Month: March 2012

By Channel 6 News/ March 20, 2012

An 18-year-old motorist accused of killing a pedestrian on Interstate 8 in the Ocean Beach area, then taking off, pleaded not guilty to a charge of felony hit-and-run causing death.

Nikolette Kristina Gallo — who is free on $50,000 bail — is charged in the death of 23-year-old Sho Funai in the early morning hours of March 11.

On Saturday, March 17th, the San Diego Labor Council honored Jim Miller as one of eight Union Heroes the Council honored at their annual Awards Dinner.

Jim is not only a regular columnist for the OB Rag – writing his weekly “Under the Perfect Sun“-, he is a celebrated progressive author, primarily a professor at City College, and an activist in his local union, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1931. Jim is also a family man and father – his son, Walt, is constantly at his side.

Lorena Gonzales – leader of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council – said this about Jim when she introduced him at the dinner:

 “Jim Miller – AFT Guild 1931 – He brings dignity to labor activism. Jim campaigns tirelessly to raise awareness about an education system under siege in California – all the way from San Diego to Sacramento, no matter the roadblock.”

Lorena’s reference was to Jim’s across-the-state walk promoting education in 2010 when he traveled from San Diego to Sacramento.

The Ocean Beach – Point Loma area has lost a strong gay rights advocate and Democratic Party activist as Charles McKain passed away on Saturday, March 17th.

He and his partner of 36 years, Robert McWilliams, had a grand house up the hill from Sunset Cliffs in southern OB (some might call it Point Loma). They both were long-time activists in the local Point Loma Democratic Party club and used to have meetings all the time in their hill-side abode. Charles and Robert were legally married in 2008.

I met them both when I ran for City Council waaaay back in 1987 (I garnered about 10%). They were stalwarts then of the liberal wing of the Peninsula and had opened their house up for Club meetings. I recall sitting in their livingroom explaining why I was a “small-d-democrat”. I have no idea if they voted for me then, but the two of them remained active for decades after.

Here is the article from San Diego Democrats for Equality:

It does appear – after two strips this week – that Doonesbury artist, Gary Trudeau, has taken on yet another social issue. This time it’s marijuana farms in California. Take a look at these two strips that have run this week.

Oh, and it’s not like this is the first “social issue” that Trudeau and his characters have taken on. The “old” San Diego U-T used to ban the cartoon from the comics page on a regular and daily basis – and print it on the editorial page. Something Jeff Light – the current editor – failed to do this time when our daily paper killed the strip for the entire week last week due to its subject matter of women’s reproductive rights.

These days, the recently re-christened UT San Diego seems to be a fan of San Diego city councilman and mayoral candidate Carl Demaio. Pension-hating missives such as this, this, and this suggest the paper’s editors, at least, sympathize with DeMaio’s emphasis on public-employee retirement plans as an apocalyptic scourge facing San Diegans.

It’s not hard to imagine UT San Diego issuing a DeMaio endorsement in the months ahead, particularly if the mayor’s race comes down to DeMaio versus Bob Filner.

But a sea change underlies UT San Diego’s apparent affection for DeMaio. When the two first met in 2005, when UT San Diego was still The San Diego Union-Tribune, the newspaper’s reaction could be characterized as somewhere between skeptical and “pffft.”

By Matt Taibbi / Rolling Stone – RSN / Originally published March 16, 2012

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers?

Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they’ll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

San Diego Organizing Project joins the Budget Alliance to change the conversation in San Diego

by Lara McCaffrey / Empower San Diego / March 16, 2012

In the upcoming months before the fiscal year’s end, an alliance of like-minded individuals have come together to change the budget conversation in San Diego. The Community Budget Alliance (CBA) has been convening since the beginning of the year to discuss strategies to educate government officials and citizens on what to allocate more money to in order to improve the quality of life in the city. A powerful and influential part of the alliance are members from the San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP). No strangers to the budget issue, SDOP finds that joining forces with CBA aids their mission of helping San Diegans in low income communities stand up and demand more investment from taxpayer money and will help elect politicians who are mindful of where budget money should be spent.

Council to take up 11th hour giveaway of Convention Center

CSUSM: The results of electing inaction

By Kit-Bacon Gressit / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / March 17, 2012

Better election fraud than rape. That’s what I always say. Not really. That’s what I’ve been saying since Friday, when I learned that Cal State University San Marcos (CSUSM) student Matt Weaver was arrested. But he was not arrested for repeatedly promoting rape (along with homophobia, misogyny, pedophilia and racism) in the pages of The Koala, the privately-owned, for-profit tabloid he edits and touts as a “humor” publication.* No, Weaver, who was running for president of ASI, the student government, was arrested and charged with three criminal counts associated with the elections:

1. unlawful access to a computer or database,
2. identity theft and
3. election fraud.

Here’s the gist of it: The university’s information security folks noticed suspicious activity …

Many months ago I wrote an article that caused a huge rift in my family; many responses from Rag readers to the point that we needed to shut down the article because of the intensity of the comments from the readers. Because I do not want to rekindle that discussion again, I am asking my daughter to read this article over before I sent it on to be published.

The first article spoke of a granddaughter of mine, age 15, that was going to be retained in her high school for not completing her assignments in any of her classes. As an educator myself, I was appalled to think that in today’s society a young student would be forced to repeat all the classes of a particular grade because work was not turned in. To make matters worse, my field of expertise was teaching teachers how to “Individualize the Curriculum” and how to teach to the needs of the student. I felt that this was not being done in the case of my granddaughter.

Last week news of a “compromise” between Jerry Brown and the coalition behind the Millionaires’ Tax was announced and was seen by some in the media as a victory for progressives. In the LA Times the Republicans greeted the news by saying that the Governor had surrendered to a “backwater union” (my statewide union, the California Federation of Teachers) by giving in and upping the taxes on the wealthy and lowering the sales tax in his initiative.

While the “compromise” does up the progressive elements of the tax and lower the regressive elements, it is still structurally the same as the Governor’s original initiative, hangs on to the regressive sales tax, and continues to be temporary without any of the guarantees of higher education funding beyond community colleges or any of the other specific requirements that the Millionaires’ Tax contained. Indeed, it’s likely that what this new measure will do is go to the general fund to offset costs rather than restore cuts and/or create new jobs.

This is the sixth and final day in which “Doonesbury creator” Gary Trudeau satirizes Texas’ state mandated health care requirements for women seeking an abortion. Trudeau depicts a woman in the first trimester of an unwanted pregnancy as she undergoes a state mandated transvaginal sonogram, listens to her physician provide a state mandated detailed description of her possibly 2 ½ inch fetus, and then waits another state mandated 24 hours before having the abortion.

Are these really the same people who are frothing at the mouth about “big government mandated Obamacare?” My shit detector just hit “10.”

In an interview earlier this week with the Washington Post Trudeau explains the impetus for this week’s strips:

“For some reason, the GOP has chosen 2012 to re-litigate reproductive freedom, an issue that was resolved decades ago. Why Santorum, Limbaugh et al. thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate, I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice.”