.com

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21? It would dominate the news. We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here.

Well, the equivalent has happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the superhero movies). It even has a name: green-on-blue violence. In 2012 — and twice last week — Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security guards, largely in units being trained or mentored by the U.S. or its NATO allies, have turned their guns on those mentors, the people who are funding, supporting, and teaching them, and pulled the trigger.   [Read more…]

Unexpected Visitors: Critters on the porch, under the house & in the yard

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I live in the City Heights neighborhood of Teralta East, the long thin sliver of flat land wedged between the busy major thoroughfares of University Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard on the south and north and Fairmount and Euclid avenues on the west and east. There is not much in the way of open space in the area and the canyons are cut off from Teralta East by those same surface roads. Nevertheless, a coyote was recently spotted in Fairmount Village. My little section of 45th street, in fact my house, is home to opossums and skunks and a raccoon has even passed through.

The opossums have been around the longest. They seem to have adapted easily to urban living. During the early years here, they feasted upon the snails and slugs that abounded in the yard. After wiping out all of the snails and slugs, they came to rely more and more upon the cat food which we set out for the abandoned outdoor cats that have also taken up residence with us. It is an understatement to say that a mature opossum is not exactly the classical beauty of the wild kingdom. There’s the rat like tail, the scroungy fur and the close set eyes and long narrow face that fall woefully short on the intelligence and cuteness scale.   [Read more…]

Polls Show Local Races up for Grabs; National Parties Ante Up

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DCCC reserves $1.65 million from national funds, NRCC pledges $1.6 million to Bilbray–Updated

It’s the end of July, and some important political races in San Diego are beginning to heat up. Two polls released yesterday started to bring both the San Diego mayoral race and the 52nd District Congressional race into focus for the general election campaign.

According to a report by Roll Call, a Washington, DC based publication, the race between Democratic Challenger Scott Peters and Republican incumbent Brian Bilbray is a dead heat with each candidate receiving 40% of the projected vote. The poll showed a significant 19% of those questioned as undecided.   [Read more…]

Phoney Emails Catch LA Times and San Diego Reader in Hoax About San Diego US Attorney Targeting Pharmacies

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A hoax has caught both the LA Times and the San Diego Reader in a bind. Both newspapers carried stories today – July 31st – that US Attorney General Laura Duffy was now targeting pharmacies in San Diego for illegal drug sales.

But it was all a hoax perpetrated via two phoney emails sent out to media outlets under Duffy’s name, title and office.

The false email opened with this:

United States Attorney Laura E. Duffy today announced enforcement actions against local pharmacies for distribution of drugs for illegal purposes. Immediate enforcement will target pharmacies in the Coastal areas of La Jolla, Carmel Valley, and Pacific Beach; chosen for both the high rates of pharmaceutical drug abuse and high property values of targeted pharmacies. Affected pharmacies will have 45 days to shutdown in order to avoid harsher penalties.

The LA Times ran this headline: 20 San Diego pharmacies targeted by feds in drug sales crackdown. The San Diego Reader also ran an article about it.
  [Read more…]

In Wake of Prop B, Filner Sidelines Pension Refinance Plan

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Candidate accepts the will of the voters; critics accuse him of abandoning his principles

Mayoral candidate Bob Filner is taking heat again this week for saying that he would go along with the law. Last week he was challenged for saying that as mayor he would enforce Prop B—the so called pension reform initiative that he so vehemently opposed during the primary—and essentially flip-flopping and supporting the controversial plan. This time he’s being accused of abandoning his own principles.

During the primary Filner touted a plan to refinance the pension debt, issuing 30 year bonds to do so. It was a plan he claimed would save the city $500,000 over the next 10 years, citing all-time low interest rates and comparing it to a homeowner who refinances his or her mortgage and in the process cuts the interest rate they pay nearly in half. That’s a lot of money the homeowner gets to keep.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – ‘Let’s Not Be the Last Generation to Retire’; Seniors Push Back Against GOP Plans to Slash Medicare and Social Security

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As the LA Times fronts today with an article detailing GOP lawmakers’ plans for dismantling Medicare, a senior citizens group supported by organized labor has began a national campaign to educate seniors on Medicare and Social Security issues. The Times article details how conservative critics of Medicare are readying a new push to dramatically scale it back should the GOP win control of the White House and Congress in November. GOP governors are leading the fight by blocking expansion of Medicaid to meet the goals of the Affordable Care Act.

Yesterday senior citizens groups around the country participated in events marking the 47th anniversary of the Medicare act. Billed as the ‘Let’s Not Be the Last Generation to Retire’ Campaign, the DC-based Alliance for Retired Americans will be sponsoring additional educational events at senior centers in coming months and organizing protests outside offices of lawmakers who have voted against the needs of local retirees.   [Read more…]

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