San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Incumbent Zapf Dodges District 2 Town Council Candidate Forums

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San Diego Councilwoman Lorie Zapf – incumbent for District 2 – has gone missing for at least 3 district town council candidate forums now.

Zapf failed to show at all three area forums; the Pacific Beach Town Council candidate forum, the Ocean Beach Town Council forum on April 25 and then most recently the Clairemont Town Council forum on May 3. (The Mission Beach Town Council calendar didn’t show any recent or upcoming candidate forum.)

Zapf – the only prominent Republican in the race for District 2 – has amassed more campaign funds than other candidates for city council throughout all the council races. So, perhaps she feels she’s safe or knows she’ll at least be in the November run-off.   [Read more…]

A Review of ‘The Gene: An Intimate History’ By Siddhartha Mukherjee

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By Chelsea Pelayo

This week I have been reading The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I recommend this book to anyone who thought the history taught in science classes was tedious and irrelevant — because admittedly the way it is often taught is tedious and irrelevant. Mukherjee does an amazing job of telling a compelling story of the race to decipher the mysterious inner workings of heredity. It turns the technical world of genetics and biology into a melodrama that emotionally invests you in its path to discovery.   [Read more…]

The Monopolization of America – How Much Choice Do Consumers Truly Have? | Video Worth Watching

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From the Inequality Media website: Robert Reich takes a take an in-depth look at antitrust laws in the United States and explains how corporate giants have come to dominate the American economy and politics.   [Read more…]

Hinky Political Ads, San Diego 2018 Primary Edition | Gun Toting, Tree Hugging & Fighting Trump

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Tis the season for misleading and attack political advertising. I’ll be doing an irregular showcase featuring the campaigns and “Independent” committees willing to sling mud, spin tall tales, make unkeepable promises, or engage in fear-mongering.

Today we’ll start with ads from the Working Families Council in support of Lori Saldaña for supervisor, simply because those were the first to land in my mailbox. Feel free to send me ads you think are hinky via the email address at the bottom of the page.

This will be a non-partisan endeavor, mostly because I can’t stand being talked down to, regardless of political party. “They all do it” is a tired excuse from people who fundamentally don’t believe in Democracy but are not honest enough to say so.   [Read more…]

Crib Sheet | Progressive Voter Guide | June 2018

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Here’s a quick and easy way to vote in the June 5, 2018, primary election.

Many San Diego County races, including District Attorney, Sheriff, and Assessor will be decided in this election since any candidate getting better than 50% gets a pass on the November election.

City and State races, on the other hand, allow the top two finishers to go on to November. We’re told there will be a ballot measure in November to bring the county into sync with the rest of California.

Not every candidate listed here will appear on your ballot. If you don’t live in a district, you don’t get to vote on their candidates.   [Read more…]

What Does Ohio’s Primary Tell Us About Ourselves? | Dear Ohio, Part 6

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Dear Ohio,

You are America’s portrait artist. As our bellwether election state, your results on Tuesday will be like a fine, sharp pencil, sketching the outlines of a new America, struggling to get the shading just right, the lines clear, the white space well-defined. Your results will begin to tell us once again who we are. Or what we have become.

In your last big portrait of America in 2016, our image was one of anger, creased with lines of cynicism, parched of human kindness, cloaked in a shredded garment of self-righteousness.

I can’t say I blame you for letting your pencil run away with your resentment. You are just as American as we are here in California and the other 48 states. All of us were reared on a diet of civic values that sang the praises of the people as the true governors of our democracy. But over the last few decades, largely because we were not paying attention, we discerned a new reality – one in which we had absolutely no importance to the people who hold the reins of our country.   [Read more…]

Sessions Vows to Prosecute All Illegal Border Crossers and Separate Children From Their Parents | Video Worth Watching

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This Monday, May 7th, Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited Scottsdale, Arizona and here in San Diego, to deliver the message that the Justice Department will begin prosecuting every person who illegally crosses into the United States along the Southwest border.

In other words, the Justice Department’s vision will no longer see families desperately fleeing violence and persecution, they will only see criminals attempting to break border crossing laws. For families traveling together, they will see adults smuggling children; adults who must be jailed, separating them from their smuggling “victims”, even if they are their children.

The Washington Post reported that

In San Diego, Sessions was interrupted by a heckler with a megaphone.

“We don’t want you in our state,” the man yelled. “Are you going to be separating families? Is that why you’re here? Why are you doing this? Do you have a heart? Do you have a soul? Why do you work for this administration?”

Those questions went unanswered.
  [Read more…]

The UC Strike Is About More Than a Paycheck

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Good reporting on organized labor is hard to come by these days. The mainstream media all-too-often seems bound by the ‘everybody knows’ perspective about unions being an anachronism, interested only in getting higher wages on the next contract.

Coverage of this week’s limited strike throughout the UC system is no exception. I’ve noticed the focus on medical facilities in reporting, with an emphasis on questions concerning patient care, with the back and forth about demands for higher pay framing almost every story I’ve read.

There is a much bigger story here to be told; this work stoppage is reflective of growing realization about social and economic injustice going beyond the confines of the workplace. I’m going to do my best to cut through the haze and go beyond the bread and butter demands.   [Read more…]

US Senate, Local House of Representatives Seats & Ballot Measures | Progressive Voter Guide, June 2018

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Today: US Senate, Local House of Representatives & Ballot Measures

Already Published:

Progressive Voter Guide for County of San Diego Elected Offices

San Diego City Council Progressive Voter Guide

California Statewide Offices & Local Legislative Seats

The San Diego Free Press and OB Rag are pleased to present part four of our 2018 Primary Election Progressive Voter Guide. As usual, we tried not to let perfect be the enemy of good in our decision making. This year we’re breaking it into parts to make it more digestible.   [Read more…]

The Trump-Pence Theocracy Continues to Take Shape, As “Abstinence” Is Elevated To National Policy

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By Dartagnan / Daily Kos

Between 2007 and 2015, the rate of teen pregnancies in the United States dropped approximately 50%. Much of the credit for that goes to federal and state educational programs that teach teenagers about birth control and making informed choices about sex. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, implemented in 2010 during the Obama Administration, was one of the most effective of these efforts, providing annual grants totaling 200 million dollars to the states to operate and evaluate their public health programs aimed at preventing unwanted teen pregnancies.

These programs are vital because more than 25% of American girls become pregnant by age 20. Many of these pregnancies are neither expected or wanted. The drastic negative economic and social implications of that fact–to women and American society— should be obvious. The real beneficiaries of programs such as the TPP are women because it is women (in this country at least) who have been burdened socially with major responsibility for contraception. It is women’s lives and futures that are impacted the most by an unwanted pregnancy.

In August of last year the Trump Administration, through its Department of Health and Human Services, effectively ended funding for the TPP program two years before it was to be re-authorized. In its place, the Administration specified that any recipients of grants from the TPP must follow one of two “abstinence-based” agendas,  de-emphasizing birth control as a method of preventing pregnancy.   [Read more…]

Oh, If We Could Listen With Heart Like Nipper

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When I was a child there was a commercial about a dog named Nipper who was supposed to be listening to his “master’s voice” on a windup disc gramophone. I thought about him early one morning recently.

On this morning I woke up a little earlier than usual because my iPhone SE startled me awake, vibrating and buzzing like crazy, kind of like those European police sirens.

And, hey, I’ve got to say I didn’t know I had an app for such as all that. I shut that little device up by grabbing it like a cowboy wrestling a steer he’d just roped only to find out that its histrionics was regarding an article about a book Arizona Senator John McCain had written.

I was forced to question the very notion that I was in possession of anything approaching a smartphone.   [Read more…]

‘Last Days in Ocean Beach’ Benefit for San Diego 350: Saturday May 12th at North Park’s Torque Moto Café

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Last week after I sent off my column about why I wrote Last Days in Ocean Beach, a novel about living on the border between dread and wonder in the Anthropocene, the news cycle was full of coincidental but eerie echoes.  A

Los Angeles Times story observed of the recent floods in Kauai, “A Hawaiian island got about 50 inches of rain in 24 hours. Scientists warn it’s a sign of the future,” while the Washington Post reported, “’Fallen off a cliff’: Scientists have never observed so little ice in the Bering Sea in spring.”

And then, flying underneath the radar while the Trump circus dominated the headlines as always, there was this story, also in the Post , “Earth’s atmosphere just crossed another troubling threshold”   [Read more…]

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