Here’s a little help in catching up with the commentariat:
• When a candidate announces a run for office, out come the ax-grinders.
This week, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis told everyone she’s running for mayor in 2012. “I think the current mayor has done a good job in bringing things forward,” she told Liam Dillon. “I think there’s more to be done.”
The main point of contention, apparently, is her view on marijuana dispensaries (probably related to this case against Davidovich, for which he was acquitted) though there are plenty of other gripes and some less-specific but finely polished philippics such as, “Dumanis will be held accountable for the many years of destroying families, innocent lives, and her undermining of the legal system through a monarchy style reign as District Attorney.”
There’s even more of that sort of thing on the Bonnie D.A.’ Mantis anti-site.
To understand some of the venom in the anti-Dumanis crowd, take a break to read our five-part series, “The Rise of Dumanis”, which is an in-depth investigative look at how she got to be San Diego’s most powerful politician.
Short version: when you become powerful, you can’t please everyone.
$10 copay for meds? $20 copay for office visits? Try this on for size. I have $4,000 deductible. I pay over $5,000 a year for that privilege. My annual out of pocket max is $7,000. I usually end up paying just enough so that it really hurts, but not enough to be able to take a deduction on my income taxes. Oh, and that covers only my wife and I, no kids.
• When public assistance investigators visit Sandra Galindo’s house, she finds the visits to be denigrating. They can even bring her to tears, she writes in City Times, the student newspaper of San Diego City College.
Next, he starts checking on our laundry hamper, looking at my family’s clothes, searching for something that would prove I’m committing fraud. The lady enters our bedroom, where all four of us sleep. She flips over our air mattress and reads the personal papers I keep underneath.
it is in a vast financial pit created by prior mayors and council members who failed the citizens by inept budgeting and pitiful use of taxpayers’ funds and land holdings.
Blogger and political commentator Norma Damashek agrees we’re in trouble but wonders where any mention of bankruptcy is and scoffs at the remedies the task force does mention:
Their report hurls some tough-sounding recommendations in the direction of the City Council that dazzle for a minute before ricocheting like the rat-a-tat-tat of a fizzling firecracker.
• A North County Times editorial says that the new census data suggests that when “distributing scarce resources for things such as transit, a whole lot more money should be moving to the rest of the county rather than the big city to the south — maybe twice as much.”
• Oh, surely you saw this, but I can’t help myself: in Slate David Weigel answers the question, “Why do conservatives hate trains so much?” In short, they believe new rail lines cost too much, not enough people will ever ride them to make them worth building, and liberals want to make America look like Europe. We’ll all be train-riding surrender monkeys!
Items quoted here may be lightly edited for spelling, grammar, or style (such as using proper capitalization, removing extra exclamation marks, or fixing obvious typos). Send comments you’d like to have included here to Grant Barrett, engagement editor for voiceofsandiego.org: grant@voiceofsandiego.org or (619) 550-5666 or @grantbarrett on Twitter.
Voices on Dumanis, Benefits and High Speed Trains
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Here’s a little help in catching up with the commentariat:
• When a candidate announces a run for office, out come the ax-grinders.
This week, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis told everyone she’s running for mayor in 2012. “I think the current mayor has done a good job in bringing things forward,” she told Liam Dillon. “I think there’s more to be done.”
Then up popped Eugene Davidovich in a bunch of places to link to a Facebook group called Not Dumanis — San Diego Citizens Against Bonnie Dumanis for Mayor in 2012.
The main point of contention, apparently, is her view on marijuana dispensaries (probably related to this case against Davidovich, for which he was acquitted) though there are plenty of other gripes and some less-specific but finely polished philippics such as, “Dumanis will be held accountable for the many years of destroying families, innocent lives, and her undermining of the legal system through a monarchy style reign as District Attorney.”
There’s even more of that sort of thing on the Bonnie D.A.’ Mantis anti-site.
To understand some of the venom in the anti-Dumanis crowd, take a break to read our five-part series, “The Rise of Dumanis”, which is an in-depth investigative look at how she got to be San Diego’s most powerful politician.
Short version: when you become powerful, you can’t please everyone.
Dumanis’s campaign site is here, including a link to a MySpace page. No songs posted yet. Maybe they’re only on vinyl? She’s not following anyone on her brand new Twitter account. If she’s not following, she must be a leader, right?
• As part of a conversation about educators’ benefits, Mary Laiuppa, an educator, reports that her insurance copays doubled for medicine to $10 and for doctor visits to $20, which Doug Sommer calls calls “unbelievable whining.”
• When public assistance investigators visit Sandra Galindo’s house, she finds the visits to be denigrating. They can even bring her to tears, she writes in City Times, the student newspaper of San Diego City College.
• We — San Diego — are in a financial crisis, a task force told us again, or as reader Bob Jones put it,
Blogger and political commentator Norma Damashek agrees we’re in trouble but wonders where any mention of bankruptcy is and scoffs at the remedies the task force does mention:
• A North County Times editorial says that the new census data suggests that when “distributing scarce resources for things such as transit, a whole lot more money should be moving to the rest of the county rather than the big city to the south — maybe twice as much.”
• Oh, surely you saw this, but I can’t help myself: in Slate David Weigel answers the question, “Why do conservatives hate trains so much?” In short, they believe new rail lines cost too much, not enough people will ever ride them to make them worth building, and liberals want to make America look like Europe. We’ll all be train-riding surrender monkeys!
Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield is one of those anti-train people (or at least pro-highway). He introduced legislation to divert $2 billion in federal stimulus money for high-speed trains into making repairs to Highway 99, which runs basically up the middle of California’s Central Valley, roughly parallel to Interstate 5.
Items quoted here may be lightly edited for spelling, grammar, or style (such as using proper capitalization, removing extra exclamation marks, or fixing obvious typos). Send comments you’d like to have included here to Grant Barrett, engagement editor for voiceofsandiego.org: grant@voiceofsandiego.org or (619) 550-5666 or @grantbarrett on Twitter.