Month: September 2012

Among the 47% Who Pay No Income Taxes Is Mitt Romney Himself!

Mitt’s money that has not been funneled through offshore corporations linked to bank accounts in no tax jurisdictions has been taxed as capital gains, not income.

Mitt Romney dismissed 47% of the American people who don’t pay income tax as slackers and deadbeats. Thanks to a loophole Romney pays US taxes as “carried interest” which is taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%. That figure would not only include Romney himself who pays no income tax, but also all those corporate persons (remember Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend”) such as Exxon Mobil and GE who not only pay no income tax but get a generous rebate thanks to American taxpayers.

Here is a list of the top 10 corporate deadbeats and slackers (thanks to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont):

1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

By John Patrick Anderson
Issue: Funding for new stadium
Best For: San Diegans, beer drinkers, anyone over 21

Craft Beer Debates is a “fun, non-intimidating way to introduce people to local craft beer and local issues in an interactive “house of commons” style format”. The first debate was held Wednesday, Sept. 12, at Slater’s 50/50 in Liberty Station. I’m a huge fan of craft beer, especially craft beer from San Diego breweries, and had seen the debate series mentioned on Twitter numerous times leading up to the event. I decided to go and crossed my fingers that I could finagle a seat despite having failed to sign up in advance.

Twitter [last Friday, Sept 14th] succumbed to pressure from a New York criminal court to turn over deleted tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protester. This is why you should care.

By Andrew Couts / Digital Trends / Originally published September 14, 2012

Twitter gave in to a New York court subpoena requiring it to turn over more than three month’s worth of tweets posted by user Malcolm Harris, 23, who was arrested last September during an Occupy Wall Street Protest. The surrender of the tweets, which Harris deleted from his public profile, follows a months-long battled by Twitter to keep the information from landing in the hands of prosecutors.

The surrender of the tweets was the result of presiding New York State Supreme Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino’s threat to hold the company in contempt and impose a fine on Twitter if the tweets were not handed over by today. To assess the amount of the fine, Sciarrino demanded that Twitter disclose its earnings statements from the past two quarters — financial data that Twitter, as a privately-held company, does not want to be made public by the court.

em> By Dr. Emily Gibson KevinMD.com / Originally published August 16, 2012

I must have missed the declaration of war on pubic hair.

It must have happened sometime in the last decade because the amount of time, energy, money and emotion both genders spend on abolishing every hair from their genitals is astronomical. The genital hair removal industry, including medical professionals who advertise their specialty services to those seeking the “clean and bare” look, is exponentially growing.

Here is tonight’s agenda for the Project Review Committee of the Ocean Beach Planning Board. They meet at the OB Rec Center, 4726 Santa Monica Ave., at 6:30 pm. The meeting is chaired by the Board’s vice-president, Landry Watson.

On the agenda is a Sprint Wireless renewal permit for the PL Methodist Church at 1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd. Also, there is a request of the City of San Diego, on the second item, for the OB Planning Board to participate annually in the capital improvement project program.

Some people go on and on about labor unions as if they’re some kind of STD, so un-hip to the reality that the Labor Movement is us, We the People.

Who else labors?

As far as my relations with unions is concerned, if it hadn’t been for the San Diego Teachers Union I wouldn’t have enjoyed the time of a lifetime, a period of three years where I put work aside and took a “Parental Leave,” the first such leave taken by a man in the school district.

I don’t know how that wonderful opportunity made it through all the stancing and dancing required to get a contract signed. I think it must have happened as kind of an after thought, something put on the table as part of a tooth fairy like wish to mess with management’s mind, and the district must have gone along with it in a “Whatever, if it sails your boat” frame of mind, knowing they weren’t going to give up much more. That’s how negotiations go in the labor movement sometimes.

Book Review: Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps

Author: Greg Palast / Introduction by: Robert F. Kennedy Jr
Seven Stories Press / Release Date: September 18, 2012

Ten elderly nuns get kicked out of an Indiana polling station for not having driver’s licenses or other state ID.

Electronic voting machines in Georgia report massive malfunctions – but only in Democratic-leaning low income districts, where the hot, humid conditions of polling stations aren’t conducive to electronics. The ones in wealthy, Republican-leaning districts are protected in well kept, air-conditioned buildings – and have no problems registering votes.

Thomas Brown, a black Floridian, has his name purged from voter rolls because a white man with the same name and birthday once committed a felony.

Foreclosure firm Trott & Trott shares an office building with John McCain’s Detroit campaign headquarters. Whenever Trott completes a foreclosure, the McCain campaign challenges the foreclosure victim’s voter registration to have it purged from Michigan’s voter rolls: if they’ve been kicked out of their home, the address they used to register must not be valid.

The Ocean Beach Historical Society Presents:

Author Richard L. Carrico’s

“The Country Boy, Madame X and the Japanese Spy”

Thurs., Sept. 20th, at 7 PM
At P.L. United Methodist Church, 1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd., O.B.

From 1934 to 1936 a ring of Japanese agents and spies enlisted the help of U.S. Navy Personnel to conduct espionage for the Japanese government.

The centers of the spy activities were Washington D. C., San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Surfrider to Hold Ocean Friendly Garden Workshops

By San Diego Surfrider

Point Loma residents are invited to attend a series of workshops to learn how to curb erosion caused by storm water runoff along the scenic Sunset Cliffs Natural Park by modifying their landscaping to absorb more rain water.

The workshops are fun and engaging, and when the lessons are put into practice, will help preserve the beautiful blufftop park and public open space that make the Sunset Cliffs a uniquely beautiful asset for San Diego.

Last year the park at Sunset Cliffs was named one of the top five disappearing places alongside Florida’s Everglades by Wanderlust . The San Diego Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation has been working diligently to preserve this local treasure. The cornerstone of those efforts is the foundation’s Ocean Friendly Gardens program aimed at educating residents on what they can do to protect the bluffs from devastating erosion.

Hillcrest Banners Favor Prop 37 On Robinson Street Overpass

By Nadin Abbott and Frank Gormlie

It was close to 4pm on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street – Monday, September 17th – and the mood at the Canvas for a Cause headquarters in Hillcrest was expectant. As people started to arrive for the programed rally in favor of Proposition 37, Nadine Abbott had a chance to talk to Doctor Norrie Robbins of Women Occupy San Diego and a member of the singers Occapellas. Robbins is also Adjunct Professor at the SDSU Dept of Geological Sciences, and is retired from the United States Geological Service, DC office.

Robbins said: “I am worried about my food. I’m beginning to get weird allergies that do not run in my family.”

After nearly twenty years of ‘reform’, the schools of Chicago remain among the lowest performing in the nation.

A funny thing happened on the way to labor’s extinction: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) staged one of the most daring and important strikes in recent memory. As Chris Hedges put it during his Democracy Now interview last week “the teachers’ strike in Chicago is arguably one of the most important labor actions in probably decades.” And in the midst of this struggle, most of the corporate media around the country have decried the horrible greedy teachers from their editorial pages and assured readers that they were on the side of the children rather than the teachers.

The California shoreline is one of the most beautiful in the country, yet each year thousands of tons of garbage end up on the beaches and in the ocean. Tomorrow, (Saturday) September 15th , thousands of volunteers will be meeting up at locations throughout the county starting at 9am to give our shoreline and coast areas a god scrubbing. Last year 7,600 volunteers removed 146,000 pounds of trash and recyclables from 201 miles of shoreline. Plus, an additional 2,000 people in Baja California collected 42,000 pounds in Tijuana, Tecate, Rosarito and Ensenada.