Serving OB, the Peninsula and San Diego Beaches
By John Lawrence / Will Blog For Food / July 31, 2011
Republicans want to “reform” social security. They say social security is broke. Not so.
There’s $2.5 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund (SSTF). The way the funding for social security works is this. Workers pay a payroll tax otherwise known as a FICA tax. …
By Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch.com / August 2, 2011
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline.
There is growing community interest in acquiring the keys to two parks in San Diego County that the governor plans to padlock next year.
Organized groups have launched preliminary talks with state parks officials with hopes of saving Palomar Mountain and San Pasqual Battlefield parks if pending legislation passes to permit nonprofits to take over campgrounds, museums and forests.
This venture I’m involved with, the UT’s Community Editorial Board, has brought about mostly affirmative responses from around the city.
But of course there have been those who’ve reacted to what we’re trying to do by throwing dirt on it like Richard Rider, well known tax fighter about town, who had this to say regarding my “Let’s Make a Better World for Our Children” kind of essay: “The first editorial “for the children” is by board member Ernie McCray, a lifetime hard left advocate. Indeed, as I recall, at one time McCray was actually the spokesperson for the local Communist Party. No, not the Democrat Party, or the Peace and Freedom (socialist) Party. The actual COMMUNIST PARTY. His lame response when confronted about this was that he was not a MEMBER of the Communist Party — they just needed an articulate spokesperson for their cause.”
By Bruce E. Levine / AlterNet / July 31, 2011 |
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday [August 2, 2011] is expected to redraw its political boundaries —- and when it does, critics say, it will violate federal law.
The law in question is the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Civil rights activists say the redistricting map favored by the board, which consists of five white Republicans who have served together since the mid-1990s, violates the law by ignoring the county’s growing Latino population and further diluting minority voting power.
Last night, President Obama agreed to a deal with top Republicans that is widely seen as a big victory for the Tea Party.
It has trillions in spending cuts that will hurt poor and middle-class families and no taxes on the rich. It also lines up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits for future cuts.
Nancy Pelosi said “none of us may be able to support it” — but many Democrats are making up their minds in the next few hours.
Can you call your Representative, Susan Davis, right now? Tell her to vote NO on this bad deal — Click here for her number and a script.
Progressives are mobilizing this week – Tuesday, August 2nd – at the offices of Congressional Republicans to protest their willingness to place our entire economy at risk over raising the debt ceiling. Progressives are outraged at how the Repubs are willing to do this just so millionaires, billionaires, and oil companies get to keep their tax breaks. We need to send a strong, clear message to all the the GOP:
Don’t destroy the American Dream.
San Diegans are urged to join this “Rapid Response” action at Duncan Hunter’s office, located at 1870 Cordell Court, #206 in El Cajon, at 12 pm.
by John Nichols / The Nation / August 1, 2011
WASHINGTON – “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time,” said Harry Truman.
If the thirty-third president was right, then Barack Obama just did himself and his party a world of hurt.
Faced with the threat that Tea Party–pressured Republicans in the House really would steer the United States toward default, and in so doing steer the US economy over the cliff, Obama had to do something. But instead of bold action—borrowing a page from Ronald Reagan to demand a straight up-or-down vote on raising the debt ceiling; borrowing a page from Franklin Roosevelt to pledge to use the authority afforded him by the Constitution to defend the full faith and credit of the United States—the president engaged in inside-the-Beltway bargaining of the most dysfunctional sort.
Here is the agenda for the next Ocean Beach Planning Board meeting. It will be held Wednesday, August 3rd at the OB Rec Center, located at 4726 Santa Monica Aveune. Meeting begins sharply at 6pm.
The two big ticket items are chickens and the memorial benches.
For those of us who read the news and analysis of the news online, it is not uncommon to find a correction appended to an article or some part of the original text struck through, but still visible, with a modification following it. Online material is uniquely adaptable to quick corrections and updates in the interests of getting a story “right.”
Removing a story, scrubbing it from the site’s archives and replacing it with a completely new version is a jaw dropping breach of journalistic integrity and responsibility. The U-T did precisely that when it wrote that it had “moved” an article written by Wendy Fry on July 25 about the presence of paid “activists” at a series of Chula Vista city council meetings in which rent control in mobile home parks was being deliberated.
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