Five Years Later, This Blog Is Still Going Strong

When activists resurrected the San Diego Free Press in June, 2012, I made a commitment to write news and commentary five days a week. I was just coming off my first cancer surgery, I couldn’t speak and my head was blown up like a pumpkin.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if others in the room were skeptical; I wasn’t 100% sure I could do it. But I wanted to try. I needed something in my life to aspire to beyond being a cancer survivor and a lurker in the shadow of history..

My experiences with the underground press in the late sixties and early seventies provided motivation -I saw the power of the pen. Two years as an editor/researcher in Washington DC gave me the skill set of wading through large quantities of reporting to find the good stuff. And I’d networked my way in with local activists working to prevent cuts to education.

Roughly 1400 of my posts later, the Free Press ran out of energy. Keeping it a volunteer operation eliminated the headaches of dealing with finances, but keeping motivation on track was what did us in. SDFP ended with us all being proud of the body of work published during a tough time in politics. There was no scandal or shame. We’d done our best with what we had.

I didn’t know what to do for a few weeks after that ending. I missed the discipline of writing, and having an outlet to express thoughts on politics and progress.

In the third week of January 2020 I started anew, launching a standalone website –Words & Deeds– with yet another promise of frequent political expression. My first post was a preview of the 2020 County Supervisors election.

• In District 3, incumbent Supervisor Kristin Gaspar’s shift rightward on immigration issues makes her vulnerable to a Democratic challenger. She placed fifth in the 2016 49th Congressional district primary, and is rumored to be looking for another opportunity.

• Her ‘date’ for last year’s White House photo op and fear mongering session, Escondido Mayor Sam Abed went down in a surprising defeat last November.  Gaspar sat across from President Trump as he said, during a discussion on undocumented immigrants and gang members: "These aren't people. These are animals."

• Terra Lawson Remer, a high profile organizer of the flip the 49th campaign, has already told associates she’s planning to run. She’s progressive, quick witted, and knows how to build a winning grassroots organization.

The following year (or was it two?)I took my writings and moved over to the Substack platform. I was freed from the tyranny of search engines ignoring what I had to say because I wasn’t paying for the privilege.  And the social media oligopoly (including the new wannabes) has largely moved away from anything ‘divisive’ and toward even more pet pictures.

Voices of dissent and oppression are being muted as the realm of celebrity worship, both sides-ism, and balderdash has achieved dominance as accepted expressions of the First Amendment.

Medium, Substack, Ghost, and other author-centric platforms have arisen to become the newsstands of the internet. Some writers are even making a decent living based on readers being willing to pay for informed content. 

As was true with newsstands of old, you can find some exploitative and abhorrent content toward the back wall. Wannabe nazi’s have become the new Hustler, with more sanitized versions of the same drek being the new Penthouse. Some authors are demanding a more sanitary environment. Others are happy just to have a place where they might get heard.

Since moving out on my own, I’ve published 1748 articles, with my daily submission as the vast majority of those. Jim Miller (Mondays), Timothy Holmberg, and Brad Willis are local authors who appear as often as they finish a thought. I’m a big fan of Cory Doctorow, so his Pluralistic.net analyses appear quite often.

Later in the year I’ll be joining with other area writers to launch The Jumping Off Spot, a weekly journal of Labor, Politics, Culture, and San Diego-centric elucidation. Don’t worry, Words & Deeds will continue as a daily (m-f) publication.

I’ve been through some struggles along this road; surgeries for recurrent cancers, family trauma as our greatest generation moves on to a higher plane, and the bane of creatives everywhere-depression. 

I have few regrets and still more aspirations; there are sides of me I haven’t shared, like the Star Trek nerd and guy who is hesitant about dining out because he thinks he can make better food in his own kitchen. 

Finally, there is the year ahead. We’re going to be asked in thousands of small ways if the democratic experiment is worth continuing. Every time we’re exposed to news, the framing is likely to influence us to accept untruths and/or reject the norms and institutions around us.

The late stage capitalism we exist in is the creation of groups and individuals who want us to believe they know better what’s good for us. And generally that means a few people acquiring vast wealth and power at our expense. They are the center of their own universe, and notions about sharing bores them. We are daily being indoctrinated that “I’ is more important than “we,” and thoughts to the contrary are dangerous and unworthy.

I stand for something. My beliefs have evolved over the years, but the essential point that “justice for all” nis a supreme virtue remains. I’m always gathering new data and fashioning analysis to gain meaning. 

While I see pragmatism as necessary, I have no fondness for those who don’t (or won’t) understand the larger picture. Sometimes radical action is necessary, because the same-old-same-old isn’t cutting it. Our lack of housing and healthcare are two excellent examples. 

Tuesday News Clips

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A swing and a miss California Playbook via Politico. (CA GOP Senate candidate flubs first debate)

• Reps. Barbara Lee, Adam Schiff and Katie Porter keyed in on his achilles heel early in the night, browbeating him for playing coy about whether he’d support former President Donald Trump in 2024.

• Garvey repeatedly refused to answer, saying he would decide before Election Day. “At that time, I will make my choice.”

• Porter retorted with a zinger: “What they say is true: Once a Dodger, always a Dodger,” she said as the audience howled. “This is not the minor leagues. Who will you vote for?”

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Inside the collapsing U.S. political-media-industrial-complex by Max Tani via Semafor

• The 2024 presidential primary was supposed to lure audiences back to news after several years of flagging interest in following Donald Trump’s eventful departure from office. News outlets prepared accordingly: NBC brought in a new face for its flagship political show Meet The Press, CNN leadership debuted a new primetime evening lineup with the assumption that they’d need heavy-hitting campaign coverage.

• Trump fulfilled his duties, roaring back at full force with rallies in front of thousands of rapt supporters and deploying his time-honored campaign tactics, which largely center on bullying his opponents. But even though he appears poised to potentially lock up the nomination this week on a bombastic campaign laced with the kind of once-shocking remarks that used to spur highly-rated days-long news cycles, the evidence continues to show one thing: many fewer people care.

• Traffic to political coverage on digital news sites is down compared to the 2020 and 2016 presidential primaries. Television ratings for the Iowa caucuses were terrible: CNN averaged 688K total viewers with 194K in the 25-54 demo sought by advertisers in the primetime hours of 8 to 11 pm, while MSNBC averaged 1.15 million total viewers, with 143K in the demo. Fox couldn’t crack 2.8 million viewers, with 402K in the demo. In 2020, Fox News drew 4.4 million viewers overall, while 1.8 million people tuned into CNN and 2.5 million watched MSNBC. That was down 17% across the board from 2016 Iowa caucus viewership. By comparison, the NFL wild card game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Philadelphia Eagles the same night drew 28.62 million viewers.

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The GOP is Betting on Crisis Pregnancy Centers Via Jessica Valenti

• CPCs are also a huge part of the GOP’s anti-birth control plan. As I outlined in September, Republicans are stripping their states of real OBGYNs and clinics and replacing them with CPCs—groups that aren’t just unable and unwilling to prescribe birth control, but that proactively spread misinformation about contraception! In short, they create reproductive and maternal health deserts, and then populate desperate communities with fake clinics that tell them birth control is bad for them.

• CPCs are also behind the rise of ‘maternity’ homes. (Please note that Speaker Johnson mentioned those homes in his comments.) These are essentially residential crisis pregnancy centers that target vulnerable women who have nowhere else to go—and they’re run by the same large umbrella organizations that run CPCs. These groups often control women’s movements, their phones, and make them ‘earn’ things like diapers by going to Bible classes. This past June, I warned you that the anti-abortion movement was working to create a “national network of maternity homes”—we’re starting to see that in effect now.

• CPCs will enact the anti-abortion movement’s plan to pressure and force women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. You know this is something I’ve been tracking closely. When Republicans pass legislation that forces doctors to give women ‘prenatal counseling’ resources, these are the groups they’re being sent to. And because they’re pushing these programs using language like ‘perinatal hospice care’ and ‘prenatal counseling’, the GOP believes that Democrats will have a hard time opposing funding from a PR perspective.

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Murder, shootings, drugs, shoplifting – CONSERVATIVE areas are driving California’s troubles by Mike Males via Daily Kos

• Remember the crime everyone used to fear (before we terrified ourselves over shoplifting): homicide? Republican California (the state’s safest area 20 years ago) has gone murder-crazy – homicide rates up 65% -- and is now the most dangerous in the state. Meanwhile. Democratic California, which includes once-deadly Los Angeles, Oakland, etc., went from the most murder-prone to the safest (down 37%).

• You won’t see the Republican-murder crisis featured on Fox, nor that arch-Republican Kern County (the same population as San Francisco, but with 2.5 TIMES MORE MURDERS) is the “murder capital of California.”

• As the rightist media praises a rural sheriff for defying California’s strictest-in-the-nation gun laws, gun death rates in Republican counties have risen 24% over the last two decades, while falling 27% in Democratic cities. Today, residents of California’s Republican counties are 65% more likely to die by gunfire than those in Democratic counties. Still, California’s gun laws may be helping to protect conservatives from themselves. As high as hard-core Republican-county gun death rates are by California standards, they’re still much lower than in 35 American states, including arch-Republican Florida and Texas.