Friday, January 6, 2012

Examiner.com: Dems Candidate Stands By Community Record Heading Into Election Year



San Diego City Council Candidate Mat Kostrinsky is carrying last year’s early momentum into 2012 by identifying his strong track record of community involvement as the key to him winning District 7. 
Kostrinsky lists rebuilding the Lake Murray playground and the new performing arts center at Patrick Henry High School as examples of what can be achieved when a strong local voice brings together the community to achieve real outcomes. 

“I am proud to have helped with coordinating a diverse group of friends and neighbors to restore a community asset that sat in disrepair for years.  Just as this playground will once again serve as a gathering place for neighbors, I look forward to helping City Hall once again serve as a place where real solutions are achieved for San Diego at-large.”

Kostrinsky was instrumental in helping raise more than $185,000 to rebuild this important social infrastructure at Lake Murray – which has local residents excited of what he might be able to deliver in Council.

Continue reading on Examiner.com

Thursday, January 5, 2012

VOSD: How to Run the City Without Taking Sides

San Diego City Council President Tony Young said he knows the challenges he'll face in 2012.
For the first time in seven years, San Diego will have a mayoral election without an incumbent. 

The majority of City Council seats will be up for grabs, too. It's not, Young said, the best environment to make major decisions.

Read the article here.

SDUT: Stadium, new city hall to be discussed

In a New Year message released Wednesday, Young quoted John Lennon’s “Imagine” in challenging his colleagues to re-imagine how they govern and serve the city’s 1.3 million residents.

“We will be re-imagining how we address the budget, how we implement projects, how we form impactful partnerships with other entities and how we strengthen our local economy and improve our vibrant communities,” Young wrote.

Read the article here.

SDUT: Sen. Anderson edged out for GOP leader

State Senate Republicans elected a new leader Wednesday, but it wasn’t Joel Anderson of La Mesa.
Sen. 

Bob Huff of Diamond Bar, after wrapping up commitments from a majority of the GOP caucus earlier, will take over.

Read the article here.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

100th Anniversary Free Speech Exhibit Debuts in San Diego




***MEDIA ALERT***MEDIA ALERT***MEDIA ALERT***

100th Anniversary Free Speech Exhibit Debuts in San Diego



WHAT:          
Community-wide Celebration to honor 100-Year Anniversary of San Diego’s Free Speech Fight. Local labor, community, and educational groups from around San Diego will gather to remember San Diego’s role in the American free speech movement that hit a fever pitch in January 1912 based on a San Diego City Council ordinance banning speech in public around 5th Avenue and E Street.

EVENT:         
Opening night activities include: photo display of the San Diego Free Speech Fight; a reading from FLASH (a book based on the San Diego Free Speech Fight) by author Jim Miller; live music by Gregory Page, The Proles, and the People’s Revolutionary Choir; and more. Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be provided. 

WHO:             
San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, ACLU – San Diego Chapter, San Diego City College Labor Studies Program, Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, University of San Diego Department of Communications and History Graduate Program, National University Center for Cultural and Ethnic Studies, and Federation of Retired Union Members. All will be available to speak with media.

WHEN:          
Friday, January 6, 2012
                       
7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

WHERE:        
Centro Cultural de la Raza, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA 92101


For additional information and a detailed event listing of the San Diego Free Speech Fight 100-Year Anniversary activities, please visit: www.aftguild.org/free_speech


# # #






SD CItyBeat: The U-T's connections to Carl DeMaio and the Lincoln Club

And to continue harping on The San Diego Union-Tribune—shit, done it again—U-T San Diego: Last month, the San Diego Daily Transcript reported that City Councilmember and mayor candidate Carl DeMaio has a history with the new owners of the city’s main daily newspaper, hotelier Doug Manchester and broadcaster John Lynch. In 2005, Manchester donated $100,000 to a DeMaio-run political committee, while Lynch’s radio station provided the committee with $38,400 in free air time.

Read the article here. 

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Two Cathedrals: A leaderless movement can still be led

Read the original at Two Cathedrals

In its editorial last week, CityBeat tried to kickstart a conversation about the future of the Occupy movement, particularly in San Diego. The gist is that the physical occupation side of things has run out of steam and distracted from the original goals of raising awareness and building consensus around the economic and political disparities in San Diego, the country, the world. That’s probably right, although as much as the physical occupation was important because of its impact on others around it, it also worked because it was such a low, opt-in bar for potential activists to clear in order to participate. That’s what makes ‘graduation’ tricky.

The more difficult needle to thread is what comes next? CityBeat recommends joining the system to save the system from itself, a strategy that’s been around forever in equal parts co-option and Crashing the Gate, depending on who’s talking. Especially in San Diego, a more engaged citizenry with higher expectations is a desperately needed step, but it isn’t an end in itself to just make a list of other people who don’t do enough. Occupy has kicked the door open and created opportunity, now it’s everyone’s job to go through it.

Here’s the piece that so few seem to understand — or want to. Occupy was never about occupiers taking over the system. They aren’t aspiring to write new bills, or hold elected officials accountable, or be the next generation of reform politicians. They are think tank policy wonks. They aren’t journalists. They aren’t legislators. They already have vocations and already have lives. They’re protesting the disruption of those vocations and lives because policy, elected officials, watchdogs aren’t keeping up their end of the bargain. They aren’t looking for a new gig — they just want their original gig back. There are plenty of people who have run for office, who have started or joined community organizations, who have invested themselves in the stuff of making our communities stronger, who now must rise to the occasion.

It’s a tough concept to grasp across the spectrum. For every conservative seeking to discredit the objections of the 99%, there are Democrats dodging behind the ‘where’s their plan?’ tut-tut. Scott Peters is waiting to be led. Bob Filner wants to know where the itemized list of demands is and compares with nostalgia to his heroic time as a Freedom Rider. It’s still just four months since Occupy began; it was more than three years between the Freedom Riders departed and the Civil Rights Act was passed. The Voting Rights Act took another year — and after those four years activists were still getting beaten bloody on the road to Selma. They’re running to solve the same problems that Occupiers and their allies are are raising, so solve them. Leadership is earned by example.

Stephen Lerner has been one of the sharpest leaders on this point, identifying the need and the opportunity before there even was an Occupy, emphasizing both the need for an effort shaped like Occupy eventually was and the need of innovative leadership to grow into the bigger issues that the effort has exposed. Now, “Lerner is neither in nor of Occupy Wall Street…Be that as it may, his name is very near the top of that lamentably short list of strategists of how to rebalance power in America so that the 99 percent have more of it.” But he’s helped make clear that economic justice shouldn’t be a difficult concept to champion; leadership should not have trouble rising to meet this occasion.

Everyone needs to maintain and build on this momentum, but it isn’t the time to demand that Occupiers lead everyone else (though they’re welcome to it, and let’s take leadership wherever we can get it). It’s time to demand that all the people who signed up to be our erstwhile leaders to snap out of their reverie and actually do the job. They can do it; they know how. We’ve seen a couple early steps towards challenging the inertia of concentrated money and political power. There’s popular support served up on a platter for anyone willing to earn it.

To their credit, CityBeat declares itself an ally in this effort. But at some point, it has to stop always being someone else’s job to go first. That’s how we found ourselves in this spot to begin with — waiting for someone else to take responsibility. The strength of the Occupy effort is in its work outside the system: Bank Transfer Day moved $4.5 billion into community credit unions. Occupy Our Homes is forcing the country to confront the never-ending foreclosure crisis in new ways.

The opportunity isn’t to turn the 99% into politicians. This moment is when we’ll find out whether any of our politicians are ready to be leaders for the 99% — and whether there’s still room for populism to work at all.

by Lucas O’Connor