Wake and Bake Kids! It’s TGIF!

By OB Joe

Hey y’all! Hi ya’all doin’? You made it through the week – cowabunga dude!

Doug Porter couldn’t write up his First Cuppa Coffee this morning cause he’s been ill.  So, once again Editordude calls me at the last moment to fill in. I told him that Doug usually has a theme to his column and I can’t do that. He says not to worry. So, here ya go – a bunch of recent newsclips that were lining my bathroom wall:

Chris’ Deli almost robbed early this (Friday) morning.  One of the workers at the Deli, located at the corner of West Point Loma Blvd and Sunset Cliffs Blvd, walked in early only to find two guys trying to break into the store’s safe. He told investigators that one of the guys pointed a handgun at him, so he took off. But he watched what happened from a safe distance.  He saw the guys then place a sledgehammer and a gray trash can into the bed of an older dark pickup with a California license plate.  They both had on white bandanas and hooded zip-up sweatshirts,  one orange and the other yellow.  Oh, btw, the first U-T version of the attempted theft called Chris’ Deli, “the Princess Deli and Liquor”.

What a rip! Thanks a lot Carquest Auto Parts! SDGLN.com reports that Golden State Supply, doing business as CARQUEST Auto Parts stores in the San Diego area, has agreed to pay a $242,715 judgment after being accused of charging customers more than the advertised or posted price on items when they were scanned at check-out counters. In addition, inspectors observed in eight stores that the cash registers failed to display the price of items where the consumer could see the display, which is a violation of state law.  In San Diego, the County Department of Agriculture, Weights and Measures inspected local stores.

 Mayor Sanders finds a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  This is the beeg news municipally-speaking.  The U-T reports: Sanders declared an end to San Diego’s lingering budget woes, saying an unexpected revenue surge erases a long-standing deficit and allows him to begin restoring services he had been forced to cut in recent years. The city all of a sudden “has an additional $16.5 million to spend for the current fiscal year because of better-than-expected tax revenue and measures implemented by Sanders to reduce costs in the $1.1 billion operating budget.” Part of the pot of gold money, like $5 mil, will go to increase needed hours at city libraries and rec centers, among other places, like expanding the police academy class (hoping they’ll change some of the training also – ensure that new recruits understand the Bill of Rights).

Good-bye to the Midway Post Office.  Matt Hall of the U-T informs us:  The days of the Midway Drive processing plant in Loma Portal are numbered.  The facility is now officially one of 223 processing plants slated for closure and consolidation after mid-May in a cost-cutting move that could trim 35,000 jobs and cause a net savings for the deficit-ridden postal service of $2.1 billion a year. …   Currently, the postal service has 461 processing facilities, down from 675 six years ago.  The Midway place – which handled the bulk of San Diego’s mail from 1972 to 1993 but now processes about a tenth of it – was put up for sale two years ago, but no buyers emerged.  It handles about 1.6 million pieces of mail a day of the approximately 16 million pieces of mail handled at the main distribution center in Carmel Mountain Ranch.

San Diego water watchdog tracks the City of San Diego’s response to claims the water department is sitting on excess monies.  George J. Janczyn, editor of Groksurf’s San Diego, reported how ” U-T San Diego recently reprinted an Investigative Newsource story criticizing the Public Utilities Department use (or non-use) of money raised from rate hikes (Water rate hikes leave $630 million unused) and KPBS followed up with Public Utilities flush with cash but behind on projects.  Today the City responded with the following letter….”

Short bar employees rob Pacific Beach. This is an interesting scandal brewing in our neighbor, Pacific Beach. It turns out that certain businesses – especially PB’s bars – are under-reporting the number of their employees, saving themselves a bunch of money, but costing the community needed funds for the commercial district.  The Voice of San Diego is on top of it.

Does San Diego have the most divisive medical-marijuana community in the nation?  One med-herb expert writer from the Village Voice thinks so, so says City Beat‘s Dave Maass. Maass goes on: “San Diego’s medical-marijuana community has long been plagued by warring factions and political undercutting, particularly between groups such as San Diego Americans for Safe Access (SDASA) and the San Diego Chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Personal attacks regularly fly over email and Facebook; activists accuse each other of unprofessional conduct, harassment, secretly working for the Drug Enforcement Agency and conspiring to establish a medi-pot monopoly.”

Maass quotes Steve Elliott, who covers the medical-marijuana beat nationally for Village Voice Media’s Toke of the Town blog as describing San Diego as the most contentious medical-marijuana community in the country.   “I observe the medical-marijuana scene all over, and from my observations, San Diego is perhaps the most divisive scene in the United States, full of bitter vendettas, tiresome one-upmanship and counter-productive infighting,” Elliott says.